GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

If power is subordinated to a higher principle or purpose, like freedom, or peace, or the greatest good of the greatest number, or equality, or the protection of rights, then it will eventually turn out that power is a site of struggle between opposing conceptions of freedom, peace, equality, right, etc. and therefore of opposing powers. If, on the other hand, power asserts the prerogative to determine what counts as freedom, right, etc., etc., then all these words are really just synonyms for “what power wants,” and therefore not “principles” at all. The absolutist project is to find a way out of this antinomy. We might consider an essential, even founding gesture of this disciplinary space the treatment of human history as a series of experiments regarding what kind of figure is to be placed at the center. We can attribute such an intent even to those figures we would consider our worst enemies and the most destructive actors—even the worst of intentions must have involved an intention to put a particular type of figure at the center. Complementary to this axiom would be the assumption that each such experiment is an attempt to retrieve the configuration of the originary scene, under conditions created by previous attempts to retrieve the scenic configuration. Such attempts are necessary because each, like the originary scene itself, opens new historical possibilities. The most obvious “experiments” are the exercises in rule by those in power, the attempts to solve specific problems any occupant of the center must confront, and the a priori and a posteriori accounts given of such attempts. But we can treat any social praxis as such an experiment, at least potentially, as any praxis involves a sovereign imaginary positing some relation between center and margin. The point is to be able to talk about everything, to move from the most macro to the most micro level, from the analysis of ongoing events to longer term projects.

The originary sign, the aborted gesture of appropriation, points to a center that is simultaneously a sheer “this” (one of Wierzbicka’s primes, incidentally), that is, the very thing that we are looking at right now, and a named object and agent, from which all other names, acts and intentions derive. Everything specific to this object goes into making up its name, and insofar as that name compels attention to and hence sustains the center the anthropomorphization of that Object will be the source of all commands, practices and even the language of the community. The retrieval of the originary configuration involves the extraction of more “thisness” at the expense of the name, which further means that other means of sustaining attention other than those maintained by ritualized repetition of the name in its increasingly varied iterations. The question is, what is to replace something like “Zeus commands that we perform the sacrifice here, now and in this manner” in answering the question, what should we do? Richard Seaford shows how universal monetization in Ancient Greece served to mediate sacrifice once distribution in accord with competition among elites replaced centralized, egalitarian distribution. Money creates a new and more indirect centered configuration under conditions where the ritual center has been usurped by the Big Man, who distributes in accord with merit and loyalty. Once money is widely available, what to do can be determined in accord with distributive principles based on equality, which comes to challenge aristocratic criteria. And these principles imply new, more democratic means of determining distribution. Laying the groundwork for a new usurper of the center to promise even more “equality,” which has more “thisness” relative to centrally organized ritual.

We have come up against the HL v M problem. One thing we can note is that the political “content” advanced by actual or prospective occupants of the center is “always already” part of the relation to the center itself—for example, some form of “equality” is essential to political strategies simply because that is the way you construct a more direct, less mediated relation to the center, as per the originary configuration. It’s much easier to call for more money for everyone than for more honors for everyone. In any good faith attempt to make occupancy of the center and operations directed from there more secure, promoting equality in some form, cutting out some “middleman,” seems to be the path of least resistance. So, more exclusive criteria are replaced with more inclusive ones (according, of course, to some understanding of what counts as “exclusion” and “inclusion”). The mimicry of standard right wing politics in the US, for example, which is set upon showing that the left is comprised of the “real” racists, misogynists, fascists, etc., is a replication of the same assumption. The difficulty of thinking our way through this difficulty, without calling for the restoration of a historically concrete, replete name (like medieval Christian kingship) and thereby relieving ourselves of the intervening historical materials, is a sign of the hobbling power of what we could probably just call political thinking itself.  The experiment seems to have gotten into a rut early, and stayed there.

Who implements the new mode of equality? Such a question reminds us that a new dispensation simply replaces the old officer’s class with a new one. The middlemen as such are never eliminated. Even in the most totalitarian states, which supposedly pulverized all institutions, communities and even individuals into atoms related directly to the gravity of the state or dictator at the center, are thoroughly infested with the middle: party members, the various secret and political police forces, hierarchies in the schools and factories and even the pervasive difference between those better and those worse positioned to inform on others. So, it’s helpful to keep in mind that what we are always really talking about is the way the occupant of the center rules through the middle, and how the middle is selected, controlled, maintained, replaced and so on. This serves to weaken the focus on equality, which focus is always really a way of levying and mobilizing a new middle out of the lows, a process that also involves an internal competition among those seeking to ascend to the new officer class. The high and the low talk about equality; the middle talks about status, qualifications, gradations, commands, factions and so on—at least when they are talking amongst themselves, but we can see these obsessions in the bromides they produce on command for the low (which generally involve providing markers whereby they can be clearly distinguished from the low). Equality-talk can be nothing but blather; attempts to work out the terms of existing hierarchies and chains of command allows us to distinguish between obscured and dispersed, on the one hand, and easily identifiable, on the other, hierarchies and chains of command. We can see the difference between a corporal told to make his troops less “masculinist,” on the one hand, and being told to ready them for maneuvers, on the other. Informed observers know what the latter looks like. The command to make soldiers more diversity friendly, meanwhile, is a transparent attempt to install a new officer class.

