I’ve used the term “expectant scene” a couple of times and will now spend a bit more time on it, within a broader context. The term itself is meant to compress and replace “stack of scenes,” which I’ve been using to incorporate Benjamin Bratton’s reunderstanding of sovereignty in terms of the “stack” within “planetary scale computation”; and, at this point, to create an interface with the Antikythera project that has succeeded the Strelka Institute. My assumption is that any mode of thought unable to engage at the highest research and scholarly level with planetary scale computation will not rise above the level of propaganda.
But “stack of scenes” is a bit contingent and unwieldy—what counts as the “stack” is always changing (Bratton himself has revised his original earth/cloud/address/city/interface/user model) and I don’t want to rely on empirical designations once we reach a certain level of abstraction; what doesn’t change, though, is the reality that expectations are built into every scene in the sense that we are always being measured, data is always extracted from us, feedback provided regarding if not necessarily to us and these expectations derive from some mode of optimizations built into the systems within which we operate (Michael Roth’s Telemetry, Phenomenology, Commonwealth is very good to read in this connection).
The stack then can be compressed into the expectations deriving from all those layers—in this way we can start from the expectations built into any particular scene and work outward toward various meta-expectations rather than feeling a need to account for specific vectors coming from specific layers, which may not even be isolable in that way. So, I think it should be possible to refer to our present social order as the “expectant scene,” and that this will be a way of distinguishing, with whatever introduction of gradualism and unevenness necessary, the current order from ones it has replaced.
This, though, implies that I want some other word for “social order” than “social order,” and this is also a longstanding question for me—or, at least, a longstanding dissatisfaction with words used to label parts of collective humanity, like “society,” “community,” “polity,” “nation,” etc. A new theory of the human should revisit such designations, rather than taking them for granted or seeking to legitimate them with a new vocabulary (although the possibility that existing terminology can’t really be improved upon can’t be excluded). At the very least, the centrality of mimesis, ritual, the proximity to violence and the irreducible need to defer, the constitutiveness of the center, and more recently debt, and its forgiveness and enforcement, should be built into a specifically Center Study naming of the human as a collective.
There are objections to “society,” for example, because of its derivation from a private club separated from the public sphere—Hannah Arendt, for example, saw the concept as depoliticizing and its “colonization” of modern discourse a symptom of the reduction of the public world to private interests (of course, there are counter-objections to this, insofar as we move toward a convergence of sovereignty with property—but that wouldn’t necessarily make “society” any more useful). “Community” might be better as I remember (but the Online Etymological Dictionary does not confirm this) reading that the concept ultimately can be traced back to sharing a meal together, which gets us very close to ritual, but “community” seems both too generic in any but its most ancient uses and not sufficiently scalable—it’s a stretch to speak about a modern state as a “community.”
I have my own history of trying out different concepts to name the human on the scene. “Centered Ordinality” is a concept used in Anthropomorphics and earlier, and I still deploy it on occasion, but is seems to me more of a description of founding and maintenance of the human on the scene than a name for it. It seems awkward to refer to the United States, for example, as a centered ordinality—that is, there’s a kind of grammatical problem here insofar as “centered ordinality” doesn’t really give us a way of singularizing, of distinguishing one centered ordinality from another. And, more recently, the more avantgarde or esoteric “Ve/orticist,” which I like very much but is built more for display than use—it gets at something essential to the human on the scene, the vortexical pull toward the center and catastrophe along with the verticalization from the center that resists and reverses this quasi-gravitational pull—while combining the two in a single word, with a slight internal variation.
In its physical and geometrical abstraction, though, it doesn’t explicitly refer, but only alludes metaphorically, to anything humans actually do. These objections are not reasons to reject these concepts, which I’m sure I’ll keep returning to—it’s possible we don’t need a single concept, but rather a range of idioms for interfacing with other, more entrenched, idioms. The same is true for “tributarian,” which I’ve used (as recently as the previous post) mostly to counter currency like “communitarian” and “libertarian,” and especially with regard to economics, and which contains an unequivocal affirmation of the center.
Here, I like the association with “tribute” as the foundation of any human on the scene, which further flows out into “contribute,” “attribute,” “distribute,” and so on. All these resonances are valuable. But tributarian could only refer to a specific kind of order and not order as such and, in fact, is used to refer to certain ancient monarchical forms. And originary grammar has a stake here as well, as “prolonging the imperative” might do a lot of work—but could one replace “society” or “community” with the “prolonging of the imperative” or “the prolonged imperative”? Maybe, but maybe not always.
If I now want to give “expectant scene” a trial run, should the very fundamental concept of “scene” be brought in to do the kind of work I want done here? That is, prior to the expectant scene, there were other kinds of scenes, and an account of history would focus on scenic transformations. Eric Gans has done something like this for aesthetics in Originary Thinking , where he traces scenic constitution in aesthetics from ancient Greek tragedy where the occupant of the center of the scene (e.g., Oedipus) is simply accepted at the center, so that the resentments of the crowd or audience can be directly deposited in him, to Renaissance (e.g., Shakespearean) tragedy where the question of the legitimacy of the occupant at the center is fundamentally in question, and on into modernity (which I’ll neglect here, in part because I am less sure of his descriptions as he goes along).
There are some interesting discussions, upon which I’ve drawn freely, of modern politics that define it in terms of its centerlessness, or the unoccupied center, which certainly describes the post-monarchal world and are very consistent with my thesis that with the execution of the king for treason subsequent politics can only be based on attempts to discredit and replace the current occupant of the center through the claim that he “tyrannically” wants to “usurp” it. The expectant scene would (geo)locate that center to whatever firm can best secure the data that best provides for the futures of those expectations and whatever executive can best secure that firm.
