Dual Use

Eric Jacobus has suggested a modification to the originary hypothesis which I have been thinking about for a while. Such things are obviously not to be undertaken lightly, given the significance of the minimality of the hypothesis. But Jacobus pointed to a question about the hypothesis that I myself had had, which is that a group of bare-handed hominids could not wreak upon each other the kind of potentially fatal harm that would make the sign of deferral necessary (why wouldn’t they just slug it out and go back about their business?). My own response to this was that there is no need to assume they could pose such a threat to each other, but only that, given the novelty in the collapse of the animal pecking order, that they could imagine such a horrific scenario. Jacobus’s answer to that, as I understand it, is that something more is needed even to imagine the scenario, which is the possibility of a qualitative escalation, in which the other has unknown capabilities which one might need to anticipate, procure, or invent for oneself. In other words, a weapon—just as, in initiating a street fight with some stranger, you’d have to imagine the possibility that he has a knife or gun, and prepare for that, if possible. Now, chimps use “weapons,” like stones, sticks, or excrement, in battles with other chimps, but they just throw the stuff—they don’t hold it in reserve in case their antagonist pulls out a piece of crap, nor do they engage in something like an arms race. Jacobus at first seemed to be thinking of the escalatory situation that would elicit the sign in terms of tools turned into weapons but has more recently spoken more generally in terms of the distinction between “object directed aggression,” which other hominids exhibit, and “recursive object directed aggression,” which they don’t. So, one of the proto-humans would escalate a confrontation by raising, say, a stone in a pre-emptive way, generating a corresponding response in others. Now, we have a new situation in which each has to weigh the possibility that the others will initiate a new and unprecedented mode of violence, and whether, in that case, to initiate it oneself. We could then more easily posit an “annihilatory imaginary” to which the emission of the sign would be a salvational response. And we don’t have to change our assumption of the scene taking place around the body of a felled prey, as we can assume the “weapons” used to take down the animal are now turned on each other in the mimetic crisis we are familiar with. Perhaps everyone turns their stones or sticks back to their meal (swords into ploughshares), and we have our ostensive gesture.

The risks involved in violating the minimality of the scene seem to me worth taking because the conversion of, if not “tool” (a stick or stone is not specially prepared for some purpose) at least object into weapon and back again seems to be a permanent feature of technics. If technics, as per my technological hypothesis, is the work of composing the scene for increasingly complex and variegated rituals, then that every scene counterposes in some way the peaceful to the violent use of some “prop” is a plausible architectural principle. Maybe, in fact, the specificity with which the harm one might suffer or do to another contributes to the specificity with which a tool needs to be designed. All technologies are ”dual use,” in that case. And that means that any prop or “furnishing” serves as a potential pedagogical platform upon which not only is its use taught, but one kind of use is distinguished from another. This further centers pedagogy in the way I have always done but have been especially emphasizing lately—the earliest initiation rituals would involve teaching young men to distinguish tool from weapon construction and use, and this would become a principle of design because it would define the group in its ritual operations. In the case of both production and warfare the imperative becomes a privileged speech act because organization, hierarchy, rapid coordination and absolute trust, along with the discipline needed for all of those features, are paramount. So, I can return to my formulation of technics as the perfection of the imperative—the imperative is perfected by inscribing it in the scene so that it can be continued beyond the direct human relationship between imperator and imperatee. A tool or weapon is a kind of congealed imperative, ready made to transmit to new actors the relation of pedagogy and command that went into its creation, including the trial and error required for its perfection. I can see no other way, outside of brute force, for managing in sustained ways the ever present possibility that emulation might be converted into rivalry than formalized pedagogical relationships—relationships that can stage rivalry as part of the relation of emulation itself. And even brute force requires some pedagogical relation, because some team must be prepared to carry it out.

