Designing Idioms for Data Treatment

I’ll return to my “ergodic hypothesis” and assume, contra “grammaticalist” assumptions regarding the endless possibilities of uttering new sentences, that language, in fact, encloses within a limited system of idioms—of course, on one level, we are always saying things that no one has ever said before but it is always by recombining elements of the system. Just like we have never left the originary scene or moved beyond ritual (merely replacing desecrating rituals for consecrating ones) we have never moved outside of the oral. “Ergodism” counters one of the main attacks on Large Language Models, i.e., that they just recombine existing language—yes, of course, but if you want to differentiate them meaningfully from the human on those grounds you’d have to distinguish between different modes of recombination, not simply contrast recombination with “originality.” Most important for me here is that the ergodic hypothesis, as opposed to the grammaticist, allows one to think in terms of working on language rather than “clothing” thoughts in language.

Some of what I’m going to say here follows my reading of Florian Fuchs’s Civic Storytelling, even while I’m not going to hold myself to high standards of fidelity to the particulars of his study. Fuchs tracing the emergence of modern storytelling, especially the short forms (at one point he seems to me to suggest that the longer forms—e.g., epic length novels—may merely be concatenations of the shorter ones), out of the breakdown of the old rhetorical world where writers worked with a set collection of known and approved commonplaces that they articulated in ways appropriate for an occasion (there is, according to Fuchs, a misreading of Aristotle in here, but I’ll leave that aside). I would say that writing, in this case, is being modeled on the oration. As is often the case in such derivations, Locke plays a critical role, that of insisting that inherited commonplaces violate and falsify our own experience of the world, which should be the source of our commonplaces. In a way that upends the very meaning of the term, “commonplaces” came to refer to collections of observations and experiences that a writer would undergo in the course of his daily life. From here we get to the emphasis in modern Western fiction on the narration of a “meaningful experience,” some “turning point” or moment of “conversion” that can be embodied in an event—Joyce’s “epiphanies” being a kind of logical conclusion of this movement.

This kind of study encourages a very practical approach to the production of idioms, organized around the linguistic articulation of events as boundary holders, placing the language user on both sides of some boundary simultaneously. I would resist the individualism of the modern literary narrative, but that’s a minor difference here—I can apply this design practice to the scene stacking of the center. I can start working with the idioms I’ve constructed out of the tripartite ritual/juridical/disciplinary structure I’ve laid originary hypothesizing into: the before and after are the same; the part of the all is the same; doing is the same as happening. I’ll be adding one more, I think very important, one, but we can see how these natural semantic primed idioms direct one to, first, identify some after that, on the face of it, is not the same as before, i.e., some significant change in some institution or practice that one knows; some way in which the part of the all is not the same, i.e., some injustice taken as a violation of the originary distribution or nomos; and some way in which doing or happening excludes the other (which is already the mode of appearance of experience)—and, then, find the thread, or succession, that through the differences enables us to see the same. One sets up a sharp distinction, as sharp as possible, to the point of incommensurability, and then finds some scale, up or down, or temporal, enabling a re-commensuration. The composer of the idiom is on both sides—this is a directly pedagogical approach, a basis for ongoing practice. Some new ritualization, or increment of justice, or human/social causality is discerned as a result. Even if it’s “wrong”—the ritualization doesn’t stick, the increment of justice can’t be institutionalized, the causality only applies to special cases, etc.—it adds to the broader work of idiomatic intelligence—spreading such idioms is an intelligence gathering operation, and a data spread.

And I don’t mean to restrict such work to those three idioms, which themselves are to be combined and translated in various ways—made “programmatic” in every sense. As an example, I’d like to add one which I stumbled upon accidentally in a recent entry, trying, precisely, to find a new commensuration. I stumbled upon in the effort to bring the analysis of originary debt initiated in Zack Baker and my “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center.” I can recapitulate and simplify the analysis as follows: let’s work with Gans’s “market society” as the material instantiation of the Christian revelation along with Ian Dennis’s unfortunately neglected generalization of what we could call the “market hypothesis” in his Lord Byron and the History of Desire: everything, everyone, is on the market, selling something, negotiating, increasing one’s value, talking down another’s value, etc., all the time. Every social interaction can be described in these terms. But we have to add something: everyone is operating on credit, if not literally (both Gans and Dennis themselves go well beyond the “literal” marketplace, where exchanges are mediated by money) then figuratively, in terms of reputation, skills that can decline, knowledge that can become less relevant, good looks and other physical attributes that fade with age, charisma that is broken by failure, accumulated trust that can be squandered or lost through no fault of one’s own, and so on. Others take these signs that you will fulfill certain desires of theirs, and they “pay” you attention as an advance on you fulfilling these implicit or explicit promises. You need to maintain these forms of credit, which means taking out further credit from governing institutions that ensure the markets upon which you promote yourself, hedging on alternatives (e.g., getting married and investing in family life before your good looks fade) and insuring yourself against unexpected hits to your valuation, which also means indebting yourself to the insurers who will insist on certain conditions. And you will then find yourself in situations where you either want someone to use their monopoly power to pump up your valuation or to ensure that it remains continuous with the conditions under which you contracted various debts and took out various hedges and forms of insurance. It’s still a market society, but the exchange between individuals for the sake of fulfilling individual desires no longer describes very much of it—to address it comprehensively you must speak in terms of your debt to the center, what you must pay so that your credit holds, which may be anything from holding a steady job and saving money to being willing to serve as part of a rent-a-mob to destroy someone else’s credit. 

