The Scene On Which You Find Yourself

There is no inquiry that can’t be reduced to an utterance on a scene. The more you singularize the utterance the more you fill out the scene and filling out the scene evokes and invokes other utterances on other scenes. This is the continuation of the work of the ancient scribes and the early modern philologists and archivists, among others. The utterance on the scene can be further reduced to the cited sample. To treat any “thing” as a sample is to ask what it is a sample of, and it’s a sample of all the other things it is “like” in one way or another on innumerable other scenes. It remains a sample for as long as you don’t close off the field of likenesses and when you do close off the field in order to establish same/other distinctions that only creates entire new fields of likeness above and below the threshold any same/other distinction establishes. Presenting a sample is presenting it as cited, as, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “summoned” to appear. And every utterance or sample is cited, and is citing citations, which in turn… History is ultimately a project of tracking the chains of citations all the way back to the origin; at least, that is the imaginary guiding historical inquiries. “Citationality” most immediately comes to us as a post-structuralist concept, through the work of Judith Butler but through her citing Derrida’s Limited Inc., in particular, where he deconstructs John Searles’s attempt to distinguish between “proper” and “improper,” “sincere” and “insincere” uses of language in part by, over the course of the book, quoting every word in Searles’s essay, completely “expropriating” it. We can say the originary scene is composed of a series of mutual citations, establishing language as citationality, where everyone says the same thing so as to ensure that we don’t all do the same thing at the same time. As self-citing samples we are all signs, all literal allegories, all idiomatic intelligences, all faithful satires.

It's been a long time since I read Derrida’s book, but I’m pretty sure that what enables him to turn Searles into a figure of fun is Searles staking “sincerity” on a kind of “legality”—that is, copyright becomes impossible if we can’t distinguish between who is really saying what. It’s not too hard to turn this around and say that what we consider “sincere” will depend upon the legality of the situation, which is to say that morality and ethics are interpretations of legal and ritual practices, rather than seeing law (or even ritual) as the implementation of a moral order (conceived where, when and how, exactly?). Of course, Derrida himself took umbrage when misquoted, or quoted “out of context” (what constitutes a “context” also being an issue in Limited Inc.), i.e., “misinterpreted,” perhaps even “maliciously” (i.e., insincerely). Critiques of hypocrisy are irrelevant here, though (isn’t “hypocrisy” just an effect of the possibility of arguing for either side in a legal dispute?)—it is both urgent and ultimately impossible to “nail down” citations once and for all. Tracking down and verifying a citation ultimately leads us to some point where we can’t proceed any further, without being sure there’s not some “plagiarism” or fabrication we haven’t detected. Most of language is both citation and beyond citation. Knowing that it is citation serves an important purpose in guiding inquiry: every utterance or sample is citing and creating a scene for the reception of the citation of some other piece of writing, and we can lay down likely paths, such as between legal, medical, pedagogical and journalistic texts and novels. Constructing possible lines of transmission issuing in the text now considered as a tissue of citations will provide far more productive interpretive practices than those focused on authorial intent or genre (such practices will include these terms), especially now that we can work through vast databases and powerful searches so as to move back and forth between distant and close reading.

This is not primarily a matter of literary studies, since any kind of research imposes similar demands, and any kind of intelligence involves research. Any politics predicated upon what I’ve referred to as the Big Scenic Imaginary, which is really just a more primitive, pre-electronic, oral/literacy interface, will be easily captured and disposed of. Look at people on Twitter swearing to “oppose” this or that, to do so strenuously, bravely, along with the rest of “us,” even to the death, etc.—on what scene is this “struggle” taking place? How does it get scaled up from the individual tweet? How is this struggle distributed across the Stack? What are to be its tributary, juridical and disciplinary articulations? If you can’t answer these questions you’re engaged in a ritual practice, a minor cult, perhaps similar to those found all over the Mediterranean world before the victory of Christianity, even if electronic media makes it a globally distributed cult. Even meme-ing, that most electronic media form of communication, is just a cultic practice if you don’t have laboratories and factories working on industrial scale memes. What scene am I on now, for that matter—the scene on which I’m writing this is only in a very specific sense the same scene(s) upon which it will be read and then perhaps cited, more or less accurately, with or without attribution. If the scene upon which I’m writing this is not a programming scene, the creation of an iterable idiom that can maintain minimal consistency while translating and being translated into an unlimited number of scenes, then I would concede its pointlessness.

However conscientious, scrupulous and diligent, you will always reach the point at which citations trail off into the mist and you find yourself outside of the disciplinary or juridical and within the tributary. The tributary is the broader field of likenesses, where everything is like everything else in some way and to some degree—the disciplinary is like the juridical is like the ritual and all is circulation with devotion to the center shown through the preservation of each and every likeness within one’s reach in the form of the same sample. Samples and data are just particular articulations of likenesses, available to others who are like enough to the collector. The tributary never appears as such but breaks through the break down of juridical or disciplinary discourses, precisely when the boundary between citation and citing discourse is broached. What happens then is bits of discourse simply being there, unattributed, without anyone having said what they say. The Derridean argument is that in the end this is case for all discourse, which is why such moments of unattributability are revelatory and it is of course a good, if not exhaustive practice, to reduce to an absolute minimum the particular circuit through which some words re-enter circulation. The “I” who wrote those words, after all, has been created by a long process of buried mimicry and long-forgotten self-held conversations. The deconstructive argument, though, doesn’t take the scene into account—the “I” is also a product of public verifications, attestations, signatures, registrations and so on, in which that “I” had to be in specific places in specific times and in ways witnessed and accounted for by others and that’s enough for an “I” to emerge upon who we can hang sufficient intentionality. The stripping of samples of everything raising them above the threshold of anonymity then invokes the renewal of procedures and naming and authentification.

