GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

A practice, as I have been using the term, is doing something so that something happens as a result of what you have done. The better the practice, the more it is reduced to only those means that produce these results, and the more it can be ascertained that these results can be attributed completely and only to that practice. Since a given practice relies upon other practices in order to have the necessary means available, practices also convert other practices into auxiliary practices, or practices to which the practice in question is auxiliary. What I will be more explicit about now is that part of the practice is narrating the history, outcome and purpose of the practice, all of which derive from the limitations of other practices—this part of the practice can also, of course, be perfected. Since all of human life is comprised of practices, articulated with each other in various ways, and at various stages of perfection, the theory of practice is the theory of society and culture.

The power of this theoretical approach can be demonstrated by the similarity between practices and rituals. A ritual also aims at producing a result that can be completely and reliably attributed to the shared act. The ritual arranges a gifting to the being at the center in such a way as to obey the imperative attached to the gift expected in return from the being at the center. A good ritual would be one that excludes all acts, thoughts or gestures that don’t contribute to the devotion to the center enacted by the ritual. The outcome of the ritual is, of course, uncertain—burning the choice chunk of meat to the god, or renewing one’s “membership” in the “clan” led by the antelope-god will not in itself make the upcoming hunt more successful. But if we keep in mind that rituals are collective acts, aimed at increasing mutual trust and cooperation amongst the congregants, it may very well in fact be the case that a ritual can be deemed successful. This is especially so since the tightly scripted and choreographed ritual can be replicated in other activities, further enhancing effectivity—which is in turn enhanced through legend and lore retelling of hunting expeditions, war, and other shared projects, through which the discovery and deployment of techniques become ritualized. Ritual and myth shape the “soul” so as to encourage imitation of the models considered most admirable in the community, which also is part of their “perfection.”

This similarity between ritual and practice means that we could think about post-sacrificial history, as the imperative to participate in the ongoing conversion of rituals into practices. Without a shared sacrificial center, ritual cannot survive, and without ritual, myth becomes detached stories rather than communication with the founders of the community. So, there’s no way to return to a ritual order, but this doesn’t make the Enlightenment approach to “demythification” any less delusional and destructive. If a particular ritual/myth nexus is dismantled, it has to be replaced by an equivalent—the most historically important project of demythification, Christianity, understood this. If a particular ritual/myth nexus is not replaced by a higher form of sacrality and a new integration of ritual and “theology,” it will be replaced by lower forms of centralized violence, or scapegoating. What anyone says and “believes,” and their enactment of their priorities and commitments, is an account of their relation to the center and that relation to the center must be revised not “debunked.” And that goes for any of us, as the center is always taking on new “data” that changes our relation to it, making the narratives we rely on at least partially “mythical,” indicating (as so many contemporary deperfecting practices do, on fantasies of return to a shared sacrificial center).

The conversion of ritual into practice provides us with a practice of history. What is the relationship between what anyone says and does, on the one hand, and the expected vs. the actual outcome, on the other hand? This is always a very interesting topic of conversation! What, exactly, are you trying to do here? And, assuming you manage to do it, then what? These questions can never get old. Whatever is ritualistic and mythical in your practice is that which “serves” a particular figure in your narrative (the “free” man, the “anti-racist” man/woman, etc.) but can’t be shown to actually follow from your practice. We can perfect the practice of zeroing in on this ritualistic and mythical residue by oscillating between macro and micro frames. So, for example, you want a “more equal” society and so you go to this demonstration, hold up this sign, shout that this counter-demonstrator, argue with these less doctrinaire comrades, etc. What path do you see from doing all these things to a “more equal” (in what sense, measured how?) society? What other practices would need to be constructed so as to actualize that path? How would the construction of those practices follow from the practice you are currently engaged in? How would you know those practices when you see them? These are very good questions for anyone. At every point along the path, then, you construct hypothetical practices, keep perfecting them as practices by fitting them to other practices, and the chances are very good that the “path” ends up looking very different than was originally imagined.

The conversion of ritual into practice follows the imperative of the center to construct an iterable scene around an object. On the originary scene, a gesture must have been “perfected,” at least “sufficiently.” The “outcome” of the gesture was the repetition of the gesture on the part of the others in group, as a “marker” of each member’s refraining from advancing unilaterally toward the center. All subsequent actions are to be coordinated, and any “unilateralism” is to lead to a distribution including all within the group. The gesture both says and does this. The construction of practices that identify and preempt violent centralization is identical to the construction of practices that transform the social order into reciprocally supporting practices. So, in trying to hear the imperative of the center, you convert whatever command you do hear (from your boss, your parent, your priest, your conscience, your president…) and convert it into a practice that identifies, translates and where necessary discards whatever is ritualistic and mythical in it. This is what it means to resolve the ambiguities of any command by following that command back to an earlier, and then yet earlier one—each command you seek the traces of is ordering you to bring what you do and what happens into greater conformity, both with each other and with what others do and make happen. Like on the originary scene, the aim is a sign everyone can say is “the same.”

