Event Intelligence

For Bernard Stiegler, technics is the externalization of memory. The first form of memory, characteristic of the most primitive forms of life, involves the transmission of genetic information transgenerationally. The second form of memory, secondary retention, characteristic of more advanced forms of life, involves the ability to repeat and vary within strict limitations, certain operational sequences: this form of memory gained from learning about the limits of given operational sequences, does not extend beyond the individual organism, except to the extent that the individual organism might alter the environment within which other organisms operate. Finally, there is the specifically human form of memory, tertiary retention, in which memory is exteriorized and made relatively permanent through some kind of inscription upon some matter. Here, Stiegler draws upon Derridean “differance,” according to which each mark or “gramme” takes its reality or “meaning” from its difference from and deferral of other marks or inscriptions.

Stiegler is caught up in trying to solve philosophical problems, especially those bequeathed by phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger in particular) so he speaks in terms of these exteriorized marks being re-interiorized so that we can arrive at the kind of consciousness accessible to philosophical discourse. Stiegler comes close to paving a path (leaving and inscription) towards moving beyond philosophical discourse by speaking in terms of a “default of origin,” when exploring the implications of the origin of tertiary retention. How could an inscription be recognized as an inscription? This problem is very familiar to those of us steeped in the originary hypothesis: how could the first sign be recognized as a sign without there already being signs, articulated within a system, that allows us to recognize some mark as a sign? Stiegler can’t get past the realization that this first inscription must be “accidental” but not quite accidental, because it at the same time must have been seen as something necessary, or at least repeatable. You can’t repeat an accident. Hence “default of origin”: there must be some origin, but we can’t say what it is, certainly not without falling back into metaphysics, so we’ll make what is ultimately the same move Derrida made—treating the origin as an “inevitable” presupposition that nevertheless must be endlessly deferred as a sign that we will never once and for all extricate ourselves from metaphysics.

If we set aside the problems of individual consciousness and memory (i.e., metaphysics), the default of origin can be replaced with a genuine origin, by acknowledging that the “accidental” inscription is “conscripted” into use upon a scene, in an event—in that case, we have an “event-al anthropogenics” instead of philosophy. The pathological avoidance of origins is replaced by the insistence that all we have and do is retrieve and enact the origins through which we have and do. We don’t even need to speak of “interiorization” in that case: we are always in the environment of inscriptions which we know how to “read” because we have been tutored and initiated into the scenes made up of those inscriptions and upon which attention is directed towards some center. We all experience some form of interiority, some of us quite intensely, for some of more “really” than externality is experienced—nevertheless, we are always on the margin of some scene, however configured, in accord with whatever temporality, in terms of whatever mode of participation in that scene we find imaginable. The solitary thinker who never leaves his room or books is a highly active participant on the scene of solitary thinkers, in dialogue with other solitaries whose books he reads and those he hopes will be reading his books into the distant future.

So, while acknowledging Stiegler’s assertion that what metaphysics has really suppressed is not writing but technics—which is systematically thought as merely instrumental to the uses determined by the mind reflecting on the eternal, which remains the commonsensical way of speaking about technology (we invent devices to do the things we’ve decided we want to do in some non-technological space)—I extend that claim to insist (not inconsistently with Stiegler, I think) that what metaphysics has suppressed is learning, and in particular language learning. It’s extremely interesting that Plato came to see knowledge as a form of recollection, which is to say that he found no other way of resolving the paradox that if you come across something genuinely new, it resists all your pre-existing categories and therefore you can’t know it while, if you can know it, it fit your pre-existing categories and therefore you already knew it. Again, this becomes a completely different and more productive problem when reframed scenically and, in a way that I also think converges with Stiegler’s thinking, idiomatically (to speak of “idioms” is to recognize the dependence of any utterance upon the scene where it is uttered and those subsequent scenes where it is repeated). The unknown breaks down the network of idioms you have for translating the world, for “enlikening” (to refer to Paul North’s fascinating Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness) that novel thing or happening to things and happenings already named within that network of idioms. “Knowing” it involves conferring a new name (which might be a revision of an existing one) upon it, with that name in turn being “verified” or “authenticated” upon a scene where you teach and are taught by others to refer to, attend to, appropriate, “emplace” that thing or happening—which, at this point, is part of a revised network of idioms and not quite the same as the thing or happening “itself.” That we’re always learning is in itself a banal truism, but it becomes less so once we say we are composed of our learnings and teachings, by the pedagogical relations infiltrating every thought and utterance—to “understand” something is to be able to rehearse a way of showing others (specific others, whom you imagine more or less explicitly endowed in specific ways) how to see and hear what you take yourself to see and hear (which will turn out rather differently once you see and. hear it again through these others).

