GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

The most destructive thing about liberalism is the systematic falsification it imposes on all of reality. One could say that this has gotten worse—that, for example, mid-20^thcentury liberalism didn’t so adamantly demand fealty to obvious lies—but this only means that our social orders were less liberal then. At this point, there are very few things one can tell the truth, or seek the truth, about, even in private life, without some kind of “backlash.” The reason for this is that liberalism is founded on the oxymoronic practice of imposing equality from above (which is the only way of imposing “equality”). The purpose of imposing equality from above—from a centralizing power position—is to demolish intermediate layers of authority. You need to demolish intermediate layers of authority when you can find no way of integrating them into the power dynamic you need to set in motion in order to undermine some other power center’s dynamic. The consequence is that you destroy reality, because reality can only be comprehended and apprehended from within positions of power and authority, where you need to make decisions whose results are visible and important to others who have to make decisions. And then you have to redouble your attacks on anyone who gestures towards a reality outside of your egalitarian imperative. This process has already significantly corroded the sciences and engineering, and can only continue to do so.

The creation of a new order would have to involve more reality. That is, people would have to be rewarded, not punished, for speaking and seeking the truth; or, more precisely, for putting forward disputable hypotheses within recognizable intellectual traditions. There will always be borderline hypotheses, where one or more of those traditions are radically called into question, thereby raising questions of institutional authority, but even there a wait and see approach can be maintained, while that sphere of inquiry is “quarantined” without being squashed. Truth (or reality) friendly regimes have so far only been possible within protected spheres deemed essential to central authority. To extend such regimes further requires further increments in solving the fundamental human problem of mimesis. If I am to look at what someone else says—something unfamiliar, something troubling, something potentially harmful to my status—and ask questions that allow that statement to be further fleshed out rather than denounce it as heresy, then I must have constructed a model of behavior for myself modeled on central authority rather than on some rampaging power agency solicited to advance my rivalry with some resented other. And there must be a sufficient number of others doing this as well, so that I don’t have to denounce before I am denounced. This means that for a sufficient number of people discourse is sufficiently abstracted from mimetically driven rivalries so that statements can be commented on outside of a “who, whom” frame.

The most radical form of traditionalism is one that sees mimesis, mimetic rivalry, communal expulsion (what I call “violent centralization), and mimetic crisis, along with the myriad ways mimetic relations are reconfigured through the deferral of actual and potential crises, as the problem with which all of human culture, which is to say all of human language, is occupied with. Every myth, every ritual, every political order, every work of art, is above all concerned with this problem, and represents an attempt to resolve it in a form that accounts for the particulars of a given case or scene, while still being enduring. A denial of mimesis might be the purpose of the self-generated individual posited by liberalism. In moral and anthropological terms, the “individual” is created as a form of deferral—the individual is the one protected from violent centralization, or scapegoating. In this case, who the individual is doesn’t matter—it’s precisely the individual who “triggers” certain forms of rivalry within the community who must be protected, precisely in the name of controlling the escalation of rivalries. The individual, in that case, as one created in the image of God, is a cause for reflection upon our own “sinful” nature, with “sinful” meaning “mimetic”: driven by lust, envy, and hatred—by a relation of “reciprocal usurpation” with some other. But if the individual is self-creating, and is the foundation rather than product of a social order, on what grounds can mimetic desires be criticized? Indeed, to criticize them is to attack the “individual,” to be “authoritarian.” In that case all of inherited culture represents arbitrary impositions on freedom.

Liberalism makes much harder what is in any case very difficult: realizing that we are thoroughly mimetic and mediated beings. It’s almost impossible to desire something while simultaneously thinking that you desire it because you imagine someone else desiring it—it’s “cognitively” difficult, and we’d rather not do it, because it saps desire. The satisfaction of desire becomes much less satisfying if such considerations are kept in mind. But where else do you imagine desires coming from? Yes, outside of any human order one would want food, drink, sex, shelter—animals want those things, and work on obtaining them. Some food would taste better than others, some potential mates be preferable to others, etc. But, absent mimesis, we wouldn’t want a particular “object of desire” more because we have been denied it, or because we imagine someone else enjoying it. And this also means that without mimesis we wouldn’t think in “non-pragmatic” ways about things, because what we think about are what we desire, what or who we fear will abscond with what we desire, those who interfere with our desires, and the ways in which this entire configuration is characterized by ongoing fluctuations: an object seems irresistibly desirable, but, then, not; someone seems unattainably admirable, but then maybe a bit contemptible; a particular struggle seems existential, but then rather silly. All of these events happen through language, which is what first of all allowed us to desire something while still deferring appropriation of it but while still desiring it, etc. And it is through language that all of this can become “interesting,” which is to say worthy of sustained and self-reflective attention.

Now, think about how difficult civilization is. Civilization requires hierarchies and divisions of labor. This means accepting that there will always be others who have better things than you, and can order you around, and being able to consider yourself unworthy for dwelling on this fact. And why, exactly? Maybe those with more than you are “better” in some relevant way, but maybe not—such claims can be neither verified nor falsified, so you can tell yourself what you like. More subject to proof is how the power of your superiors is used: we can tell, at least to some extent, whether an enterprise or community is well run, whether problems are solved or allowed to fester, how this particular authority measures up to others we are familiar with. Still, it’s precisely when things are being run well that we might imagine ourselves most capable of running them—it seems so easy, and therefore all the more “unfair” that this guy gets to do it rather than me. And when we have the “right” to complain about things being run poorly, how much of that arrogated right depends upon us not knowing all kinds of things that are involved in “running things”—and, then, how can we tell how “justified” our complaint really is? (A simple example: I recently saw some figure, respected or at least more respected on the “nationalist” or “dissident” American right than “Conservatism Inc.” say something like, “it’s time to focus on our rivalry with China rather than getting bogged down in endless wars [in the Middle East, etc.],” with this sentiment being met with approval, as rejecting “endless war” has been a password providing entry to the new right. But: will not China seek to extend its influence where it can, including those areas from which the US withdraws its influence? And will not getting serious and directing our attention to our rivalry with China therefore not involve countering such attempts by extending our own influence? In other words, is not rivalry every bit as “endless” as our recent wars, and in fact the cause of them? Unless, of course, “international relations” can be reset in new, cooperative, terms. Why not?—but doing so will involve controlling rather than exhibiting resentments.)