We can call this practice of converting ritual into practice the imperative constant, which makes all practices increasingly consonant with each other. Only an imperative from the center can make the perfection of practices more than a kind of professional scruple. Even the professional scruple presupposes a social order in which such scruples can be formulated and protected, and the resulting work properly distributed and appreciated. Wanting to become the best teacher, doctor, welder, landscaper, writer, etc., I can be only makes sense if all of these skills are integrated into a community in which people can tell and value the difference between good and bad teaching, welding, and so on. And if they can’t, I can note that as a measure of social dysfunction or decline. I can’t possibly want anything other than the internal anomalies of the practice and its intersection with other practices to enter into my work on perfecting the practice. And this means I want the imperative from the center—to do nothing other than convert rituals into practices—to remain constant, for each member of society to be able to show any other member how he is doing this. From a total ritual society to a total disciplinary society—whatever we do is perfected so as to make the relation between doing it and this transformation happening more consistent and iterable.

This practice is a performative one—practices are always on display, even if in different ways and to differing extents for different “audiences.” And it is always moral, even when seemingly primarily or even completely technical. There is always resistance to the perfection of practice and relapse into more ritual practices and mythical narratives. Here is where we can locate such “mimetic structures” as desire, envy and resentment. The perfection of the practice always rubs up against existing habit, relations and hierarchies—it always threatens to shift existing relations to the center. Even under the most collaborative conditions, with a group of dedicated practitioners wholly in accord regarding the shared end, to propose some further perfection is always to appear a bit of a usurper of the center. Registering these appearances as they are distributed across the group, giving them representation, and converting them to proposals for distinctive contributions by those less central is itself a practice that one perfects.

All of the historical and conceptual material I’ve been generating and gathering—the “exemplary victim,” the “metalanguage of literacy,” more recently, the “ve/orticist app” and so on—should all be used to bringing about the conversion of rituals into practices. These are features of discourses to be surfaced and identified, with the language in which they are articulated subjected to translation practices. It is quite remarkable that it’s almost impossible to speak about politics without some victim of the other’s practices to gather around—the whys and the hows of victim selection and promotion and insertion into practices is always a productive site of attention (George Floyd died, therefore we…. What, exactly, and why?). The problem with the metapolitical concepts generated in opposition to “tyranny”—justice, freedom, equality, democracy, the republic, etc.—is that they are resistant to being converted into practices, which marks them as ritualistic and mythical.

At the same time, though, we can’t simply discard all these words and expect others to do so as well. They must be turned into transitional concepts as they are stripped of their mythical content and the victimologies through which they cohere subjected to the pressure of more perfect practices. New concepts derived from the “stack” and the data-driven algorithmically articulated reality are themselves meaningful as parts of practices that break up oralizing fantasies of community and distribute signs and discourses across practices within disciplines that can accordingly be infiltrated and their practices perfected. The exemplary victim and the metalanguage of literacy allow us to construct model scenes and narratives against which we can generate various algorithmic paths to the scenes and models constructed by the media—and transitioning to the defense of the center (the perfecting practice) and infralanguages of literacy help us to block those paths. All metalinguistic concepts are aimed at obstructing some “tyranny” and thereby indirectly indicate some possible executive action—to put it simply, what should be done is something the anti-tyranny metaconcept enjoins. Convergence upon a victim is a ritual and mythical practice, but it signifies, not a specific form “tyranny” targeting that victim, but disordered power to which the specificities of the victim are incidental. Infralinguistic centering practices follow the imperative constant to disable the victimary-metalinguistic link. “This violence against this victim means that the system is guilty of this form of tyranny which we must devote our entire being to overthrowing” always needs to be translated into “this anomaly (whether in a law enforcement, or economic, or reporting, or educational practice) indicates the need to perfect this cluster of practices.” This would be the continual conversion of ritual into practice.

