Concepts

“The aborted gesture of appropriation, then, restores that fleeting condition of perfect information in a more sustainable form.”

“It is this aborted gesture of appropriation, designating the object, but no longer directed at appropriating it, that we postulate as the first sign.”

“The originary sign, the aborted gesture of appropriation, points to a center that is simultaneously a sheer “this” (one of Wierzbicka’s primes, incidentally), that is, the very thing that we are looking at right now, and a named object and agent, from which all other names, acts and intentions derive.”

“The absolute imperative is to stand in the place of whomever is violently centralized, i.e., scapegoated.”

“But that in turn means that the absolute imperative is translated into the command to raise the marginal imperative.”

“This absolute imperative is, over time, pared down to “don’t break linguistic presence,” and this entails bringing some repetition of the originary scene in to supplement the failing linguistic presence.”

“If I keep returning to and abstracting from the center, I head towards the creation of requests to the center that are simultaneously their own answers.”

“Rather than abstracting mass organization from social interaction, the observation of social interaction itself would have to become the source of models for technological transformation.”

“They will be the source of economic dynamism, abstracting themselves and everyone else ever more thoroughly, and generating new forms of technology out of all the newly possible configurations.”

“By now, the forms of embedment defended against abstraction are the results of previous abstractions that have been re-embedded.”

“Abstraction creates new “elements,” and therefore new relations between elements.”

“The abstraction of the sovereign from rivalry provides a model of action free from resentment: regardless of the actual motives of actual sovereigns, to the extent that they are sovereign the absence of resentment can be imputed to them.”

“Aesthetics is located on the originary scene, in the oscillation of the attention of the participants between the sign put forth by the other and the object.”

“This history commences once aesthetics is distinguished from ritual.”

“Aesthetics, then, also refuses degraded and decadent forms of sacrality, like the bizarre Christian heresies that have devolved into liberalism.”

“Agency is located in some form of programming while the analog/screenic offers stupefaction.”

“But we will see that Lobo’s focus on the individual organism as opposed to any collective agency is an important component of his critique of the originary hypothesis.”

“The agency of the center is constructed through the ongoing interaction between center and margins.”

“The materials of art are the materials of other areas of life, which also use colors, shapes, surfaces, words, sounds, etc.”

“The scene of art is a supplement or direct replacement of the ritual scene, with the art object or happening at the center and the audience at the periphery.”

“The separation of art from ritual coincides with the same disruption of sacral kingship that produces politics and the problem of the “tyrant.” It’s therefore not surprising that central to the first works of art is the problem of the tyrant and usurpation of the center more generally.”

“Referring to something implicates one in an attentional space: you’re adding to the attentional “load” of something other have been, are, or might be talking about.”

“The disciplinary space joins the attentional space and works on making it disciplinary by making the relation between subject and object, between those with the desires and resentments and the reality resistant to it, itself the real object of study.”

“The ostensive sign, the attentional space it summons, can only be completed if supplemented by referring to what is missing in a way that would eventuate in someone supplying it.”

“This is the kind of question my essays on “attentionality” and “mistakenness” were trying to answer.”

“What are the new modes of attentionality; how are we seeing and giving ourselves to be seen (and heard and felt and imagined) in new ways?”

“I have argued previously for the priority of “attentionality” over “intentionality”—attention must precede intention, and “intention” individualizes what is “joint” in attention, making it more of a declarative than an ostensive concept.”

“That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”

“Post-ritualistic patriarchal authority is established as a tributary of monarchical authority, which in turn models itself on the former.”

“Institutional position and authority are essentially constitutive gestural elements, situating one person closer to the center or more “vertically” than another.”

“At the heart of the Axial Age are the antinomies of the juridical, which take the form of the possibility of an injustice beyond remedy within the justice system.”

“My argument here is that the Axial Age is the ongoing testing and examination of this kind of hypothetical case which was, in fact, most closely realized in the cases of Socrates and Jesus.”

“The Axial Age acquisitions, then, restart history by creating centers outside of the imperial one.”

“The Big Man is the beginning of history and of all our ethical and political dilemmas.”

“The Big Man is the Alpha, a term central to the socio-sexual hierarchy constitutive of androspheric thinking.”

“The Big Man is first of all the center of distribution: gifts come to him and he recycles them back out to the community.”

“Bureaucracy is always called into being when those differences have resisted elimination, or when new, and even more egregious, differences emerge out of the wreckage of the first attempt at differencide.”

“Bureaucracy is characterized by rules designed or, perhaps more often, “evolved” through settlements of specific cases, to “rationalize” interactions and regularize the functions of the institution.”

“Discipline and disciplines are good; bureaucracy is, if not evil, then an evil.”

“Capital is so all-embracing and all penetrating that it’s hard to imagine what it would mean to think outside of, or beyond it.”

“Capital is a distribution of power aimed at solving the succession problem by constraining the possibilities—no ruler can rule against capital.”

“Capital is property that can be borrowed against and therefore generate more wealth than it contains itself—but that’s impossible if legal titles are not available, especially if much of this “property” is held not only extra-legally but illegally.”

“The center is now whatever can be attended to—defined, treated, assessed, categorized, manipulated—by disciplinary metalanguages.”

“The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere.”

“The center is what makes any mutual understanding (any joint attention) possible, so disclosure is aimed at interrupting concealment of the conditions of such understanding.”

“Enacting and speaking in centered ordinality is the only way back to the center.”

“The centered ordinality you are most directly embedded in is, in its turn, embedded in another centered ordinality of which you are more or less directly aware, which your immediate center wants you to be more or less cognizant of.”

“Centered ordinality accounts for hierarchically ordered and yet reciprocal social relations (the first must attend to the second, who is attending to the first, and so on), whether those manifested in consensually recognized pre-eminence in informal settings, or in complex and organized institutions.”

“The means of self-centering are distributed to all of us equipped with various devices (we might say “apps”) for leveraging, mobilizing and activating those means to wind us up as proxies for various liberalizing raids.”

“From my discussion of morality in “Fraud and Force,” we could say that responsible parties should establish institutions that extract from a situation in which some violent centering is possible the facts of the situation and the mode and degree of responsibility of all involved, freed from the logic of the vendetta.”

“There are intimations of centering in even the most violent trashing.”

“The more money in the system, the more the central authority is likely to be marketized as well.”