A properly civilized attitude, then, requires one to be inquisitive regarding the exercise of authority, including over oneself, while ensuring that this inquisitiveness leaves permanently open the question of what one does not and cannot know as an inquirer without access to the very power one is questioning. You have to be aware of your place within a system while being simultaneously aware that you don’t know the system. And the system itself would have to encourage this level of maturity. As a mimetic being, you must imitate your model as closely as possible while still maintaining an inviolate distance from him. Now, in the tradition of advanced civilizations, sustaining this equipoise becomes difficult because the system drifts further and further from its founding principles and becomes more reliant on exploiting the hierarchies that were creating under other conditions, in accord with another principle of merit, but that are now primarily sources of self-enrichment available to those most skilled in intrigue and flattery. Here is where the constant revolutions introduced by a technological social order may improve the prospects for the civilized attitude, and provide a means of exiting the seemingly permanent “cycle” of rise and fall. The proper technological attitude is rather similar to the properly civilized one: one must recognize oneself first of all to be a means of much larger, impersonal systems, i.e., to de-personalize and fragment oneself, in order to imagine the ways one might be an end of such systems.

The first, ancient, technologies were predicated upon the power to move around masses of people who didn’t need to be considered as people, i.e., as named within some sacral order. (We can distinguish this from crafts and techniques, which can always be contained within a relation to some cult, transmitted through pedagogical apprenticeship relations.) It was the ancient empires, with millions of slaves gathered from conquered peoples, which had such power, and used it for various construction and destruction projects. All the parts became homogeneous because all the people who were the parts could be made so. The availability of the masses of nameless slaves was equiprimordial with the imperial vision which could imagine god-like projects, i.e., projects of world destruction and creation. This is the origin of the technological world view, which is therefore mimetic to the core: the ancient emperors modeled projects on the power of Gods and technologists today model this imperial vision. The technological vision excludes consideration of human ends irreducible to the project itself, even when enacted for the purpose of improving the human condition, and even when it does, in fact, improve the human condition. But there are good reasons why the technological vision didn’t, for the most part, engage in the transformation of materials rather than the movement of masses of people until starting from about half a millennium ago.

If you are to advance the technological vision beyond the imperial one, you need to expand the range of practices that might become models for technological transformation. Rather than abstracting mass organization from social interaction, the observation of social interaction itself would have to become the source of models for technological transformation. The development of machinery out of the very careful examination of the cooperation, often indirect, of workers, as noted by Adam Smith and then Karl Marx, might be “dehumanizing,” but it first of all required attention to minute human practices and “sub-practices.” Modern technological development is predicated upon explicitly posing questions that have already been implicitly posed by collective practices, and then further sub-dividing so as to replace machinically the practices that posed the question in the first place. So, it becomes evident that more rapid communication across great distances would facilitate practices already in place; so, “communication” must be analyzed and disassembled into its elements (signals, vibrations, spread out temporally, “codes” and decoding processes, etc.), which can then be simulated and transmitted through wires, and so on. And, as a result, even “face to face” communication becomes “distanced” in new ways.

This process looks a bit like the “high-low vs. middle” power “mechanism”—it’s as if the “high,” the technologist, organizes the “low,” the particulate, “unconscious,” elements of signification “against” the actual speakers of a language. And we could further see how disciplines like linguistics, communications, and information are marshalled in this “campaign.” This might be because the conditions for a “breakthrough” of the HLvM process are the same for the technological breakthrough: a social order that is simultaneously desacralizing and resacralizing. Desacralizing, because the old sacrificial cults have been torn down (and who knows how long the war against their remnants continued even after the cults were officially overthrown), by Christianity in the West, but by the Axial Age more broadly across the board. Resacralizing, because what replaces the cult is not ‘secularism,” not even for philosophy, but the cult of the innocent victim targeted by cultic and imperial power. It is this latter cult that is responsible for the inviolate “individual” discussed above, and that led to new and very intense forms of attention being paid to human individuals. But this is unsustainable as a cult claiming to be outside of, or above, power. For Christianity to find a way to govern the West again, it would have to be a Christianity that makes explicit the entire set of power relations it in fact presupposes: the sovereignty Christianity projects onto God would have to be mapped onto the kind of human sovereignty being projected, with all of the political and economic categories of Christianity (“redemption,” “hostage exchange,” “shepherd,” etc.) spelled out.

So, we cannot and will not make humans masses of nameless slaves again; but we will continue to detect in the practices other humans perform the elements of new practices inclusive of but unimaginable within the older ones. In the process, technologists mobilize us all to do (including to ourselves) what we “cannot and will not,” even if we disavow doing so all the more vociferously. It may be that a lot of contemporary resentment can be mapped onto such disavowals—it may even be that this is part of the reason it seems to be becoming easier to see each other (and to act?) as enemy “bots,” i.e., cogs in political machines, indistinguishable from pre-programmed responses to utterly predictable “provocations.”  The kind of governing authority that could guide a post-sacrificial technological order is one that accepts the absolute responsibility to name everything, established and emergent, within the human order; while knowing that naming does not close but rather opens the order to new possibilities. Naming things, persons, practices, institutions, entails placing them at the center, and the creation of a new center in turn creates new peripheries.

If you take responsibility for naming, you reject—and name—the position that pretends that reality names itself, that wishes to have the names without the resentable namer. In that case, you want the names to last, because you want your name, as you have tried to inhabit it, to last. So you want the names to be able to stand on their own, with you, or a proxy, providing the most minimal backing possible. That means they must encourage a stance of deferral over resentment: those most capable of deferring their resentment and therefore looking carefully at those named objects most likely to incite their resentment must be those who find the most use in the name. This is what will make the names honest and truthful. And these are also the names that will most evoke expansive tacit realities. Stable, ordered, named institutions will create individuals who know their names mark events, and that these events can be replicated through the naming of others and self-re-namings. We could come to see our practices, individually and collectively, as the sources of new technological processes we would participate in sovereignty over. First of all, soliciting and enabling such participation would be made intelligible, and become a practice. As a practice more available to some than to others, it would generate resentments, all the more so because the practice has become available—why should the other be a more fully technological subject than me? So, then, the practice is replicated and extended to meet that resentment. The most basic precondition for an enduring technostructural civilization, then, is the generalized practice of responding to others’ resentments by extending to them a practice; and, of course, a general preparedness to accept such pedagogical gestures as an answer to one’s own resentments, resentments such answers will have explicitly formulated (because to be a subject of resentment is to be at least partly blinded to the mimetic investments generating those resentments). So, in response to a complaint: here’s something you can do—and, even if it had on the face of it nothing to do with your complaint, you do it, and find that it did, and so you can then replicate the practice for others.

