Figuring Things Out

How do we solve problems, especially technical problems—but that means all problems, because technics is nothing more than the construction, maintenance, and modification of the scenes upon which we act. One of the hardest problems to solve is how to describe this process in a useful way that might help others get better at it, precisely because thinking is scenic and being on a scene cannot be reduced to its articulation of language. This makes it an interesting test of the thinking of technics as scenic design I’ve been working, so I’ll be writing a few of these posts dealing more or less directly with, until, hopefully, some way of addressing the question becomes implicit in all of my writing.

The phrase, “figure it out” seems like a good way to get started, as it suggests extracting a figure from what was presumably non-figural, but “figure” is a verb, not a noun, so discovering or designing a figure would be part of the process of bringing the figure out. If you’ve ever figured anything out, and you have, you know that the emergence of the “figure” involves a kind of revelation in which a solution appears, a solution irreducible to all whatever work you have done in arranging the elements of some scenario, hoping for a catalytic event. Since people are engaged in figuring all kinds of things out all the time, and, in fact, since this is central to world order, organized technologically, developing a “grammar” of “figuring out” would seem to be a pretty important thing to do.

I’ve spent a large part of my life designing writing assignments, and I’ve come to take this as a paradigmatic model for thinking about figuring things out—so much so that I would say that the best way of judging and responding to any piece of writing is to posit the assignment it’s written in response to, at least implicitly. (The implication is also that we want to make the assignments—which is to say, imperatives, that we’re always composing, even beyond writing in the narrow sense, in response to, more explicit.) In designing a writing assignment, I assume a student bearing a particular “load” of language, in the form of commonplaces, chunks and constructions. I assume that reading and writing are a single practice of literacy, because we can only know how someone reads through how they write about what they read, and any piece of writing, even if not produced in direct response to a specific text, is a kind of translation of some other text, suitable for “similar” occasions, that the writer has “inscribed” in his practices. Here, as well, supplying the implicit source text would clarify a lot of what we do as writers, just like positing a hypothetical model, translated in some mistaken way into a set of habits, would clarify a lot of what people do. (Everyone is always at least partially on some other scene than the one upon which you confront them—figuring out who and where they are on that scene will often facilitate “fixing” things with them on this scene.)

In designing the assignment, then, you want the student to work with the source text in such a way as to single out that source text as a distinctive utterance, against a hypothetical field comprising the totality of possible utterances. This is what you want the student to learn how to do, with any text, on any occasion, because in this way you become a producer of irreducible, irreplaceable texts. So, you have the student read the text against a hypothetical field of texts posited by the text itself—any text constructs itself through negations and distinctions signifying that it’s not saying what all those other texts are saying. I’ve always worked with texts that make some kind of distinctive theoretical or scholarly claim, but in principle the approach would hold even when it comes to extremely stereotyped or “uninteresting” texts. The practice of approaching such texts would simply have to direct attention more to the markers indicating the singularity of the conditions under which this text has been written, read, and might be read in the future. Perhaps it will be necessary, to bring out the singularity of the text, to situate it imaginarily under conditions where the very infrastructural features that allow for the repetition of documentary forms are presumed absent. As you singularize further, you produce “problems” for future readers of the text, and your text—so, the student has to move, intellectually, from a scene upon which the text is legible because the reader can find points of reference that reduce it to other texts within the field, which is to say, a scene upon which all actual and potential readers would be converging upon a reading that slots this text within the existing field, to a scene upon which all those potential readers are now situated differently, as engaging upon a series of reconfigurations of that field. (Incidentally, all the issues of the traditional writing class, in particular those of grammar and syntax, can be productively addressed within this frame insofar as the breaking up of the commonplaces, chunks and constructions under the pressure of singularization are caught up in supplementary assignments to inquire into the origins and consequences of the resulting mistakes.)

So, the student has to figure out how to “transport” himself and all his possible readers from one place to another. And I am saying this is the model of all figuring out, including the most technical—you’re always on one scene, dealing with some element of the scene that is both in and of the scene, on the one hand, and out of it and badly fit to it, on the other hand. To reconcile the element, you need to construct a new scene with that element at  the center of the scene. The “imagination,” then, comes into play here, but what is the imagination, originarily considered? The imagination is one of the concepts that seem to us absolutely fundamental, but can’t be derived directly from the originary scene. The imagination extends, surrounds and constitutes the perceived with the unperceived—it conjures the invisible. If I see someone running, I can imagine he’s running from, to or for something; and I can take running as “like” and therefore a sign of other activities. I fill in the scene, or transport an action from one scene to another—I have to do at seem some “filling in” to make sense of the person running. But none of this is possible on the originary scene, where the central object “communicates” directly to all and each of the participants, and where each of the participants see the others directly suspended and held by the center. From our perspective, that may look like imagination, but it’s really more like hypnosis, if we could imagine ourselves perpetually hypnotized by every object we come across. And, before the advent of writing, which makes the representation of absent scenes routine, I think there is no real imagination—just things in the world speaking directly to participants on various scenes, situating them within the community with other members and the supernatural beings presiding over it.