Even more, saturating our talk with the middle is a better supplier of thisness than equality or rights talk. The originary scene can only consistently be represented as uneven and staggered, both in the instigating rush to the center and the “rippling” stand down. The archaic ritual scene forgets the originary event as it commemorates it ritually, and the Big Man must eventually usurp the center as a more complete remembrance of the event as uneven—even if we must later work on correcting any representation of this usurpation as being carried out in the name of equality. The center effects not equality, but order: the antipolitics of absolutism works on stretching out the middle towards the high and low, rather than crushing it between them. Equality confuses the thisness of the center by giving it one ephemeral name after another; ordering refines thisness by seeking to continually clarify the commands, tacit and explicit, issuing from the center. There is always a circularity in the relation between center and margin—in a sense, the center is the center because it is distinguished from the margin and vice versa. We’re dealing with a structural property of all social activity. But while we can refer to any old thing as “this,” in articulating our actions by reference to thisthis, more and more of its thisness comes out as the model or pattern of activity we follow as choreographed with other ever more present forms of activity by seeking out that model or pattern thisly. What would the center have me do so that I can continue to ask what the center would have me do—the more the occupant of the center represents centrality the more consistently this circular question becomes a sequence of questioning. The occupant of the center is the summation and synthesis of the gradations introduced everywhere in the social order, even temporarily and infinitesimally, which tend towards making everyone part of the middle.

So, the Left is the major key of the HL v M accelerated turnover of the officer class; the Right is the minor key, trying to decelerate or, in extremely rare cases (I can’t think of one off-hand), reverse the turnover. This is the explanatory value of the model, which we will always have to revise so as to account for exceptions and complications, but this modification of the terms we use to employ includes within our descriptions and analyses the antidote. A sovereign imaginary implies a staffing of the officer class. Brush aside talk of principles with the question, how will its implementation be staffed? What model of activity would you be looking for in this new officer class, and how do you imagine other (let’s say “pedagogical”) sections of the officer class producing the numbers of individuals practiced in that model? What kind of know-how would be required, or would have to emerge? We would now be arguing about models of activity, and about inculcating institutions, and about setting the tone for one or another mode of activity, and whom we might look towards to do that. The whole left-right framing dissipates. The closer we approximate discussing nothing but bringing power into further accord with responsibility the more thisness, unencumbered by historical accretions, but informed by the wealth of historical experiments, comes into view.

When we speak about the absolutism of central power, the point is less that whatever the occupant of the center says goes (so that if something he says doesn’t go he must have said the wrong thing, but in that case was he really occupying the center?) than that no one can imagine anything happening without reference to the center. If I want to do something, I imagine the conditions under which the central power will allow or support it—if I think in terms of how I can do it by evading central power, I am still thinking of the center as a general constraint that must structure my thinking. If I want to bring about some social change, whatever form of cooperation with others I hope to organize, I ultimately assume the change must be channeled through the center, even if that means changing its occupant or even trying to occupy it myself. The center as referent and constraint on meaning is implicit in all of our uses of language—if the role of the center in a particular instance is not obvious, it is necessary to invent it. The centered nature of reality is what provides us with the general imperative to support a centered ordinality, which is to say an order in which the articulation of power from the center through the ranks it establishes is rendered transparent and consistent.

There has to be a center because humanity is constituted through joint attention, and attention must be attention toward something, and if attention is joint that something must be at the convergence of the respective lines of vision of the attenders. The only way this object of attention can be held in place is if it is desired by all of those attending upon it, and the only way it can be desired rather than appropriated is if its appropriation is proscribed; and the only way its appropriation can be proscribed is if the participants on the scene constitute this proscription by offering signs to each other that they will suspend any attempt to appropriate the object. The source of the sign(s) offered must be a reversal of the movement towards the object, and this reversal must result from the fear of violence produced by this novel, collective, unconstrained rush toward the object. Now, up until this point in our reconstruction of the originary event, there is in principle nothing that the participants on the scene couldn’t talk about and arrange deliberately among ourselves. That is, so far, there would be some justification in seeing the originary scene as a kind of social contract, if we were to set aside the problem of there not being any language in which the terms of the contract could be set. But we have left out one thing: precisely because there is no language within which a “negotiation” could take place, the injunction against appropriating the object can only come from the central object itself.

Now, one could take the atheist position and say that imagining the central object ordering everyone to stand down is a mere “illusion,” generated by the unspoken balancing of the “odds” and projection of motivations onto each other by the participants on the scene. Maybe one could map it out and mathematize it. But it’s an illusion that returns each time we use language and “understand” each other—the atheist can rationalize the scene in retrospect in terms of a parallelogram of forces, but he couldn’t show us how its participants could have done it then; he can also imagine that he’s rationalizing the world scene on which he acts today, but unless we make the completely  irrational assumption that everyone is rationalizing equally and simultaneously such rationalization is really just an attempt to marshal, or imagine marshaling, all of the scientific and technological capacities bound up with the very possibility of rationalizing in the attempt to destroy by force the “problem” of human meaning.

An illusion which cannot be filtered out of “reality” is not really an illusion—it is what Hannah Arendt called a “necessary appearance,” or what we could call an “imaginary.” In this case, a central imaginary—that is what we can’t think or speak without. All of culture is human beings placing things at the center, which is indistinguishable from being told what to place at the center by the center, and charting and narrating the movements of whatever is at the center. As I suggested in the previous post, we are always trying to get word from the center, no less when we generate complex genetic and psychological typologies than when we consult with demons and spirits. There is a continuity between magic and science and technology, as evidenced by the fact that the vanguard of each new scientific revolution accuses its predecessors of some variant or residue of “magical” or “mythological” thinking. This progressive relation to the center is what I have been calling “imperative culture,” or the “imperative order,” or “imperativity.” The center issues commands, commands with their origins in the injunction to suspend appropriation of the object on the originary scene; the participants on any cultural scene make requests of the center. These requests are often refused, and when that happens new cultural forms must be created: the request may have been refused because it was made improperly, which means that the center orders more formalized and supervised forms of petition; it may have been refused because the one making it was not worthy of having it granted, meaning that the center orders new modes of self-examination and purification—these are the ways in which resentment at the center’s refusals are made productive. The relation to the center is in this way refined, and the means of yet further refinement created.

