Muffled Transmission from the Center

We live in a time when it is plausible to ask about every thought that comes into your mind, “who wants me to think that?” And, then, once you realize that, to inquire into the various means by which those others might be inducing you to think that. But things don’t stop there, because maybe those lines of inquiry themselves fall into the category of things others want me to think for reasons that, precisely because I am trying to sort out what is mine and what is theirs in my thinking, I will never discern. But, then, if this is our contemporary condition, we can then ask, compared to what? Thinking always comes from the center, and the center, as the depository of converged and abstracted discourses mediated by various chains of command, is always ahead of us—those who once lived in a mythico-ritual world were certainly not “thinking for themselves.” But it is possible to redeem the idioms one circulates within, even if their origins and logics exceed one’s own position within the circuit, insofar as one can test, refine and revise the imperatives issuing from the authorities we are bound by. The wildest “conspiracy theorists” not only do not set aside formal, established authorities, but organize all of their theories upon the discrepancy between what those authorities are authorized to do and what they in fact do. We can’t think outside of the powers that would set the terms of any adjudication we might enter or be drawn into, but we can think their outside by entering the space of judgment and recording where justice is done or denied, and getting more precise about what would count as “justice” by working with the assumption that anything we call justice must be doable. This requires intellectual discipline, and the creation of at least preliminary or virtual disciplinary spaces.

If there’s a disagreement, must one or both be wrong? What I want to get at is whether the study of the center requires a concept analogous to “ideology,” or “mystification,” or “illusion” or even “heresy.” Is it possible to let difference simply be difference, even while preferring (but how and why?) one intervention in the world as opposed to another? If we’re stepping outside of philosophy, we don’t have an “epistemology,” but there is still the question of when to claim you “know” something. I tried to deal with this question in the first essay on ‘disciplinarity” I wrote for Anthropoetics but was not satisfied with my answer or approach (nor do I remember or wish to retrieve it at the moment). But the way to approach it must be in terms of respective paths to the ostensive. You can always ask someone, who would have to be making which decisions, and with what effectivity, so as produce what you would see as the event you are hoping for or warning against. If there’s no path to the ostensive then you could say that what the person is saying is, strictly speaking, meaningless; but you could also refuse to shut down the inquiry by remembering that you never know for sure where a path to some ostensive might show up and so you lay down a few markers (here’s where I think it would have to be). And we can say the same about simple factual claims regarding what has happened or is happening, as we lay out chains of witnesses, recorders and reporters and embed them scenically.

My own thinking of “subjectivity,” though, involves the concept of “listening to the center” and “hearing and obeying imperatives from the center,” so if someone finds themselves with no path to an ostensive we could say that the “transmission” from the center has broken down and consider how to describe and explain such occurrences. I would like to interfere with the almost irresistible assumption built into such questions that I, of course, do hear and obey the imperatives from the center because otherwise how could I know when others don’t. That takes us down the path to a kind of pure declarativity that sets its own arbitrary criteria of “proof.” The imperative from the center is always heard anew, and one of the ways you hear it (the primary way, really) is through the utterances (”samples”) of others which must at least be provoking you to find a new path to the ostensive, or retrace one that might have become obscured. The initial ritual scene presupposes complete unanimity, and some trace of that unanimity remains insofar as we are able to exchange signs at all, so one can always try to force it to the surface—and, in fact, we always do, if often in very flawed ways (like pointing out “hypocrisy”). To recover that trace of unanimity it might be enough to describe, even in outline, some act that all participants in the conversation could agree is “good.” This is an undervalued utility of the originary hypothesis—it gives us an undeniable good act at the beginning of humanity, so we could always start there, even if “hypothetically”—if several people all really wanted to grab the same thing at the same time would it be “good” for them, singly and through coordination, to find some way to share it? Then we could work from there to develop analogies with whatever the current situation is. And so the most fundamental imperative from the center is to do that, which we can now speak of as affirming the originary distribution—which really can only be negated in one or another Pol Potish (or, we can now say, “decolonizing”) way.

But the imperative from the center is now conveyed by an occupant of the center, and an occupant, furthermore, who in most places is considered temporary, contingent on the cooperation of a wide range of actors, and subject to open contestation and attempts to dislodge through a whole range of more or less legitimate means. The closer we are to an undisputed monarch the less confusion there will be regarding the imperative from the center. The “what about incompetent/evil/deranged/etc. monarchs” question really comes down to noting that monarchs can create disputes regarding their power because a king who does not or cannot himself recognize the terms of the originary distribution will issue imperatives that themselves have no clear path to the ostensive and therefore require the establishment of factions that must filter, redirect and mitigate orders. But when the occupation of the center is defined precisely in terms of its contestability, then that unanimity around the originary distribution and the imperatives enforcing it becomes impossible to articulate; indeed, it’s prohibited. Liberalism tries to install “values” to replace that unanimity around, ultimately, succession, like “rule of law,” “pluralism,” the importance of opposing opinions as a way of getting at the truth, etc., but these are all ways of conferring power upon the disciplines who will govern in tandem with elements of the state capable of protecting themselves from public scrutiny so as to maintain some continuity in governance. And all this is to facilitate the chopping up and auctioning off of portions of the imperative of the center so that some will never get a clear hearing of it.

