Any writing instructor could provide you with a long list of common student mistakes involving the confusion of one word with another. One of the earliest I noted, and always one of my favorites, was “interoperate” for “interpret,” which I begin seeing before I had ever seen “interoperate” in other contexts, but which eventually came to seem to me prescient and now prophetic—to “interpret” a text is, in fact, to make it “interoperable” with some other discourse which recodes it, and we have passed the point where we should transition from asking students to interpret to asking them to interoperate (or render interoperable), which includes the former while being far more expansive in its implications. This holds for all learners in all fields, who will flourish by rendering themselves as interoperable with as many centers, users and interfaces as possible. Of course, interoperability can take on many forms, and this is something we should start exploring.
In 2006, in my essay for the GA book I edited, The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, I defined “meaning” as “the experience of initial conditions.” I mention this because this formulation is itself the initial condition of something I’m still working on now as part of my project of turning the metalanguage of literacy away from metaphysics and towards an intralingual pedagogy. To say that meaning is the experience of initial conditions is to say that any utterance is a hypothesis regarding the possible consequences of that utterance (I’ve always been borrowing heavily from Peirce here). So, instead of measuring a statement or gesture in terms of its use of words with specific dictionary or specialized meanings, its truth value when measured according to established epistemological standards, its moral or ethical reliance on utilitarianism, consequentialism or deontological norms, etc., treat it as a prediction of how everyone on a given field would be situated differently at some future date as a result of the utterance. Instead of an epistemological criterion, we “posit” that a particular person, possessing certain observational and reporting capabilities, a certain mode and degree of scrupulousness, and certain conditions under which to act more or less freely, would ascertain such and such to be the case. We populate a field. Needless to say, we don’t need to itemize all the positions comprising this field—just one, which is exemplary for the purpose of the discourse in question. Instead of trying to conform to presumably air-tight standards, we lay all our bets on this one guy. And then we want to find out if someone approximating him indeed exists, making the rest of our discourse a search for him, or signs of him.
This scenic, or field-ic, thinking is a proposal for re-temporalizing the declarative sentence. The declarative sentence constructs a present, but rather than a present standing outside of time, it is a present marking the conversion of the scenes we have been leaving into the ones we will be entering. This means that it is a way of bearing the imperative within the declarative, because the imperative is the only speech form that is intrinsically temporal—in a way the declarative is a kind of mediated ostensive, as both create a present, while the declarative constructs a present distinct from the linguistic present it constitutes, but the imperative can only take on its meaning in its fulfillment or denial by another, after the utterance. The imperative is language’s clock—we can measure our relation to the center by the “expiration dates” of the various imperatives we are obeying, resisting or defying at any one time. And we are nothing other than the sum total of those imperatives, which come to us from sacred texts and rituals, parents, ancestors and other models and teachers, the spaces designed for us, and the technologies we use. I presented this choice in Anthropomorphics: when someone does something, we can posit some inner agency within the agency that led him to do it (will, conscience, intention, etc.); or, we can look for the imperative he’s following. I consider the former approach essentially mythical, grounded in some imperative exchange disguised narratively—some kind of deal with reality. The latter approach gives a way to start putting order into the imperatives we follow, by submitting the more transient to the more enduring. “Internal spaces” are just places to dump attributions and motivations that we need to make our narratives work.
The originary event, then, de-temporalizes, as Gans has pointed out: it creates the first present. This provides yet another reason for rejecting the “internal scene of representation,” which would introduce some little narrative within a scene that is so self-referential that it doesn’t move. Whatever you think you would need to deposit in the internal scene of representation can be resituated in the scene itself, in which every participant constitutes himself in response to him seeing everyone else constitute themselves response to… It was pointed out to me in a discussion of my book with GASC members and others that the basis for positing an internal scene of representation given by Gans is that on the scene the individual participant anticipates the consumption of the object as he is refraining from advancing to do just that—that “anticipation”—this provides an interesting link to Siegert’s account of the origin of technics—is the origin of the internal scene. But the anticipation itself is seen in the hesitation of all the others in the populating the field confronting the individual participant. The anticipation is just as “external” to him as any “fear” or other emotion we could reasonably attribute to him: it is completely bound up in his relation to the others, whom he also sees waiting, and therefore representing his waiting. But if there’s no internal, there’s no external—there is just a scene comprised of the number of levels of self-referentiality needed by us as inquirers while being unrepresentable past a certain point to the participants themselves.
The imperative, then, introduces time into the human community. We have our account of the imperative, as a speech form, emerging from the inappropriate ostensive. We could say, well, we have imperatives, however they originated, and now it’s just a question of how and when to issue and obey (or defy, or evade) them. But this would be to fall back into a metaphysical understanding of technology: some subject “decides” to issue an imperative, and another “decides” to obey or defy it. We’re back to a subject with an internal scene upon which we have to model some process of decision making, eventually creating an elaborate metalanguage for the purpose. The originary, or anthropomorphic, way of approaching the question is to see any imperative as emerging from an ostensive that has ceased “working.” One is moving about, surveying a populated field one has been authorized to supervise, singling out for attention first one, then another, practice, until a discrepancy emerges between what one sees, which is to say, what has been pointed out (even by oneself, a moment ago), and what would complete the thing one sees. The ostensive sign, the attentional space it summons, can only be completed if supplemented by referring to what is missing in a way that would eventuate in someone supplying it. So, the imperative, properly issued, is always an extension of an ostensive. You do your best to see everything in order and only when you are compelled to acknowledge that something is coming loose do you extend your looking into a command. The more practiced you become in both issuing commands and assessing the new scene they eventuate in, the more practiced you become in identifying even minute and potential disorderings that might require extended, complex and conditional imperatives.