I’ve been using the phrase “post-sacrificial culture,” generally in conjunction with the “Axial Age acquisitions,” to refer to the breakdown of the “imperative exchange” constitutive of sacrifice. Sacrifice involves an imperative exchange because the human member of the community offering the sacrifice (bringing his goat, or whatever, to the altar) is following an order issued by the deity to offer up some of the fruits provided, ultimately, by that deity; while, in exchange, the sacrifice represents a request, on the part of the one offering the sacrifice, that the deity continue providing these benefits (more goats). In a sense, our culture is not post-sacrificial, and it may be that no culture can ever be so, definitively—we engage the institutional orders around us in terms of imperative exchanges all the time, simply by assuming if we “play by the rules” we will be commensurately rewarded, and in resenting the failure of the institutional center to hold up its end of the bargain. But it’s still correct to call our culture post-sacrificial, because our “sacrifices” are figurative and not directly measurable—we speak in terms of trust, consent, contract, and so on, and keep extending those terms into areas where the ”superstitious” nature of our “faith” on institutional structures would be embarrassing. But the fact that it would be embarrassing, for most, in most situations, to say we offer up a “piece” of ourselves not so much to our boss (which would feel especially ridiculous) or even the institution, but to some “idea” of the institution, even one we don’t really “believe” in, is what makes us post-sacrificial.

But any concept with a “post” (or, for that matter, a “neo”) in it is still a placeholder, and therefore unsatisfactory. Now, we can say much more about how we have arrived, through those “Axial Age acquisitions,” at a “post-sacrificial” culture. Sacrifice is “embarrassing” because it has been discredited, and it has been discredited because the violent centralizing involved in sacrifice—we commit violence against this being that we all focus on in exchange for peace and prosperity—has been revealed as fraudulent. It’s our own mimetic desires that confer centrality on the “sacred” being, not any attribute of the being itself. And we see this because all sacrifice tends towards human sacrifice and, paradoxically, as Eric Gans shows in The End of Culture, does so the more God Himself is understood in “human” terms—that is, more as a mediator between humans than a central focus precluding the emergence of humans as centers in their own right. If the gods give us food, then we owe them food in return; if God has created us out of nothing, we owe him everything, even our firstborn. But how could even that be enough?

Human sacrifice emerges along with human hierarchy, as the first figures to make a claim to permanent centrality were sacral kings, who were no doubt often killed in manners that, with immense variation across cultures, became increasingly ritualized. The sacral king mediated between the community and the cosmos, and if that mediation went wrong sacrificing the king would restore it; at a certain point it would make sense to regularize the oscillation between effective and ineffective mediation. Divine kings introduced layers of bureaucratic mediation between themselves and those they ruled, so they themselves could no longer be sacrificed. But divine kings eventually established justice systems to deal with disputes between the new centers inevitably created within those new “layers” between themselves and the people. Regularized forms of compensation are established. Large scale imperative exchanges are established between the divine king and those situated in the various layers, all of whom bring tributes to the divine king who has, of course, provided his people with everything. With a justice system, injustice becomes a possibility; if injustice becomes a possibility, it is also possible for the system as a whole, in failing to remedy that injustice, to itself be unjust. And its unjust nature could be concentrated in a singular figure, a victim who has become meaningful in a new way, by being victimized precisely as a result of revealing systemic injustice. The sacrifice of such a victim in order to resolve some crisis would take on the ritual sacrificial forms but would be impossible to “contain” within those forms. This process would set in motion the erosion of sacrificial forms, and of the imperative exchange they institute.

So, the divine king inches ever closer to demanding a “total” gift or sacrifice, but can only do so in terms that are so monstrous that the more civilized regions of the system make it possible to see those terms as an indictment of divine kinship itself. From here, those in a position to negotiate in some way with the divine center can go in one of two directions: toward cynicism and nihilism, on the one hand; or, towards another form of “total donation” on the other. Cynicism and nihilism can only be a local phenomenon indulged in by the privileged. The new kind of total donation is to a new kind of center, which cannot be embodied in a central figure, and certainly not a central ruler—this is a center that commands a refusal to engage in the discredited forms of violent centralizing. A genuinely and completely post-sacrificial center would be devoted to propagating and embodying, or signifying, this command. Very few do so wholly, but it is only a certain number, which we couldn’t determine in advance, which would necessary to exemplify the limits of sacrifice and preventing the social order from being engulfed in it.

So, if we don’t want to call this order “post-sacrificial,” what should we call it? Part of the difficulty is that liberalism “launders” sacrificial imperative exchanges through a post-sacrificial order. Needless to say, scapegoating goes on constantly within a liberal order—much of it remains symbolic, which raises a question: are we irredeemable scapegoaters, so the best we can do is make scapegoating more symbolic, and less violent?; or does a liberal democratic system predicated upon symbolic scapegoating prevent us from more decisively marginalizing scapegoating? If the latter is the case, the only way of creating an order that would be more than merely “post-sacrificial” would be the establishment of an order we might call “charismatic autocracy.” “Charismatic” in Philip Rieff’s “graceful” sense of charisma as deferral in obedience to an absolute imperative (in our terms, the imperative to defer violent centralizing). “Autocracy,” meanwhile, is essential, because as long as we have hierarchical societies, someone will be at the center, and the only way to avoid constant accusations of illegitimate usurpations of the center and hidden powers behind the temporary occupant of the center would be to place the occupant of the center beyond any external criteria of “legitimacy.” That would represent a radical curtailment of sacrificial logics, because the desire to replace the figure at the center is the most “bad faith” desire possible because it self-evidently represents an attempt to be closer to the center oneself. A general renunciation of that desire would represent a quantum leap in the deferral power of all members of the social order. The argument for such an order would be predicated upon the assumption, for which we could find a wealth of practical examples, that symbolic scapegoating is really just a “gateway drug” prepping us for the real thing. The “charismatic” component of the “autocracy,” then, is less a quality possessed by than conferred upon the autocrat, who is himself in fact desacralized and represents nothing more than the need that someone occupy the center. (This doesn’t mean a social order wouldn’t want, and couldn’t arrange for, the best possible person to occupy the position—it just means that such arrangements must themselves be bound up with the irreducibility of the central authority.)

In grammatical terms, “charismatic autocracy” involves a movement past “imperative exchange” to “interrogative imperativity.” Under the regime of imperative exchange, declarative culture is ultimately a kind of scorekeeping, trying to figure out the respective “values” that are being exchanged. To this day, most discussions of morality take this form. But once the imperative is to resist or defer imperative exchanges, an interrogative, a question, is introduced explicitly into the proceedings. Not the question, “how much is this worth,” which is never a real question because it’s just a way of accommodating oneself to the powers framing the existing order; rather, the question is, what violent centralizing lies at the end of this imperative exchange? All the linguistic means by which you construct yourself as a center then become open to “interrogation,” as either demands for a better “deal” or “intimations” of the creation of new centers that would render any deal irrelevant. Only the demand for this state of questioning can satisfy the command for a total donation.

