In my day job, I often imagine a writing assignment that would have students unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text, ideally a single sentence. This would be done by making explicit the implications of the sentence, implications derivable from the very relations in the sentence itself along with the field of implicit negations and distinctions constituted by the sentence. One could then make explicit the implications in the explicit statement of the first set of implications. In the process would be produced a discourse that is transparent, self-explaining, and self-contained, while also infinite. So, for example: “students might unfold an entire discourse from a very limited starting text.” Students, then, are things such as can unfold, at least, a discourse, and a discourse is something that can be unfolded, at least by students. Texts can be starting texts, and, therefore, presumably, middle, and ending texts. Texts can be the source of discourses and, furthermore, can be turned by students into a source of discourse. If students can turn texts into origins of discourses, teachers either can also do this or cannot do this, which means they share, to this extent, a common relation to texts and discourses with students, or a radically different one, one in which, for example, perhaps discourses are the origins of texts and teachers are incapable of affecting the relations between discourses and texts. And so on. With the help of a dictionary, word oppositions, degree words, and other means of singling out and articulating, we would eventually have a discourse about the entire history of the universe, had we world enough and time, and along a very distinctive path. You could say this would also be the most ethical discourse, one that doesn’t impose any normative frame or extrinsic questions upon a discourse, but just keeps restating what has been said along with what has been just barely left unsaid.
Such an understanding of discourse, as an endless unfolding, necessarily intra-referential, of a singular event-statement seems to me to correspond closely to the originary hypothesis. Discourses founded on formalizable, universalizable rules are themselves only particular variants of such event-statements, those that effected a more stringent form of deferral, under specific conditions, by elevating the declarative sentence over the ostensive and imperative. Such event-statements can be. located historically, in the history of philosophy, or in the displacement of “intuition” by purely symbolic language in the mid to late 19th century, as studied by Erich Horl in his Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication—producing what Federico Campagna calls “absolute language.” Even such completely symbolic language, cleansed of representation and even reference, is dependent upon specific scenes and events, embedded as they are in institutions that summon forth other scenes so as to make themselves legible and recordable in the (say) financial terms demanded by tendentially or aspirationally symbolic systems. This primacy of the event over the symbolic, whereby the symbolic is simply a form of deferral, is what I will call “ergodism,” drawing upon Huan Saussy’s understanding of oral poetry as “ergodic”:
We might describe oral tradition as a poetic technology marked by collective composition, modularity, iterability and virtuality... In collective composition, the right to determine the content of a performance is distributed widely through the community of performers; even where a norm exists, it does not exclude variation or improvement. Modularity: poems are combinations of performed units that can be put together variously; any two different works in a tradition will tend to have many of these units in common. Iterability: a poem is not a final result but only one exemplar in a series of recitations, and to be preserved it must be recomposed again and again, modularly, by members of the collective. Virtuality: what is passed on and learned from poet to poet, if this is seen as occurring, is not the poem itself, a determinate series of words from beginning to end, but rather a recipe or strategy for making a poem that will answer to such and such a description. Conversely, no particular rendition of a poem exhausts the possibilities of the poem’s tradition. The ambivalent relation of such traditions to the usual systems of notation lies in the fact that notation has been limited to recording the particular renditions, leaving the potential dimension of alternative realizations to be inferred. The oral is that virtual or ergodic register. (The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and its Technology, 72-3)
The ergodic, on this account, can only be recognized as the virtual environment surrounding the literate systems of notation, and which therefore includes and grounds what must remain implicit in those notations. Even the most privatized silent reading is nothing more than the eliciting of another component of the collective recomposition of the text, whose written character does nothing more than channel the ergodic within centralizing, hierarchical institutions of memory and pedagogy—that “nothing more,” admittedly, is quite a lot, enough, in fact, to generate the illusion that the symbolic, trans-intuitive world can be the real one. The fact that it cannot is not necessarily reassuring, because the attempt to implant “absolute language” or, as I would prefer, the “absolute declarative,” has very real effects insofar as it involves the issuing and increasingly frenzied enforcement of imperatives that cannot be recognized as such, but only as self-evident, logical conclusions of centralized data collection and curation. More deliberately inhabiting the ergodic, then is, not so much “resistance” (there is not outside to resist from, such outsides themselves being phantoms generated by the declarative world), as modes of infiltration and intelligence that deploy and emit data as sources of deferral insofar as the commensurability of all data is advanced by further “granulating” the singularity of each point of data creation, collection, transmission and curation.
