The Thing That It Is: Toward a Curriculum for the Officer Class

I’m going to follow up on suggestions in preceding posts and outline the program of a prospective Academy for the New Officer Class. I will reject liberal concepts like “disinterestedness” and “neutrality,” but without presupposing that, even if all education is intrinsically political, an educational institution can simply know in advance what is in the interest of those interests it serves. What is good for this or that group or social project is itself a matter of inquiry, the results of which can’t be determined in advance. I can distinguish this proposed project from liberalism by saying it will serve the center, and even go further and say that it should serve the Nomos through succession rituals and providing the kinds of knowers and knowledge that will settle cases within the juridical—only secure succession and a juridical order oscillating between the lower threshold of the vendetta and the upper threshold of the vendetta against the nomos can provide the extremely high quality data required for the anthropomorphic disciplines . But the disciplines, whatever they are to look like, will need to explore those questions on their own terms—it’s not as if the occupant of the center or a team of practicing jurists can set research agendas beyond opening questions—they themselves are the products of former research agendas. In fact, in place of concepts like disinterestedness and neutrality, which could never drive inquiry and only serve to provide criteria for judging it, we could simply place curiosity, unlimited curiosity, with the only additional demand being that the results of your inquiries be placed fully at the disposal of the curious. We want our academy to be comprised of people who want to know what kind of thing every thing is.

The broadest way of conceptualizing this I have at my own disposal is in terms of what I’ve been calling “stacked presencing,” which in this context means following all the paths cut by human intentions, tracing them all the way back to the first human intention, on the originary scene, and forward through all their trajectories. This does mean I would insist on founding such an institution on the originary hypothesis—or, to put it another way, I wouldn’t myself be curious enough to do it any good if it were founded otherwise. I will suggest as I go what (certainly less evident) implications this would have for the physical sciences, but I’ll also mention that the originary hypothesis itself can be a kind of “target”—that is, if you can enhance it, excellent; if you can replace it with something better, fine, but you first of all would have to show you know what that would mean. Beyond my own “belief,” I would make the case that only through the originary hypothesis and the center study that follows from it, can a comprehensive curriculum be developed that overcomes the fragmentation of the modern disciplines without resorting to some kind of orthodoxy, much less the trivium of the medieval university. “Intention” is the maintenance of presence in the face of more or less imminent or anticipated violence that would disrupt the continuation of a speech act. In Gans’s analysis of the emergence of grammar in The Origin of Language, this is the process of emergence of the speech forms and, as I have argued many times, can be extended to the emergence of all cultural forms. I name something and it isn’t there but there might be trouble if it’s not supplied so another retrieves it—the origin of the imperative. I demand something but it’s unavailable; rather than outright refusal or failure, which includes a risk of violence, I convey, by combining the name of the object with the “operator of negation,” that the object has been rendered unavailable and that the demand for it should cease (mediated by the imperative stretching out into the less threatening but still not quite remitting interrogative)—the origin of the declarative. In each case, it is the maintenance of presence, not the creation of that specific cultural form, that is intended.

The maintenance of presence is synonymous with the maintenance of a scene, and so the creation of linguistic and cultural forms derives from the maintenance (which is also the re-creation) of scenes. And the “scenic intentionality” (we could also use the title of one of Gans’s books, the “scenic imagination”) therefore employs all the materials afforded by the scene—its props, furnishings, sceneries, which includes the other players on the scene and oneself. Using the elements of the scene to block a path toward its implosion and forge one towards its enhancement creates a new arrangement and purposing of those elements but in a manner and with consequences well beyond what could have been planned. Even if we speak in terms of scenic design, the more mapped out implementation of scenic intervention simply produces even further reaching implications beyond those which have been “input” to the design. We are building on past presencings to hold mimetic violence further at bay, and we can do so more intentionally (otherwise, why even bother thinking about it?) but never in a way that will free us from continuing to do so. What I want to draw attention to here is the extraordinarily rich field of study of all human activity in its engagements with the world and technology such an approach opens up. Any particular object we study—a text, an institution at a particular stage in its development, a device, historical actions—would be or be the results of stacked presencing, and we would develop ways of distinguishing the potential crisis (and its degree of imminence) constitutive of any intention and the reworking of available materials to fend off that crisis in greater or lesser degree. No a priori moral or teleological assumptions would be needed here and I suspect they would be most unwelcome. We would be cultivating the sense that we, ourselves, are engaged in stacked presencings, preserving the scenes we inhabit (including the scenes of our inquiries) with whatever means their furnishings provide us with. If we are “biased” at all, it is toward identifying founding events, which will always be posited hypothetically, and as a way of bringing into focus specific actors on specific scenes, regarding which productive conversations can be had.

