GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

The declarative sentence makes explicit what remains implicit in ostensives and imperatives. Ostensives and imperatives “work” because a whole scenic configuration is already in place and goes unnoticed and unremarked upon. Not noticing and remarking upon this configuration is a precondition for the operation of ostensives and imperatives, and remarking upon them is an interruption of their operation. But sustained imperative orders include provisos involving the solicitation of periodic feedback, which is an invitation, in a limited form, of declarative culture into the ostensive-imperative world. You could say that all of “politics” concerns the way this happens, and whether the representatives of declarative culture (the disciplines) support or usurp the ostensive-imperative world.

Postliberals, or autocrats, have a problem in this regard: we must be ruthlessly critical of everything existing, but what we are ruthlessly critical of is primarily the subversion of the ostensive-imperative world by ruthless criticism. We want to identify and pre-empt every encroachment of the declarative upon the ostensive-imperative, while recognizing that the existing ostensive-imperative world is largely comprised of the accumulated results of centuries of such encroachments. We have to be more explicit about scenic orders than liberals can afford to be, while doing so in the name of a restoration of implicitness to its proper place.

It is actually the more fully developed declarative culture that supports implicitness. The use of declaratives to undermine authority (the ostensive-imperative world) by positing a more real “super-sovereignty” against which that authority can be measured (“nature,” “justice,” “equality”) but can’t be trusted to measure itself is simultaneously a refusal to use declaratives to examine the desires and resentments that lead to the relentless targeting of authority. The declarative culture inhabiting the cloud-cuckoo land of super-sovereignty, then, is really more the outgrowth of a competing, rogue, imperative order than a properly declarative one.

So, one can target the existing “health care system,” pointing out the “greed,” “waste,” corruptly disordered priorities, inequities, and so on, all the while presupposing a completely unexamined model of what a “good” health care system would be. If you ask someone consumed with the ruthless critique of “insurance companies,” or whatever, well, how, exactly, should a “health care system” work, you will most likely be provided an idealized description of some end result: everyone should have “access,” health care should be “affordable” or even “free,” no one should go bankrupt because of a long term illness, etc. In other words, you get a consumer’s rather than a designer’s perspective. If you then probe a bit further and ask, for example, about the training of medical professionals, and which medical professionals should address health “issues” at what level; or how priorities should be set regarding planning and preparing for unanticipated contingencies (or, for that matter, how to determine which contingencies—or, rather, “types” of contingencies—should be more or less “anticipated”), providing preventive care, allocating responsibility for conditions conducive to better health at various levels of authority, including that of families and individuals; upon what other institutional structures does “health care” rely upon; and, finally, what effects the preferred policy of the moment might have on all these imperative orders, you will most likely get a blank stare. And understandably so—everyone is encouraged to play at being president, with immediately implementable opinions; no one is encouraged to think and operate at the level at which one’s feedback might be help (except, minimally, as a private consumer).

When you “want” something like “universal access to health care,” however that is pictured in your mind, you really want an entire social order which you could never fully articulate. The left can make it to this point with us, but then they short-circuit it when this “entire social order” dissolves into babble about “disparities in wealth and power” or the like. They want to imagine a social order in which everyone is exactly equal in wealth and power but such a social order is unimaginable—it’s a kind of declarative sublime. As soon as you were to say something like, “well, doctors would have to…,” you invoke an entire order in which doctors are produced, certified, guaranteed a certain income and social status relative to others, embedded in institutions in which that “have to” would be actualized, and all that in turn implicates a whole series of hierarchies and command structures. The proper use of declarative culture is to articulate all this, and engage others in its articulation.

Such a practice of declarative culture, and the cultured declarative, will invariably have a satiric dimension. Someone says, “I just want to be able to take my kid to the emergency room without going bankrupt” and you say something like, “so, you want a slave class of emergency room physicians forced to work 16 hours a day for subsistence”; or, coming at it from the other end, “so, you want a redirection of resources to medical innovation freed from certain FDA strictures and a redesign of health care professional training so as to provide for more precise layers of qualification”; you will get a “wait—what?” kind of response. But something like that really is their desire, properly laid out. And you thereby initiate a conversation—should the other wish to pursue it (and this is a good way of determining very quickly which discussions are worth pursuing)—about what kind of conditions would leave us with harried, exhausted, over-educated and low paid doctors or a well ordered hierarchy of medical professionals and institutions (and associated research institutions, and educational institutions that supply them, and so on). And at the end of such questioning is the question of who could we expect to provide for the preferable alternative. What kind of orders would have to be given at what level, and what kind of people would be capable of giving and implementing such orders? In other words, we would be speaking about the imperatives we hear from the center.

You can already find discussions of health care that approximate the kind I’ve been simulating—anyone with any responsibility or knowledge of the field knows that these discussions involve institutions, resources, large scale decision making, and so on. But there are whole fields of desires and resentments where this is much more tenuously the case, and which are therefore especially rich fields for rogue imperative-qua declarative super-sovereignties to enter. These are the desires and resentments generated by the grotesque superstructures of anti-discrimination law, the fields of race, gender, and sexuality, where fortunes can be made or lost on the interpretation of a joke or a gesture. “I just want, as a woman in the workplace, to be treated with respect, and not as a sexual object.” Well, yes, but “respect” and “sex” are historical, deeply tradition-laden concepts, which require elaborate translations if their meaning is to be determined outside of a given institution’s Code of Conduct (which has processed those terms through political structured legal innovations)—or even if we are to make sense of that Code of Conduct in a given case. The actual desire here is to have the option to be a plaintiff in a particular kind of lawsuit, presided over by a particular type of judge, produced by a law school within a system of law schools dominated by a particular judicial and political philosophy, and therefore upon certain funding institutions—and, moreover, to be represented in various media in specific ways which can be described in phrases like “having one’s voice heard,” “having one’s experience recognized,” “finally saying ‘enough’,” and so on, which one has already internalized by imitating skilled and canny female strivers represented by those same media. And this is not yet to speak of the whole history of pulverizations of intermediate institutions and authorities, a history largely forgotten but marked by the epithetical residue of demonizing and popularized terms like “mansplain.”

