I’ve been working with the hypothesis that we find, in late 17th century England, the near simultaneous emergence of capitalism as the Bank of England is established and becomes the creditor of the government itself, on the one hand, and that of the two-party system, the embryo of post-revolutionary constitutional orders, on the other. The connection is in the demolition of the sacrality of the occupied center, i.e., the overthrow of monarchy as the fount of government. But this “economic”-“political” conjunction needs another suture, both to include the massive technological developments that we can trace, at least intellectually to this same period, and to properly account for how valuing by discounting against expected future earnings and the ritualized rotation (overthrow and installation) of figures at the center are tethered to each other. This suture is the assumption than any “thing” is composed of parts that can be broken down into other parts, ad infinitum, with the composition of that thing being governed not by any defining integrity constitutive of the thing but through “laws” which would apply to all things, while operating differently in each case. Any scientific inquiry or engineering project is predicated upon this assumption of compositionality, and this assumption is in turn impossible with thoroughgoing desacralization. Anything can be taken apart and put together again, much like, say a clock, that quintessential technology of the early modern age and inaugural metaphor for Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan—which is, of course, the first attempt to map out a thoroughly desacralized world in which anything, including humans as individuals and communities could, certainly in thought and to a great extent in reality, be disassembled and reassembled. Hobbes’s thought, as we know is a product of the English civil war, and his masterwork essentially an attempt to disassemble and reassemble the occupied center which had just been violently disassembled in reality. Hobbes, in this moment of crisis, was far more forthright about these assumptions than public thinkers would allow themselves to be for quite a while, so they had to advance Hobbes’s premises while disapproving of and disavowing his “atheism,” “cynicism,” etc.
I’m interested here not in Hobbes but in the founding, generative assumption of compositionality, which lies at the basis not only of modern science but of a whole range of political and cultural developments that aggravate the crisis of the center, insofar as the center itself can presumably be disassembled and reassembled. My argument regarding technology has been that you can see reality as disassemblable and reassembleable under conditions of desacralization or loss of unanimity in addressing the center when its possible to see masses of people as manipulable and recombinable in any way desired. Behind the English civil war, a kind of template for the American and French (and Russian…) revolutions to follow was a couple of centuries of state breakdown and state building across Europe, carried out through wars and a great deal of Machiavellianism. And, of course, the discovery and exploitation of the new world suggested unlimited possibilities for moving, shipping, arranging and working large numbers of people. Compositionality, or, let’s say, the “breakdown,” would have to suggest itself as a way of thinking through the possibilities and problems opened by the new situation. The social sciences become possible, as the starting question, “what are the most basic components of this thing and by what law are they held together” is suited to inquiries into trade and wealth, government, thought, learning, and anything else humans do. And, of course, the possibility than anything could be put together in some way as to make other things happen, that the entire world is made up of raw materials to be composed in useful ways, equally suggests itself—more precisely, it suggests itself to those struggling to acquire power in a very competitive arena, where freedom from traditional constraints provides an edge.
This “discretization,” which ultimately becomes digitalization, has itself its origin in grammatization, which is to say the alphabet, the beginning of writing, and the first science. Sentences can be broken down into words and words into sounds, each of which can be represented by a letter. All reactionary complaints are in the end about writing. On the one hand, then, there cannot be a privileged, permanent occupant of the center, one who simply belongs there and is inseparable from that location and all the duties, ceremonies—forms of attention—orchestrated around it. Such a position would resist breakdown. On the other hand, terms of ownership that would be turned over in the struggle to determine assets in such a way as to best advantage those best positioned to discount against future earnings relies on the a priori of breakdown—anything could become an asset, something to be invested in, utilized or exchanged. So, here we have a link between economics, politics and technology. This link establishes relations across desacralized, or broken down, institutions, but the relations are not harmonious—there’s no reason to assume what is isolated and targeted as an asset will also facilitate a breakdown of some scene so as to recompose it in more productive or energy efficient ways; or that either breakdown will coincide with the rotation in office favorable to either process. We do, though, have a map of the path the candidate for center occupancy will take towards ensuring succession, at the very least his own self-succession (i.e., remaining in power as long as possible): mobilize the distribution (lending and investment) priorities in such a way as to create the scenery that will increase and empower the various layers of active and passive support needed to ensure one’s continued occupancy. This will ultimately be a way of selecting a successor very different from oneself as lending and investment and technological possibilities not taken will find their constituencies and agencies.
There is really no way of thinking other than one grounded in mimesis that could do anything other than accelerate the breakdown. If you try to be a reactionary today you will have to find some basic “principle” to organize your own projected composition—exactly like Hobbes had to attempt. Mimetic theory operates its own breakdown, but stops at the threshold where species becomes community. That’s the basic, minimal “unit,” but it’s a unit the inquirer can’t step outside and recompose because any inquirer is still doing the very thing described—at least we can still say this with the originary hypothesis, while Girardians remain mired in muttering about apocalypse. The deferral of violence through representation is a very unique “prime” or elementary particle. How you are doing it as you are (re)discovering it is the measure of its truth and reality. And you can’t do it by yourself—it is always a demonstration, an exemplarity, which is to say, a pedagogy—pedagogy is, then, the unit—the “interface” between teaching and learning is the very thing that makes the model emulatory rather than rivalrous. This means that the basic “units” of any inquiry modeled on the originary hypothesis would be thresholds and interfaces, and tied, cybernetically, to the threshold or interface between the space or scene of inquiry and the object of discovery itself. There is no limit to the possibility of discovering and creating (finding and founding) such thresholds, but that means that there are unlimited possible tetherings between inquiry and realities, and that we’d look to networks of such tetherings that would be activated, reworked and spawn data with each discovery.
