Reconceptualizing Desire

I have termed the “Big Scene” the transposition of the originary scene upon post-Big Man scenes that operate according to a different logic of the center and are therefore distorted by this transposition. On the originary scene, the central object is an object of consumption and, simultaneously, a source of proscription. The proscription is reconciled with the consumption by imposing an order of equal distribution, with “equal” determined by relative proximity or similarity to the central being by members of the community. So, you can consume, on the condition that you do so on the terms of the center—what I just referred to as “central being” is the ongoing iteration of the originary proscription as modified by the relative centrality distributed across the group.

Once a human comes to occupy the center, this “grammar” starts to change. The Big Man, and certainly the sacral king, can be sacrificed and perhaps even devoured, but not on a regular basis—it’s not like a hunting party bringing back an elk every few days. The occupant of the center starts to distribute, and can no longer be seen as an object of consumption. The more the occupant of the center is placed beyond sacrifice, the more thinking in terms of equal or appropriate distribution of the central object is at odds with reality. But this configuration continues to make intuitive sense, because we have our origins on the scene, and no culture has done more than create specialized practices that enable practitioners to defer the implications of these spontaneous intuitions. This notion of the “Big Scene” is a pretty close equivalence to the concept of “ideology” that Marxists struggled so mightily over through the 20th century. All the forms of desire and resentment, embodied in emotions ranging from “greed,” to ‘vanity,” to “envy,” to “anger,” “hatred,” and so on can all be reduced to some narrative that has others enjoying some part of the central object that is “rightfully” one’s own. This narrative projects the intentions onto others that makes them suitable obstacles to one’s desire within the narrative, and introjects the intentions that make oneself the victor, on whatever plane that enables the narrative to be roughly reconciled with reality, or, more precisely, with one’s continued participation on future scenes. And it’s all a “misrecognition of one’s real relation to one’s social relations,” to speak Althussereanese. Or, to invoke a once famous essay of T.S. Eliot, your anger, hatred, or for that matter, love or empathy, has no “objective correlative.”

The fact that, in a post-Big Man order, everyone can imagine one’s own centrality intensifies the anomalies. Not only must one receive one’s rightful portion, but the terms on which one deems it rightful must be recognized. It may be that the tendency toward every man being his own cult, with the consequent cargo-culting, has made the extreme centralization of modern states easier—it’s always possible for those within reach of the center to align enough orbiting fantasy worlds so as to pursue whatever path toward centralization provides the path of least resistance. The disciplines, inheritors of the Axial Age acquisitions, preserve specialized practices of deferral while also accelerating the turnover at the center, depleting those very acquisitions. But, as I have pointed out many times (and therefore won’t belabor here), the indebtedness of the Axial Age acquisitions to narratives of the exemplary victim ultimately contribute to fantasies of centrifugal centrality. The separation of the center from any scheme of equal distribution requires the abolition of such narratives and the installation of practices which iterate this very separation from redemptive victimhood. What this conversion looks like is the following: you are angry, say, and you want to express this anger and extract some kind of tribute, material or symbolic, from your object of anger; as soon as you put the question this way, you realize you are in the realm of equivalents, or values—X amount of anger = Y amount of reparation; so, you then start to calculate the means by which this value can be secured (one person would have to suffer one way, another person could have to be recompensed in another way, etc.); which in turn leads to the imagining of a series of acts that would secure it; and to the gradual realization, through the mapping out and implementation of these acts, that they are ultimately incommensurable with the value they are intended to obtain; that the reason for this incommensurability is that various individuals, and perhaps institutions, would have to be “in place” for the practices to have their intended effect and one has no way to ensure they will be; leading, finally, to the rerouting of those practices to contribute to everyone, including oneself, being “in place” of maximal addressability. This kind of conversion of ritualism and narrative into practice and hypothesis can be designed at any scale. Addressing the center from your presumed position in relation to the center through your engagements with others opposes invoking the center on your behalf against others. This requires large scale linguistic, moral, institutional and infrastructural reconstruction.

The moral and intellectual implications of installing the iterative center are immense. The only possible order is one in which Big Scenic thinking is abolished, with everyone “intuitively” seeking out maximal addressability to sample utterances, everyone engaging “spontaneously” in scenic design practices. The occupant of the center is not only beyond sacrifice but beyond distribution, which is determined by the needs of participation on one or another “team.” This corresponds to the structure of scientific thinking and practice, which always involves a conversion from some kind of “atomism,” in which reality is conceived as having a determinate number of “pieces” to a conception of the field as being organized around a centered concept that is simultaneously inside and outside of the system. In social practices, questions of distribution and “desert” are converted into respective places in a shared practice that is partially explicit and partially implicit in the very dispute that threatens to degenerate into questions of distribution. The translation of a sense of being shortchanged or belittled is translated into a proposal for doing things differently, and embedded in that proposal is the first step by the complainant towards establishing that new way of doing things. One exchanges one’s portion for a hypothetical place in a modified collective practice. The moral rigor of abstaining from demanding your portion matches the intellectual demand of replacing the search for ever smaller “basic elements” in increasing complex relations with the enactment of hypotheses that can attract converted desires.