This post continues the thinking initiated in “The Pursuit of Appiness” several posts back. What I want to emphasize is the importance of thinking, not in terms of external attempts to affect and influence others’ thinking and actions, but in terms of working within the broader computational system so as to participate in the semiotic metabolism which creates “belief,” “opinions,” “principles” and the rest further downstream. The analogy I used there was prospective (and, for all I know, real) transformations in medical treatment where, instead of counter-attacking some direct threat to the body’s integrity, like bacteria, a virus, or cancerous cells, the use of nanobots informed by data accessed from global computing systems would enable the body to self-regulate so as to be less vulnerable to such “invasions” in the first place. The nanobots in this case would be governed by an App, an interface between the individual “user” and the “cloud,” and part of the “exchange” is that the bots would be collecting data from your own biological system so as to contribute to the ongoing refinement of the organization of globally collected and algorithmically processed data. The implication of the analogy is that as social actors we ourselves become “apps,” and, to continue the analogy a bit further, these apps turn the existing social signs into “bots.”

This approach presupposes that we are all located at some intersection along the algorithmic order—our actions are most significant insofar as we modify the calculation of probabilities being made incessantly by computational systems. Either we play according to the rules of some algorithm or we help design their rules—and “helping design” is ultimately a more complex form of “playing according to.” The starting point is making a decision has to how to make what is implicit in a statement explicit—that is, making utterances or samples more declarative. Let’s take a statement like “boys like to play with cars.” Every word in that sentence presupposes a great deal and includes a great deal of ambiguity. “Boys” can refer to males between the ages of 0 to 18—for that matter, sometimes grown men are referred to, more or less ironically, as “boys.” Does “liking” and “playing” mean the same thing for a 4 year old as for a 14 year old male? How would we operationalize “like”? Does that mean anything from being obsessed with vintage cars to having some old toy hot rods around that one enjoys playing with when there’s nothing else to do? Does “liking” place a particular activity on a scale with other activities, like playing football, meeting girls, bike riding, etc.? Think about how important it would be to a toy car manufacturer to get the numbers right on this. We could generate an at least equally involved “explicitation” for a sentence like “that’s a dangerous street to walk at night.” What counts as a danger, as different levels of danger, as various sources of danger, what are the variations for different hours of the night, what are the different kinds and degrees of danger for different categories of pedestrians at different hours of the night, and so on. Every algorithm starts out with the operationalization of a statement like this, which can now be put to the test and continually revised—there are various ways of gathering and processing information regarding people’s walks through that street at night and each one would add further data regarding forms and degrees of dangers. Ultimately, of course, we’d be at the point where we wouldn’t even be using a commonsensical word like “danger” anymore—we’d be able to speak much more precisely of the probability of suffering a violent assault of a specific kind given specific behavioral patterns at a specific location, etc. Even words like “violent assault,” while legal and formal, might be reduced to more explicit descriptions of unanticipated forcible bodily contact, and so on.

All this is the unfolding of declarative culture, which aims at the articulation of virtualities at different levels of abstraction. There are already apps (although I think they were “canceled” for being “racist”) that would warn you of the probability of a particular kind of danger at a particular place at a particular time. And, again, you being there produces more data that will be part of the revision of probabilities provided for the next person to use the app there. But there is an ostensive dimension to the algorithm as well, insofar as the algorithm begins with a model: a particular type of event, which must itself be abstracted from things that have happened. When you think of a street being dangerous, you think in terms of specific people, whose physical attributes, dress, manners and speech you might imagine in pretty concrete terms, doing specific things to you. You might be wrong about much of the way you sketch it out, but that’s enough to set the algorithm in motion—if you’re wrong, the algorithm will reveal that through a series of revisions based on data input determined by search instructions. The process involves matching events to each other from a continually growing archive, rather than a purely analytical construction drawing upon all possible actors and actions. The question then becomes how similar one “dangerous” event is to others that have been marked as “dangerous,” rather than an encyclopedia style listing of all the “features” of a “dangerous” situation, followed by the establishment of a rule for determining whether these features are observed in specific events. Google Translate is a helpful example here. The early, ludicrously bad attempts to produce translation programs involved using dictionaries and grammatical rules (the basic metalanguage of literacy) to reconstruct sentences from the original to the target language in a one-to-one manner. What made genuine translation possible was to perform a search for previous instances of translation of a particular phrase or sentence, and simply use that—even here, of course, there may be all kinds of problems (a sentence translated for a medical textbook might be translated differently in a novel, etc.), but, then, that is what the algorithm is for—to determine the closest match, for current purposes (with “current purposes” itself modeled in a particular way), between original and translation.