Even those who think such transformations were good or necessary prefer to not speak of them in other than mythical terms of underdogs overcoming transparently tyrannical forms of power. Dragged out into the light of day, they look less obviously beneficial and inevitable. Answering the rather obvious question, “how did the powerless win,” is where the mythmaking comes in. They must have had somepower in the end. Behind the mythmaking lies the rogue imperative order—someone (and we could always name names) wanted to circumvent the established order. Well, maybe there was some good reason to but, regardless, we would have a very different story in that case. It would be a story of one form of authority displacing another, each with its own hierarchies, “entailments” and “affordances.” The ultimate revelation is that every desire is the desire of the center and for the center. Here’s the model of authority entailed by your desire, and here’s the model of authority I would propose in response: where are the overlappings and incommensurabilities? Can we imagine various syntheses? What “enablements” and what defects are we presupposing, along with which potential remedies, in the form of authority, and the traditions informing it, authorizing this very discussion we are having right here and now? Let’s play a little game—how many degrees of separation are there between us discoursing here and now, and someone doing something, indebted to our discoursing, that might make some difference that wouldn’t have been made without our discoursing? How much of our discoursing is informed by the knowledge available to us regarding our remoteness from power and of the constitution of our discoursing by that remoteness? Answering the subsequent question, “well, then, what, exactly, are we doing now,” would be an appropriate use of declarative culture.

Traditional logic, a central pillar of metaphysics, involves turning a subject-predicate relation into a definition, and then using that definition to “certify” another subject-predicate relation. “Old people are bad drivers”; “that man is old”; “that man is a bad driver.” A particular subject-predicate relation, along with the definitions of the words involved, is assumed to be stable, which makes it possible for logic to take on a machine-like form of operation and ultimately because the basis of new kinds of machines. This mechanism is transparently a result of literate culture’s hypostatization of the declarative sentence, which produces both grammar and definitions. Aside from the fact that words change their meanings, can have multiple meanings and, indeed, may have less “meanings” than “uses,” any definition relies upon metaphysical or anthropological assumptions that can’t be “proven” within the system itself. But it’s very helpful for a mode of thinking to have a logic, less to adjudicate disputes within the system then for pedagogical purposes—a logic helps produce shared problem-solving devices and habits upon which more advanced forms of inquiry can be built.

I think that Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic metalanguage (her “primes”) can provide us with the basis of a generative, “anthropomorphic” logic. Her NSM provides us with a set of words with a stable meaning, but their meaning is not fixed through arbitrary definitions produced through a particular metalanguage, but through the existence of words in every language with these same meanings. This places these words beyond definition—any words you could use to define “think,” for example, would in turn need to be defined in other words, and so on, and you will ultimately be brought back to the word “think” itself. Now, the word “think” can be used in lots of different ways, so we can question the unity and stability of the prime words as well, but a good place to begin developing the primes into a logic is to note that the prime words limit each other. So, in sentences like the following—“I think I might come”; I’ll have to think about it before I decide”; “you may think so, but wait and see”—the word is being used in fairly different senses: first to indicate indecision, second, to refer to a process of cogitation, and, third, to contrast assumption or expectation with reality. But one thing is constant across all three uses: someone “thinks” when one doesn’t “know.” Similarly, however many ways we could use the word “do,” what they will all have in common is that insofar as you’re “doing” something, something is not “happening to you.”

It’s important to point out that there’s no reason to assume that the prime words, any, much less all, of them, were the first words in any language. It’s best to think of them as the enduring residue of declarative language—these are the words that we couldn’t make sentences without. Part of the project of transforming the primes into a logic will involve hypothesizing “paths” through the ostensive, imperative and interrogative to the declarative on the part of the primes, but that will involve looking at the primes as teleologically oriented towards becoming the declarative “infrastructure.” The primes are the minimal language needed to talk in and about a world in which imperatives can be refused or disappointed without increasing the likelihood of inconclusive and destructive conflict. If we resist the habit of seeing words like “think,” “know,” “want,” “can” and so on as representing “inner states,” “capabilities,” “potentials,” and so on, we can see that they all allow for the “codification” of various forms of hesitation: “I want” replaces some form of “give me”; “I can” introduces some space between what one has been commanded to do and the actual doing, and so on.

Wierzbicka’s purpose in developing the primes is to develop a logic of translation—first, she demonstrates the untranslatability of the “key words” in any language, and then she introduces the primes as a means of translating them. She both proves the Sapir-Whorf thesis and transcends it. A generative logic would be more a logic of translation than of “correction.” Instead of taking one claim and validating or disqualifying it, we want to be able to translate discourses into other discourses. We then get a logic that both reduces a discourse to its minimal elements and expands it into other discourses. At a certain point I will introduce construction grammar into the equation—construction grammar is the linguistic theory that contends that meaning resides not in individual words but in formulaic constructions. This theory of language agrees best with both Michael Tomasello’s demonstration in Constructing a Language that children learn language through the absorption of “chunks” of language learned in daily interactions and with studies of oral culture that show the basis of oral poetry in fixed formulas and commonplaces. Wierzbicka herself may not see things exactly that way, but we will be able to make her NSM consistent with construction grammar. Once we do, we will be able to construct a logic that is based on translation operations carried out on familiar constructions.

Let’s take a look at a couple of prime words in relation to non-prime words that are very close in meaning. (Of course, the results of this exercise will be different in different languages.) First of all, “see,” which is a prime, and “look,” which isn’t. We can right away see a hierarchy between the words: you can see without looking, but you can’t look without seeing. Seeing is built into looking; looking is a particular way of seeing. You look in order to see something, while you see whatever is in front of you (even involuntarily)—looking adds a layer of intention onto seeing, which is intentional only in the most minimal sense of seeing something. You ask someone if they see something, or what they see, while you ask someone what they’re looking at. If you ask someone whether they see some particular thing you have in mind, and they say they don’t, you will tell (command) them to “look there.” Once they look, you ask if they see it now—“seeing” is the ostensive confirmation of the command to look.

We can do the same kind of exercise with primes like “touch,” “feel,” “want,” “think,” “say” and “know,” but none of them seem to have such an obvious “complement” as see/look—for example, the relation between “want” and “need” seems to me less complementary, as does the relation between “say” and “speak,” or “tell”—and I’m not at all sure what other words might be “closest” to “touch” or “think,” especially if we want to stick to a pre-literate vocabulary. So, we might want to have more of a method before approaching those—it will probably turn out that there are several different kinds of relationships, involving not only semantic differences, but ostensive-imperative relations, first vs. third person reporting and so on. But “hear” has a relationship to “listen” that seems to me perfectly analogous to see/look—“listen” adds exactly the same layer of intentionality to “hear” as “look” does to “see,” and the interrogative—imperative-ostensive loop also seems to me identical—you might need to listen more closely just like you’d need to look more closely. It’s certainly no coincidence that these are the two senses through which we take in “meaning”—but, of course, we have to assume that this analogy is not identical across all languages (otherwise, “look” and “listen” would also be primes).