“In each case, some kind of resentment towards central authority is involved, ultimately for not being central and authoritative enough, as proven by the fact that one can challenge, revise and circumvent it in these very ways.”

“There is, in any community, a central authority, the final source of imperatives; and yet those imperatives are only worthy of being followed if the central authority is in accord with the signifying center: to put I more precisely, if the imperatives issued by the central authority are the same as those issued by the signifying center.”

“Once we have identified the central imaginary as the “topic” of our conversation, we can start to seek out imperatives from the center.”

“This means we all have what we could call a “central imaginary”: a proto-narrative of the center as the agent that could meet our demands.”

“Charismatic disclosure is therefore “apocalyptic” in the more common sense, insofar as it is always combustible, always raises hackles and induces shrieks.”

“First is to say that consciousness is only possible for soul or spirit.”

“Human consciousness is a new awareness of others, as mediated by a sign.”

“In evolutionary terms, consciousness is a way for an organism to negotiate its environment.”

“But the other is the esthetic contemplation of the linguistic sign, in which this paradoxical faith is not tested in practice but enacted, without resolution, in the imagination.”

“The proper use of declarative culture is to articulate all this, and engage others in its articulation.”

“In one sense, all of culture is originary, in the sense that all of culture can be traced back to the originary scene.”

“All of modern culture is a result of the misfit of models and aspirants, which is to say our fundamental mistakenness.”

“The declarative is born in terror of the imperative and, by extension, the ostensive, the latter of which it produces a virtual version of.”

“The declarative was invented in the course of deferring the imperative, so it follows that one trajectory of the declarative is to imagine the abolition of the imperative.”

“The declarative is a kind of proposed bet that something we could recognize as the restored ostensive is out there, somewhere, and at least potentially available, if certain ostensive-imperative-ostensive conditions were to be fulfilled.”

“The proper use of declarative culture is to articulate all this, and engage others in its articulation.”

“We are completely within ‘declarative culture” here, and declarative culture is predicated on the banishment of imperatives and ostensives that don’t “follow” from declaratives.”

“Declarative culture promises us we will only have to obey one imperative: the imperative of reality.”

“Secularization and desacralization is ultimately de-ritualization.”

“A broader desacralization is necessary before “art” can take on some kind of independence relative to the sacred, but until that point aesthetic considerations would be critical to representations of the sacred.”

“Here is where the not reactionary, not even conservative, but well armored, resistance to the corrosions of desacralization are to be found(ed).”

“I think this description is accurate and the social transformation in itself beneficial, but, as it stands, massively forgetful.”

“We can then ask which description is better—people talking to each other as “equal” or people talking to each other as engaged in fine tuning and testing the direction each wants to lead the other.”

“The implication of my description is that language is ordinarily invisible—we don’t notice ourselves speaking, we don’t think of ourselves as adding one word to another as we speak, much less as making sounds that we could “listen” to by bracketing their meanings.”

“Desire is ultimately concerned, after all, not with appearance but with substance, appearance being only a means to an end.”

“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 imitate or, more broadly, are bound to through a web of models.”

“We can certainly attribute to mimetic desire the “cause” for a particular act, but mimetic desire is always mediated through language.”

“The political purpose of my study of disciplinarity is to get at the discursive roots, the roots in a habit of thinking, of “political philosophy,” in all its forms, including the most everyday, “popular” ones.”

“In the most basic sense, there is nothing but disciplinarity: disciplinarity is coextensive with the human: the originary scene was a discipline, even if that cannot be recognized until a critical mass of overlapping disciplines has emerged.”

“The mode of exchange with the center of disciplinarity is that of data security, which includes the creation and archiving of knowledge that would, say, both inform a speech regime organized around a robust enforcement of laws against slander, libel and defamation while remaining invulnerable to that regime.”

“The disciplinary space is where we argue over these questions and construct such a center, and you have a disciplinary space when enough of these decisions have been made so that those within the discipline can readily generate new questions while those outside of the discipline would essentially be guessing if they tried.”

“The disciplinary space is an engine of differentiations, turning the object into a generator of new signs.”

“Language learning is lifelong—entering a new disciplinary space is learning a new language.”

“By now, the forms of embedment defended against abstraction are the results of previous abstractions that have been re-embedded.”

“The esthetic is thereby reabsorbed back into ritual and elicits the millennia long suppressed producer’s desire of all the people.”

“The satiric dimension within the esthetic is this moment of the scene at its most scenic, where we have what Gans once referred to as the “fearful symmetry” where each is at once potential victim and potential attacker, threatening and vulnerable simultaneously.”

“Yet no student of painting or sculpture considers the pictorial or plastic components of artworks as in themselves devoid of esthetic interest, apprehended and integrated by means of a formal “competence” to which the esthetic is irrelevant.”

“If ethics is centered upon some good to be obtained, morality defers another kind of centering—the violent centering involved in sacrificial practices.”

“Disciplines stay alive to the extent that the tension between value and ethics is re-established, through the creation of various forms of “ skunkworks ” within disciplines.”

“While it doesn’t quite prove anything, doesn’t the fact that so many millions of people can be recruited into an increasingly apocalyptic leftism that in many cases at least cuts against individual economic self-interests suggest that for many, if not most, utilitarian ethics are extremely unsatisfying?”

“An event is represented, and an event “behind” that event: what’s happening is shadowed by what is “really” happening.”

“So, the end of one event is identified as the beginning of another and the middle of a third event—all within the same space.”

“The act of participation in this event is conscious in a way no animal action can be, because its conscious nature is inherent in the sign that is shared with the other members of the group.”

“The exemplary victim is the one whose path we could follow as a means of salvation while always falling infinitely short of the example.”

“The exemplary victim is constitutive of our language and narratives, which is why it needs to be “unwritten.” The whole range of exemplary victims produced across the political spectrum constitutes our “alphabet” (or, perhaps, “meme factory”).”

“A large part of the power of models figuring an “exemplary victim” is precisely the plausibility and richness of the events they are drawn from, with Jesus on the cross, or Socrates sitting with his students waiting to drink his hemlock among the most obvious examples.”

“And the libertarian explanation is… well, other than some vague references to our having forgotten our principles, it doesn’t seem to me they really have one—which would be why someone like Ron Paul exceeds even the most fevered Leftists in his conspiracy-mongering.”

