GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

To my knowledge, no one has ever placed the transition of power at the center of political theory—neither as an explanatory principle distinguishing regime forms from each other, nor in normative terms, as a way of accounting for what makes a form of government good or just. Propagandists for democracy like to talk about the “peaceful transfer of power,” but generally in the context of fearing it might not take place—never as a defining feature of the regime itself. Such propagandists are savvy enough to know it isn’t a particularly strong selling point—indeed, defenders of democracy know better than to claim their favored form of regime even provides for the best governance; they know better than to direct inquiry in that direction. But even monarchy hasn’t approached the question in this way (at least as far as I know)—maybe because there is no single monarchical method of transitioning from one occupant of the center to the text. Primogeniture is, I suppose, the most common monarchical method of succession, and one can see how it would minimize conflicts over succession, but the weaknesses of this approach are obvious, and history is full of its consequences—kings without sons, or with idiot or wicked sons, open up the power structure the system was designed to prevent, without any clear way of closing it up again (once the chain is broken, there can always be questions about the legitimacy of the monarchy). So, maybe no one has wanted to center political thinking on the question of succession because no one has ever felt confidence in any answer. But it really is the best way into theorizing governance: any regime that could present its form of succession as representing a form of continuity that could be traced back with as little question as possible to the origin of the social order itself would surely be the best possible regime. This is a very economical approach.

Anthropomorphicspresents a solution: the present occupant of the center chooses his successor. This follows from the rejection of any form of imperium in imperio, or “super-sovereignty”: if there is some rule of succession independent of the ruler, then the interpreter of that rule is sovereign. And, of course, the ruler could choose his son, or a family member—and that would sometimes be the best choice. But sometimes it wouldn’t be, and we can therefore derive a rule for selecting a successor: whoever is going to succeed as ruler must have the character to set aside his personal and familial interests for the sake of the country. This is not a rule that could be imposed on the present occupant of the center (it couldn’t even be formulated coherently enough for that), but one that would be part of the education of the ruler, instituted by the first ruler to choose a successor outside of his family, if not earlier. Anthropomorphicslays out a series of such “rules,” again, understood as optimal cultural and pedagogical conditions sure to be discovered from the first principle of selection of successor. Here, I’d like hypothesize regarding the necessary character of a ruler under the kind of post-sacral, post-liberal conditions we have to imagine to conduct our political thinking; and draw the implication of that for our political thinking.

Let’s continue with the selection, education and sequestering of the successor by the current occupant of the center and draw out the implications for actual occupancy from that. The question of succession being central, the entire social order would be oriented towards the process. Competitive academies for training the next generation of governing elites would solicit applications from across the country, giving each community a stake in seeing its native sons and daughters “fast-tracked” to those academies. At a certain level, a small number of students are put on the rulership track, to undergo more specialized training in occupying the center. In being selected for this track, the participants forego other ambitions, for the sake of a much grander ambition which, however, the odds are against them ever fulfilling. The highest level candidates—say, a couple of dozen—from which the current governor would always have one selected, cannot exercise power themselves. They cannot be permitted either to become associated with a particular location or institution, or to build a separate power base. They would live their lives publicly, as the succession game would be fascinating to follow, as the current governor could change his mind regarding his successor, and so the prospective successors would have a kind of celebrity, like a royal family, but would have to comport themselves so as to use that celebrity to model lives of pure service. This would be a continual test, and a candidate who tries to become a “star” would be immediately and permanently removed from consideration. While not exercising any direct power, the candidates would “shadow” the ruler, learning the ins and outs of governing, making “sample” decisions, allowing the governor to study their abilities. The candidates would live separately, and rarely if ever see each other or interact; and I think it would have to be considered a gross breach of protocol for them to refer to each other, especially in the presence of the governor. Those candidates who are not chosen to succeed may be kept in the pool by the new governor when the time comes, or they might be removed and sent back to ordinary life, without any prejudice, of course, but having squandered at least some of their prime years that could have been spent on building some other career.

So, we would have rulers with a strong sense of discretion and modesty, a capacity for solitariness, a sense of having been chosen, to a great extent due to their own merit but, at the same time, with a sense of having given over their lives to their country with the possibility of a “reward” that is at least to some extent arbitrary, or at least unknown—it would be impossible to know completely why the ruler decided to place the bet of the country on you, specifically. Each ruler would be aware of being undergirded by powerful institutional and cultural supports which pave the way for clear rule from the center, but without having the support of a powerful family or institutional clique to lean back on, or operate informally through. The success of his rule will depend very largely upon his ability to promote, directly and indirectly, the smoothly functioning practices of the major social institutions. He would have a family, and, as I suggested earlier, might very well build what might become a dynasty (we could imagine a strong presumption that a child of his would have to go through the normal process, but this would be within his prerogative)—anti-monarchical prejudices would be ridiculous under such conditions—but it would be very difficult under advanced technological conditions to use the office to acquire the kind of wealth and institutional power that could guarantee its permanency—only a sequence of good rulers could do so. In that case, the normal process could be retained as a back-up, which would surely be needed at some point—the demands of social command would be rigorous, and eventually there would be either no heir, or one whom the ruler would have to concede is not up to the job. But the responsibility that comes with knowing that, even if it is your own son, you have chosen your successor, would temper any temptation to do more than bend the established protocol.

For social theory, we have use the following means of regulation of “quality control,” or what me might call anthropomorphics’ six imperatives from the center. First, power and responsibility are to be matched as closely as possible—it’s immoral for someone to have power without uses of that power flowing back to communal goods, or for someone to be given the responsibility to perform some task without being provided the means to do it. Second, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” as long as we keep in mind the needs of the able, which might be considerable if they are to give in accord with their abilities. Third, while all scapegoating, or violent centralizing, obfuscates and produces regrettable actions, the most dangerous violent centralizing, the type to which all others tend, is that of the occupant of the social center: the usurpatory motives we might attribute to the occupant of the center, motives which serve as an anchor giving pattern to facts and events, are to be converted into imperatives from the center we make as consistent as possible. Fourth, we are to continually work on articulating the traces of previous scenes into the elements of practices, as argued for in my previous post. Fifth, the mimetic dimension of practices, our reliance on models and previous practices, are to made more explicit as an ongoing socially bonding pedagogical order. And, sixth, the social order is to be seen as a project, with “society” treated as a team of teams, directed toward that project—entering any institution is joining a team, and therefore learning its rules, taking up established (or creating new) roles, and respecting the “captain” and associated hierarchies.

