On the Existence of World Scenes

If we’re going to talk of the stack of scenes then we’re going to be speaking of hierarchies of scenes and scenes referencing other scenes in various ways. If we think, for example, of a deliberation regarding some law leading to a vote in the US House of Representatives as a scene then we would have to acknowledge the specificity of that scene—it has a center, it generates resentments that are institutionally deferred in such a way as to reinforce the center—while also recognizing that everything on that scene is informed by myriad other scenes—the scenes of lobbyists meeting candidates in closed rooms, of congressional staff strategizing media strategy, activists and media outlets doing their own strategizing, etc., and then all the cross-over scenes between these various actors. And we are on some other scene here, me writing about this and you, whoever you are, reading it, on the scene mediated by electronic technology. I plan to encroach on McLuhanesque media theory here, by collapsing it into technology, or the stack of scenes, and that into pedagogical platforms. I’ve approached this before, drawing the fundamental line between the claim that media is an “extension of man” and my own claim that media is scenic design. At the same time I want to bring together my thinking on technology, which has a lot of not quite integrated components, but none of which I want to abandon: the stack of scenes, scenic design, the perfection of the imperative, mimelogical impressments and, more recently, bringing the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative into closer alignment (maybe I’m forgetting something). It’s not that any of these descriptions contradict each other but that there is something to be gained by attempting to synthesize them. Moreover, Yuk Hui, in his new Machine and Sovereignty, recalls (as do Bichler and Nitzan in their Capital as Power) Lewis Mumford’s notion of the “mega-machine” drawn from the ancient slave labor and military armies—something which I also had in mind in thinking about technology in terms of the kind of desecration needed to turn men into machine parts and then model actual machines on those configurations. Maybe I won’t get all this done in this post.

Media (or technology) as the extension of man retains a humanist residue, as there is a man to be extended; technology as scenic design has the human and technic entangled from the start, in a way consistent with Eric Jacobus’s reconstructing (in my reading) the precondition of the originary scene as the “recursial” object-based aggression made possible by the proto-human’s use of tools doubling as weapons. The creation of the earliest scenes is therefore already technological, as we are all instrumentalizing each other to protect and take instruction from the center. The earliest scenes were ritual, and ritual always entails design, because the participants are playing strictly choreographed roles that require them to be positioned in relation to each other and to the center in very specific ways that can be repeated. And the ritual is technical insofar as it makes something happen, in this case the co-constitution of the community and the center. This leads me to transfer this ritual dimension of the technological to the pedagogical, also at the heart of the communal and ritual (“education” is just an “extension” of “initiation”). This may be the least intuitive of my claims here: how can I say that the real purpose of building factories, cars, airplanes, advanced weaponry, medicines, etc., is the creation of pedagogical platforms. That social media conforms to that concept much more readily might suggest that I’m just projecting the obviously interactive nature of social media to earlier forms of technology. But what we need to remember here is that technology is also always (and this is something I forgot above) a mode of governance and governance is always technological. Governance always concerns countering some real or anticipated resentment by bringing the governed into closer accord with imperatives from the center—making the governed more visible, as James Scott contended, but also making the center more legible and intelligible. So, technology always points outwards towards war and inward towards governance (which also involve imminent war against some section of the community), and this therefore means always training the governed in ways that make them more fit for both. So, yes, the purpose of factories, new forms of transportation driven by new forms of energy and all the rest is “ultimately” aimed at increasing coherence, adherence and competence in desired ways.

Even from the standpoint of the individual inventor invention is fundamentally pedagogical: as AI teaches us especially forcefully, to replace a human activity with a technical device means studying that activity just as you’d have to do in order to practice it and in the process creating new human activities that can be replaced, and so on. Media theory tends to focus on the consumer or user of the media of technology—how cars transform living and working patterns, etc. If we look at things from the producer’s standpoint, or in terms of governance, then all those changes in lifestyles appear as opportunities to create new conditions, new modes of consensus and new paths towards proximity to power for the officer class. Idioms like “perfection of the imperative” and “bringing the ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative into alignment” point to a trajectory that is both driven and stifled by distribution at the center. Under desecrating forms of power, Instrumentality of power is centralized while occupancy of the center is “desecured,” introducing divisions within the governing class and making the power of the central bank on one side and intelligence agencies on the other side more overt. One of the founding insights of the progressives, and the reason for their now generations long attempt to undermine and rework through subterfuge the US Constitution is that once technology reaches the point of quasi-monopolization dependent upon extended supply chains and technological coherence and continuity there are all kinds of things we can no longer productively argue about. The standpoint of the small producer can no longer dictate politics, even ideologically. But the Progressives themselves had to work through a political order that lacks fundamental transparency regarding the source of imperatives and therefore relied upon technical and scientific metaphors. And they had too many of their own resentments to accurately gauge so as to enable them to give due respect to, and gracefully defer the resentments of those undergoing rapid transformations out of their own control. I wonder whether it would be possible to untangle the strands of 20^th and 21^st century technology that owe more to the relative competence in centralizing (perfecting) the imperative and those that owe more to back and forth subversions of untrusted sectors of the governing class.