“It seems to me that the best explanation is the alliance of the new, vulnerable, but potentially revolutionary market order with the absolutist state—the imperial state, in other words, which is really nothing more than a permanently asymmetrical gift relationship (is there anything more “given” for us today than the state?).”

““Explains” lets us know more implicitly that an explanation is coming.”

“Maybe that will happen, if firstness is ever restored through a generalized immunity to the victimary.”

“A reliable indicator of firstness is the ability to revise previous assessments and assignments and to formalize present fitness.”

“Second, though, as I suggested earlier, Jewish firstness is represented by a willingness to endure historical contingency, adhere to the moral law (even if no one else does), and ask for no recognition or “proof” of election.”

“If your frame is wrong, that’s the only way you’ll ever find out anyway.”

“To frame is to rule, and to target ways to enhance discipline is to frame.”

“What makes it that kind of frame is the practice that initiated it, and the way it draws in the elements and means from the whole.”

“Everyone must speak for the same amount of time?), the deliberative process is impaired, and if that framing is encouraged, it will impair the process beyond repair.”

“In other words, power judges us in terms of “equality” or “duty.” The best framing is the one that unites power and accountability, that gives everyone the power to do what they are obliged to do—in other words, absolutist framing.”

“Every one of us does know things about our respective milieus that no one else does, even if it may sometimes be the case that the proper questioning or framing is required to elicit such knowledge.”

“On the other hand, consciousness and free will are completely anomalous in our universe.”

“Saying that human consciousness and free will are a function of our unique cultural/social “nature” may well be true, but it doesn’t seem to answer the philosophical problem of how exactly this is possible.”

“But this is not an act of existential free will on the part of each member of the new community.”

“The notion that equality and freedom are competing values is false to the core.”

“The elemental form of freedom is that of the discipline: a shared, inviolate and inexhaustible locus of attention.”

“If the choice between freedom and coercion is thus treated as a matter of expediency, freedom is bound to be sacrificed in almost every instance.”

“To input the miraculous to the grammatical stack is to hypothesize wildly from the slightest sample.”

“This involves ordering what we might call the “grammatical stack”: the articulation of ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative.”

“Full exploitation or “optimization” of the grammatical stack would lead us to ask what would be the inappropriate ostensive that initiates the technological move and what would be the inappropriate technologized imperative that integrates technology into the declarative, which is to say, juridical and disciplinary, order.”

“If the difference between the two is reduced to the infinitesimal, the two will be changing positions, so your identity is simultaneously that of a learner as well as teacher.”

“Insofar as we have a new center, that center wants to be more central: if we have a center we are using the same sign, and its identity is affirmed in the self-reference that situates one scene generated by the sign in a history of scenes with an origin that is continually marked.”

“But we can’t do without sovereignty—it meets some very definite human needs, and is, in fact, what people usually mean when they speak about “human nature.” Sovereignty provides identity, which is first of all self-sovereignty, and, again, is inimical to freedom, as identity is just another set of shackles.”

“The imperative is dependent on extra-linguistic real time in a way the ostensive is not.”

“The imperative is a set of expectations: be ready for what will happen to the main opponent/watch what the president will do next/look for that oppositional leader’s profile to be raised.”

“The imperative is a result of an “inappropriate ostensive.” One member of the community issues the ostensive sign in the absence of the object, and another member of the community then supplies the object.”

“What emerges within this imperative culture is a continual attempt to reduce the difference between performance and effect.”

“In his analysis of imperative culture, Gans notes that the memory of the sacred object must conceive of that object as a sacred being that exists above and beyond the concrete manifestations it may take on.”

“The imperative exchange is replaced by a declarative culture in which the voice issuing the absolute imperative is always in dialogue with you to the extent that you defer the immediate imperatives to sacrifice either the target of your resentment or some proxy.”

“The imperative exchange is embedded in a sacrificial economy: the subject demands more and more of God, as each form of salvation brings another form into view, and so God correspondingly demands more in return: in the end, the most treasured possession, i.e., your first born.”

“Imperative exchange is ancestor worship, and the absolute imperative embedded in I AM THAT I AM is to suspend ancestor worship and remember the originary scene—that is, remember that it is the participation of all in creating reciprocity that generated the sign, not the other way around.”

“The work of closing the imperative gap is conducted in “disciplinary spaces,” which are retrievals of the originary scene/event.”

“Now, I can say that the imperative gap is closed to the extent that each of us contributes to singularized succession in perpetuity.”

“One’s operationalization of the imperative gap is not an individual matter but derivative of one’s position within the stack of scenes—you can only start with the commands it is within your power to work with, and with whatever clarity the chain of imperatives they issue from is inscribed upon those aimed at you.”

“The problem of access to the imperative of the center is the problem of institution building, of data security and scenic design practices.”

“The parceling out of the imperative of the center means that a calculated strategy of betting against those most dedicated to the creation and transmission of practices of data security can not only break those lines of transmission but can turn those very practices against them.”

“What I have been calling the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center is not so much resisted as raveled up by creating knowledge of use to cases in stacked scenes that keeps pushing cases asymptotically to their self-abolishing limits.”

“Within interrogative imperativity, declaratives take on a far wider scope, that of converting possible (and impossible) imperative exchanges into a rule or constraint for deferring “analogous” imperative exchanges.”

“The para and the infra are the forms of imperativity, telling you what texts you must take as models, how to take them as models, how to use those models to work through some particular content or materials, and how to read texts as instantiations or modifications of those models.”

“Don’t look at me as a “_____,” the individual demands, look at me as… the other of “_____.” Individualism is a kind of negative gnostic theology.”

“There can never be enough democracy, freedom, individualism, peace, tolerance—the concepts, unlike, say, sovereignty , are intrinsically open-ended and even infinite.”

“The most terrible consequences of liberal individualism come from the destruction of this assumption that all individuals, before all else, have their entire existence within the group.”

“The inquiry into resentment, which is always the resentment of specific selves and others, is presumably part of culture, so this inquiry is itself part of the impossible attempt to represent and defer its own resentment.”

“Inquiry is required to invent and regulate that technological mechanism, but once it is controlled by the feedback from measurable effects (the regularized relation between laughter and ratings) not only has the discipline of comedy been displaced but so, also, has the disciplinary inquiry into various forms of inducing laughter.”

