Revivalistics

The center is whatever interferes with violent centralization. Think about it this way: have you ever felt (and given into) the temptation to “pile on” someone who is being criticized, attacked, or ridiculed? There is no way you would have been thinking of the clever bon mot you are about to add without the mimetic instigation of those who have already dropped a couple. Then you know what violent centralization looks and feels like, even if we can’t really place some good natured ribbing among friends in that category. But the reason we can’t do so helps us to answer the obvious question, well, what kind of concentrated focus on an individual or group would not be violent centralization? We must be permitted condemnation of wrong actions, sharp and uncompromising critiques of thinking and behavior, the conviction and punishment of criminals, and so on—otherwise, how could we even address the problem of scapegoating without engaging in it ourselves? Where is the boundary here?

The boundary is scene-specific and our knowledge of it partially tacit, so we can’t draw up hard and fast rules, but we can construct thought experiments that include the interruption of an emergent bout of violent centralization. The good natured ribbing follows from a “tradition” of friendship and it is “framed” in terms of the roles each occupies in the group—at the same time, the nature of the ribbing can become a bit less “good” if, say, it is persistently, and perhaps imperceptibly increasingly directed at one member, or if the “material” of the ribbing is taken from outside of the range of regular topics and therefore has not been “framed” and “vetted”—like, say, some argument a couple of members of the group have been having elsewhere and here transport to the ribbing; or a new vulnerability of on the members (e.g., he has just lost his job) makes him a target in some fresh way. The transgression of such boundaries, from a carefully constructed normative environment to one in which other vectors of mimetic rivalry are transmitted, is a rich source of art. Here’s how we can tell when that line has been crossed: at what point would it be meaningful for one member of the group to reframe the scene so as to block the path to the target. By “meaningful,” I mean that both the potential victim and emergent victimizer(s) could see what they are becoming. If the intervention is wrong, then the intervening member is merely ridiculous and will be laughed at within the same “good natured” frame, enabling him to rejoin the group; if it’s right, the hostility directed toward the initial target will be transferred to the intervening member, but with everyone more aware of what’s happening, and a more even contest that now depends on the intervener’s will and ability to serve as an alternative model to the other members of the group.

If we scale up a bit, the difference between exposing abuses and organizing a mob lies at that point where the creation of a case relying upon, building and activating institutional or institutionalizable norms is replaced by a contest to see who can make the target more attractive, unprotected, vulnerable but also, paradoxically, more powerful and urgent. (“The monster lies there right before us—this. is our chance...”) The normal rules of dealing with social disorder must be suspended, without any “new normal” being instituted. Here, as well, the boundary will be marked less by victims fighting back (because if they’re genuinely victims, they can’t, against a unified mob) than by defections which might be wrong, misguided, misdirected or futile. This is just about the most difficult kind of thing we humans have to do. All of this shows up in language, in whether we can point to without tearing apart the same thing, because if the concerted and inter-referential pointing to interrupts the tearing up it will become a kind of artificial space in which more and more “interesting” and “relevant” things can be noted and which makes the tearing apart increasingly distant. An enemy may still have to be killed, and a danger of the community may still have to be confined but doing so will add to our knowledge of the various ways of “dealing with the enemy” and “dangers to the community,” and first of all of identifying those who belong to these categories. Those who, to put it bluntly, stand between the mob and victim in this way, are listening to the center—which can also, of course, be done more or less acutely and carefully (other voices, ultimately those of the mob, have to be “tuned out” or modulated).

All of this is pretty familiar, but I want to say more about the crucial need, in developing GA, to scale up—we always begin with small group settings, because that matches the originary scene, but social order can’t very usefully be modelled on a bunch of guys ribbing each other. We have to turn our attention to orderings that are predicated upon a sacrificial logic and those that aren’t—once we’ve made a breakthrough to non-sacrificial means of controlling violence, then those means provide the model for all other settings. But a lot can, and has, gone wrong in this transition: much of modern civilization can be seen as a kind of auto-immune disorder, where our ability to detect orderings that not only are explicitly based on sacrifice (e.g., inter-group vendettas) but the “potential” within not obviously sacrificial orderings to “revert” back to sacrifice has led us to find and fear dangers which are in fact negligible. Anything that looks like a ritual can set off alarm bells if the sensors are set to a low enough threshold of detection; so, for that matter, can anything that looks like devotion to anything other than maintaining that threshold of detection—if you care more about your family and your neighborhood than about the proper level of sensitivity to even indirect and hypothetical threats to protected groups, then you have yourself come under the scrutiny of those with the proper level of sensitivity. I’m well aware that those with radar set to detect the tribal and the ritualistic become a tribe of their own with their own, far more bizarre rituals and martyrs; and that a great deal of power and wealth is invested in maintaining and deploying the infrastructures of detection and response. But I’d still like to propose that those of us who would to see communities and institutions develop their own means of deferring mimetic violence while sustaining the necessary level of mimetic “energy” needed to develop cultures of emulation will do better to set aside the admittedly difficult to ignore malignancy informing the hunt for the unmarked (and unprotected) and nevertheless operate under the assumption that the difficulty lies in our remaining at a crude level of data collection, storage, curation and analysis.