It is not surprising that once human beings, that is, kings, start occupying the center, a similar process of trial and error would be required—in fact, not only have we, or, more precisely, no political leadership, yet completely solved this problem, we could see the centuries of liberal usurpations of the center as both another attempted solution and a hysterical avoidance of the problem itself. The more we see the incoherence of liberalism, the more problematic and interesting the modern order becomes, because the modern order has obviously seen scientific, intellectual and technological accomplishments that any post-liberal order would preserve, albeit in some revised manner. So, has the industrialization and post-industrialization, the massive wealth creation, of the West, and much of the rest of the world in its wake, been accomplished because of liberalism—in which case do we have to accept liberalism along with the technology and wealth, or reject both (and in that latter case, how, exactly)?; are the material developments in spite of liberalism, in which case we can just junk the liberalism and move on to a rational and beneficial harvesting of our growing powers (this seems a little too convenient); are these developments side effects of liberalism, partly rooted in, partly separate from, that political order (in which case a perhaps more complex surgical operation, which might transform the “patient” in unpredictable ways, might be needed)? All of these ways of framing the question, in the very positing of a “we,” are implicated in magical and mythological thinking, direct translations of our hopes and fears into requests of the center.

In sacred kingship, the king is the mediator between the community and the supernatural world, or the world created at the origin. He has to resolve the paradox of the center, that it both precedes “us” and is the depository of our desires and resentments. The sacred king is responsible for all aspects of the well-being of the community—he brings rain, he ensures adequate food supplies, protects against natural disasters, and so on. This means that these are all things we expect from the center. (The fact that we can still look out the window and say “oh, no, not rain again!” means that we still expect these things.) It makes sense to assume that sacred kings would have done what they could to supply what they could, and to turn their failures back onto the community. Furthermore, they would elevate their role from mediator to arbiter, if possible, creating the distinction (made by David Graeber) between “sacred” and “divine” kings: the divine kings “make themselves the equivalents of gods—arbitrary, all-powerful beings beyond human morality—through the use of arbitrary violence.” Graeber sees sacred kingship as a way of controlling for the effects of divine kingship, but there is no contradiction in noting that divine kingship would offer a way of transcending the limitations and dangers of sacred kingship.

Violence against humans and violence against the natural world and everything in it are of a piece—it is only fairly recently that the distinction between the two could even be made. The readiest solution to sacred kingship is, then, divine violence. The imperatives issued by those on the human side of the imperative order start to become more imperious: people can start to say to “gods” and “natural” beings, “do this!” And watching very closely to see whether they obey. And, further, watching very closely for what the audience seems to accept as “obedience”—or, more precisely, what the audience can be induced or made to accept. Andrew Bartlett, an orginary thinker of the GA school (see also his Mad Scientist, Impossible Human) locates the origins of science on the originary scene in the possibility of handling one part of the originary object as a part separate from the whole, and that is what happens in the growing autonomy of the imperative order:  imperatives need no longer be issued to the center itself, but to its “messengers” and “agents.” The specialization of a few members of the community in the acquisition of such knowledge is the beginning of the disciplines, and the delegation of such powers by the king is the beginning of imperial kingship. This is the road towards the struggle for sovereignty.

So, there is a dialect between the center through which violence must ultimately circulate and the disciplines, which give, revise, and suggest compound “meanings” granted to anything and everything in the world (everything that has been loosened from sacred kingship). Technology itself, as I think Heidegger was suggesting, is itself a way of conferring upon or summoning forth meaning from nature and human capacities. For those of us in the disciplines, who if anything want even less than the pittance of power allotted us in liberal democracies that means engaging in the kinds of disputes that can only be settled by resetting attention to a lower threshold. When we think or speak we are always on a scene, or a possible scene—but all scenes are really only possible ones. None of us has created the language we use, and even if we speak to ourselves, the self we speak to is not identical to the one who listens—but it’s also very easy to forget this, since the most readily available means of assertion (I think, I believe, I am sure, etc.) give credit to the assumption that we are each of the original source of what we say.

There is no “world scene,” which is an Enlightenment fantasy, but it is possible to see all of us—“we” language users—as embarked, in all our overlapping and spread out disciplinary spaces, on a collaborative project to refine further our instructions from the center. The architecture of each discipline is a construction of a meaningful “piece” or “dimension” of reality—we undertake the construction by seeking out the failed imperatives we have issued to the center of our space, and replacing them with ones whose meaning we can now test. Imagining goals, causes and regularities, and then finding ways to test their viability is the process of participating in the disciplines. One thing that centralizing power does is widen the scope of possible disciplinary inquiries—centralizing power mobilizes collective forms of action, and demands and receives new forms of material force, and therefore provides new areas of inquiry for students of those activities and of power itself. It may very well be, then, that a form of power like liberalism, which is simultaneously centralizing and centripetal, would give a huge impetus to various disciplinary inquiries; and it is also not surprising that those inquiries vary widely in quality and sustainability. Liberalism is a kind of weird, swirling sprawl that sucks everything towards an abyss at the center. But anywhere within that sprawl one can try and slow things, redirect attention, and look at some failed pleas to the center that haven’t even been noticed as such.

All discourse is the representation of imperative exchanges in declarative, ultimately narrative and paradoxical, form. Myths explain rituals, but they’re not the cause of the ritual—the cause of the ritual is the recreation of the scene to make the central being present, and revisions of ritual are responses to some failure of the central being to appear. The new ritual changes the request, the question and the conditions of the answer: if we do this the being will appear, and the appearance of the being will take this form. Ultimately, if the appearance of the being is evidenced in the petitioner’s ability to find that presence in his own ability to defer some desire, we have reached the point of minimal ritual—ritual as continuous inspections of increasingly refined habits. This can then take the form of a narrative of some kind of intellectual and psychological self-transformation. Disciplinary spaces can arrive at the point where they essentially report on the efficacy and results of practices that maintain this minimal and continuous presence. This minimal and continuous presence is to be maintained within spaces where presence is less minimal and continuous—it is to keep working on these spaces, producing practices that with minimal input maximally increase the presence of central being. This kind of practice is what I have been examining in the last couple of posts in my proposals for the deconstruction of metalanguage, which is really a kind of mythological or magical discourse. All metalinguistic terms can be reduced to some scenic version of think, say, feel, or know, and these words can in turn be reduced to imperatives to draw new instructions from the center.