So, it’s possible to counter the ongoing progressive reduction to homogeneity, the quantitative, equality, interchangeable, etc., not in the name of some already existing or lost sacrality (a center demanding, in itself, as a condition of recognizing it, unqualified devotion) but the pedagogical relations necessarily built into every human encounter but also continually corroded by the breakdown. This includes starting from the intrinsically qualitative dimension of data security, which is establishing who has seen, heard, felt and said what, when, and upon what scene. And this is what language is for, so learning is always language learning. The more suited to their posts all these individuals are, the more you’d want them to shape their roles, and determine who is to succeed them. This breaks things down to the most originary interaction, that of showing another what the center needs, which is for you to emulate rather than seek to replace me. And for both of us to emulate another, who exemplifies whatever emulatable mode of being each of us models our actions on—this other might be an ancestor or metaperson, but at a certain point someone will adopt the mantle of that ancestor or metaperson, and so we’d want to keep learning how to recognize that as well. Of course there can be false “mantlings,” but the more expert we become in what’s involved in inheriting one mantle or another, the better equipped we will be to ease the transition from a flawed occupant to a better suited one.
The counters I have been suggesting across ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes provide us with the thresholds that serve as analytical units of analysis and re-scening. Assets are always already data, and the more we treat them as such the more data we can solicit regarding the articulation of scenes comprising the totality of the infrastructure and supply chains—we could translate the price of a given asset into the entire distribution of agents across institutions better or worse placed so as to ensure data security, i.e., the regime of ostensivity. Technology, the realm of scenic design, is always already peopled by pedagogical platforms built into the technology itself, simply to ensure its functioning and the continuing supply of skilled personnel to man it, and we can always be on the look-out for an as yet unexploited platform, some prop around which a new scene can be constructed. And there will always be resentments, which can be rerouted to questions of distribution and pedagogy, i.e., to someone making decisions that attempt to “short” the system or gain an advantage now that seems more certain than a later accomplishment or reward whose reality might seem too mediated, unlikely, or dependent upon the faithfulness of too many. And then fact-finding and convention-assessing scenes are constructed, to match up some accusation against a circumscribed reality. Introducing differentiations in (idiomizing) currency is also essential to creating the necessary threshold: creating currency whose reliability is tied to sustained modes of cooperation around a shared center will eventually become used more widely and oscillate between certified users and anonymity, assuming the institution sourcing it can withstand attacks from other power centers, perhaps because it has already infiltrated them.
The most durable threads of my thinking through GA, my “anthropomorphics” (despite my heavy reliance on and unbounded intellectual respect for Charles Sanders Peirce, I only realized lately, thanks to the Peirce twitter account, that Peirce also argued for a kind of “anthropomorphics”), going back to way before the political changes that led me to break from “mainstream” or “official” GA, are those of disciplinarity and language learning. Here is where the not reactionary, not even conservative, but well armored, resistance to the corrosions of desacralization are to be found(ed). Reintroducing a strong understanding of the center simply amplifies the significance of these concepts. There’s no greater beauty, and nothing more holy, than showing someone how to do something and letting them show you in turn. Even if it involves “bad” things sustaining the pedagogical order will entail showing “good” things that will eventually crowd out the bad. The only way of ensuring that something is the same is by having one person show another how to do it and that other person performing it back for the teacher. And this is the only way of maintaining traditions and inheritances, it is the source of all aristocracies, chiefdoms, and kingships. The overt and even overdone sacralization of those relationships is the best human beings could do then, and the work and devotion that went into these community sustaining relationships is a source of awe—but now we can and must minimize and reduce these relationships, break them down, into the elemental particles, exactly as you do when you try to teach someone how do something (“no, don’t stand that way, more like this…”). I think there is a robust research agenda here, one requiring the entire extent of existing institutions as a learning scene.
The way one currently contributes, according to one’s ability, to the tributary center, is to create a new mechanism whereby the scenic sensorium converts into actionable intelligence for disciplinary actors to lock a juridical concept in so as to pre-empt juridical mediation. To use a simple example, inventing a new way not only to detect “racism” or “transphobia,” but to automate the transmission belt from detection identification and exemplary punishment of offenders near and far, low and high. The parallel “economic” move is to identify an asset the value of which is defined by a set of preconditions known to those also most capable of seeing to the maintenance or creation of those preconditions. Both moves rely upon pipelines to state intelligence and feeding its interest in tightening the constraints upon the more transient and potentially unpredictable actors on the political scene in particular; perhaps it all gets summed up in the woke financier who operates both to elevate effective attack dogs and launder money through donations and funding and who can be completely immunized or hung out to dry by the intelligence apparatuses as circumstances require. Perhaps the woke speculator is now the privileged mode of subjectivity, the form of worship, we are increasingly expected to approximate. These are the extremely trying conditions under which a transfer idiom must be created and communicated. Such an idiom can only create thresholds in which commemoration/scene setting, juridical deferral of vendetta, and the dedication to creating scenes out of disassembled scenes continually inform and support each other. A new type of intelligencer who can do this inside the tributary system is the program.