“The new pedagogy or mode of inquiry is then, partly explicitly and partly tacitly, integrated into the system of reciprocities.”

“Each layer of intentionality is a layer of deferral, and being able to say that maybe we can know or see allows us to add more layers.”

“Built into the notion of intentionality is some deep structure of the will; built into the notion of attention is something demanding attention and demanding you draw others’ draw others’ attention to, which involves configurating ourselves around something at the center.”

“This presence is a collective, centered presence, and not the phenomenological self-presence (in which my intentionality is fully “borne” by my utterances) Derrida deconstructs, but a presence nevertheless.”

“One’s internal scene of representation is the mental space within which we conceive the meaning of language, as when listening to another or reading a book.”

“If we are to speak of an internal scene of representation, it must be composed as any scene—by means of a sign of deferral of some appropriation that would, if attempted, destroy the scene.”

“This renunciation of the temptation to occupy internal scene of representation in rebellion against the tyrant in the name of some super-sovereign is what we can call “donating your resentment to the center.” Media and technology are, as Marshall McLuhan noted, extensions of our senses and body.”

“The interrogative is a prolonged imperative, which is to say an imperative that understands it may not be obeyed.”

“Intervening between the imperative and the declarative is the interrogative; an interrogative is a softened imperative, which is to say, an imperative coming to recognize that it might not be fulfilled, and therefore transitioning from a command to do something to a demand for information regarding the possibility of doing it.”

“And then we become ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative signs of the center.”

“The imperial institution of justice is therefore quite hostile to the heads and chiefs and the extended kinship relations they embody.”

“The assumption, though, is still that distribution comes from the center: justice is the distribution to each of his due, whatever that means and however it is to be determined.”

“That threshold itself is assessed with the specific networks in mind—even vigilante justice is not necessarily excluded, as long as it doesn’t pass the threshold beyond which there will be nothing but vigilante justice.”

“The law is sufficient, that is, to continually generate hypotheses of the law’s emergence and revised terms of its evolution, to maintain its divine sanction while reducing that sanction to maintaining the collegiality and accountability of its interpreters and the inexhaustibility of the shared text.”

“Generally honor cultures exist where the rule of law is weak.”

“Needless to say, every law is enforced (or left unenforced) by someone.”

“History, then, has exhausted itself in the antinomic agencies of contemporary liberalism, where the genuinely stripped bare human that can be the only source of legitimacy is nothing but sheer opposition to whatever norms make social functioning possible.”

“But what does the increasing or more intractable inequality have to do with the diminishing legitimacy function of the welfare state—is it that the rich no longer have enough money to support it or the less able are no longer willing to accept the bribe (or have figured out that the bribe will continue even if legitimacy is denied)?”

“Success is only possible if you turn the infiltrators into your tools: speak always and only as if you will only obey the commands of legitimate leaders of legitimate institutions, and you are always simply pointing out that the rate of turnover in terms of legitimacy is accelerating and it can be rather difficult to keep up.”

“Linguistic presence is not a “channel” of communication, and al though for the higher linguistic forms, the channel analogy is an adequate approximation in most cases, it cannot help us to understand the origin of these forms.”

“The problem of linguistic presence is now posed in a new way.”

“If the other disobeys, linguistic presence is put in danger, and the moral thing to do is find some other way of maintaining it.”

“The reason for the linguistic turn is that the metaphysical scene of humanism, predicated upon the metalinguistics of literacy, could no longer effectively defer violence.”

“Completing the linguistic turn is essential because the metalanguages of humanism and metaphysics obscure the forms of authority needed to ensure intelligent participation in institutions and hierarchical orders.”

“The linguistic turn in Western thought in the 20 th century derives from this recognition, which was certainly aided by both the emergence of mass literacy and mass education, and by the emergence of new media that made it possible to place writing in a broader historical context.”

“Literacy is crucially involved in the shift in the heroic narrative from the “Promethean” (and doomed) struggle against the center to the victim who exemplifies what we can now see as the unholy, even Satanic, violence of the imperial center.”

“For this purpose the metalanguage of literacy is deployed: relations between nominalizations deposit in the scene what might otherwise be looked for in the disciplinary scene of representation.”

“The metalanguage of literacy is an intellectual or ideological bulwark to the state, while also providing the material for decentering power by appealing to transcendent models to which the sovereign must adhere.”

“If logocentrism is really phallocentrism, Eurocentrism, etc., then the critique of metaphysics is essentially volley in a partisan political battle, rather than an attempt to disclose a more originary presentation of human being than metaphysics allows.”

“The logocentrism Derrida associated with Western metaphysical modes of thinking, along with all of its distinctions between rational and irrational, civilized and barbaric, and so on, can indeed be predicated upon modes of thinking produced by writing.”

“That logocentrism, that we see in concepts that construct phony simulations of battles between familiar opponents, is what is to be targeted most persistently.”

“In other words, what converts desire into love is that the object breaks out of the vicious circle of desire by giving promise of continual mystery and by making the desirer such an object him or her self.”

“But our love is not the expression of an impersonal life-force.”

“The movie cliché of two people looking into each others’ eyes and realizing simultaneously that they are in love is a model of this experience, which never really happens but is the presupposition of all that does.”

“Markets represent forms of delegation by the central authority—markets are areas of social life that are not under direct sovereign supervision.”

“Markets are created by states so as to provision their militaries when abroad, and money is supplied so as to enable soldiers to participate in those markets.”

“Markets are real insofar as they are what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with knowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and bounded but not directly supervised by such authorities.”

“Meaning is ultimately grounded in ostensivity—to put it crudely, any utterance points at something, tells you what to notice.”

“Meaning is established rather differently in a scientific discipline organized around experimental protocols.”

“Of divine origin, but ultimately its meaning is rational and cognitive.”

“The media is already preparing the narrative of Obama the rescuer, “like” Lincoln and FDR.”

“The media are propaganda agencies of some power center or another—the blogger Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse asserts that the CIA leaks to the Washington Post and the FBI to the New York Times .”

“The media is speech and writing publicized, transmitted, broadcast and preserved through technological and pedagogical—scenic—infrastructures.”

“The metalanguage is the anomaly, and therefore the crisis, not its distortions.”

“Metalanguage is a way of solving this problem, and it’s not surprising that the masters of writing would have found this solution to be an appropriate one to the problem of potentially infinite dissemination.”

