One distinction between GA and traditional philosophical and theoretical thought is that GA replaces the concept of “intention” with the concept of “attention.” “Intention” gets you focused on the subject and the subject’s constitution of the world. “Attention” gets you focused on an inextricable subject-object unity in which the object has the higher priority. But this is not a materialist reversal which sees the object as more “real” than the subject. The subject and object are co-constituting. But even this talk about “subject” and “object” mystifies things, and keeps us enclosed within traditional philosophical discourse, even if we shift to modern social and political theory, which are filled with subjects and objects taken as given and as “interacting” in some way. But, why are there subjects and objects, rather than nothing? We set off on a new course of thinking simply by acknowledging Michael Tomasello’s demonstration that the most intelligent hominids aside from humans, the great apes, don’t point. This very simple activity, one that very small children can perform very early, is impossible for animals that might be far more intelligent than those children by all kinds of measures. Two chimps can’t look at something together, and let each other know that they’re doing so. That’s really what an “object” is, something we can “let be” and look at together. And a “subject,” then, is that being capable of letting it be—but the discourse of subjects and objects is caught up in attaining subjective mastery over objects, which is really what “intentionality” is. Sometimes you may want mastery, for certain purposes—but taking intentional subjective mastery over objects as your primary descriptive discourse assumes a liberal, and we can even say capitalist, ontology—one, to refer to Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power, of “capitalization.” The subject is discounted against anticipated future earnings—that’s what subjective mastery over objects amounts to, a risk assessing and limiting project. Simply conceding that something evades or resists the mastery of even the most capitalizing subject, though, introduces a crack into this discourse—and one thing that escapes your mastery is the source of the “intentionality” informing it. Why do you want what you want? If there doesn’t have to be subjects and objects, what we can shift our attention to is the process or, better, the event, that co-creates what will eventually be recognizable as subjects and objects. Built into the notion of intentionality is some deep structure of the will; built into the notion of attention is something demanding attention and demanding you draw others’ draw others’ attention to, which involves configurating ourselves around something at the center. So, we start neither with subjects, and their intentions, or objects, and the laws governing their operations, which really just confirms the intentionality of the subject identifying and exploiting those laws, but with a center that compels. It compels in at least the minimal sense that it holds you: while you’re looking at it you’re not looking away. You’re looking at it because others are, or could be looking at it (even if that “could be,” imagining what you’re looking at in terms of potential audiences, is a later development)—which means you’re looking back and forth between center and margin. But the center creates the margin, so you’re looking at others on the margin as held by the center, just as you are. Whatever you and others may eventually do with the object—consume it, break it down and reconstruct it, use it as an ingredient of something else, turn it into an instrument—will only be imaginable and therefore possible insofar as it is represented as a way of maintaining the center-margin configuration itself. This means there’s a subsistent center beyond the center at which any particular thing sits—so, there’s the center, and there’s centrality, or, as I’ve called it, the occupied center and the signifying center. And the first thing the center tells or commands us is to sustain centrality. The radical implication of this, which I’ve tried to remain faithful to, is that all of our thoughts and deeds are of the center—commanded by the center, carried out for the benefit of the center. History, in that case, is the history of center. Phenomenologically this can be described as follows: the center calls you to it, along with others on the scene, but therefore also tells you to coordinate your approach with those others—so, as you approach the center, or step back and wait; accelerate or decelerate; model for others a way of engaging or appropriating the center, or protect the center from others—each single move you make is a “reading” of the center, but to call it a “reading” introduces too much subjectivity, so it’s better to call it a “hearing” of the center, because you hear whether you want to or not. It’s like imitating someone very closely—he raises his arm, you raise yours, he kneels, you kneel, he jumps, you jump—you need to be very focused in order to follow him, and that is our relation to the center, which we are, in fact, imitating from the beginning by participating in preserving the space the center opens up for us. Now, it’s possible to say that once we have this anthropological knowledge, we can see that there is something “illusory” about all this. Once we realize we’re always imitating someone, can’t we stop doing it? Once we realize we’re interested in what is at the center because others are, or we think might be, interested in it, can’t we just break with the illusion that there is anything ‘intrinsically” interesting or important about what is at the center? In specific cases, yes, of course—we can shift our attention, we can break compulsions and addictions. But this very knowledge of centrality derives from a higher form of attention to a less visible and therefore more durable (and in some ways more fragile) center. The first break with a mode of centrality was when a human occupied the center, and took control of ritual and distribution. We can assume that that development was “demystifying” regarding the community’s commitment to its sacralized animals and ancestors. That human at the center will come to be “supplied,” not necessarily with “absolute” power in any obvious sense, but with all of the power necessary to defer whatever violence he must have originally defered and whatever new potential forms of violence his presence might generate. This means that even if we’re not thinking about the man at the center all the time—maybe the animal-god at the center wasn’t thought about explicitly all the time—we are still thinking “about” him in the sense of thinking in his vicinity, on ground “covered” by him. When we pay attention to something else, with others, that space is bounded by the knowledge that under certain conditions it could become the business of the occupant of the center—so, built into your attention to anything or anyone on the margin is the need to imitate the thing or person, to imitate its own centrality, preserve and frame its existence, in such a way as to keep the occupant of the center out of it where him getting into it would undermine your relation to that thing or person, and to bring him into it in a way favorable to you, if