Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“What is a center? Whatever can invoke and be referenced by an ostensive sign: the center is both cause and product of the sign—as cause it subsists beyond any particular reference, and as product it is continually renewed. Invoking the sign exceeds the reference, though—it is already the beginning of an imperative. So, a center is a locus of imperative exchange—whatever about the object commands the issuance of the ostensive sign is also an agency of which requests can be made. But it is mimetic desire, and the rivalry and crisis it causes, that leads to the emission of the sign; true, and our ability to pare down language derived from scenes at the center and apply it to proto-human acts that created the center is itself a sign of our current relation to the center. The center is whatever we can compose declaratives about so as to formalize the incommensurabilities between what we ask of the center considered, let’s say, as a “situation” or emergent event, and what that center, that situation, that event, yields “in return.” We have to start within a fully developed, perhaps (as I will suggest) wrongly developed, declarative culture, in order to reconstruct the emergence of that culture out of its prerequisites. This assumes we have a fully developed vocabulary with carefully refined concepts that have been fully anthropomorphized, and made available for reference to proto-humans and then humans in their “barest,” hypothetically minimal state. I will now start examining how that came to be possible.”

— Adam Katz, The Centrality of the Center · 2020 · Anthropomorphics