Within the imperative exchange, declaratives essentially involve haggling over prices—what one owes the gods/institutions, what they owe us, and, further down, what we owe to each other, whether in market terms or in terms of honor and kinship. Within interrogative imperativity, declaratives take on a far wider scope, that of converting possible (and impossible) imperative exchanges into a rule or constraint for deferring “analogous” imperative exchanges. The first question, rather than, “how do we get what we’re owed,” becomes more like, “what makes you think obligations can be calculated?” And then an inquiry is opened up into all the different ways people can imagined they’re owed this or that—and once the strict terms of obligation have been displaced many more such possibilities become imaginable. All the mythical and ritual imperatives you are obeying to imagine each and every one of them become evident. Narratives accordingly shift from telling of the spiraling out of control of one imperative economy until it leads to a reset, to putting all imperative economies in question, exposing the imbalance in all presumed balances.

The most powerful way of doing this is originary satire, which involves turning every threshold and boundary into a narrative wherein figures on both sides of the boundary or threshold turn into each other, so that the terms of some expected imperative exchange are reversed. That is, the “vocation” or telos of the sentence is represent other scenes within the scene of composing and hearing/reading the sentence itself. Everything grammar does—tense, mood, aspect, etc.—it does in order to articulate relationships between the scene of utterance and the other scene(s) it refers/defers to. In that case, all these boundaries and thresholds are themselves materials for originary satire: the relation between present and past, between a continual and a completed action, between possible and actual are all abstracted and re-embedded in narratives. It’s just as easy to say we spoke with each other a thousand years ago as it is to say we spoke with each other yesterday; that we are in the middle of doing something that’s been going on for decades and is further metastasizing even as we speak as it is to mention where we are right now; something that is unbelievably unlikely can be set alongside something that seems obvious; linguistically, you could be saying what I think as easily as I can. Originary satire targets chunks of language, stereotypical sentence types, which tend to harden into the marshalling of evidence for imperative exchanges, for their beneficial or inevitable nature—i.e., sentences that supplement imperative exchanges, rather than extracting samples of language from them so as to remind us that language is always received on a scene. In simpler terms, our expectations of one another rest on the bedrock of imperative exchanges, and the purpose of disciplinary spaces aimed at satirizing those expectations is so that we can see them, ultimately in order to construct charismatic and autocratic modes of interaction requiring more “input” into the construction of expectations. In truth, this is the most realistic use of language, because we are always, still, on the originary scene, which can never “close.”

The concept of “interrogative imperativity” makes it possible to pose more explicitly a question that has been implicit in my earlier discussions of literacy as a kind of supplementary originary scene: why is the scene of classical prose objectionable, or worth exposing? Because it fulfills one imperative of the declarative (to defer imperatives by “absenting” the demanded object) by renouncing the other imperative of the declarative—to articulate other scenes with the scene of language itself. This means that the literate declarative scene can only keep reiterating and justifying its own supplementations (again, all the “beliefs,” “assumptions,” “claims,” “suggestions,” “implications,” etc.) so as to sustain the unitary prose scene—it must systematically obfuscate the declarative’s grounding in the ostensive-imperative world. Classical prose and the “classic” disciplines are interested in making beliefs, assumptions, etc., unequivocal, that is, used the same way by everyone—for this reason, they cannot construct, or even imagine, the possible ostensives and imperatives that would come before any “belief” or “assumption.” Originary writing, in that case, restores this grounding, but not, of course, by pretending the literacy revolution never happened. Rather it takes the nominalizations constructed by classic prose as names which we can apply beyond their restriction, imposed by classic prose, to the unitary scene—most directly, by applying them to the disciplinary iterations of classic prose itself. So, originary writing obeys an imperative from the center discovered/invented by the nominalizations of classic prose and the disciplines. That imperative is to generate more potential ostensives and what these ostensives do is name sites of emergent dangerous violent centralization, as early on in their onset as possible. Some nominalizations will end up being genuine names for practices of advanced deferral; some will turn out to have been incitements toward violent centralization—the work of the disciplinary space is to iterate these nominalizations/names so as to discover/expose which is which (or to detour them to new uses).

When we study “reality,” that is, what we are doing is inventing and deploying concepts enabling us to detect potential sites of mimetic contagious outbreak. We can do this because of the cognitive consequences of literacy, which parallel and contribute to the discrediting of sacrifice. But classical prose and its metaphysical superstructure just contain and normalize sacrifice by classifying and ordering the markings of the potential victim rather than relying on the spontaneous crisis. Still, it is only through that prose and those superstructures that we can generate the terms of a charismatic autocracy. The supplementary concepts used to simulate a shared scene for writer and reader can be turned into means for generating new scenes of origin of deferred scapegoating. If you take a concept out of its context so as to conceptualize the context itself you create a disciplinary space within that context—that disciplinary space will either reveal that the discipline (the “context”) is too bound to its unitary scene to generate further potential ostensives, or recover and prolong the origin of the discipline/context in a recontextualized ostensive.

Insofar as power is desacralized, there is nothing but mutually hostile “interests” engaged in struggle over the decaying corpse of the social body; at the same time, power is never genuinely desacralized, because as soon as the sacred center is punctured, mythicized centers like “the common good,” “the voice of the people,” “Constitution,” “rule of law,” and, eventually, “GDP” are set up as masks of what everyone must assume is there—an unquestioned authority rooted in a singular origin. These mythicized centers are intrinsically arbitrary and divisive, though, which means they must eventually escalate hostilities into some “total” form.

Desacralization of power, though, is possible because there is a difference between the ritual center and activities engaged in outside the center. In the earliest human communities, we can assume that in activities apart from the ritual center nothing at all changed, and the ritual center reproduced as precisely as possible the originary event. But the sign deployed on the originary scene, along with the constraining structure of ritual, would be extended to other activities; at the same time, linguistic development towards the declarative would involve the attribution of actions to (“mythical”) occupants of the center. The mythical interpretations of ritual would be drawn from the far less interesting but nevertheless determinative actions outside the central aura and be converted into actions modeling behaviors for the community. Out in the field, hunters battle their prey; on the narrativized ritual scene, the sacred beast gives life to the group.

As social cooperation increases, stories of the origin of each new mode of cooperation would be “heard” or derived from the center—it would probably be the case that you couldn’t do or create something new without attributing the discovery to a mythical agent. You would in turn be obliged to that mythical agent, and would give to it some part of the fruits of your labor, which in turn would be part of the individual’s contribution to the center for the entire community. The gift the god has given you comes with an imperative: in one form or another, that imperative would be to use it in such a way as to honor the donor. In return, the individual issues an imperative to the mythical being: a prayer, requesting aid in successfully using the skill or implement. All the implements of work and war would be created within this frame, of what I have been calling an “imperative exchange.”