In our essay we proposed putting the outside option and the outside spread, power and money, together, so that everything is driven through succession. We could say that the outside spread is created so as to price the increasingly unpredictable and risky outside option. The more familiar way of explaining why this becomes a problem would be the growth of the merchant class, its own expression of power by pricing outside options; true enough, but first of all desecration must have reached such a point where expanding finance and commerce served as a weapon against emergent imperial rivals. Once the outside spread places the various governing options on the market, the outside option is closed off—only inside options can be considered within the system. This helps with pricing within the system, which must presuppose some continuity in governance in order to determine the expected future earnings from ownership of an asset. The question of succession then gets transferred to the field of possibilities one determines, ultimately, the price of money itself as an asset, against. This really does reduce governance to debt enforcement—that’s what those holding the outside spread need to know in order to price their derivatives and determine arbitrage opportunities: which debts will be enforced, how and when. This must be engaged—this is the form of political power in the modern world. But the power of debt enforcement is also the power of debt forgiveness, albeit only at the highest levels of sovereignty. So, what to enforce, what to forgive? We have a maxim for this: that which one does must be enforced; what happens must be forgiven—governing, then, is deciding where to draw this line, which is really drawn through the juridical. For that matter, one might enforce more on one’s allies, of whom one expects more, and forgive more to the powerless and therefore less relevant—so, the enforce/forgive line does not coincide with the friend/enemy one. You want to distribute power (the power to distribute) in accord with people’s abilities (what they can do) and their needs (what needs to be forgiven), which then means introducing succession involves interfering in made markets so as to convert prices into delegations of responsibility, assets into data. This is really covered by creating prediction markets on, e.g., just decisions, and turning that into currency, as discussed in the previous post. But we’re bringing in the maxim now, which can perhaps include the others in the generation of idioms as currency.

What is done must be enforced, what has happened must be forgiven draws most directly upon the third of the formulas I’ve been working on: doing is the same as happening. Here it might mean that what is done by some happens to others, which is one way of establishing sameness or commensurability. But we can make this maxim interfere with, or we can toggle it with, variations on the other formulas. As I mentioned above, drawing the line between doing and happening takes place within the juridical, where one must put forth a claim of having done or not done something, of having something happen to them, and of having that happening to them because of what another has done, or not. How to ensure that the part of the all is the same after this doing and happening? The doing and happening presupposes something like “property,” a set of possible options on transference and delegation that have themselves been transferred or delegated to one. Chains of custody, chains of command, supply chains and lines of succession all come into play here. We can then formulate the following question: what has the plaintiff or defendant done so as to ensure, or (to stay closer to the primes) see to it that his part of the all is the same? How has he curated his inheritance and the responsibilities it brings? A property purist would say none of this matters, because one is not obliged to do anything to maintain rights in one’s property—and, yet, one is presumably asking for those rights to be protected, which means he could not protect them solely on his own, at least not without violating others’ protected rights (making their part in the all not the same). So, the line between doing and happening can be pressed in the individual case, so that all the doing and happening that a sovereign might conceivably be responsible for assessing can be made to constellate in the specific case. And these considerations bring us back to the ritual level, as it is the governor’s responsibility (the responsibility without meeting which he would not be governing) to make it so that after is the same as before. The center’s advance to us is to maintain the precedence of what it does over what it merely allows or fails to prevent from happening, and our debt to the center is to maintain such a precedence in our own little centers, which is the way in which we supply data as intelligence to the center. In the end, as Peirce pointed out, even the best insurance company, with the most sophisticated actuarial information and probability calculations and the most responsible direction, will go broke—the black swan will happen—and it is precisely at this point that we will find out whether the community has acquired sufficient credit beyond the measurable in conventional terms to find some way to make after the same as before.

I want to keep in mind the reference to narration here. Narratives are ways of stretching the line of credit from before to after, even if that credit has to be redistributed to the writer and readers as a kind of virtual community. But this is never given in advance (we must take its possibility on credit) and involves a distribution of happening and doing that is arbitrary if judged according to some external standard uninterested in the continuance of the community (and even in that case the judges would at least be interested in the community of judgment). These narratives get distilled into our commonplaces—maxims, proverbs, axioms, even transitions within sentences (“in order to,” “by way of,” etc.)—and get us through transitions in our conversations (“well, what can you do?”; “you need to stick it out,”: etc.) as well as transitions in our communities. This is where the real work on language, for which I am providing something like templates, takes place. Reworking, pressing, making more explicit, the relation between and distribution of doing and happening in a particular narration or description, even if vocabulary that is made up of derivatives of these primes is used will, I think, always produce sharper, more helpful idioms. This work is what an academy devoted to originary hypothesizing would entail tied to specific writing tasks and an archiving of Wierzbicka-style “translations” of words, phrases and sentences back into the primes. I think that large language learning machine models will prove very useful here, within a well-structured disciplinary and pedagogical space.