The word “cant” has two meanings, which are distinct but have an important area of overlap: on the one hand, “hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature”; on the other hand, “denoting a phrase or catchword temporarily current or in fashion.” One can be hypocritical without being fashionable, and vice versa, but being fashionably sanctimonious and sanctimoniously fashionable involves occupying a specifically liberal linguistic zone. Fluently employing the latest argot, imposed and enforced by an elite, becomes the marker of morality. “Cant” is a particular form of metalanguage. Metalanguage turns language itself into an object of inquiry, even on the most basic level: children learning the alphabet are studying language. Once we have metalanguage, pointing to the uses of language becomes a normal part of language use. The boundary between language and metalanguage then becomes one more of different uses than of separable regions of language. So, there’s no sense in which language is more real than metalanguage; and metalanguage is just as much a use of language as any other: it directs attention to uses of language, while language directs our attention to the centered world, but language is itself part of the centered world. Metalanguage is the pedagogical dimension within language, which means that the primary sin of metalanguage is assessing uses of language without issuing operable imperatives: assessments of the language use of others devoid of operable imperatives is the way I would define “cant.”

The most useless imperative is one that tells you to do what you already thought you were doing, like your writing teacher or editor making the marginal note “be clear!” or “unclear!” on your text. Presumably, you thought you were being clear, so what we have here is the case of an imperative masking a declarative: “be clear!” really means “I’m the kind of person who knows what clarity entails, and you’re not.” It seems to me that a great deal of the language we use in discussing writing and thinking falls into this category: attributing “richness,” “insight into human nature,” “a deep exploration of emotional life,” etc., to a novel, for example, are all, for the most part meaningless, i.e., cant—think about what it would mean to command someone to “improve your insight into human nature.” This is just way of saying that the labels we apply to the novels we approve of we refuse to apply to this novel. Any use of the word “deep” will fall into this category (“go deeper!”). Another excellent example is “critical,” which is very popular these days, especially in the form of “critical thinking.” David Olson claims that the more advanced literacy enabled by the metalanguage surrounding “classic prose” allows its possessors to “think critically,” but he doesn’t seem to consider that this just applies one term within the metalanguage to other terms.

“Critical” at least has a real philosophical genealogy, going back, of course, to Kant’s Critiques, and then working its way through Marx to the Frankfurt School. But while I’m certainly not going to try and make this argument here (or, most likely, anywhere else), I will still suggest that maybe Kant and the others are not doing much more than expanding the possible uses of the metalanguage built into literacy. Philosophy, or metaphysics, which, as Gans has pointed out, takes the declarative sentence as the primary or prototypical form of language, is metalanguage on metalanguage. But philosophy can also involve awareness of this. Whenever you use one concept, you use a word within a particular system of words, and that concept therefore depends upon all the other concepts (words) within that system; and, for that matter, within other systems as well. When you use a concept, all this is not present in your mind, so it’s easy to fall into the illusion that in using the word you are simply referring directly to something out there in the world. The “critical” standpoint is there to remind you that it can only refer indirectly to something out there in the world.

But it’s still futile to urge a “critical” attitude upon someone, to tell someone to “be more critical,” either in general or towards something in particular. These are really just ways of calling someone stupid, or telling them to shut up and listen to you. “Being critical” requires that one be part of a disciplinary space that takes as its center of attention the “foundational” concepts of another discipline—and this is possible because anomalies in the various uses of those concepts have already become evident. As a metalanguage attached to a form of literacy, it is meaningless. Which is to say, it is cant. So, what wouldn’t be cant? Metalanguage that issues operable imperatives—imperatives whose successful completion could be “authenticated” by anyone familiar with the imperative itself. These would be imperatives whose completion would be as easy to judge as an imperative like “pass the salt.” If the salt makes its way from the person asked to pass it to the person making the request, imperative accomplished! If we think about metalinguistic imperatives in a pedagogical context, such a “meaningful” imperative might be something like “identify all of the words in this text that refer to something in the world and all the words that refer to something in the text itself.” This would be asking students to distinguish between linguistic and metalinguistic elements in the text. The assignment would surface differing tacit assumptions regarding the significance of the elements of the text, but it would be situated within a shared ostensive field in which we could keep lowering the threshold at which phenomena can be attended to. And the student would gain far more from this seemingly simple and basic assignment than from the best-intentioned request to read “critically,” or “logically,” or “deeply,” or “carefully,” or with an eye to “themes,” images,” “evidence,” “characters,” etc. Once we direct our attention to the uses of language and metalanguage the ground of all inquiry in the “human sciences” shifts. The culling of cant follows from this shift.

Culling cant means distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless metalanguages. Meaningful metalanguage issues imperatives for attending to normal language use that are operable, that produce ostensive results that reset attention; meaningless metalanguage issues imperatives that are nothing but double-binds—they ask you to have already mastered the model that you are being measured against. The culling of cant allows us to formulate the political goals of anti-liberalism and absolutism more comprehensively: what we want is meaningful order. Meaningful order means that institutions and positions have the power and capacity to perform the functions allocated to them, and that they do so. So, when we speak of a “university,” for example, we would have a shared use of the term that corresponds to how the participants in the university see their inheritance of and obligations to that institution. This corresponds to the rendering explicit of power hierarchies, chains of command and responsibility proposed by political formalism. Meaningless metalanguage always stands ready to be used to advance political conflicts within any institution, whether it asserts that students should be turned into “critical thinkers,” or “well-rounded individuals” or guardians of civilization or masters of civic and sacred knowledge. The most meaningful metalanguage is one that keeps attending to the distinction between language and metalanguage.