The implements themselves, their parts, and the implements used to produce the implements, are themselves all part of this imperative exchange. This is to say there is a “magical” component to the process: ritual words and gestures must be applied to all acts involving production and use, and instances of successful or failed use would implicate the implements themselves, which don’t simply break, and aren’t simply poorly used, but refuse, for reasons that may be more or less formulated, to follow the commands given them. In a certain sense we could say that, of course, an early human smoothing out his spear knows that this has to be done so that it can fly straight and fast when thrown, but his way of thinking about it will be framed completely in terms of being in harmony with all the agencies of the surrounding world. Such processes become institutionalized, and to craft some item in a way that is not traditionally prescribed and monitored by the upholders of that tradition would also be unthinkable.

So, the question is, how did it become possible for “technology” to emerge—that is, production conducted outside of these forms, in accord with the logic of continually reducing the elements of one process to another set of elements produced by another process? I think that the answer must be: when it becomes possible to see other human being as implements. The divine kings, commanding hundreds of thousands, even millions, in their slave war and labor armies, would first get a view of all these individuals as “parts” of a whole that might be more than the sum of its parts. Some could be added; some subtracted; some moved over here; some over there. If some worked harder, the possibility of combining all the better workers would come to mind; if workers or soldiers improvised and found some new way of cooperating with each other, that could be remembered and reproduced. This is already a kind of technology.

The Axial Age acquisitions made it increasingly difficult to levy these vast, sacrificial, masses. So, in the European middle ages, while there was steady technical development, and some remarkable feats of engineering and architecture, such development never exceeded the limits set by existing corporate and authority relations. The masses confronted in the New World and, especially, those flowing into the cities from the farmers enclosed out of their land must have ignited a new technological imagination. For quite a while, the development of machinery seemed to track pretty closely intensifications in the division of labor, with each laborer being given increasingly simpler tasks within an increasingly complex process. If automation has now itself become an autonomous process, it is because men were first automated. Eventually, of course, technology came to alleviate and eliminate human labor, but in the process the disciplines, focused on both technological and human resources, became the main drivers of social development. The human sciences, which took over from theology and philosophy, treat humans in technological terms, as composed of parts that work together in ways that can be studied and modified. Even attempts to “humanize” disciplines like psychology reduce people to set of interchangeable and predictable clichés.

The disciplines naturally think they should run the government which, after all, is just another technology. And whatever claims the government might make on its own behalf, like fulfilling the “popular will,” are best left to the disciplines, upon whom the government would anyway be dependent in measuring such things. The emergence of data and algorithm driven, all-intrusive social media which more and more people simply can’t live without is a logical extension of this process, as is the elimination of millions of jobs through new modes of automation. But desacralized technology, like desacralized power, provides a frame within which ultimately unlimited struggles ensue. Indeed, technology is the dominant form of power. If technology presents itself to us as an enormous system of interlocking imperatives which provides a very precise slot for us to insert our own imperatives, who or what is that the center? What ostensive sign generates the system of imperatives?

Technology is completely bound up with the specific forms the centralization of power takes in the wake of the desacralization of power. It is part of the same furious whirlpool of decentralization, as old forms of power, predicated upon earlier forms of technology, are broken up, and then recentralization, as new forms of power exploit the new technologies to remove mediating power centers in zeroing in on each individual. In that case, the commands of the center are mediated technologically, which is to say through our self-centerings as both objects of technological manipulations and imaginings and subjects becoming signs of the algorithmic paradoxes: our choice here is to become either predictable and unreliable, or unpredictable and reliable. In this way, we situate ourselves at the origin of the technological event, and model forms of power that will advance participation in the reinscription of technological markings upon us.

The telos of technology, then, is to make technologically produced human interactions into models for further analysis of practices into networks of sub-practices, out of which new practices are synthesized. In the process, the cultural work of deferral becomes increasingly technological—this means that we will think more in terms of deferring possible conflicts in advance, in making them unthinkable and impossible, rather than intervening crudely after the fact. We would work on turning binaries into aggregated probabilities, and making those aggregated probabilities capable of expression in language—this would be a source of important artistic and pedagogical projects. It would be as if we were producing futurity by continuing to work on the originary scene itself—in, say, settling “in advance” some dispute between friends, a particular wrinkle in the fluctuations of aborted gestures on the scene is revealed—the scene, one can now see, would only have cohered if one member had shaped his sign of deferral while positioning himself just so in relation to his neighbor and the center.

What about all the moral and ethical questions bound up with technology—gene manipulation, increasingly destructive weapons, pharmaceutical interventions into behaviors, deficiencies and capabilities that were once within the normal range but now, at a higher resolution, seem to call for remediation, etc.? Behind all these anxieties is the fading away of a sense of the human that was formed logocentrically, which is to say through the assimilation of the literate subject to the scene of speech, in which all are present to each other, and intentions are inseparable from signs. Humanism is a degenerate form of the Axial Age acquisitions. But this is not to say that our telos as technological beings is simply to go full speed ahead on all counts. We need a new way to think about these things, one that doesn’t rely on what are ultimately historically bound feelings of defilement. There is a human origin, and origins that iterate that origin, but no human nature. The event of technology, in which we become, collectively, models of further interventions that will in-form us, is itself originary.

Some of those moral and ethical questions are not real questions, relying on dumbed down or falsified versions of actual or possible scientific developments. The answers to those of them that are real questions will depend upon the state of the disciplines. Only within disciplinary spaces will it be possible to ask whether a proposed innovation or line of inquiry, i.e., some proposed new power, will have commensurate responsibilities assigned to it. Only in properly composed disciplines can these questions be raised free of scapegoating pressures demanding remediation to enjoy new “freedoms” or to avoid some form of ostracism. Anthropologically grounded disciplines would have to work to make new innovations and inquiries consistent with the basic terms of social coherence, while using new possibilities to continue studying those terms; and then we would have to assume open channels between the disciplines and central authority. There is even a place for “letting the market decide,” as long as we keep in mind what the “market” is: what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with knowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and bounded but not directly supervised by such authorities. Supervision can be relaxed and tightened for various purposes, and one of the purposes for relaxation is certainly to see what intelligent and talented people can do when encouraged to engage in skunkworks. In this case, as in all cases, the ultimate test for the reception of any novelty would be whether it helps sustain the pyramid of command starting from the central authority, and even contributes to ensuring the continuity of that authority from ruler to ruler. And the disciplines will accordingly, make themselves over into articulations of practices refined by the latest divisions in labor that study the diverse forms of human interaction for models of technological transformation—in the process establishing meta-practices for representing this dialectic in a way intelligible to central authority.