“The most meaningful metalanguage is one that keeps attending to the distinction between language and metalanguage.”

“Metaphysics is the attempt to rectify language when such events force language into self-reflexive states so that we can continue to look through language; originary grammar tries to articulate looking at language and with language with looking through language.”

“One way of breaking with Western metaphysics is by acknowledging the traditional character of all thought.”

“The best-known exponent of this version of metaphysics is the German social democratic philosopher Jurgen Habermas.”

“Mimesis is an excellent foundation for talking about the human because it provides a minimal version of human sameness that immediately opens onto a vista of human difference.”

“Mimesis is an adaptive learning behavior and as such can be considered a form of intelligence.”

“Mimesis is first of all positive and generative—you learn from watching another if you can translate what he does into your own movements.”

“Gans assumes that the mimetic crisis is organized around some object of appetitive attention—most likely some food source, perhaps a recent kill.”

“Deferring some mimetic crisis is always the obverse of any observable act which suggests that the measure of any action is the relative imminence of that crisis and the delayed and distributed effects relative to that more or less likely crisis of the action taken.”

“The victim does need to be consumed, and the emergent community does need to put its new sign to work to ensure this can be done in a communal and non-violent (or, sufficiently non- violent so that the mimetic crisis is not re-activated) manner.”

“We can certainly attribute to mimetic desire the “cause” for a particular act, but mimetic desire is always mediated through language.”

“For Girard, this mimetic desire is a source of conflict and tension within societies, and it is mitigated through the act of focusing the cumulative mimetic desires of a society on a single individual who becomes a scapegoat.”

“Mimetic desire leads to the crisis; resentment comes in its wake, as the center now forbids us from satisfying our desire for the object located there.”

“Money is used first of all for internal bureaucratic accounting in the ancient empires.”

“Money is both continuous and discontinuous with this history of exchanges with the center that constitutes humanity.”

“Money is the means by which agents compete within the networks so as to prove their usefulness to the network and to the center.”

“Teleology and morality are fully implicit in the originary structure.”

“What kind of morality is this, then—what does it consider more important than maintaining a livable social order?”

“When we think in terms of the relation between morality and power, for example, we are conceding the differentiation of the disciplines: morality is defined in one arena (“Philosophy,” “Ethics”), and power in another (“Political Science”).”

“This understanding of myth is not obviously related to the emergence of the Big Man, but the increasingly complexity of intentions attributed to figures on the ritual scene (which, of course, can include animals and the elements) lays the groundwork for making sense of the Big Man’s “usurpation” of the center.”

“One (more) thing the Oedipus myth is about is human survival through love, minimally defined as the deferral of violence.”

“Under a ritual order, when the interlocking imperative exchanges don’t work, myth is generated; with the evacuation of the ritual order, imperative failure leads to hypotheses (hypotheses are really articulations of particular ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative sequences).”

“Naming is performative, like christening a ship or marrying a couple, activities that manifest the most basic social traditions.”

“Naming is the way the sovereign and his delegates (those who have been named by him) incorporate and authenticate institutions, authorities and practices.”

“Naming is also the most basic pedagogical act: nothing better marks the minimal hierarchy self-evident and modeled in any pedagogical act than saying “we’ll call this ______” Naming is the result of pedagogical practices of solicitation of the center.”

“Narrative is always sacrificial, regardless of the best efforts of its most sophisticated practitioners.”

“Narrative is originary (at least implicitly), but literature, it seems to me, is not, since it evolved later.”

“We all have a sense of how, for example, a narrative is structured—there is a hero, a goal, there are obstacles to achieving the goal, the hero overcomes them, and so on.”

“The nihilism of much modern art and modern thought is best understood as a protest bemoaning the absence of such a world.”

“Nihilism sets in once public battles seem to be about nothing—a combat with no real victor, because victories that are muddied, or dissipate, or are endlessly re-litigated , can no longer be appreciated as a contest.”

“Cynicism and nihilism can only be a local phenomenon indulged in by the privileged.”

“A nominalization is “redeemed” in the same way, through the organization of “congregants” who can generate ostensives singularizing the nominalization.”

“We could construct paths to nominalization producing these concepts, which are metaphors drawn from machinery and statistics.”

“Even “thought” is such a nominalization of the verb “think”—we can have “thoughts,” but there is also a whole world of “thought,” with its own history.”

“The occupied center is still taken as a kind of accident, acceptable only insofar as we can reduce the occupant to the implementation of one of these concepts.”

“One’s place in relation to the signifying center is fundamentally questionable, even if one’s relation to the occupied center is not—hence the discrepancy.”

“The discrepancy between signifying and occupied center will generate struggles over the occupancy of the center, which struggles then inform and divide the disciplines.”

“The originary event is a sample of humanity because all members of the group became sampling samples there.”

“The originary event is an instance of successfully seeing what happens when we do this to that—meaning is achieved.”

“The originary event is also the origin of resentment: the same sacred Being that preserves the community restrains desire while endowing the object with a sacrality that enhances its desirability.”

“Anyone interested in what my originary grammar is doing at the moment, here is my latest post on JCRT Live http://jcrt.typepad.com/jcrt_live/2009/03/originary-grammar-part-2.html”

“Processing the primes through originary grammar is the path toward making language programming and making it currency, against, I would guess, the discoverers of both these linguistic hypotheses (but, maybe, we can redeem Wierzbicka’s and Gans’s intentions by prolonging them through the stacks).”

“The metalanguage of literacy produces a fabricated present contrived out of various match-ups between categories deposited in the mind and categories deposited in reality—the purpose of originary grammar is to deconstruct such a present into the stacked scenes presented with the problem of succession.”

“The originary hypothesis is easily summed up in a couple of paragraphs, at most, and all it really assumes is that human beings are mimetic creatures.”

“Here, the obstacle in the way of perceiving the originary hypothesis is a refusal of paradoxical thinking.”

“Does that mean that one doesn’t claim that the originary hypothesis is true, or gets us closer to the truth of human being than other ways of thinking?”

“Cognition as Originary Memory The shift in focus, in cognitive theory, from the relation between mind and objects in the world to the relation between minds mediated by inter-subjectivity, brings it into dialogue with originary thinking.”