Disciplines are organized on the boundary between language and metalanguage—there are many such boundaries, and therefore many disciplines. Language directs our attention to “the world,” but what this really means is that it attests to the presence of a center and the transparency of the scene constituting it. Metalanguage directs our attention to language, which is to say to the scene of language, which has in some respect become opaque, endangering linguistic presence. In this case, the imperative is a metalanguage in relation to the ostensive and the declarative a metalanguage in relation to the imperative. There’s something metalinguistic in asking someone to repeat himself because you didn’t quite get what he said, and deliberate mimicry is probably one of the oldest forms of metalanguage. So it’s not as if an expropriating metalanguage snuck up on an innocent language—language must have always lent itself to being metasized. But literacy represents a threshold because metalanguage no longer needs to share a scene with primary language, and specialists in metalanguage and the power it provides become a permanent feature of the social landscape.

So, the boundary between language and metalanguage iterates the oscillation between center and the scene on which the center is made to appear. Meaningful metalanguage engages in this oscillation without falling into either the “naivete” of forgetting about the scene or the “cynicism” of seeing the center as a fabrication of the scene. That statement itself comes close to meaningless metalanguage by advocating for an “attitude” which the advocate presumably already exemplifies—hence his qualifications for advocating for it. (“Balancing” statements—“we must neither go too far nor try too little…” tend to be the most meaningless samples of metalanguage.) But we can issue imperatives from that metalinguistic statement—the discipline is a scene with a center of attention, and what makes the discipline disciplinary is that anything you say about the object at the center is simultaneously something you say about the history of the discipline. If sociology is a genuine discipline, it is because within sociology everything someone says about “society” is simultaneously something said about the history of inquiries into society, while such inquiries are in fact part of society—even more, society itself is nothing more than inquiries into its own constitution, even when carried out by the most “naively” accepted rituals.

Similarly, to exercise power is to treat everything in the space wherein power is exercised as effects and examples of that exercise of power. To exercise power is to have one’s imperatives obeyed, which means that power as inquiry is interested in the form, effects and ramifications of imperatives. Power involves a kind of reductionism, an interest in the world only insofar as it can be treated as transformable through imperatives. Discourse on power is metalanguage inquiring into the scenes upon which power is exercised, into the scenic conditions under which imperatives will be completed or will be revealed as meaningless. Imperatives are always part of an exchange of imperatives, albeit an asymmetrical exchange: the commander commands, while the subordinates request, even implicitly in their manner of obeying, that he keep widening his view of the “extension” of the imperatives he issues into a broader field of consequences. As you think forward into a longer chain of ramifications issuing from your imperatives, you also think back to older, more originary imperatives that you have been obeying all along, and can now obey more attentively. Discourse on power shows this larger field to be implicit in even the most immediate and trivial command, imploring the commander to bring such metaconcerns into the framing of the imperatives he issues. This leaves no room for cant.

Cant is a linguistic form of imperium in imperio. So are all uses of language that don’t generate operable imperatives, which is to say, something equivalent to “look at this” or “show the difference between…” And there’s no better place to begin than the practice one is presently engaged in, which is bound to have a meaningless metalanguage ready to be circulated within the language it regulates. How clear is the demand for clarity, how critical the insistence of critical thinking? What rules is the journalist defending the rule of law following? Metalanguage purports to have its own autonomous existence, based on its system of internal references—it is fanatical about setting the rules for proper speech, and rules for proper speech are rules for acceptable representation, and rules for acceptable representation will command power to represent some nature or essence known only to initiates into the metalanguage. Asking metalanguage to represent its own distinction within language restores the center by paving the imperative-ostensive path to it. The test of a meaningful metalanguage is that it can indicate the possible sign that would necessitate the transformation of the metalanguage.

Marx and Engels have been heavily criticized for not providing a detailed model of the communist society they hoped would succeed capitalism, but on this point, at least, they were right. Leaving the details out allows for steady focus on the contradictions you want to exploit; providing a detailed model provides you with something new to argue about, even if there’s absolutely no way of settling all the questions without having power in the first place. So, it provides you with a distraction. I think that we can push this point even further: once a political project has a canonical model, filled with procedures, organization structures, required policies, and so on, it also has a permanent basis for political conflict based on the claim that the actual leadership is not in conformity with the “real” project. This argument is really a corollary of the argument for personal, non-procedural rule central to absolutism.

There are good reasons why this kind of conflict is endemic with political movements in general, and particularly those aiming at substantive change. The creation of a “doctrine” and a “program” is itself a response to conflict—movements usually start by being for and against something very specific but the specific things they are for and against become vaguer and more complex the closer you get to achieving them; what was originally thought to be “the problem” turns out to be just a subset of a larger problem, and maybe the first “solution” just brings that larger problem into view, and even creates new problems itself. So, the only way to quell all the arguments about “what are we trying to accomplish here” is to get something down on paper that can garner enough agreement among the leadership so that the rest can be bullied into line. Still, everyone knows that if this or that detail of the doctrine or program has to be modified or jettisoned in the interest of gaining greater proximity to power, it will be—thereby confirming that managing internal power dynamics is the real purpose of the doctrine and program. That’s why the insider who knows where all the pieces are will generally win out over the one who has best mastered the doctrine and program.