All of these imperatives overlap with each other and none of them provide the basis for any kind of super-sovereignty because they are all immanent to an existing order and paradoxical. There’s no external point from which needs and abilities can be articulated—any attempt to do so would be employing something theoretical or managerial ability which would already be relying upon certain needs being met. Similarly, power and responsibility can only be matched in relation to some ongoing exercise of power or claim of responsibility—again, to try and stand outside and “measure” power and responsibility would itself be an attempt to take responsibility on the basis of some actual or aspired to power. Violent centralizing is always very precise and context-specific and can only be detected on the spot, in its emergence, by someone positioned so as to either accelerate or decelerate the process. Even a social project is more something that is pointed to, abstracted from, and turned into a model for transforming, an existing hierarchy of practices. All these imperatives provide entry points into extant practices which are entered so as to make them more thoroughly and coherently practices.

A good ruler promotes, enforces, exemplifies and obeys these imperatives. The best way to examine how this will shape his character would be to start with number three. The ruler is aware that all resentments can ultimately be channeled his way, especially once the democratic alibi of pretending that his decisions and authority are not really his own is rejected. The ruler is above all a specialist in formulating and issuing commands—this is his discipline, his practice, his pedagogy. There is always an “imperative gap” between the command issued and the command obeyed—no order can be obeyed without at least some degree of discretion being exercised. The practice of commanding is both to minimize this gap and to fill it with preceding exemplars, previous decisions, and previous exercises of discretion which can be translated for current purposes, along with an entire sensory and investigatory apparatus to follow up on and therefore inform obedience to the imperative. Every command issued by the occupant of the center refers back to the mode of occupation intrinsic to that command, while simultaneously grounding that occupation in all the positions, subsidiary centers, occupied throughout the social order. The decision is represented as both as minimal and as consequential as possible: in an enormously complex and intricate order, one tiny “switch” is turned; that one tiny switch is chosen precisely where the choice between bifurcating paths would make the most difference. The command has an economy to it: no more and no less is said than necessary; commands are issued only to those who need to obey them; and this economy models the way further commands for implementing the prime one are to be issued. The ruler both disappears into his commands and stands outside of them. Any complaint directed to the occupant of the center becomes a question—an extension of the command which one delays obeying by complaining—regarding the economy with which one has situating oneself at a bifurcation. The character of the good ruler is one that can always say, I’m doing at my point at a particular bifurcation nothing more and nothing less than what I’m asking you to do at yours.

The ether is replaced by the constancy of the speed of light; phlogiston is replaced by oxygen; and, of course, geocentrism is replaced by heliocentrism. In each case, critical experimental results effected the scientific revolution, but what I’m interested in here is how the logic of scientific revolution can be applied to the revolution in the human sciences I take the originary hypothesis to initiate—a scientific revolution that is qualitatively different because the scientist is part of the phenomenon under study, and must study that phenomenon by acting within and therefore changing it. Scientific revolution is not only a valid, but an essential model here, because what both levels of inquiry have in common is what Gaston Bachelard called “epistemological obstacles,” which is to say, concepts grounding a process of inquiry that are themselves ungrounded in anything other than inherited institutional and what we could call “mythical” imperatives. The theological and therefore moral implications of the displacement of geocentrism by heliocentrism are well known, as is the “trauma” of Darwin’s hypothesis regarding the origin of species. I don’t know of any equivalent investments in phlogiston and the ether, but there were certainly intellectual and perhaps aesthetic investments—such concepts presumably provided a kind of apparent coherence that would have been lacking otherwise. Meanwhile, moralized resentments against the decentering of the conscious, self-centered human subject brought about by modern theorists like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud were also for quite a while grist for highbrow ruminations. The continuity between the natural and human sciences, then, is that the replacement of one disciplinary center by another requires the reordering of an entire constellation organized around that center, and such an event is always consequential.

As in my previous post, I want to bring the model of scientific revolution, or center replacement, from the level of the one or two in a lifetime event to our day to day thinking or “signifying” (or “sampling”). In a way, the problem gets much more interesting on this level. Once astronomy rejects geocentrism, or chemistry phlogiston, those paradigms are gone because inquiry now proceeds on the transformed terrain; but everyday discourse throws up new epistemological obstacles regularly, because ongoing events always need to be thought through on terms that can’t be completely given in advance. There are always assumptions in place that make it possible to see some things and impossible to see others. Moreover, in human affairs, not everything can be made explicit—indeed, with everything we do make explicit, more implicit assumptions are generated. There is always what Hannah Arendt called a “necessary appearance.” (Her example was that, however up to date my cosmology, the sun still looks like it is rising in the morning.) On the originary scene, it “appears” that the central object is holding the assembled in place. The same is true every time we attend to something—I’m already looking at something or thinking about something before I can ask why I’m doing so. I’m always being “held” in some way before “reflection” kicks in and, in fact, reflection tightens the grip of whatever holds me because my reflections find it to be necessary, or motivated, or rooted in something “deeper” that holds me, or an entry point into some network that encloses me, or a malevolent spirit that must be combatted, etc.

