Stacking Against the Big Scene

I’m going to follow up here on the notion of the “grammatical stack,” or the imperative to “line up” the speech forms (ostensive>imperative>interrogative>declarative>imperative>ostensive) so as to approximate maximum internal referentiality across the speech forms. In other words, the imperatives you follow should map onto the ostensive field they emerge from and serve the preservation of that field; those imperatives should be “prolongable” into the questions which flow exhaustively into your sentences and discourse, and your declaratives should “give off” imperatives that guide other centers in the identification of new ostensives that reconfigure the ostensive field around the anomaly that originally broached linguistic presence, initiating the sequence. I will call this moral practice (and should be replacing the concept of moral practice with) “stacking,” so as to include grammatical stacking in the broader practice of data exchange and the conversion of users into interfaces.

I’m pursuing stacking here as a continuation of my breaking up of what I’ve been calling “the Big Scene”—that is, the representation of social reality (on any scale) modeled on a single scene with a divisible object at the center. Most ways most people talk about most “issues” would serve as examples, but here’s a simple one: when we speak of something like “racial justice,” we presuppose agents designated in racial terms (say, “blacks” and “whites”) and we imagine them standing together, perhaps across from each other, on a shared scene with the total goods of society at the center, with the “whites” receiving more of those goods than some imagined “equal” sharing would allow for. If you look at any discussion of racial justice, gendered justice, social justice, global justice, etc., you will see that it can all be reduced into these terms. But the terms are illusory—the agents don’t exist as agents, that is, “blacks” and “whites” don’t “do” anything—they wouldn’t work as characters within a coherent narrative; nor is there a set of social goods that can be divided like a pie into more even slices. Big Scenic thinking can only generate resentment; moreover, it is an indication that we have not transcended sacrificial thinking, which can only be formulated into terms of exchanges with a center in which unified agents give something to the center (“follow the rules,” “act as good citizens,” etc.) in exchange for a fair piece of the pie.

The most direct way to opt out of such narrative structures (in which whites and blacks fight, do injustices to each other, reconcile, try to work it out, etc.) is to treat only official names as narrativizable agents. Sovereigns can act; institutions delegated or chartered by the sovereign with designated officials can act; individuals with names can act. So, “blacks” don’t do, say, or think anything, but the NAACP can, individual African-American individuals can, and so on. Attributing agency to unchartered and therefore mystically summoned actors contributes to the erosion of sovereignty by imagining behind the scenes narratives behind formal actors, who are therefore mere fronts. This is not only the source of “conspiracy theories,” under the assumption that the agents who officially do things can’t really be the ones doing them, but it’s a great bane to the social sciences, which use the same kinds of magical actors to exert their own pressures on sovereign and chartered actors. Needless to say, sovereignty “leaks” considerably, and the construction of behind the scenes narratives is effect as well as cause of this—in the end, though, if you want to point to agents controlling or circumventing sovereign and chartered agents, you will have to point to them doing so through those agents, and those who are behind the scenes are ultimately named themselves—specific individuals, specific organizations, even if clandestine ones that are nevertheless following assignments from named actors. Let’s say we have a country where unofficial mafias run everything and all public officials are in their pockets and under their sway—we will find that the mafias, or their heads, or the heads of at least the most important families, have in fact been formalized in some way, and could therefore be formalized more explicitly. Formalism is a mode of analysis, not just a political aspiration.

But surely we can study ethnic groups (Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc.), keep records of them, speak of tendencies and patterns we see across these groups, including stereotypes and so on? You couldn’t stop people from talking about the ethnic groups in their neighborhoods, after all. Yes, these groups are groups because they have passed from one sovereign to another, but also because they establish various ethnic organizations that are recognized by the sovereign. There’s some discrepancy, to be sure between the “real life” and communal existence of an ethnic group and the various fraternal, cultural, trade, lobbying, etc., organizations it establishes—still, if you drill down a bit deeper into communal institutions, like schools, local businesses, churches, neighborhood events (block parties, etc.), and even into things like gangs, which themselves are bound to families and attended to by the police, social workers, and so on, usually with the same ethnic “inflection” (not every police officer in a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood will be Italian, but disproportionately they probably will be, and those who are will probably have a different relation to the community), then the discrepancy ultimately evaporates. Of course, plenty of sociologists, ethnographers, anthropologists and, for that matter, reporters and novelists have known this, but it is very rare to see the kind of discipline I’m suggesting now, of giving a publicly registered name to every agency to whom action and motivation is attributed, and whom you wish to put into a narrative. Even if you don’t know all the details—and none of us do, except in cases we’re close to—you should speak knowing that they could be known, and that there are such agencies implicit in your descriptions and that you’re always rendering a hypothetical account of them.