In a thoroughly magical world, you would always be trying to convince, coerce, cajole or trick some entity to do something so as to transform the scene and your situation within it. This kind of engagement with the world is what gets replaced by using the imagination to try and figure things out. You’ve stepped back from an actual scene (where the ongoing flurry of imperatives requiring “time-sensitive” responses leave no space for the imagination) and constructed an imaginary scene in which the actual one is embedded. You do this because there was something you couldn’t do on the actual scene—say, obey conflicting imperatives, placing you in a double bind—and now it becomes something you can do on the imaginary scene, because a wider sphere of possible responses, due to a suspension of the immediacies of the imperatives, opens up. The actual scene, as one among a multitude of similar scenes, now becomes raw material for composing the imaginary one. Other people on a scene are always projections of some shared attention we imagine with other others on the scene—if you see a particular individual as weak or strong, ally or enemy, obsessed or unconcerned with you, deploying this or another strategy, etc., that’s because you imagine some convergence towards that individual that will elicit these “qualities” (in a thoroughly magical world, some immaterial being would simply speak out from other participants of the scene and tell you who they are). What you project onto others, that is, is the way you hold the scene together, and you experiment, in this imaginary space, with different ways of holding the scene together, so as to discover the tightest one, because it is there where you will find the lever that overturns the scene and makes it a new one, resituating everyone.

Once the elements of the scene upon which all are acting are no longer magical things that need to be approached with the right formula, they become technical—“cultural techniques,” as Bernhard Siegert calls them. These are rules, norms, precedents, means of enforcement, of ranking, exclusion and inclusion, along with physical design, like building, rooms, media, and so on. These are surrounding scenes, and preceding scenes, informing the one in question, the one you want to transform. The stronger your imagination, the more you think about changing one scene in order to transform all the macro and micro scenes including it and which it includes—as with any technical enterprise, the greatest transformation with the least effort and energy is the rule you follow. But to get to that you need a proliferation of possibilities, including low probability ones, including the lowest probability you can imagine, precisely because those are the ones you’re most likely to overlook. There’s a lot of “if... then” work going on, constructing scenes, imagining acts that would tighten up the scene in one way or another, and this kind imaginary activity prepares us for our future vocation of training algorithms to take over this kind of work—because this kind of work won’t get us out of the scene and into a new one (it won’t create an event), even if the kind of critical mass of endless scenic construction is necessary to bring to light the anomaly in the scene around which a new norm can be constituted.

At some point the imagination must be used to transform the dimension of the scene—to enlarge or shrink it; to slow it down or speed it up; to extend or retract it temporally; or really, several or all of these at once. The scene must be made plastic. This must eventually involve doing things differently on the actual scene—pressing on the anomalies and double binds, making the scene as paradoxical as you can. The source of all paradoxes, and therefore all anomalies and double binds, is that we are creating the things we name as always already having been there and what they are. Congealed within naming is the mimetic crisis averted and converted into that name and thereby commemorated. Approaching and soliciting such paradoxes is dangerous, which on the one hand means you should only do it when a kind of cascade of paradoxes point to one; but, on the other hand, it means that once you decide to “handle” it you have work it all the way through until a re-naming can be enacted. Everyone on the scene has to participate in a kind of implicit ritual of naming, so as to make it that new thing. To get there you have to imagine yourself, even minimally, on a scene upon which the new name is already operative and you are engaged in naming other things on the scene accordingly. What else must be in place for you to be able to do that? If you can imagine a whole new infrastructure, which has eliminated the conflicting imperatives that initiated the sequence in the first place, you’ve figured it out. This would include creating an environment in which people can enact paradoxes more freely and with greater attentionality. It goes without saying that at any point along the way you could be completely wrong about which paradox is really the active or sore one, and you might be the obstacle, the stumbling block, but working it through nevertheless will shake others loose from their positions so that one of that might put their finger on it.

When I design writing assignments, they’re not aimed at ensuring that students get the “right” or an ‘acceptable” reading of a text, or that they compose in a way that would check off enough boxes so that it can pass as a “good” piece of writing in “enough” situations. You can’t even do these things if you try—this is the kind of stuff students pick up by themselves, or don’t, through mimesis, which in this case means gaming out the likely responses of the authorities in charge of assessing your work (what students think of in terms of “what does this guy want?”). They’re aimed at forcing students to use texts to break up their own commonplaces, chunks and constructions, and to do that enough times so that it can become an iterable practice that the student and others could see as such—what is produced is what scholars of language learning call an “inter-language,” where words and sentences students bring into the class are mixed with those of whatever text we are working with in class, as a Russian speaker learning English will use English words in Russian idioms and syntax. The practice of generating an interlanguage is what students study as well as what they do in the class: it becomes the object of inquiry, and so students develop a kind of fluency in transforming interlanguages into potentially shared idioms. And this becomes a model of language use in general. Language use is language learning, which is picking up the idioms constituting a scene and showing you’ve learned them by innovating in them. And each of these idioms itself contains worlds, that is, scenes within scenes within scenes, and so language learning is what generates the resources for the work of the imagination, figuring things out, explored here. And this means the next post needs to address the Mobius strip of event and language.