We can formulate the problem, and thereby a way of avoiding it, in a more fundamental way. A doctrine aims at logical clarity: it proposes certain premises, and then claims that, if those premises are accepted, certain other claims must be accepted as true; and, if those claims are accepted as true, given certain values, certain conclusions must “therefore” be reached and subsequent actions taken. “Programs” are structured the same way, usually in long lists of declaratives and the imperatives that logically follow from them. We are completely within ‘declarative culture” here, and declarative culture is predicated on the banishment of imperatives and ostensives that don’t “follow” from declaratives. Once you have banished imperatives (in particular, because if the imperatives go, the ostensives go with them), you are wiping the slate clean and setting all prior obligations, commitments and loyalties aside. You take as your starting point the attempt to construct a discourse which everyone will be “compelled” to agree with, at least if they accept the basic premises of declarative culture. And the basic premises of declarative culture are that, first, in using words, you rely upon established (i.e., through the dictionary, or through some accepted theory) uses of words; and, second, that in constructing relations between words and sentences, you base such relations solely on grammatical relations, which is to say, the substantive-predicate relation (substance-quality, for logicians) and hierarchy, and words (also to be used in formally established, with increasing rigor as declarative culture deepens) like “because,” “therefore,” “if,” and so on.

To return to David Olson, the scholar of the history and consequences of literacy I have been referring to in recent posts, writing is itself a metalanguage identifying elements of and relations within (but invisible to) previously existing oral language. The development of logic is the further development of the metalanguage already implicit in literacy: it uses the relations between words abstracted in in the creation of written language as a way of assessing and regulating the use of language. In other words, once a discourse has been produced, we can use a model of logic to determine whether it is “logical,” “rational,” “true,” and so on. But, Olson emphasizes, these metalanguages tell us nothing about how the discourse is actually produced in the first place, which is to say they tell us nothing about how we actually think. This should be obvious if we consider an even more basic metalanguage than logic: grammar. We can easily see when a sentence has a grammatical error, and we can, if we are informed regarding grammatical terminology, identify the error very precisely, but no one composes a sentence in their mind according to grammatical rules (no one thinks, “now I have to connect a predicate to this subject, now I need an adverb to modify the predicate,” etc.). Interestingly, Olson himself has virtually nothing to say about what we are actually doing when we think and compose sentences in our mind—he seems to hope the metalanguage will seep in sufficiently to make us somewhat better at it.

But we can develop a pretty good idea of what we are doing when we compose sentences in our mind, and Michael Tomasello’s Constructing a Language is very helpful here. The answer, according to Tomasello, is simple, and fairly obvious in retrospect: in constructing our own utterances, we work with the utterances we have heard and used many times already; what he calls “chunks” of discourses, or what rhetoricians call “commonplaces,” and grammarians call “constructions.” Better and more experienced writers and thinkers have a wider range of “chunks” available to them and, just as important, acquire the skill of varying, and “riffing on” the chunks they are familiar with in accord with the present “rhetorical situation.” Even more, we can learn to identify the chunks others are using, and put them to new uses by situating them in relation to some of our “our” chunks. Along the way, you probably will get more grammatically proficient and “logical,” but, even more important, you will get more discerning, more comical, more satirical, more alert to the manipulation of clichés, more capable of subverting others’ clichés without falling into your own, more patient when it comes to looking over sentences so non-obvious absurdities can strike you, more detached from the metalanguages so as to be able to mix them up with the “primary” languages they want to expel from their own precincts, better at staying within a particular “topic” past the point where all the conventional things have been said about it so it becomes necessary to find something new to say, etc. These are the kinds of things we are doing when we are “thinking.”

Tomasello’s “user-based” model of language points to the ways in which we can avoid being mesmerized by metalanguage, or declarative culture. Privileging metalanguage, or declarative culture, and therefore the “doctrine” and “program,” is like setting up a permanent imperium in imperio in your own mind, or in the collective discursive space you inhabit. It will always be possible to show how some discourse violates the rules of logic or reference and is therefore “invalid.” If it’s not possible, those rules can always be refined further so that it becomes possible. Whoever is most proficient in mastering the metalanguage has a permanent power base, while being unable to actually rule, because that would leave him vulnerable to the very same criticisms, thereby undermining his power base. (Every organization has those who are always referring to “rules” and “procedures” in frustrating any attempt to arrive at a decision, doesn’t it?) But the installation of the imperium in imperio in the shared thinking of even the more decisive or “alpha” members of the group is the more devastating effect, because it blocks real thinking and inhibits initiative and a willingness to experiment. It may take a dozen violations of logic and regulations in order to arrive at a direction that will in fact be far less vulnerable to charges of “fallacies” than one arrived at under the strict supervision of logical regulators. This, I suppose, is what is meant by “anti-fragile.”

Hopefully, it’s needless to say that I’m not arguing for “spontaneity.” The first point to be made is that hierarchy and a clear chain of command is prior to the specifications of doctrine and program. But the hierarchy itself must of course presuppose whatever it is the hierarchy is for. We do need to start with a clear intellectual, conceptual distinction, and a minimal model. Social relations precede individuals; relations are always articulated, and therefore hierarchical; the center is ontologically prior to the margins; any relationship (institution, society, etc.) has an origin; origin is essence; and so on. In working with the “chunks” of language presented to us by an overwhelmingly liberal social order, we keep bringing these distinctions and the models they presuppose to bear in reworking those chunks, turning them against their origins. Inflexibility regarding the basic distinction and model allows for maximum flexibility in “de-chunking” the constraining metalanguages and generating new chunks to send out into the world (what we might call “memes”).

