I have never signed on to any political, ideological or spiritual position among those circulating on the right, like Prometheanism or Faustianism, in part because I would anyway have to translate these terms into originary ones, but also because professions of faith of any kind are at odds with my understanding of the consequences of the originary hypothesis, at least as I have processed it through Anna Wierzbicka’s primes and histories and theories of literacy like those of David Olson and others. I don’t believe in “belief,” or have an faith in “faith,” because these words already presuppose the declarative order—if asked what you believe and have faith in, your answer will be in declarative sentences or, at least, in single words whose meanings are constituted by declarative traditions (“God,” “truth,” “loyalty,” etc.). To inhabit the hypothesis is to have a different relation to inherited vocabularies, a zone between literalness and allegory, demystification and unreserved indebtedness to the Other. I know that all human interactions derive from a scene that can be dissected with such analytical precision as to evaporate all idealisms while at the same time knowing that this knowledge cannot be made fully explicit on any particular scene that already comes with its settings. A scene upon which others might be interested in the hypothesis will have its own terms and cannot simply be transposed upon the originary scene hypothesized, and one must be on and in that scene. And this would be the case for any name those on the scene give it, which implies a steady turnover in such names. So, if I’m pressed on these questions, I have to say something like, “I’m on the originary scene, gathering data as to its (non)closure.” But what I can speak about, in a way that I think addresses all those names in a way that meets the demand for self-reflexivity imposed by the hypothesis, is “scene stacking.”
Scene Stacking
Scene Stacking
Scene Stacking
I have never signed on to any political, ideological or spiritual position among those circulating on the right, like Prometheanism or Faustianism, in part because I would anyway have to translate these terms into originary ones, but also because professions of faith of any kind are at odds with my understanding of the consequences of the originary hypothesis, at least as I have processed it through Anna Wierzbicka’s primes and histories and theories of literacy like those of David Olson and others. I don’t believe in “belief,” or have an faith in “faith,” because these words already presuppose the declarative order—if asked what you believe and have faith in, your answer will be in declarative sentences or, at least, in single words whose meanings are constituted by declarative traditions (“God,” “truth,” “loyalty,” etc.). To inhabit the hypothesis is to have a different relation to inherited vocabularies, a zone between literalness and allegory, demystification and unreserved indebtedness to the Other. I know that all human interactions derive from a scene that can be dissected with such analytical precision as to evaporate all idealisms while at the same time knowing that this knowledge cannot be made fully explicit on any particular scene that already comes with its settings. A scene upon which others might be interested in the hypothesis will have its own terms and cannot simply be transposed upon the originary scene hypothesized, and one must be on and in that scene. And this would be the case for any name those on the scene give it, which implies a steady turnover in such names. So, if I’m pressed on these questions, I have to say something like, “I’m on the originary scene, gathering data as to its (non)closure.” But what I can speak about, in a way that I think addresses all those names in a way that meets the demand for self-reflexivity imposed by the hypothesis, is “scene stacking.”