Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“I can now say that a good sentence, then, issues redeemable tokens (here I am answering questions coming to the above discussion from my more recent inquiries into debt and power). A discourse (an institutionally recognized or potentially recognizable arrangement of sentences) offers words, phrases, sentences that can be used as counters within other discourses. They are on loan and are used to pay some other debt. Every sentence and every discourse issues the imperatives that will assert and clarify the originary distribution and singularize succession (expose and cut the ties between the holder of the outside spread and the outside option) by constructing juridical scenes that serve as pedagogical platforms. Idioms are currency and forms of intelligence. Centered ordinality takes on directly linguistic forms: in any form of social organization or coordination, someone will go first, simply because everyone can’t do the same thing at the same time—this is what “firstness” means. Someone initiates a conversation, someone shifts the conversation to a new topic, someone spots the impending emergency and moves toward it or others away from it first. Simultaneity is impossible, which is why it must be constructed ritually, which is to say institutionally and verbally. We all say the same thing so as to prevent everyone from doing the same thing at the same time—everyone doing the same thing at the same time can only be centralized, auto-accelerating violence.”

— Adam Katz, Tokenization · Dec 12, 2023 · Bouvard Substack