If we continue on with these two, then, we could trace a path from see/look through all the other words used to indicate taking something in visually—“observe,” “notice,” “view,” “identify,” “spot,” “distinguish,” and so on—or aurally (a quick look at an on-line dictionary reveals that there are far fewer of these).  So, if someone “makes a distinction,” he sees something—seeing something would be the ostensive “verification” at the end of whatever trail from seeing gets us to “distinguish.” We always come back to the primes—to start spanning out a bit, if someone “speaks” or “tells” something, that person must have saidsomething—you can always ask what, exactly, they said—which is a demand that a quoted statement be provided. If someone “comprehends,” theyknowsomething; if someone “reflects” or “contemplates,” they thinksomething. If you distinguish, you see that two things are not the same (all primes). If you identify, you see one thing that is not the same as anything else. If you observe, you see something happening (or not happening). We can use the other primes to add in these layers of intentionality: you wantto see if something will happen, or if something is not like other things, or if one thing is not the same as one other thing; and once you have seen, you knowthat something happened, that things are not the same, and so on. Each layer of intentionality is a layer of deferral, and being able to say that maybewe canknow or see allows us to add more layers. And we can construct some kind of ostensive-imperative-interrogative pathway in any of these cases, which would in turn open the inquiry to questions of institutions, or where we do these things. In this way, we can develop ways of detecting the equivalent of what traditional logics call “fallacies”: if some statement can’t be brought back to “this person said,” “this person saw,” “some person could see if…,” then it has no path back to the ostensive and is ultimately devoid of meaning.

We can take any sentence and break it down into the primes to as granular a level as necessary. So, for example, “the armed robber killed the victim who resisted.” We can start with a formulaic sentence: “someone did something bad to someone else.” There are a lot of bad things people can do to each other, so we’d need to approximate further. “This someone wanted something that the other had. The other did not want this someone to have it.” Along the way you’d have to lay out the moral objection to armed robbery and murder simply by translating them into the primes—why is it “bad” to do something to another because you want something the other has? We’d work our way through “do,” “affect,” “change,” “hurt” and so on—there are good ways of affecting and changing people and bad ways. The bad ways might be when the person affected can’t do some things that person did before. But, of course, we can imagine cases in which it would be good to ensure someone can’t do at least some of things he did before—so we need to get more precise. It would be making it so that person can’t do things which are good, or that we know are good, or that all people think are good—with each of these claims calling for scrutiny in turn.

A generative logic of translation, predicated upon a fluency in the primes, would be enormously helpful in, to refer to a famous paper of Charles Sanders Peirce, “make our ideas clear.” And we could do so in a way that never loses touch with a basic human being in the world, or ethics and morality. Everything we do or say is either “good” or “bad”—or, at least, that question will always be pertinent. We can interrupt even the most abstruse chain of reasoning, filled with hypotheses, speculations, assumptions, conditionalities and so on, at any point, and ask questions like, “if you say this, what other things can you say?” “What can’t you say?” “What can you do if you think this?” “If you say this can you say that what others will do because they heard it will be good?” Shouldn’t anyone be able to answer such questions? A statement worth working with, and re-translating in turn into other spaces, would be one that can be completely dissolved into something like things that we do because we want to see that something is the same as before, because we could then say it is good—or some other articulation of the primes. It’s a kind of laboratory built into language, allowing for both the testing of hypotheses and the invention of new discursive devices.

The primes could lead us to more adventurous and paradoxical logics. I suggested above that insofar as you are doingsomething, something is not happeningto you. I meant this very literally—describing what you are doing as you do something excludes consideration of whatever might also be happening to you—which might, of course, be represented later. But maybe the mutual exclusion is the equivalent of Euclidean geometry, where we simply assume the existence of points, lines, right angles and so on. Maybe in a more non-Euclidean prime logic we explore ways in doing things is a way of having things happen to you and having things happen to you is a way of doing them. Maybe saying things is a way of hearing things and there are similarly transactional relations between seeing and thinking, doing and wanting, and so on. We could then bring this more pataphysical prime logic to bear on the layers of intentions we uncover in the disciplines. The disciplines are built so as to foreclose such possibilities, but leave themselves open to them in all kinds of ways. Imagine a pedagogical enterprise that prepares people to conduct such clarification operations.

Maybe this should be more formalized. It may be better to produce sample translations to serve as models. At any rate there’s plenty of work to do. But the end point should be to combine the traditional functions of logic (determining the clarity, consistency and truth of statements) and rhetoric (invention, responsiveness to conditions) so that anyone who acquires fluency in prime logic can intervene effectively anywhere, with a non-arbitrary base of assumptions.

The hunger artist of Kafka’s story ultimately reveals that he has spent much of his life eating no more than was absolutely necessary to barely stay alive not as an astonishing feat of asceticism but simply because he could never find any food he really wanted to eat. I’m working on putting GA on an equally rigorous diet for a similar reason—while GA is already extremely minimal, there are several concepts that pose problems of digestion. The ideal would really be to have just two concepts—and, then, to get gluttonous and set forth into the world and repurpose the rest of language into GA concepts. The centrality of Anna Wierzbicka’s work to my thinking also comes into play here—I find her contention that any theory should be articulable in the primes, and therefore universally intelligible, compelling—especially for a mode of thinking with the kind of universalist and “absolutist” pretensions GA claims.

Let’s start with “resentment,” the most problematic of all. Resentment is the emotion (?) or attitude (?) one has towards whomever denies you your desire. On the originary scene, this is the sacred center, which “withholds” itself from the desiring community, and becomes even more desirable as a result. This resentment toward the center must alternate with love for the center which has, after all, saved and even created the community. It then follows that anyone who denies a desire after the originary scene is taken to be doing so on behalf, or in the name, or under the authority of, the center (how else could another have the power to deny one’s desire?). The originary desire is for the center as such—to be recognized by, or even possess, the center—while subsequent desires would be for one’s “proper” allotment from the center. So, if someone denies you your “allotment” (and what this is can, of course, never be fixed once and for all), say, by robbing, cheating, or even out-maneuvering you through some “creative” interpretation of the rules, your resentment may be directed first of all towards that person but ultimately toward the center itself, which must have “allowed” this “injustice.”

