Center Study: An Introduction

Generative anthropology is by now a mature intellectual tradition whose fundamental axioms Gans and his followers have been teasing out and applying to ever-new realms of cultural history for several decades now, and Katz’s assumption of familiarity with these deep roots on the part of his readers often renders his prose opaque. Nor does it ease the novice’s path that Gans and Katz, in speculating on the origin of language, have judged it necessary to mint an original technical vocabulary for the humanities. As with all texts occulted within a cryptic language, it is not immediately apparent to the uninitiated what precisely is at stake, or what is to be gained by sounding its depths—the scholar poring over a tablet written in Linear A can never know if the text holds the answer to some burning historical conundrum or merely an unremarkable bureaucratic circular. Katz asserts that human language is a source of mythification, and his peculiar idiom is intended, if not to wholly demystify it, to at least provide the language user a greater degree of reflectivity.

To demythify language is to craft our utterances in direct reference to our being on a scene, and ultimately in reference to the first scene, or the originary scene. As Katz explains: “The way we would all be coming to speak of things if we were all in the process of incorporating the originary hypothesis and all its implications is the way, I find, I am speaking here . . . the reader is thrown in medias res, with regular recallings of the beginnings in the middle.” This is all well and good, but I am going to speak as if I were not incorporating the originary hypothesis in order to allow the reader to more easily orient himself in Gans’s and Katz’s work, though this may come at a loss of greater precision in articulating the originary hypothesis. It goes without saying that my commentary cannot substitute for a thorough reading of the primary sources, above all Katz’s book Anthropomorphics (published under the pseudonym Dennis Bouvard).

A new mode of thought that can only be entered “in the middle of things” and whose implications run to a total reform of language—this has the sound of systematic philosophy. But Katz proposes no totalizing complex of internally coherent doctrines akin to that spoken by Hegel’s Wise Man; there neither is, nor can there be, a “Katzism” analogous to the totalizing edifice of Marxism. Katz does not claim to have developed a system, but simply to offer a new frame of reference—“If originary thinking fulfilled its wildest ambition, which is, it must be said, to reframe all frames, it wouldn’t be a monolithic discourse describing everything in an abstracted meta-metalanguage; rather, it would be a world of originary inquiries, undertaken wherever people are, within their languages, discourses and traditions and through the new idioms the inquiries themselves would generate.” The point, in other words, is to address the present situation with reference to the originary scene, or to do what political philosophy has always done—to take up fundamental questions of human coexistence in a way that offers actionable solutions to the problems facing the specific political community posing said questions.

Katz is not the first in our time to have taken up these questions in this way. While generative anthropology originated in dialogue with the vernacular of what Americans peculiarly call “French theory,” there is much to be said about Gans’s and Katz’s engagement with that tradition that the present piece cannot cover (for our concerns are primarily with political thought.) Center study took shape in the “neoreactionary” milieu that emerged out of Silicon Valley in the late aughts. It would be beyond the scope of this essay to survey the entirety of the political philosophizing done in this latter sphere, and any attempt to do so would surely provoke no end of disputation and correction from its participants—better to wait until everyone involved is safely dead. Yet there is a canonical text; an “operations manual” in which the perennial questions Katz addresses were first posed in the context of an as yet unconsummated process of security state-directed, software-augmented industrialization that promises no less than a wholesale transformation of the modern state and of the very concept of sovereignty—a wave of “palantirization” that shall come to define the twenty-first century and refashion every aspect of human culture in line with the values of its avant-garde. The text is Peter Thiel’s essay “The Straussian Moment,” whose exact date of publication is unclear but was certainly first presented at a small Stanford symposium on “Politics and the Apocalypse.” I will not rehearse the arguments of this wide-ranging piece, assuming the reader has already read it, for—quite appropriately in a text dealing with Leo Strauss—it is what Thiel does not directly say that is of greatest interest.

Thiel’s essay rests on an unstated assumption without which his entire argument would fall apart: that there exists an imperative to defer violence. Thiel does not explicitly give any reason for why the nihilistic violence of the 9/11 attackers should be condemned. Since Thiel is evidently familiar with early modern political philosophy, and since he takes the civilizational problem of 9/11 to lie in its rupture with the founding political assumptions of the modern age, we may infer his reason to be that the disavowal of such acts of mass murder is already presupposed in the act of reasoned discourse in which he and his readers are engaged.