The structure of a scientific experiment is similar to that of a sacred ritual insofar as in both cases we have a closed space on which external effects are excluded, we have a precisely organized practice aimed at generating an event with a specific range of expected effects, as a result of which something will be revealed. “Scientific” thinking, in the sense of a practice organized so as to produce a revelatory event, was obviously “applied” to the human community well before it was applied to things. In that case, all human practices must have this structure—we are always assembling our body as a system of signs, conjoined with the mediatory and technological signs across which our attention and its effects are distributed, in order to reveal something: this something will always be some center, which will tell us what we need to do to be “held” by it. When a practice fails, which is to say that the center does not extend us an answer we can “process,” we draw upon our relation to the center as a model for a narrative that will re-position us in relation to the center. We can then translate that narrative into new practices, aimed at revelation. Of course, this process, taken on its own, is just as likely to lead to further obfuscation as clarification. And that’s really the question—how do we distinguish one from the other, and generate practices, narratives and translations that allow us to make this distinction regularly and in a controlled manner? Without the controlled scientific space, we must ourselves be both subjects and objects of virtual experiments that never leave the realm of the hypothetical. So, what makes for a “good,” or “generative,” hypothesis in the human realm?

It’s one that makes the practice generating it more of a practice. The simplest way to think about a practice is that as a result of some performance, something comes into existence that wouldn’t have come into existence without that performance, and this emergence produces a new scene onto which a performer of practice could enter and perform anew. Games provide good examples of this kind of thing—a good move in chess sets up a subsequent move, etc.—but we could think in terms of asking someone a question. A good question is one that elicits a statement that wouldn’t have been made without that question, and that will now enable a new question that itself wouldn’t be possible without the previous question-answer sequence—that allows the questioner to continue as questioner in an unanticipated way that the previous sequence nevertheless prepared him for. So, you could think in terms of continually becoming a better questioner, or interviewer, as a practice. As this happens, you will discover that both you as the questioner, and the one being questioned, however important or interesting, recede into the background of the event of questioning itself. The more you focus on specific things you yourself would want to know, or imagine a reader or hearer would want to know, the less perfect your practice; the same with a focus on the interviewee as the center—you and the interviewee are nothing but the preconditions of this particular practice of questioning. Let’s say you have to keep the focus on the interviewee, and the specific things people want to hear from him, because those conditions are what made the questioning possible in the first place—in that case, those would have to become further preconditions of a more constrained but still potentially excellent practice of questioning. (Of course, the constraints could become such as to make anything approaching a genuine practice impossible, in which case one might be ethically obliged to decline the assignment.)

What we see here is an act of decentering and then recentering: from the interviewer or interviewee being the center, which in a sense is the natural situation in a conversation, the process of questioning itself becomes the center, which the individuals involved merely serve. With one of the individuals as the center, the oscillations of desire and resentment generate the scene—the interview humbly defers to the great man, but also hopes to catch him out in some remark that will diminish him, so he projects onto the great man the intentions and qualities corresponding to his own imperfect practice—the great man is arrogant, or insincere, or indeed great beyond all comprehension, etc.—all the narratives of a failed practice. The perfection of the practice purges such narratives and translations—insofar as both are being constructed and constituted in this space, through this event, as figures or subjects of this singular line of questioning, all those projections are dispersed. If you think about, or come to narrate, your life as a sequence of practices, and your life as a whole as a practice of practices, within a social order in which those practices are situated and is continually reconstituted by and as those practices, then the problem of the continual replacement of the center comes into focus.

The mythical narrative interferes with the perfection of practice. It keeps in place a failed practice. This happens because a failed practice at one point must have been successful, or at least seemed more likely to be successful than alternatives. It relies on a narrative whose exhaustion has not been acknowledged, and a relation to some center that seems to have no alternative other than “chaos.” The only way out of a mythical narrative and a center that can no longer keep its “satellites” in “orbit” is to continue in the path of perfection of that practice. First, though, you need to understand that what you’re doing is a practice, even if only the decaying remains of one. This means directing your attention to whatever you are doing that you are not incorporating into some practice. When faced with some problem, or encounter, or confrontation, there is probably something in your engagement that you can’t situate within a practice—something that indicates the remains of some gesture that, you imagine, once “worked.” There might be many such things; perhaps there’s nothing you can see in what you do that is the product of a practice. What you are noticing are many at least partially failed practices, and the corresponding narratives and translations of narratives into new practices will to that extent deserve to be called “mythical.” There is some event with a center that you are faithful to but, rather than constructing a practice that allows for continual recenterings of the center of that event, you resist anything that interferes with attempts at reconstituting the entire scene that seems inseparable from the event. The mythical narrative and its practical translations are essentially cargo-culting.

Even more: whatever in your own doings and thinking you can’t represent as a practice is by virtue of your inability a part of others’ practices. If you’re thinking of yourself as an individual, with a conscience and consciousness, with character traits, a personality, beliefs, likes and dislikes, and so on, without being able to represent all of this within your practice of your life as a practice of practices, then there can’t be any doubt that all of these things are the results of practices of education, public relations, propaganda, entertainment, the social sciences, and so on that others have constructed for you. The perfection of practices always involves inhabiting all these practices produced for you, decentering the desire for recognition, the fear of public rejection, the immersion in thoughtless narratives and all the other centers created by those disseminated practices which provide prepared scripts for the repetition of familiar revelations—and recentering the composition of practices shared by others that treat the practices circulating through as practices rather than pre-given scenes. The good hypothesis, then, is the one that proposes a possible structure as a practice for some experiential given that has been revealed as an indication of a failed practice. Say you feel impotent rage at some failure or humiliation, or betrayal at what has turned out to be misplaced trust. Bound up in these feelings is a narrative involving characters with certain rights, possibilities and responsibilities, and somewhere in that you placed yourself on a scene just because it conformed to a model of experience of some other scene. There’s something in there that hasn’t been constructed as a practice, some form of mediation between you and others that just seemed inherent in the scene. That experience indicative of a failed practice and pointing to the need to incorporate hitherto unnoticed practices into your own is the moral equivalent of the scientific “anomaly” that calls for a new “paradigm”—a paradigm in which others would be invited to co-construct practices with you, rather than re-inforce a relation of “co-dependency.”

I approached, in this post, a very similar question as the one I approached in a very different way in the previous post. They’re in different languages, you might say, and we should all be multilingual. I think they are completely mutually translatable into each other without loss, but I’ll think about it. If a practice is fundamentally making oneself over as a “sample,” then I think the crossover becomes easy.