So, if “racism” becomes a proxy for “threat of lynch-mob violence,” and we then go off looking for proxies for “racism,” we not only delegate all power to the anti-racist “experts,” but, more directly, are working with corrupt data collected something like 70 years ago and barely analyzed. If we agree that the threat of lynch-mob types of violence must be controlled as a fundamental condition of civilization, we can also assert that, in that case, we should be having our social sciences gathering data directed solely to answering the question: what kinds of conditions, relations, legal structures, inter-group enmities, forms of economic dependency, and so one produce what we can take to be proxies of various degrees of likelihood that certain sectors of the population might “evolve” towards intolerable forms of violence. But this wouldn’t just be a project for the human sciences in the strict sense: each and every one of us is a human scientist, gathering as well as giving off data and curating and analyzing in the situations where decisions need to be made—where to walk at night, where to buy a house, how to go about protecting oneself, which politicians to vote for, and so on—what are well known as “revealed preferences.” A lot of the human sciences should involve little more than making what is implicit in such decisions explicit, and in broadening the context of the decisions that are explicit. In this way, the human scientists would be collaborating with their “objects” of study who would in turn become more “subjects” of the study.

Now, if we bring in the other sciences—environmental, biological and medical, engineering, and so on—all this obviously gets far more complex, while the superfluity of data currently at our disposal makes it possible to have a data-driven order that is far more participatory than what we have now. As I suggested a couple of posts back, this means that ultimately the most important form of security in any order is data security, or intelligence. The integrity with which data is identified, collected, labelled, curated, employed, distributed and organized is paramount. Nothing we do can mean anything outside of that. And this includes ensuring data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, and that money and assets, which increasingly function as data, measure and record what they are supposed to. The only mode of governance that will be anything other than haphazard harassment and protection rackets will be that which ensures that data is controlled and distributed in accord with the capacities of those who can use it and the needs of those supplying it. This also means that the only meaningful politics today would be one that contributes to a transition from the current distribution of data-drivenness to one in which all institutional entities “gravitate” towards or approximate total commensurability or fungibility of data precisely so as to support the infinite incommensurabilities and non-fungibilities of the pedagogical encounters and contingencies that create the idioms through which each of us enters the field of data. A brief look at the conditions of data handling and usage scattered across all the governmental, scientific, media, education, health, military, financial and so on institutions throughout the world would demonstrate the immensity of the task.

So, now, something new. I want to zero in on that idiom I dropped earlier, when I referred to those of us who would like to sustain the level of mimetic activity and engagement in every scene required for each scene to develop a culture of emulation that would control its own mode of mimetic rivalry and potential violence. Cultures of emulation are probably the oldest kind, as every archaic tribe no doubt educated and initiated its young through the promotion of models for emulation, mythical and living. This continues into modernity, as it must (could teachers stop referring, or even gesturing involuntary to the best pupils and implying that others might be more like them?) but is still at odds with it. We speak of “role models” and “mentors” (again, we must have some elements of a culture and even economy of emulation), but these are never to infringe upon the freedom of the individual or the procedures of the institution. But we could set ourselves to judging and reforming each institution in terms of how it would best generate an economy of emulation in which every single act and decision would be justified in terms of “being” or “doing” like some promoted model. This would also have to be an economy that encourages individuals to step up and test themselves and be tested by others as candidates for such models. As I’ve pointed out before, this would engross us in studies of what is involved in being “like” someone under conditions that are inevitably different than those under which that person was “like” someone else.

I have still not read Ghil’ad Zuckermann’s Rivivalistics, but I’m going to do my best Pierre Menard and apply his approach to the program I’m proposing. With the data at our disposal, if we can revive dead and dying languages, we can revive long-dead communal forms. We would want to type into our database the search term “orders that best approximate rule by model.” I think the results would satisfy traditionalists and reactionaries, but there’s more to it—we would have to revise the search, or create the proper translation program, so as to identify which current forms of organization would be the best receptacles for such revived forms. This would then mean that those interested in one revivalistic project or another would work on creating groups and communities that would be better receptables. Rather than simply insisting that something lost or stolen be recovered or returned, such projects would participate in the project of “cleaning up” our sewer like data streams. It would be possible to bring into focus those elements of revived forms that could create economies of emulation and sift out the purely sacrificial elements. Such efforts would have an interest in promoting other revivalist projects, even among ancient enemies, because we could also develop programs to help us to game out the causes of ancient conflicts and convert those causes into modes of reciprocal learning and exchange. And my guess is that what would, of extinct orders, be best suited to a world of data exchange (but also controlled data currents), most “tensile,” would not be the bloody rituals themselves but the kinship and clan relations which I genuinely think could with the help of ethnographic, archaeological and biological data (like DNA) be revived in an attractive form that creates a “middle” capable of productive transactions with “high” and “low.” It is not too hard to imagine a revived ethnos, presenting its data to various institutions and negotiating for various rights to in-group authority—among the data offered might be such as shows such an arrangement would lower crime and inter-group violence rates and other positive benefits could be adduced. You could start with, I don’t know, cousins fourth removed as the outer boundary, and offer invites to all that would be included in that group, complete with a revived language, folklore and other cultural appurtenances which might be more or less central to group formation, with the group also being more or less plugged in to surrounding cultures. Make the group as attractive and non-degenerate as possible and you might draw in the best candidates for increasing your numbers. Included in this might be claims to land acquisition, which, of course would be complicated, but could also be subject to negotiation and land and population exchanges. It’s an uncertain project—without achieving a certain threshold of revived peoples, those modeling revivalistics might turn out to be too isolated to sustain inter-generational stability—but it might succeed, a lot would be learned from it, and it would put a lot of hypotheses regarding the centrality of group belonging and various ways of determining group belonging to the test. At its most successful, revived clan and kinship relations, and a total economy of emulation (which would itself provide pressures to embed and materialize emulation in long-term forms) would abolish all the abstracting struggles over the center, articulating data commensurability with pedagogical and idiomatic incommensurabilities.