The Center as Paradoxical Locus of Human Attention
The center, in Center Study, is not a metaphor or a political preference — it is the fundamental structure of every human scene. As Katz writes in Lecture 4: The Center, "there’s a subsistent center beyond the center at which any particular thing sits—so, there’s the center, and there’s centrality, or, as I’ve called it, the occupied center and the signifying center." The occupied center is the thing or person actually holding the position of central attention at any given moment; the signifying center is the more abstract principle of centrality itself — the sacred, the authorizing function that no single occupant ever fully exhausts. Katz's foundational claim is that these two dimensions of the center are inseparable yet distinct, and that most of our social and political confusion comes from collapsing them.
The simplest phenomenological description of the center is that it is what draws your attention right here and now in a scene shared with others. Bouvard clarifies in The Holding and the Held Center: Beyond Disagreement that "is always what draws your attention right here and now—and, even if it’s something you’re looking at by yourself, the fact that you are directing human attention towards it means that the attention is nevertheless shared—you are looking at with, through, and for others even if those others are not there." This means the center is always already social: there is no purely private center. And because it is shared, it generates coordination problems — how do I approach what we all want without conflict with the others who want it too? The originary answer is the deferral of appropriation through the sign, the gesture that makes the object sacred by marking it as untouchable.
The center is also described, more precisely, as "the paradoxical locus of attention that constitutes every social scene," as Katz puts it in There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center. Its paradox is that it both attracts and repels: it concentrates desire and simultaneously forbids direct appropriation. This is why the center is always also a source of resentment — we are drawn to it but blocked from it, and the sign that defers violence is also the sign that institutes inequality, since some are always closer to the center than others. As Katz notes in Centerism, "Liberal GA works with the circle model, and can therefore emphasize the equidistance from the center over the center itself," while the approach Katz develops — centerism — insists on the primacy of the center over any egalitarian distribution around it.
The center, further, is not merely spatial or attentional but imperative: it commands. In Way, Way, After Sacral Kingship, Katz writes that "The meaning of the center is in the subjects’ form of obedience to imperatives to the center—t" The center does not simply sit there to be contemplated — it issues commands, and our practical relationship to it is one of trying to read, hear, and fulfill those commands across whatever margin of interpretation they leave open. As Lecture 4: The Center puts it: "each single move you make is a “reading” of the center, but to call it a “reading” introduces too much subjectivity, so it’s better to call it a “hearing” of the center, because you hear whether you want to or not." We do not choose to be oriented by the center; we are always already oriented by it.
Finally, the center is historical: it has been occupied successively by sacred animal ancestors, by god-kings, by constitutional abstractions, and now by financial and technological systems that manage our relation to it in de-sacralized form. As Katz states in Scale, "there is always a center whenever humans are arranged in relation to each other, and the center is always occupied, even if only by a sacred carcass. All the continuities and discontinuities in human history follow from successive attempts to occupy, hold, expand the reach of, or replace, the center or its present occupant." The most concentrated statement of what the center is — and why we cannot escape it — comes from The Ends of Man: "All of our ends are bound up in discerning the imperatives of the center, knowing it, shaping ourselves in accord with it. You could deny this, but in what language would you do so?"
Excerpts
"We hypothesize swapping the anthropological vocabulary derivative of central banking (with concepts like “self-interested individuals” and “market forces”) with a new minimal vocabulary derivative of the center. We are indebted to Eric Gans’ Originary Hypothesis and its discovery of the center: the paradoxical locus of attention that constitutes every social scene. Thinking through the center, and the transactions humans have with the center, reveals the “economy” as nothing more than an ideological representation of our more primary debt relationship with the center."
[There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center] · PDF Read →
"the center calls you to it, along with others on the scene, but therefore also tells you to coordinate your approach with those others—so, as you approach the center, or step back and wait; accelerate or decelerate; model for others a way of engaging or appropriating the center, or protect the center from others—each single move you make is a “reading” of the center, but to call it a “reading” introduces too much subjectivity, so it’s better to call it a “hearing” of the center, because you hear whether you want to or not."
[Lecture 4: The Center] · PDF Read →
"The decisive move in my rerouting of GA away from Eric Gans’s liberal humanism was to place the center at the center. Or, to return it to the center—because, where else could it have gone? This, I realized, was the aporia that blocked crucial elements of reality from view for Gans and those working within the “orthodox” GA he created: we are supposed to believe that somehow, as a result of the Christian revelation unfolding into market society, there was no longer a social center; rather, each individual was a center in a new, albeit still emergent, omnicentrism."
[Intelligence and Technics] · Substack Read →
"There is always a center whenever humans are arranged in relation to each other, and the center is always occupied, even if only by a sacred carcass. All the continuities and discontinuities in human history follow from successive attempts to occupy, hold, expand the reach of, or replace, the center or its present occupant."
[Scale] · Substack Read →
"The center speaks through these differences: the more what any “I” says generates a range of meaning different than that “I”’s, the more what that “I” says is the discourse of the center. The disciplinary space that can singularize any speaker’s meaning while treating it as product of all the ways it has been taken up is the discipline training itself to listen to the center."
[Money and Capital as Media and Power] · GABlog Read →
"The originary event involves an exchange between center and periphery. This is an asymmetrical exchange, recognition and obedience from the periphery and existence, protection, even creation, from the center. This exchange is materialized in ritual, as a portion of the meal that the center has provided for us and enabled us to share, is returned to the center."
[The Scene is the Same] · Substack Read →
"The 'center' refers, most 'centrally,' of course, to the originary object, which is both the thing we attend to and the meta-person we obey and participate in. It is these two 'features' of the 'center' that get separated as, over time, humans come to 'turn their back' on the center as issuer of imperatives so as to attend to the more singularized object of attention."
[The Sample as Our Donation to the Center] · Substack Read →