Disciplinarity and the Center

To continue articulating in a more thorough way the transitions from ritual, to juridical, to scientific scenes, and to do so without forgetting the reciprocal imbrications of them all (we’re never and will never be done with the ritual, as attempts to transcend it only install particularly dysfunctional and vicious versions of it), I will now look at the transition from the juridical to the scientific and technological scenes, to which pretty much all of our contemporary struggles over the center can be traced. In many ways, we already have a society of the disciplines, and the juridical has been significantly displaced (just think of how much scientific evidence, including social scientific evidence, much of its nonsensical, has come to shape juridical proceedings and their mediatic representations.) We couldn’t turn back from this even if we wanted, because the juridical form, with its standards of proof and always problematic notions of intentionality, invites from the beginning these extra-juridical interventions—a large part of the development of the juridical has been “baptizing” and regulating these interventions in a way that makes them consistent with its own operations which, I will remind you, are aimed at representing and resolving conflicts through the use of centralized and measured force that would have otherwise led to vendettas and blood feuds that would make it impossible for social exchanges of all kinds to develop beyond the bounds allowed for by local patriarchs. Technology, as scenic design, is already a mode of governance insofar as it generates new forms of surveillance, record-keeping and constraints on and constitutive infiltrations into social interaction, while more literal innovations in governance always become expanded intelligence operations drawing upon and calling for the creation of new technological forms (an obvious example is taxes, since, just in order for the government to get the money it wants from each of us it must be able to detect and archive all manner of transaction and accumulation).

The ”subject” of science is the “community of inquirers,” or the disciplinary space. A group of people is organized around an artificially created scene which has been designed so as to determine what happens if we do this to that. All other possible doings and happenings must be excluded from the space. I’m prioritizing this kind of disciplinary practice over “technology” because the building of any technological system will require multiple experimentations in which the builders will have to stop and create a space where they see what happens if we do this to that. The attitude or stance of the participant in the disciplinary space is determined by the assumption that truth is what the inquirers will come to agree upon in the long run. It is a mode of deferral, and a paradoxical one: every truth the inquirers agree upon will only serve as the launchpad for a new inquiry. The deferral, then, is the point, and this also means a deferral of power and a refusal of invitations and opportunities to exercise it. Once a scientist says “science dictates that we now impose...” he is no longer a scientist. There is a “politics,” though, to protecting such a space, and acknowledging that it must be maintained even if it will never give us the answers to the most urgent questions we face now. Those answers will come from protecting the space, not violating it by trying to leverage its authority—rather, the answers come from modeling political spaces on disciplinary ones, taking into account—making part of the object of study—the different temporality and greater vagueness of relations between thises and thats.

Veblen sees science as grounded in the disinterested production of knowledge, distinguishing it on these grounds from the “barbarism” of exchange and therefore sacrifice based moral economies—very much including Christianity, where you trade faith for eternal life. Science and knowledge, then, would be outside of exchange. In that case it would also be outside of desire, but even if we grant the possibility of a transcendence of desire so complete as to shame the most devoted ascetic mystic, it would still be necessary to effect that transcendence—unless we imagine science getting to the point where all humans are somehow raised free from desire. But desire would enter into the attempt to accomplish that. I think we will be better able to speak of science, or disciplinarity, if we see it as continuous with ritual and juridical deliberation insofar as it is a mode of exchange with the center—in this case, the desacralized center. Science is born with the state, which does not reduce it to being a servant of the state; it means that science bears with it the imaginary of a perfected state, perfected at least insofar as it preserves and promotes scientific activity itself. Science is an ongoing exchange with the signifying center while proffering an invitation to join to the occupant of the center, prolonging and exposing the imperative gap constituted by the difference between signifying and occupied center, asking us to, whatever we have to do in the present, and whatever contingent and partial truths we need to do them, to never forget the “long run” and the need to continually lengthen it. This also means that science (and I’ll suggest this must be true even of mathematics) is always ultimately historical—resolving the most fundamental questions in physics (like the reconciliation of gravity with quantum undecidability) will require situating them within the history of the universe.

