Originary Hypothesis as Shared Source and Target

A streamlined way to think about the political future is to figure out the various paths by which the originary hypothesis would be the unquestioned common sense of a new global order. “Representation is the deferral of violence” would be at the tip of everyone’s tongue just like a phrase like “God-given rights” is now for most Americans; every event, along with whatever its specific scenic content might be, would also be an overt commemoration of our shared origin on a singular scene. Nothing less than complete unanimity is to be accepted here, and yet such unanimity must be attained in accord with the logic of the originary hypothesis itself: through the incessant deferral of potentially species ending forms of violence anticipated at a greater distance with increasing rigor as a result of the forms of preparation derived from the latest instances of deferral. Deferral is a form of power no one could ever imagine giving up in favor of paltry substitutes, and enjoyment in life’s goods is continually enhanced as the mimetic desire and resentment informing our choices of objects is continually displaced by the immediate apprehension of whatever draws our attention as a gift whose enjoyment is itself a way of reciprocating.

So, that’s a sketch of the “utopia” or the GA “endgame.” How can you have a theory that you take seriously without imagining everyone sharing it, in however a differentiated and distributed form? Not only that, but the details of the various ways of getting there must be extremely interesting—a way of fully participating in the present. Every word is the Name-of-God, as Eric Gans has put it, and invoking the Name-of-God is a mode of prayer. So, insofar as the originary hypothesis occupies all the bandwidth in your brain, you are doing nothing but praying for the power to contribute to the ongoing revelation of a mode of being so completely hypothetical as to eliminate from consideration all other hypotheses and thereby be ostensive reality. If the originary hypothesis were to so absolutely inflame without consuming our every interaction, would it still exist? If it so permeated our thinking as to leave no other way of thinking, would we still be thinking it? We wouldn’t need it as a reminder, because if we did that would only remind us that resentment still crouches, ready to strike, representing failure rather than deferral. And if our every word and deed were a commemoration of our common origin, would we still be commemorating? As opposed to what? With no possibility of forgetfulness, what need of remembrance? So, we insist upon the originary hypothesis, insert and insinuate it everywhere, so that it will eventually with away, just becoming language itself. Unless we want to assume that, like Christian original sin, a residue of resentment must always remain; while this possibility must be considered, I don’t see why the conversion on the originary scene from each member imitating the others to each member imitating the center can’t be completed. I don’t see how the originary hypothesis could exclude that possibility, why it couldn’t take “yes” as an answer.

As always, the way from here to there is to assume that we’re already there, albeit without a full awareness of being so. This is a mode of reasoning akin to the “sovereign imaginary,” later called the “central imaginary,” I proposed a few years ago. Whatever you say you want, imagine the conditions under which it could be delivered in a way that you would recognize it as the thing that you wanted—and, then, think of what would actually be delivered in that case. Whoever could give you exactly what you want could also want to give you something else and the purpose of thinking along these lines is to deconstruct your desires, yes, but in such a way that you learn to desire particular infrastructural clarifications rather than arbitrarily designed fantasy end products. Installing the originary hypothesis as the sole functioning social software is precisely such a continual practice of translating infrastructure. The more you see what goes into producing your wants the more you want your wants to be interoperable with that process of production.

The paradox of the originary hypothesis as a universal idiom is enacted by treating the originary hypothesis as an increasingly operational translation machine. What does it mean to say that representation is the deferral of violence here and now, wherever and whenever that ‘here and now” is? This scene, whatever it is, is not the originary scene, precisely because the originary scene has made it possible. At the same time, it is, kind of, the originary scene, because we can’t really say when that scene ended (after the first ritual commemoration of the scene has been completed, perhaps, but that has only been completed insofar as it is commemorated by future rituals, and so on), but that in turn just means that the originary scene itself is never perfected as a model as it keeps taking on further “deposits” of memory. An excellent—my knowledge is insufficient to say the best—model for this is Hebrew scripture which, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, becomes increasingly fascinating for me the more I learn about how it was made (my growing familiarity with its historical conditions of production—its “demystification”—only increase my reverence for it). During the 5th and 6th centuries BC, a fairly small number of people worked through what must have been an immense collection of legendary, mythical and ritual material, from diverse, often contradictory and even highly antagonistic sources, all of which had been significantly transformed in meaning by recent catastrophic events which must have made the very work of synthesizing and preserving it both tenuous and at times hopeless—and they created, sanctified, raised successive generations to continue recording, remembering, teaching and performing, no doubt with significant oral and written addenda now lost to us, a revolutionary document we now call the Hebrew bible. This document is marked by enmities, petty squabbles over borders that may not have even been relevant anymore, resentment towards imperial conquerors, disguised antagonisms toward entrenched practices of the target population, and so on—while creating the concept of the human created in the image of God, and therefore a standing rebuke to the kind of mythical, that is, mimetic, violence overwhelmingly characteristic of all human orders up until that point (and with only some diminution, still today), including the most imminent, imperial and intimate violence of human sacrifice. The production and reproduction of this scriptural tradition was no doubt first aimed at reworking the people in whose name it spoke—we can assume that the Hebrews themselves were guilty of all the monstrosities of which scripture accused their neighbors. That this conception of the human and the divine was in the next few centuries worked over in explicit rivalry with the Hellenistic and then Roman conceptions of beauty, reason, power and sovereignty that still largely govern Western institutions both informed by and resistant to that input makes it easier to see why resentments are always simmering and occasionally flare up.