When you “signify” in any way, there are two ways of thinking about what you have done: first, you have conveyed or communicated some meaning, or content, in a package, so to speak, to be delivered to some recipient; second, you are modifying the mass of signifying material transmitted to and circulating around you from the totality of language users. The problem with the first way of thinking about it is that whatever content you believe yourself to transmitting is not something outside of language but is, rather, made up of transmitted and circulating signifying material, which references, then, other “contents,” which are themselves comprised of…. Leading us to infinite regress. The problem with the second way of thinking about the process is similar: that great mass of signifying material is signifying material because it is signifying “something,” something that is presumably not reducible to the signifying material itself. Here, again, we are led into infinite regress, as we can only track the various paths taken by signifying chains by referring to their to some extent at least extra-linguistic referents (i.e., “content”).

This antinomy is a metaphysical one, insofar as it presupposes the primacy of declarative culture, where we need to keep providing content for sentences but the content can only be more sentences. The originary hypothesis transforms this antinomy into a generative paradox by positing the ostensive sign as the first sign, so that the sacred object at the center is also the first “content,” but content only made available through the act of signification itself. So, there is indeed some “content” “outside” of any act of signification, but it is a content that is the content of that particular act of signification, under those conditions of signification, within a specific event of signification, which thereby produces that content. Since that act, event, and those conditions must be the performance of positions, rules and possibilities created by the entire history of language and humanity, the creation of that content could just as easily and accurately be described as a modification of signifying material transmitted and circulating—kind of like pulling a switch that directs a chain of signification of one path onto another.

There is “content,” then, because we can use the “same” sign pointing, or providing a kind of map enabling us to point, to the “same” thing. This is really a single problem, because the “same” sign is the same because it is pointing to the “same” object. What makes this possible is what I call a “disciplinary space,” but it would be more precise to say that this is what a disciplinary space is. But we can just as readily use Eric Gans’s terms from The Origin of Language: “linguistic presence,” which is maintained or restored by “lowering the threshold of significance.” The only really satisfying answer to the question, “what do you mean by that?,” is some version of “look at this.” The whole problem then resides in being in the same “place,” “facing” the same “direction,” undistracted by other things one might look at which might obscure “this,” and so on. And this is a problem that can only be solved within some practice, a practice constructed at least in part in order to solve it, here and now. (What “here and now” means is also determined by a disciplinary space: there can be a “here and now” stretching across the earth and the millennia—we can share a disciplinary space with the “recipient” of an ancient divine revelation.) All of our conversations are shaped by some form of the question the novice asks the expert when told to look through some specialized device of observation: “what am I looking at here?”

The implications of the paradigm-specific nature of knowledge has been studied extensively, by Gaston Bachelard, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn and others—the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has some interesting things to say about Bachelard’s notion of an “epistemological break” separating one paradigm from another—Kuhn’s “scientific revolution.” For a contemporary thinker who goes over this material in an informed and thorough (and accessible) way, I would recommend Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, whom I just came across myself. But my own ambition is to bring “paradigm dependency” into the realm, not only of the human sciences, but that of normal and idiosyncratic signifying activity, which is to say, social interaction. This would also bring the question into the moral and ethical fields: it would be immoral to ignore the “anomalies” that bring an established “paradigm” into “crisis,” because in doing so you would be abetting the crisis. But what this means in, say, a conversation between two people, or a political debate, must be very different than what it means in an established scientific discipline. The trick of a certain kind of progressive is to ignore these differences so as to license themselves to harangue their political enemies with what might at best be slightly more “qualified” claims from some “expert” domain. But if you ask such a progressive for the theory of social interaction and signifying activity informing such bullying, you’re very likely to draw a blank. He won’t be able to tell you what he’s doing, and what could be more important to thinking about what is “good” and what is “bad” than being able to say what you are doing?

The best way of infiltrating all discourse with some translation of paradigm dependency is to articulate all the speech forms identified in The Origin of Language, and explored in various directions in Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center. Any speech act, in any medium, articulates the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative levels of discourse. We can borrow from Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack, and, as I have been doing already without remarking upon it, refer to the “grammatical stack”—those levels of discourse are articulated in what we could call a particular “slice” of the stack (one might say a “cross-section”) in any utterance. The “meaning” of an utterance (and, like “here and now,” what we mean by “utterance” is determined within a disciplinary space: an epic poem, even an entire tradition, can be treated as an utterance) is the way it slices the stack. And another language user or (risking confusion) “signifier” acknowledges this meaning by slicing the stack in a way that is possible only because of the previous slice. We all can tell the difference between meaningful and meaningless statements. For example, a billionaire insisting on the need for greater “equality” while ordering his sub-minimum wage illegal alien domestic worker to scrub a stain is not really making a “meaningful” statement: “hypocrisy” is the ready at hand word for this kind of meaninglessness. But what does anyone mean when they “call” for greater “equality”—where is the route from that declarative statement to a set of ostensives and imperatives that would lead to a result we could point to together and say, “yes, that’s what ‘greater equality’ looks like”? If you can’t answer that kind of question, what you say is just as meaningless as the virtue-signaling of the most transparent hypocrite. And if this doesn’t strike you as an important problem, your pretensions to being a moral actor are perfunctory, at best.

I propose approaching this by treating signifying acts or utterances as samples. “Sample” might seem like a narrowly scientific term, of dubious application when applied to humans, but the word has a richer history than that—it is really a “spin-off” of “example,” which means it carries the meaning of a “model,” or “match,” and is part of a family of Indo-European words with the root “em,” which means “to take, distribute” (from the online etymological dictionary, of course). So, when we “sample,” we’re passing around parts of the whole, not, in this case, to consume, but to use them to figure out what the whole consists of. Any use of language is a sample of language, and its relation to language as a whole is precisely what is in question. Here I will invoke, as I have done many times, Peirce’s assertion that knowledge involves determining the relation between some proportion between elements in the sample and the proportion between those same elements in the whole. If you could represent the whole you wouldn’t need samples, and there’s no doubt that with language you can never have the whole. So, when I say something, I’m presenting not only a sample of language (and myself as a sample of language users), but a(n intrinsically open) hypothesis regarding the relation between that sample and the whole (the hypothesis being that the study and iteration of my sample will enable you to generate samples that better approximate the whole than would otherwise be the case). This hypothesis is far more often than not implicit, but it’s definitely there insofar as my sample, or part, or slice, is a “response” to others (rather than the feeble “response,” we can say that my sample repairs a break in linguistic presence threatened by a previous sample, using the reparative means provided by that sample). One sample includes, via allusion, impersonation, citation and translation, others, and thereby proposes a better match between sample and whole.