If the disciplinary space involves seeing what happens if we do this to that the disciplinary space can be grounded in ordinary, irreducible, practices of meaning making. Can this person be trusted? Does this person love me? If this person is behaving anomalously, is it something in the situation, in my expectations, or some previously unexposed component of that person’s self that makes it appear so? All of these situations call for the establishment of a kind of provisional disciplinary space. A great deal of literature deals with these kinds of imagined spaces, in which one creates a new form of scrutiny. A great deal of literature remains within a Christian framework which exposes and denounces sacrifice by representing an exemplary form of it, and this leads to narratives in which love, trust, respect, acknowledgement and so on are destroyed by attempts to “test” them—what is by now a familiar, humanistic, anti-scientistic message. But testing trust by mistrusting and testing love by doubting it is a reductive approach and therefore a caricature of science. More scientific would be taking care to create new objects of shared attention that would either increase love and trust or contribute to the broader set of relations that formalize such commitments and provide new models for them. This means that it’s scientific to elicit and strengthen latent and neglected features of ritual and juridical institutions and concepts.

The transition from taking inherited faiths and juridically anchored rationalities as the ground of our institutions to taking the disciplinary stance as the ground involves working towards the reversal of the relation between school and society proposed by Gaston Bachelard in his concluding words to The Formation of the Scientific Mind: “society will be made for school, not school for society”; that is, constitutive pedagogical relations, not necessary those existing institutions we call schools. Seeing what happens if we do this to that is a learning practice, and staging it is therefore a teaching practice. One of my most fundamental differences with Eric Gans’s version of GA lies here. We agree, I think, that all events and therefore all meaning can be understood as re-stagings of the originary event (although I imagine Gans wouldn’t put it quite that way)—these re-stagings are retrievals. For Gans, the post-sacral retrieval and re-staging of the originary event is found in liberal democracy—in the formal equality established in the market economy and voting system. Language derived from the originary scene—our sameness before the center—is certainly deployed here, but such language would be deployed in any social setting because we have no other language. Even the most brutally inegalitarian order would construct some form of equality in relation to some center, while simply ignoring those features of the social order that don’t fit the model—just as the liberal democratic market order ignores or cleverly narrates out of view whatever doesn’t fit its model.

The originary event is an instance of successfully seeing what happens when we do this to that—meaning is achieved. To claim the liberal democratic market does the same involves one in endlessly circular apologetics. It is in the successes of disciplinary spaces that we see the retrieval and restaging of the originary event. The same patience, or deriving from deferrals, is involved in the attempt to establish meaning even in what we take to be non-scientific spaces. It is the disciplinary stance that replaces the sacred, and this means the disciplinary stance must be eminently non-destructive and must be able to find a home in ritualistic and juridical spaces. Thinking in terms of replacing religion, morality, ethics, aesthetics, etc., with science was always the wrong and anti-scientific approach (and I’m not sure how much scientists, as opposed to politicians and propagandists, ever thought this way). An ongoing displacement of existing infrastructures by ones more disciplinarily informed is a different matter, as displacements are always ongoing. There can be no certainty here, but, to take one example, there’s no reason to assume that increasingly knowledgeable and analytically penetrating Biblical criticism couldn’t strengthen Christianity; or that a data-driven digital humanities wouldn’t enhance the power of literature. Not wanting to know things will eventually place you in a ridiculous position.