At one time I set myself the task of generating a discourse on social reality completely in terms of the originary hypothesis—that is, without any supplementations or borrowings from other social theories, disciplines or everyday discourse; or, at any rate, if such borrowings were to be made, the borrowed or supplementing terms must be shown to be fully convertible into GA, with the use of external terms to be a mere matter of convenience. This line of thinking led me away from the more spatial and “geometrical” vocabulary of GA—center/margin, vertical/horizontal, etc.—as well the more anthropological vocabulary—desire, resentment, transcendence—and towards grammar: ostensive, imperative, interrogative, declarative. This seems to me the most rigorous approach: from within the other vocabularies, there is no way of speaking of grammatical relations, so that the relations between, say, the imperative and declarative (as modes of culture), go unexplored and these seminal concepts remain stunted. Meanwhile, within the grammatical vocabulary, all the other terms can be assimilated: we can speak, and more precisely, albeit in more roundabout ways, about the relation between center and margin in terms, for example, of imperatives derived from ostensives; and about desire and resentment in terms of the “same” ostensive on different scenes and imperatives that cannot be obeyed.

Eventually, I found that I had to make one exception to the exclusivity of the grammatical vocabulary, and that was the concept of the “center.” The concept of “attention” has already to be entered into grammatical discourse, because some minimal mention of the mode of being capable of using these signs is necessary even to speak of the signs, and there’s no way of speaking about “attention” other than through some center thereof. From ostensives through imperatives and declaratives we have an increasingly complex reciprocal relation with the center. And, of course, once we admit the center, we also bring in “scene” and with it the entirety of the spatial and anthropological categories. Of course, my purpose was to enrich, not impoverish GA, so I have no objection to the re-emergence of these categories in a new frame. If the spatial and categorical terms are now in a dialectical relation with the grammatical terms, they undergo a kind of “askesis” themselves, relying less of inherited and intuitive uses and more on their commensurability with a grammatical analysis.

The work of internalizing all discourse within the grammatical categories is paralleled by the work of internalizing all discourse within scenic categories. If, for example, the meaning of a sentence or discourse is the deferral, conversion and re-institution of a particular ostensive-imperative field, then the constitution of a scene involves making simultaneous the signs of the previous and surrounding scenes within that scene itself. A scene is itself comprised of wholly scenic materials. The center and periphery of one scene have been transported or transposed and, of course, transformed in the process, from other scenes; desire and resentment involve a misalignment of scenes, or the differing locations of the same center on different scenes—coming from being the center of one scene to the margin of another means that the “same” ostensives won’t work on the new scene, leading one to “desire” their previous or remembered transparency; while the imperatives fulfilled seamlessly on the previous scene are overridden by other imperatives, or simply bereft of “objects,” on this new scene.

It then becomes possible to speak of the source of the “imaginary,” in its constitutive as well as its illusory forms, as the “supplementing” of a newly constituted scene with the simultaneity of all the other scenes it is comprised of. On the originary scene itself, what was no doubt a fluctuation of a series of awkward and uneven gestures around a center becomes representable or iterable in the ritual form in which it is repeated afterward, in which everyone issues the gesture simultaneously and identically. This is then the way the scene is remembered. (Notice how we can now bring in new terms from “surrounding” vocabularies, like “memory,” “imagination,” “error” and so on as specifically scenic concepts—this is how we “interface” with more traditional discourses). In the same way, when we act as if everyone on the scene were fully present on that scene, we give the scene a memorable form while effacing the constitution of the scene, which necessarily took place through the articulation of elements extended and differentiated from other scenes. We could put this in simple terms: consider all the projecting you have to do in order to make sense of what anyone else is doing, even on the most familiar scenes—you must assume motives of others’ behaviors and in doing so take as given various psychological or phenomenological concepts that enable you to identify and “verify” those motivations. You assume, that is, that the person is behaving “like” that person has behaved before in “similar” situations, and “like” other people, “comparable” to this individual in “relevant” ways, have themselves behaved in other “similar” situations. Anything that can’t be familiarized is either “interpreted” in such a way as to render it compatible (“he didn’t quite understand what I was asking him…”) or pathologized (“he’s weird,” or “he’s not himself today”).

The other way of engaging a scene is to make more explicit your own and everyone else’s constitution of the scene and attending to the way in which each presents himself as a center is a selection and articulation of modes of centering from other scenes. And what is selected is selected so as to maximize whatever center holds this scene together. If we assume the presence of the scene, we maximize the centeredness of the participants at the expense of the scenic center. If we constitute the simultaneity of the scene, we minimize the participants in the name of maximizing the scenic center. Each of us is nothing but the semiotic capacities we are able to marshal so as to contribute to bringing the center bringing us here into view. The problem here is that the semiotic capacities most demanded by the scene might wreak havoc, for the participants, with the modes of centrality that sustain them elsewhere. In other words, it can strip them down—nothing they’ve done anywhere else really counts, except insofar as it provided the attentionalities demanded here. You have to love the center of the scene to want to make this “exchange.” There is usually something more comforting in seeing the scene you are on, not as an opportunity to shed yourself of the “badges” of former scenes, but as a compulsion to engage in the familiar contest of competing centralities.

We can get at this from a different angle. It is only a residue of the belief that words have magical powers that leads us to assume that the same word used on different occasions means the same thing; or is, in fact the “same” word. As I suggested in a previous post, all we can ultimately care about is whether the sign (and by extension, the entire semiotic system) remains the same sign across different uses. One way of reassuring oneself of this is to rely on an official meaning and attack all deviant uses; the way to ensure oneself of the sameness of the sign, though, is to distinguish its use on one scene from its use on all other scenes in such a way as to direct everyone’s attention in a way that situates the sign onthisscene. For those assuming presence, the sign is the sign is the sign—any divergences are due to inattention or mal-intention. For those constituting simultaneity, the sign is different from these other previous uses of the sign in all of these different ways, because those of us on this scene are distinguished from those constituting all those other scenes in all those different ways. The point here is not to criticize others for not sufficiently differentiating the scene on which they “sign” from other scenes but to go ahead and introduce a differentiation.

