Bouvard Substack

A kind of rigor of thought and action can be derived from creating the paradox of wanting complete transformation of all social institutions but not only without revolution but without anyone...

We are always on a scene, but any scene is at the intersection of any number of other scenes, and we can describe this fairly precisely and embed it consequentially in idioms. The problems of time...

Style is a fundamentally mimetic concept. At the origin of any style is the performance of a role. Roles are ultimately ritual performances: certain gestures and utterances are commanded by the...

I have been using “perfecting the imperative” as an idiom for technology for a while now and have started to pursue it further in some recent posts, in part by refining it through the concept of...

The question of speech or, to evoke post-structuralism, the sayable, is now to be pursued more thoroughly on the terrain of the expectant scene, credit and originary grammar. Obviously free speech...

I have worked with the notion of “idiom” rather than “theory” or “knowledge” because I want to defer the possibility of any metalanguage that is not convertible into the language it describes along...

Let’s start with a little utopian vision, one which I’m borrowing from someone who gave a talk at a GA conference some years back along those lines. He wanted to argue for the possibility of...

The last (Grammar of Technology) post suggests avenues of inquiry that would tie together on a higher level all the center study idioms I’ve been developing the last few years. First of all, it opens...

I’ve been stuck on my definition of technology (the primary one among others yet to be fully integrated) as the perfection of the imperative since I formulated it because, as I now realize, in part...

A few posts back I suggested “pointman” as a possible title for the occupant of the center (so I don’t have to keep writing “occupant of the center”) but in doing so I continued to overlook the fact...

A single sample includes the whole. This sentence is advocacy for a wild form of thinking, one involving abduction and an endless range of constantly re-examined (even self-re-examining) hypotheses....

I’ve been positing what would have to be seen as fairly radical “post-economics” theory in some recent posts and it seems like a good time to see if I can focus on it directly and in a sustained way...

I’m going to begin by doubling down on something I don’t recall mentioning for a while: the principle, or imperative, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” I won’t...

I’ve just read Gregory Lobo’s essay in the most recent Anthropoetics, “Homo imaginatus: Generative Anthropology, prefrontal synthesis and the origins of the human,” which includes a critique of the...

I have to admit I was a always a little tentative about the title of my book, even though it seemed to me appropriate and necessary. My thinking was that while anthropomorphizing was a very common...

This will be a short post. I think I have a simple way of addressing the issue of obedience and disobedience to the center more minimally than I have done so far. Both my recent incorporation of...

Carl Wennerlind, in his Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720, observes that the emergence of journalism in the wake of the political duopoly of Whigs and Tories resulted...

A central element of the “linguistic turn,” at least in its poststructuralist and postmodernist form, was the critique of “humanism,” taken to be the guiding ideology of the West in the post-WW 2 era...

The Axial Age can be defined as a new mode of rationality transcending ritual or a kind of secularization in which new modes of universal understanding transcend narrow or “compact” social groupings,...

Continuing to pursue the Holy Grail, or the white whale, whatever the case may be: a complete, self-generating, perfomative discourse on language drawn entirely out of the originary hypothesis and...

Secularism is a question regarding assessing the modern world but also one more specifically for the originary hypothesis which, you could say, brings secularization to its conclusion and thereby...

I’ll begin by doubling or, maybe, by this point, tripling or more down on couple of basic idioms or hypotheses. First, and most central, singularized succession in perpetuity—recently, in the course...

https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v12/katz.pdf https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/double-helix/v12/katz2.pdf Center Study Center is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and...

Deferral and debt are closely related; we might even say that debt is the tokenization of deferral. The beauty of the concept of deferral and its irreplaceability for center study as for GA is that,...

All of liberalisms most cherished principles presuppose unbridgeable asymmetries in power. Equal rights, human rights, free speech, voting rights, freedom of association—all of these “God-given”...

This post will be a synthesis and reframing of many of my previous discussions of language, prompted by the observation that I have never directly applied deferral to the analysis of language itself,...

When forced to answer questions like, what is the ultimate telos, what does it all mean, what allows us to reject nihilism, etc., I always fall back on the answer: language. Language is literally...

For some, the question, “why obey,” is the political question, and while that’s a liberal framing of the political, predicated upon an anarchist anthropology, the question must still be addressed. It...

This is a short essay I wrote a while ago, in response to a solicitation from ISGAP, which had published Eric Gans’s and my book on antisemitism. I never heard back from them, and had assumed it...

The early modern “absolutist” state in England was broken by a revolution, the execution of a king, the creation of a central bank in control of credit, and the establishment of a prototype of the...

If you have some radical ideas about how to remake the social order it’s a very helpful exercise to think through how those changes might be introduced with minimal, or, even, no overt...

The existence of Jews is a scandal, and therefore their existence is an unmistakable sign of immeasurable and monstrous Jewish power. “The Jews as scandal” is preferable to “antisemitism,” because...

Here's a way to prepare for the explorations of this post: think about “argumentation,” what we mean by it, what counts as a “good” or even “genuine” argument, and then “counter-argument,” how to...

If we’re going to talk of the stack of scenes then we’re going to be speaking of hierarchies of scenes and scenes referencing other scenes in various ways. If we think, for example, of a deliberation...

The earliest computer translations were comically bad, because they tried to translate texts word by word—at first, it seemed, without any grammar check, but even if they added that in they would be...

After the early, highly successful, Israeli moves against Hezbollah in Lebanon, I saw it reported that Israel was offering to stop the attack on Hezbollah in exchange for Hamas releasing the Israeli...

There’s nothing that can’t be automated but there will always be a residue to any automation, and a new, surplus capability to train the new forms of automation. It is this residue and surplus that...

I begin by recalling (and revising) an old thought experiment of mine, somewhat derivative of Moldbug (but also Peirce, and maybe even Nietzsche), and which I can now speak of in terms of the...

Desire is generally understood in distinction from need, and in that way its specifically human quality is brought out—desire implicates us in the other, which for mimetic theory means those we...

Tokenizing NSM primes involves turning the declarative sentence into or treating it as an output of the linguistic data stored as ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits.  I’ve taken the concept of...

If I had the ear of any billionaires, I would try to persuade them to stop wasting their money on political candidates and even most of their think tanks and divert it towards developing a...

Reworking the relations between currency, succession and the Stack provides a frame for returning to Anna Wierzbicka’s primes and giving them some real work to do. Wierzbicka’s discovery of a set of...

It is true that monarchy is the only real form of governance—everything else is either mimicking monarchy or predicated on the endless struggle to prevent others from installing “their” king (the...

“Critical thinking” is an extremely popular phrase, not only in the academy, where it has been institutionalized as a kind of Holy Grail that we are to lead students to, but in the world of online...

The development of the imperial center, i.e., the state, is gradual process of demolition of kinship—monetization, the juridical and the disciplines all take kinship, where blood feuds and vendettas...

This post is a further development of my Cybernetics of Judaism , and drawing out further implications of the hypothesis of J udaism as the longest, most convoluted, revised and thickly imagined...

The imperative is a vast, unexplored territory. There is first of all the enormous continuum, from precise imperious command, backed by unimaginable force and the will to use it and supervise the...