Which kind of event you choose as the model is crucial, then, as is the way you revise and modify that event as subsequent data comes in. To be an “app,” then, is to be situated in that relationship between the original (or, “originary,” a word that is very appropriate here) event and its revisions. For example, when most Americans think of ‘racism,” they don’t think of a dictionary or textbook definition (which they could barely provide, if asked—and which are not very helpful, anyway), much less of the deductive logic that would get us from that definition to the act they want to stigmatize—they think of a fat Southern sheriff named Buford, sometimes with a German Shepherd, sneering or barking at a helpless black guy. This model has appeared in countless movies and TV shows, as well as footage from the civil rights protests of the 50s and 60s.  So, the real starting point of any discussion or representation of “racism” is the relation between Buford and, say, some middle-aged white woman who gets nervous and acts out when a nearby black man seems “menacing.” The “anti-racist” activist wants to line up Buford with “Karen,” and so we can imagine and supply the implicit algorithm that would make the latest instance a “sample” derived from the model “source”; the “app” I’m proposing “wants” to interfere with this attempt, this implicit algorithm, to scramble the wires connecting the two figures. This would involve acting algorithmically—making explicit new features of either scene and introducing new third scenes that would revise the meaning of both of our starting ones. There’s a sliding scale here, which allows for differing responses to different situations—one could “argue” along these lines, if the conditions are right; or, one could simply introduce subversive juxtapositions, if that’s what the situation allows for. Of course, the originary model won’t always be so obvious, and part of the process of self-appification is to extract the model from what others are saying. In this way, you’re not only in the narrative—you’re also working on the narrative, from within.

Working on it toward what end? What’s the practice here? You, along with your interlocutor or audience, are to be placed in real positions on virtual scenes. We all know that the most pointless way of responding to, say, an accusation of racism, is to deny it—if you’re being positioned as a racist on some scene, the “appy” approach is to enact all of the features of the “racist” (everything Buford or Karen-like in your setting) minus the one that actually marks you as “racist.” What that will be requires a study of the scene, of course, but that’s the target—that’s what we want to learn how to do. And the same thing holds if you’re positioned as a victim of a “racist” act, or as a “complicit bystander.” If you construct yourself as an anomaly relative to the model you are being measured against, the entire scene and the relation between models needs to be reconfigured. The goal is to disable the word “racist” and redirect attention to, say, the competing models of “violence” between which the charge of “racism” attempts to adjudicate: for example, a model of violence as “scapegoating” of the “powerless,” on the one hand, as opposed to a model of violence as the attack on ordered hierarchy (which is really a case of scapegoating “up”), on the other. If we’re talking about “violence,” then we’re talking about who permits, sponsors, defines and responds to “violence.” We’re talking about a central authority whose pragmatic “definition” of “violence” will not depend upon what any of us think, but which nevertheless can only “define” through us.

This move to blunt and redirect the “horizontalism” of charges of tyrannical usurpation so as to make the center the center of the problematic of the scene is what we might call “verticism.” The vertical looks upward, and aims at a vertex, the point where lines intersect and create an angle. The endpoint of our exchange is for all of our actions to meet in an angle, separate from all, which someone superintends the whole. Moreover, verticism is generated out of a vortex, an accelerating whirlpool that provides a perfect model for the intensification of mimetic crisis—and a vorticism aligned with verticism also pays homage to the artistic avant-garde movement created by Wyndham Lewis. “Vertex” and “vortex” are ultimately the same word, both deriving from the word for “turn”—from the spiraling, dedifferentiating and descending turns of the vortex to the differentiating and ascending turns of the vertex. The “app” I have in mind finds the “switch” (also a “turn”) that turns the vortex into a vertex. From “everyone is Buford” to “all the events you’re modeling on Buford are so different from each other that we might even be able to have a couple words with Buford himself.” So, I’m proposing The V(e/o)rticist App as the name for a practice aimed at converting the centering of the exemplary victim into the installation of the occupant of the center.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My previous post set up a couple of paradoxes, which we can formulate as elements of a historical dialectic.

First, I advanced the notion of history as a process of desacralization, or secularization, which brings into view the essence of the sacred, which is presence on a shared scene. Attempts to supplement the vanishing sacred through the disciplines advance secularization while revealing the means to replace the sacred with explicit representations of our sociality.

Second, I proposed that secularization is an ongoing attack on tyranny, itself a product and construct of secularization, which makes the deferral of charges of tyranny the path to the originary responsibility.

In both cases, there is the further paradox that the remedy for desacralization or, more provocatively, desecration, and the fully conflicted order it presupposes and generates, must be a retrieval of traditionally grounded knowledge from the hyper-declarative order that razes traditions to the ground. But we don’t need to recover traditions of rituals and ideas to re-traditionalize knowledge—all of the tacit underpinnings of our semiotic practices represent traditions that can then be represented. Part of my purpose is drawing upon thinkers like Anna Wierzbicka, David Olson and Marcel Jousse is, beyond beginning to construct a new tradition drawing upon traditions of questioning metaphysics on a linguistic level, to develop ways of uncovering those more tacit traditions, or the obscured ostensive-imperative world that always surrounds us

According to Jousse, the extensive commentaries generated by the early Jewish and Christian communities concerned themselves with the “transfer translations” those communities composed in so as to preserve traditions preserved in now dead languages: first of all, from Hebrew to Aramaic, but, then, from Aramaic to Greek. These transfer translations involved finding formulas in the target language to correspond to formulas in the source language. These formulas are memorized and steeped in tradition and ritual practices, as well as the idiomatic and metaphorical resources that have been exploited within that particular language, so the problem here is not merely semantic.