We can posit a somewhat different provenance for the originary hypothesis itself if we situate it within an ergodic space—the originary hypothesis, first of all, would be nothing more than the making explicit of the just barely unsaid of any statement whatsoever, or the virtual form including all those unsaids—for any utterance to “make sense” something like the originary scene must be a tacit condition. This does not detract from the indispensable assertion that the originary hypothesis refers to an actual event, something that must have happened, but it brings that originary event within the ergodic world itself, as a virtuality that we collectively compose, modularly, through its successive iterations. We are still within the originary event, continuing it, retroactively and proactively recomposing it out of its own elements which have become all the words, sentences, discourses, texts and the material scenes and institutions created in accordance with them. The originary hypothesis spreads and is simultaneously minimized; scaled up around global institutions and scaled back down to the elements that we are ever recomposing reality out of. This would provide us with a measure of historical improvement: the infiltration of the originary hypothesis into all surfacing of implications. The concept of singularized succession in perpetuity, the aphilosophical concept that provides the only possible guide to infiltrating intelligence, is also nothing more than the making explicit of what is implicit in the originary scene, that the preservation of this event must be ensured through the transition from one mode of occupancy of the center to another and that the entirety of the elements and relations on the scene must be solely devoted to ensuring this. Not only must be, but are, even if resentment of the center interferes with the mobilization and direction of all participants in that direction by conflating that work with the demand that the center close its own acknowledgment gap on one’s own behalf: in other words, resentment is the insistence that one’s own proper formal naming by the center has been infringed upon by the center’s undue attention to another. You either contribute to the center in such a way as to better qualify it to see to its succession, or you demand from the center the reinforcement of the terms enabling you to make demands on the center—but even in this later case you simply see your own demand as essential to the continuity of the center. Who, after all, can imagine a world without oneself? The question is, within what kind of virtuality do you compose out of the successive iterations of that self within its social and technological ecology? There’s no way to avoid participating in the commensuration of data because that’s part of what language does, and what will count as a self that “consists” will be one that erects the constraints within which improbabilities and incalculabilities will be collaboratively both preserved and commensurated.
We can draw upon the strictly mathematical definition of “ergodic” here: “relating to or denoting systems or processes with the property that, given sufficient time, they include or impinge on all points in a given space and can be represented statistically by a reasonably large selection of points.” I wonder whether all systems could be represented statistically by a “reasonably” large selection of points, but that point about a system or process including or impinging upon all points in a given space is on point (but doesn’t the reference to “sufficient” time make this rather expansive as well? Perhaps given sufficient time and reasonable size all systems are erogdic): let’s just say that ergodism entails conferring meaning on any “point” within the system (any sign) in accord with its immediate or more or less likely or indirect “impingement” upon some other and ultimately every other sign in the system. Everything is just the way it refers to everything else, keeping in mind that every thing relates to (ultimately is “like”) every other thing in a distinctive way. Anything new in the system is just another articulation of one sign in a network of intra-references with all the other signs. The just barely unsaid of any utterance is nothing more than what remains implicit in this articulation of references, which then means that all we ever do, and should therefore do more deliberately and precisely, is surface some as yet unsurfaced reference within the network. Which one is the best to surface? The one that best draws upon the articulated elements of the system so as to constrain the conditions of the naming of the successor of your practices. Resentment, and the violent centralization it leads to, would in this case simply be a refusal to see to the naming of your successor—the refusal to acknowledge that the world will continue without you. Socially speaking, it’s a refusal of pedagogy, a refusal of initiation, a refusal to rework precedents, even a refusal to mitigate.
Naming your successor cuts through the eternal stand-off with the center regarding reciprocal obligations, a stand-off that leads one to seek out usurpers of the center who have reneged on their obligations. Naming your successor also limits the scope of any purified symbolic system, because the continuation and elaboration of such systems does require the pedagogical raising of the next generation of the officer class to maintain and expand it. Only the originary hypothesis brings us into the centrality and irreducibility of this practice. The originary hypothesis can meet no scientific standard not only because there are no scientific standards but because science can’t address singular events, including the succession of singular events marking its own extrication from the ritual, sacrificial order, which it still serves insofar as the originary hypothesis is not yet co-extensive with the idiomatic central intelligence. Perhaps the cloak of invisibility in clear view, penetrated only by a few (if only I could create an algorithm accounting for the whos, whens, wheres and whys of such penetration), of the originary hypothesis enables it to occupy that irritating center immune to notation, to simply display the conversion of convergence upon a particular point of irritability into the most generative source of data regarding the notating subject itself and its field—the originary hypothesis would then be modeling the practice of the new officer class that will be ready to take up the failing functions of sovereignty at some point.
Data at different scales and according to different systems of measurement—the data taken, say, from a certain experiment on cellular resistance to viral infections along with, say, the data on human reliability under certain workplace conditions involving the collection, handling and transport of the biological material containing the necessary cell cultures for said experiments and, even more, data regarding the sustainability of the infrastructural chains enabling the obtaining of such material and the dissemination, replication and publication of the experimental results—will all need to be made commensurable because “studying cells” includes it all and this can only be done by further singularizing the accountability of those engaged in such practices at each point along the way—increasing automation of decision making processes increases the singularity of remaining human decision hinges. These are pedagogical relations through and through, pedagogical relations within language, wherein ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives, and declaratives need to be sorted out in their transitions and integrity. Whoever can enter existing institutions and reorganize them by doing this sorting out where necessary will remake and lead the world and save us all. Only the originary hypothesis, as a kind of, I suppose, Schelling point, can articulate the pedagogical practices that can guarantee a steady flow of such people.