One way of summing up my “dissidence” towards the “mainstream” GA represented by Eric Gans would be to distinguish between two ways of understanding “scenic thinking.” For Gans, it seems to me, scenic thinking is the way we think of others: we “explain,” “describe” or “narrate” what others think and do in terms of a scene hypothetically occupied by those agents, a scene modeled, of course, on the hypothetical originary scene. For me, scenic thinking includes the thinker—in other words, some implicit answer to the question, where are you when you think or speak, is always part of the thinking or speaking. If the scenic conditions of your own discourse are not translated or translatable into that discourse, in my view you aren’t really thinking scenically---yours is a sceneless thinking. And a sceneless thinking doesn’t represent a break from philosophy and the human sciences so as to found something new. Even more, sceneless thinking leaves you with no alternative to working with the materials offered by the media or, at best, some version of reality promoted by a canonized text (and institutionally approved through that very canonization). A particular way of narrating and framing events thereby emerges, one in which you locate one-to-one equivalents between the originary scene and the “prepared” scene you happen to be working with. So, the “free market” is “like” the alignment of participants on the originary scene, the resentment of one ethnic group for another is “like” the resentment “felt” and presumably suppressed on the originary scene—perhaps the best example is the definition of antisemitism Gans has advanced, which maps Jews and non-Jews directly onto the first participant to issue the sign and those who come after, respectively. If you examine Gans’s writing on antisemitism and the “Jewish Question” more broadly, I think you will see that “Jews” are perpetually frozen, much like the figures on Keats’s Grecian Urn, in the pose of those who invented the one true God (who created the world and declared all humans to be equal) and who did nothing else thereafter. The question of why anyone would resent those called “Jews” today for a discovery made by some very different people who weren’t even called “Jews” 2,500 years ago, never gets asked, much less answered. And this is dictated by the model, which must freeze all the “pieces” as if on a game board which the players have left, having gotten bored and moved on to other activities.
These reflections converge with another issue which has become increasingly urgent for me recently—the question of scale. We have, in GA, an originary scene/event from which, we hypothesize, humanity has issued. Gans has made the very bold claim, one I would “double down” on, that everything human can be traced back to some “moment” or “element” on the scene. And the converse must be true—everything on the scene must be carried forward in all of the diverse and increasingly complex paths the human species has taken. But this can’t mean that a particular category, with the meaning it has for us (“us” being a particular segment of the historically spread and diversified human species), can simply be “found,” intact, on the originary scene. This remark lies at the basis of the objections I’ve made recently to Gans’s references to “morality,” the originary kernel of which he claims to locate on the originary scene. Such efforts to map contemporary categories directly onto the scene must fail because, in this case, a term like “moral” is a latecomer to human societies, on that has taken on a distinctive meaning in certain sectors of the modern West, a meaning that it does not have and has not had for most people throughout human history. There’s a kind of Whig historicism on steroids here: unless you want to insist that what “we” mean by “morality” now is the historical cumulation of humanity’s “moral” wisdom already implicit in our origin, you have to acknowledge that “moral” is a modification of other words (“mores”) that meant very different things in societies that didn’t have a word for what “we” mean by “morality”—and the same is true for “ethics.” These analyses only hold up if we assume that the academic and broader public debates that have enshrined these terms in, I’m guessing (we could pursue the question by starting with a quick Google ngram search), in the postwar liberal democratic West, represent “peak humanity”—something it is getting harder, I think, to assume. You end up making originary claims drawing upon propagandistic simulacra—it’s not all that different than making claims about “race relations” based on the latest media-promoted panic about police violence towards blacks.
This problem is not exclusive to GA—far from it. I think the problem is virtually universal—no mode of thinking has really scaled up from the “small group” models that everywhere lie at the origin of inquiry into social interaction. Attempts to do so end up relying upon, e.g., statistics that operate at whatever scale you like but end up abstracting from human agency in the very specific sense that the very concepts which designate things in the word about which one could gather information were created and are sustained in social settings—I don’t think I need to make a sustained argument to the effect that statistics don’t directly access and transparently represent the real. Neither do reified concepts like “structure” and “process.” Collapse of collective into individual agency and inflation of individual into collective intent are the norm, and not only because it makes for good trolling and propaganda. There’s a real problem here that I think only GA can solve, but only a GA that has solved its own scaling problem.
My own solution is to hold fast to the one thing absolutely distinctive about GA’s model of the social: the center. Gans allows us to believe the center disappears in modernity, to be dispersed across the “market,” because this is the only way to bring GA into accord with what he takes, for what I must assume to be reasons external to GA, to be the best form of social organization, “liberal democracy.” This makes sense because “liberal democracy” is a propagandistic simulacrum of Cold War ideology—strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist, as not a single country calls itself a “liberal democracy.” But if we work with the obvious implications of the originary hypothesis, and, indeed, “scenic thinking,” there must always be a center. And if we actually look, behold! there is, in fact always one, in the most literal sense, as no country has abolished its government or “de-privileged” its capital city—the monarch was replaced by people doing similar kinds of things, not some empty space we can pretend doesn’t exist. And all the players on all the markets know this very well as, every time they find themselves in conflict with other players on the market, rather than creating an alluring self-representation that will seduce the antagonist into a mutually beneficial compromise, they without fail try to drag the state in hoping it will see the matter their way. But I’ve made these arguments many times already and if anyone is interested in them they are certainly not situated with “mainstream GA.”