Instead of thinking in terms of striving to conform and force others to conform to logical models, we can learn to think, more productively, in terms of thought experiments. This is already closer to the way most of us think, which is by using examples to probe a particular situation or bring a problem into focus. A thought experiment is essentially an example transformed and given greater reach by being “processed” through our a priori distinctions. How would a particular discourse look if we hypothesized the origin of its governing concepts? How would one of the “we should…” quasi-imperatives compulsively issued by pundits and would-be power brokers look different if we imagined the concrete hierarchy and series of practices that would be required to implement it? How can we place an “individual choice” in a new frame by embedding it in the extensive network of relations that make it seem more like automatized mimicry than a “choice”? In a sense, “all” this really involves is repeating the chunk in sentences and discourses where it doesn’t really “belong,” which dissolves its naturalness in an acid bath of highly constructed and power-mediated discourses and chains of command.

A useful criterion (a kind of minimal metalanguage) for the creation of thought experiments would draw on the old appearance/essence distinction: imagine an entity or situation whose appearance is both almost indistinguishable from, while also diametrically opposed to, its essence; for example, a very close friend who simulates trustworthiness almost perfectly while systematically betraying you at every moment. What would be the single, barely discernable “tell” that would enable us to identify the essence behind the appearance? We could answer this question in various ways, for various kinds of friendships (or relationships relying upon trust in general), various forms of betrayal, and so on. That’s why it’s an experiment, to be talked about as long as it’s useful to do so, and not a logical conclusion to be deduced. This is similar to the proposal I’ve made in previous posts for treating declaratives as imperatives: in order for me to really “believe” (belief, for Olson, is a metalinguistic term affirming the “sincerity conditions” of an utterance—it doesn’t refer to some “inner state”) a purely abstract, logical argument, purporting to depend upon nothing more than the established meanings of its words, firmly established referents, and non-fallacious connections, what commands would I in effect have to follow, and would in fact already be following? Part of the purpose here is to bring out of the shadows the vast array of authorities that must be acknowledged and obeyed without question in order to “believe” anything whatsoever; the other part of the purpose is to be able to obey them in a way that winnows out all those within the chains of command who don’t, in fact, command anything, leaving it to those who do command to actually do so. With the declarative imperium in imperio, thinking is engineered so as to undermine hierarchies; with imperative de-chunking, thinking is designed so as to bring hierarchies into sharper focus.

The danger of titling one’s political position “centerism” is that it is bound to be confused with “centrist,” which will undoubtedly one day become a synonym for “stupid.” (Even spellcheck wants it to be “centrist.”) But centerism ties together ontology and practice in a way that is not necessarily explicitly absolutist, but certainly undergirds absolutism. Centerism entails always supporting the center or, more precisely, donating your resentment to the center. How do you know where the center is? It doesn’t necessarily always announce itself unambiguously, after all. But it’s always there, whenever you talk or think, on both the most micro and the most macro level.

If you utter a sentence, you direct someone’s attention to something different, maybe even only slightly different, than what they have been attending to. What you direct their attention to may be something they simply didn’t know about, but in some way they must have not been completely prepared to see it as significant. “Significant” is identical to “central.” You are redirecting, with your utterance, their attention from one center to another. We are never centerless, but one center is marginal relative to another. So the problem is distinguishing the central (or perhaps it’s best to say “centeral”) from the marginal. It is when what you have been taking to be a center enters into crisis that its subsistence upon another center becomes evident.

Let’s take the example of two criminals, with a prisoner-type dilemma. They are about to be captured, and each could find a way to abandon the other and cop a plea; or, they can take their chances sticking together in trying to escape or refusing to cooperate. In talking or thinking about it, they put their “partnership” at the center; we can identify in what this partnership consists more precisely: specific events, which included or implied certain commitments (certain imperatives) which, retroactively, is constructed as a “bond” they share. What has sustained that center up until this point is mutually profitable enterprises, but maybe other things as well—shared threats, close calls which enhanced trust between them, maybe they like each other, etc. Now that this center is coming under pressure, it must either transcend the form it has taken so far (as the likelihood of future profitable enterprises becomes vanishingly tiny) or collapse—in the latter case, in will be replaced by some more sustainable center (like repentance for criminal activity) or reduce each man to an even smaller center, his own selfishness.

To be a centerist is to seek out the more sustainable center, and do your part to make it even more sustainable. For the criminal, that might mean abandoning the co-conspirator/friend and finding in the legal process that now frames him examples and signs of significance to which he can convert; or, it might mean sticking with his friend and sacrificing himself in the name of a friendship that now means something more than it did previously. Even in the latter case, assuming the two survive, the fact that a new center has been found might open both of them to yet other centers, centers that it’s no longer so easy to dismiss as relevant only to the less lucky, brave, or skilled. Maybe the two friends can now encourage each other in self-reformation projects. Their resentment toward law, or order, or civilization, or respectability, or whatever it was, must now be donated toward that center in order to make it more capable of ordering such self-reformation projects.

Liberal GA focuses on one element of the originary scene while absolutist GA focuses on another. The question is which can frame the other. Remember the originary scenario: a group of hominids, more advanced than other species in the sense of being more mimetic, surrounding some object which they all hunger for, with the hunger of each mimetically inflaming the hunger of the others. The pecking order, which would have the alpha eat first, then the beta, etc., cannot contain this mimetic contagion, and some new form of order is necessary. One member of the group, perhaps the alpha under the sudden, unprecedented pressure of mass resistance, but at any rate probably someone close to the ‘top” and therefore likely to be noticed, converts his gesture toward an appropriation of the object into a gesture of deferral—pointing to the object in such a way as to demonstrate that he will not fight others for the object. By some process, which we can imagine unfolding in any number of ways, the newly invented sign is used by others, as the mimetic contagion is reversed, and all stand pointing to, designating, the object.