Within GA there has been both a paucity of examination of the relation between these two foundational terms, “scene” and “event,” as well as what seems to me (I feel certain a search of all writings composed under the aegis of GA would vindicate this claim) a massive disproportion in the attention showered upon the respective terms in favor of “scene.” Gans speaks of “scenic thinking” regularly, and he has a book called The Scenic Imagination—I can’t recall him ever speaking about “event thinking,” and the word ‘event” is not to be found in any of his book titles. This may be specific to Gans’s style of thinking or something more endemic to GA itself—at any rate, I’d like to start redressing both these defects. To some extent, “scene” and “event” can be seen as opposites, insofar as a scene is static and defined by everything being in place, while an event is action and transformative. But there’s more of a dialectical relation between them since, obviously, there can be no event without a scene, and the scene is designed for the purpose of staging events (and wouldn’t designing the scene have to be itself an event?). The word “scene” does overflow the boundaries I’ve just ascribed to it—for example, why do we speak of someone “making a scene” when they act “outrageously,” rather than “making an event”? In this case, it’s a question of introducing drama where there wasn’t before—but, then again, where could there be no drama? Calm, rational discourse focused on adhering to routines and solving some problem upon which there is a consensus is its own kind of drama. So, “making a scene” is less introducing drama to a non-dramatic situation than protesting the illusion of its undramaticality and revealing its inherent scenicity upon a newly created scene. Complaining about someone making a scene is therefore pointless—since you’ve acknowledged that they’ve made the scene, there’s nothing to do but find a way to act on it.

Let’s say that Stiegler’s tertiary retention is inscribed on a scene which is itself nothing more than an arrangement of inscriptions that enables further inscriptions to be made. On the originary scene, the inhabitants inscribe upon each other, as each “carves” his gesture as a “reading” of the others who have carved theirs in response to his. There’s no need to insist that inscription relies on some device, like a sharpened stone—the others on the scene are material enough to take inscriptions that have been caused by one’s own movements. The implements are themselves derivative of the inscriptions made upon each other by the participants on the originary scene. So, we can both minimalize and maximize the difference between scene and event by saying that the scene is the articulation of inscriptions enabling a new inscription while the event is the new inscription that re-inscribes all the existing ones. Since the first technics, then, involves making the inscriptions constitutive of the scene, technics are always, to bring back a concept I’ve used quite a bit but not too recently, scenic design practices. The repetition of the originary event in the first ritual will start from some remaining inscription of the event itself and use it to re-member the event—perhaps placing a bone left over from the shared meal to mark the place where the. new kill is to be brought would be enough of a reminder that the entire risky business of experiencing all over again the mimetic crisis can be avoiding by re-enacting it. Technics is the continual reinscription of the scene—scenic design practices are events within scenes that design scenes in ways that facilitate new events. Scenic design practices are therefore discovery procedures that elicit, frame and reinscribe the new forms of desire and resentment that are generated by the latest reinscriptions of the scene.

It's interesting that Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes provide us with a richer vocabulary for speaking about events than for speaking about scenes. “Do” and “happen” are both primes, and, really, what more do we need to speak exhaustively about any event than to identify the ways people are doing things and the ways things are happening to people (the same people are doing and having things happen to them)? (I’ll also briefly mention “move,” also essential descriptor of events.) This, in fact, cuts through all the conceptual clutter of “will,” ‘freedom” “choice” and all the rest of the vocabulary of action—from different positions on the scene we can see different ways of drawing the do/happen boundary (where you think you are doing something I may see all kinds of things happening to you), and that will tell us everything we need to know for the purposes of scenic design. These lines are just further inscriptions on the scene. For “scene,” though, we just have “place” and all the relative locations—here, above, below, inside, side, far, near. But this helps because what makes a scene a scene is that everything on the scene takes on its meaning from everything else on the scene, so it is all relative—one thing is near because something else is far, one thing is above because something else is below, etc., which tells us where we are on the scene in relation to each other. Any inscription, then, will articulate scene and event by marking where some do/happen line needs to be drawn relative to all the other do/happen lines.