Serious examinations of pedagogical relationships will always note the porous border between a beneficial and enabling initiatory relationship, on the one hand, and various kinds of potential violence on the other (manipulation, cultism, intimidation, “gaslighting,” etc.). Pedagogy involves bringing someone into a new spaces and that entails wrenching them out of an existing set of habits and commitments. There’s always something traumatic about that, and trauma needs to be dramatized, and so any powerful pedagogical act is self-dramatizing, which makes it even more “suspicious.” There’s no other way to communicate an imperative and create the conditions for its obedience, which requires the suspension of those habits that would serve as a distraction from the full attention performing the imperative requires. That such acts are “always already” “weaponized,” and that weapons are “always already” pedagogical provides us with an originary approach to some very trying questions. I’ve taken an interest in the ongoing inflation in the use of terms like “psy-ops” to the point where one must ask—what wouldn’t be a psy-op? In what situation is there not someone with “designs” on you? What community is not a “cult”? And if the answer is, as I am obviously suggesting, we are always being designed, what then? The criticism of one or another campaign as being a psy-op or a cult presupposes that one could be located outside of the psy-op or cult, and where would that be? In some position of “reasoned enlightenment” where one just examines the facts on a case by case basis and arrives at “independent conclusions”? That all seems to me like a psy-op as well. One could, presumably, be located within a more socially approved and therefore safer and reassuring cult, like one of the mainstream religions, but that just means you’re in a more relaxed cult, that can rely upon the subsidiary contributions of other cults (consumer cults, media cults, start-up cults, etc.), but offers no defense against cult-collapse where even the more easy-going cult will have to get serious or lose its membership.

Everything is a cult, and that’s OK. It’s just another way of saying we have never left ritual distribution from the center. What we can and do have, though, as a way of differentiating between destructive and productive cults, are disciplinary spaces. Even if you say that all the existing disciplinary spaces—the professions and the academic disciplines—are utterly corrupted in one way or another, you are not going to deny (indeed, the critique presupposes) that such things as bodies, objects and texts can be studied in such a way as to better know how they have been produced and what kinds of things might be done for and with them. All the professions and disciplines originated as cults anyway, with oaths, secrets, pledges and so on. But this just resituates the question—how do we tell a “true” disciplinary space from a “fake” one? The better disciplinary space will re-tool questions and imperatives coming from other disciplinary spaces while the worse disciplinary space will weaponize its own procedures of knowledge production to repulse such questions and imperatives. This doesn’t make the better disciplinary space less of a cult; it just makes it a different kind of cult: to “entertain” questions by treating them as imperatives to reorder your space in some way is a practice and a mode of deferral which must be built-in—technized—in the pedagogy of the scene. We might say that the true disciplinary space sees the exchange with any and all other disciplinary spaces as central to its exchanges with the center. And the proof of such a disciplinary space will be the degree to which it functions as a central intelligence, and thereby as a constant pedagogical layer infiltrating all the other cults.

That tools can always be weaponized is a reminder of the sacrificial dimension of any “breakdown”—you are, after all, tearing something apart, destroying its integrity, turning it into a means for the sustaining the coherence of the group. That weapons can always be “tooled” is a reminder of the deferral at the origin of cult(ure). Keeping the tool/weapon boundary visible might be an extremely fruitful methodological principle, enabling us to imagine the entire spectrum of forms of human organization opened up by simply inquiring into reality. If you make weapons sufficiently pre-emptive, they become indistinguishable from tools: if people are especially likely to kill each other under certain knowable conditions, you can rearrange those conditions so as to make them somewhat less likely to kill each other, and so on—in the end you will have created new conditions under which violence has become unthinkable because there are just too many obstacles and mediations you’d have to pass. This proposal is only “inhuman” if your definition of the “human” includes the assumption that humans must always and everywhere be equally likely of committing all kinds of violence against each other, admitting no possibility of mitigation. But cult(ure) is precisely this mitigation. But how to proceed on the path towards pre-emption is certainly not self-evident, and it’s worth considering that pre-emption is always a way of speaking about committing an act of “unprovoked” violence precisely on the grounds that doing so will mitigate some other violence in some longer run. In that case, the ideal state, preserving the original meaning of “the state” as derived from the word “statistics,” is to continually improve on both layers of pre-emption—to built layers of deferral while being ready to act suddenly and decisively when any layer is breached. The state, then, would be the cult of data security—and what counts as “good data” is whatever enables you to know that the imperatives you’re issuing first of all can and then are being fulfilled. And this includes knowledge of the temporality of the imperative—the imperative is the source of temporality, as both the ostensive and the declarative are concerned with constructing presents. We are still fulfilling imperatives issued thousands of years ago, jostling for our attention with imperatives issued seconds ago and we should work on crafting imperatives that our successors will be fulfilling thousands of years from now, while also issuing the imperatives with much closer expiration dates that are nevertheless preconditions for the more “eternal” ones to be “platformed.”

