Idiomatic Intelligence as Register
I think that Jean-Francois Lyotard, with his concept of the differend, identified the central problem bequeathed to us by the enslaved debtor’s (anti)imperial imaginary that emerged at the end of the Axial Age. The differend refers to a situation in which some form of violation creates a double bind by also making it impossible to litigate that violation; interestingly, Lyotard sees in the differend a feeling that cannot be articulated in language, and therefore as the source of new idioms. Lyotard uses examples like Holocaust denial and Aboriginal land disputes, but I think that the concept is at least as applicable to the found(ed) God of history. In the ancient empires it was unthinkable that the emperor himself could commit a crime, because who could adjudicate a claim against the emperor? But the Hebrew bible insisted that the emperors did commit crimes deserving of punishment and it seems to me that they were able to do so because a subsequent emperor remedied the harm (to an extent): I have in mind the crux of the composition of the bible, the period of the Babylonian exile and Persian sponsored return. I assume that very few peoples survived the kinds of catastrophes described in the bible, and the survival of the ancient Judeans had to appear as an act of divine grace—in that case, though, the destruction itself must have been divinely sanctioned, a judgment against the Jews, and the emperors carrying out the destruction, like those “redeeming” the exiles, must be mere instruments of God; a God, therefore, heading a court of appeal superior to that of any worldly emperor. “Monotheism,” then, was the invention of a new idiom in the space of a differend, and this idiom required the articulation of the privileged subject wronged by and defiant toward the emperor (placing the emperor in a double bind that God himself can be placed in) and the dispossessed masses who can see in that uncertain figure a new, redeeming, center. And “redemption” here must be taken with full reference to slavery, into which one could be thrown as a result of one’s debts, and from which one could be saved by repaying them. If it’s God who redeems you, though, you are now indebted to Him in a way far exceeding any worldly debt: human sacrifice, the only form of payment that could seem commensurate with the debt owed to the divine emperor, is cancelled by an even more incommensurate debt of ongoing devotion of your whole self. The idiom generated is one in which your entire linguistic order is transformed so as to detect and remedy anything less than complete devotion to God, and there is a great deal to detect and remedy since all of our desires threaten to derail that devotion.
All of Western thinking, at least, which is to say any thinking done in any of the successor states of the Roman Empire, from the farthest left to the farthest right, remains completely within this differend; and non-Western thinking, to the extent that it is required to participate in the Western-created and dominated international system, does so as well. I say this is a problem for us because in demolishing sacral kingship once and for all, the subjection of actual authorities to higher authorities provides, as the only path to legitimate authority, posturing before some imaginary authority. This makes governance incoherent at the very time that more governance, some of it excrescences produced by the endless struggle to secure power, but some of it quite necessary for the sustenance of technological and monetary systems upon which all other systems now depend, is being erected. All that references to higher authority, whether those higher authorities be “democracy,” “human rights,” “the Constitution,” “freedom,” “nation,” etc., can do is create more counter-authorities to the already existing ones—and these counter-authorities get incorporated in the form of the massive excrescences in our burgeoning power structures. Needless to say, there is also no way back to sacral kingship, assuming there were any “constituency” for it. Somehow government will have to be made good, rather than an entity we are always performatively defining ourselves in opposition to. None of our existing political categories help us here.