Beginning with Hobbes, early modern political philosophy understood the drive to violence to be man’s natural constitution. The purpose of political order was the repression or deferral of those natural urges; and since such deferral runs counter to nature, it must then have sprung from a conscious act of reason. Leaving aside for the moment whether this act was truly conscious, this binary between reason and violence is intuitive—violence is so sublime and unmediated an experience as to render reason superfluous. Violence is the pure consumption of matter; it takes what is given to be taken, whereas reason is a kind of “economics” concerned with its proper ordering (according to systematic criteria) through the analysis of causes and effects. Violence consummates itself without the need of mediation via language; it is an enclosed circle of itself. Reasoned discourse, logos, begins only where violence is deferred—yet to say so tells us nothing of how the deferral comes about, and leaves open the possibility that logos itself originated by accident.

This understanding of violence as the ever-compulsive satiation of a desire is a fundamental axiom on which center study rests. Consumption, in the natural world, is directed toward the satiation of material wants and involves the destruction of lower forms of life. Among men, the needs that impel violence are more complex, such as the “desire for recognition” that we first encounter in Hegel; that is, in the desire to occupy the position of an object of a desire by a subject whose desire itself is desirable—this cannot occur without displacing that object, and since the object presumably does not want to be displaced, the attempt to do so will necessarily involve violence. René Girard speaks of mimesis, the imitation of a person occupying some desired position within a group (let us say: the esteem of the group’s members,) but here he differs from Hegel more in vocabulary than substance. In both Hegel’s and Girard’s accounts desire is liable to spiral into violence: if everyone occupied the desired position, the recognition granted would be so general as to be meaningless, and so desire is by nature intensely rivalrous. The violence that this rivalry threatens to unleash will consume the entire group absent an act of deferral by one or all members of the primitive human community (Hegel suggests the former, Gans the latter, while Girard posits the existence of an unwilling third party; the “scapegoat” made responsible for rivalry within the group). Since man’s natural state is violence and consumption, deferral must in some way involve the renunciation of nature; in other words, the activation of the logos—hence we find ourselves back where Hobbes began. We might alternatively understand this in economic terms: human culture begins with a low “time preference”: that is to say, the willingness to forgo immediate satisfaction of desires in order to attain a significant reward in the future. Consumption and violence cannot be expunged from human life altogether—there is no such thing as zero time preference, and to suggest otherwise would be to repeat the antichrist’s false promise of “peace and security”—but they can be so structured to hold truly destructive consumption, and conflict, indefinitely at bay.

Having so established that it was by way of the logos incarnated in an act of deferral that nature passed into culture, let us return to the question of where the logos actually came from. As we already established, the answer of early modern political philosophy was that it did so in a conscious decision—the classic formulation to which all later theories owe a debt is that of Hobbes, who conceives of a group of men endowed by nature with equal right of contract hashing out a primitive constitution. Whatever its merits as an allegory for the origin of absolute monarchies, the Hobbesian social contract is wanting as a theory of man’s exit from his natural state, because it presupposes that sufficient mutual understanding already exists between men for there to be a common language in which the terms of the contract could be negotiated. Girard’s theory of the origin of humanity—which assumes that the murder of the scapegoat has a moral significance that requires a moral sensibility and presumably a moral language within which the community can validate it—is rejected by Gans and Katz on the same grounds. As Katz writes in Anthropomorphics:

The limit of Girard’s account is that there is no reason for the event in question to become meaningful and memorable. Why should the killing of a conspecific, not a very unusual event among mammals, transform the group in any way? I used the word “murder” in my description of the scene, but “murder” presupposes a moral order, and nothing in Girard’s scenario accounts for how the scene would create such an order. This is another way of saying that Girard doesn’t account for the emergence of language, which would itself be a prerequisite of a moral order and a community to share it.

We are here led to the insight that the founding act of humanity must occur simultaneously with the emergence of a system of symbols through which humans may communicate with each other and understand themselves as self-understanding beings. Language itself is the “social contract,” but language cannot beget itself, since there can be no agreement to construct language that is not haggled out in some existing language, and no volition sufficiently sophisticated to construct something as complex as language where language does not already exist. Thus we must conclude that language emerges simultaneously among the members of a group by accident.