The mode of exchange with the center of disciplinarity is that of data security, which includes the creation and archiving of knowledge that would, say, both inform a speech regime organized around a robust enforcement of laws against slander, libel and defamation while remaining invulnerable to that regime. The current dementia regarding “misinformation” is completely wrong, but so completely that it points to what would the right approach: a juridical order that makes everyone liable for lying about others while giving expanded forms of standing to bring the liars into court and make them accountable—all this assumes a “knowledge base” that is reliable and shared—that is, a knowledge base full of claims upon which accusations of interested lying would leave no mark. Curation and archiving and data analysis would here continue to rely on juridical categories like perjury and relevance. I’m not imagining, then, through the slogan of data security, a form of rule by computer programmers and IT guys—the broader provenance of data precedes its final categorized and analyzed forms. To govern is to protect the disciplinary stance and to display that stance: the public process of singularized succession in perpetuity is a permanent disciplinary project, an open study of forms and requirements of leadership under changing (as part of the changing) scenic and infrastructural conditions. The irreducible need to figure things out, to project immanent scenic possibilities, within a time frame imposed by the need for decision, and to therefore step back while stepping in, brings the disciplinary space into every practice. Maintaining the disciplinary stance while everything around you militates against it is qualification for governance. There’s always some difference between what you say and what you do, even though your doing is simultaneously a saying and your saying a doing: the disciplinary stance entails catching this difference and letting the doing be the difference. If you’ve done it right, everyone else will want to do what you do, but won’t quite be able to, not in the same way at the same time, and you will thereby be installing difference. If you’ve done it wrong, which you always will to some extent, everyone will coordinate their doings against yours. Let what you have done happen and it will attract both responses, and this happening provides the infrastructure for saying what everybody else is saying. You will have done something to something and now you organize spaces for all to see what as happened, as the happenings accrete.

There is a kind of oscillation involved in the disciplinary stance, one between the continuing search for models behind models, simultaneously an unpeeling of anachronistic labels pasted on things by the disciplines, an ongoing dispossession of assumptions, on the one hand, and a retrieval of lineages made up of intentional inscriptions, on the other hand. We can’t help but construct a hypothetical history of our own emergence, even while not only acknowledging but drawing intellectual sustenance from the fact that the hypothesis will only be tested in the long run. It’s not so much a “belief” in the originary hypothesis that is to displace all previous faiths and re-embed them in the infrastructure as its operationalization as an idiosyncratic universal translator. The disciplinary stance as an attractor is the operationalization and retrieval of the hypothesis, the revelatory apocalypse of which is all of us still being on the originary scene itself—it has never closed. I think this is a stronger and more operationalizable claim than any faith could make.

The forms of exchange with the center must always be named, which is why we can never. transcend the question of succession: some formal transference of “deemed” power, authority if you like, must always be made explicit—even if it’s just a nod of the head in a small informal and close-knit group. If the juridical can convert the vendetta into contending claims heard in court, this is because the emergent imperial power must deem all forms of possession as having their origin in the imperial center. (The vendetta, in using violence to maintain the power of the patriarch, is also formalizing succession, albeit in ways incompatible with written forms of record keeping.) Presently, the gathering of data relies completely upon juridical forms: we gather information about individuals and groups based upon categories through which the state exercises juridical forms of governance. If the disciplines can come to create categorizations that yield knowledge without deriving them directly from “non-scientific” juridical sources, that would only be either by reducing humans to biological and chemical categories or by creating such tightly woven and intentional systems of human interaction in which humans are so at one with their practices that simply describing a role on a particular scene will bring into play a kind of “curvature” in the infrastructure that suffices to further design the scene so as to bring that role into even closer relation to others enacted on the scene. So, something like “operator of device X in group Y within system Z” would so completely articulate your relation to broader distributions of positions and access that it would render categories surrounding “citizenship” obsolete. Maybe we can assume a kind of triangulation of the juridical leading to its displacement—it would be precisely those involved in advanced disciplinary activities who could set aside humanistic sentimentality and simultaneously monitor themselves as a biochemical community hosting and transmitting various viruses, germs, etc. and having specific effects on enabling environments. This is likely and desirable to the extent that the equivalences constitutive of the juridical (humans as bearers of rights, as citizens, and so on) are no longer given priority over other representing exchanges with the center. And this will be the case insofar as those equivalences no longer seem real because they interfere with more urgent ways of handling “hand-offs” of power. This would be total data exchange with the center and the actualization of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”