“Inasmuch as originary memory reproduces a memory of the whole scene and the whole event, all forces tend toward the community’s peaceful acceptance of the new object: the usurper wishes to minimize the risk of violence to himself, and the community wishes to minimize the risk to itself.”

“Originary satire is clearly lashon hara, which means I have a differend to work with here.”

“A kind of originary satire is required here, in which one invents the gestures that display the terminal points of actions taken within the oscillation of debt issuance on the one hand, and debt enforcement on the other (roughly, the central banks and the national security/intelligence agencies).”

“The originary satire which is simultaneously absolute idiomatic infiltration of central intelligence is the only sustainable mode of inscription now.”

“The originary scene is commemorated in ritual, and the specific movements, arrangements and props that organize the scene through the accretion of the memories of the group in its ongoing dialogue with the center is the origin of technology.”

“Following the sparagmos on the originary scene is the iteration of the scene in the ritual.”

“The paradoxes of deferral we see on the originary scene are enduring features of the human.”

“The originary sign is iconic and ostensive, because it is constitutive—that is, it establishes the very conditions under which iconic and ostensive signs are possible; but it does so ostensively and iconically.”

“The originary sign had to be gesture—it couldn’t be imagined as a sound, or a line drawn on the ground.”

“The originary sign creates a radical difference between the meaningful central object, on the one hand, and everything else, on the other.”

“I don’t deny that originary thinking is also compatible with liberalism, just that it only and intrinsically is so.”

“Ultimately, originary thinking is a way of tracing all the frames it comes across back to their origins, and through those origins, the origin of language and humanity.”

“The task for originary thinking is explore the overlapping terrains covered by this sprawling vocabulary, and make sense of them as so many ways of being signifying beings.”

“The ostensive is meaningless in the absence of its referent; the declarative can do without a real-world referent.”

“The ostensive is the “eating” in which we find the “proof of the pudding.” This is the kind of thing a disciplinary space is interested in—what counts as a sign that an imperative has been completed?”

“The syntactic form that corresponds to the ostensive is, I would say, the exclamation : “what a lovely day!” expresses that originary sense of gratitude as does “how awful!” because the latter expression equally presupposes some non-awful condition that allows us all to immediately recognize how awful the one indicated is.”

“Paradox is constitutive of power and sovereignty as well, a point of supreme importance for absolutism.”

“The paradox is contained within the ethical dimension as well: the deferred object becomes all the more desirable the more barred from appropriation it is.”

“Of course, this paradox is meant to examine our assumptions regarding “identity.” So, it’s still the same ship insofar as it’s still called the S.S.”

“The seemingly radical implication of performativity is that social roles rely upon ongoing participation and therefore revision and adaptation and can therefore always be taken up differently.”

“This doesn’t mean rule by “nerds,” because linguistic performativity means leading men, and men dedicated to the most rigorous testing of the more daring hypotheses.”

“It’s easy to overlook these modes of performativity, or to examine them only in some kind of protest mode which pretends to imagine a return to an earlier form of liberty, and thereby remain focused on the predations of social media.”

“Politics is sure to channel such resentments, compromising the independence of independent arbiters of insurance contracts.”

“Politics is most effective when the actors represent cleavages within the audience and reflect upon the meta- or constitutive rules governing the political space itself.”

“Politics is for protecting the dominion of habit and helping it become self-reflexive and open to novel compositions.”

“The post-sacrificial epoch would better (and more positively) be called the epoch of the absolute imperative, a concept I take from Philip Rieff.”

“Post-sacrificial civilization (accomplished via the Judaic, Biblical, and Christian revelations in the West and otherwise—via Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, etc., elsewhere) is the ongoing effort to bring that category into focus.”

“Post-sacrificial modes of being involve giving over our desires and resentments to the center in the knowledge we will have to sustain our attention towards the center so as to be worthy of when those desires and resentments come back transformed into imperatives from the center.”

“Power is both a priori and provisional, a location and its occupant.”

“Power is ontologically prior to and causative of, markets and all the rest.”

“Power means thwarting the ambitions of whoever would break ranks and rush to center.”

“The practice is the transposition of a sample from one field to another, in such a way that the fields are converted into elements appropriable by the practice.”

“The practice is to operationalize the meanings you encounter (as, e.g., in calling something “hard” means a certain kind and degree of force would be needed to alter its surface) and elicit the stack of scenes and grammatical stack that would make the sample meaningful, or more meaningful, or put on the path toward meaning.”

“A practice is a doing in the middle of things that are happening.”

“The model for this kind of semiotic presencing is sovereignty: you acknowledge that my utterance has brought into being a world you must find your way in and sustain.”

“Transcendence has us protect the separateness of the object; presencing is interested in the continuity of the scene—the object, then, would tend to devolve into a series of more or less premeditated pretexts for doing so.”

“That’s the work of stacked presencing—to perform the stack of scenes as an ever problematic, never guaranteed prolongation of the originary scene.”

“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, drawing upon the simultaneous emergence of Greek Philosophy, the Hebrew prophets and Asian phenomena like Buddhism and Confucianism.”

“Reactionary politics wants the levels of adjudication all named up.”

“Reactionary Future ’s explanation for the Black Lives Matter riots brings out the strengths and distinction of absolutism as a theory of social order.”

“Reactionary politics derives from this approach ever more detailed maps of the power sprawl that constitutes contemporary disorder and a model of disciplined attempts at securing power.”

“To name is both to reify, to create a role independent of whoever fills it, and to singularize, insofar as we can always distinguish between those who more or less adequately or authoritatively “inhabit” that name. the reification is then less an alienation or objectification than the creation of a new set of capacities.”

“We could hypothesize that in the gift economy and the honor/shame moral economy that goes along with it, it is competition among the performers, whose reliability is at stake at every instant, that is the issue; in a fully fledged market economy, it is competition among objects, and we don’t even have to see the performers.”

“Here is where a real marker of political reliability will be one’s ability to resist the temptation to turn these accusations back on one’s accusers, which continues the transformation of politics into attempts to be licensed as an arbiter of unacceptable speech.”

“All this would depend, of course, upon the reliability of the firm’s judgments—only insofar as those judgments and the reasoning offered for them were seen to be impartial could its success as a company and metric of civilizational layering be assured.”

“The deferral of violence through representation is what we are “meant” to do.”

“But more importantly, no symbolic representation is involved with the alpha male’s position in the group.”

