The Center, Speaking

It should be clear that I'm not calling for the restoration of the sacred, but for the increasingly rich direct representation of our sociality. The sacred is an indirect, unaware representation of sociality, since the human contribution to the construction of sacrality cannot be explicitly represented. Directly representing the social was also the project of secular thought, but the project turned out to be impossible on those terms because the "human" individual must be taken as its own origin, with the signs that mediate between humans mere expressions of what is always already internal to the human individual. The emergence of government enables a more direct representation of sociality, but as long as government is sacralized, the human contribution to sociality cannot be represented. The modern subjection of government to points of reference taken to be immediately "human" (rights, equality, nature, and so on) has the effect of making anti-sociality a condition of intelligibility. That is, individuals and groups can only be represented in opposition to the social, which stands in for "tyranny" or some other form of coercion (like determinism). Only by starting with a center which is both internal and external to the human, that is, a product of human practice but in its effects irreducible to any human practice, can we begin to represent sociality in more legible terms. Think of how every word or sentence we speak or write, every gesture we make, is dependent upon the millions of times those words, sentences and gestures have been deployed in extremely similar ways—by contrast, whatever is novel in any of our utterances is minimal. Part of the paradox constituting the human is that such minuscule "revisions" of the common stock of linguistic resources might have effects far beyond what the proportion between "new" and "old" in the utterance might suggest. Directly representing our sociality is paradoxical, then, because any such representation now becomes the property of our language, requiring new representations. Representations of sociality, then, are re-presentations of existing, less legible forms of sociality: they represent those forms of sociality as more differentiated, more reciprocally embedded, more centered, so that those differentiations in practices and relationships, and those elicitations of previously unacknowledged reciprocities, can become explicitly formalized designations which distribute authority and responsibilities more transparently and publicly. What I am saying here can be said in more familiar sociological, e.g., Durkheimian terms; but the specificity of representation needs to be accounted for. The line between anti-sociality and more formalized sociality is drawn through language itself. If we try and represent human or social relations directly, unmediated by the center, we will only end up representing their resentments and claims on each other, leaving us to seek some reconciliation

or balance between antithetical "elements." If we take care of language, meanwhile, we will be taking care of humans, that is, each other—language always directs our attention to a center, and through that center, the center that conditions that centering.

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. To try and stand outside of, say, social media, and denounce it for isolating and manipulating and enraging people, is simply to leverage one medium—say, writing, or TV—against another, ascendant one—it’s not to position us within nature against something artificial. We have to think in terms of interlocking media strategies—for example, using highly contagious maxims on Twitter to, in part, direct attention to longer essays or a book. But it’s not just a question of strategy—rather, it’s a question of modes of being; that is, it’s ontological. If we think of ourselves as separate individuals, waging war against some tyranny on behalf of a rebellious subjectivity we are playing into well-worn strategies directed from above. Thinking in terms of group identities, however conceived, is really the same strategy on a larger scale. Thinking of ourselves as beings of the center, representatives of the center, delegates, emissaries of the center, opens up new possibilities. In that case we’re offering the central authority feedback based upon the difficulties we’re having in fulfilling imperatives coming from the central authority. Among those imperatives are, certainly, ones directing us to individualize (self-center) ourselves in certain ways, and to organize ourselves into communities along certain lines. Every imperative from the center—every law, every invocation of a constitutional obligation, every priority suggested by some government action—necessarily suggests various modes of individuation and corporatization. Again, the point is not simply to drop all the ways you have of thinking about yourself, but to see those ways as always already in a kind of asymmetrical exchange with the center. What is wanted is to have those identities named, and the imperatives following upon that naming to be drawn out.

The various media and technologies, then, are our articulation with and through the center. Questions of whether technologies dehumanize us, or interfere with our privacy or personal freedoms are always questions posed, futilely, from within an older media to a newer one. Even more specifically, it may be that most of these criticisms come from an imagined experience of mid-20th century urban living, where for many a certain balance among the desires of prosperity, freedom from externally imposed norms, and sociality was possible. However that may be, the central authority will always want to know enough about the people it governs to govern them; and the governed are also filled with expectations regarding the maintenance of safety, conditions for forming families, engaging in productive activity and enjoyment that always already presuppose a central imaginary seeing to spatial arrangements and information gathering. A demand that I be left alone entails a whole series of assumptions about my relations with

others. Even more, it assumes the existence of projects I am or could be engaged in with others, either directly or by proxy. Imagine stripping from our discussion all references to “rights,” on the one hand, and notions of “checks and balances,” or “public and private,” on the other hand, and consider what discussions of the relationship between individuals, communities, corporations and governments would then look like. The only way we could get our bearings without those familiar legal and political markers is by isolating another, also familiar one: the notion of “chartering,” central to Western culture, at least, since the Middle Ages, and in a way Roman antiquity. If everything is chartered—corporations, profit and non-profit, subordinate units of government—as, in fact, is already the case, then as individuals we are always already all chartered up. Questions of social order then come down to clarifying the terms of the charters issued at all levels, and the only agency capable of doing that is the sovereign, and sovereign agents. Charters bind all agencies to the imperatives of the center. To the extent that we’re all agents of the sovereign, even if not to the same degree of officiality, our main contribution to public discourse is clarifying the operations of the institutions we participate in in terms of their charters and our own competencies. To the extent of our abilities, we clarify and represent the kind of scenes the media we participate in place us upon: at the very least, this means incorporating, in the way each media allows, the feedback of actual and possible audiences, and reconstructing one’s centeredness accordingly; and, it means that it is as “pieces” within the “technosphere” that we create fractal pedagogical hierarchies. These practices are part of listening to the center.