If we go ahead and differentiate amongst the constitutive elements of the present scene, we will do so grammatically: ostensives put forward on one scene have been transmitted to another scene; imperatives issued on one scene are outstanding and yet to be fulfilled on another; the ostensives and imperatives that had been effaced or disavowed by the declaratives on some previous scene emerge on a later one when their declarative force weakens. Now, once we start articulating these speech forms on a given scene, and ask ourselves what imperative we are following, and how might follow it further up to its source, or extending it further to the point where it could be formed as a question to generate new sample declaratives, the differentiation between scenes disappears from our scene of inquiry. We are simply on and in our present scene. But if we have to ask why someone continues to try and obey an imperative with no “correlate” on the scene we are thrown back into the problem of introducing scenic differentiations. The differing vocabularies are both incommensurable and transition into each other. Hence the “moebius strip” of the title of this post—if you follow one vocabulary to the end it “obverts” into the other, complementary but “indigestible” one.

It’s possible to think about the relation between the spatial and anthropological, on the one hand, and grammatical, on the other hand, concepts, analogously to distinctions between esoteric and exoteric and emic and etic. The “method” of scenic differentiation is more suited to a traditional social scientific analysis than the grammatical one, while the grammatical approach “implicates” one—what imperative are you following now, as you do what you are doing? On the other hand, the grammatical “method” could in principle enable the construction of a far more intricate and penetrating analysis of events than the scenic differentiation approach—it would be the only way of approaching the immense complexity of Peirce’s projected (but rarely, if ever, conducted) semiotic analyses, meant to include all forms of knowledge and all practices of inquiry. And it is just as easy to imagine asking someone, how did you come to be on this scene, given the way you are signifying on it? Where the moebius strip obverts itself is the center, both the center of whatever scene we construct as our site of inquiry and the center of the scene upon which we conduct the inquiry. The most objective analysis reaches its end when we can say, on the scene we construct analytically, what the center wanted of those gathered there and how those on that scene heard, heeded, or evaded the commands of the center. But that scene is only “closed” when it turns into an ostensive sign eliciting imperatives from the center of our scene of inquiry. And inquiry into another scene becomes an inquiry into the scenic conditions of our own inquiry, which in turn leads into other inquiries. It is this paradoxical self-referentiality of sign use that our moebius strip models and enacts.

So, the broader implication of this mutual implication and reciprocal distancing of grammatical and spatial/anthropological originary thinking is that it suggests the need for a moebius strip style of thought. Think in terms of starting a sentence on one side of the strip and continuing it on the obverse, in such a way as to come back to the first side, but with some reversal of the elements. This is the logic, for example, of my notion of “donating your resentment to the center.” Within the earliest human communities, in which hierarchies between humans are not established, a sacrificial logic emerges in which commands from the center are obeyed in exchange for favors from the center: an imperative exchange. As the center becomes a site of intra-communal hierarchy, the exchange becomes increasingly unbalanced and untenable: nothing one could give to the divine king, including all of one’s possessions, one’s first born, etc., could ever match the boon of life provided by the king. We have imperatives that can no longer be fulfilled, which means the sacred center is no longer a reliable “target” of ostensives. Rather than abandon the imperative exchange with the center, which is unimaginable, one makes the exchange incommensurable on both sides: to the center we give everything, all the time, but not to the center as occupied by the God-Emperor. Rather, we give everything to the center that commands us to present ourselves and address others as centers. And everything includes, more than anything, that which we hold most dear: our grudges, our pride, our righteousness. Once, that is, the grammatical form is pushed to its limits, it becomes necessary and possible to imagine corresponding changes to the spatial/anthropological form. Now, this, of course, is not the kind of empirical claim that could be “proven” or “tested,” even if it provides (for example) a new way of thinking through the historical material associated with the emergence of the Axial Age. (For example, it has enabled me to hypothesize that the emergence of a justice system once honor culture has been, if not eliminated, “trimmed back” considerably, necessarily leads to the emergence of exemplary victims that could become cultural icons.) Rather, it’s a way of converting, conceptually and “praxically,” one mode of centrality into another: from a mode of centrally in a constant struggle for space with other self-denominating centers to a mode of centrality that confers names within a new space within which that struggle is converted into a joint operation.

As sacral kingship disintegrated, and the unity of the sacred and social centers was dismembered, the response in the late middle ages in the West was to retrieve the originary scene. Going back to the scene is the only response to any social crisis: if the existing institutions and the totality of gestures they organize no longer defer violence, what else could there be to do other than discover some new gesture; and what other means could we have other than finding some central object the deferral of the appropriation of which we can organize around? Sacral kingship in its high imperial forms (i.e., “divine kingship”) is in fact anti-scenic: the sacral king of a community small enough that they might still be able to simply kill and replace the king if his powers fail is still the center of a scene; with the monstrous empires of antiquity, where the king is completely protected and most people, we can assume, pay him tribute while relying more directly on their ancestral cults, there is no real social scene. In a sense, nothing happens for very long periods of time, other than court intrigues.

The Axial Age acquisitions, then, restart history by creating centers outside of the imperial one. The Axial Age acquisitions—Greek philosophy, prophetic Judaism and Christianity and even, I think (but probably less so), Chinese philosophy, are both anti-imperial and imperial. They construct a position from which the existing emperor falls short in God’s eyes, which is to say they institute a kind of permanent resentment towards empire; while at the same time imagine an eternal and universal empire under a true, divinely ordained king. Western “history” is, we could say, the history of the deserved fall of empires until the establishment of the one true empire at the end of days. Both Marxism and liberalism fit this apocalyptic pattern. So, from the failure of non-scenic imperialism, the recovery of scenicity takes the form of the imagining of “History” as a scene. This is why the anti-imperial side of the Axial Age ultimately wins out—the only acceptable God-Emperor would be God himself, who will rule once love of Him has been implanted in all human hearts by some revelation produced by the final, cataclysmic fall of increasingly evil empires.

We can see a comprehensive iteration of the originary scene here: our evil inclinations lead to us wanting, also fearing, but finally demanding and deserving the tyrant to end all tyrants; while the gesture on this scene that prevents our final descent is the Word of God becoming our words. How violent this final apocalypse must be, and how much it depends on human action rather than divine intervention will vary according to circumstances, but the structure is unvarying right down to the present day. We are still told, in the midst of declared crises of the liberal order, that the “voice of the people” finally sets things right. We still think there is a “voice of the people”—nothing can be more commonplace than to hear commentators says the “American people want (or don’t want)” this or that. What they mean to the extent that they are accurate, is that a sufficient majority could be patched together, by hook and crook, for a particular purpose. But imagine what it would sound like if politicians and pundits spoke in that way (as they often undoubtedly do amongst themselves)—there would be absolutely no reason to grant any decision they make the slightest legitimacy. Which means there is no other way of thinking about liberal legitimacy than according to what is still a Rousseauian notion of the “general will.”

