Generating Idiomatic Intelligences and Translation Practices

The only thing to do is to create spaces for the training of writers, with writing understood as the maintenance of data security, as the participation in scribal-archivist-philological-programming traditions, as the meta-representation of oral-literate interfaces constitutive of spaces of writing pedagogy. The more all inscription is traced back to the ascertaining of ritual and liturgical traditions, to discerning the viability of one line of tradition over a sea of others nevertheless maintained in abeyance, the more creative and inventive we will become because it is out of the identification of a stream of seemingly minor differences that all programming emerges. The ritual and liturgical traditions are continuous with mythological and royal conditions, once the center has been occupied once and for all, and only by training ourselves to follow the lines of these traditions will we be able to cancel the permanent trial of the center and centering that is the post-sacral world. The complementary problems of succession (the continuity of the center, the system of references of the occupied to the signifying center) and of meaning (enhancing the scenic performativity of our signs), which is all that sociality is comprised of, find their solutions in the creation of such spaces.

I’ll follow up on “God’s affordances,” which is the hearing of God’s voice within a juridical and disciplinary setting produced by writing. It’s obviously crazy to think we could be hearing God’s voice today—that’s definitely the kind of thing that, under red flag laws, will get your guns taken away. But, then, where does our language come from—our heads? Do we just echo other voices, those we hear around us, those we’ve read and therefore recited to ourselves? Even in that case, these voices are different with each iteration—we can either anthropomorphize our “minds” (a construct that serves the very purpose of housing the voices that come from we really know not where) and deposit the thought machinery there, or we study and program the ways we derive voice from the center. The voice we hear from the center in that case is the signifying center’s, as it tells us how to fill the imperative gap in our asymmetrical exchanges with the occupied center. This is clearly the more generative approach, and one that supports inquiry rather than the piling up of metalinguistic concepts aimed at reducing human thinking to a set of controllable propositions. Instead of asking “why do you say that” we would ask something more like “where does what you’re saying come from, and how did you receive it?” But the difference between the voice of the center and voice of God is merely a semantic one.

The voice of God always interrupts some program running in our “head,” “pre-empting” it, as Gans suggests in the Chronicle I discussed in the previous post. We can hypothesize that this interruption is elicited by some anomaly in the imperatives from the center we’re trying to obey. An interruption breaks into your scene, whatever back and forth you are engaging in with others or rehearsing for yourself; but, for us (we generative anthropologists), an interruption into one scene can only come from another scene. And, indeed, the voice of God can only come from another scene. The ritual, juridical or disciplinary anomaly one is confronted with is now opened wide, and an alien voice is present on the scene. We might even say that the entire scene is now organized around either expelling or “naturalizing” that voice. I’d like to suggest, precisely as a basis for the training of writers, a way of eliciting and naturalizing, precisely by alienating and denaturalizing the scene which has been interrupted.

So, we have two scenes: the one in which you struggle with an imperative from the occupied center and the one from which a voice interrupts that first scene, which we provisionally identify as a scene upon which the signifying center speaks—and this is certainly a scene which, in the post-literate world, we can never claim in any way that meets any conceivable practices for maintaining data security to be present upon. It’s a scene we can only know through its interruptions of the scenes where we can be fit to measure; and, in fact, it’s a problem knowing whether that is where we have derived the voice from. We can only put the utterance of this voice to the test by initiating the composition of a new, third, scene, upon which we work out the terms on which that utterance can be the same on both of those other scenes. Unsurprisingly, God’s utterance to Moses—I AM/WILL BE WHAT/THAT I AM/WILL BE—is the best preliminary example here, because this utterance will always interrupt anyone who is wondering where or what God is, what we can ask of Him, what He expects from us, along with a range of other possible questions—and the answer it gives to all of those questions is, first of all, I am and will continue to be here for you just as I have always been there for others who asked for My presence. This utterance of God’s is the same here as it is on any other scene it interrupted, and therefore the same as on the scene from which the present interruption was launched.