There is always a center whenever humans are arranged in relation to each other, and the center is always occupied, even if only by a sacred carcass. All the continuities and discontinuities in human history follow from successive attempts to occupy, hold, expand the reach of, or replace, the center or its present occupant. Questions of scale are therefore questions of the reach of the center, and its maintenance or extension of that reach through the creation of subordinate centers. A particular historical trajectory (Christian-informed modernity) is completed once every individual can become a center within some space, and this only happens once the occupant of the center has been sufficiently singularized so as to become something like a “personality” upon which other “persons” can model their own, which also means becoming sufficiently desacralized so as to become an actor outside of very tightly scripted ritual roles. This is basic GA “orthodoxy” that I wish to strengthen, not undermine. It means that what I called, in Anthropomorphics, the “signifying center” can inform the practices of individuals in ways that are irreducible to commands given by the center’s occupant. This doesn’t loosen the bond between individual and center, though—rather, it makes individuals more active and intentional participants in the center, a form of participation I describe there as the incessant work of closing the “imperative gap” between orders given and orders obeyed. That is what declarative sentences are for.
The work of closing the imperative gap is conducted in “disciplinary spaces,” which are retrievals of the originary scene/event. This speaks directly to the question of scale: the configuration of the originary scene/event is reproduced in all human activity, but directly only within disciplinary spaces, which are governed by their own inquiries and idioms. It may very well be that disciplinary spaces generate their own utopias by mapping themselves onto the social—a small group, bound by duty, devotion and sacrifice easily takes itself to be model of the ideal order. But scenes directly orchestrated by the center, in collaboration with its closest subordinates (these being, today, the major media and tech companies), are of an entirely different character: these are spectacles, mass mobilizations, shows of force, sentimental morality plays, scapegoating rituals, and so on. Since everyone is included in these scenes as spectators, it feels natural to assume that participating in them in ritually prescribed ways and opining on them affects them and that this, in fact, is the most genuine form of public activity. Only work that goes on in disciplinary spaces such as to facilitate the formation of new disciplinary spaces within and on the margins of these scenes matters, though. Disciplinary spaces have been organized for quite a while within institutions dedicated to their perpetuation and exploitation, in particular universities. Needless to say, once an institution is established in order to produce the large and small scale knowledge needed for governance, including that exercised through technology, the authority granted to such knowledge will make it an irresistible pole of attraction for those competing over occupation and securing of the center.
The only solution is the cessation of struggles over the center. This is not news, and I don’t need to repeat my arguments on this point. Here, I want to bring this argument to bear on the question of scale, which is to say, what does it mean to say someone does something, or might do something, that has such and such an effect. Obviously, saying “I oppose,” “I resist,” “I struggle for change,” etc., means nothing. These are phrases that energize the members of some group on the margin. The ideal or model intervention, argument, or text would be one that signified to all situated in their respective positions relative to the center so as to provide the intellectual (declarative) resources to close the imperative gaps where they are. The imperative gaps can be enormous, and any practice needs to put that on display. Sometimes one could say that demonstrating the imperative gap, making oneself a sign or bearer of it, is the best practice of beginning to shorten it. Since I think only the originary hypothesis can save the world, I have to think very carefully about which frames, organized in what ways, directed at which audiences, are best suited to eventually making it the global lingua franca. But everyone must be included. We may be heading, as I suspect, towards some form of global governance (which I also suspect will look very different than both its current supporters and opponents imagine), but even if I’m wrong and nationalism (or regionalism, or some new feudalism, or whatever) prevails, it will be an “international nationalism” (or whatever) in which everyone is cognizant of everyone else and works to move in alignment with all the others in accord, then, with some center, even if one explicitly occupied only on occasion by a particularly exemplary national leader who happens to be positioned so as to arbitrate some dispute. So, even as a nationalist, one would be thinking in terms of embodying such exemplarity and recognizing it in others.
But everyone has a part to play, and if it’s manipulative and deceptive to tell some impoverished, disempowered young person that you’ve got the movement that will make him one of the elite, or a contributor to “genuine change,” if your own practices are capable of reproduction and spread they will make a place for pedagogical relations all up and down the line. Anyone, anywhere, can study the forms of authority they must attend to, however corrupt, decrepit, or hostile they might be—we all know who we must ask for a license or permit to do something, who can help or punish us, whose aid we would solicit in some dispute with another. You can read your understanding of the authority you’re subject to off of your own resentments—who do you feel, at least on occasion, denies you your place in the sun? How does that authority stage events, at various scales, according to some schedule? Everyone can examine the means and mechanisms of staging, including the staging that has positioned oneself, written the scripts you’ve rehearsed, mastered and improvised on. Everyone can think of ways they might contribute to re-stagings aimed at ensuring that transitions from staging to staging bring everyones’ roles and “lines” into greater coherence with those of others and the scene as a whole. And everyone can help others think of such ways. Everyone can think of himself as auditioning for a team or “troupe” that will become possible as a result of enough people auditioning for it. The more you act and think this way, the more you will in fact find yourself in better ordered settings, better equipped to assess the outcomes of events, including the events of informing others of events—“facts” and “information” will come “encrusted” with the material of the events issuing them. And then our scaling will get better precisely to the extend that orderly, pedagogical relations are maintained across different scales—and the scene/events orchestrated by the center will be more like the formation of a central intelligence in which all are agents and less like tawdry, hysterical soap operas and woke remakes of action movies.