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Bouvard on Originary Scene and Big Man Dialectic

Reddit · Mar 30, 2019 · 4 min read
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If you are: - Globalist/into universality - Into imperialism and view geopolitics as nothing more than ‘power games’ - Call progressivism ‘Faustianism’ and still think our job is to transcend everything - View ethnocentrism as quaint, outmoded, and maybe dangerous - No problem with multiculturalism/multiracialism, so long as the ruling class is still largely elite white+Jewish - Don’t want major reforms, just want to make what we’ve already got more ‘formal’ - Have a romantic notion of white supremacy and patriarchy, think Indo-European elites are still running the world - Believe in a pre-Human ‘state of nature’, with society forming after an originary ‘social contract’ from which legal/moral abstractions can be derived Sorry if this may feel uncharitable, but I’m trying to make the point clear. In what way is your ideal society actually different from liberalism? Would it basically be the same but without due process, lol?

In a sense I would argue for a very "reactionary" position insofar as we are ultimately modeling our praxis on the originary scene and its dialectic with the Big Man revelation. So, we're taking as our lodestone very ancient social formations, to which we want to conform our practices. But it's not "reactionary" insofar as these are generative scenes in a dialectic with each other, and therefore open-ended. There are scenes which have an "object" at the center, and we want to clear everyone away from the center so that we can all look at and "report back" on what we see--and I mean "object" in a very general sense, included concepts, institutions, other disciplines, etc. There is leadership on such a scene, but it's geared toward showing something new about the object--whoever does that is in charge for as long as he needs in order to show it. What is involved in constructing such scenes, what objects are set at the center--this is all historically specific--these questions are themselves "objects" on other scenes. Scenes on which a human occupies the center must be formalized, or named, much more explicitly. The main job of the person in charge is putting other people in charge of the different parts of the job. And so on horizontally across all domains of social life and vertically from top to bottom. The larger job of the central authority is to protect and supervise the disciplines; the job of the disciplines is to clarify and "enhance" the imperatives from the central authority. All this is done through reference to the originary structure of the social order, the specific set of deferrals which established the lineage to which existing authority is traced back; with an eye to the original act of deferral itself. And this is where we get into language--each use of language is like a "unit" or "quantum" of deferral. We can, perhaps, move away from talking about issues, and more towards talking about events, texts and institutions as indicating disciplinary scenes that are more or less focused on a central object, and institutional scenes that are more or less governed by a transparent "pyramid" or "cone" of power. Is some middle-level guy filling in, "clothing himself" in the objectives set by his superior, or is he listening to others from outside the institution--and what is the superior doing about it in that case? What "hypothesis" is a particular disciplinary scene pursuing? These should ultimately be our questions.

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I do like and agree with a lot of things with this model, but doesn’t the question of ‘what’ still remain open? I’m not agnostic to who the sovereign is and where he came from, who fills the positions of that cone of power, and what hypotheses are being pursued in society. The nature of those things is equally important to their configuration, if not more, in my view. Aren’t those ultimately the more difficult questions, determining the way it _should_ be?

Once we start talking about specific societies these "slots" must be filled in. GA can't answer all these questions--only people participating in organizations and institutions can do so. If you find the model useful, then you can bring it to bear on the responsibilities you are taking on for yourself. You want to associate with and help certain people and advance a certain trajectory--well, GA will either be helpful to you in hashing these issues out with others, alerting you to things you wouldn't have noticed otherwise, and maybe having a more critical sense of the ways resentments might get in the way of your goals--or it won't. I think it will if you become a bit "fluent" in this way of thinking and at the very least it will make your thinking more mature.

If i told you, here are the GA answers to a checklist of questions you have, you wouldn't believe that either--and you'd be right not to. It's a way of thinking, not an ideology.

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