What makes for a better match is that some “same” sign is now seen to be marked by difference as a consequence of a new same sign (or sample). We could say that the origin of the declarative is iterated: an ostensive is shown to be lacking, or referentless, or distributed among so many referents as to be inoperative; while a new ostensive realigns the field. This can be seen as a scientific practice—multiplying anomalies until the new paradigm can be constructed—it can also be seen as a moral and ethical practice of reparation, and an aesthetic practice of framing. The more we move away from established scientific disciplines and toward “everyday life” or, more precisely, more open-ended scenes, the more the latter aspects of the practice become the decisive ones. The “anomaly,” in moral and aesthetic terms, is the break in linguistic presence. It is a breach one steps into. Your sample has to be a sample ofthe missing layer of the stack presented by the other’s sample. This is the kind of practice I have discussed many times before: you might take the other’s declarative as an imperative, thereby revealing the contrary or inoperable imperatives implicit in it; one might take oneself to be named in some “meaningless” reference in another’s discourse, and act out that absence; one might repeat another’s declarative in a series of declaratives, each producing a word or phrase in the other’s sentence, thereby laying bare what we are expected to think here. Of course, this need not be antagonistic—one could use these kinds of practices to amplify another’s discourse, to accentuate the fullness of meaning. In fact, one is always doing a bit of both, because even the meaningless discourse must be acknowledged as enabling the breach one can now step into.

I’m always trying to introduce further gradients of differentiation and deferral into these hypothetical renderings of linguistico-moral-aesthetic practices. We can’t get to the point of writing all-purpose pedagogical scripts (but that may be an imperative from the center that can’t be unheard), but we can clarify an imperative and create a vocabulary for naming its “stations.” We keep putting forward samples with a relationship to the whole that is indeterminate and nevertheless more closely matched than another sample to be included within our own. Every sample is distinct—distinctiveness is the relation between the “elements” in the sample and the relation between those same elements within the whole. The sample is the same as itself, as “verified,” “confirmed,” or “acknowledged” by the other samples it generates. (You could say the determination that any sign or sample is the same is a “fiction,” but as opposed to what reality?) Insofar as the sample can be “authenticated,” though, this sample iterates and is therefore the “same” as a whole series or “sprawl” of samples.

So, you can always locate any sample at some point on a continuum where at one end we identify everything that makes the sample the same as lots of other samples, all that reduces it to a “stereotype”: the use of words and phrases in the same way, the reliance on grammatical constructions and rhetorical commonplaces, the deployment of familiar tropes, the reliance on the affordances of the media employed, and so on: this brings into focus the tasks of “media studies.” At the other end of the continuum, meanwhile, we identify everything that distinguishes this sample from any other, including time, place, audience and the various possible modifications of inherited means of expression. The breach is where you accentuate both, or represent an oscillation between the two, showing how accentuating one end of the continuum ends you up back at the other end—where the most insistent adherence to fixed models produces the greatest originality. The title of this post has the inappropriate “to” instead of “from” so as to accentuation the simultaneity of discovering and constructing the source of any sample. “Derive to” is a sample of mistakenness, interfering with the linearity implicit in the notion of “derivation.” Maybe a good sample, maybe not. Leaving your sample to simultaneously be an absolute novum and a complete copy is language learning as the definitive moral act—you discover what you “mean” by minimally but systematically differentiating your utterance from others. Anything we would take to be moral, above all refraining from projecting your own mimetic crises onto the background of others so we might see them as following the same imperative as us, follows from the derivation of the sample to its source.

All discourse is with and of the center; all exchanges are of and with the center; all discourses are mediating exchanges with and through the center. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the human is the center speaking and exchanging with itself, with humans as the medium of discourse and exchange. We’re the language and money of the center. The reason this isn’t a solipsistic monologue of an autistic deity is that the exchanges take place over time, and the center of now is not the same center as the center now (nine words further along in the sentence). When we think of economic exchange, which is t say, desacralized exchange outside of the ritual center, we think of exchanges between agents located on the periphery—so, my formulations here counter that model. But even if exchanges on the periphery merely interface exchanges of the center with itself over time, that mode of exchange would still be a new interface of intra-center exchanges, and one that itself going, eventually, to be mediated by money.

Money, then, while initiated to facilitate imperative exchanges with the center through the provision of articles for group sacrifice, comes to stretch imperative exchange to its limits. With an imperative exchange, the participant can say why he is bringing this article, why now, why here, and the reason will include references to a ritual tradition which includes established forms of reciprocity between individuals, families, kin, and communities. The tendency of money is to abstract from all that and render it irrelevant. But what money doesn’t abstract from is its relation to central authority, as means of distribution and measure of stability. If someone has $200,000 in the bank, that $200,000 represents, not the amount of labor that person has performed minus what was spent purchasing the results of others’ labor, but the existence of that bank, within a world of banks and other means of registering and preserving amounts and accounts, protected by a particular mode of sovereignty guaranteeing in various ways the ability of the bank to have any or all of that $200,000 available when called for by the holder of the account. And, of course, that $200,000 also represents a certain amount of purchasing power in relation to the rest of the economy, which means today it can buy you a nice house in a good neighborhood whereas perhaps in a couple of years it will get you a decent car.