None of this is particularly new, but I think I have a better way of approaching it as a result of the work the division into ritual, juridical and disciplinary now enables. The economic-political knot now looks as follows: the overt dislocation of centered occupancy is the other side of the funding of the state through loans directed by the central bank; decision making from the center is now determined by the imperative to ensure ongoing capitalization possibilities for the strongest sections of capital; this gives the state a great deal of power, and in fact leads to the accumulation of centralized power, while sharply constraining any particular occupant of the center. The president or prime minister is very powerful when securing capitalization opportunities, through taxation, regulation, war-making, etc., policies, and very weak (unpopular, scandal-ridden, etc.) when countering those opportunities. Opposition to the capitalization of the most capitalized is necessarily allowed within a system in which parties rotate in power, but such opposition will eventually feedback into the system as the strengthening of state capacities to constrain capital eventually are transformed into capacities at the disposal of some state-capital project. In the process, the intelligence of the state, i.e., its spies, operations but also the need to take in as much information as possible, to have eyes and ears everywhere, to channel as much disciplinary activity as possible towards the state, is taken out of the hands of the monarch and distributed in unaccountable ways. So, here’s my question: how can we ever manage we have a reasonably accurate, much less actionable, picture of all this? I read all the time accounts claiming to have extensive knowledge of various deep state activities—what are the psyops, who is really an intelligence asset of this or that state, etc., and not only do I have little idea whom to believe (I hardly anyone see anyone consider that maybe what they dug up was put there for them to dig up, or conceals other layers, etc.), since these accounts often contradict each other, but they almost all, caught in the weeds as they are, fail to give intelligible accounts of what all these intelligence agencies want in the end, why they can do some things but not others, how successful they are in getting what they want, whether when they get what they want it’s really what they want and so on. If you’ve missed some string, as you surely have, doesn’t that effect in ways you couldn’t calculate, the significance of the strings you hold? The sheer thrill of discovery, usually accompanied by a naïve democratic faith in the power of public exposure, obscures any attempt to create an all-encompassing and plausible narrative. And if you don’t have something like that, and are dazed and confused rather than complicit, aren’t you a kind of unwitting asset yourself?
I’ll pose the question this way: what can we say that will withstand the “economic” fluctuations in volatility along with the dialectic of centralization of power along with the invisibilization of agency directing that power? You can stand tall, have integrity, stick to your principles, speak the truth no matter what, live in truth, etc., but whether what you say is true in any but the most trivial sense is an infrastructural question, and it’s the infrastructure that’s subject to fluctuations in circulation, power redistributions, and data flows. My notion of the “idiom,” or what I’ve been calling “idiomatic intelligence,” and which is probably indebted to Lyotard’s, can, now supplemented with the tripartite distinction of the social into ritual, juridical and disciplinary layers, help us think this problem through further. I’m going to say the most basic, universal, untranscendable layer of language (fully developed language) is the pragmatic paradox, in which what you say is simultaneously constituted by and constitutes what it’s “about.” This is the layer of language commemorated in ritual, myth, parable, riddle, and all the wisdom literature collected by all cultures. This is the layer of language in which we know that what we desire will desert us if we obtain it, that those you are closest to can best betray you, that luck is really preparation but preparation can be undone by bad luck, that no man should be counted happy until he is dead, and hundreds more already written and that we could write if we set our minds to it. Every sentence, even the most ordinary and commonplace, can be paradoxicalized, and this is the source of idiomatic intelligence. At the every least, any sentence could be read as the answer to one of two questions, implicit or explicit, one directed at the subject and one at the predicate: “it’s warm here” can be answer to the question, “what’s the temperature like here?” or “where is it warm?,” and responding as if the ”wrong” question has been answered paradoxicalizes the sentence by placing it on two scenes simultaneously. “So, you’re saying it’s warm only here?” Sustaining the boundary between the “plain” and paradoxical levels of the discourse you’re in keeps the “windows” to the infrastructural conditions of possibility open.
The reason for speaking of “idioms” is to take any privileged metalanguage off the table, metalanguage being that bludgeon of the disciplines. An idiom is a mode of language use constituted through use and therefore more fully available the more embedded in the scenes of its usage. This describes all language use, so the idiomatic character of language is equivalent to language itself, with the only question being disabusing uses of language that consider themselves sanctioned or official in some way of that assumption. And the ongoing paradoxicalization of language uses is certainly a good way of doing that. The “intelligence” adds the need to move across idioms and transfer signs from one to the other insofar as the provide helpful information—the more learned you are in one idiom the more you should be able to move amongst and gather intelligence from other idioms—the highest knowledge is to know that you are always in an idiom because there is nothing but idioms. Of course that very claim sounds, paradoxically, like a universal, non-idiomatic claim. And isn’t the originary hypothesis, for that matter, a claim to transcend and thereby found all idioms? Everything should translate into the originary and someday we should be speaking “originary.” But as soon as I say that I turn the originary hypothesis into an idiom into which any other idiom can be translated but which no idiom says without being re-translated and if the originary hypothesis ever came to saturate all discourse it would bring with it maximum idiomatic intelligence of always constituting and being constituted by the stack of scenes we are situated on.