What will happen once one ruler selects his successor is that we will see relations reduced to sovereign-to-sovereign ones, without the mediation of a whole conglomerate of shifting and unaccountable agencies. The reduction of all relationships to such formalized ones: ruler to ruler, ruler to delegate, delegate to delegate, ultimately including everyone in an ordered way—that is the way out of liberalism, on the international as well as national level. As terrifying as it may sound to some, such an order in fact expects the most of its people, wherever they are situated within hierarchies. What is absolutely forbidden under such an order is directing violent centralization toward the authorities—and that target is the source of all violent centralizations, which always, at whatever scale, seek to find and punish a hidden power imagined to lie behind the scenes of the official power. Authorities are never opposed as authorities—no one is ever, in practice, an anarchist—but as usurped authorities, at which point we enter the realm of the super- sovereigns we invoke to do battle against usurping tyrants. If we can’t charge the authorities with usurpation, our resentments must be constructed according to the terms of redress and remediation constructed by those authorities themselves. If those terms of redress and remediation turn out to be applied in an “unjust,” even “absolutely” unjust way, on their own terms, it will be recognized that directing resentment toward those institutions or those who staff them cannot possible correct those injustices. To assume that it can is to assume that the temporality of resentment is commensurate with the temporality of institutional rectification. With all the means available, one provides feedback to the system, but it is a mark of advanced deferral to acknowledge that the effective recipient of that feedback cannot be anticipated within the feedback itself. Even if we consider the necessity of disobeying an unambiguously immoral order, such an act must be presented as a sign of what will eventually come to be regarded as

obedience—not to some higher power, but to that very, for the moment shortsighted, power. Leaving testimony for agents of the regime to examine is a repudiation of any instigation of a revolt against the system. 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. McLuhan seems to be imagining a “natural” body made “artificial,” though, which paradoxically presupposes some kind of control center “using” those extensions, as if they were deliberately developed as prosthetics. The situation looks different once we consider technology, media and capital as means of generating asymmetrical reciprocity between center and margins. The sign on the scene is itself the first media, and we use it to “keep an eye” on each other, while turning ourselves into “limbs” ready to restrain anyone interfering with the visual apparatus, and into measuring rods dividing up portions. Now that eyes are literally everywhere, each of us can transform surveillance and recording devices into our eyes and ears; now that calculating probabilities of human action has been automated, we can all transform machinic algorithms into our brains; we each have our own access to wheels and wings; and so on. Now, instead of plugging these observations into an oceanic feeling of global communality, consider what is involved in coordinating all the “organs” of these bodies, that each of us participates in from our respective positions on the margin. So, when I see something (say, a video making the rounds of Twitter), it means something to the extent that one of the “legs” (or wings or wheels) I have anthropomorphized out of the technological nerves, bones and muscles I operate within get me close enough to what I see so that my “hands” (e.g., security guards able to stop an appalling situation) can “touch” and “handle” things; or, perhaps, that one of the voices I’ve anthropomorphized as an echo or amplification or translation of my own can command those “hands” to operate in that way. If I want to increase the efficacy of these “motor functions” so that what I see and hear can be more closely integrated into what I say, which in turn contributes to my transformation of things happening to me into things I do then I need to think about where such coordination is already taking place so that I can, because then I can know where to move within the system. Where seeing, hearing, doing, happening, saying, thinking and knowing are all moving in the same way, that’s where the center needs to be, and to some extent already is. The center is the coordination I’m seeking within the circuits of capital, technology and media, and every attempt to contribute to greater coordination is in obedience to the imperative of the center. I may be wrong at any time, but if I’m wrong, it’s about the transmission and full implications of an imperative that tells me to defer some resentment at been compelled to coordinate, and others can correct and improve my effort. I may imagine I can see and “grasp” everything I need to, but my vision and reach is in fact partial relative to projections of my power; it’s not that the occupant of the center is all seeing, knowing, doing, and so on (he does all that through us)—rather, it is only in attempting to enhance the commands coming from the center by animating whatever organs within organs respond to my motions that it can even make sense to think of increasing my own motor functioning.

Now, I want to conclude this way so that I make it clear that, how, and why anthropomorphics eliminates humanism; but also to show that originary grammar identifies the always already becoming human that makes it impossible to think of any post- or transhuman project as anything other than a series of distributed attempts to declaratively hierarchize commands from the center so that in re-centering those attempts we pose the kinds of questions that open new ostensive regions. And we can learn to see any utterance in terms of if and how it opens up those ostensive regions. In the end, a human science needs no more “proof” of anything other than what people say (in relation to what other people say, have said, might say...). All we can say (through whatever media) is what the center has us say, and that the center has us say it. You talk about something, and in doing so make a place for that thing; that place, then, as a center, is assailed by some, and inhabited by other, interested parties; you invoke some other center to convert the convergence into a sign of the endurance of the thing in its place; your utterances are in turn marked by more or less implicit references to that other center; those markings in your discourse make you a center as they are noted by others; if you can become a center for others you can inhabit the place where you become so and your discourse can become a center for yourself; everything you say, then, counts as saying insofar as it is marked by a reliance on the center becoming invisible by marking the visible, and it is so marked insofar as it makes that center even less visible because it is a sheer effect of its visible representatives all maintaining the places enabling you say what you are saying and that you are saying it. We become more human, that is, more capable of deferral and constructions of inviolate reality, insofar as less and less is said about the center and all of our doings become the articulated representation of the center, that is at the same time the retrieval of distributed effects of ever more distant centers.