But this raises a larger question, regarding the image of language we’re working with. Most literate, educated people take for granted an image of language as a vast collection of individual words that speakers of the language articulate according to grammatical rules more or less firmly installed in their minds. This image of language, which almost all philosophical discussion relies upon, is very obviously a reification of what David Olson calls the “metanguage of literacy.” In making language conform to writing, language must be treated as an object of inquiry—that is, it must be broken down into parts or “elements” that are articulated in some way. These elements are things such as phonemes, syllables, words and sentences. Everything in the language must be reduced to these concepts. Most important for our purposes here are words and sentences—the development of prose, which is always an “official” matter, requires that words be seen as identical to themselves, and that the possible relations between words and sentences be subjected to rules. This requires definitions and grammatical rules. Think about how many arguments are ultimately over the definition of words, when it is undeniable that the meanings of words vary over time and space. Likewise, think of how many arguments are over logical, which is to say, grammatical, connections between words and sentences.

The image of language that Jousse and his contemporaries and successors who developed the study of oral cultures and thereby provided us with awareness of the form of our own, literate, culture, is as follows: language is a vast array of formulas, phrases, commonplaces, and proverbs that can be articulated in various ways with each other. When you listen to someone speak, or read a text, you don’t disassemble the words you see and hear and then reassemble them in your mind or brain, like going through the Star Trek transporter; rather, you assimilate the particular articulation of formulas you’re are confronted with to your own set of formulas, revising as necessary along the way. It takes a great deal of discipline to respond to precisely that in the other’s utterance that is not reducible to your own system of formulas—and even then, you are performing a kind of revision of your own formulas under this new pressure, and not some abstract “thinking about it.”

It also follows that the formulas available to speakers of a language have been generated out of what was once a much smaller set of formulas and, if we are originary thinkers, ultimately a single one. This means that there are layers within the formulaic structure of language, and we could distinguish between more concrete formulas and those that function more as templates, whose slots can be filled in various ways. When we’re using language we’re essentially deploying formulas or filling in slots in the more abstracted templates. Needless to say, a great deal of inventiveness and ingenuity is involved here. If you just take a few clichés and switch out the words of those clichés with others more or less at odds with the meaning of the original cliché, and then at odds with the meaning of substitutes, and so on, you would find that you have pretty much all the language you need. Being able to read more complex texts, that is, texts that are the results of more extensive practices of substitution and articulation, means being able to work on those “samples” of language in the same way.

This means (to return to Jousse’s notion of “transfer translations”) that when we “use” language, we really have one thing in mind: how are the language practices that result from a process of substitution a rearticulation vis a vis previous ones the same as, and how are they different from, those they are derived from. Take what has become a very common meme template: the juxtaposition of some attack on or defense of a figure conducted by someone on the left, by someone on the right inserting “now do X.” The juxtaposition assumes some set of analogous features between the two figures; in elaborating on those analogies, along with the differences, you would be generating stories about those figures and the background or scenes they are set in—that is, you would be generating culture. So, rather than having big stories from which we then derive smaller stories and moral lessons and folk knowledge, the big stories really result from the ongoing efforts to reconcile one use of language with another by filling in the anomalies distinguishing them in order to show how they are really the “same.”

The implication is that all our stories and arguments are really aimed at demonstrating that two different practices, phrases, formulas, orders, institutions and so on are really the same insofar they are both translations of some model including them both. A disagreement, then would be each side trying to represent the other’s claim to identity as difference. The best approach to disagreement, then, is to multiply the differences as much as possible and locate the sameness in some “It” we could all still be talking about, and continue talking about. How, then, does all this bear on the paradoxes I began with? The sacral order maintained identity through ritual: people gathering at the same place, at regularly scheduled times, carried out prescribed symbolic acts, which is to say, iterating the originary scene. Secularization and desacralization is ultimately de-ritualization. The myths and ideas can’t be sustained without the ritual precisely because those myths and ideas were nothing more than representations ensuring that the rituals and the community performing them could be deemed the same over time as, of course, the communities and the rituals themselves changed. But this falling away from ritual made it possible to separate ritual itself from the great variety of rituals throughout the world and hypothesize a single scene they would all derive from—all be the “same” as.