How can language arise by accident? According to Gans, it did so in an event where some small group of primitive men is gathered around an “appetitive object”—he quite reasonably suggests the carcass of an animal killed in a hunt, but we cannot know what it was for certain, and the details are in any case of secondary importance. Were it only animals on this scene, the alpha of the pack would move in first to claim his portion, followed by the beta, and so on down the Greek alphabet, and there is no reason to assume that among primitive men things would be handled otherwise. But here, according to Gans, mimetic desire has increased to the point that everyone envisions himself as the one occupying the singular position at the head of the pack. As each simultaneously moves in to claim the alpha’s portion, one member of the group—seized, perhaps, by a Hobbesian terror in the face of the impending “war of all against all”—holds back, and the others, motivated presumably by a mixture of their own terror and the mimetic intuition that this member has seen or anticipated something that they have not, imitate his behavior. Gans calls this the “gesture of aborted appropriation,” in which “the order provided by the animal pecking order is replaced by an order mediated by the sign, which defers violence through representation.” No reasoned decision to defer violence is taken, because man in his natural state is incapable of doing so (here Gans parts not only from Hobbes but also Hegel;) instead “each [member of the group] is only repeating the others’ reference to the central object.” What is significant on the scene is not the object itself (hence why it does not matter to Gans whether it really is an animal carcass or some other item), but the group and its presence—this is what prompts the deferral embodied in the gesture, and as such what the members of the group are really gesturing toward. It is from the center—the group’s collective acknowledgment of its presence—that humanity emerges, and it is in reference to the center that man is always and everywhere constituted as such. As Katz puts it: “All we do is try to follow what the center is telling us to do. Even more, we are of the center, which speaks through us.”

The first sign, in Gans’s terminology, is an ostensive sign. What is meant by this, according to the online Glossary of Generative Anthropology compiled by an anonymous internet user with Katz’s authorization, is “a gesture or utterance issued where its signified is present”—this includes any sign that meets this simple criterion, and not only the original sign. Now, it will be apparent to the reader that our language can express a great deal more than mere ready-to-hand phenomena, and Gans will trace the development of an “originary grammar” across three additional “tenses”: the imperative, the interrogative, and the declarative. Unlike the hypothetical construct of the originary scene, Katz proposes to take the theory of originary grammar “quite literally”—“there is no way we could ever be doing anything that is not following an imperative within a network of imperatives deriving from an ostensive world and explicated by declaratives.” This network fits together in what Katz calls a “grammatical stack”: the manner in which sentences are constructed out of these elements—and “your speech is good when your Declaratives answer the most precise questions that emerge from the most urgent Imperatives that were generated by the most anomalous Ostensives.” What is important for our purposes is less how this phenomenon operates at an individual level but rather how civilizations construct their “grammatical stacks”—Gans has applied this frame extensively to the analysis of different episodes in the history of culture, although a detailed discussion of these would fall outside the scope of this essay. In order to grasp Katz’s political philosophy, we need to understand the grammatical stack that makes up Western civilization, but to do this we must first review the tenses.

The latter three tenses—imperative, interrogative, and declarative—all emerge at some later point than the ostensive. The usage of these terms in GA broadly corresponds to their meaning in ordinary language, although the Glossary defines “declarativity” more narrowly as “speaking about something detached from its physical presence.” Since there is no inherent property of the ostensive that impels the existence of these later tenses, and since Gans and Katz reject a decisionist theory of linguistic origin—the contention that language emerged out of a conscious decision—this leaves them to conclude that these must have originated in a mistake or a misunderstanding. That this mistakenly issued sign will not simply dissipate into the ether but instead be productively repurposed is ensured by what Gans calls “linguistic presence”: once the community interprets the things present on the scene through signs, the appearance of some unknown element precipitates a crisis to be resolved through the creation of a new sign; the appearance of a new sign a crisis to be resolved by the creation of some new meaning. It is easy to imagine, for example, how an ostensive directed at an object not actually present might be repurposed as an imperative, or an imperative concerning an object that cannot be proffered instead transformed, in a face-saving maneuver, into an interrogative, and eventually into a mere statement of fact, although how the process unfolded is of secondary importance.