This is critical because names are ostensives and are therefore the first samples fed into the stack, grammatical and computational alike. Moreover, that you start by sorting out the names that will include everyone also implies that the purpose of your inquiry is to strengthen the system of naming. And that is indeed the purpose: to turn names into sites where power and responsibility coincide. The coincidence of power and responsibility is the organization of the grammatical stack. A name gives off imperatives—directly, to its subjects; indirectly to others, to offer some kind of support, engage in some kind of exchange, ultimately in order to direct attention the relation between the name and the center. You want the name to remain the same in relation to the center, even if that involves exposing all the discrepancies and inconsistencies in its relation to the center. In fact, a nominalist appreciation of the arbitrariness of the name initiates the hypothesizing of possible relationships between the name and the center. Whatever anyone says about the name is to be treated as such a hypothesis. These hypotheses are questions shading into declaratives: is the president the president if_______; if not, what would the president have to do in order to be president; in order to do that, how would other named centers need to arrange for their own succession? You generate a series of sentences that might answer these questions, sentences that correspond to different degrees of likely occurrence, of success if realized, supplemented differently with guesses regarding information one couldn’t possibly have but are necessary for a definitive answer to your questions. These sentences generate questions and imperatives for you: who would you have to be to receive such a president, and start preparing to become that person—you would then be able to detect signs in your relations to others pointing you towards the fulfillment of that imperative, and its subsidiary imperatives.

Approximating the same name in its successive samples is a continual source of hypotheses, but never of narratives. Narratives presuppose that the name remains the same—of course, the protagonists of a narrative change as a result of the events depicted, but the changes are meaningful precisely because the protagonist remains the same in spite of it all, however transformed. You couldn’t “learn from your experience” if you weren’t the same person who had the experience. The hypothesis acknowledges that the name remains the same insofar as and to the extent that the center calls upon it in a way that leverages previous denominations. Narratives are what keep the Big Scene in place: every narrative follows a protagonist, individual or collective, from having or lacking its piece of the central pie, to losing or gaining more of the pie, in such a way as to demonstrate, if not the justice, at least the irresistibility of the center (and irresistibility is really justice for those capable of the level of deferral needed to discern it). If your hypothesis is a program design for a world exhaustively described by the names conferred by the center, then there’s no protagonist and no narrative—even the occupant of the center, assuming your hypothesis fleshes him out and makes him interesting, isn’t a protagonist because nothing’s at stake for him—if something is at stake for him, he’s not really occupying the center. If someone were to ask, well, what do we do to right the world, how do we act on this hypothetical knowledge (if “knowledge” is the right word), the answer is: make a name for yourselves. Organize yourselves as the immanent regime, the regime the “actually existing” regime should be and “really is,” in such a way as to model the regime becoming itself through the rectification of names. Treat names so as to more closely approximate the terms of their charter. Every named practice presupposed the intervention of the center insofar as any act can be contested and appealed to the center: engage disputes when called upon to do so, but convert the dispute into an exemplary practice making the name more itself by deriving an assignment from the center. “I have a right to…” becomes “insofar as we are indeed_____, here’s what we are doing:_____.” Convert drama into hypothetical practices.

That is what stacking against the Big Scene will look like. Names issue imperatives insofar as they are not the same as themselves—the imperative is to reduce the discrepancy, to have the names approximate themselves, but, to do that, the imperatives must be prolonged into interrogatives regarding the whole field of discrepancies, using what seem the less irremediable discrepancies as anchoring points. These questions are mapped onto declaratives: this self-same name would approximate itself more by…; …by…; …by…; etc. Each sentence is a hypothesis, which “leans into” new imperatives, because they “suggest” (“suggest” refers to a soft imperative, barely emergent from its declarative cocoon) testing out the descriptions, which necessarily leave openings in the field. And these imperatives to test out these possible openings or positionings within the field empty out into ostensives, which are indications that a given name, or network of names, or the entire system of names, might self-approximate more given the position occupied. Such practices will generate new names, but the best way to generate new names is by working on rectifying the existing ones until you get to the point where you can see that the name is the same as itself because it’s not what it once was or what you imagined it to be. And this will result from wiping out vast semantic swaths, as whole vocabularies turn out to not only be intrinsically subversive of self-approximating naming, but designed so as to make such self-approximation impossible. You can guess at what those semantic regions are—they are organized around terms like “freedom,” “equality,” “rights,” “tyranny,” “oppression,” and so on: all terms designed for deployment in semiotic wars over the Big Scene.

Grammatical stacking needs to be put in an uploadable form so that it can be data entried into the computational stack. That will be the work of the coming months. Whether it is ever in fact computerized (I do want it to be) or not is less important than that it provides primearchy a way of processing parallel to the planetary stack. Even if the planetary stack turns out to be less than resilient, or unable to resist the dysfunctional power relations on which it relies—indeed, even if we see some kind of collapse, and we have to learn to homestead once again—the planetary stack will still be the immanent regime, the system a functional system of power will one day occupy. It is therefore the present horizon of thinking.