Concept
Media
The network of attention that runs through the center, from the originary scene to the algorithm
Ask AI about Media“So, originary media is a network, a set of invisible lines we could hypothetically draw connecting the sensorium of each of the scene’s participants to each other’s, but also to all the different “parts” (what counts as a “part” depends on the vision, embedded in a body in motion or stasis) of all the others’ bodies.”
From the Archive
“Jousse insists that even more technologically advanced and abstracted forms of media, like reading or films, are thoroughly mediated mimologically.”
“the order provided by the animal pecking order is replaced by an order mediated by the sign, which defers violence through representation.”
“more mediated forms of representation (where the poles of communication are separated temporally and/or spatially) have two alternatives open to them: the supplementation of the represented speech act with whatever means the medium provides for simulating the presence of the represented scene (“classical prose” is the first virtual reality, remarkably immersive); or, the representation of the speech act as one variably probable utterance on the variably probable scenes that medium can represent.”
“We are all highly mediated and technologized men and women. It’s staggering to think of all the ways we operate as signs across all the different media, and the way in which all of our habits, including of thought, depend upon all the devices we are plugged into. It is clear that the political vocabulary we are used to, comprised of “values,” “ideas,” “opinions,” “agreements and disagreements,” “principles,” and so on, are completely inadequate for conditions where the tweak of an algorithm will determine whether 0 or 10,000 people will be exposed to something I say.”
“The mediation of the center is above all an operation of interdiction ; the sacred being that guarantees the exchange process is what is forbidden, unexchangeable at least for a time, and the energetic investment of mimetic desire transferred to the sacred center is not “discharged” but on the contrary consecrated to the object of communal devotion.”
“The discipline, by contrast, plants itself explicitly in the literate scene, and knows it can only represent the speech scene in a mediated way.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.For GA, media begins on the originary scene, before any apparatus. The pacifying conversion of rivalrous imitation produces "an order mediated by the sign, which defers violence through representation," so that mediation and deferral are the same operation seen from two sides. Bouvard radicalizes this: "originary media is a network, a set of invisible lines" connecting each participant's sensorium to the others' — even apparently solitary, abstracted media like "reading or films, are thoroughly mediated mimologically," extensions of the body's miming on the scene rather than departures from it. What every medium carries forward is the center: there is "a certain kind of presence always implicit in representation, even in some technofuture where humans only engage each other in mediated and simulated forms," a "collective, centered presence" that no degree of separation between the poles of communication can dissolve.
Because mediation always runs through the center, media is never neutral transmission but the management of desire and resentment. "The mediation of the center is above all an operation of interdiction"; the sacred object is held unexchangeable so that mimetic desire is transcended in representation rather than fought over. This is why GA distinguishes external from internal mediation — models placed beyond rivalry versus models close enough to become rivals — and why the disciplines, which "can only represent the speech scene in a mediated way," exist to recover the opacity that immediate literacy collapses. The contemporary condition merely intensifies the originary one: "We are all highly mediated and technologized men and women," operating "as signs across all the different media," where "the tweak of an algorithm" governs whether a hundred or zero attend to what is said — distribution become indistinguishable from the centering of attention itself.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“For Gans, the demise of metaphysics and the poststructuralist elevation of representation signal the beginning of human science construed as a systematic construction of the”scene of human origin.” Ultimately, all culture is concerned with recreating the originary scene, but it is only generative anthropology that proposes this scenic creation as a subject…”
“This is the hypothetical scene on which human language originated and on which human language continues to be used. The scene of representation is that place in which a hypothesized generative set of circumstances produced the event of originary signification. Generative anthropology proposes that human beings are best understood not as grammatical subjects…”
“Writing is a medium—it generates scenes around a text; film is a medium—it generates scenes around a screen; radio is a medium—it generates scenes around broadcast sound; and so on. Are pen, typewriter, microphone, projector, DVD, large darkened room, also part of these media? Yes, but the various elements, settings or implements of the media are more or…”
“It seems to me that we’ve gotten to the point, with the emergence of computing as a “metamedia,” where there’s no basis for distinguishing between “media” and “technology.” All media, including the most basic, such as speech, gesture and writing, are implicated in the vast array of recording and monitoring technologies, and as subject to algorithmic…”
“This is as true of economic exchange as of religion. The scene is a model of generative human interaction; its product is representation, the establishment of the sign, or system of signs, as a separate, transcendent mode of being that brings the things of this world into the central focus of human culture. The fundamental task of anthropology is to explain…”
“I’m not going to get into a detailed analysis of the tremendous developments in media over the last century and a half that have had the effect, most obviously, of enabling simultaneity over great distances—unlimited simultaneity across the planet, in fact. I will just point out that what the model I’ve just constructed would suggest must be seen as a…”
“Generative anthropology is less attuned than either victimary or positivist (“materialist”) thinking to the communal style of today’s academy. To think anthropologically is to renounce the metaphysical point of departure based on the declarative sentence, or, to put it another way, on the idea that “mind” can be abstracted from its implantation in human…”
“It is Generative Anthropology (GA)’s ambition, not to synthesize the substance of these discourses, let alone to “inter-disciplinarize” them, but to trace them back to their originary roots and explain why they diverged, and why their diverse paths were in some sense necessary. In The Origin of Language (TOOL) I made a fundamental distinction between two…”
“The human exchange system does not merely reshuffle the same elements; from the first and ever thereafter, it creates meaning by incarnating, capturing, and consuming– sacrificing , in a word–its sacred Other. All earlier models of human behavior have either been centered on this Other as though we could understand “its” intentions on the analogy of our…”
“In 1999, Cambridge University Press posthumously published anthropologist Roy Rappaport’s magnum opus, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity , whose major thesis is that religion and language are coeval : that whichever of the two we use to define the minimal state of the human, it did not come into existence without the other. Generative…”
Key Texts
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