This is all coherent and powerful, but I don’t see a consistent way of identifying “resentment” in a practice. It all seems to be “internal”—as I suggested above, a “feeling,” “attitude” or “sense of things.” But if we want to speak of someone acting resentfully, what are the markers of resentment in that act—presumably the other way of acting beyond desire is in love, so what marks an act as undertaken out of either love or resentment? Even if we take an extreme, revenge porn style example, like hunting down the guy who attacked me and responding in kind, couldn’t I be said to be acting out of love for his potential future victims just as much as out of resentment for the injury done me? We’d need some protocols for reading the particulars of the act itself upon the scene of its enactment, making “resentment” a hermeneutic or heuristic principle—in that case, though, more fundamental would be the interpretive practice through which we identify markers of resentment. If we zoom in close, we may see resentment, while if we pull back we see love—in that case, the question is, how do we decide to focus? Presumably out of resentment or love ourselves, which means someone must be reading our reading in turn. None of this necessarily invalidates or vitiates the concept, but it does make its use contingent on what kind of scene that application of the concept helps maintain.

Bound up with this is the moral and intellectual status or meaning of resentment. Can resentment be justified, or is it intrinsically wrong (at least as a “motive” for action)? If it is justified, is it still resentment? Is “justification” or a refusal to justify itself simply another act of resentment? To gesture towards “love” as the transcendence of resentment is to beg the question: what counts as “love”? Eric Gans in his latest Chronicle(#649) seems to suggest that the sharing of food provides a model of love, but it’s always possible to claim that food has been shared “unfairly.” And, if resentment is toward the center, wouldn’t love also have to be first of all for the center? Is resentment a form of insight, or even cultural productivity, or is it merely a source of violence and conflict to be repressed or controlled? If it can be either, how could we tell whether the kind of resentment we’re looking at in a particular case is one or the other? We can find examples of these opposing ways of discussing resentment across the literature of GA, without, as far as I know, there being any real attempt at reconciling them.

Another problem, connected with the above, is that resentment might be a very good “third person” concept but it is certainly a very bad “second person” concept. In other words, however useful it is for speaking about others, it is useless and harmful for speaking to others. To point out someone’s resentment to them is to accuse that person, which means that one is generating resentment in that person, thereby interfering with the observation one was purportedly making. Even more, it would be hard to deny some resentment on the part of the one making the “accusation,” which even further introduces more of the “disease” in the process of “diagnosis.” Even if it’s necessary to reveal another’s resentment to that person, there are better ways of doing so than telling that person they seem a bit resentful. And if our concepts are to serve the purpose of social interaction and engagement, our concepts should be just as helpful in second as in third person situations.

One can see in much GA literature the suggestion that resentment can be alleviated in some way—either by conceding something to the resentful subject or learning how to control resentment. But this raises the following question: if resentment can be minimized, it can then be minimized further, and if it can always be minimized yet further, can’t it eventually be eliminated? If the answer is yes, all of moral and political discourse within GA should be oriented toward this possibility. But if the answer is no, presumably because resentment is so basic to the configuration of the human, then it follows that resentment can’t really be reduced or controlled either. In that case, what, exactly are we doing when we engage in all kinds of actions and institution building that certainly seems aimed at protecting us from resentment? Is resentment simply “deferred,” like violence—is civilization building just an endless deferral of what remains a steady “quantity” (and if we don’t want to speak about resentment in terms of quantity, how would we do so in terms of “quality”?) of resentment, which must mean an awful crash lies at the end of it all. That conclusion might be convenient for those of certain passive and cynical habits of mind, but the implication would be that the human is ultimately a failure as a species, so why are we talking about this in the first place?

Next up: “Violence.” I’ll first note that Wierzbicka mentions “violence” as one of those specifically Anglo words that doesn’t translate into other languages. I don’t remember where she says this, or her precise reasoning, but my guess as to what makes it specifically Anglo is that its contextless “doing bad things to people’s bodies” presupposes the possibility of a neutral application of physical force. More important is that, as I was reminded recently in discussions with Joel and Josh regarding the constitutive GA definition of “representation,” in arguing for the primacy of the “deferral of violence” one has to be very specific about what kind of violence is meant. We can, for example, imagine on the originary scene that some members of the group, after discovering and sharing the sign amongst themselves, had to then turn on some “unsigned” members and use physical force to restrain them from approaching the object. Even if we assume that a great deal of “violence” had to be used in thereby saving the scene, violence that we would have to accept as necessary, even beneficial, it would not change the fact that another, very different kind of violence must have already been deferred to make that collective effort possible. In this context I will also mention something I discussed years ago—that, in fact, the kind of pan-destructive violence conjured by specifically mimetic crisis could never have actually occurred. If the participants on the scene did, indeed, overrun the pecking order and begin attacking each other, there’s no reason to think it would continue until all, or even most, or even many, of the group had been killed. Most likely, everyone would forget what they were fighting about and the former order would be more or less restored. The kind of violence deferred on the scene, then, is a phantom.

None of this vitiates the power of the originary model—quite to the contrary, I would say. There’s no reason why a kind of omni-destructive imaginary couldn’t both lie at the origins of the human, and be a kind of fantasy. In fact, it makes a lot more sense than assuming that language was founded on a kind of accurate “risk-assessment.” But this reading of the scene makes the kind of “violence” we are talking about even more specific, and calls the usefulness of the concept of “violence” here further into question. What we would really need is a word for a kind of violence that is an intimate betrayal, an exploitation of one’s most vulnerable and irremediable weaknesses, by the last person in the world you would expect to commit such a “violation,” and at the worst possible time. (Maybe the “deferral of violation” is better—but “violation” often refers more specifically either to rape or to more commonplace transgressions.) Like, say, your twin brother stabbing you in the back as you’re about to confront a shared enemy. But this means that the “violence” in question doesn’t simply come before the sign, and the sign doesn’t just halt it. It would mean that the emergence of the sign and the near climactic perception of imminent violence are simultaneous. There is a moment where the sign is put forth and sharing it has begun and this emergence both incites and registers an even more frenzied mimetic surge toward the center. In other words, only as framed by the sign could this very precise form of “violence” be perceived, feared, and deferred. The “ultimate” terror is of the shattering of this novel form of solidarity—and, the “ultimate” violence is towards those upon whom the grace of the center shines. But this also means that this “satanic” violence need not be particularly violent, or even threatening, physically. In issuing the sign, the first signers create the conditions for and defer the “violence” of a refusal of solidarity when it’s most needed. This, in turn, is possible because at this moment the center emerges as “self-aware” and both bestows sameness on the group and demands they constitute themselves as and around an other.

