Data Mining the Sentence

The thinking of technics should be compressible within the succession of speech forms culminating in the declarative sentence, so long as we follow that sequence back from the declarative sentence as made iterable by writing. My present hypothesis: technology is the imperative order, as various chains of “do this” are made interlocking with each other. At one end of the chains (which we would then have to imagine drawn together in a single set of interlocking chains) is the central intelligence, which is interested solely in selecting the successor most likely to select the successor most likely… in perpetuity. That is, the network of imperative chains is ordered by the chain of maintaining order and continuity and recruiting all of the idiomatic intelligence toward that end. This dependence of the technological network on the central intelligence reproduces the reliance of the imperative upon the ostensive: just as technology replaces ritual in articulating the community at a certain distance from the center, so the central intelligence replaces the originary central object and resolves the problem of situating an individual at the center—since that problem lies in the uncertain nature of succession, “selecting the successor most likely… in perpetuity” offers a solution. We can leave the actual content of this completely open—will it be a king? Military leadership? Something resembling a one party state? Will rulership be life long, or will rulers pass the baton to their successors regularly? All that matters is that succession is staged all throughout the order, and that every order culminates in an apex. At the other end (in this case, the many ends) of the network of chains, then, are the various idioms, intelligences, assignments, or, as we can still call them, individuals, in their pedagogical introductions to the imperative order.

The imperative succeeds the ostensive, but it also translates the ostensive, and in doing so leaves a residue which is also a construction of the imperative. Ostensives now give off imperatives, at a minimum the imperative to preserve that ostensive relation—to keep a clear view of the center. Interrogatives must, then, in turn, translate and construct imperatives: imperatives are now all potentially extendible into various requests for information regarding the possibility of their fulfillment. Likewise for the declarative and the interrogative: interrogatives come out “mappable” by a declarative. Still, that residual ostensive force, and then imperative and interrogative force is necessary for linguistic relations to be sustained. This residual force is articulated through the declarative’s mapping of a new distribution of ostensives, carrying with them imperatives and so on. The declarative invokes an imperative from the center to counter the imperative force decelerated interrogatively—that imperative relies on the ostensivity of the center of centers, and is represented in the declarative as a spread of sign users who would issue the ostensive signs authenticating that emergence of the center of centers. A sentence tells us, in a highly compressed and largely implicit way, what we would all see, hear, feel, say and do if we were all positioned in the way directed by the sentence.

Writing represents the sentence as a linguistic artifact and thereby rips it out of its relation to the ostensives and imperatives out of which it flows and back into which it would directly flow. Among other results, this creates a relation between a sentence that could have been said by anyone and that is “heard” by each reader internally (even if the silent reader stands at the end of a long history of reading—“hearing” internally is just repeating the words silently).  More importantly here, this is an early, enduring and highly transformative mode of technics. The objectification of the declarative sentence leads to logic, and therefore math, and then computation (but also accounting and therefore accountability): what science does, through mathematics, to the world as text, is first of all what the declarative did to the earlier speech forms: study, dissect and rearticulate elements and movements so as to make them available on a scene. There’s really something approaching perfection (while still trailing off into “exceptions”) about the grammar of a literate language. It’s the perfection of an imperative: to make the language itself transparent, so that shared attention can be directed toward the scene that is linguistically mediated, without distraction by the mediation itself. The success with which this transparency is created is the reason why technics (and learning) have essentially been banished from philosophy (as the study of the declarative sentence and all its implications): only insofar as the mediation gets in the way can language be turned into a model for the study of technics.

This is why remembering and recognizing all those modes of writing that violate the demand for transparency is central to the study of technics and technology. This includes pre-alphabetic writing, it includes writing that has illustration built in, writing that treats the letters as “characters” in the “content” of the writing, writing that draws attention to formulas and devices. Non-transparent writing displays the scene of learning that must precede and always inhabit the transparent scene. Such practices reset writing within an ostensive and imperative world—you have to, for example, pay attention to the shape of this letter to understand what is being said. This is a practice of deferral—the real story, or the real point, can be endlessly delayed by reviewing all the preconditions of “really” getting there, and then reviewing the preconditions of those preconditions and so on. This process is always cut off at some point, but the insistence on having it inhabit and inform the discourse makes the technological conditions and consequences of any saying evident. The principle here, first articulated, I think, by William Burroughs, is that you only write what is happening right now—a principle that presses the limits of both transparency and opacity.

