Mediated Centrality

We can see the different speech forms as different media, even in the sense that each can be used to channel the others in revealing ways: you can point at something in order to ask a question about it in some contexts, a question can really be a statement, a declarative sentence an obvious, and ominous, command, and so on. Whatever marks an utterance as one form or another, or some overlapping of forms, is what marks it as media, because the simplest way of thinking about media is as whatever provides for the scene enabling and constituted by the sign itself. The first medium is the mimetic structure of the originary scene itself, with the symmetry spread across the scene and mirrored and modulated from one body to the others setting the stage for the gesture of deferral. We can take this tightly organized network, with each “station” “pinging” the others, as the model for all media. Mimetic theory is usually too quick to find its way to easily recognizable examples of imitation, like those found in the mimetic triangles of desire so critical to Rene Girard. Marcel Jousse’s “mimism,” though, reminds us that mimesis, or miming, works on much more levels both more fractal and more macro, and continue operating within the “ideas” and “social structures” that we can take to be moderating responses to mimetically generated violence.

For Jousse, every move we make is not only mimed, but recalls and deploys (“revivifies”) all the muscular and other physiological responses deposited in the “anthropos” from previous mimings. The world and any knowledge we have of it is mimed, not in “images” in our “minds,” but in our bodily movements, stillnesses, and tensions. As soon as we come into the world we orient ourselves to our surroundings by miming everything in it, with our eyes, ears and touch. With our mimed gestures, we act back on the world, forcing new disclosures on its part, which we mime in turn. All our communications and interactions with others are saturated with miming, something which is easy enough to notice if you look at the eye contact, nodding, head tilting, word repeating and checking, body opening and closing that is evident in every interpersonal encounter. Jousse insists that even more technologically advanced and abstracted forms of media, like reading or films, are thoroughly mediated mimologically. How have we attained the control over our body that allows us to sit still, face forward, eyes focused on black print on white page,

as we read? Even this non-movement is miming, as we would probably confirm if we can remember the days of learning to sit quietly over books and other reading materials in schools. On the originary scene we should imagine a cumulative reciprocal matching of body parts and movements as part of what we call the “gesture of aborted appropriation”—as I’ve pointed out, any stray movement, any sudden move within the process of “lining up” in front of the object could easily lead to the breakdown of the scene. Jousse is necessary for anthropomorphics because he doesn’t remark on the causal primacy of miming and then go on to talk about the activities we already have familiar names for, like “religion,” “art” and so on. He insists that we focus on the constitutive mimological character of each and every one of these human endeavors.

It’s extremely instructive to consider that one’s attempt to construct a complex string of arguments, aimed at displacing and modifying some other complex string of arguments, is riddled throughout with the oral and written styles derived from the rhythms of vocabulary, grammatical constructs, habits of paragraphing and punctuating, assonance and alliteration, and so on, which one has mimed from others and now inhabits as a result of an entire lifetime of reconstructing and recombining these rhythms. Even more, the fundamental purpose of the clichés, formulas and parallelisms Jousse identifies in the oral style, that is, memorization, is no less central to our mimetic and pedagogical practices to this day. It’s true that we don’t need to memorize actual texts, but more tacitly we have to remember learned responses to texts, to conversations, to questions, to implicit and explicit imperatives, to a world of emergent ostensives—if we look closely, we can see people’s self-centerings organized through various mnemotechnic devices that involve remembering who they are. In other words, we have to remember the scenic forms of our interactions with others. Jousse believed that we have abstracted or “algebrized” ourselves away from our native miming spontaneity by giving ourselves over not only to writing but mathematized forms of social interaction, but he provides us with ways of seeing a equally pervasive miming being carried over into these media as well. The reason we are more than just a jumble of dissociated mimes inscribed in us through the billions of separate “events” we live through is because we bring the mimes that “stick” into various rhythmic relations with each other; and eventually into what Jousse calls “style,” or the becoming conscious of the mimes working their way through us. Jousse’s project is a profoundly anti-metaphysical one, which would have us recover our rhythmic birthright, and which has formed a crucial tributary into the study of the difference between orality and literacy pioneered by Millman Parry’s study of Homer, continued by Alfred Lord, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, of course Marshal McLuhan, and others—a tradition which I have taken David Olson’s more recent work to be a kind of culmination of. What Jousse does not consider is the problem of violence, or mimetic rivalry, viewing the gestural world as a kind of Eden which has never really been lost even if it’s under threat in certain more “educated” regions of the Western world. It’s not surprising, then, that even though Jousse would seem to be especially well placed to hypothesize regarding the origin of language he, on the contrary, considers it to be a non-problem, with oral language itself simply a form of gesturing, making use of a different combination of muscular networks—those producing sounds that originally just supplemented gestures. How we could have ever gotten lost in the algebraic modern world then seems to be a problem, but I have no interest in engaging in a “critique” of Jousse here—like other seminal thinkers one has to accept

that what he can give you may very well depend upon him not being able to give what he can’t.