I should say that I see no problem with “mimesis,” both because it is not a specifically human concept and because I see a fairly easy way to translate it (and its escalation into mimetic crisis) into the primes, indicating its universality: “Someone can say: ‘I see you do something.’ This person wants to do like this other someone. This person wants to have what this other someone has. This someone wants to be this other someone. This someone knows this someone cannot be this other if this other lives.” The “center” may turn out to be problematic, but I would eventually like to speak about the center in terms of a “this-it” relation or oscillation. “This,” what we are looking at, becomes “it” (or IT) as we all see it through the other members of the group. “Desire” I find much less problematic than “resentment,” but it’s certainly not a universal term, and it would be more coherent to see desire as coming from the center than from the subject—desire would be a kind of “ITwardness,” which we “feel” or “know” when some “this” becomes “it-like.” Terms less directly tied to the necessities of describing the originary scene, and which are even more clearly indebted to very specific intellectual and ritual traditions need not detain us long. I don’t see any need for a word like “transcendence,” for example—“presence” is a much better word for our purposes, and is more easily translated into the primes: all can say “all see the same thing now”—not to mention that it is a grammatical tense, which we assume to be the first one, the first to create a world that both is and is not “here and now.”

What would replace all this would be the oscillation between mistakenness and presence. In terms of the primes, this involves the shift from “It’s not the same” to “You can say it’s the same.” I’ve reviewed the concept of “mistakenness” recently, and so I’ll now emphasize the subtle but decisive shift in the way it leads us to speak of human intentions. The metaphysical, which has become the commonplace, way of speaking about “intention” is to imagine a kind of internal map that projects some transformation in the world (itself always already organized as a map). We could then speak of an intention realized if the world is made over to look like that internalized map (which can, of course, be externalized and made public). And we can speak about degrees of realization depending upon how different the intentional and actual maps are from each other.

Instead of this “picture,” we would think in terms of someone wanting to do what someone else has done—i.e., we start with a model, who commands you to emulate, conform to, continue some work, etc. The more faithful you are to the model, the more certain you are to mistake the imperatives issued by and through the model, because you must fulfill imperatives issued from a previous scene upon a new one. Your actions will be mistaken according to the “rules” implicit in the imperative itself, as well as according the rules of the new scene or field, to which you are bringing something at least to some extent unprecedented. Your action will have to be redeemed within the scene, by participants who will have to stretch or bend the rules so as to make them applicable to the novelty you have introduced. So, you don’t really know what you’re doing until you see what they take you to be doing. Your “intention,” then, is really a prolonged act of attention, carried over from your original attraction to the model to the signs of reception given and given off by your audience or collaborators. And if at points along the way you stop and state in explicit terms what you’re trying to do, how, and why, that itself is an act, and one which involves you following some model and seeking “redemption” in some shared scene.

Talk of intention can therefore shift to the question of what makes any act the same in the course of its performance, what makes any agent the same over the course of carrying out successive actions, what makes a scene the same from the start of an event enacted within it to the completion of that event. We know that in each case the “object” in question can be treated as not the same: the act can be seen as broken or inconsistent, the agent as a fraud, the purported scene in fact a product of shared illusions and reciprocally cancelling actions. We know this because on the originary scene this was the first problem nascent humanity had to solve—determining where all members put forth the same sign as the others and none were advancing some design upon the central object. This is the problem we solve through names, designations, rituals, repetitions, self-referentiality, markers of authenticity—and pretty much everything else we do. The first command from the center is to determine that your gestures be the same.

Let’s return to the problem of turning “resentment” into a second person concept. We would have to be able to say that what we now call “resentment,” which Eric Gans in his latest and aforementioned Chronicledefines, in its originary form, as “the hostile reaction to the object’s self-refusal,” as a “mistake.” It’s not much of a stretch—since the object’s self-refusal is the basis of the foundation of the community, “reacting” in a hostile manner is a “misreading” of the situation. (In relation to what “correct” reading, though?) But we could look a bit more closely at that “reacting.” First of all, it seems that the resentful member doesn’t really do anything, insofar as the scene holds, so the reaction is either “internal” or delayed—say, until the sparagmos, when the central victim can be torn apart with special ferociousness. I don’t see any way of positing anything “internal” to the human at this point (or any other—but that’s a different issue), since the center hasn’t yet provided a model for anything that could be described in that way. So it’s delayed—but if the sparagmos is, in fact the central being giving itself up, wouldn’t that “appease” rather than exacerbate any resentment? Isn’t it simpler to say that the sparagmos is the first trial run of the new sign, and the “aggression” displayed by members of the group are tests of its deferral capabilities?

If the members on the scene “experience” (more indigestible words) “hostility,” it must be because the central object first of all drew them all in, led them on, gave a promise of itself. It was a tease. In taking his fellows as models, each member was taught to approach the object in such a way as to confer more power of compulsion on that object in the course of approaching it. We don’t have an imperative yet, but the central being is “telling” one and all to become more and more like the others—and it continues to tell them this, but suddenly in a totally different way. Everyone was told to be the same in one way, and now to be the same in an utterly opposed way. The mistake was in thinking all could be the same in appropriation; a mistake that would be revealed as the approach of the others toward the object progressively close off one’s own opportunities to approach: the central being then becomes other. This mistake is corrected with the new practice of sameness in restraint, and distribution, and, even more precisely, in relation to an other (another prime word); but the central being cannot help but provoke that same mistake forever. Even the practice of deferral participates in that same mistake by making the central being more estimable and desirable. What we call “resentment” is seeing and hearing the other as we become more the same. But that practice of having the other emerge as sameness reaches its limits and then revising the terms of sameness might include much that we wouldn’t call resentment, but would be included under this seeing and hearing the other.

So, we can then get rid of psychological terms like “resentment,” “reaction,” “hostility,” and so on, and speak in terms of signs emitted from the center that are mistaken. The mistakenness-presence oscillation is a same-other-same dialectic. We tried to be the same—the same as each other, the same as the being modeled by the center, the same as ourselves—but we mistook the signs needed to verify that sameness and found otherness instead. The mistake is then taken as a sign of presence—everyone is here now before the other—which compounds and redeems it. We need never leave the space of imitation, centrality, mistake, presence, sign, same, other. We must imitate, and we always get imitation wrong; certain ways of getting imitation wrong are prolonged and reversed into a new form of imitation that includes imitating the being we thought was pulling us in, vortex-like—but was in fact arraying us, vertex-like.

The mistakenness of any practice will become apparent in unforeseeable ways, as will the redemption of that mistakenness. This doesn’t mean we can have no goals, projects or purposes. It means having goals, projects and purposes that include generating scenes upon which our mistakes will create presence. The more aware and attentional we become regarding our models—the deep and vast streams of traditions inflowing all our practices—and the more explicit we make our indebtedness to them, the more obvious must all the ways we are mistaking them also be. Once upon a time we could call these mistakes sins and expiate them through sacrifice. Now, we can present our mistaken practices as calls for presence, as innumerable ramifications from the present each of which faces the other and faces the others as other and asks to be redeemed as the same.