We are talking, then, about the transition from immersion in one scene to the creation of and entrance onto, another scene. An imperative is the only way of effecting that transition—things only change because someone obeys an imperative (to defy one is just to obey another), even if implicitly, which is to say an imperative that can be read of the scene itself because it was intrinsic to its construction. Technology is the organization of the inorganic so as to obey imperatives produced by but unfulfillable upon, other scenes, and so as to install a new constellation of imperatives as a scene resistant to that kind of imperative failure. This also means that the more advanced the technology, the more it creates potential scenes, unpredictable by, but within parameters set by, the designer. It’s a matter of producing more, and more densely networked, but also more open-ended, imperatives. In this situation you can be either a user or an interface—this distinction will be critical to any future “moral” discourse (which I’m increasingly hoping won’t be called “moral” discourse). To be a user is to be plugged in and fed—to be an addict, essentially. To be an interface is to retrieve data from the Cloud, to “eavesdrop” on the exchanges between non-user addresses, so as to convert users into interfaces. The telos is for all of us to be interfaces: that is the translation of what most people would now think of as “critical, thoughtful citizens,” or something along those lines. Since we’re all becoming different interfaces or, more precisely, samples and apps, soliciting and converting data so as to supplement some disordered field, the “moral” question is how to make all of ourselves interoperable with each other—it’s a problem of curating data so that it can travel across the boundaries separating the zones within which we operate.
Within the Stack, the way a human (there is always a non-programmed and only potentially programmable distinguishing feature of the human) takes initiative and exercises authority is by giving assignments. You can give an assignment to a single individual, to a group, to a crowd, to everyone; you can give an assignment to everyone so that those who can participate in the practice it directs can self-select for it. The “sovereign” will be he who can give assignments across zones, which is where interoperability is necessary. The assignment is meant to convert the user, who is infiltrated by the programming, into the interface, who infiltrates the programming so as to effect this. You want to stage a confrontation between the programmed and programming. Look for where “chunking” is taking place—“chunking” is the use of prepared “utterances” or “samples” that are automatically elicited by certain “kinds” of situations. When you’re predictable, it’s because you’re chunking. Take a chunk—a phrase, a cliché, a familiar attitude or reaction—and reduce it to its elements: break it up. Take one part and replace it with another part. You can do this in a programmed manner that nevertheless interferes with programming—this is the value of the literary strategies of pataphysics, and especially Oulipo: use, for example, the N+7 constraint: replace a noun in the chunk with the 7th noun after it in the dictionary. You’ll get a new phrase that you don’t necessarily have to use, but can become the material for a transfer translation. Now more than ever we need to free ourselves and others from stock responses, and designing assignments that interfere with those responses is the way to do it.
Treating another’s response to you as if it were an assignment, asking you to break up and re-arrange a chunk in some way is how you make yourself interoperable—this doesn’t mean “fitting in” or “getting along”—it just means data can be exchanged between the two interfaces. Data can travel along different routes through various vehicles—you can make others “carriers” of your data, and yourself a carrier of theirs, in many different ways. Providing a response that causes a revision of expectations, that interferes with chunking, right away allows for data exchange. Speaking, partly ironically, partly literally, about your discourses and communications as data exchanges will itself facilitate data exchange. Making the linguistic present approximate the real present, which is to say, saying only exactly what is happening right now and is happening when the sentence you have written is read, facilitates data exchange. Being maximally addressable—obeying and defying imperatives, authenticating or “decertifying” ostensives, drawing out imperatives from ostensives constitutive of the other’s declaratives—facilitates data exchange. The chunk works insofar as its always already lined up with a verified ostensive—if someone says “but that’s socialism” in accord with certain conservative talking points, one assumes that we can point to the same sample and find “socialism” there. If you treat the chunk as an inappropriate ostensive, so that linguistic presence can only be preserved by treating it as an imperative, and “bringing” something (maybe something both appropriate and incongruous) to supply the needed reference, you open up the possibility of data exchange—of turning everyone involved into interfaces.
The real test is the design of distributed assignments, where you want to mark existing institutions and practices in such a way so that large scale conversion of users into interfaces is possible. Assignments need to be inscribed at points where sovereignty (law and its enforcement) names samples that are named differently within some trans-sovereign zone (a population governed by technological, scientific, commercial or other imperatives). The assignment will be to develop a new sovereign practice of naming, which might require first of all some unnaming, and that would subject the zone to the sovereign order of naming by compelling those within the zone to inhabit those names. A difficult program! The assignment—to be varied and modified accordingly in each case—is to become an infiltrator into the discipline (zone) in question on behalf of a possible mode of sovereignty, or, more precisely, on behalf of a closer approximation to prime-archy, governance concerned only with firstness. Creating a disciplinary space within the discipline transforms the user into an interfacial avatar of firstness and in turn an agent of prime-archy. Identifying some sample that needs to be translated back and forth between sovereign and disciplinary terms is always a good starting point—the translation that becomes the necessary reference point will also project the new form of sovereignty, will program for prime-archy. You maximize the self-referentiality of the sovereign-discipline interzone so as to produce a new stream of imperatives for reordering sovereignty.
"But if there's no internal, there's no external - there is just a scene comprised of the number of levels of self-referentiality needed by us as inquirers"
-where does this leave the centre? Won't that be experienced as an externality. or are you saying not yet?
And what do you make of the conclusion to Gans' latest: "it is one thing to talk of "love of God," and another to *situate* this love as the transcendence of resentment in a specific orginary context. Classical phenomenology attempts to find such configurations within the researcher's own mind through introspection, but there is no substitute for positing them in the first place as objective external realities, which they must have been at some point in order for the human universe to get started."