Concepts like “desire” and “resentment” can’t survive the shift from narrative to hypothetico-practice. The means for further perfecting your hypothetico-practice are always there, and so the drama of erecting obstacles to your obtaining your rightful portion can’t gain any foothold. Neither can the projection of enemies aiming at shoring up those obstacles, which means no resentment—of course, your practices are dependent upon others, and cross purposes can lead other to interfere in your practices, but the “data” generated by such interference is itself incorporated into your revised practice. You can always render explicit the implicit (and thereby generate more implications for new practices to reveal), test the emergent meaning of sample utterances, and make yourself maximally addressable, and that’s all practices do, even scientific and technological practices, which design scenes, like all other practices, by showing how what seemed external to a scene is really constitutive of it. The perfecting practice generates new ostensives, thereby obeying the oldest imperative, which we retroject to the pre-imperative originary scene, to generate ostensives around which new spaces can be created.

It is the emergence of planetary-scale computation that makes the installation of the iterative center possible. What is new here is that we are always already within data, and hence dependent upon innumerable observations, controlled and uncontrolled, recorded and transmitted in various ways, with the provenance of all of it tailing off into vagueness at some point. To start with one data point as an anchor for organizing a field is to already have a hypothesis of the whole, just like determining what counts as a “sample” is to hypothesize the whole. From the sample we extract a search term, and what happens to that search term as it is run through a data field will depend upon the algorithms created so as to sustain that field, but the operations of the algorithms also depend upon the search terms entered into them. Seeing every utterance as a search term, aimed at organizing a field, is a very minimal hypothesis of the way we enter streams of data as living, breathing hypotheses. Greeting someone in the most conventional terms is the entering of a search term into the system, even if it’s a search term governed by highly restrictive algorithms returning extremely predictable responses. Of course, sometimes even the familiar greeting will return anomalous responses, revealing new data fields.

When we enter terms into a search engine we embark on a process of successive approximation, without end or even an aim that can be formulated in advance. I might be curious about how the voting patterns of a particular demographic group has changed over the past 50 years. So, I type in something like “Hungarian-American voting” into Google, and I might (probably not in this case) get back a chart with clear numbers—from 40% Democrat to 45% Democrat, or whatever, over the decades. But then I might get interested in the difference between those Hungarian-Americans who vote Democrat and those who vote Republican, or parallels and differences between Hungarian-Americans, Czech-Americans, Romanian-Americans, etc., and then how differences within these groups parallel one another, and then whether these voting patterns overlap with other patterns, like membership in various associations, profession, education level, and so on. If I then meet a Hungarian-American, or, say, someone who is ¼ Hungarian-American, I’ve got them mapped out in a way which may or may not bear upon my specific interaction with them, in which case that interaction is the introduction of another search term into the system.

So, the world is thereby spread out into fields, fields within fields, fields overlapping other fields, all in motion, and we get the image of moving swarms shifting this way and that which leads to some beautiful imagery and is a new kind of art, but since it all derives from data, which has been gathered and stored by institutional entities of varying degrees of official sanction and reliability, this entire swarm simultaneously confirms the solidity and authority of the institutions collecting, storing, transmitting, and allowing varying degrees of access to data. Data gathering, going all the way back to the first statistics gathered by early modern monarchs, is the technological form in which the High-Low vs. the Middle process has operated—we are all abstracted from our embedments in kin and place and equalized before the central power as demographic categories. But it can also be the case that statistics make us all the middle, albeit high-middle, middle-middle and low-middle—everyone is searching and a search term, everyone is responsible for the maintenance of some data chain: in searching, in being a search term, you are modeling for the algorithms. Statistical institutions are set within vast mimological impressments, where humans and machines co-constitute practices, and so all the frenzied struggles over the center appear as struggles over the certification of data, which really means the naming of things that can be indicated ostensively. Which brings us back to the originary scene, but not in the horizontal form of peering sideways at our neighbors to see whether they’re encroaching on our portion (what could this even mean within data fields?); rather in the vertical form of directing all our attention to ensuring that the sign we all emit and see is the same sign to the maximal degree of possible confirmation, so that even those who deny it must do so in a way that confirms it, so that it is really the center putting forth the sign through us. Since such confirmation can never be confirmed once and for all, perhaps this is a kind of “desire”—a desire to see and hear the fields we feel ourselves to be immersed in.