Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“How singularized succession in perpetuity catches this up is in the implication that to be ready to obey such an authority is to (to continue to speak a little Nietzschean) “will” its continuation on its own terms, which in turn means to participate in whatever way falls to you in ensuring that authority select its successor, and not just any successor but a successor that it most likely to choose its successor, and so on in perpetuity; and what is implicit here but what I have not yet made so explicit is that if singularized succession is the optimal condition what can this mean other than exercising singularized succession in perpetuity in the way appropriate to whatever disciplinary spaces each and every one of us is implicated in. (Can there be singularized succession in perpetuity at every level in the social order? What if a higher level disapproves of the way someone under his supervision selects his successor? This would be an indication of dysfunction to be addressed pedagogically.) This, then, is the purpose of scenic design—to set the stage as precisely or vaguely as necessary for the understudy to step in when needed and ready (to help the understudy be ready when needed). This, then, is technics: inventing, refining, spreading and repairing devices so that the figure proposed by any utterance, that successor however distant, will be in a position to enter and revise whatever idiom might pop up on that scene.”

— Adam Katz, Language, the Ultimate Source and Analysis of Data · Jan 09, 2022 · Bouvard Substack