That human culture has come quite far since the originary scene should be apparent to the reader—otherwise there would be no need for Gans and Katz to re-clarify it. Yet if the center is no more than the representation of the community to itself, it must still be with us in essentially the same form it took on the originary scene, even if the possibility of expressing oneself in tenses other than the ostensive has obscured it. If—as the theory of linguistic presence asserts—changes in the structure of language correspond to the appearance of new elements on the scene (with the causality working in both directions), then the expansion of the originary grammar serves the practical work of representing such changes to the community in such a way as to defer the potential violence that a breakdown of the previous composition of the scene could occasion. Since it was a moment of simultaneous restraint by all members of the group that allowed the center to emerge qua center, a movement to occupy the place of the central object would presumably cause this “social contract” to implode, unless some new gesture of deferral were to be performed. Such an attempted usurpation would generate an imperative: an imperative to react—affirmatively or negatively—in a way that would somehow carry forth the deferral of violence manifested on the previous scene. Whatever configuration emerged would have to be justified by reference to the usurped scene, which, as it would no longer be present, would require a more complex grammatical form than the simple ostensive; i.e., a declarative. The tenses and the grammatical stacks constructed with them are thus what allow the center’s presence and authority to persist despite periodic usurpations thereof.

One such usurpation holds a special place in generative anthropology: the so-called “Big Man revolution,” a term borrowed from the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and transposed by Gans into GA in The End of Culture. Katz will name the Big Man’s emergence as “the second most important originary event in human history”—second only to the appearance of the ostensive itself. Only since the Big Man revolution has humanity been able to expand beyond the group into more complex forms of organization. This Big Man is for the most part what he sounds like—an exceptional individual who, by means of the outstanding wealth he amasses, places himself at the center of the community and maintains his presence by controlling the distribution of resources. Yet Gans uses the term in a specific sense, bound up with his distinction between what he calls the “producer’s desire” and “consumer’s satisfaction.” The Big Man accumulates his capital because he defers consumption in order to produce indefinitely (how else is capital amassed?) We may infer—consistent with this motivation—that he spends his largesse to usurp the center in order to better reap the advantages of scale that the central place confers on his production. The readier appetite of his fellows for consumer’s satisfaction is what lets the Big Man purchase their loyalty; yet his gifts breed resentment as well. Here the declarative comes into its political own, in the entreaties that he ensure a “just” distribution corresponding to the memory of the previous scene.

The Big Man’s usurpation of the center is the dawn of human political history. It is in dealing with its consequences that Katz parts from the politically quietist Gans and lays out the political implications of originary thinking in which Gans, for the most part, is uninterested. Let us recall once more the dictum that “your Declaratives answer the most precise questions that emerge from the most urgent Imperatives that were generated by the most anomalous Ostensives.” The Big Man revolution is one such ostensive, in that it is an event whose consequences we live with, and one that continues to shape our political reality—there is always a “Big Man” that we can point to. From here, it requires no great leap of logic to deduce that, since the Big Man’s ethos is to scale up deferral, the imperative his presence generates is to do so in perpetuity. Thus we have the essence of Katz’s political program: “The West,” he writes, “is the ongoing perfection of the ‘Big Man’ (Marshall Sahlins) revolution across all spheres of life—that is, power held by one person (almost always a man) who continually stakes that power on the results of his use of it.” The person who continually stakes that power on the results of his use of it—we might think here of Faust, who wagers against his “consumer’s satisfaction” (which is, as per our earlier definition of consumption, an act of annihilation) and constantly “wins the bet” through cycles of creative destruction. Thus, while Katz provides an original formulation, he stands within an eminent tradition of thinking about the West.

Politics, as Schmittians posit, is about friends and enemies. Katz, with a clear definition of the West in hand, proceeds to say who these are. “What is ‘anti-West,’ then, is to swamp or flood that power with exercises of power that are untraceable and unaccountable. Untraceable and unaccountable sources of power, such as the ‘masses,’ or, for that matter, ‘the people,’ or some historical process or law.” The West’s enemy is liberal democracy and what Katz will call “post-Nuremberg international law”—the attempt to found a new nomos (again, in the Schmittian sense) or system of deferral by means of the establishment of an international society in which nation-states would be integrated as equals, in deliberate contrast to the order of mastery and slavery (to use Hegel’s terms) to which Hitler had attempted to subject the German nation’s neighboring populations. This nomos Katz judges to have failed, for the repudiation of mastery—or of anything that might be mistaken for it—has decayed into the delegitimization of the nation-state as such whenever it asserts authority over some subaltern group. The master-slave relationship, as the ultimate moral prohibition handed down at Nuremberg, became the language in which every group at practically every level of society in every country has since cast its claim to legitimacy against every other group to the point of absurdity. While custom and law have thus far prevented this form of legitimacy from cannibalizing society, the directionality is clear, and only the assertion of a genuine nomos—the center—can prevent the slide into chaos.