And what Jousse, resituated within originary grammar, can give us is a model of originary media, which subsequent media progressively distance themselves from, retrieve and supplement. In other words, I am suggesting a more general application for Olson’s reference to “classical prose” to illustrate the operations of the metalanguage of literacy. Let’s say that the “media” is whatever makes a scene hold together as a scene, and whatever makes it hold together as a scene is whatever provides a space for the sign to signify. This provides us with a kind of continuum for articulating scene and sign: we can see the sign as a minimal “protuberance” on a densely networked or mediated scene; or, we can see the sign maximally, as requiring an extensive articulation requiring only a few “props”; or anywhere in between. To use Gregory Bateson’s definition of “information,” the sign is the difference that makes a difference on the scene, and any judgment on what counts as this “difference” can only be made from within another (disciplinary) scene. 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. We would even have to draw lines directly from body parts of one participant to body parts of others, as we should assume tacit, tactile and subtle forms of responsiveness on everyone’s part. So, just as the metalanguage of literacy supplements whatever on the speech scene that cannot be directly represented in writing, everything “horizontal” in the originary media would have to be supplemented in subsequent scenic articulations; and, just as classical prose generates the simulation of a scene upon which the author and read stand with the topic of the prose, all subsequent media aim at an equivalent simulation of those lines connecting us bodily to our fellow participants.

Just like the sign is immersed in the scene without there being any definite boundary separating them, the scene itself is immersed in its surroundings, making its surrounding conditions of its own scenicity. To follow up on the previous discussion of aesthetics, every media represents itself as a medium in its distinction from the surroundings it converts into its conditions—again, without any definite boundaries. An early human ritual maximizes everything remembered to be present in the first ritual, with such memory itself being a series of mimings, supplementations and simulations—everyone is dressed as the animal placed at the center, everyone has a prescribed part in the drama represented in the ritual—all this is media. This mediated scene closes itself off from whatever isn’t the scene—the forest beyond the clearing where the ritual takes place, say. But if there are noises from the forest, or an animal appears from it, the community will likely be able to respond to such contingencies from within the ritual, giving these new additions a part, using them to further substantiate the scene. They may become serendipitous additions to the established ritual. But this would also mean that members of the community are attuned to what is non-scene as potential scene, including other animals, water, sky, sun, stars, and so on—all of which could become media insofar as any of it can be brought in to supplement the scene and more precisely distinguish the sign. This is all miming—if the wind, for example, becomes medium by blowing through the ritual and modifying the setting of the ritual, this is because the effects of the wind can now be mimed, but if those effects can now

be mimed, that means they were always already mimed, which would explain how they could have been imagined as contributing to the ritual in the first place.

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 problem each form of media— radio, TV, film, the internet, etc.—must solve is how to draw those horizontal lines connecting all the participants in these very different kinds of scenes. What kinds of miming, supplementation and simulations allow for the operation of these different media? Already with writing, we have media that constitutes not a single scene, but unlimited possible scenes. In what sense is, say, a modern translation of _Oedipus Rex_ the “same” text as the one first read or performed by Athenian citizens? This is a way of asking in what sense we are on the same scene as those Athenians. Insofar as we are, that shared scenic relation is generated mediatically: through histories of performance, transmission, study, translation, and so on—all of which are forms of media generating signs that go into the composition of a transhistorical scene, a present, upon which that text might be the “same.” So, those horizontal lines are drawn by reaching into the surroundings of a given media and incorporating some of those surroundings into the media. Now, the miming, supplementations and simulations I have been contending are constitutive of the media are also the elements of the media that “critical” media theorists have always taken to be sources of mystification. Isn’t it, after all, the illusion of believing in the lovers’ passion on screen, of participating in the woes of the novelistic character, that enables one to be “interpellated” by the “dominant ideology”? In other words, the media generate the illusion of all whose attention it draws being on the same scene. It’s not just an illusion, but it’s that as well, and a potent one insofar as the devices employed to generate the experience of sharing a scene conceal the historic mediations that actually make the scene the same in a different sense. New scene can then be generated to represent the mechanisms used to generate the illusion. Paying attention to the scene, bringing the scene and scenically transformed elements of the non-scene into the sign is all part of the practice of originary satire—we could say this all involves enhancing our resources as mimers beyond what the current media would, strictly speaking, allow. The challenge is to develop modes of inscription that uncompromisingly expose the historicity of any particular scene (including the scene of inscription itself) while inscribing a transhistorical (anthropomorphic) model of exposure that persists through the successive scenes organized around the text. But we can now pursue all these inquiries without that other illusion of laying bare, once and for all, an unjust hierarchy to be dismantled in the creation of a just egalitarian order. It is remarkable that almost nobody really believes in such a transformation while at the same time everybody does, as is evident from the omnipresent references to “examining power relations” and the still popular gesture of muckraking into “abuses of power,” hidden “power elites,” and so on. Yes, there are power relations, and abuses of power, but no power-free or power-neutral model against which to measure them. No one wants to say what, exactly, “non-abusive” power would look like because then they’d be confessing that power hierarchies can in fact be unobjectionable—that is, virtually no one can think outside of the opposition between the tyrant and the holy victim. What could be more illusory than that?

