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
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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