Or, at least, the expectant scene, which on the face of it might seem to refer to a kind of perfected centerlessness through a self-regulating optimization process but leaves open the question of the ongoing formation of those expectations to the continual input of data the collection, preservation and analysis of which can vary widely and is itself subject to various modes of measurement. Someone is ultimately holding the yardstick, as we will always find out when things break down, or start to.
Still, without diminishing our enormous dependence upon the concept of “scene,” the scene is the result, or presupposes the result, of more primordial conditions of the human on the scene. Everyone is more or less in their place on the scene but in naming human collectivity, the coming together of this specific mode of being which is specific in its coming together (or “having come together”), we want to build in some reference to how they got to those places and the possibility of displacing and being displaced. The incompleteness, or mistakenness, of the scene, must be there—and this problem holds for all of the accepted concepts, which take the completed configuration as given.
This is where a bit of deconstruction might be helpful. I started playing around with “tribute” and “impunity” (I’ve been reading Trevor Jackson’s Impunity and Capitalism because I’m interested in the extent to which capitalism can be brought within the law)—the former easily conformable to Center Study, as outlined above, but the latter introducing some “destabilizing” element into the system. The idea would be that any “community” or “social order” is also constituted by “delegating” to someone (not always the same someone, of course) the “right” or “obligation” to be outside of the system, not subject to its laws or ritual requirements.
This could be the Girardian scapegoat, but this “constitutive outside” (to begin to speak deconstructively) could be enacted in many other ways. I’m drawing upon Schmittian (and not only Schmittian) notions of the “exception,” which itself overlaps with the Godelian demonstration that every system depends upon something that cannot be proven within the system. Is the enforcer of the law exempt from the law? For Hobbes, e.g., yes. It’s hard to deny the necessity of some grant of immunity (not the same as impunity but not completely different either) to whomever is to “police” the law or ritual rectitude of the congregants.
I’ve always posited that the consolidation of the originary scene itself would have required those who accepted the sign to confirm or realize the sign by restraining, in the “name” of the sign, those who continued toward the central object. And there could be no restraints on how this restraint would be exercised. The Big Man likewise “usurps” the ritual scene. So, we’re talking about a fundamentally human mode of being.
Derrida got interested (I don’t remember how early on, and my knowledge of his inquiries in this area are still largely second-hand) in the network of concepts around “host,” which, if you go back far enough, is the same word as “guest,” and linguistic inquiries have taught us that when words contain opposite meanings, or when we drill down to the point where they do, we are getting at some fundamental paradox, of the “pharmakon” (medicine/poison) species. (Think of words like “sanction” and “cleave,” for example.) The word “ghost” is also there (ghosts visit us and perhaps host us as well), as are words across the spectrum like “hostile” and “hospitality.”
There’s a kind of immunity and impunity here, insofar as violations of the obligations of either host or guest are especially heinous crimes, punished by the gods, but, against, to follow the deconstructive line of inquiry, aren’t these obligations “always already” violated in the expectation of their violation that each side must bring to the exchange? Derrida took these inquiries in a self-negating, even suicidal direction (a kind of absolute hospitality) which is obviously in conversation with European disputes over migration, but I feel no need to follow him there. The problem for me is to extract a name for the human on the scene from this network, a name that will include all that I have outlined above and that will be usable, i.e., will be a good noun, one that could be used in a sentence as readily as “society” or “community.” (Let me also, since I’ve been doing some footnoting here, say that Derrida also does a lot with “immunity,” as does Peter Sloterdijk, whose You Must Change Your Life! Was important to my thinking through of “discipline” many years ago.)
I have arrived at “para-host,” maybe without the dash (a dash disappearing seems to be a good indication that a new concept has “taken,” so why not be bold and expedite the process?). I chose “para” as the prefix because “beside,” with a sense of “like” but not the same, of supplemental, seemed to me better than the “infra” (below, with a sense of below some threshold) I’ve had a preference for because it is always the center that is the host and we are its guests, but we are all also beside the center, standing in (substituting) for the center, supplying the center, in a sense comprising the center (and the “para” raises the possibility that maybe it’s “para” all the way down), which also means that the center is itself “para,” never settled, always beside itself and never completely itself.
And we are simultaneously the enemy of the center/host, have always violated the terms of our exchange or debt relation with it, and it is therefore our enemy as well. That is also part of the “para.” Also, the host/parasite relation is implicated here—a dangerous formulation, but the point is to be near the danger because that is where the saving power is. And let me add to this “hostage,” which sounds like it must come from the “host” vortex but the Online Etymological Dictionary is unsure here, suggesting it might also derive from the Latin “obsess” (to sit before), which would also suit me fine because that derivation includes the notion of being held as security or surety (including a lodger by a landlord), which is another network of meaning I wanted to include in this new name, and now I have.
And the parahost can clearly be articulated in various ways, take form in various institutional distributions, i.e., the guest/host/enemy/hostage/ghost network is a highly oscillatory one and the term might therefore allow for penetrating originary studies. So, now it’s a matter of seeing whether a phrase like “the American parahost” can be made to work well in sentences. Part of the purpose of introducing a new concept like this is to “arrest” you, in the sense of delaying you (and maybe in another sense as well) and making you think (both hosting and “dropping in” on you as a guest). How does the whole swirl of hosting, guesting and ghosting, of being hospitable and inimical, work itself out on our expectant scene?