Money, then, is a tissue of threads anchored in the sovereign which, in quivering, register clusterings of power interfering with central authority, new delegations of disciplinary power more or less directly sanctioned by central authority, the moral health of the community using that money, insofar as that moral health figures into the structure of the workforce and consumption, and so on. And, not only registers, but reweaves and sometimes cuts off connections. It’s obvious that for a community to have, say, a certain number of highly skilled engineers, it must have a certain number of functional families raising children with the discipline to become trained as engineers, and some form of schooling that does the training, and a sufficiently pacified environment so that those who might become engineers are not compelled, as teenagers, to join a gang to survive, or to avenge the rape of their sister, and that to have all of these things one must have a lot of other things as well. Since all this is articulated through money, a true understanding of economics would find ways of using money to measure all this. But, for starters, we could say that the question of, say, “priming the pump,” or “printing money,” or “qualitative easing,” must ultimately be a question of whether enough (and how many will be “enough”?) people, in the “right” places, expect the central authority to see to, over the long term, the core social competencies that will produce X number of highly skilled engineers, with X being the number necessary to sustain and enhance as needed the various infrastructures needed to make everything else happen. And such expectations are going to be formed in accord with the extent to which the central authority can be seen maintaining the distinctions and differentiations, or the pedagogical relationships, that would ensure that what we mean now by “highly skilled engineer” will be commensurate with what we will mean by that phrase ten years from now. And that continuity in meaning can be “read off” of all the phenomena we see around us, in new terminological coinages, in slippages in the use of familiar terms, in new specializations that either degrade qualifications or represent genuinely new disciplinary spaces. If we know how to read it—which means that those who know to read it—and to read money flows as signals in the movements of meanings—will eventually constitute the “social spine,” if there is going to be one.

To read money as rendering the meaning of social differentiations is to read against the grain of money, the primary tendency of which is to efface them. This doesn’t necessarily mean “opposing” money (it doesn’t necessarily mean not opposing it, either), because one could introduce some measure into an order for the purposes of observation and modulation while granting it the necessary autonomy to be of use in that regard. The exchanges among non-sovereign institutions and individuals facilitated by money represent a concession of authority which is really a delegation, by the central authority. There can be good reasons for relaxing control in some areas, and maintaining a system of measurement to indicate when further relaxation might be beneficial or, on the contrary, control should be tightened. The alternative is to have spies, or plants, which is to say some kind of sensory “membrane,” in institutions granted authority, which reports back to central authority. Of course, both methods can be used simultaneously, and for those find the notion of spies or plants in “private” institutions to be disturbingly totalitarian, I would ask whether the currently mythologized figure of the “whistleblower” represents anything other than an encouragement to individuals to train themselves as potential spies and plants.

But reading against the grain of money does lead to imagining its extreme limitation, to the point of its disappearances, at least as a thought experiment. If money serves the same purpose as could be served by spies or plants or, let’s say, sensing and measuring agents directly responsible to central authority, then we could formulate a kind of “equation”: the more that money is minimalized, the more pervasive the sovereign sensorium must be. However “appified” all this sensing and measuring might be, there will always be authorized individuals making decisions. (One of the comical aspects of the systematic and often bizarre censorship exercised by social media corporations like Google, Twitter and Facebook is the fact that, for all the sophistication and complexity of the algorithmic-driven data collection and sorting, in the end the specific decision to suspend this or that account is made by some neurotic, hyper-sensitive, peer pressured, semi-educated 20-something.)  In this case, money would be measuring the fluctuations of the integration and isolation of disciplinary spaces within institutions: the more the social order is constituted by skunkworking throughout its institutions, the more meaningful money would be, and the better indicator of social health over time; the more skunkworkers are reduced to the condition of “whistleblowers” (with greater or lesser effect), the less meaningful money will be. Things could get more complex—fake whistleblowers can try to undermine genuine skunkworks, for example, in the interest of clusterings of power subverted by effective work—but these developments would also be fluctuations of the integration/isolation of disciplinary spaces. At the extreme, if we could imagine achieving “total skunkworking,” it’s hard to see why there would be any need for money at all—money, as a map, would have become so meaningful as to become absorbed into a shared attunement to the “territory.”

Friedrich Hayek’s argument was that all of the tacit knowledge embedded in the practices of all the distributed agents in the exchange order would be lost if those practices were to be reduced to the direct imperatives of a central authority. For Mises, the problem of there being no money is that price signals are necessary to mediate to allocation of resources. But there seem to be exceptions: emergency situations where mobilization proceeds in accord with motivation, competence and courage, and where it’s easy to see who’s a slacker or malingerer. Maybe just like hard cases make bad law, emergency situations make bad social science. But the equivalent of a permanent emergency would be a project engaging the energies of the entire society. The tweeter “scientism” makes a good case that the purpose of liberalism is to prevent the coalescence of such a project—the last such project was the organization of the social order to serve and glorify God, and liberalism got its start by muddying up that project. It’s hard to imagine anything as comprehensive as that replacing liberalism, but what can replace liberalism is a social order of “seed projects,” proposals seeking support for space exploration, medical research, communications and infrastructural developments, and even such leftist fetishes as cleaner energy—the sovereign responsibility would be to order and prioritize amongst such projects, to devote long-term research allocation to them, and to assign to the others the organization of educational and other institutions the task for preparing the people to participate. The articulation of large scale planning and distributed tacit know-how would then take care of itself.

Exchanges with the center over time, then, involve disciplinary spaces transforming disciplines and doing so by recognizing and creating other disciplinary spaces. Any creation of a new line of attention confers, however indirectly and imperceptibly, meaning upon money by enhancing the sensorium of the (possible) central authority. One could always, in principle, state explicitly the articulation of distributed scenes represented by a particular use of money: $200 for this television set represents a certain number of people working a certain number of hours upon a certain kind of machinery, with the product of that labor then being transported in a certain way of a certain distance, and so on. Leftist activists used to excel at such visualizations of the “global factory,” and it must be much easier to do today. The idea is that the more you state it and visualize it, the easier it becomes to consider changing it. This is obviously true. If you look at one link of the supply chain, e.g., the working conditions in some factory in China, you can say: “this is unacceptable. These conditions must change.” You can then specify the changes you would make and put a dollar amount on that. Maybe improving the working conditions or moving the factory out of China would make the TV set cost $220. This, in turn would distribute outlays of money all along the line. The purpose is to integrate production and consumption decisions into a moral framework. As in so many other cases, we can say to the leftist activist, first, “what kind of central authority do you imagine being able to approach the supply chain in the kind of systematic way necessary to make this approach coherent?”; and, then, “once you have imagined such a central authority, what makes you imagine it will do the things you want it to do”? The question applies equally to all of us, of course, but we will be better equipped to aid in the installation of such a central authority if we are exclusively focused on contributing to a pedagogical order in which disciplinary spaces as the sensorium of central authority are a matter of course.