Determining the utterance to be the same on the two scenes—the scene from which it has been launched and the scene upon which it has landed—can always be modeled on this originary scribal oral-literacy interface, but it will always be more difficult to carry off. This is the work of the literary experimentation undertaken on the scene of writing, a work which can be modeled very closely on the generation of ancient canonical writings (including, of course, the Bible) out of materials used for the training of the scribal class—but, now, under conditions where we have access to the data of what will eventually be something approximating the accumulated discourse of humanity along with automated ways of collecting, arranging, collating and curating all of that material. The space of writing, that is, will be intimately interactive with language AIs. The question of how to think, which is usually pitched in one or another logical-imaginative form (“steps” for arriving at a “conclusion” from a “premise,” ways of “imagining” yourself in a conversation or whatever) that forgets that thinking takes place in language and that language is the very compositionality of the human and not a tool; that question can now be rerouted to questions of writing, of reworking according to preserved but always also improvised rules and moves sample sentences.

Any voice can be the interruptive voice—God can speak to us any way he likes; the question is, how do we find ways to listen. Let’s push it: any interruptive voice, which is to say, any utterance that can be treated as interruptive, is God speaking to us, as long as we construct the space wherein to listen and transcribe. Any sample of language that can be made the same on two different scenes will do. The proof that it’s the same will be the full commemorative order (ritual, juridical and disciplinary) you construct around each utterance on the respective scenes and your “straddling” of both of them on the scene of writing. Say, for example, you’re confronted with an accusation of lying—an accusation that certainly comes from another scene insofar as the accusation relies upon certain juridical (at least) protocols that must be observed differently upon the scene from which the accusation emerges than on the scene where you are not, presumably, unanimously and unequivocally considered to be lying about that particular fact or incident. To make the accusation the same on both scenes would involve more than just “refuting” the accusation on terms satisfactory to those you share your present scene with; it would involve exposing the two scenes to each other, having them frame and comment on each other, perhaps by introducing disciplinary or ritual “scenery” into both scenes. On the scene of writing you would thereby be constructing a new articulation of the ritual, juridical and disciplinary, ultimately for “training” purposes.

Even this fairly simple example makes it clear that the scene of writing is a space of innovation and I’d like to take that observation further and claim that all innovation, including technical and scientific, can be modeled on the scene of writing with its oral-literate interface. Inquiry and innovation begin when some utterance presents as anomalous, which is to say we don’t know what it’s telling us to look for, or to do, or how to respond to it—the programming has broken down. Repeat any utterance enough times and you will get to this point—the frame of reference upon which its intelligibility depends will have changed, the place it originally held no longer needs to be held, the controversy it resolved is no longer operational, it’s surrounded by an unfamiliar set of utterances with a different set of reference points, etc. Even an invention presupposes that there is some transformation or conversion or transmission that seems to be demanded by a larger process that existing vocabularies can’t describe or help you enact. So, you try and derive an utterance that will work, and in doing so imagine possible scenes, but what that means is separating off the scene upon which you are now trying out these scenes from the scene that no longer works. And on this provisional scene you are visiting others, others that maybe never completely came off—a single action on one scene may turn out to be decomposable into a series of actions on other scenes, or a new scene might be able to turn a series of actions into a single one, given some scenic design that would distribute positions in some new way. What new utterance, along with its full range of references and implications, would make it possible for you to say the same thing on a not yet existing scene that you couldn’t say with the old utterance, on the previous scene? You work on creating the conditions under which a new concept, phrase, command, question or sentence would attract new selvings and practices that would use that utterance to point to the same thing, and in the process you keep, along with others, hopefully, continuing to revise the utterance. The first science of all, the science of language, of determining which marks would represent which sounds, and which words related to which other words in a sentence and how, is the model for all the others, and this science was first designed so preserve, and show others how to preserve (and show others how to show others…) verbal traditions at some distance from the liturgical settings which are no longer replicable so that textual transmission must do some of the work of presenting the center previously done by ritual transmission. Even the most advanced technological innovation is still deriving some new mode of commemoration from a now absent scene that has become an abstracted model of scenic design.