Nor do I mean to suggest that we should stop using terms like “resentment,” “violence” and the rest. It’s important to undergo the rigors of conceptual clarification—a hunger strike, if you like—so that we can know better what we’re doing with the conceptual resources at our disposal. Afterwards we can gorge on our inherited vocabulary. It’s good to know that we can go without using familiar terms so that we get clearer about how we use them when we do—and maybe in more and different ways than we tend to realize. It’s good to be able to slim down to the dimensions of Wierzbicka’s primes—maybe it will even be helpful to someone doing translations somewhere down the line.

I’ve written this post in response to the following comment on the Absolutist Neoreaction reddit page:

I’ve noticed that even in your recent articles there’s something still off. That’s in regards to GA and mechanics.

It’s fair to say that liberalism has an obsession with the self and super-sovereignty in general. I don’t see how focusing on these pragmatist mechanisms is really actually transcending that. It seems like all we’re building is just some superior version of Gentile, which isn’t going to actually solve anything.

We, ourselves, can’t fall into this trap of evaluating liberal mechanics. As you’ve put forward there needs to be a direct scenic participation; however, I dont see how anything less than embodying paradox will solve this issue. Rather than speaking about paradox (predicate) we should speak paradox (subject).

When I say paradox I speak about asymmetry, first-ness, outside-ness, paranirvana, etc.. All of these are great examples of this emerging paradox that GA elucidates.

If we focus and bring a further awareness of what we’re even talking about, it becomes obvious that this is GAs true calling card. In order to properly transcend liberalism in toto, we can’t just simply focus on design even.

Rather than a flat rejection of super-sovereignty we should be gathering threads of older imperatives in history in order to develop a constantly evolving praxis. We’re only ever actually going to get anywhere if we can participate fully, ultimately that’s what’s going to make us different. Not evaluation of ‘why these are bad’ or ‘inquiries into language’, but rather the focus is the most direct participation available.

Now to address the morality issue of simple charisma and unifying centers. This, once again, is part of the same issues. There needs to be a recognition of unity in dissonance. Embodying and speaking anthropological and moral paradoxes. It really can’t be distilled so easily to static and even dynamic charisma vs transgression. We need to further pick apart moral agency even, with that focus on paradox/asymmetry. Ultimately we shouldn’t be unifying to distill into one bigger center, but rather recognizing that we can turn centers themselves (paradoxically) into larger grander ones, simply by digging down (backwards in history).

I should add before I conclude, that what I’ve typed is by no means fully formed or all that probably has to be said. I’m open to being wrong but I hope I got my point across.

To conclude, don’t speak about asymmetry, embody it to generate praxis.

Since this message is a call for praxis, I’m in a bit of a double bind because my response here can hardly be anything more than speaking about all of the above. I certainly wouldn’t know how to begin to speak about something like strategy or logistics in this context. The question of flatly rejecting super-sovereignty might be a good place to start. In a sense we shouldn’t be flatly rejecting anything—all language is language we can inhabit. Participation is first of all participating in another’s language. If you surface the paradoxes constituting the other’s discourse, then you’re embodying paradox. A good place to begin is making explicit the distinctions and boundaries implicitly established in the other’s discourse. You find a way to represent some position that both can’t and must exist in the other’s discourse. A simple example: I’ve noted that if you listen carefully to certain victimary discourses, especially on gender and race lines, you can, with very minor adjustments in the feminist’s or anti-racist’s discourse, show them to be essentially confessing the inadequacy of women or blacks to fully participate in a modern social order. Too much offends them, too much frightens them, too much disables them, too many minor obstacles for others are insurmountable stumbling blocks for them, etc. You can learn to simply read this off the other’s discourse and enact it, without making any overt argument of your own. You can then, not present yourself as the real anti-racist who is quite confident that the victim group in question is quite capable of meeting all the rigorous demands of modern life, but, rather, initiate a discussion of institutional and social design. The feminist or anti-racist might be stymied—if you perform well—but I think my notion of the “sovereign imaginary” could be effective here in laying out some of the governing prerequisites for meeting some of the other’s explicit and implicit demands. What kind of state are you imagining such that it could do what is necessary to address what you want addressed?

I’ve been experimenting with a kind of “vocabulary reform” within my anthropomorphic version of GA. I’ve been working with the concept of “mistakenness” for quite a while now, and it’s one of the concepts that some seem to have found the most interesting and useful. I want to first of all emphasize that this concept is derived directly from Gans’s analysis of the succession of language forms from ostensive to imperative to interrogative (which has still not quite gotten its due) to the declarative. The imperative derives from an “inappropriate” ostensive, which the interlocutor tries to rescue by actually producing the demanded object. The declarative, in a more complex way, derives similarly from an inappropriate imperative. What leads to the rescue of the inappropriate gesture or utterance in each case is the desire for what Gans calls “linguistic presence,” and which we can perhaps simply call “presence,” because what would a non-linguistic presence be? The need for maintaining or restoring presence itself derives from the originary scene—we can say, a little anachronistically, that preserving linguistic presence is the first imperative of the center. And what it meant first of all was that each member on the scene ensure that his sign was the same as that issued by others. A sign that wasn’t the same would be a marker either of an intent to resume the approach to the center or to cease defending the center along with the others—either possibility would threaten the collapse of the group.

So, from the start we have this basic dialectic of mistakenness-presence. My hypothesis is that this dialectic can do all the work of what I have increasingly come to find to be the clumsy and imprecise concepts of “desire” and (especially) “resentment.” With “resentment” in particular, not only do I not see it attain a stable meaning in Gans’s work, but it’s the kind of term that impedes praxis or “participation.” Once you call the other “resentful” you disqualify him as a participant—he really has no choice but to throw the same epithet back at you. My “bet” is that anything we refer to as a marker of resentment could just as illuminatingly be referred to as an instance of mistakenness—an imperative from the center has been obeyed “inappropriately.” The most stable meaning of “resentment,” I think, is that it involves accusing another of receiving more from the center than he “deserves,” which in turn is an at least implicit accusation directed toward the center—the substance of that accusation being that the center is insufficiently central, since a genuine central would distribute benefits “appropriately.” But since the center always distributes appropriately, this accusation must be mistaking the command of the center as one to point out this insufficient centrality. The restoration of presence on the part of the other participants on the scene then involves obeying that command in such a way as to ensure that both the accuser and accused have “something to do,” and a more explicitly named (not necessarily better) status within the community. Insofar as the center was insufficiently central, that deficiency lay in some failure in our obedience to its commands. In scriptural terms, the problem is that we were “of little faith.”