What might this nomos be? Recall that to carry on the Big Man revolution means that producer’s desire must continuously trump the consumer’s satisfaction. By re-clarifying the opposition between production and deferral on the one hand, and consumption and satisfaction on the other, we possess a standard with which to evaluate political doctrines, social theories, metaphysical claims, and the realities that they either defend or seek to bring into being in terms of their compliance with the instructions from the center. Doctrines that promote deferral—what Weber called the “Protestant ethic” and which appears today most faithfully practiced by the Chinese state—can be assimilated into the praxis of center study (or their pure forms recovered—I am not suggesting, nor does Katz, that we must all embrace communism or become Protestants.) Doctrines that emphasize man’s entitlements to some form of satisfaction—perhaps a metaphysical belief or a legal dogma that affords him some inherent rights, or an economic theory that recognizes an individually determined utility, but this is hardly an exhaustive list—are to be rejected. Center study may not of itself be able to provide the technical knowledge required to “defer consumption” on a meaningful scale, but it can re-clarify the terms and integrate other disciplines into a synthesized understanding of history and man’s place in the world that flows naturally into a simple and practical course of action—no less than Protestantism has done in various epochs and Marxism does in China today. We might think of center study, whose “clarification of the terms” is none other than a “rectification of the names” as a kind of “Confucian characteristics” optimized for the West, waiting to be scaled up beyond a scholarly tradition by courtly mandarins into a civilizational operating system on which everyone in society runs.

Reindustrialization—that is, civilizational expansion through scaled-up deferral—is the most urgent imperative generated by the center, but the “rectification of names” is a far grander and more permanent task. But why do the names need rectification in the first place? This, in short, is an externality of the Big Man revolution and the expanded use of the declarative. A group organized by a Big Man is capable of producing such a surplus as to draw other populations into the Big Man’s sphere of control. Katz describes a shift from “sacral kingship,” i.e., a Big Man regime in which “everyone shares the same ritual order” (that is to say, is “named by the center,”) to a “divine kingship” where the king’s rule extends beyond the scene and takes on the characteristics of an absent deity who can only be referred to in the declarative. The same scale that necessitates indirect speech (not in the sense of vague speech, but speech concerning things that are not present) also requires new, indirect techniques of rule, along with mechanisms of distribution to and among the center’s vassals beyond simple gift-giving. These exigencies give rise to the market: Katz agrees with David Graeber that “markets are established, and money provided to make those markets functional, for the purpose of provisioning soldiers stationed in foreign territories.” But money, as a derogation of the figure occupying the center’s authority, also subverts it and allows alternative loci of power to form. “The pluralization of power within the polity,” writes Katz, “means that power centers can align themselves with or against the king, and the king can align himself with some power centers against others. With money, markets and plural power centers comes justice systems, secular thought and at least the beginnings of technology.” What Katz is trying to do is no less than to find a “master key” to explain the dawn of the Axial Age, when speculative, universalistic thought emerged hand in hand with a political pluralism and a monetary economy.

For the originary thinker, the apparent problem that explaining the emergence of the Axial Age represents is in fact quite simple. This “problem,” as Katz sees it, presents itself only because we are still tied up in derivations of Axial Age thought, which is by design declarative and thus unable to grasp the ostensive in reference to which it appears. We can observe this in microcosm in the problem of tyranny—a problem first posed by philosophy, and whose referent cannot be understood but in connection with philosophy, with which it shares roughly the same hour of birth. This is not to say that tyranny is a mere spook invented by the philosophers. Tyranny, according to Katz, is a corollary of the political pluralism that emerges from the overextension of divine kingship. The tyrant does not derive his authority from the center as the sacral or divine king does, but persists “through the manipulation of conflicts between social groups.” Tyranny always rests on fragile foundations; in short, the tyrant is not a producer but a rentier on others’ resentment, whose authority both requires (and is equally easily disarmed by) discourses of legitimacy that cannot be uttered but in the declarative, for there is no “center”—no community representing itself to itself in ritual—in a tyrant’s political economy and therefore no ostensive except in banal contexts.

