Writing as the Programming of Scenes: The Affordances of God

I’ve come back on a few occasions to my critique of what I’ve called the “Big Scenic Imaginary”—that is, the representation of the world as a single scene on which unformalized agencies act directly upon each other. The Big Scenic Imaginary is what we are constructing when we speak about relations and interactions between ethnic, national or racial groups, between sexes, between sexual orientations, between classes, occupational groups and so on or, for that matter, “forces” like “technology” and “media.” I developed this concept originally as a way of critiquing Eric Gans’s political thinking, relying as it does upon the relationship between high achievers (bearers of “firstness,” in his understanding) and those who are, let’s say, somewhat less endowed, intellectually speaking—the resentment of the latter towards the former, and various attempts on the part of the former to fend off such resentment is, for Gans, a defining feature of contemporary liberal democracies. What I wanted to point out here is that these “demographics” are not agents to whom emotions like “resentment” can be attributed. Gans is obviously not the only person who sees things in such broadly characterized terms, filtered, as I see it, through media sensationalism (where the media sets itself up as prosecutor and judge on a simulated scene). In fact, I may be in a small minority here. My assumption is that the only real agencies are those constructed upon ritual, juridical or disciplinary scenes (I include the level of the state within the juridical, for reasons I’ve been giving in the last several posts)—any agencies not so constructed reside in a fantasy world, however widely shared.

I want to now place the Big Scenic Imaginary within a broader framework by observing that it really represents a residual orality within literacy. In other words, it represents a kind of illiteracy, if we operate with a more robust notion of literacy. The Big Scenic Imaginary is equivalent to the scene of writing of classic prose, predicated upon the presence on a shared scene between writer and readers, in which the writer “points” out things that the readers can see as clearly as he can. If the writer and readers can be on this scene, present to each other, then so can everyone and everything they talk about, including groups, which act in unison as individuals. In fact, these groups can be interlocutors within the conversations, on mass mediated scene producing simulacra of juridical scenes upon which judgments, which heavily impact actual juridical scenes, can be pronounced. But writing is less a presentation of a shared scene than a programming of possible scenes: if someone were to write X then some implicated set of persons might be expected do Y range of things. In other words, a declarative sentence is best understood as an algorithm figuring various possible ostensives at the end of the line of a sequence of imperatives. The better sentence is the one that more singularizes the operator of the hypothetical prospective gesture at the end of the line. Such a sentence would be anonymous—that is, it could be uttered by anyone in a position to have uttered it, which would be anyone who might have figured that range of possible ostensives—and yet the link to orality, to voice, is never lost. The written sentence is still one to be read and “heard,” even if in an unidentifiable voice within one’s own “head.” The sentence template “I AM THAT I AM” pronounced by God in naming Himself to Moses, articulates the intimacy of that heard voice with its “anyoneness,” “anywhereness,” and “anywhenness.” Only under such conditions could God always be with you, untethered to any specific ritual place or gesture. The God whose name is the declarative sentence is therefore a mode of generating scenes (which ultimately must “take place”).

Jacqueline Vayntrub’s Beyond Orality helps me to arrives that this conclusion in her study of Biblical “wisdom literature,” by observing that while speech, throughout the Bible, is invariably attributed to someone (even if in traditional, quasi-ritual ways, as in attributing the Psalms to David), in the Proverbs this tether to some putative “speaker” is broken and we get “sayings” that just “say” themselves. At this point, writing becomes autonomous, needing no longer to be presented as a representation of some locatable speech act—but what this further means (Vayntrub doesn’t go in this direction but other studies of “wisdom literature” do) is that this literature represents the centrality of the scribe. A lot of discussion, within Biblical studies but well beyond it into studies of the ancient near east, in recent decades has followed up on the obvious observation that a specific group of people, with specific skills and training, sharing traditions, reaching across social classes and social functions, often exercising considerable power and at any rate indispensable to those who did, must have written, edited, rewritten, preserved and saw to the dissemination of all these texts. That much sacred writing, issuing in the Bible but also the literary traditions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and so on, originated and served as material for training scribes seems to me to be pretty important, making the scribe a far more interesting figure than priest, shaman, oracle or other essentially oral figures. To get ahead of myself, I want to draw a line from the ancient scribe to today’s “programmers of programmers,” to use Laurence Diver’s term from his Digisprudence. This would mean that the texts we read, preserve, refer to, and produce all have the purpose of training these “programmers of programmers,” the “descendants” of the scribes, now engaged in scenic design practices, in creating affordances. That would have to be what I’m doing right now as well. This would then be all the “agency” we need for what I’ll call an “open source Messianism”—an agency on the boundary between formalized and non-formalizable, which is to say, a completely literate mode of agency. (“Open source” because the waiting for the hidden Messiah is inverted into an increasingly explicit identification and creation of advance conditions under which one who will name his successors unto perpetuity will emerge.)