If you were determined to prove to another that he was acting resentfully (not just prove to others who, like yourself, might be too prepared to convict), what would be the best way to go about it? It seems to me you’d have to construct a scene upon which his resentments were acted out without any “objective correlative” to those resentments in the scene itself. If you, for example, suspect someone of resenting his friend’s success, while he in fact believes he has a perfectly good reason for criticizing that friend (e.g., he’s a “sell-out”), then you’d need a situation in which that friend is demonstrably not selling out but the criticism gets triggered all the same. This is essentially a comic, or satiric, episode. You’d then be able to point to how the “resenter” acted, and what he responded to, and help him see the incommensurability, or “inappropriateness.” If it’s done well, and he’s at all willing and able to see, then he will. But the best person to be at the center of this enactment would be the friend himself, which is to say the person who actually elicits the resentment. So, “participation” here means being willing to put yourself forward as the “trigger” for resentments that you could then expose, elucidate and find some way to share and thereby dissolve.

But I said that I don’t want to speak in terms of “resentment”—or, at least, I want to not have to do so. That makes things easier—rather than proving that the other is mistaken, you create presence and prove it by canceling the mistake. And we’re all always mistaken within some frame. You can think about mistakenness as someone making a move that would be appropriate in some actual or possible game, but not in the game everyone else happens to be playing at the time. Since the person presumably wasn’t making the mistake on purpose (in that case it wouldn’t be a mistake), they were making a move that can be seen as “analogous” in some way to moves that would be proper within the ongoing game. In that case, someone can find a way to revise the game so that move would now be a proper (but not necessarily winning) one. But this also means that someone could stumble into a new move which renders all the appropriate ones inappropriate, i.e., turns the entire game into a new one (it would have to be a strong move to enact its own mistakenness so insistently).

If we’re focused, in this way, on countering and building on one another’s moves, with the main goal being to keep the game going, make it more inclusive, more productive of better moves and new kinds of coordination, then we never have to step outside of the game to question someone’s motives or whether they are the bearer of feelings or “states” like desire and resentment. Whatever we need to know about them will be exhibited in their moves. So, this is a kind of paradox to be embodied: knowing it’s a game—or, really, the more open-ended “play”—while simultaneously taking it completely seriously. The more self-referential the play, the more each move points back to and repurposes previous moves. The existence of the play, and the increasing density of the “traditions” of moves embodies an adherence to the center around which we revolve, however unevenly; meanwhile, the ongoing play provides opportunities for the players to occupy centers by making moves that create “temporary monopolies” (a term of Gans’s) of attention—all on the condition that no one steps outside of the play into a meta-language (super-sovereignty) that would claim to codify the rules from outside of the play. (Any attempt to do so would be treated a mistake and recouped within the presence of the play.) Such temporary monopolies would be, within this analogy, “governance,” and one possessing such a monopoly would govern so as to sustain that position as a node within the field, that others could subsequently occupy, insofar as they model themselves on the present occupant and make that region of the field especially productive and “corporal” (that is, involving all its members).

Wherever you are, whether thinking or acting, someone has just made a move for you to translate into the first in a sequence of moves, governed by rules that will become more explicit while generating more tacit rules along the way. There’s even a practice of composition here, as you can counter and build on your previous “mistaken” moves, creating structures that contain a margin of mistakenness acknowledging their own historical limitations, and making implicit requests for saving presence from participants yet to come.

I’ve been working for a while with the assumption that the “Axial Age” created the conditions for the generation of a new, post-sacrificial morality. Sacrificial morality relies, ultimately, on human sacrifice: someone is put in the place, ultimately, of the sacral king, who served as the target of the mimetic crises that plague any human community. Girard called this “scapegoating,” and I have been calling it “violent centralization,” and I have been following Girard, and then Gans, in attributing to the Christian scriptural tradition the revelation of the “bad faith” of sacrifice—the members of the community must blind themselves to the fact that what they see as an act of deserved retribution (the victim must always been rendered “guilty” in some way) really has nothing to do with the victim and everything to do with their own internal relations as a group. Calling the social orders marked by this revelation “post-sacrificial” is not to argue that such bad faith centering of the other no longer takes place—obviously, it’s quite common—but that everyone knows it’s wrong, can see it in others, and require elaborate rationalizations to carry it out. When we do it, we must insist it’s something else—and, of course, sometimes it really is.

I believe that, so far, I share this understanding of what Gans calls the “Christian revelation” with just about everyone who has been working in GA since, say, the 90s. In other words, it’s “canonical,” or “orthodoxy.” There is a seemingly obvious corollary that is equally canonical or orthodox, but which I reject. This corollary is that a certain understanding and reality of the “individual” results from the transcendence of scapegoating: the individual who is “equal” to other individuals, within the framework of what gets called “moral equality.” I’ve criticized this concept before, but my recent thinking about design provides it with a larger frame. My initial claim is that the social injunction to refrain from scapegoating implies nothing, and need imply nothing, regarding the “being” of the potential victim. In order to justify and reinforce that injunction, or the prohibition on scapegoating, it might indeed be helpful to project onto those not to be sacrificed the qualities which make them undeserving of such treatment. So, for example, if human beings all inherently somehow possess something we can call “dignity,” then it is because of that dignity that they must be treated in certain ways. The same goes for things like “consciousness,” “conscience,” and what Gans has always called an “internal scene of representation.” Rather than such projections, all we need to be able to say about the self is that is continually constructed as a sustainable center of attention, that of others and the self itself. These qualities and entities, along with the aforementioned “moral equality,” and notions of the “soul,” are all, that is, parts of a mythology of the individual, a way of invoking the center (drawing from it imperatives) to match the imperative to refrain from marking individuals in ways that have proven communally destructive.

It would be at least as easy to say that this prohibition on “marking” the other as victim (or “stigmatizing”) leads us, not to an ontology of the “individual,” but a semiotics of marking. So, we could say, if you frame this kind of behavior in this way, it is likely to incite this kind of response from a particular audience, and so on. A cataloguing of such “markings” would tell us nothing about individuals, but only of possible social constructions of them. And which markings needed to be attended to, and cautioned about, in different cases, would differ considerably—in other words, the prohibition on scapegoating could just as easily lead to an insistence on attending to lots of differences among individuals. Such an approach would be far more effective than the one based on “moral equality,” which leads us to scapegoat anyone who notices anything that might make us skeptical of that moral equality, and the way it is enforced under any given regime, and therefore leads straight to our current victimary order, which is has significant sacrificial elements. It would be more effective because it would direct attention where it needs to be, on the proclivities of the community and the various fluctuations in mimetic tensions, rather than upon the imaginary qualities of potential victims and potential perpetrators.

