Term
Imperative of the Center
used in 17 texts across the archive
“The need for maintaining or restoring presence itself derives from the originary scene—we can say, a little anachronistically, that preserving linguistic presence is the first imperative of the center. And what it meant first of all was that each member on the scene ensure that his sign was the same as that issued by others.”
In use
“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.”
Key texts