And it is also true that unanimity regarding the originary structure of a social order is necessary if that society is not to completely degenerate into warring forces devoid of any limits on the weapons used and aims pursued in the struggle. So, it’s not surprising that liberalism recognizes this. Even leftists need to reference a unanimously held originary structure. Their anti-whiteness, for example, is not asserted as a matter of taste or mere tribal hostility—they must assert that there was in fact another, truer, America all along, with its own genealogies, its own sacred events and names, its own anticipated apocalypse. These are all versions of what I would call The Big Scene, and in the end there isn’t that much to choose from among them. The Big Scene is big in size and in consequences, but most importantly it is big in the sense of limitless because it is a scene constructed, not around a center, but in order to prevent the emergence of a center. A centered scene always has limits in space and time—participants must be in a circumference a certain distance from the scene to be witnesses, and if the number of participants grows beyond the size of this original circumference, it is people in the “rows” further back who acknowledge the precedence, in space or time, of those in the front rows, so this growth can be orderly.

A scene whose participants are devoted to the suppression of any center, though, is inherently unlimited. One can organize entire countries, or the majority and most active parts of them, around preventing the emergence of some proxy for a center. One can even organize regions around it; it’s too soon to say whether the world can be organized in this way. Such scenes are like lynchings—anyone can come along and throw another stone. They tend toward egalitarianism—everyone is against the same thing, and intensity is always increasing so no one can establish real preeminence in that regard. Elections are still about selecting a government, so they must put someone, some imperial figure, at the center—but the history of democracy is the history of the effacement and disfiguring of these central figures so that they represent nothing more than “who we are as a people” at this point. No doubt part of the hysterical hostility to President Trump is the overly imperial figure he strikes—he seems to actually make decisions, rather than just being the final filter through which the information circulating among elites and specialized institutions is processed. But all of the surrounding para-governmental institutions—the media, the NGOs, the universities, and so on—are completely uninterested in governing, and are free to engage in perpetual center smashing. They support politicians, of course, and more fervently than ever, but center-smashing politicians, more interested in gestures and less in coherent imperatives. And the politicians themselves eventually assimilate to this crowd. Governing of a sort continues, by the civil servants hired to do it, but they are themselves increasingly caught up in virtue signaling and helping to take down anyone who threatens to establish order.

It was liberalism that finally tilted the apocalyptic scene towards its permanently anti-imperial trajectory. And that’s when we get The Big Scene firmly installed as the imagined retrieval of the originary scene. It is a false scene, because it imagines a world without the Big Men—in this sense, liberalism and democracy are carnivalesque. But for this very reason it seems closer to the originary scene, which had no one at the center, just an object to tear to pieces. Anyone presuming to be a Bigger Man would violate the scene, but the same must be the case for any attempt to propose a general basis for agreement on anything whatsoever because that too must merely be an attempt to sneak someone into the driver’s seat. This is why resentments cannot be remedied in this way: only resentments that are framed in terms of some discord between the social center and the sacred or paradoxical center can be addressed. But only a shared concord between both modes of centrality makes discordance a problem—if all social centers, all central authorities, are equally illegitimate because equally evanescent and arbitrary, resentments can only feed on each other.

The discourse of The Big Scene is deeply rooted in our cultural and political vocabularies. If you listen carefully, across the entire political spectrum, you will see that virtually no one criticizes anything or anyone on any other basis than the violation of one norm of equality against another. All we see is people leveraging one residue of liberalism against another. It’s all people elbowing each out of the front row in the march of The Big Scene. For example, people can acknowledge that there are relations between nations that are best described as “imperial” or “hegemonic,” but such words are only used as terms of opprobrium, and the states accused of creating such relations will insist on euphemisms disavowing them. Imagine somebody criticizing the Saudis and Israelis for not superintending the Middle East effectively enough, or China for not establishing clear rules of inter-state interaction for East Asia, or the US for not thinking seriously about the best mixture of traditional and modern social forms to promote throughout Latin America. For that matter, think about how the sting of populist nationalism would be removed, and the basic ends of such nationalisms brought closer to achievement, if we could simply acknowledge, one, that many, maybe most, societies will be ethnically mixed; and, two, that in ethnically mixed societies there will almost always be a dominant, majority ethnic group that should set the tone for, be deferred to by, and in turn offer patronage to, minority groups. All of these approaches would imply “little scenes” with a center, and therefore must be overrun by The Big Scene apocalypse.

Restoring the originary structure of the social order only secondarily involves getting into arguments over the officially recognized founding events: the “real meaning” of the American or French revolution, of “1688” or the Magna Carta. “Arguments” are part of the problem. The originary structure will be restored through the constitution of disciplinary scenes carved out of the many anomalies of The Big Scene. Every scene must be revealed as originary, as having a central object, even if unidentified or even unsought; every scene institutionalizes itself, even if minimally. The semiotic materials of the scene should be used to name every emergent practice on the scene. The practices on the scene at least then become objects of the scene, and the origins of those practices point to other objects to be placed at the center. Relapses into argumentative clichés can be named, as can the pedagogical moves used to circumvent them. This kind of practice in itself looks back toward other originary scenes, as it finds its precedents in them, in part by looking for models to extend its own scene. The more such practices inform and lead others to institute related practices, the more the commonly recognized founding events can be introduced, probably in a revised manner, into the discourse.

By the way, did you understand the title of this post? (Before you started reading? While you were reading? At this point?) “Anarchist ontology” might be a fairly familiar phrase, going back the Reactionary Futureblog. We’ve been contrasting it with “absolutist ontology” for a while. That one might propose that an ontology has an “anthropological basis” might not be very surprising for people familiar with GA. “The Big Scene” is a phrase new to this post, but, of course, in GA we are always speaking of scenes, the scenic, and scenicity. Perhaps the originary scene was a small scene, so this one is distinguished from it, perhaps pejoratively—that it’s the basis of anarchist ontology, which is generally distinguished unfavorably from absolutist ontology, would reinforce this impression. But if you’re unfamiliar with all of this, the title would look like sheer gibberish. It would be “unclear.” Now, that someone would say the title is gibberish and unclear, rather than saying that there are signs here of an unfamiliar disciplinary space is another way of being on The Big Scene. The norm of “classic prose” is that your writing should place all readers on the same scene along with each other and the writer. A text which some will understand but others won’t is inherently suspect. Imagining yourself on The Big Scene is the equivalent of what Marxism called “ideology.” The kinds of incommensurabilities between languages identified by Anna Wierzbicka are “retouched” through supplementations like “progress” and “cultural development” rather than seen for the originary constructs they are. There is nothing outside of the attention articulated in disciplinary spaces as they study the always distinctive and present imperatives from the center. Building distinctive spaces to study what is distinct even in those spaces under the spell of The Big Scene and being able to answer charges of merely having a little scene by ratcheting up the distinctions all around is the way you resist The Big Scene.