The disciplines, meanwhile, try to ensure the sameness of social and political practices through definitions and logic, which is to say an internally consistent system of concepts and categories that can only sustain itself by concealing the dependence of all on ostensives and imperatives. Whoever issues imperatives without proper disciplinary backing is the tyrant, and whoever insists on an event that must be iterated as the source of social order is the herald of that tyrant. This is why the best way into any conversation, rather than requesting definitions and “principles,” must be through some version of the questions, “what model are you working with,” and “who told you to say/do/think that?” The second sounds more obnoxious, but it really leads back to the first, once we get past the more or less bizarre rituals claims to self-origination that subjects of a liberal order generally feel obliged to gesture towards. We can then exchange models, read each other in terms of our respective models, determine what those models dictate or demand of us, and direct our conversation to questions like, what makes us the same as our models; and, how might our models be the same as each other?

I’m not speaking of ignoring or trying to abolish differences. Quite to the contrary, sustainable sameness can only be distilled through a full presentation of differences. You have a model, but what’s the model of that model? There’s no infinite regress here precisely because we’re not dealing with logic but anthropomorphics: human beings came into being at a certain point in time. Here is where originary thinking outstrips logic because it includes not only the question of the likeliest starting point but the question of whether it’s better to speak of a starting point and if so, what kind of starting point? Even more, what kind of starting point are we already talking about by virtue of talking and assuming there is some “it” that serves as a final reference point? We can place “It” (one of Wierzbicka’s primes) at the center—we are always referring to it, but it is never It. It must be generative of all differences: whatever represents despair for you (say, complete social isolation and betrayal by your comrades to your enemy) is the violence deferred on the originary scene; whatever represents salvation is the sign—so, then, the problem is showing that our respective despairs and salvations are the same as the originary scene and in that way, as the other. They can only be the same insofar as they were generated differently from the originary scene, which must have contained the possibility for infinite ramifications. And, then, that is what all our talk is about; and about continuing the conditions under which we can continue that talking. Maintaining that thread of the same through increasing cognizance of differences (or “thises”) is where responsibility for direct acknowledgement of our sociality (the It tacit in every this) begins.

The Linguistic Turn and Generative Literacy

I’m going to begin with the assumption that the linguistic turn entails the rejection of any attempt to find legitimation for what we say in language in some reality taken to be outside of language, whether this outside be truth, nature, human nature, reality, any form of interiority, the greater good, or anything else. This means that language, rather than being primarily representational, that is, trying to provide an adequate and therefore legitimating picture of what is outside of language, is generative—that is, it is relationships intrinsic to representational structures that create what we call truth, reality, nature, good and so on.

To say that language is generative is to say that the meanings of signs are to be found in their effects on other signs, not in reference to reality: the main question, then, becomes, what are the levers or mechanisms within sign systems that make transformation possible? To put it in pragmatic terms, to take the example of public discourse, instead of trying to prove that your discourse represents reality better, the point is to transform language so that your discourse works steadily within it to the point of becoming it.

Anna Wierzbicka’s discussion of modern English in her Experience, Evidence and Sense: The Cultural Legacy of English provides us with an example of what this means: she shows how the entire language was transformed as a result of one intervention: Locke’s theory of knowledge and politics. She traces a whole series of terms, such as “experience,” evidence,” “empirical,” “sense,” and others back to Locke’s usages, and points out not only the historical contingency and cultural specificity of these terms, but that these are among the very words English speakers take to be most universal and commonsensical. It’s no coincidence that these are the words taken to provide us with access to what is outside of language. It lies outside of Wierzbicka’s inquiry to explain how these words operated generatively upon the English language, but I would suggest that raising and answering that kind of question is, in the wake of the linguistic turn, central to any aesthetic, moral, ethical or political inquiry. It may very well be all such an inquiry entails.

The generativity of language, at least in the post-structuralist forms given it by Derrida’s claim that there is no outside of the text or Rorty’s notion of an ongoing conversation of civilization in which everyone participates, is generally taken to be a pluralist doctrine in which the difference inhabiting the sign is irreducible. But the sign that constitutes the originary scene is absolutely generative, insofar as the sign creates the scene and the human, while at the same time presupposing complete unanimity. And, in fact, I think that the linguistic turn, understood through originary thinking, poses a very different kind of problem, to which we can, in fact, reduce all human problems: that of ensuring that all participants on a scene issue, and know themselves to be issuing, the same sign. This is a problem because it never really is the same sign (the linguistic turners are right about that)—since signs only take on meaning within a scene, a sign on one scene cannot be identical to a sign on another scene, no matter what measures we take or what rules we construct to ensure the sign will be recognized as identical—indeed, we take such measures and construct such rules precisely because there is no internal essence of the sign that makes it the same.