Philosophy, and by extension secular thought, emerges in connection with the problem of tyranny when “the post-priestly class of philosophers makes a bid to become a new source of power by presenting itself as in command of the concepts that make ruling “legitimate,” that is, non-tyrannical: nature and justice.” At this juncture, it’s worth digressing slightly to note a contemporary of Katz, Costin Alamariu, who likewise links the origin of philosophy to tyranny in his 2015 doctoral dissertation, “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche”:

It is precisely this teaching of nature so corrosive of all convention and all morality, that is politically explosive, and that explains the deep connection between philosophy—the criminal study of nature outside the city and outside the myths and pieties of the regime—and tyranny—the criminal and feral regime of rule outside and above all law and all convention.

While the relationship he postulates between tyranny and philosophy differs from Katz’s account, Alamariu’s understanding of “nature” (and, presumably, justice) as a concept that in classical antiquity had to assert itself against “the myths and pieties of the regime”—Katz would say “the center”—makes his account ultimately reconcilable to that of Katz. Tyranny, in Katz’s schema, is “the central problem the foundation of political thought aims to solve, and it remains the problem political thought has yet to solve”—unsolvable, at least, “without the creation of a social order grounded in the imperatives issued by an originary center—and such an order cannot be grasped by political thinking derived from the problem of the tyrant.” It is, of course, precisely this order that Katz aims to restore, yet this must be done in a world where the serpent of secular thought has already entered the garden. Katz is not trying to restore the sacred to a disenchanted world, critiquing the concept as an unnecessarily mystifying representation of human sociality, but merely to re-articulate it at a higher degree of generality; to tease out the pure form of the sacred in the idea of the center. What he does is to attempt a dialectical synthesis between secular thought and the originary scene. We are too steeped in the legacy of the Axial Age, whether in its Hebrew or Greek stream, (both of which culminate in secular thought,) to simply cast it off, and yet the center always remains with us and can be returned to or re-clarified at any moment. I cannot be more clear than Katz when he writes:

It’s easy to see, though, that nothing has replaced, with any unanimity, the sacred aura of kingship. We can see modern politics as a series of replacements for that sacral legitimation, from “freedom” to “the people,” to individual rights, to the “nation,” some oppressed class or group, and so on. These terms are the source of endless arguments because they are in themselves nothing more than signs of resentment towards some previous form of sacralized empire, now marked as “tyranny.” If you ask someone what “equality” means, you will inevitably be told that it means someone can’t take something from you—the concept itself has no substance. It merely marks a presumably inviolable center to be protected from tyranny. Moreover, these modern forms of legitimation have never corresponded particularly well to actual social relations, which remain every bit as hierarchical and, in most areas of life, “dictatorial” as most historical “tyrannies.” Demands for more democracy or equality are demands that the state act on your behalf against some of your enemies; it thereby empowers the state, and whichever agencies are best able to access and leverage the state. It follows, further, that the way for the more powerful players in the modern world—state agencies and corporate leaders alike—to enhance their power is precisely by leveraging such concepts against their rivals. Indeed, we can see that “equality” can’t really mean anything more than the same in relation to central power, and that for central power to treat everyone the same it must acquire ever more power over all of them. So, we see in the modern world, in democracy and liberalism, not the continuation of the repudiation of sacrifice enacted in metaphysics and (more completely) in scripture, but its revival, as violent centralizing is “laundered” through the institutions that, in purporting to balance powers against each other, actually unleashes them against each other.

So, what is to be done?