A sentence, then, is a chain which, by getting a hold on it, enables you to get hold on parts of the larger networks. You can then see the sentence as a site of production, with each sentence one in an unlimited number of variations, with the reciprocal translations of the variations producing the meaning. The sentence seen as a site of production, an unlimited number of variations in each sentence, so that the reciprocal translations of the variations are productive of meaning. Each sentence varying itself unlimitedly, translating these variations into each other, is productive of meaning, as you can see. Translating these variations into each other limits the variations, without which there would be no meaning that you could see. Productively seeing meaning entails limiting variations and translating limitations into other limitations which would then be the sentences. Sites within sites are productive, vary and translate, limit, see and are seen, here by you. I just looked at each iteration of this sentence and imagined what might be done with it next, what had I left out in the last couple of iterations, etc., but this practice of internal translation could be reduced to a set of rules aimed at producing a discourse which one could shape and refine as it produced unanticipated paths. It’s not a question of whether we do this, but that we see this as a model of language production as opposed to transcriptions of existing realities in either the lower or higher realms. Because, in fact, language is actually produced more along these lines, driven by imperatives inherent in the chunks of language available and the ways those chunks presently at hand get magnetized and polarized by a field in which the same and other, complementary, chunks, are configured differently. Someone else is for something, compelling you to be more for or against it; someone doesn’t see what you can see precisely through their neglect or omission, so you must point it out: in doing so, you turn their sentences around much in the way I just played with my own sentence.

If we oscillate on the boundary between nonsense and highly marked sentences we can establish continuity across the linguistic forms, including literacy and orality. This entails working with a model in its difference from itself, as an origin, rather than an original preceding all models. I know this all sounds very abstract and unpragmatic, but this is the best way of thinking technology in such a way as to enter and participate in it rather than remaining at the end of fairly predictable chains. What we say goes all around the world on wires dug under the ground, powered by massive amounts of energy mined and transported, preserved in data farms soaking in huge pools of water, our words move across various jurisdictions, subject to ever changing terms of service, might surface in various times and places, be remade and rewoven with other words and images in ways we can only partially anticipate—and all this is part of what we say. It’s not enough to say, “well, what I meant was…”. Your point is not your point. We can’t assume antiquated transmission models whereby someone “understands” what you say, conveys it someone else, until eventually something changes as a result of what you said, and in a way “contained” in what you said. This model of transmission derives from the world represented as a Big Scene with a single sacrificial center, turned into a discourse model by the Enlightenment: all of us, equals in speech, stand across from each other in the public square and concede to the force of the better argument. Much discourse, even produced by those intensely aware of exactly where the terms of our tightly administered discourse come from, is conducted in accord with this model. We don’t all need to become avant-garde writers… but, maybe, in a sense, we do. And much dissident discourse is not so far off—as someone incompletely familiar with and initiated into the language of online exchange, I can say that much of the meming, indirection, and fragmenting of the mainstream discourse fits right into those traditions. I’m certainly not the first to point this out (nor is this the first time I’ve pointed it out). To an extent, I’m describing as much as I’m prescribing.