There are two ways in which the identity of the sign can be established. One, all participants on a scene can agree that the sign is the same according to some agreed upon criteria for identity—in other words, some metalanguage, which will then have to be grounded in a metaphysical reality outside of language. Or, we can establish the identity of the sign by deliberately and self-referentially constituting a scene upon which the sign directs us to some center. Here, we would embrace what Johanna Drucker’s calls “inscription,” suggesting there is no sign without its embodiment and embedment in material and historical enactment. The problem with relying on metalanguage, or what Drucker calls “notation,” of course, is that any metalanguage is subject to the same self-difference as the language it tries to control.

Language is going to be generative even if we act as if it is representational—pretensions to a secure metalanguage really serve to guarantee a moral or political certainty that avoids the problem of creating in some space of language the shared attention directed towards some center. We can find the origin of this logocentrism in literacy. David Olson has shown that writing was created out of an inquiry in language, including the speech scenes upon which language is used. More recently, Olson has used the notion of classic prose (taken from Mark Turner and Francis Noel-Thomas’s book, Clear and Simple as the Truth) to show that the telos of the metalanguage of literacy is to simulate a scene, modeled on a presumed original speech scene, upon which writer and readers are all present. It is for this purpose that the metalanguage of literacy establishes norms regarding the correctness of sentences and the uses of words—which is to say, it is literacy that enshrines the declarative sentence as the primary form of language—metaphysics is just further elaboration on this.

Insofar as we rely on notation and metalanguage, then, we imagine ourselves to be present on a simulated, always already constructed scene, with guarantees provided in advance that we all use the same sign. We can then proceed to eliminate deviants—the ungrammatical, the illogical, the unclear—which further proves that those of us remaining are all in possession of the same sign. This metalinguistic imaginary elides the difference, constitutive of the declarative sentence, between the scene of utterance and the represented scene. Since the scene of writing and reading can be represented on that scene itself, introducing a difference within the scene, this elision generates anomalies within metalanguage.

These anomalies open the intrinsically imitative and therefore pedagogical dimension of language use that metaphysical presence occludes. This pedagogical dimension can only be enacted “infralinguistically,” to use Bruno Latour’s term. In place of the hierarchy between language and metalanguage we have the performance of the difference of the metalinguistically guaranteed sign through its representation until its event nature is elicited. These efforts aim at making visible and inescapable the event-character of the sign, which is to say the sign’s inextricability from histories, traditions, the various ways in which it has used by different groups in different situations and, above all, from some event, some act of deferral, some origin, the participation in which is the only the way we can reciprocally “authenticate” one another’s use of the sign.

I have been implicitly suggesting an infralinguistic strategy or vocation for GA, whereby we speak and write in “originary” and “generative” English (or any other language). The basic concepts of GA, such as “desire,” “resentment,” “center” and others don’t really allow us to remain unimplicated in the objects of our analyses—on what basis could I claim to be unresentfully drawing the contours of another’s resentment? GA, then, despite its distinctive (if minimal) conceptual vocabulary, is ill-suited to be a metalanguage. I am asking, what kind of knowledge is GA? If it’s a new way of thinking, it’s a new relation to language. For starters, I’m contending that literacy is itself a second revelation, broadly parallel to the emergence of the Big Man—the revelation here being, as I pointed out before, the autonomy of the declarative sentence.

We can make further use of Olson to get a sense of what the implications of bringing this revelation to the fore as part of the linguistic turn might imply. Olson points out that the metalanguage of literacy serves the purpose of “supplementing” the presumed scene of recorded speech with verbs referring implicitly to mental acts that would have been performed in a speech situation. If I say someone assumed that something to be the case, I am reporting what another said, while also distancing myself from it—the other person was presumably more certain than I am in reporting his speech. In an oral setting, this would have been reflected in the tone—perhaps mildly mocking—in which the speech was reported; since we don’t have that tone, literacy introduces supplementary terms like “assume.” This allows for another innovation of literacy: the distinction between the meaning of an utterance, and the speaker’s meaning—we can now represent all kinds of ways in which the two can be at odds.

These verbs then get nominalized and we get new entities, like “assumptions,” and whole new disciplines organized so as to study them. All the human sciences are derived from such nominalizations, and much of everyday discourse (which has been transformed by literacy and the disciplines) as well. Even universally available words like “thoughts” and “ideas” are probably constructs of literacy. What this means is that there are vast domains of linguistic usage that are entirely dependent upon elaborations of the metalanguage of literacy, and also completely oblivious to this fact. We ourselves, within GA, are also thoroughly immersed within the metalanguage of literacy—the difference is, we can know it, and know why, and propose new disciplinary articulations that show such words to be scene and event dependent.