What closes us off from hearing the imperative of the center then is a commitment, which we can only with great effort and at the cost of having no “net” for catching information avoid, to a particular succession narrative; a succession narrative that must cut of all paths to the ostensive precisely because it splits off into digressions in accord with the shifting value of pieces of the imperative of the center. No progressive nor, for that matter, can any conservative, tell you how their vision of the future plays out in terms of probable technoscenes. The narratives are designed not to get you too far past the next couple of election cycles. The problem of access to the imperative of the center is the problem of institution building, of data security and scenic design practices. We can at least know something of what we would need to build to eventually acquire knowledge that would regularly interface with governance. And we can know something of what interferes with that, so the inevitable confusions and shortenings of the imperative can at least be made explicit and hypothetical scenes that would draw in information contributory to governance constructed. This practice, as an extension of the originary hypothesis, might then be a way to create a new form of the founding unanimity which rotating occupancy of the center obscures. I’m thinking of Thirdness here, assuming that the best form of thought experiments possible right now might be those imagining potential prediction markets that might be organized around scenes and events determined with precision through the juridical and transdisciplinary originary inquiry (center study). Does anyone really have any idea how all the “deep states” or “intelligence communities” of all those states that have such institutions with transnational reach interact with each other? Where are they aligned and cooperative, where competitive and inimical? How would one measure their respective power? How do publicly observed and recorded events correspond to their machinations? I never see anyone really try and answer these questions—just about everyone seems content either with presupposing the illegitimacy of all these doings and therefore just pointing to the scandalous fact that there are such institutions and they do affect the world, or singling out a particular narrative to “grift” off of. But these institutions operate as they do because the official form of governance disallows governance, which must be done one way or another. So, when there’s a war, or inflation, or scandal, or infighting in a major political party or any of the other millions of events the media can process, what has actually happened across these levels? What kind of prediction market might be established to gather information on the various correspondences between political activity on the surface and intelligence activity in the depths? Maybe we’d discover direct and indirect ways of communicating with the “depths,” by affecting the algorithms they rely on. But only if we clear our heads of our succession fantasies.

I have, though, developed what does, in effect, function as a theory of ideology, what I have been calling the Big Scenic Imaginary. No doubt I had my extensive reading of Marxist theories of ideology from decades ago swirling around in my thinking as I worked on this. It does point to a similar kind of “reification” and. “fetishization” that Marxist theories relied upon, but I’m not sure I ever gave it a causal explanation. Why should “we” use the word “we” so promiscuously, as if the economy, particular countries, the world as a whole had moods, ideas, had made decisions, had concerns and anxieties, and so on? My first impulse for introducing the category was to distinguish my thinking on “resentment” from Gans’s, to make it clear that large groups of people don’t, in unison, resent other large groups of people, as if they were individuals located on a human scale scene. The groups of people resenting each other in such narratives, those of Gans and others, are almost invariably state-constructed groups designated by law in some way, and therefore representable in familiar media rituals and spectacles. And this perpetual construction of antagonisms is a result of the process of the centralization of power tethered to the intensified rotation of occupancy of the center. So it’s this dialectic that underlies the Big Scenic Imaginary: the centralizing keeps things “big” while the rotation keeps recreating the narratives, less authentic and more frenzied (so we have amazing stuff like European countries declaring themselves, on the model of post-60s America, to be “nations of immigrants”).

What about “resentment” as a causal factor interfering with reception of imperatives from the center? This gets us to the central failure of mimetic theory and GA alike—whatever can’t get reduced to the scale of a 19^th century French novel can’t be thought, and broader social developments are addressed only through homilies and thoughts and prayers. Does resentment simply not scale up, and is therefore to be discarded in political thinking? I don’t think referring to the decisions of big players—corporate leaders, finance chiefs, intelligence agency heads, etc.—as driven by resentments will be very productive even if the model seemed to fit the nation-state system from the 19^th into the 20^th century. One could at least imagine speaking of the world wars as driven by mimetic rivalry between the imperialist powers, but even there I think we’d find the explanation limited, beyond the banal sense that you must anticipate and therefore represent to yourself possible responses to your own actions. Governance involves the transcendence of resentment, on the part of ruled and ruler alike, and mimetic theory and GA must both deny this possibility, even while the originary hypothesis presupposes its possibility. To the extent that we explain decisions by rulers as motivated by resentment, especially today, where states are already “networked” and heavily dependent upon “the stack,” we’re really talking about dysfunction, not “human nature.” But resentment, as the feeling that one’s obedience to the imperative of the center has not been reciprocated, ultimately by the center itself, is certainly real, and provides the raw material of media narratives (of which it is also the product). And clearly at that level it clouds our receptors of the central imperative. But the cloud of unknowing that blankets the modern world has its starting point when the British state jump-started itself an empire by subordinating itself to the central bank and writing itself out an unlimited line of credit. And from that point on I don’t think we can say the ruling classes themselves know what they’re doing. Everyone has just been reacting to the British initiative, which was then inherited by the US, while the Anglo-American empire has been mostly preempting potential challengers. It would be trivializing to speak of this in terms of resentment. It is the creation of one device after another to simulate a replacement of sacral kingship, the unity of ritual and policy. The builders of the technoscene, to whom power has been delegated in ever larger doses might be one part of a governing machinery that can create an equivalent unity—computational theocracy, in which we would know ourselves as sites of data exchange and circulation. The other part, perhaps to emerge largely from within pockets of the technoscene and debt enforcement and forgiveness agencies is the new officer class (I don’t yet have a better name for it so this borrowing from Philip Rieff will have to do) and if we can know what will contribute to its formation we will be as close to channeling the imperative of the center as is possible. I start with the assumption that however dysfunctional or even psychopathic the ruler, he will need some reliable information about what’s going on, even if just to protect himself against whatever genuine enemies he has, and so some site of data creation is allowed to remain functional. And if there is always that minimal scene of intelligence, other scenes can be infiltrated and transformed by it. In that case, we know where to look for the imperatives of the center. So, the question is not so much how and what can we know as how we (someone, anyway) can build pedagogical platforms in and adjacent to institutions that might become suppliers of knowers to those who want to know.