If our only interest is in “marking,” then, we need no ontology of the individual—nothing, no consciousness, no soul, inner being, free will, nothing. But people would, naturally, construct their behaviors in ways that make the markings most potentially relevant to them as irrelevant (or “counter-relevant”) as possible—to put it simply, they would both be aware of the way certain stereotypes might apply to them, and do what they could to disrupt the application of those stereotypes—which, in turn, would make things easier for those who don’t want their thinking to be in the grips of such stereotypes, but also don’t want to censor themselves for noticing differences. In fact, we would be finding ways to take the sting out of stereotypes, for ourselves and others, by making them explicit and thereby making it possible to modify behaviors, even by turning “negative” stereotypes into “positive” ones. All this would obviously be very different from the way we go about things now, and, I’ll repeat, requires no projection of an ontology onto the “individual” nor any assumptions of “equality.”

What it will do, though, is turn individuals into designers—of practices and institutions. I’ve been doing some reading in contemporary design theory, of the kind that is very cognizant of postmodern thought (I’ll mention briefly the work of Benjamin Bratton, especially his The Stack, and his colleagues in the Strelka Institute in Moscow), and one can see the tendency towards a very promising post-humanism. The notion that individuals were “constructed” was once a fairly esoteric theoretical speculation, but how does one deny it now that our whole lives are very tightly governed by algorithms under the control of corporations and states that now, between them, regulate all social interactions? Now, this intellectual tendency is very clear about how the complex of systems constructing our lives—which they are sure to do far more intensively, down to the molecular level, as technology improves—practically dismantle the mythology of the individual I’ve been referring to—where does one find “freedom,” or “conscience” in all of this?—assertions of such qualities are themselves programmed gestures. But the same does not hold for the prohibition on scapegoating, which I would say, counter-intuitively, but in agreement with Girard’s claim that Europe didn’t stop burning witches because it became scientific but, rather, became scientific because it stopped burning witches, that the prohibition of scapegoating has made all of modern technology and even more so its current, scary, intrusive, seemingly uncontrollable social media technology possible.

It’s not hard to find people with complaints about the totalitarian nature of social media and the forms of government surveillance and information gathering and keeping that work seamlessly with them. But, despite the very serious criminality of sections of the American government that has been revealed through inquiries into the Russia collusion hoax, a criminality almost universally shared with the major American media (which is really nothing more, and probably never has been anything more, than a racket trafficking in information and what we could call “information laundering”), it is still worth pointing out that, for example, these ubiquitous means of social monitoring and control have not led, say, to the isolation and targeting for elimination of large social groups. You could say I’m setting a low bar, but if it were the case that this thoroughgoing construction of the individual revealed morality to be a myth concealing sheer utilitarian power struggles or the conveyance of collective resentments, such things would be happening (as they seem to be in China). Meanwhile, if it’s the case that it’s the origin of these technological capacities in the study of the various “dangerous” markings that the prohibition on scapegoating calls for, then the evidence of clear moral limits on the use of this immense power is no surprise. In fact, if we set aside the dominance of much of social media by the “wokeratti,” what this media mostly does is provide security and enhance knowledge dissemination. It’s actually much easier to use it to exonerate rather than frame the innocent.

A lot of scapegoating takes place on social media—at times it seems like little else goes on there. My claim here is that the nature of social media is more to be used to design social interactions or “interfaces” that foreground dangerous markings along with ways of deferring their danger. I’m obviously also saying that those who want to abolish victimary practices should be using social media in this way. Also, I’m just using social media as an example here—post-liberalism should be a project of design across the board. The human sciences should be practices of design—mimetic theory channeled through the originary hypothesis allows us to diagnose institutional dysfunction in terms of ineffectively designed modes of deferral caused by undetected modes of mimetic rivalry; and such diagnoses would lead to proposed designs that would acknowledge the rivalry and re-set them.

You could say that this leads to a practice, if not ontology, of the individual—the individual as designer of social interactions. Again, nothing needs to projected onto individuals—we don’t need to say that humans are “by nature” designers, that it is their telos to design, that they are genetically determined to be designers, etc.—it’s enough that we are designers as a result of the ways our ancestors and predecessors designed the institutions producing us. We don’t all need to be equally good at it. Those who are better at have an interest in helping the less skilled; indeed, they have an interest in designing institutions and practices that will make people better designers. Making design the definitive neo-absolutist practice supports the kind of dedifferentiated disciplinary spaces I’ve argued for elsewhere. We’re always starting with a practice, which we can assume fits a model, and has therefore been designed more or less directly. We can start right where we are, in other words, in improving the design of our own practices and interactions so as to minimize the damage unthinking mimesis does to them. Once we’re committed to a particular practice, we become interested in organizations and institutions that can house and support them. This, in turn, generates new design projects. Designs can be made across the moral, aesthetic, pedagogical and political spheres—we design assignments to enhance learning; we design impossible objects, like perpetual motion machines or Rube Goldberg-style devices, to satirically expose failing institutions and unconsidered assumptions; we can design inspiring utopian visions in the great tradition of such visions; we can unite the infinite with the infinitesimal in our designs; we can design projects for social reform for potential patrons (indeed, wouldn’t they demand it?). In this way, any discussion can be put on entirely new footing, and piles of ideological baggage swept away—we can be designing to make sure that happens as well.

Design involves translation: a problem into confluence of reciprocally counter-acting designs; desires into a project; a territory into a map; a map into directions; patterns of social interactions into accumulations of reciprocal mimetic modellings; declaratives into an imperative meeting an absolute imperative; imperatives into extended ostensives; any utterance into spread out presuppositions and implications of that utterance; oral into written. Measuring is translating; money is a medium of translation. Any two terms you could put an “=” sign between involves a translation. Even more, then: the use of words and phrases at different times involves what we could call a translation of a term into itself, insofar as it becomes different over time. The designing frame entails looking at everything as problems of translation (and if we want to push this a bit further, transcription and transliteration as well0. You ascertain that the two terms are the same, that the “=” is appropriate, which makes you identify all the ways one could introduce a / through or an ~ above the =. When you design you confirm the = by eliminating all the /s and ~s. This is done on the scenes upon which you design narratives and articulate human movements with materials so as to inhabit and suspend the /s and ~s; you are being designed on this same scene, since the most basic reciprocal translation is that between design and designer.