I’ve worked with the concept of “overlap” more and less explicitly as a way of thinking about time and space or, better, boundary areas, for a while now. I prefer it to speaking in terms of causality as well, because what makes things happen is enough things overlapping each other. The original source of my thinking on overlap is my reading of Peirce’s discussion of boundaries—when thinking about how to identify the line between, say a red patch and a blue patch, what you are really looking at, taking it at higher resolution, is the minimal number of blue spots on the red side and red spots on the blue side. The implication is that you never get to zero, certainly not as your microscopes get stronger or, let’s say, you can assume you will never get to zero because we can’t set any limit to how strong microscopes might get. Rather than discrete objects, then, we are always looking at degrees and modes of overlap.
Regardless of the interest of this principle for various inquiries, it became important to me as a way of thinking through questions in scenic thinking going back to the beginning of my thinking about the originary hypothesis. What is the boundary between scenes? When has one scene ended and another begun? When would the originary scene itself have been over and done? The “orthodox” answer, which is not exactly wrong, is when the ritual dimension of the scene is complete: we go, following Gans’s earliest analyses of the scene, from the issuance of the sign, through the sparagmos, ending with the iteration of the gesture, this time in a more choreographed way and with this now ritualized gesture the scene is sealed.
But it seemed to me you could not say this had in fact happened until the scene itself was iterated—as a one-off, the scene would be no scene. So, the originary scene is not “closed” until it is reiterated on a subsequent scene, and, it’s easy to see that by the logic of infinite progress, the same would be true for each subsequent scene leading me, at least, to the conclusion that the originary scene has never been closed and that we are still on it—but, by virtue of being on the originary scene we are also marked by each of the subsequent scenes needed to “authenticate” the originary one. This is the way I have always thought about it.
This might still seem to leave a clear break between one scene and its iteration but subsequent scenes must be compressions of previous ones which means that elements (gestures and postures) from the previous scene are being carried over, stripped of “extraneous” features (whatever is unnecessary for the next scene to “take”), and iterated, as iteration always does, with a difference on the new scene. This self-referentiality and recursivity of the scene is an overlap—like the boundary between red and blue, not only are elements of the previous scene present on the new scene, but elements of the new scene are present on the previous one in whatever will have been given its form retroactively.
Peirce also dealt with the question of boundaries in narrative form and in a way more directly relevant to scenic thinking: the beginning of one scene is the middle of another scene and the end of yet another scene. This method allows us to identify overlaps within a differentiated scene (all scenes are internally differentiated), and an important example for me was a addition to the sparagmos as it was conceived by Gans who, I think, was trying to include something of Girard’s frenzied lynching model here, and so portrayed the sparagmos as a kind of frenzied, ultra-violent, tearing apart of the central object. It seemed to me that without the conservation of some memory of the sign which has just been issued (and which broke down the pecking order that would have prevented such a chaotic approach to the object) the sign itself would be lost in the sparagmos and the scene go uncompleted.
What, then, could provide such a memory? In my thinking, only the issuance of the sign in the course of the devouring of the object as a kind of moderation of what would certainly be a rather wild ingress toward the object. That is, in the midst of the clashes and collisions that would comprise the sparagmos, issuing the sign at tactically felicitous moments would prevent the mayhem from reaching a threshold at which the scene would collapse. And this would then be a further refinement of the sign and continual reminder of its original “function.”
What this introduction of the sign into the sparagmos means, though, is that we have a differentiation within the sparagmos itself between those heedlessly tearing into the consumable and those still on the scene of the issuance of the sign, carrying it over into this new “act” of the scene. And even those heedless now might become those carrying the scene over as “roles” keep rotating in the course of the sparagmos (and this would mean that there was always some overlap between the heedless and heedful). Likewise, once everyone is more or less sated, or, at least, the meal done, and the sign issued more equally and smoothly, some and therefore to some extent all on the scene are more or less vaguely on the lookout for signs of breakdown, with the sheer distance from the center now the central object needing to be evenly distributed.
This mode of analysis can be applied as microly and as macroly as needed as the stack of scenes is comprised of myriad overlapping scenes including supervisory scenes erected over other scene, all of which I’ve resolved into the expectant scene, which is a way of thinking about all the tendrils through which each scene becomes increasing overlapping with all the others. This overlapping creates and maintains boundaries along with sometimes erasing them: “identity” is a particular way of overlapping with other scenes. Before the rigidification of national borders, at every border there would be towns where the language of the neighboring country was spoken more than the language of the distant capital of the state sovereign over one, and often some intermediate dialect.
A lot of modern history has involved stamping out these overlaps, but new overlaps take over, as in citizens located in institutions, like media and universities, engaged in constant exchanges across borders, import in compressed form various observational posts from foreign scenes—precisely in order to distinguish themselves from the overlap-phobic.
I’ve begun working with the concept of “inscripture” much more recently, as, obviously, a portmanteau of “inscription” and “scripture.” I want to indicate a convergence of the two words: everything that gets inscribed becomes scriptural, in the sense of a fixed reference point, relative to what does not get inscribed. It’s also an “aspirational” concept, encouraging us to inscribe such that in the vast competition among inscriptions, one’s own more closely approximate scripture. In both cases we’re talking about writing, but writing has been assimilated to a broader understanding of inscription that involves any mark on any surface or in any medium that might be made intelligible which means, potentially, or imminently, or overlappingly, any mark in any medium.