We can, then, make the scene/event distinction something akin to the wave/particle duality in quantum physics, which is the kind of conceptual clarity and reduction ad paradoxem that thinking in the human sciences should aspire to. And this readies us event-al anthropogenicists to engage on the terrain created by information theory, cybernetics and what Benjamin Bratton has called “planetary scale computation,” the gigantic computing “exo-skeleton” that we can call a scene/event generator. I will remind my reader (inscribe upon our tertiary retention) that taking up the language of the central intelligence must be done both sincerely and satirically, since any language of the human or subjectivity will be nothing more than a translation of the infrastructural possibilities of those articulations of the human or the subject—which makes it no less real, because—well, what other reality do you have in mind? The originary satire which is simultaneously absolute idiomatic infiltration of central intelligence is the only sustainable mode of inscription now. So, let’s consider what happens when we make the obvious observation that, in any human scene/event, what counts as “noise” is always going to be mimesis. For clear communication you need to minimize, ideally eliminate, noise—this equates to abolishing the difference between the scene upon which we presently inscribe and the events that provided the inscriptions constituting that scene. The computational ideal would be that the signs or samples we exchange on our scene are always already, constitutively, the same—which could only be the case if all participants on the scene were constructed in advance as prompted by those signs as to enter operational sequences functionally identical to sequences upon which any other user would enter. History would then be a long process of scraping the noise off of signs so that we’re all equipped to use them the same way. This is the telos inscribed in information theory, even insofar as it’s presented as a purely neutral attempt to understand communication.

Stiegler’s program for resisting the entropy and “anthropy” that ultimately pervades, and now increasingly destructively, human negentropic efforts (the memory embedded in technics first and above all) would involve refusing the oblivion of the incalculable. I think event-al anthropogenics can help here. But, first of all, is mimesis entropic or negentropic? Or, rather, wherein is it either or both? Mimesis is first of all positive and generative—you learn from watching another if you can translate what he does into your own movements. It then becomes rivalrous and destructive—you both want the same thing. So, first of all negentropic, but then gives way to entropy through lack of differentiation. Like the rest of nature, I suppose. But, then, another layer of imitation can be added: the imitation, we can now say, of our reciprocal inscriptions upon each other. This is unequivocally negentropic and incalculable: you can’t tell which new inscription will reorder all other inscriptions in the field and convert them into reinscriptions. The way to do this is to disperse the samples presented to us as the same across a field of likeness (“same” and “like” both being primes, with, of course the difference between them as vanishingly small as we wish to make it) and, as Paul North (I cannot recommend that aforementioned book too highly) points out, everything is in some way and degree like everything else. So, from the same, to a field of likeness or enlikenings (which includes all things, all things related to all things, all ways of looking at and using said things and relations between things), and then back to a sameness that rehierarchizes the field of likenesses (this is me, not North) so that we have repeated with some significant othering and satirizing differences the sequences that promoted the sample to the status of the same in the first place. And there must be computable ways of getting to this incalculable. It’s easy to imagine (probably harder to do) jiggering with algorithms so as to produce the convergence of a field of likenesses, articulated a particular way, into samenesses. We can use computers to identify all the ways things are like each other that we know must exist but could never gather on our own, and to rate degrees of likeness according to various experimental scales we can construct, issuing in a determination of criteria for sameness. Then, whatever would be involved in configuring ourselves on our varied scenes so as to place those “sames” at the center would be up to us (even if we continue to use algorithms to keep narrowing down the alternatives so as to make them more manageable). At the highest level of technology we would then be doing nothing more than what we humans have been doing from the beginning: affirming through an event that we are on the same scene because have retrieved the “accidental” inscriptions we’ve made upon each other within a self-referential system of inscriptions directed toward the distribution of what those inscriptions have made the same thing and therefore distributable. And we could do so in a way that minimizes and converts into computable resources the noise created by the secondary retention that tertiary retention has not yet managed to eliminate—let’s say that it’s mimesis that extends secondary retention to the high point of tension that makes the event-al “tip” into tertiary retention possible and necessary. So, the mimetic noise of endless enlikenings is converted into the information of samenesses. But Stiegler also insists that part of our crisis is the replacement of knowledge (enduring) by information (time sensitive, computable, and therefore opposed to thinking). Yes, but the deconstruction of this binary leads us to “intelligence,” which has us tracing information back to all the event/scenes that make it intelligible and therefore has us doing everything “knowledge” would have us do.