We can set the problem, then, of translating a particular monetary exchange into the measure of the distance between the actual alignment of disciplines and a possible alignment characterized by a further increment of pedagogical relations, or fractal hierarchies made more explicit. As always, we work with a specific slice of the stack, interfacially, “app”ially. And pataphysically, or through what we could call the imperative imagination—so, for example, paying 20% more for your TV set means some worker in China will have free time to study neoabsolutist theory—so, get to it! This can be, at one and the same time, a mockery of activist hysteria and an invitation to a discussion of social priorities, and the assumptions we make about authority when we posit them. You don’t claim to represent the totality, just to be an interface between the totality (or Cloud) and the specific situation (the desire of some user). You want the terms of exchange set up by a new occupant of the center (even if it’s the same occupant at a later time) to be consistent with previous terms. You want money to represent the “stock” of skilled engineers, intact families, settled populations, functional educational institutions, and so on, rather than the power grabbing or desperation of someone close enough to the center to inflate it like a bubble.

In a very interesting (and short) book, Urban Planning for Murder: Murder Fact Event, Aristides Antonas argues that the governing logic of the city is to render murder anonymous, and therefore neutral and innocuous. The city takes the “eventness” out of murder. This is a way of identifying the city, which we can in turn identify with civilization, as the transcendence of the vendetta and the tribalism informing it. Under the terms of the vendetta, a murder is an event that puts everyone on high alert and accentuates all social differences; in the city the victim is, literally, a number, filed away in an archive, processed through the judicial bureaucracy which similarly anonymizes the murder. But Antonas goes on to add another ingredient to the formula of the city—the injustice that is incommensurable with the justice system because it is committed by one outside of that system, against the system itself. This injustice, committed by the sovereign charged with ensuring justice, produces (I am following up on Antonas here) the exemplary victim, the memory of whom will both undergird and intimate the limits of the justice system.

Let’s approach the city and civilization from another angle. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias traces the process of civilization through the gradual separation of the scene of slaughter from the scene of consumption. At the most primitive stage, the animal is killed, the meal prepared, and then eaten, in succession, in the same place—the slaughter-house and dining hall are one. Then, the slaughter is carried out elsewhere, and the food brought in and prepared and consumed in a single place. Then the preparation is set apart from the consumption, so in the end those eating can be completely oblivious to the provenance of their meal. As animal rights activists try through desperate stunts to remind us, this allows us to remain blissfully unaware of the systematic brutalities which eventually land the food on our tables. Labor activists make the related point regarding, e.g., the children digging in tungsten mines in Africa so that we can tweet about trans rights on our cellphones. Here, events are made invisible, but if someone were to propose a remedy to such situations, those remedies would repeat the same civilizing process of eliminating anything event-like along the supply chain through regulations, inspectors, lawsuits, NGOs and so on. In other words, another layer of delegation and distancing would be introduced.

These processes of civilization in turn produce a strong desire to see what we don’t really want to see. The equivalent of snuff films are meant to attract our attention to the atrocities underlying our peaceful consumption—this kind of porn goes back a long way, as any reader of Dickens knows. Elias traces “sentimentalism” to this process of separation and seclusion: those who slaughter what they then cook and eat, right then and there, aren’t going to be sentimental about animals, or hunting, or the bucolic life: there’s no other scene on which to project the resolution to the resentments felt on the scene one occupies. Genres like the idyll and the pastoral are the products of urbanization no less than modern genres like film noir and the horror film. Film noir reconstructs and sensationalizes the murder events neutralized through insurance claims, police procedure, property disputes and other urban non-events. The horror film tries to simulate the revenge of repressed nature, from which the viewer is of course at a safe distance. This is fundamentally no different than the pastoral representing the shepherd as a paragon of the virtues forgotten by the city-dweller. “Nature” is a product of the “artificial” city.

The exemplary victim of civilization is not suited for representation within these genres, which is tantamount to saying that the unrepresentability of the exemplary victim generates these supplementary genres. Think about the victims of precisely the liberal democratic states, violating precisely their founding liberal principles, over the past few years—these would be those dissident right figures marked as “racist” so as to bring the entire machinery of state, economic and cultural institutions down upon them, rendering them as close to “non-persons” as it’s possible to be in an order that records everything. One can want to see these individuals obtain relief and even justice, but insofar as they are suing, appealing, having their cases work their ways through the courts or the adjudication processes of Facebook, Twitter or Chase Manhattan, they are not the kinds of victims who “void” the claim of the system to avoid eventness. Nor would this change if one of these victims went out in a terrorist blaze of glory, which would likewise confirm by triggering the justice system. Pastoral, noirish and horror representations would still be possible.

The exemplary victim is the one whose path we could follow as a means of salvation while always falling infinitely short of the example. To speak of this civil exposure of the terms of civility we need the language of money, which is as intrinsic to the city and civilization as writing and justice. We have to think of these different power interfaces together. A good starting point for doing so is Devin Singh’s Divine Currency, which examines the ways in which concepts of currency, coinage and debt are constitutive of early, formative Christian thought. Singh’s work is part of an emergent disciplinary space inquiring into the relations between the monetary concepts pervasive in Christianity in a way that doesn’t reduce them to metaphors—books like Michael Hudson’s …and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year, among others that will no doubt come up in future discussions are example of texts that take seriously, to take just one example, the economic roots and implications of a concept like “redemption.” I will preface this preliminary discussion by saying that the economic dimension of the fundamental concepts of Christianity neither “discredits” Christianity nor reduces it to an ancient world debt-forgiveness activist movement—no more than does the political dimension of calling God a “king” giving “laws” and “ruling” the world discredit Christianity and other monotheisms reliant on such concepts. Quite to the contrary—the implication of such an inquiry is that Christianity, if it hopes to be powerful in any sense, will have to recover its relation to the totality of human life, eternal and temporal.