But what I want to highlight here is the unrivaled density of translation work evident here, in which we can see, for example, that a reference to a particular stone in a particular place is a means of evoking certain narrative sequences that rehearse so as to revise and conceal (never completely, just enough to go on) certain divisive contests of competing forms of sacrality—and this, so as to provide an inheritance that will be re-ritualized and re-narrativized so as to be as portable as necessary. This is the work of translation of imperial infrastructures, whose power must be conceded and negotiated, and to that extent even sanctified, but also desacralized and even demonized in part and rendered nugatory in the long run, while resistance to it, mostly failed, but occasionally, perhaps, successful and therefore to be a site of narrative investment and inflation, is simultaneously commemorated in the name of the only power greater than the imperial one. We don’t need to rehearse these entanglements in perpetuity, but the originary hypothesis, an inheritor of scripture, helps us to see this as a model for the very different infrastructural translation work that will infiltrate into the linguistic level of the infrastructure. Whatever happens now, however we talk about it (and nothing really happens if it isn’t talked about, or, maybe evaded in talk about other things), is retrieval, continuation and enactment of the originary event, whether anyone realizes it or not, and therefore a translation of all other retrievals, continuations and enactments (in some order of pertinence enabling this retrieval, continuation and enactment).

We demonstrate this by deriving a more minimal and yet minimally refracted or idiomatic version of the originary scene from any translation. When speaking of translation, we distinguish between the source text and the target language: a particular arrangement of revised and recontextualized idioms that function within one linguistic economy, are to be transferred into an arrangement that will be situated the “same” way in another linguistic economy. For infrastructural translation, the source text is any piece of language in the entirety of any context whatsoever—any sample; the target language is the originary hypothesis. There are multiple histories of programmed deferrals referred to implicitly in any sample utterance an calling them programmed deferrals refers us to the originary hypothesis as we excavate one scene of deferral after another implicit in every word, in its idiomatic, disciplinary usage, after another, and all the other words and sentences implicitly referred to by every word, but selectively so, with the selection criteria determine by the production of the new sample that will be doing this so as to be as helpful as you think you can be in enabling the sample to which you pair your own enter a little further into the central imaginary or intelligence. Your selving cleaves with their selving as you create a linguistic arena to ensure maximal transferability of terms across the paired samples. You want to help them help you help them excavate together, including making explicit whatever remains incommensurable. The end point is the same sample, data created by and because of that scenic encounter, which will enable us to say we’re doing the same thing as they/we did on the originary scene, so that the difference between this scene and the originary one is minimal, maybe even illusory.

This also means that the originary scene is continually overlaid with these other scenes which it translates—we keep removing the overlay so as to prepare the originary hypothesis for the next translation, but residue remains, anticipating the replacement of the originary hypothesis by the residue as it simply becomes language that knows what it’s doing. Take, for example, Benjamin Bratton’s “accidental megastructure,” the “stack”: cloud, user, address, city, earth, interface. Surely a translation of the originary hypothesis is implicit here, with the cloud, the source of endless exchanges, at the center and the users at the periphery. Whatever roles we assign to city, earth, interface and address will entail a revision of the scene, as we make the scene technical by imagining how the first sign would be communicated through the group this time in time, how the group would subsequently “regulate” its approach to the object and then the controlled frenzy with which it divides and consumes the object—and, finally, the way it commemorates and consecrates the event once the food is devoured—imagine them all standing there, satisfied, with nothing between them—what now? Andrew Bartlett located an originary science in the midst of this extraordinary complex and equally constrained scene and I would locate an originary technics as well. Just follow the sign all the way through—think of what it’s being asked to do: restrain a hungry horde; then mediate the newly invented mode of consumption of this horde; then refer back to this unprecedented event. What keeps it the same all the way through? That question remains our lodestone in insisting fanatically upon the minimality of the scene: if you imagine one form of the sign, you must imagine the rest of the scene in complete conformity with it. There are more addresses than users—what are the implications of that for the originary event?

In this way we messengers and evangelists of the originary hypothesis process all events, narratives, texts and processes through the translation machinery of the originary hypothesis so that everything refers to everything else in an ever emergent architecture and infrastructure enabling us to say we’re over and over again doing the same thing under the incredibly different conditions created by our continually doing the same thing. We should be able to speak endlessly about the originary hypothesis without ever mentioning it—the materials provided by all the other events stored and commemorated provide us with all the materials we need to translate the originary scene and misplace the original for a while—a while that can become a longer while, in the faith that if the originary hypothesis were ever to be forgotten because it had become unnecessary because completely institutionalized, it would be remembered or recreated as soon as it was needed because it would provide the only way of accounting for why it was needed. Everyone is always already doing originary thinking and for most of them it may not ever even become necessary to point that out instead of just helping them do what they’re already doing.

Now, let’s say that my description above of the formation of the Hebrew bible, as far as my best guesses based on my familiarity with but certainly not extensive reading in contemporary scholarship on the question takes me, is in fact to be taken as a kind of suggestive allegory of how those of us messaging the originary hypothesis through today’s data field are to proceed. Indeed, how could it not be something like that, regardless of my intentions? That little story of how a “few people” leveraged some heterogeneous materials against massively embedded habits to confer transferable meaning upon a condition of exile and return (perhaps a rare occurrence?) would have to, in the mind of any reader following me closely, have implications for what a few of us might be doing now. That in turn opens a space of commentary, and a return to the originary scene (any time a “few” resist the “many” will suggest the first gesture on the scene) and a model for examining other situations and texts and thereby infiltrating those situations and texts and making them approximate this “transfer translation” more closely. Every text is like this—a translation of some other actual or composite text that tries to conceal and compensate for its deviation from that other text. This is what ensures some, hopefully the needed, degree of cultural continuity. The “few” are always putting their own and others’ transfer translations to work, making them generative. In this regard, data collection, storage, analysis and use is just another field of translation.