“Every representation does need to posit some scene upon which all “receiving” the representation are virtually present.”

“Resentment is the emotion (?) or attitude (?) one has towards whomever denies you your desire.”

“Resentment is directed toward this second function of the object (or, to be a bit Lacanian, Object)—it bars the realization of desire.”

“Resentment is the imitation of the central presence, the enactment of the rule that is derived from the object in the midst of the failure to clear the field for desire.”

“We could say, instead, that rights are rooted in one’s participation in a gift economy.”

“Demands for rights are deliberately destructive of meaning, because the world of meanings is what prevented attention from being lavished on the plaintiff.”

“In such societies, persons, property, and rights are defended by recourse to third parties, usually courts, police, and so forth, that, if necessary, wield violence on their behalf.”

“Ritual is modified with the emergence of the imperative out of the ostensive.”

“Ritual is an exchange with the center: the participant fulfills some command of the center while making a request of the center.”

“Ritual is most fundamentally commemoration and scene-setting.”

“The underlying identity of significance and sacrality is not a mere metaphor.”

“His sacrality is more abstract, and less bound up with the ebb and flow of everyday life.”

“In that case, the question of sacrality is suspended, because determining something to be sacred and hence the source of the good, the true, etc., would then invalidate the conversation.”

“Satire is the medium in which such a winnowing out would be enacted, and for the satire to be trustworthy the ruler would have to be on the stage as well.”

“Satire is an attempt to further refine names until they position someone or something or some event on the originary scene, retrieved prior to the second revelation.”

“Satire is not really interested in being realistic, or in improvement—it just wants to show us what inevitably gets forgotten in more acceptable forms of representation.”

“Scapegoating is particularly alarming today, with the weapons of mass destruction at our disposal and the ways instantaneous media facilitate mob-like reactions to events.”

“Scapegoating is a practice of subtracting likeness from the othered, making likeness among those who do the othering less threatening; to acknowledge various ways of identifying the same amongst the like is to make it possible to lower and raise the threshold of differentiation as needed.”

“But there is some question as to whether such resistance to scapegoating is more than just “pragmatic,” with the resentment being enacted in some ritual or aesthetic manner.”

“The scene is completed simply by having a “critical mass” of participants see each other this way, because enough people seeing each other this way and showing that they see each other this way is the sign.”

“The scene is fundamentally contingent for him, and the various errors in emission upon the scene are smoothed out or “normed”; nor does he have any thought as to what will come after the scene–he will participate in the sparagmos like everyone else, but he has been assimilated to the group, which can take care of itself, by that point.”

“The scene is designed so as to make that action the only conceivable one.”

“The scene of representation is still primarily a place of deferral of conflict, not contemplation of a model of reality.”

“Anybody who uses language is a self endowed with free will; to use the sign on the scene of representation is to be a human self.”

“The scene of representation, however, is not just a rhetorical model of language as communication, but rather a model of transcendence or meaning.”

“So, the work of scenic design is the translation of events designed into narrative form into the terms of a possible practice.”

“The purpose of scenic design is revelation: scenes should be designed so as to maximize information coming from the center, which is to say anomalies generated by the selvings across those scenes.”

“Scenic design, extracting and deriving from the scene, is the event.”

“What is ignored by this scientism is the anthropological origins of the juridical form, which lie in the suppression of the vendetta (which would mean that the discussion of appropriate punishment must always find reference to some lower threshold that might reignite the vendetta).”

“Originary grammar should supersede scientism while preserving all the intellectual advances of science.”

““scientism,” a fellow participant in an online forum and (I think) the owner of an (eponymous) excellent twitter account, sees in the modern state a dialectic of centralization and fragmentation.”

“The “speech words” among the semantic primes are “say,” “words,” “true” (not even “false”).”

“The Natural Semantic Primes are on the one hand the simplest, most commonplace words and the most mysterious—how is it, exactly, that we “think,” “say,” “know,” “do” and so on?”

“The idioms I’ve been creating out of a reduction of scenic thinking to Anna Weirzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes is, then, intended to become the language of a team, or teams of teams, operating directly on the field of probability.”

“Indeed, the center must be marked first of all, insofar as the participants in the event attend from the sign/gesture to the object; but the effect of this shared attention is to have everyone attend from the object as sacred to each and every one’s profane desire for the object, culminating in the regulated sparagmos.”

“It is this first example of joint shared attention that is the beginning of human language.”

“There are two ways shared attention can be interrupted: first, through some kind of distraction; second, through some kind of fixation.”

“The sign is both the invention and the memory of that insight, an insight which must have been available on the scene to someone positioned so as to witness a simultaneous escalation and de-escalation in different “sectors” of the scene.”

“The sign designates the central object as taboo or sacred: too desirable and dangerous to be appropriated.”

“By its nature, the sign is an individual act, even when performed with others.”

“The ostensive offers a “profane” version of the scene, an intentional model of the universe limited to a single present reality, whose significance is presumed to require immediate attention.”

“I think we could say that lowering the threshold of significance is the way we conserve linguistic presence: what threatens linguistic presence is the loss of a shared center that we could point to; by lowering the threshold of significance we place a newly identified object at that center.”

“The man of resentment suffers from his finitude, not because he knows his life is finite, but because he feels his significance is finite.”

“In contrast, the signification-criterion is roughly speaking that of truth, al though only declarative sentences possess a genuine truth-value.”

“Attending to the tacit knowing enabling any signification recuperates distractions by using them to break up the fixations that interfere with our attending to the overlapping margins of our idioms that make language learning possible.”

“Any act of signification aims at changing the field of probabilities within which it is situated.”

“One’s place in relation to the signifying center is fundamentally questionable, even if one’s relation to the occupied center is not—hence the discrepancy.”

“Through these pedagogical and moral practices the signifying center is brought to bear on the occupied center, and imperative gap closed.”

“The signifying center, which under sacral conditions was supplemented by narrative and liturgical knowledge on the part of supplicants, is now constituted by attempts to apply remembered promises from the occupied center to the very scenic (technological) conditions constructing the memory.”

“It’s starting to look like fewer men are signing up—how many would be enough to make a difference?”

“But now that GA has provided the birth of our signing ability with a plausible real-world foundation, the problems of both philosophy and the human sciences can be placed on a new footing.”

