Fict-tech-tion; Archae-tecture

Eric Gans has remarked on many occasions, in agreement with Rene Girard, that mimetic theory has been derived ultimately from literature—rather than, by contrast, from philosophy and the social sciences, on the one hand, or even religion, on the other. I agree with this as well, and the reason for this is that literature is a continuation of scripture under post-liturgical conditions. Philosophy is a repudiation of ritual, and the social sciences are split-offs from philosophy, sharing this constitutive repudiation. Scripture, which is to say, the sacred text, shares a kind of contemporaneity with philosophy, insofar as the sacrality of the written word is only possible and necessary when there is no longer a shared sacrificial center. There’s a rejection of sacrificial ritual here, as, for example, in the Hebrew bible’s denunciation of idolatry, but this repudiation is in the name of acknowledging a more originary centrality, rather than recentering truth in the exchange of declaratives among those who have set aside their ostensive commitments.

Scripture is testimony, which means it derives from the juridical systems established, along with markets, and reliant upon writing, in the ancient empires. Scriptural testimony is extra-juridical, as it represents a plea, a stating of one’s case, before God and fellow petitioners—but this must be modeled on the petitioning of the monarch by subjects. The whole apparatus of “monotheism” is modeled on the divine monarch, with the appeal, over the head of the divine monarch, to God, with whom a covenant is entered into, modeled on those between the imperial power and its vassal states. As per this covenant, God will see His people through until the end of all such worldly monarchies. Scripture is essentially exilic—I have hypothesized that it is modeled on the special case of injustice delivered to a privileged subject of the king; special in the sense that it implicates the justice of the system as a whole insofar as the masses of enslaved or “unpeopled” can be represented as sufferers of this injustice as well. The logic of scripture, then, is to record the testimony of the victims of this special injustice which brings to bear the weight of an evil empire on a single individual and community whose relation to a redemptive divine is mediated by that individual. This also means that scripture is the testimony of those exposed to and exposing human sacrifice. Scripture creates the privileged text, which must be authenticated and commented upon (including the comparison and assessment of various versions and translations), and which therefore also creates a new disciplinary space, which allegorizes its own interpretative practices through sacred narratives, and is ready to imitate its exilic, sacrificed heroes on behalf of scripture itself.

The love of God for those who have been so despised must be great, and scripture testifies to this love—and also, of course, the testing and chastisement of those who have been promised such love. God is incommensurable to all earthly powers, while being intimately concerned with each living soul; we must, according to scripture, imitate God by showing this concern ourselves for our fellow sufferers. This testimony on behalf of the unseen, unheard, unconsidered by the powers, is also the logic of literature. Poetry is the cry of abandonment and assurance that it will end; fictional narrative is the continual playing and testing out of the sacrificial practices renounced in scripture. In literature, there is nothing but language, though, and so the historical tendency of literature is to reduce it further and further to pure utterance, the miracle of utterance in itself. I have been reading Trevor Stark’s Total Expansion of the Letter, which examines the ways in which Stephane Mallarme’s purification of poetry so as to reduce it to the sheer emptiness of language, informed more powerfully than has been recognized the avant-gardes of the 20th century. Gans knows Mallarme very well, admires him, and has written on him, but in learning more about Mallarme’s fascination with the sheer being of language, its universality and fragility, its endless deferrals, even, within the limits imposed on him, its origin, leads me to believe that the originary hypothesis may owe more to Mallarme than Gans, as far as I know, has ever imagined (the same seems to me true of French poststructuralism as well; and, while I’m on the subject, it seems to me that Derrida’s most indelible contribution will be that he helps us to read philosophy and all its descendants as literature).

There’s something intrinsically anti-technic about scripture, and this carries over into literature—the ancient machinery was composed primarily precisely of those unpeopled slaves, and brought massively to bear upon the human sacrifices. Scripture and literature testify against this insult of effacement added to the injury of enslavement and slaughter. But this mode of literarity is no longer tenable, and no longer necessary since, as Girard and Foucault pointed out in different ways, the resistance to scapegoating instituted by the spread of scripture created the legal norms of objectivity that ultimately made science and technology possible. Now that technology has replaced the old world of imperative exchange with the center with design practices through which one extends the imperatives one receives into questions circulating through others, other modes of non-humanist literarity serve as better models. For literature to continue to work, not so much as a means of anthropological revelation, but as the ongoing manifestation of language modeling enactments of its constitutive paradox by “languaging,” it must serve as a model for the singularization of succession in perpetuity through the imperative order of technics. To design is to arrange a scene, including a scene organized for the arranging of other scenes, so as to issue an extended imperative through a relay of imperatives, landing on the final recipient of the imperative for whom it must be an imperative to perfect his practice so as to set the scene for its successor practice. I don’t see language in general as technics, but literature turns language into a model of technics insofar as it displays the way in which in language, in this way just as in technics, the implicit preconditions of an explicit practice either present themselves or are elicited as an interruption of that practice. So, literature that continually exposes the devices and narrates its own coming into being to the point where that coming into being is a hypothesis shared by writer and readers, models the designed participation in design that constitutes an idiomatic intelligence that must deliberately and explicitly see to its own continuity. I’ll call this kind of literature “fic-tech-tion,” which we might see as a kind of meta-programming.

