Concept
Center Study
The juridical and transdisciplinary originary inquiry that gives this archive its name
“I’ve suggested before that center study (I won’t complain if anyone wants to continue calling what I’m doing “GA”) might best be seen as a kind of programming idiom to be made interoperable with other idioms. Less “meta” than “infra”—other idioms don’t need to be translated into a fully operationalized theoretical discourse; rather, the asymptomatically self-cancelling idioms designed within center study generate aligned idioms out of others.”
From the Archive
“Center study could be seen as a kind of metalanguage, converting all discourses into mimesis and deferral just psychoanalysis converts all discourse into desire and repression or historical materialism converts all discourse into base and superstructure.”
“Center study is held together by a sufficiently small number of concepts—along with the above, we have nomos and the juridical and surely a couple of others I’m forgetting now. Creating new idioms involves using one of the concepts as a platform for the others—this is itself technological and a kind of stacking.”
“The previous paragraph serves as a reminder that the Natural Semantic Primes can never be far from our minds when designing idioms. For originary hypothesizing, or center study, they simply replace philosophy, providing the originary meaning of the words out of which all other meanings can be produced.”
“The goal of center study is to stay as close to boundary between diagnosis and prescription as possible on the longest timeline imaginable: to always be able to say, this is what everyone is already doing and here’s how they might, given certain shifts in visible trajectories, do it more explicitly and accountably.”
“It would vindicate center study as a fork-off of the originary hypothesis away from GA, with the distinctive argument I’ve been making for the juridical as a provisional space between the ritual and disciplinary.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Center study names a continuation of Generative Anthropology rather than a repudiation of it — Bouvard "won't complain if anyone wants to continue calling what I'm doing 'GA'" — while still marking a real divergence: "a fork-off of the originary hypothesis away from GA, with the distinctive argument I've been making for the juridical as a provisional space between the ritual and disciplinary." The name relocates the emphasis from the origin of the human to the center that inquiry, and the archive compresses it into a single phrase: "the juridical and transdisciplinary originary inquiry (center study)."
What binds the project is deliberately minimal: "Center study is held together by a sufficiently small number of concepts," and "creating new idioms involves using one of the concepts as a platform for the others — this is itself technological and a kind of stacking." At the base of the vocabulary sit the Natural Semantic Primes, which "simply replace philosophy, providing the originary meaning of the words out of which all other meanings can be produced."
Its mode of operation is idiomatic rather than doctrinal. It "could be seen as a kind of metalanguage, converting all discourses into mimesis and deferral," but the preferred figure is "less 'meta' than 'infra'": a programming idiom whose self-cancelling constructions "generate aligned idioms out of others" instead of translating them into theory. And its inquiries hold a fixed discipline: "to stay as close to boundary between diagnosis and prescription as possible on the longest timeline imaginable" — always able to say what everyone is already doing, and how it might be done more explicitly and accountably.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“Department of English University of Victoria Victoria, BC Canada, V8W 3W1 rvanoort@uvic.ca For three gorgeous days in June, against the scenic backdrop of Victoria’s charming Inner Harbor, attendees at the 2014 Generative Anthropology Summer Conference explored the theme of “Deferral, Discipline, Knowledge.” The idea of deferral was a nod to GA’s roots.…”
“The disciplines claim knowledge of the mind, the social, religion, customs, the state, beauty and so on, as things in themselves, while for the disciplinary space of originary thinking the practices given these names are all representations by those on the margins of the center. The study of this practice of representation is what I have been calling, on…”
“Welcome to Center Study Center by me, Dennis Bouvard. Author of Anthropomorphics”
“This kind of conversion of ritualism and narrative into practice and hypothesis can be designed at any scale. Addressing the center from your presumed position in relation to the center through your engagements with others opposes invoking the center on your behalf against others. This requires large scale linguistic, moral, institutional and…”
“Abstract 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…”
“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…”
““Donate your resentment to the center,” one of the first coined idioms of center studies, can now be given a more strictly economic meaning; i.e., it can be tokenized. “Resentment” remains an irreducible concept for center studies—indeed, one impetus for separating center studies from generative anthropology was the inadequate and impressionistic…”
“For center study, what is happening here is the multiplication of scenes, macro and micro, upon which the assembled can say “this is the same” in unlimited ways. Finding and creating new scenes upon which we can say “this is same” and thereby say the same thing so as not to do the same thing becomes a self-directed practice, an “end in itself.” This is how…”
“Center study assumes that any tracing of any idiom to its possibility and emergence will lead us back to the originary hypothesis, while anthropomorphics assumes that the originary hypothesis can only find its proof of work and concept in the jarring of an idiom. Anthropomorphics, then, is not so interested in reducing or explaining, metalanguage like, any…”
“I always want to compress the results of new inquiries into new idioms so as to continue to flood the scene with center study idioms because your thinking is not radical if it’s not creating a new language more compelling than the ones people are already speaking. How, then, to encompass recent inquiries into credit, the perfection of the imperative through…”
Key Texts
Where the term is defined.
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