The Sample as Our Donation to the Center

Sometimes the Online Etymological dictionary is worth working through carefully. I’ve been centering the word “sample” for a while now, using it, essentially, as a replacement for “sign” or “utterance,” so as to place language within the broader field of inquiry created by language. I don’t think there are many possible uses of “sign” or “utterance” where the replacement would impair the meaning and many where it would enrich it. “Sample,” though is just an offshoot of “example,” which adds the extremely important notion of a part that provides knowledge of the constitution of the whole. This makes “sample” central to science and inquiry, as Charles Sanders Peirce insisted in his assertion that all knowledge can be reduced to the relation between the sample and the population. I want to use the etymology of “example,” which I will “credit” to “sample,” to take the implications of this “substitution” a bit further:

late 14c., "an instance typical of a class; a model, either good or bad, action or conduct as an object of imitation; an example to be avoided; punishment as a warning," partial re-Latinization of earlier essample, asaumple (mid-13c.), from Old French essemple "sample, model, example, precedent, cautionary tale," from Latin exemplum "a sample, specimen; image, portrait; pattern, model, precedent; a warning example, one that serves as a warning," literally "that which is taken out," from eximere "remove, take out, take away; free, release, deliver, make an exception of," from ex "out" (see ex-) + emere "buy," originally "take," from PIE root *em- "to take, distribute." 

Here we see “example” implicated in mimesis, as the provision of a model to be followed or avoided, with further suggestions of folkloric warnings; but this then leads us back further into a series of uses implicating mimetic crisis, i.e., scapegoating, where the “warning” tale is of someone who has been singled out, made an exception of, or released from having been made “an example” of. And, finally, we get down to the IE root of “taking” (out of) and, most “originarily,” “distribute.” It’s as if we see the entire history of the sacred object at the center here: its sacrality is affirmed through a practice of (“equal”) distribution, in which everyone takes a part from the whole; eventually, a human occupies the center, who becomes the “exception,” a model, sacred, but also a possible victim; then a more neutralized mode of demonstration and explication, which we can trace back to processes of deferral and remember always involves that originary danger; until, finally, it becomes, as “sample,” that “part” of reality that we place in the center of some inquiry so that we can treat it was representative or indicative of the whole. The history of “sample” follows, we might say allegorizes, the history of humans’ distancing from the originary scene with the shared object at the center. The earliest humans were present before the central object, on a scene where they could all affirm that the object was the same for all of them, confirming this affirmation with strictly choreographed rituals enacting the originary event itself. The Big Man’s “usurpation” of the center introduced the first distancing of the community from the object—now, the object is only available through the Big Man’s distribution, a distribution which might have started off adhering closely to the more or less egalitarian norm of the originary community, but would gradually introduce new layers of distance, as the Big Man would distribute first of all to the worthiest and most loyal of the community, and then delegate to those “senior” members the responsibility for distributing among their “clients.” We can then see developments in money and technology as further measures to ensure that we all remain on the same scene through ever complex mediations by which some commensuration between donations to the center and distribution from the center is ensured.

I wrote a post entitled “The Holding Center and the Held” which explored what seemed to me some ambiguity in the uses of the notion of the “center” that I’ve been working with, and that I think can be more perfectly clarified now. The “center” refers, most “centrally,” of course, to the originary object, which is both the thing we attend to and the meta-person we obey and participate in. It is these two “features” of the “center” that get separated as, over time, humans come to “turn their back” on the center as issuer of imperatives so as to attend to the more singularized object of attention. So, the question I had is, what is the relation between the center of my attention when I focus on a loved other or a carefully prepared object of inquiry, and the Center that organizes the very possibility of forgetting it so as to devote my attention to this more contingent piece of the world? The answer is that in treating the other or thing as a fully individualized sample to the extent possible on existing scenic conditions I make the object a worthy sample of my own donation of my entire self to the center. So, to put it simply, we can no longer walk up to some hallowed place, bring a specific, authorized object, and present it directly to the deity, along with the rest of my community. I can only iterate that originary gesture across the monetary, sovereign and technological expanses that create a circulatory and tributary order. Of course, holy places, where revelatory events are commemorated, still exist, and might exhibit their power in unexpected ways, but insofar as they do such exhibitions will also take place on the terms of the prevailing media, which will enable those commemorations to be broadcast and repeated. Even if you go into a Church and utter exactly the same words as a worshipper did 1,000 years ago, it’s only the “same” insofar as your prayer and petition cut against the grain of today’s world “similarly” to the way that worshippers did against the grain of his. Everything needs to be according to measure, or scale.