To continue: the second layer of language use, this one corresponding to the juridical, is that wherein any utterance, any sentence, makes some claim regarding an exchange that presupposes a field of exchange and anticipates some adjudication. You are providing or passing along some intelligence, and as a post of transfer you make a claim and claims can be made upon you. Every sentence defers some imperative by pointing to a less deferrable imperative deriving from reality, but that initiating imperative lies in wait, to be enforced or redeemed. The exchange dimension of any sentence is cut out of the broader cloth of the paradoxicality of language and is ultimately retrieved by it once again, but “ultimately” can be a long time and in the meantime the demands are real and inescapable. As society becomes an articulation of distanced and differently scaled scenes this exchange dimension of language is pressed upon harder than in the single scened social order in which we still, for the most part, imagine our utterances to be circulated—pressed upon harder, that is, by the surrounding paradoxicalizations. What can a promise mean when the conditions of keeping that promise—having some legally recognized freedom of motion, physical integrity, source of economic support, expectations of loyalty, etc.—are increasingly under pressure with that pressure increasingly difficult to withstand? But it is also—paradoxically—under such conditions that the promise and other indications of an exchange implicit in language are even more in demand and more meaningful even when honored in the breach. Even in the most “totalitarian” system language wouldn’t “work” if the possibility of the promise (always idiomized) is completely eliminated. The “tensegrity” of such obligations created through speech therefore becomes a register of the subversions of succession and the tentativeness of bidding on the claim that any scene will have been the same.
And then, corresponding to the disciplinary, is knowing the scene you are on along with the supply chain of scenes upon which it is dependent—here is where Peirce’s “what will prove true the long run” is especially pertinent because none of us can have all of the chain present to us at any time and to that extent are flying blind. But knowing the scene means knowing how the scene has been cut out of the encompassing paradoxicalization of language and some scene of exchange that makes the knowledge urgent in the first place. The construction of the scene upon which you know is co-constitutive of the scene the doings upon which you want to know. You can always make a judgment regarding whose speech seems likely to sustain the exchange relations predicating it and be continually informed rather than invalidated by its possible conversions into paradox. A figure who can be believed and trusted by the same people able to ridicule and laugh heartily at him will likely be at least a rich source of information. And your model is what you hope for your own speech: to stand up to scrutiny days, weeks, decades down the line, even if it turns out to be mistaken in many or even all respects. And this model also allows you to construct a scene upon which you try out what kinds of mistakes you might be liable to make, which also means what kinds of mistakes you can make allowances for in others, so that your basic relation to the scene can remain the same even as you learn from it. A new scene can always pop on the scene—someone you took to be a reasonably independent actor turns out to be someone whose strings are held by another more closely than you would have imagined (which might also lead you to imagine what kinds of strings are holding you). That must be manifested, though, by something like promises broken or actions turning paradoxical to the point of incoherence, and even if that might be happening on some scene off-scene it must register on the scene you can follow. So, in broken obligations and paradoxicalized actions and utterances you can see and register the presumed effects of other scenes and at the very least stand in as a sign of where those boundaries are and where we can bring our presence to bear on having obligations met and paradoxes surfed rather than sweeping away. This is what requires idiomatic intelligence: entering the language of a scene and refusing to submit that language to an authoritative metalanguage. Maybe a simpler and more wisdom literature way of putting it is that universal lying, deceit, betrayal and idiocy are impossible because we can identify the tendency toward them and tend to the means of attestation, obligation and learning. Someone has to stand for that tending in order for you yourself to tend, and that someone can be pressed toward the center with an eye toward permanent occupancy—and if that someone ends up being no longer an imaginable occupant you would nevertheless being creating a mantle that someone will eventually come to fit. If you imagine yourself to trust no one that just means you most trust whoever best demonstrates the trustworthlessness of everyone else and avert your eyes from the infrastructural conditions of that capability. Someone who is worth the trust will point to margins of trustworthiness where they can be found and reveal the infrastructural conditions of that capability. Of course, those margins are always receding and shifting which is why those samples of trust must be fed back into the infrastructures to which you tend. We’re all tending a piece of the infrastructure.