The task here is to speak of all this as the stack of scenes—scenes within scenes, scenes simulating other scenes, fake scenes and real scenes, scenes behind the scenes, etc. We can’t name all of the trillions of events taking place daily throughout the world but we can keep tokenizing those that best serve as proxies for others in the ways that juridical orders (which include economic exchanges) make visible. I stay focused on the juridical because, as I’ve explained before, even events that seem outside of the juridical like scientific discoveries and technological innovations ultimately appear in juridical forms by relying upon property rights, investments, liabilities, insurance, sales, and so on: a new invention created by some lone individual in their garage only becomes an event once it enters that arena. We could say that the media already tokenizes events by presenting them in a particular shape, and that the media’s representation is itself an event that is tokenized by that same media and others. It is tokenized in the sense that the event through its representation draws upon a kind of credit—we pay attention for some reason—and either accumulates or dissipates credit as a result. We could also say that the narrative forms and genres through which events are presented are tokenized. And events are tokenized so as to prompt those interpellated by them to position themselves within the nomos, in a way preparatory to entering the juridical. Events almost (maybe I don’t even need that “almost”) always take the form of an implicitly juridical contest, in which competing claims are put against each other, in which we are incited to accuse or defend someone who has been accused. However much people want sci-fi talk about the acceleration of technology beyond human will and desire, even the futurists will get to the point where they have to accuse someone of preventing us from getting there faster. The only way to sustain a frame outside of the juridical is to remain solely within the ritual or the disciplinary: in the former case, that would mean creating a new nomos and doing nothing more than expanding it and refining its distribution; in the latter case, it would mean remaining strictly within a hypothesis testing mode where one is merely recording effects of some controlled action in strictly mathematical terms. Creating a nomos is the work of exploration, conquest and settlement, and is therefore the stuff of sci-fi but can also apply to earthly forms like the foundation of institutions and such things as start-ups, which therefore supply us with something like our modern myths. And events represented within the juridical will always refer back to this foundation, which itself always settles into a juridical form—which, though, in reality it always had as the discovery or foundation will have always had its origin in some charter or grant. (This is why an especially effective and somewhat cruel way of debunking such origin stories is by finding some legalistic sleight of hand that gave one or another of the founders the rights later exploited economically. It’s also why uncritical celebrations of foundings, like the story of the creation of a great store chain always comes across as kitschy and vaguely dishonest—and also will almost invariably contain a sub-plot where rivals or the government use legal machinations to block the hero.) And there’s very little of interest in the event of scientific work itself to non-scientists until the invention or discovery can be presented publicly. So, we are led back to events ultimately taking the form of framing transgressions to be remedied, with the public brought in as a kind of jury, but sometimes solicited as witnesses, or a braying mob outside a courtroom demanding justice.

So tokenizing events would involve creating chains of precedents in which guilty parties and types of transgressions can provide templates for future events to be slotted into. In this way the media producer builds an audience that presides over certain kinds of crimes and claims and is trained to respond in predictable ways toward them. In this sense, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the enormities supposedly committed by the WEF or the “murder” of Peanut the Squirrel. If we assume that events have effects that don’t get captured in media mobilizations, then we’re looking behind those scenes to the real juridical scenes, that is actual court cases, too boring or drawn out or inconveniently revealing to get media play, but where real distribution takes place. These events can be tokenized by those researching them as well, but differently—the media tokenization realizes value that can be immediately cashed in by the media outlet, its investors and its collaborators in the intelligence agencies, political parties, activist organizations and think tanks, etc. These actors can think in terms of exploiting the short term for the medium term, but not far beyond, with perhaps the exception of some within the intelligence agencies (it’s hard to know about this). The tokenization of scenes with a great degree of reality, though, can think long term precisely by planning the creation of a new nomos out of a more precise building of precedents and assets out of those precedents. There is then a question of where the real nomos building intersects with the flow of pseudo-events, “pseudo” in the sense that the juridical framing of them is more of a fantasy vendetta—we see this when some think tank or policy formation group writing up detailed position papers for prospective reference by political actors get dragged into the public light as an involuntary witness against some political enemy who can be associated with that group. The point is to avoid such occurrences but the point of the media is to dig up and exploit them, and sometimes one has to say something. So, you try to be as uneventful as possible: we’re really just looking over this data, trying to solve these very nuanced administrative problems, etc. But an officer class pedagogical company training its universal translation machine would be equipped to tokenize this artificially created event in a different way, to bring charges against the media outlets themselves—this is why the pedagogy company would have to have a Nomos/Class Action division as well. Then you drag those who believe they can produce the scene and stand outside of it, as shadowy prosecutors, onto the scene as defendants. And in this way you enter onto world scenes, create world scenes, while tokenizing them within a narrative that only the most patient and resourceful (in all senses) could assetize to the point where assets become data.

I can sum it up in this way for now: we can distinguish between media in terms of how they enable the leveraging of the more fundamental juridical infrastructure and the disciplinary and aesthetic inscriptions of that infrastructure. But there is also a dimension of the technological more broadly that involves expanding the nomos—the stack of scenes can always add new scenes with new territories to distribute. In this way we can work with media theorists like McLuhan and, currently Andrey Mir, without seeing media as an independent force. If we see media in the frame of governance, we can apply the Jouvenalian model by seeing centralization via the production of additional “units” of direct state action as operating through and over the juridical, which is to say shifting the boundaries between the juridical and the vendettas from above and below. Different media, and different uses of media, are more or less suited to eroding and reconstructing these boundaries. There’s no way to separate what is “inherent” to a particular medium from its historical function in government, and McLuhan also recognized that particular media, like, say, radio, will have different effects in, e.g., literate vs. illiterate societies. Perhaps the best way to generalize is to identify the possibilities for data security opened up by a particular media and the way struggles over the center make for data insecurity in that particular media. In this way we could still speak about things like truth and falsity without reducing such determinations to mere declarative sentences: its more a matter of preserving the integrity and continuity of the imperative of the center, which is really consistent with bringing the various speech forms into alignment. And this returns us to the centrality of pedagogy to the stack of scenes, as pedagogy is a performance of archiving, of creating, maintaining and transmitting practices of collecting, sorting, preserving, becoming data.

This turned out to be a more narrowly focused discussion of the media, suggesting that the synthesis of stacked presencing needs a wider scene.