The ”successionism” I’m proposing provides a guide to an expanded techno-media practice. You do, in fact, want to the outcome of what you say to be implicit and “coded” in your saying—otherwise, why say it, if it could mean anything whatsoever? Just as the best political order would have the occupant of the center choose his successor, and, in fact, would be organized around the entire order being generated out of this practice of selecting the successor and, moreover, just as the criterion for selecting a successor would be that that successor would select his successor such that his successor…, without break, in perpetuity, so, your practices should be designed in such a way as to select their successors and thereby participate in a form of idiomatic intelligence where all practices are so designed so as to feed back into the succession practice at the top. Saying only what is happening right now includes the way in which everything coming out of what you’re saying is part of that “now.” In part, this involves constructing resistances to certain uses, uses that would replicate the model of (transparent) classical prose in particular. Building implicit and explicit assignments, things a user would have to “do” in order to use, is important—as an interface, you want to draw upon certain irreducible contexts that would have to be reconstructed at some point down the road, maybe hypothetically. Have parts that don’t quite fit; frustrate certain expectations; impose a kind of self-selection upon your users—not only in the sense that some will opt in and others won’t, but in the sense that each user will have to select the self fit to use the writing. Improvise rules out of patterns you notice as you write and break them so as to call attention to the rules. Write as if a single sentence contains an entire universe of discourse, and thereby stage the succession of your practice.

Imagine thinking of your readers less as individuals stuffed full of opinions, ideas, viewpoints, facts and so on and more as words that might be pieced together to create sentences, or letters to produce words. Of course, they might see you the same way, in which case you should be a word fitted for some idiosyncratic set of uses, or a beautifully adorned letter. This exemplifies a more properly technological approach. Under a ritual order, when the interlocking imperative exchanges don’t work, myth is generated; with the evacuation of the ritual order, imperative failure leads to hypotheses (hypotheses are really articulations of particular ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative sequences). You find yourself a teacher, whom you might succeed, or from whom you might pave the way for another successor, or a field of successors, which means reading the teacher as the beginning of an assembling—what would succession look like here, there, now, later on; how could you make this site, this medium, this institution, this discourse speak the language of this teaching? Everything takes on its meaning in terms of the range of ways it might be assembled into provisional statements, whose continuation and implantation across the board would be imperative. So, we’re not talking about convincing, explaining persuading, etc.—we’re talking about inscribing, which might be done just as well via one’s opponents as via one’s friends.

I’ve hypothesized a model declarative sentence, which would be designed so as to confront, confound and return for revision the impossible interrogative; the impossible interrogative being a disguised imperative to the effect that the questioner and all others affirm the prior declarative that would authorize the answer to this question. So, the typical impossible interrogative would be along the lines of “what do you plan to do about X inequality,” in which you can see built into the question the assumption that all inequalities can and should have something definitive “done” about them. It’s important, than to have the elements and models prepared for designing timely transferable answers to such questions. I would suggest taking my often repeated (and hardly original) slogans—power and responsibility are to be matched; and from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs—and turn them from “principles” into sentence building materials. “Power” is a noun, and, of course, can be either plural or singular; strictly speaking, the only way of making it into a verb is as “empower,” which one does for others—otherwise, it remains as a noun, which one can “take” or “use”; and there is the adjective “powerful” (and adverb “powerfully”). “Responsible” is an adjective, with the somewhat differently significant “respond” as the verb form, and “responsibility” as the noun (which one can “take” or be assigned—but, then, taking and accepting must be a single practice). “Need” can be noun or verb, with the somewhat archaic “needful” and more distant “necessary” as adjective. “Ability,” a noun, breaks down to the adjective “able,” with the closest verb being “can” (which loops back to “power”).

The purpose of inspecting our linguistic materials in this way is to practice weaving these words, in complementary ways, into sentences designed to address impossible interrogatives. This would instill the kind of “message discipline” associated with propaganda, while being a kind of negative image of that discipline, insofar as it requires constant innovation rather than mind-numbing repetition. The two slogans are kept at the center of your discourse, but now made responsive to attempts to assert power, generating the ability to meet the needs of a given situation. Whoever might have the power to remedy the injustice you complain of also has responsibilities other than remedying that injustice and we might talk about those responsibilities but can you please come clean about the power you bring to bear on the situation? I can see how you might be pointing to unmet needs but that you’re able to make me see it points to an infrastructure that claims its own needs that may or may not have as their affordances a set of imperatives that would enable us to meet those needs and be responsible for ensuring they have been met. Designing such responses provide you with tests of good faith and, where needed, the ability to expose bad faith; but also, always, ways of zeroing in on the intersection between the perfecting imperative and the singularized succession in perpetuity at stake.