Think about taking a single sentence like, say, “representation is the deferral of violence” and simply reversing its terms: “violence is the deferral of representation.” We give ourselves a puzzle here—the new sentence doesn’t immediately make sense, but on a second look perhaps there’s something we could do with it, perhaps even in such a way as to add meaning to the original. How about “representation is the violence of deferral”? “Deferral is the violence of representation”? We’re creating a kind of parallel discourse to GA (who might utter these sentences—what, in terms Johanna Drucker uses, “pataphysical demon”?)—we might give ourselves an assignment to write a little essay that articulates all of these sentences, perhaps generating new ones through similar processes along the way—we might invite the GPT to join in. I think this kind of practice or selving or designing is analogous to the kind of scribal training culture that ended up producing books like the biblical Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and Job (in particular), all of which involve sustained play with paradox and metaphorical leaps.

We might think about the scene of writing as abolishing the distinction between knowledge and information. We leave our space open to the constant inflow of information, we modulate that space so as to distribute bits of information across different data sets, scales and time-frames, using the information itself to continue refining that modulation—information thereby comes in as “always already” a modification of the ongoing creation of knowledge. This also means that everyone in the space is at their stations, and treating those stations and their own occupancy of that as more info-knowledge to take in and send out, gift-like, as data to other users at other interfaces. I’ve recently become dissatisfied with the concept of “formalization” as a political ideal, aimed at countering liberalism by insisting, precisely, that all occupants of all stations be identified as such. The ideal is right, but “formalization” suggests a single degree of explicitness for all enactments on all scenes—as if everyone, at every moment, has to be “registered” identically. I think in terms of differing modes of “formalization”—so, the emergent leader of a tightly knit group in the midst of an emergency situation nodding his head slightly in a particular direction for his customary second-in-command counts as “formalization” for me but I can see that this could be stretching the term. And, in a really coherent order, couldn’t we imagine such “nods” as comprising all of social interactivity?

I’ll draw then, upon a fairly familiar concept, that of “idiomatic intelligence,” and us it to replace “formalization.” Idiomatic intelligence, among other virtues, suggests the need for any order, at whatever scale, to model itself as a way of modeling possible articulations of itself with its scenic and extra-scenic (or yet to be scenic) surroundings. “Idiomatic intelligence” has us keep in mind the resistance to translation the ongoing naming constitutive of any event-scene undergoes and the corresponding need for translation practices—in those scenes of writing at the oral-literate interface. “Idiomatic intelligence” incorporates the ritual, or the most originary modes of commemoration, in a way that ‘formalization,” drawing almost exclusively upon the juridical, doesn’t. “Idiomatic intelligence” commemorates the way all knowledge comes out of commemoration, and the commemoration of commemoration, through iteration, variation, and “sampling”—again, the practices constitutive of the scene of writing placed at the center here. Just as the ancient scribes created the collective identities into which rulers, occupants of the center, can step as always already having stepped into, by stitching together, revising, editing and ensuring the transmission of inherited traditions, so our spaces of writing, programming of programmers, will seed the institutions concerned with data security in all its forms (ultimately, all institutions, but not with equal weight) with intelligence programs that provide imperative transmission belts for those who can select their successors in perpetuity.

The scene of writing is derivations from deferrals and its test will be whether it can model and ultimately perform in increasingly indispensable ways functions of sovereignty. What will be distinctive in these practices is the performing of constant “stress tests” on commemorative orders in their ritual, juridical and disciplinary forms—only our scene of writing will be able to show how things stand across the board with these institutions—what kinds of orthopraxes, truths, protections against violent centralizations, and inquiries will they help to sustain amidst the increasingly comprehensive uprising against occupancy of the center—an uprising that paradoxically produces increasingly stringent mechanisms of power for whoever can manage to seize the center temporally or operate it from scenes behind the scene. The very simple practice proposed here—show samples of language to be the same across different scenes (an inhabited one and an interrupting one)—in all its inexhaustibility can sustain such institution building. Our idiomatic intelligences will retrieve the most tacit and ancient forms of intelligence while infiltrating across the range of all the contemporary modes, creating new practices of art, inquiry and revivification of intermediate ways of communal responsibility. We will be creating inscripture.