So, God is a benevolent administrator of the world economy, and humans are created in His image just like a coin is stamped with the image of the worldly emperor; Christ is the unique divine image that is then copied onto all the human “coins.” Christ is also the “ransom” paid to Satan, who holds humanity in debt due to original sin. (Singh goes into some detail regarding the account one early theologian provides of the rather dubious “negotiations” God must engage in to manage this.) David Graeber speaks contemptuously about this language of debt peonage, seeing it as a justification of power, but one can also turn that around and see Christianity as a call for the liberation of humanity from debt enslavement, a recurring problem in both the ancient and modern worlds. Singh is interested in the way this theologico-monetary discourse provided the ideological resources for early modern (and late modern, for that matter) defenses of the “free market,” while Graeber, understandably, finds the whole notion of an unpayable debt obscene. But humans have always acknowledged a debt to the center—otherwise, what were all those sacrifices about? Exchanges with the center are intrinsically asymmetrical. Why couldn’t that asymmetry intensify to the point where the debt to the center becomes incommensurable not only to all available resources, but to all imaginable discourses?

This would always have been thought of in “economistic” terms: if the local deity guarantees a good hunt, or sufficient rainfall, he is providing a good, and holding up his end of the bargain. This kind of exchange is inherently limited, though—if your god allows you to bring down a buffalo, there’s nothing more you can give him than a piece of that buffalo. Once the God-Emperor ensures the yearly flowing of the life-giving river, though, it gets harder to determine what would count as an acceptable gift in return. Money is both continuous and discontinuous with this history of exchanges with the center that constitutes humanity. Money, in its universal exchangeability, provides a language for speaking of “infinite” indebtedness, and money is introduced as a means of exercising power when the asymmetry of center and periphery is so immense as to require indirect means of control and regulation. It then becomes imaginable for the exemplary victim of the state’s crime against its own justice system to become a “means of payment” for an infinite debt payable, now, not to the king, but to the God of Whom the king can only be a minted image.

It is very helpful to keep in mind the economic resonance of central theological words like “redemption” and “salvation.” The sacred can only be a way of representing our sociality, and from where other than our institutional forms could we derive the vocabulary for speaking of the sacred? A different language of the sacred would require a different form of sociality, and vice versa. The alternative to an infinite debt to the center is not a worldly or divine communism, but a donation to the center that is simultaneously one’s “income.” From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs? Communism never even claimed to get anywhere near that point, so maybe it’s not a communist mode of exchange after all. Moreover, what I think is the common interpretation of that much older than Marx slogan, that it implies altruistic self-sacrifice of the “able” to the “needy,” misses the obvious point that the able also have their needs, which might be quite substantial, and must also be met, if they are to “give” according to abilities sourced by the meeting of those needs (not to mention that the needy must also have abilities, even if more meager, to be cultivated). Your needs are also what you need in order to exhibit, refine, maintain and transmit to others your abilities. Such a mode of distribution makes no sense in terms of spontaneity and autonomy, but only in terms of an exchange with the center, mediated through micro and macro pedagogical interactions.

A new form of “urbanomics,” meanwhile, would involve surfacing the economic underpinnings of our moral and ethical discussions, and also the way all the distinctions of civilization—natural/social, natural/artificial, private/public, and so on—have infiltrated the furthest reaches of our language. In place of attempts to find exemplary victims to martyrize, the crimes against the system of justice we need to reveal in our practices are needs unnecessarily unmet and abilities left unexercised. The civilized question is always some version of, “what could we be doing other than this”? Where is there a mimetic blockage that could be converted into a new medium or interface that would make such a blockage unthinkable? As always, this is more a question of ways of being in language and therefore in institutions, rather than a “program.” We can tell, and can get better at telling, when another wants to be too much “like” us, or we find ourselves wanting to be too much “like” them, such that the space between us is in danger of being foreclosed because we would then both have to be in the same space. It is in such occasions where the metalinguistic concepts of the disciplines—all those mentioned above, plus “rights,” ‘equality,” “justice,” “reason,” and much more get leveraged to ideologize the confrontation and make it intractable. Your donation to the center is the representation of an other to which we can both contribute something, the creation of new needs ad abilities.

One more element of the city is worth mentioning: the grid, or replicable patterns of infrastructure, architecture and information transmission. The grid is the material manifestation of the abstraction exercised through money and the justice system. The grid enforces the distribution of human activities along the lines of the distinctions mentioned above, but also divisions like residential and business, financial and manufacturing, city and suburb—which replicate those other distinctions. The killings on which each of us depend are occluded in the other districts. Should we see the beasts being slaughtered for the benefit of what seems to us a more benign secondary or tertiary activity? Does the continuation of civilization depend on not seeing how the sausage is made, or upon having it laid out for us? In the former case, this ongoing process of deferral and distantiation is to be continued—after all, each point along the way some serious conflict was deferred through some distancing and segregating mechanism until we got to the point that we can start to defend against as yet unimagined dangers—but maybe at the expense of seeing potentially “dangerous” (because conflict-generating) dangers right in front of us. In the latter case we want design for transparency, with windows from within each district opening up onto the other districts. Lots of glass and mirrors, the functional parts of buildings and streets (pipes, wires, poles, etc.) made visible and interesting, information displays like the financial ticker for all kinds of activities, explicit recognition of our enhanced visibility and audibility, and therefore more awareness of the performative nature of our activities. If hiding information becomes more difficult, for corporations, institutions and individuals, then secrecy and privacy will have to be replaced by the shaping of the information we can’t help but give off: data is infinite but its processing in real time is finite and we can control the patterns that are going to be read off of us and the ones we read off of others. This all comes back to making our practices explicitly pedagogical, and instances of originary satire.