I have thought for a while, and with greater conviction with the emergence of AIs that can produce texts, images and videos impossible (eventually) to distinguish from those humanly generated that the forward path for the human sciences involves retrieving the fundamental purpose of philology which, I think, lies at their modern origin. Philology emerges in order to distinguish the genuine sacred text from among all the variants: determining that this was the real text of a particular Gospel, for example, was critically important for institutions and doctrine, and also called into play extremely challenging and delicate inquires ranging from making out the letters and words on a piece of parchment to establishing which idiom was most likely to be employed during the time period accepted for the composition of that text (while being ready to revise assumptions regarding all that). Deepfakes, to take just the most obvious example, will confront us with similar challenges, but beyond that the access to massive databases, powerful search engines, and, now, machine learning algorithms open up research questions no one would have considered previously. To take a simple example, it is these technologies that have enabled Dennis McCarthy to establish, I think very convincingly, that Thomas North was the actual author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare (what about the sonnets and other poems though…). To take an example I like to use of the kind of research I would like to do, we could take a particular 19^th century author and correlate his texts on various linguistic levels with medical, governmental, scholarly, legal, journalistic, epistolary, fictional, etc., texts written during that same period and study the way that author was engaging the scenic dilemmas spread across various institutions—first of all, how he was drawing upon and reworking other idioms. Or, for that matter, how are they all drawing upon another—what are the linguistic tissues of what used to be called the “Spirit of the Age”? Radical revisions of our history would result. What we would be doing, in a sense, is a kind of blockchaining of history: distributing a particular text among all the other texts preceding and succeeding so that it exists for us in a network that will continue to be added to but can’t be detracted from. T.S. Eliot’s notion of tradition, in which a new poem retroactively changes the meaning of all the poems that came before it, would be made “material.” In all the vastness of the corpora and databases brought into play, we need never lose sight of the question of how this particular thing is that particular thing it is—a question that co-exists fertilely with the questions of what is everything else in the light of that thing.

In a hypothesis I worked out leading up to Anthropomorphics I suggested that the real results of the “anti-imperial imperialism” of the ancient Greeks and ancient Jews was less to provide us with abstract principles of behavior but to retrieve, through resentment toward the depredations of empire, an originary equality in the form of the proto-discipline: the philosophers in the form of the Greeks and the rabbis of the Talmud in the case of the Jews. This originary equality doesn’t scale up, which is why broader moral admonitions like “do unto others…” are really reformulations, in the style of wisdom literature, of the deferral of violent centralization also needed to constitute, and serving as the subject matter of, the proto-discipline. Disciplines can proliferate and become a model for social organization on the principle of creating scenes upon which we can say “this is the same” in a way that would be opaque to anyone not on that scene (which does not exclude the possibility of “inter-scenes” upon which the results of inquiries can be presented in various ways). The target of the Academy is the training of a New Officer Class, or governing class and so we would have another “bias” here: within the terms of a broader pursuit of disciplinarity, the Academy is especially interested in transforming governance into a discipline. This means not only a “field of study,” but a field of training and learning in which the students are considered to be apprentices to the governing class—or, now, whatever fragments of such a class might be said to exist in particular, I think, in those sectors of nomos most concerned with data security, which is to say ensuring the provenance of data and its usefulness for specific clients. Such practices are more continuous than ever with, for example, studying the authorship of an obscure 17^th century Spanish play, its debts to various literary, legal, theological and other traditions, the precise forms and reasons for its obscurity, the conditions of possibility of its retrieval as a hinge upon which the tradition of European drama is revised, and so on—an inquiry that might have been started out of an accidental discovery that sparked some researcher’s curiosity. These habits of thought, which are more fundamentally habits of literacy, will be immeasurably important to the creation of a new governing class.

The thinking of disciplinarity is a derivative of scenic thinking—to consider that every utterance takes place within some discipline, even if a popularized, outdated or degenerate form of that discipline, and takes on its full meaning therefrom, is to think scenically, and this seems to me essential to researchers within the physical sciences as well. It’s a commonplace, but maybe true for all that, that while scholars in the humanities value actual texts and creators in ways that physicists, chemists and biologists don’t (no physicist needs to have read Einstein, let alone Newton, etc.) it may very well be that innovations within these fields will be accelerated by those texts having been read, if not by individuals in the disciplines, then by the disciplines themselves, in the forms of AI models trained on various precursors and paths within the disciplines. These disciplines, within our Academy, will contribute to the Universal Translation Machine, retrieving discarded hypotheses, discovering the origins in certain discoveries and inventions in governmental or commercial or military projects in ways that suggest possible futures for those discoveries. Maybe a chat with a Feynman bot will help a young physicist achieve some breakthrough—but, then, that bot would have had to have been trained. So maybe the Academy will attract those scientists and engineers who are especially curious about how science might depend, and maybe has always depended, on materials usually taken to like beyond its boundaries. And such scientists and engineers might also be more interested in joint projects with those in the human sciences, and with artists, whom I don’t mean to exclude and who (very much including avant-garde, pataphysical and conceptual artists) should have an honored place in the Academy. I think this could be written up as a more formal proposal for any contemporary members of the governing class in exile who might want to increase the probability of leaving behind successors.

The future Officers Class needs to be able to see itself exclusively as producers, collectors, curators and analysts of data, but within a much broader understanding of data than we tend to have now. Data is whatever can be registered and recorded by the instruments we have now, whether that be money, court cases, polling results, indicators of health, textual archives and so on. We will be registering and recording far more, including much that would seem ineffable today: through learncoin, we will be registering, measuring, recording and blockchaining minute shifts in attention, along with the shifts in attention that notice those shifts in attention. Whatever is confusing to you about some old obscure movie is just as much data as what is contained in the movie itself. We will be meta all the way up and down. There will always be the remainder, all the new ostensives with implicit grammatical stackings attached—in fact, with the increase in registering there will be far more remainder, including that of all the computation itself that does not get registered computationally. This is just another way of saying that originary debt will never be cleared, and this fact provides a medium of exchange between center study and all the other ways of clearing debt throughout human history (what we call “religions”). The Academy will be pedagogical platforms throughout, which means no ideas without a scene and no scene outside of the stack of scenes: the test for whether a declarative statement is to be taken as true will include questions regarding scenes of testimony, questions of scaling and replication, and tokenization. The Academy will itself produce currency, precursors to and ultimately convertible into learncoin. Thirdness and Nomos: Class Action are folded up into the Academy. We’re not quite ready to take applications.