Alongside the meta-programming of fic-tech-tion, everything is design, because everything is scenes, and what we do on scenes is design them so actors on those scenes can design new scenes, meta-scenes, sub-scenes, and so on. All of technology, including the most “technological” (automation, engines, robots, algorithms, etc.) are part of scenic design, and the principle of scenic design, again, is to issue delayed imperatives through a relay of imperatives so that the final imperative should always be to perfect a practice predicated upon singularized succession in perpetuity.  The model I propose for design is the derivation of architecture from archaeology, or, archae-tecture. I should emphasize that I’m not trying to give practical advice to technicians, engineers, or architects here; I’m providing an ultimately literary model for thinking about design. Let’s take a simple example: you are building a new structure where a previous structure stands (and will therefore need to be destroyed) or has stood. You can take as the imperative for your construction that the new structure be situated in relation to its surroundings in the same way the previous structure was situated in relation to its surroundings. “In the same way” creates a constraint, but one whose contours need to be determined: the same in what respect? A study of the structure being replaced can focus on its function in relation to the buildings, neighborhood, area, city, country, world, around it; it can focus on appearance, relative size, the combination of aesthetic architectural traditions drawn upon, its use of materials and energy, its sources of funding, political debates over its creation, and ultimately, some combination of all of the above. This would involve the design of algorithms and simulations to “factor in” all these variables, and since part of the character of the structure being replaced is the structure it replaced, and so on, all the way back to the beginnings of human habitation and even geological deep time in that place, this would turn into a complex, extended practice always in need of further perfection, under the assumption that one is continuing the series of practices constitutive of that location. The rule, then, is that the future of the place must be derived from its origin, or initial conditions, which, of course, can always be done in any number of ways, but which would be subject to increasingly rigorous criteria, which might involve retrieval, compensation, honoring, penance, extrapolation of lost opportunities, among other possible relations to the past.

The splendors and ruins of the past are always present, and if they’re not perceptibly present, they are present in their absence, as the existing structure is taken to allude in some way to what it doesn’t directly present. I suppose this might be a kind of archaeofuturism, even though I’m not very familiar with the concept. As I always insist, this is not just a way of projecting utopian futures (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but first of all a way of engaging the present as if, of course, this is what all design of our settings is already trying to do, albeit in a blinkered manner. In the same way, each use leverages the origins of our practices, as we can recover them within the current iteration of those practices, so as to derive a new practice that both follows completely consistently that origin while being unimaginable from within it. All of the arts are to be pressed into the service of archaeotecture, even if not obviously or directly, insofar as they all construct scenes, with some centered performance or representation, with an audience separated from the center by some more or less permeable boundary, and prime the members of the audience to go forth and participation in further archeaotecture. More and more, the relation between the arts that have been sequestered, in theaters, museums and elsewhere, and their surroundings, will become subject to design practices: maybe certain kinds of sequestering will continue to be encouraged, but that itself is a design practice.

To engage in a bit of disciplinary scenic design, and perhaps scripture, myself, I’ll return now to Gans’s location of the aesthetic on the originary scene, in the oscillation of each member between the central object and the sign of the other. In heading toward the center, drawn by the object, you see the gesture of aborted appropriation of the other, which leads to deceleration and cessation, but then a renewed attraction to the object, and so on. That there is a moment like this on the scene is undeniable; that we should call it the “aesthetic” is far less certain. The aesthetic is a late category, which relies upon distinctions made within advanced civilizations between beauty, the good, and the true, and therefore falsifies much of human experience where images, sound and performance has been in direct service to the sacred center. If we make the obvious point that this oscillation is both potentially infinite and yet necessarily comes to an end, we can introduce a sequence into the oscillation whereby the sign is perfected, placed in sync with a measured, ordered movement to the center, and therefore becomes a guide towards what will have been a pre-rehearsed appropriation of the object. In other words, the sign takes shape as a practice of designing the scene of appropriation, which then makes it possible to iterate it afterwards as ritual—and sustain it as a kind of reciprocal bounding of the other during the sparagmos. Originary satire preserves and represents the initiation of the oscillation, in which the other appears as both menacing threat and impotent victim—originary satire is softened, erased, and forgotten as the scene is designed and the other is “positioned” on and shaped by it, meaning that the practice of scenic design begins by recovering the originary satirical possibilities of the space and then representing the gradual erasure and preserving traces of those possibilities. (If you say that “satire” is itself a late concept, relying upon the broader theatrical world of ancient Greece, in particular, I would counter that move by saying, alright, we can call it originary mockery, being very the same and very not the same as the other—it would be hard to deny that something we might call “caricature,” in the performance of actors at the center, goes way, way back.) Planetary scale scenic design fully replaces the imperative exchange with the center constitutive of the sacrificial—the practices producing this (we still have a ways to go) are the matter of hypothetical fic-tech-tions.