Now, when we talk about a center, we’re thinking about a circle, and a circle is defined by each of its points being equidistant from the center with all the others. It is very likely that the originary event would be remembered and commemorated in this way in subsequent rituals, and then myths, because it is the way of remembering and commemorating most likely to retain the full power of the event itself: it directs attention to its completion while disregarding the inevitably messy process. But, in fact, it is very unlikely that all members of the group would be equidistant from the center at the moment of cessation. Some would be very close, as the sign would probably have first been issued by a few co-contenders, who may have then actually have had to cooperate so as to restrain others, but would at any rate have been the model for them. We should think in terms of points distributed unevenly around a center, perhaps more of an oval or obloid, with a more complex array of symmetries. Liberal GA works with the circle model, and can therefore emphasize the equidistance from the center over the center itself—implicitly, at least the equidistance, which is to say the “equality” of all the members is what produces the center, and it is that equality that is therefore to be preserved above all. Absolutist GA, or centerism, sees the defense of the center by those who best see the threats to it as primary, since that defense is what holds together the positions arrayed around the center.

“Act so that there is no use in a centre,” declared Gertrude Stein in Tender Buttons. For a centerist, there might be nothing more perverse than this imperative, but what better way to find where the center is than to act as if there is no use in it. Such “acting” might be carried out for real, in which case its destructive consequences can be studied after the fact, or it can be carried out in a controlled way, in which case it’s a discovery process. If there really is a center, we should have faith that all attempts to subvert, evade, deny ignore, etc., that center will simply reveal it more clearly. Acting so that there is no use in a center would mean multiplying imaginable actions and treating them all as equally possible, setting aside all the frames that have always already ordered possible actions in terms of moral preferences and probability. This is not for everybody, only for those conducting inquiries into the center, which is to say only those who want to follow the source of the crisis to its lair. It is the practice of a discipline, a way of training attention. The even more radical direction Stein took this in was to apply it to the sentence, treating each word in the sentence as equally important—the sentence might just as well be “about” the conjunction “and” as about the noun.

It may sound bizarre, but it’s really just a more consistent way of holding variables constant, or acting in accord with the commonplace phrase, “all things being equal.” The result (maybe not for Stein—although no one is completely sure about her, given her right-wing, philo-fascist politics—but for the centerist) is a reassembly of the elements of any event or utterance or discourse into a hierarchy of centers, much like the arrangement of scattered metal bits around a magnet. We’re talking about something now—well, first of all, what, exactly, is that “something”—let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing, more or less. It’s good to be able to get at that thing from various angles, to zoom in or out, to track the progress of our shared focus. Whatever it is that we’re talking about, it’s something that gave us pause—we have not fully appropriated it; it resists our attempt to possess or dismiss it. It is to that extent a center. As a center it is also an example of centrality as such, and we embed it in a new center by directing our attention to that. Even if we’re just gossiping about our friend’s marriage, something about marriage, or male-female relations, or our friend, or ways of talking about any or all of these things, must be holding our attention to this. Our discussion will either find its way toward that other center, or it will degenerate into “trashing” our friend (“consuming” him, so to speak), or we will simply lose interest.

So, in every case, you either turn your attention to the center around which the center you now address is orbiting, or you “trash” or discard that center. Trashing and discarding can be of world historical importance, as liberalism has demonstrated. Now, of course, we lay the ground for a whole new set of annoying, fruitless arguments: how can we tell what is preserving and what is trashing, etc.; and, it’s true, such things are not self-evident. But a good sign that one is preserving rather than trashing is that you can (or at least are willing to) show that those you say are trashing are in fact engaged with a center that, for whatever reason (the more you can clarify possible reasons, the better), they have failed to embed in another center. There are intimations of centering in even the most violent trashing. Even liberals and leftists have their origin stories—a schoolyard bully, an obnoxious, unjust boss, stories of injustice in the old country told by your grandmother, a visceral sense of compassion for a homeless man, or even frustration at some relative’s obtuseness, etc. There will be a perfectly adequate centerist or absolutist response to all such tales of origin, while the liberal or leftist, the distracter and trasher par excellence, can never stay focused on the need to preserve the center.

This distinction, in fact, provides us with a way of engaging the liberal as needed, while strengthening our own centerist disciplinary spaces: what center are you defending, and what is the center of that center? They will be with you in the opening—I’m defending basic human dignity! Human rights! Or, even, the Constitution! But what then? If we argue about what constitutes human dignity or human rights, what guides our arguments—what makes one way of understanding “human dignity” or “human rights” more plausible, sustainable, or legitimate than any other? They will drop out quickly, and implicitly concede they are just trashers (I’m defending human dignity against…!), but any terms regarding human goods of any kind whatsoever assume reference to a disciplinary center and a sovereign center: this is the kind of thinking that has converged on this question or category, and here is where I am within that kind of thinking; here is the kind of sovereign I imagine enforcing or protecting “rights” or “dignity” and here is the kind of order that makes such a sovereign imaginable. The liberal will have dropped out by now, because it is these very questions that he is determined to trash. He’ll just point to a complaint that won’t be heard if this line of questioning continued. And why should that complaint be heard, by whom, and within what terms of reference? Well, those are precisely the kinds of questions that silence the complaint.

The ultimate center is the originary event. This is an obviously outrageously ambitious claim, but the only center all centerists, which is to say all absolutists, all reactionaries, all who want to overturn completely the liberal (dis)order, could acknowledge is the sacred center generated on the originary scene hypothesized by Eric Gans. There is nothing there to offend Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian, or any adherent to any other form of high culture or transcendent faith. Even more, each of these faiths of intellectual commitments would be strengthened by thinking of them as a particular form in which the originary event has been revealed and retrieved. Accepting this common origin would not eliminate disagreements, but would ensure that all disagreements remain centered, as a shared effort to discover more of the center’s imperatives and to embed them in our lives. The very fact of language proves Gans’s hypothesis, unless someone can come up with a better one (and good luck with that!). We can speak with each other because we share a center. Our speech, therefore, is always concerned with seeing the center, hearing it, protecting it, learning from it. Let all your talk be of center and origin, and you will dispel all distractions and outlast all enemies, whose curses will become blessings.