The ultimate and untranscendable cult is the cult of language—whatever god or historical project you “believe” in is formulated linguistically, which includes the entire performative dimension of language, i.e., ritual. Your “belief” in whatever implies certain ritual practices and the utterance of certain prescribed words in certain situations (those situations also being prescribed and described in other words) and if you have no trust in those words the entire edifice collapses. To believe in God is to believe that God speaks to men, or at least once did, leaving us records of those conversations—the belief and the relationship with God can only, then, be “reassembled” out of those linguistic remnants, that “data.” You have to “believe” in language before you believe in anything else, but you don’t really have to—nor can you—“believe” in language because you must already be “in” language to formulate any skepticism about God, reality, knowledge or anything else, including language itself. Language can become “inoperative” in specific cases, but not in general. There is, though, always some gap between what one says and what one means, which is another way of saying between what one says and what others take him to be saying. Identifying, framing, staging, scenicizing—not necessarily lessening or closing, because the gap as a sample might be worth preserving—that gap is the most basic pedagogical and disciplinary act. This is where I see the importance of Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes, which should make philosophy irrelevant and lead to a reworking of the disciplines because they provide for a kind of unified field theory of language, uniting linguistic relativity (the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”) with linguistic universalism—i.e., infinitely translatable idioms. I would imagine the primes would even serve as a programming language. We’re always swearing on and to language, taking out loans on language, paying our debts, providing our donations to the center as well as inspecting and repairing all the institutions of deferral with language. And this includes math, which is, ultimately, language and inseparable from language more conventionally considered. (At some point soon I’ll discuss Jeffrey Binder’s Language and the Rise of the Algorithm on this issue.) Building the extended scenes that enable utterances, including those of the engineers involved in building that scenic infrastructure, involves us not in something other than language but in broken down, reassembled and distributed modes of language for which our cult of language must install new practices and hypotheses.

The disciplinary, I would now say, circles back to the ritual (commemoration, distribution from the center) by taking accounts of ritual and the juridical. The account—record keeping regarding inputs and outputs, debits and credits—is the first form of writing, and it is all that writing ever does—account for where everything is on the scene. The disciplinary creates new scenes upon which the records of other scenes can be audited, so those scenes can be disassembled and reassembled. Money is itself just another form of account keeping and therefore of writing or inscription. The modern derivative represents a disciplinary space that is both deranged (a kind of pure weaponry) and an almost perfect inversion of the kind of disciplinary activity that must eventually replace it (the articulated system of imperatives). If you are betting on whether X number of people will repay their mortgages, you are also betting on whether they will keep their jobs, on whether the rate of inflation will make it worthwhile for “enough” of them to keep paying their mortgages, on the housing market, on whether enough people will acquire the credentials needed to purchase and keep such homes, on whether those credentials will maintain their value on the job market, on whether some war or other catastrophe will upend the entire system, etc.—but, then, you can also hedge your bet by betting in favor of all the conditions that might undermine the mortgage paying system, making the adjustments along the way that enable you extract arbitrage winnings from all those who are slightly behind you in making similar adjustments. You’re creating an image of the spread of the entire system while paradoxically helping to make it less likely that the meanings of words like “home,” “learning,” “family,” “community,” “country,” etc., can be redeemed (but even that, perhaps, only in some longer run). You’re also then creating a kind of inverted mirror image of the redemption of those terms. And this is what all of the cults, which are all also either disciplines or have disciplines appended to them—scientific, therapeutic, social scientific, literary, artistic, religious, etc.—do: immerse the participant in the experience of the boundary separating the dual use of all technics, all scenery.