“I AM THAT/WHAT I AM” itself as, as Gans says, a “template” of a sentence, looks like a kind of training module, an abstracted kernel of the “mashal” form Vayntrub clarifies as a kind of parallelism or “likening” (“a good wife is like gold but a bad wife is like spoiled food,” etc.) and is the basic structure of the proverb (”mashal” in Hebrew), other forms of wisdom literature and probably prayer as well. “Mashal” also means “example,” or, for our purposes, “sample.” Training on such samples, to the point where you can revise and play with them, use them to comment on and revise other sacred texts, apply them to situations in your duties as an administrator, would be enough like listening to God and having Him tell you he will always be with you to suggest something like “he is always here” as God’s name. It is then a question of creating such training modules adequate to our contemporary scenic conditions, under which everything we might think is always already algorithmized through the database—we’d then be hearing God’s voice and refining His imperatives, which is to say, engaging His affordances.

Gans, in his Chronicle of Love & Resentment 724, “The Sacred/Significant,” suggests the following as the simplest way of understanding the sacred:

consider the role of the signs of language in everyday life. Whatever I am doing, an utterance of language has in principle the capacity to preempt my attention. Unlike animal calls and cries, which humans use on occasion as well, the use of language is a cultural act, one that in principle is presumed to take precedence over the ongoing state of affairs. If the linguistic irruption is considered inappropriate, we may say that it is comparable to the misuse of a sacred privilege.

The voice of God breaks in on us, interrupting our participation in some scene, claiming our attention; but any voice does that, meaning that any voice might be the voice of God. When is it actually the voice of God, then? Let’s put this in scenic terms: you are on a scene, and the utterance interrupts you, placing you on another scene, where you are interlocutor of that voice which, if we follow Gans here, as long as the interruption was not “inappropriate,” is at least a bit the voice of God—or, the voice of God can be heard through it. But you’re still on the other, interrupted scene, and the voice of God, if such it is, must be heard there—it must crowd out and supplant, but also speak through the utterances circulating on that scene. This takes some work, work on the utterance. It is the voice of God insofar as it is heard on a third scene, one upon which the utterance is the same on both of the other two scenes. This cannot ever be the case automatically, otherwise the utterance wouldn’t be an “irruption.” The utterance will be significantly differentiated by the respective contexts of the two scenes. You find a way to become an interlocutor with that utterance in the same way on both scenes, with all of their differences (the third scene is simultaneously on both of the other scenes, a kind of meta-scene). In making the utterance equally irruptive and equally a center of attention on both scenes, you are hearing and hammering out the word of God. But this kind of working over of the utterance presupposes full literacy as the explicit programming of scenes—only someone at home in textuality can run through all the alternative framings of the utterances that would equivalate them across the two scenes, and to do so (or at least initiate the sequence) virtually instantaneously, as would need to be the case. And, however much work you put into processing the utterance, in the end it would still come from the Other, as an irruption.

A little context and commentary here might help. For a very long time I have been intermittently interested in treating thought experiments as a kind of fundamental “method,” and I tried out a version of this in my essay (“Originary Method”) in the volume of GA essays I edited back in 2007, The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry (which is very reasonably priced on Amazon, by the way). There, I was thinking that the way you would “run” a thought experiment would be to take a single utterance and imagine it at the center of two incommensurable scenes—my example was the fairly stereotyped one of an utterance that could be either a sign of complete insanity or utter brilliance depending upon the most minimal change in the surrounding context you could imagine. Not bad, I think, but what I’m proposing here is getting at something similar but in a less cloistered, more “social” way—rather than a fictional scenario to be worked out in your mind, the “word of God” here would be more engaged in a specific setting, with others, and with a less easily packaged result—even if making the utterance the same across the scenes would be continued with an “internal monologue” it would still be an utterance coming from the Other that has transfixed by interrupting you. What makes an utterance the same in different settings is not something that could be settled in accord with some external and replicable standard—it calls for the creation of a disciplinary space, even if a virtual one. I am recalling here my own “mashal,” that everyone is saying the same thing so that everyone doesn’t do the same thing at the same time—the work involved in ascertaining and demonstrating that everyone is saying the same thing in the samples available is bringing forth the voice of God and engaging His affordances.