Working “inscriptively,” then, would involve accepting that writing is scenic itself, rather than an attempt to construct a universally shared and permanent speech scene. One of Derrida’s central observations is that there is no single scene of writing—writing, rather, involves a dissemination of texts, each of which would serve to constitute a scene that might reference more or less directly any and all of the other scenes organized around the disseminated text. This means that writing generates samples of language, no more directly related to one particular scene upon which they are iterated than any other. Charles Sanders Peirce argued that knowledge is always of the relation between a sample and the population of which it is a sample. Once we abandon attempts to supplement the source, then, we have samples of language, and we generate hypotheses regarding their relation to language as a whole.

Treating pieces of language as samples involves creating anomalous uses, or, really, acknowledging that all uses are anomalous, and accordingly situating ourselves on the boundary between talking about something and no longer/not yet quite talking about something—“sampling” is a call, or imperative, to generate a new center with an object at it. If we’re obeying the imperative derived from a concept, like, say, “infralanguage,” or “inscription,” then we are looking for samples of language serving as models of these concepts, and looking for ways to make sense of less obvious instances, even seemingly counter-instances, in terms of these concepts—for example, noting the infralinguistic dimension inseparable from the most rigorously applied metalanguage.

Insofar as we have a new center, that center wants to be more central: if we have a center we are using the same sign, and its identity is affirmed in the self-reference that situates one scene generated by the sign in a history of scenes with an origin that is continually marked. Imperatives from the previous scene, like “find new ways to talk about X,” or “use the conceptual resources you have generated to replace some less differentiated way of saying something,” generate the subsequent scenes. Words that bear with them histories distributed across self-referential networks are going to be more generative.

Metalinguistic terms resist operationalization—what, exactly, are we doing when we “assume” something? Are we always assuming what we assume? If not, what’s the difference between when we’re assuming and when we’re not? The later Wittgenstein was fascinated and perhaps appalled by the evanescence of the “referents” of such meta-linguistic terms. It is precisely such terms we can operationalize infralinguistically. If we make a study of “assumptions,” it is not to define and categorize them or to leverage “hidden” assumptions against explicit statements, but, perhaps, to figure out when they come into view, and what kind of thinking is going on when they don’t. Perhaps we can imagine “assumptionless” linguistic performances; or performances that are all assumptions, right there on the surface. The purpose here being to show that such imagining would require new forms of joint attention.

If language is the deferral of violence, the only thing we are ever talking about is how we are going about deferring violence. Forms of language that can be moved across scenes make it possible to defer not only immediate forms of violence but possible future forms, even ones that we can’t yet imagine. In more critical discussions, where we’re interested in the “viability” of concepts, what we’re really inquiring into is how many possible uses for deferring violence a particular constellation of words might have. If we know this, but others don’t, in talking with others all we are doing is helping them to know this. This knowledge must lie in their own discourses, their own vocabulary—if they are going to speak GA with us they would first have to see that their own discourse is always already GA.

We’re all always and only talking about how we are deferring violence but if we don’t all always know this it is because the sign can only refer to a single center, not centeredness in general. So, in entering others’ discourse we identify those signs where reference to a single center interferes with the reference to centeredness as such. This would transform the conversation into one centered on eliciting the distinction between centering and centeredness. This distinction is elicited by treating every utterance as both hypothesizing the way some other sign refers to a center and being, as a sample, a possible center. Our interest in that possible utterance, or sample, then, is in how it can iterated and disseminated in ways that would make more explicit our talking about the way we are deferring violence.

It is this practice of sampling, taking pieces of language and pointing them at new centers, that makes language generative, memorable and effective. The reason for the linguistic turn is that the metaphysical scene of humanism, predicated upon the metalinguistics of literacy, could no longer effectively defer violence. For one thing, by asserting the unity of humanity humanism, the late form of metaphysics (locating the ultimate reality within rather than without), keeps dividing humanity. Deferring violence now requires making explicit the constitution of scenes upon which we take our own uses of language as the center—this demands that we minimize our assumptions regarding what counts as a scene of knowing, and let the object, the “samples,” organize such scenes. The more generative discourses will be those that can create revelatory scenes of the origin and identity of the sign out of the greatest differentiation in sign use. It is the discourse that knows that all we’re ever doing is talking about how we’re deferring violence without it ever being possible to be completely explicit about that will be the most generative one.