“The token issuing institution might then be signing onto the charters issued by the center, committing to issuing a certain line of credit.”

“The line between anti-sociality and more formalized sociality is drawn through language itself.”

“Directly representing our sociality is paradoxical, then, because any such representation now becomes the property of our language, requiring new representations.”

“The complementary problems of succession (the continuity of the center, the system of references of the occupied to the signifying center) and of meaning (enhancing the scenic performativity of our signs), which is all that sociality is comprised of, find their solutions in the creation of such spaces.”

“A sovereign imaginary implies a staffing of the officer class.”

“To the liberal presupposing an anarchist sovereign imaginary we counter-presuppose sovereign naming.”

“Even a globalist, even an anarchist, inhabits a sovereign imaginary, whether it be international human rights courts and organizations mediating trade disputes, on the one hand, or spontaneously formed agreements between unbound individuals, on the other hand.”

“Sovereignty is the defense of the line qualifying the actors and audience.”

“Sovereignty is the central issue here, more explicitly than it has ever been.”

“Sovereignty is always passed off—to be sovereign is to decide upon one’s successor.”

“In this case, the participants in the sparagmos are essentially summarizing the scene to each other.”

“So it’s delayed—but if the sparagmos is, in fact the central being giving itself up, wouldn’t that “appease” rather than exacerbate any resentment?”

“Subsequent to the sparagmos is a repetition or replay of the originary scene making use of the remains of the devoured object—this is the origin of ritual.”

“Teaching is always a gift to a stranger, even if the teacher and student are close friends, because we are meeting on a yet to be generated scene of joint attention, and on that scene we will become different from what we are.”

“To think technologically about teaching is to think in terms of the various ways of "downloading" models.”

“In this case, I’m also learning (a teacher who doesn’t learn things in teaching is a bad teacher).”

“Technics is the continual reinscription of the scene—scenic design practices are events within scenes that design scenes in ways that facilitate new events.”

“How do we solve problems, especially technical problems—but that means all problems, because technics is nothing more than the construction, maintenance, and modification of the scenes upon which we act.”

“Technics, that is, serves the originary media of the scene—everyone positioned in a particular way in relation to the center so as to re-enact the originary scene.”

“Technology is imperative—what we become capable of doing becomes what we have no choice but to do.”

“Technology is completely bound up with the specific forms the centralization of power takes in the wake of the desacralization of power.”

“Technology is at least potentially solid and enduring—we can tell how long built things will last—but finance is exactly the opposite.”

“The Big Scene is big in size and in consequences, but most importantly it is big in the sense of limitless because it is a scene constructed, not around a center, but in order to prevent the emergence of a center.”

“I’ll be coming back here to issues addressed in a post from April 9, 2019, “The Big Scene is the Anthropological Basis of Anarchist Ontology,” and which I can now place in the context of the conversion of the ritual/mythical nexus into practices.”

“On the Big Scene we will never be done with money, capital, debt, exemplary victims and the apocalyptic struggle against tyranny.”

“The West is the inheritor of the Big Man revolution—as for why this should be the case, well, here we can welcome all those intellectual, political and even genetic genealogies of the West.”

“Perhaps the main export of the West is our music, movies, and television shows.”

“To a great extent the pre-modern history of the West is a series of attempts to make sense of the sovereign’s accountability to God.”

“A model of thinking is always a model of a disciplinary space.”

“I don’t deny that originary thinking is also compatible with liberalism, just that it only and intrinsically is so.”

“The problem of political thinking is to scale up the self-discipline we practice so as to exercise sovereignty where we can.”

“Thirdness is the recipient and normalization of the interplay of firstness and secondness, founding and institutionalization, but it is also the position of the witness or spectator.”

“Thirdness is intended to be such a mode of organizing and strategizing.”

“Thirdness is to be designed so as simulate this process of transformation so closely as to eventually become it.”

“I think we could say that lowering the threshold of significance is the way we conserve linguistic presence: what threatens linguistic presence is the loss of a shared center that we could point to; by lowering the threshold of significance we place a newly identified object at that center.”

“All practices tend towards lowering the threshold of significance.”

“This means inventing practices that lower the threshold of significance.”

“The truth is, you can’t argue about abuses of the civil rights legal and political inheritance without being forced to disentangle what from that inheritance is worthy of preservation.”

“The truth is that, strictly speaking, desire cannot coincide with meaning: the purer the desire, the more any interference with that desire must be destroyed, intellectually and physically, if possible.”

“The truth is that the anti-white dimension of the globalist/leftist juggernaut goes far deeper than any “welfare state,” “regulatory,” or “meritocratic” issues can get at, and requires for its intellectual dismantling a more sophisticated hermeneutics that relies upon in-group tacit agreement.”

“Tyranny is the manifestation of and response to greed and the desire for domination, “passions” liberated on the post-sacral market.”

“This is the only way to fully recoup the Big Man revolution (against the Left, which is really primarily, ferociously, primordially, opposed to precisely this) and “solve” the problem of tyranny is through the establishment of a rotating dictator system.”

“Politics can be distinguished from rule, or tyranny, by the competitive nature of the struggle and the actor-audience relation.”

“Universalism is the fantasy that all humans are occupying the same disciplinary space.”

“Universalism is really the imagining of the world under a single empire—not necessarily under the rule of a single individual or institution (but maybe that as well), but certainly all subject to the same regime of rights and their enforcement.”

“In universalism, the individual is imagined as potential victim of overweening power, and the solution is for that individual to be ever further abstracted so as to be acted upon by an even overweenier power.”

“Victimary thinking is, most fundamentally, resentment towards civilization—a resentment only possible for the civilized, or those in close proximity to them.”

“Victimary thinking is an ugly and dangerous business, but the inhabitants of advanced economies in their “crowd-sourced” wisdom appear to have determined so far that it is the lesser evil compared to naked hierarchy.”

“Victimary thinking is, for Gans, a moral transformation in Western society resulting from the shock at the Nazi genocide of the Jews.”

“Wisdom, we can say, is the bringing to bear of the paradoxical nature of human existence as a means of deferral of sacrifice.”

“The new urbanity might be historical wisdom, and it might provide a model for leaving off defense of civilized standards.”

“We have the “crowd-sourced” wisdom of the inhabitants, but then the “transnational elite” and its hierarchy makes an immediate entrance.”