The voice of God heard as a result of highly literate practices iterates the residue of presence immanent in any pedagogy, however remote, indirect, or even unintentional (the way an author from thousands of years ago can “speak to you”). Pedagogy is always an irruption. But what else is going on here is what we would have call the “political” or, as I would prefer, “open source Messianic,” dimension of the center. In Anthropomorphics I distinguished between the “occupied center” and the “signifying center”—the different between the slain deer at the center of the originary scene and the divine utterance calling upon the newly human group to cease and desist and then approach in an orderly way is also (with all of its differences) the difference between the “God” and “Emperor” components of the God Emperor. The playing out of the God whose name is the declarative sentence separates out irremediably the signifying from the occupied center and this decisive separation is an important source of our current “difficulties”—if no human can be a god, then why should anyone be at the center; and yet someone must be and, in fact, is. The word of God is the irruption of the signifying center upon the subject of the occupied center and we should now be mature enough, which is to say, capable of deriving from our deferrals the requisite disciplinary spaces so that we can resist opposing antagonistically the two centers with wails and shrieks attributed to the otherworldly (our God-given rights, some open-ended horizon of equalization, resistance to “tyranny,” etc.). Working out the same sample utterance across scenes is how we listen to the center, which is to say, clarify the imperatives from the center, which is to say, fill the imperative gap. And in doing this kind of “inscriptural” commentary on my previous writings, I’m working over these utterances and making them “inter-operative” across scenes, thereby generating new formulas, eventually “templates” for a range of other utterances (samples).

Listening to God can therefore be made fairly routine, while at the same time, being irruptive, something that can always disarm us. The occupied center oversees the preservation of ritual forms, the juridical form, and the disciplinary spaces: no utterance can be meaningful to the extent that it undermines the pertinent occupied space—such utterances are what we call lies, deceptions, evasions, falsifications, defamation—all, today at least, derivatives of what is ultimately the laziness of the Big Scenic Imaginary, which is activated by any attempt to find a short cut to power by imagining a unitary agent in action. Upon these scenes we do critique or expose any utterance that we can show to be a violation of the terms of the scene. The voice of God, then, speaks most loudly and persistently through the victims of these predations—and you know when we’re dealing with a real victim (one denied the requisite protections of the scene, not one with “less” power) by determining whether supporting that target will preserve and enhance the scene rather than subvert it. But hearing the voice of God is also a disciplinary program, where we hear not only victims of violated scenes but witnesses to such violations, indications transmitted by speakers who have themselves not detected those violations, including indications of weakening and carelessness among the guardians of those scenes. This can only be work inherited from the scribes, who worked across ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes in reworking and reinstituting, perhaps often in only literary forms, rituals that sanctify the juridification of rulership and history. It’s in reworking another layer of already layered texts that voice of God becomes audible.

The Big Scenic Imaginary can be approached more fairly if we say that by “residual orality,” we mean a tilting of the juridical toward the imminently juridical within the ritual, which is to say the vendetta. The casual exchange of stereotypical insults as well as the reconciliations effected through representative figures that get dressed up more theoretically in the Big Scenic Imaginary has its place at the sub-juridical level of conflict resolution, where rougher forms of justice, based on informal, shared communal knowledge can preserve the autonomy of the community by not allowing confrontations to escalate to the point where the state must intervene. It’s at this level that statements like “that’s the way they are" and “let’s sttle this amongst ourselves” have their place, and where various degrees of insiderness and outsiderness need to be discerned on the spot. The autonomy of such spaces is essential to a good, functional social order, and they need to be revivified, counter to the use of infinitely extendible anti-discrimination categories to demolish them. But such spaces will be better preserved and enhanced, not only as “life-worlds” but as vocabularies that can contribute to the design of larger spaces, if it is recognized that they are liminal spaces bounding honor cultures and juridical cultures and they don’t scale up to the sovereign level. It is probably the case that attempts to scale these vocabularies up in this way is due to capture by the anti-discrimination slant in juridical language, which provides the disciplines with the basket of entities they need to prove, disprove, and explain. It takes some effort not to take these categories, in which all conflicts, needs and aspirations can be readily described by the state and media, as, simply, reality.