Presenting the “sample” as the residue or remnant of the originary sign and object does, in a certain sense, prioritize a mode of scientific thinking. I consider this necessary both as an intervention within mimetic theory which, present company excepted, still seems to me to operate exclusively on the model of the small, “primary” group (it hasn’t scaled up, in other words), but, more broadly and importantly, because the techno-scientific scene is the outcome of the desecrations of the sovereign center that we cannot undo and therefore must move through. Any political, intellectual, religious or spiritual project you propose that can’t be scaled up technologically is DOA. And in my formulation here I want to provide a way of thinking about this other than as a loss, about which mourning and nostalgia are the only responses. We are as “tented” and “tabernacled” as any of our ancestors ever were, even if we need to think quite a bit more about how this might be enacted. Despite the “scientistic” “bias,” though, no form of human experience or interaction is diminished here. We must prepare the others and objects (and lets just call them all “others”) presented to us as samples in accord with the prevailing scenic conditions of doing so—that is, in terms of the stacked scenes we inhabit. And these stacks are enormously diversified. We still passionately love spouses and children, immerse ourselves in conversations with friends, enjoy spontaneous walks through the woods, etc. We can think that one diminishes these activities by referring to them as the treatment of samples, but that’s precisely the “misreading” my etymological excursion aimed at deferring: by “treating as a sample” I include bringing to bear some of the penetrating insight of the modern sciences, yes, but also “taking a part,” accepting your piece of the whole gratefully, engaging the other as a model, modeling for the other (treating yourself as a sample), making the other an exception, singular being and perhaps a potential victim to be protected or, if protection fails, memorialized. All of these presences can be what they are and also scaled up without desecration—this is what aesthetic scenes are for.

On the terms of the “same sample” I can take one (final?) step further in the thinking on money and debt I’ve been attempting recently and pose the problem of language, or, more precisely, the idiom, as currency. In a sense, this will just be a scaling up of the familiar phrase “my word is my bond.” “Money talks,” money is a language, money is a sign system, etc., so why can’t language be money? I have abundant resources here (this is pretty much the problem I’ve always been working on) and would expect to return to this question repeatedly.  The best place to begin is with my privileging of the present tense, recorded in Anthropomorphics, which presented the present tense as a kind of constraint that (in the terms I’m using now) forces a kind of compression of pasts and possible futures into a single present scene, infinitely expandable. So, instead of saying something like (to propose a new thesis, but one which has probably been made elsewhere) “the entire 19^th century was a prolonged attempt to make sense of the Napoleonic experience,” you would have to say something like “Here we see the residues of our having inherited the 19^th century’s self-constitution as a prolonged attempt…” The present tense here becomes a mode of registering and measuring “samples” of the past. Even to say things “have happened” rather than that they “happened” makes the present the point of reference. Regarding the future, the constraint of the present would mobilize formulations of the “is to have been” kind. Again, this compels the construction of links between past and present or, we could say, paths of succession starting now. For that matter, I would make a case of “will have been” as the present tense because “will,” strictly speaking, odd word that it is, is the present tense—presumably its original use was to refer to something one was “willing” at the moment. It is the present turning itself into the future, making it perhaps an especially useful sample for my purposes here. Maybe I’d be freer from reproach from grammatical sticklers if I opened myself to reproach from another angle and used “it wills” instead of “it will” to indicate futurity. (Ultimately there is no real future tense in English, so all ways of indicating futurity are modifications of the present tense.) So, anything happening now is to have been some kind of case under such and such conditions or something happening now is willing some possible future condition into existence. The purpose of such a constraint is not to police language—I am not proposing that anyone, including myself, renounce the past tense—but to serve as model samples, much like the model organisms biologists determine to be particularly useful for studying particular features of life. It’s a non-philosophical way to order thinking, one that draws upon both literary and scientific sources.

In a way, information already functions like currency: if I have a piece of knowledge that will enable one to make a deal worth a great deal of money but only if acted upon within a very brief time span, then that information can be given a very clear value—that is, people in a position to use it will be willing to pay some predictable amount of money for it. But let’s consider that in exchange for that piece of information it is not money but another piece of information that is exchanged—now, we are thinking in terms of a post-monetary tributary order, even if only for those positioned to make rapid and profitable use of information—but, that’s where any transformation starts and even the less well positioned of us might always be able to find some use for information for which we would then want to acquire some information to exchange for it. Sample for sample. At the same time, I want to resist this particular kind of financialized model of information exchange. So, I switch over to the furtherest future perfect option on succession proposed here, which (presupposing the universal team subscription model outlined here, for example) involves advancing resources to those pedagogical institutions most likely to provide the prospective team members you don’t yet know you will need. Here the resources are knowledge, rather than information, since they involve creating expanded, stacked, scenes, rather than maximally compressed micro-scenes in which fortunes can be made or lost in a second. But prior to knowledge comes language, or idioms, so that, in fact, is what is provided. The most powerful idiom, and therefore the worthiest of exchange (and, like all language, only meaningful in exchange), would be the one that opens paths between past and future within the present that create the present as a site of continual deferral, which is to say, of hypotheticality. And that’s the idiom constantly on the lookout for the most promising samples and the most singularizing ways of treating them so as to represent the all as fully successionable as possible.