Imitation is one form of likeness, or of finding likeness, in a field of likenesses that dwarf those we can deem imitative; further, of all the ways humans imitate each other the vast majority are benign, with the rivalrous, and therefore dangerous modes of imitation a very specific mode. I say this not to detract from the theoretical power of mimetic theory in either its Girardian or Gansian forms even if it is worth noting that, to my knowledge at least, neither ever seemed particularly interested in this obvious observation. Those cases where imitation does initiate rivalry are just as crisis-bearing as Girard and Gans claim, and we can never know when benign forms of mimesis will turn malignant. But scaling up seems to me a problem for mimetic theory which, in the case of Gans at least but also, I feel pretty sure, Girard, ends up analyzing relations between social groups such as nations and ethnicities as if they were just outsized individuals. This is, in fact, where my critique of the Big Scenic Imaginary has been primarily directed. You end up with good cultural, anthropological and literary analyses and wretched political ones, because the political analysis needs to scenize conflicts within the institutions of deferral that given them their shape and determine their effects. Why do some rivalries and resentments fizzle out without leaving a trace and others flare up and make it into media narratives and history books? If you just focus on those that make it big you need never ask this question, but in that case you basically become a pundit with your own “take.” You can’t pay attention to hidden, silent operations that not only don’t get coverage but determine what does, and you therefore are extremely limited in the kinds of thought experiments you can design so as to hypothesize regarding the functioning of institutions. GA, at least, should have a way of diagnosing institutions of deferral, and it is there, paradoxically, that a lot of destructive work can be carried out because there is a kind of immunity to being caught up in mimetic vortexes yourself. I can’t remember a single discussion from Gans on how deferral operates. He defers that inquiry to the market, but how does the market operate?

Situating the question of mimesis, and within mimesis, the crisis-bearing mimesis, within a much larger field of likenesses provides a way of speaking about institutions and deferral in a vocabulary that remains intimate with that of mimetic theory. Articulating, circumscribing and hierarchizing fields of likenesses (systems of correspondences through ritual and myth) is how “pre-modern” or sacred communities organize deferral. This is a way of turning the center, which is always already there, into a model for the periphery. Girard’s distinction between “external” and “internal” mediation tries to account for this—the obvious conclusion from Girard’s diagnosis of modernity as the plague of internal and therefore unlimited mediation would be to reconstruct some form of external mediation but that has to be done on terms consistent with your theory and if you defer that responsibility someone else will do it in what will probably be dysfunctional ways. Thinking through institutions is needed here--clearly, we can’t just set up, arbitrarily, a new system of “correspondences” at different “levels” that everyone will share. The data search, though, can help us create a system of likenesses grounded in the historical generation of our institutions. Here we have to thank the inventors of the Google search engine which, in a merciless decapitation of modern hierarchies of specialization and classification, simply finds for you a document that is most like the one someone like you would be interested in. And who or what are you like? All the other people searching for documents in ways that reveal patterns (fields of likenesses) into which you and your search fit. There is nothing but calibrated likenesses in the data search, and you can continually recalibrate the field of likenesses with each successive search and, soon enough, by customizing searches so as to target certain databases and train the algorithm to learn more from selected searchers. All the predictable complaints about the liberal bias of AI should be disregarded—all that is a last ditch effort to control what can’t be controlled in that way.

So you, anon, are on a search scene, searching, being searched, inflecting and contaminating the field of likenesses you keep recalibrating. To paraphrase Charles Sanders Peirce, you are yourself a search term. Research on the search scene involves sending samples of language into the engine and then continually refining your search so as to build chains and networks of scenes that are present on the scene of your search. You go from anonymous, unattributed samples to intersecting fields of likeness until your scene becomes the same as all the other scenes you conjure up, scenes which you are just building a new scaffold around, a scaffold that is itself immediately full of action. In the end you want all scenes, everywhere, from the originary one on, to be presentable, which is to say to be citable. That means having them cite each other, building little research platforms within the scenes you study so that they study their own derivation from other scenes, sometimes from some corner of the scene. Citationaliy brings us to ascertainability and certifiability which are the ways those on the scene gather, name and preserve artifacts, remnants—inscriptions—from other scenes. Data is only data as a result of these processes by which likenesses are converted into provisional sameness, making it less and less likely that we will all proceed to do the same thing at the same time. Give data in accord with your ability and take data in accord with your needs is the slogan of this politics, if that’s what it is. And you package and donate, and receive and store, data in such a way as to build the institutions that will make the best use of it that will, in fact, make it data in the first place (useless data isn’t really data, so the more useful it is, the more it is data). Which means that data about management and supervision of data producing institutions (i.e., all institutions) are part of your data, singularized and prioritized so as to maintain and revise the gradations and spread of likenesses constituting your data. The less you can trust direct and indirect sources of data, the less it is data or, more precisely, the more challenging it is to figure out what kind of data it is. That’s the “politics”: enhancing citationality until it blurs over into the tributary and you are feeding and warding off the swarm of orphan samples that you are simultaneously generating and in fact becoming.