The dominant medium today is the internet which, as Eric Gans has pointed out, tends to assimilate all other media to itself: here, we see the work of miming, supplementation and simulation of one medium with regard to another taking place. But the internet is itself modeled on a rather ancient medium: the archive: books, themselves a kind of medium, placed in a single location (another medium), catalogued in various ways (more media), used by those specially trained to do so (more media—more miming, supplementation and simulation). The internet is an all-inclusive and immediately accessible archive, and it makes all signs, scenes and events instantly archivable. Archives were used to collect all the relevant cultural products of a civilization; the internet archives everything indiscriminately. Relations between elements in the archive are determined by algorithms abstracted from searches by users and shaping future searches. So, if you search “Charles Dickens Bleak House” you’ll get connected to critical discussions of the novel, Dickens’s other novels, novelists contemporary with Dickens, like Thackeray, Chancery Court, the all-consuming civil court that a subplot in the novel is centered on—in what proportions would depend upon what readers, critics and scholars focus on in their studies of the novel. The internet distributes scenes of inquiry which overlap with each other in varying degrees. What doesn’t come up in searches will eventually disappear from the culture, even if in principle it will always be there to be retrieved. The algorithm is a supplementary medium for this more abstracted, distributed and immense archive in process.

The primary form of cultural activity is therefore becoming archival work (we’re becoming librarians). We’re always constructing “portfolios,” in which one cultural item we take to be significant is shown to be significant because it adds to the significance of other cultural items. And part of what makes an item significant is that others have asserted its significance. Social and cultural theories are essentially models for conducting searches and building relationships within the archives so as to construct hierarchies of significance. Sometimes we’ll assert the significance of something as lying precisely in the refusal of others to grant it significance. Anyone who has spent much time on blogs outside of the “mainstream” are well aware of how pretty much every dominant narrative of the 20th century West is currently under extreme strain, and it’s not clear how much of the Whig history that has reigned supreme over the past 70 years will remain intact. All this is a result of archival work, and a lot of it simply involves juxtaposing texts that have been made central alongside equally (or more) compelling accounts that have been “memory-holed.” It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that’s all that Mencius Moldbug did in constructing his political formalism. It’s with far less exaggeration all Moldbug’s opposite, Noam Chomsky, did, well before the internet, in his political writing (“here’s what the _New York Times_ says; here’s what this paper in Managua, or Beirut, or Madrid says...”).

Media as archive suggests a way to begin thinking about alternative and counter-models of education, at all levels. Instead of packaging and delivering standard narratives as the school system does now, just have students, from the beginning, charting pathways through the archives. Have students juxtapose multiple narratives around a single event or historical figure, using different media from different periods and from different perspectives. Have them keep noticing differences between the narratives, and building profiles of those narratives. These would be scenes of inquiry that are in turn deposited back into the archive. Teachers can be there

to help out and ensure students construct sufficiently challenging projects. Learning how to read and write would be part of this process—dictionaries, grammar, rhetoric, logic and other resources are also part of the archives. This approach would break up ideological commonplaces and cultural monopolies, while organizing everyone around the process of inquiry itself. Of course, the possibility of such a pedagogy depends upon the coherence of power, which itself depends upon the mimological relations between different levels of power: the coherence of power would be measured by the extent to we see fractalized mimisms through the various chains of command comprising the social order: do those with more power model for those with less practices that subordinates can, in turn, analyze and replicate in ways that are later incorporated by the commanders? This inquiry would yield far more valuable information than those predicated upon liberal notions of consent, dialogue, communication, shared beliefs, sympathy, solidarity and so on. Can we actually show an institution to be engaged in a shared project? And do all institutions participate in a shared projects modeled by the central authority? These would be the properly pedagogical questions.