Insofar as a social crisis is transcended or resolved, it is done so through a retrieval of the originary scene. The retrieval of the originary scene means an assembling by deferred desire for some central object—the central object that is the most dangerous in the given social setting. Scripture and metaphysics are such retrievals of the originary scene within the crisis of the ancient imperial orders. The organization of communities around intellectual practices resistant to sacrificial mobilization, around saints, around wise men, around dialogue focused on conceptual paradoxes, around sacred texts and revelatory events: these are the disciplinary orders of late antiquity which retrieve the practices of deferral and revise and neutralize decadent sacrificial practices. The study of these disciplinary orders is itself productive of disciplinary orders. While these disciplinary orders of the Axial Age exposed the decrepitude of divine kingship, they operated exclusively through a withdrawal from questions of power. Only this way could they sustain their practices of deferral, but this limits their usefulness as models for solving the problem of restoring a kind of working amity between the signifying center and the occupied, governing center. The need to solve that problem is imposed upon all of us, because if there would be one thing we could come close to unanimous agreement on, it would probably be that there is no space of withdrawal from power struggles. We are all of us implicated in various forms of direct and indirect violent centralization, and all of our language is unmistakably marked by this violence.

The task with which the unfinished Big Man revolution presents us is thus to “retrieve the practices of deferral and revise and neutralize decadent practices” through “organization of communities around intellectual practices” that would directly address questions of power. “The civilizational project I am proposing for the disciplines,” writes Katz, “is the one I suggest they have really been pursuing all along: inquiring into the meaning of imperatives issued by the central authority.” In political terms, this means the dismantling of the declarative order, manifested today in liberalism, because it provides false instructions to the agents of the center. Since, as we have established, the center is always with us, and its instructions can theoretically be retrieved at any time, the reason we must assume this is not being done is because of an infelicity of speech: it is for this reason that center study begins and can only begin with a reform of language. Katz has no intention of making up his own private jargon and forcing it upon humanity, and emphasizes that this reform must occur on rational, scientific grounds: he suggests beginning with the linguist Anna Wierzbicka’s “natural semantic primes”—words which can be translated directly into any language—and which point to the center by “purifying” what is essential and always present in language from the self-perpetuating additions grafted on by specific cultures for their own long since forgotten purposes. If “public discourse in modern democracies can be reduced to each side purporting to demythify the other” on the authority of the disciplines (or their “critical” shadows), as Katz charges, the semantic primes model an escape from the samsara of disciplinary mythification and demythification by relativizing all language and “constituting our utterances on a scene, with a center.”

It may seem that in recommending “organization of communities around intellectual practices,” center study is preparing the ground for an epistemic community to take power in lieu of the occulted Big Man. Communism, which organized communities around intellectual practices in preparation for the day when the contradictions would be resolved and the world clarified, underwent precisely this fate as the vanguard party “usurped” a proletariat that in reality never arrived. In practice, this risk cannot be completely hedged against (though this should not prevent anyone from trying) now any more than it was in the Axial Age, even if the present state of information technology affords the Big Man a wider sphere of direct control beyond that which divine kings possessed, since he will invariably rely on a large organization that he cannot completely oversee. But the “trump” which the Big Man possesses is the right to name his successor—what Katz calls “singularized succession in perpetuity.”

Singularized succession in perpetuity is the crystallization of all that has hitherto been discussed. It acknowledges the prerogative of the center through its occupant while casting the center’s authority in terms of its absolute right to make arrangements for the future; in other words, its capacity for deferral. It frames the task of government as a kind of “selective breeding”; as constantly preparing for its own succession through the education of suitable candidates to fulfill roles in the Big Man’s administrative-academic bureaucracy, and by fine-tuning the mechanisms of selection as required by the new situations in which humanity finds itself.

The most obvious way of doing this is by establishing special academies to produce high-level government officials, and having the top 1 percent or so of graduates enter more grueling training and competitions to further narrow the number down. The ruler would take an intense interest in these academies, ensuring that they inculcate the most important political skills and traditions. Lower-level schools would have special programs training especially qualified students to apply to those academies—the academies, then, would set the tone regarding moral, ethical and political education across the system.

This pedagogy and the elites it produces will mostly reflect the present state of technology, although not necessarily; there might arise, for example, transitional periods where man can go no further on a particular trajectory or he has lost his way, and humanistic and artistic talents will be called upon to undertake the creative work of charting a new path or representing society back to itself. In any event, the point of SSIP is to hold the world in perpetual equilibrium; to continually defer its own self-annihilation through reasoned discourse—or, if need be, until the inconceivable moment of misunderstanding where a new form of speech appears on the scene and the Big Man can hand over his well-tended garden to an heir of a new type. Alles Drängen, alles Ringen, ist ewig Ruh’n in Gott dem Herrn.