that becomes necessary. The more distant and invisible the occupant of the center is, then, the more thoroughly he shapes the contours of your thinking and action. If we could peek into the thinking of any modern day citizen, we could find “attached” to any thought or action some way of shaping it so as to make potential authoritative intervention reinforcing. Now, of course, the most significant “demystification” is that of the occupant of the center itself. This, as well, can only happen through the creation of a competing center, not through some logical reasoning about the occupant of the center really just being a man like us, capable of mistakes, crimes, etc., much less speculations regarding our own reality ontological priority to the center. The occupant of the center must itself create this alternate center, and the way it does so is by “persecuting” on who will come to be or refer to its occupant. For this to happen, we have to assume there are already other centers of power, each subordinate and accountable to some imperial center, and yet independent enough to attract attention in its own right. A certain kind of attention brought to bear on what we can oxymoronically or paradoxically call this “marginal center” would intensify the attention directed towards it. This kind of attention would be “excessive” in the sense that it would reverse previous forms of attention paid to what was once a favored subject, and become incommensurable with the danger posed by any actual transgression. Somehow, the existence of the imperial center is itself placed at stake, perhaps in a long-term perspective (such a perspective is itself encouraged by empires claiming to be eternal), and so that persecuted subject, or what I have called “exemplary victim,” indicates a new center, to which even the imperial center is subordinate. This new center, which can’t be adequately named or represented in itself but only in transgressions against it, is the source of all demystifications: the revelation is that our adherence to the imperial center perpetuates persecution incommensurable to anything the persecuted could possibly “deserve.” But this new center itself can’t be demystified—only particular claimants to it can be. If you ask anyone how they can claim to have demystified or “debunked” any claim to truth or authority, that is, centrality, they will necessarily put another centrality in its place: whether they refer to “facts,” “reason,” “God-given rights,” “faith,” or technological performativity, they are asking you to imitate their imitation of a being modeling what is more real than reality—some transcendent arbiter whom we disobey at the risk of plunging blindly into destructive persecution. Once such a center exists, though, everyone wants to claim to occupy it, and such claims become a way of demanding others to affirm their centrality. The legacy of the exemplary victim is that anyone could potentially become a center, because anyone could become the exemplary victim, by representing some truth incommensurable with the “system,” which is ultimately how we imagine ourselves as “subjects.” But this means that as subjects we can only compose our own centrality as defiance toward some tyrannical center, against which we invoke the “ultimate” judgement of the higher center (“history will prove I’m right”—that is, if we look far enough into the future the really important people will agree with me). How can we demystify this, most resistant, form of illusory centrality? Let’s return to the beginning. In the beginning, we are created by the thing at the center, some This, which becomes It as we repeatedly refer to it. We preserve, protect, and obey IT, and devote our time to determining good ways to approach it, to name it, to appease it, to keep it at the center. This is first of all done through ritual, which prescribes very precise and rigorously enforced ways of engaging IT. Since we now know that any form of authority is contingent, that we contribute to its maintenance, ritual can’t work anymore to preserve IT. But we can still make it possible to say “THIS,” in a way that will secure attention, and refer us to other “Thises,” which will eventually become “ITS.” In other words, build a world of reliable reference points, “populated” at least potentially by figures able to defer their own centrality to the benefit of the social center. This involves the creation of disciplinary spaces where things are systematically “let be” in a secured setting, where we devote ourselves to finding better ways of talking about things and talking about what we’re talking about. This is not simply a question of methods or procedures, because identifying the form of authority we invoke is always a part of the practice—the only “ITS” that will endure are those that enable us to distinguish between center and centrality. This means creating ostensives, positing things we can look at and name, where they is or might be some convergence on the object. This is why the notion of political formalism is so important, because a genuine name unites power and responsibility: it creates a “marginal center” we can “imitate” in our expectations and judgments. This is the only way we can refrain from indulging in the extraordinarily powerful attraction of the role of exemplary victim, the one who is denounced or ignored by all but whom history will vindicate. Entering another space, one prepared to issue denunciations, can only be done in the interest of clarifying names and sorting out THISES and ITS—all references to oneself, as a center to be expelled in the name of consolidating the group, must be referred back to some IT or THIS that is being evoked to justify the expulsion. If we share attention to that model, the expulsion then becomes impossible, but the reversion into persecutor/persecuted opposition is also deferred in the name of contributing reference points to the founding concepts of the space. This won’t always “work,” but it’s the only thing that it would ultimately be worth making “work.” The creation of disciplinary spaces, though, is not, or at least not always, an ascetic withdrawal from daily life so that the noise can be silenced—it is just as much an entrance into other spaces, a demand, which you are conveying form the center, that others sort out its “ITS,’ and the distinction between center and centrality they entail. Perhaps the hardest thing here is to refrain from entering such spaces with the posture of the exemplary victim in waiting, with the attitude that in rejecting me you are getting on History’s bad side. You really just want to help them sort out their own “thises” and “its,” and to see whether they can do so for an outsider such as yourself. You want to make it as hard as possible for them to imagine they’ve got it sorted out on their own. This can get you into the kind of precise questioning that Anglo analytical philosophy perfected, which, placed rightly, can be powerful; but at the same time, the question of authority is persistently pressed: who do you imagine is making all these things available, who do you imagine to be protecting the path by which your imitation of, or extrapolation from what you see in these objects can correspond to the attention you’re paying to it? That’s how I see the command of the center today.