Speaking in terms of inscription sets aside logocentrism, which is to say the treatment of a written text as a transparent representation of whatever we take to be outside of the text, whether it be the speech presumably recorded or “ideas,” “thoughts” or any other immaterial we have in mind. It does this because the inscription can’t be separated from the medium, which means from the technique, from whatever physical material receives the inscription, the institution served by the inscription, and the series of iterations of which the inscription is a more or less perfected successor. For center study, that series of iterations leads us back to the originary scene, but that means that the sign on the scene was itself an inscription, “carved” into the reciprocal positioning, the gestures and postures, of the assembled.
When we iterate that sign on subsequent scenes, we do so by carrying it over through new material, new pedagogies, new assemblies, new techniques. This is part of the overlapping by which each scene recursively iterates all the others. And the sign itself is, then, an articulation of its overlappings with originary mistakenness (identified as the origin of debt in my previous post), the prolongation and perfection of the imperative (the technoscene) and the entire parahost. We can only iterate and thereby authenticate the originary scene by engrossing ourselves in whatever materials will enable us to tokenize succession.
A ritual is an inscription, and so is its successor (and “dark precursor”), the disciplinary space. In both cases the scene is predicated upon the elimination of interference, what would in effect be digressions, weakening the singular focus on the object or question at the center. And any scene will do so, even a more aesthetically contrived scene that thrives on differentiations, dialogue and chaos—even here, the deferral of scenic closure works to elicit new ways of filtering the various inputs. The simplest way to filter out interferences is to suspend, bracket, or even deny the constitutive force of overlap and inscripture.
A court deciding which evidence is admissible is an example of this. That such attempts are necessary and necessarily fail is why we need concepts like “grace,” “mercy,” “good faith,” and so on. Taking a chance on letting strays in might minimize such dependence on such meta-scenic concepts. I had a bit of a political disagreement with my son, whose job is essentially gathering biological data, the other day. The argument concerned health care issues—insurance, socialized medicine, direct payment for services, etc.—but I just want to mention one point. I suggested that the way the poor, and eventually everyone, will pay for health care is by donating their data to health care companies.
My son insisted that wouldn’t work, because that data is worth almost nothing, and I’ll assume he’s right under present conditions, but my answer to him was that we don’t know that because if data is continually gathered, made available to researchers across the biological and medical sciences, subjected to ever greater computing power, and so on, what now seems like worthless data might very well turn out to have been invaluable. In fact, I think it will eventually have to turn out to be invaluable—it’s just a question of how long a timespan one can allow for. Now, this doesn’t mean that one just shovels data indiscriminately into the system—first of all, that’s impossible, because it can’t go into the system, it can’t even be identified as something that can go into a system, without being submitted and labeled as a sample.
One thing it means to be overlap and inscripture aware is to carry out your labeling with an understanding that the same sample can be labeled in any number of other ways and aggregated or dissolved in various ways as to create new modes of sampling. This gives us a reason to be bold but not careless in labeling, because we now have an imperative to increase the precision with which we select and donate samples because it is by singling out as exactly (even if as “wildly”) as possible what we are to attend to in that object or question that you will open up possibilities for others. So, precision and exactitude in the name of as yet unimaginable varieties of precision and exactitude can replace concepts like “grace,” “mercy” and “good faith” as bets on the future (which is what those concepts really come down to anyway—deferring a legitimate present judgment in the name of some other future). And this goes for matters of the “soul,” or, as I would prefer, “selving,” as much as for the physical and biological sciences. We will do remarkable things with linguistic and semiotic samples.
As far as selving goes, being data driven might further drive us to experience ourselves as always at the beginning of one scene, the middle of another scene and the conclusion of yet another scene; and as inhabiting various liminal spaces at various distance from different centers; and all this simultaneously. The only limitation lies in the elasticity of the present tense. What “drives” us on any scene is imperatives, and the multiply-locationed experience I’m suggesting involves taking in a range of different imperatives directed toward you with varying degrees of weight, intensity, enforcement power, deadlines, and so on.
This has always been the case, so maybe it’s just a matter of making what has been tacit more explicit—all the tough decisions, complexity of choices, multiple loyalties, etc., that besiege us are just imperative pulsations, which means imperative exchanges we engage in—in such a way, optimally, that they become cybernetics with the center. Maybe questions are just spillovers of imperative exchanges, buying time during negotiations, and could all be translated directly into requests for data, measuring implements, and storage, all of which can now be converted into bets on succession. Declaratives provide an array of such exchanges in their current state, always with some indication of transitions into other states.
“Who will win?” is a crude way of trying to sum up the forces on each side, which means the question “what will winning have meant” is more important and a further request for data. In human terms, what will this outcome have meant is best articulated in hypothetical juridicals—what kinds of claims will anyone be positioned to make on anyone else, and with what likelihood of being heard and recognized? This includes everything we could call the “economic,” or everything pertaining to credit and debt, all of which only takes on meaning through the possibility of making claims and having them adjudicated. And bets on hypothetical claims are themselves bets on the juridical itself, on the likelihood that the juridical won’t relapse into the vendetta (which means hostage taking and human sacrifice) or, for that matter, be superseded by some as yet hard to imagine mode of deferral that would reside in learncoin—tokenizing initiatives in terms of which seem most likely to create a “tabernacle” of expectations so comprehensive and penetrating that violating them become unthinkable.