Idiomatic Intelligence/Intelligent Idiomaticity

Here is a problem I have been working on for many years—or, rather, working on finding a way to work on: to use the originary grammar I have developed from the succession of speech forms analyzed in Eric Gans’s The Origin of Language as a way of not so much analyzing specific texts, down to the level of the individual sentence, but of participating in the transmission of texts, down to that level. Now I think I have a way of proceeding. I mention this because the “breakthrough” comes through my exploring further the implications of the two models of language I have been contrasting recently: language as grammatical rules+words, on the one hand, and language as “chunks,” on the other. This distinction first became important to me in a pedagogical context; more precisely, the context of teaching writing, and determining the treatment of error within that context. More recently, this distinction became important in thinking through the algorithmic order, and in figuring out how not to resist nor merely endure, but to participate in—to engage in data exchange with the center.

Much of this was already worked out in Anthropomorphics, but I was still thinking about the problem of what I could call the “participation in linguistic presence” along rules+words lines—as if I had to figure out abstract rules for all the ways ostensives could be embedded in imperatives, and imperatives in declaratives. This also means I was thinking in traditional disciplinary terms, that of constructing a neutral “method,” rather than designing a practicing of contributing to new modes and levels of linguistic presence. So, it didn’t occur to me that that it was necessary to start with a model declarative, which is a model declarative precisely because it was a mapping off the very interrogative that demands the model declarative. An interrogative prolongs or stretches an imperative—from “do this” or “give me this” to “will you do this/give me this” to, finally, “tell me if/when you can/will do/give me this.” The declarative enters the scene to provide the requested information or assurances. Here, though, we’re dealing with scenes upon which the declarative is commensurate with the imperative stretched into interrogative—scenes of “good faith,” in other words, where there is a shared desire to maintain linguistic presence.

The inquiry I’m conducting, though, presupposes the unanchoring of the declarative from the ostensive-imperative world; or, really, the turning of the declarative against that world. It is only under such conditions that the question of regrounding the declarative in the ostensive-imperative world could arise, and so that problem must be made explicit in the study. The declarative that is weaponized against the ostensive-imperative is closely tied to, and may even be a grammatical transposition of, a certain kind of interrogative: an interrogative that stretches the imperative to its breaking point and thereby become unanswerable. Consider the following questions: “why are we doing this?”; “why are you telling me to do this?”; “who are you to tell me to do this?”; “what has made you the ‘who’ that can tell me to do this?”; “when and where have we agreed on the what that makes you the who that can tell me to do this?”—you can see a general progression towards unanswerability leading, not coincidentally, to a question essentially demanding the “receipts” of a social contract which is the only thing, other than sheer force, that could make me obey the command, and which is also impossible to produce. The explicit formulation of the social contract is fairly recent, but all that is needed for the question to stretch the imperative to unanswerability is the application of juridical thinking to the sovereign so that the sovereign can be placed in the dock, with unanswerable questions regarding the “title” to his ownership of the realm posed to him. In juridical reasoning, every imperative follows from an imperative: “the sovereign has declared…” Well, it doesn’t take much to realize that we can then ask who has declared that the sovereign is sovereign. Answering “God” was a stopgap for a while, but only shifted the question to the unanswerable one, “who knows what God wants”?

So, the model declarative must be one that can be mapped exhaustively onto the aggressively unanswerable question. The model sentence names precedents, however vague and tenuous, of some establishment that, at least as far as we can tell, made things at least marginally better than what it replaced, traces the filiation, however thin and disputable, by which the present authority derives from that establishment, and proposes some way of doing “this” that offers the best chance of revealing and facilitating participation in that filiation, those precedents and that establishment. Of course, any contending model sentence might do all this better than some other, but this sets the rules of the game. Not every sentence is a model sentence, and no sentence is the model sentence, but every sentence can be translated into a closer approximation of such a sentence. In this case, the imperatives that are entertained by the declarative and the ostensives the sentence would send us to seek out are determined by the approximation to the model sentence in mapping the unanswerable question into a corner of self-accusation. (By what authority can I ask this question?) This should now set me on the path toward programming the participation in linguistic presence.

The progress I’ve made here derives from and feeds back into my recent work on technics and technology; moreover, it tells us something about technics and technology, insofar as the solution to one problem will not only generate other problems but set lingering problems in a new light. Those lingering problems are really yet to be obeyed imperatives, issued from ostensives produced in previous work. I have to frame the question of technics/technology in terms of originary grammar—that’s an imperative generated by the “machinery” I’ve been working on. If I’m going to be wrong, I should be wrong about everything—that will at least be more illuminating for others. So, technics has to be thought in terms of the imperative—technics and technology make things happen, they command nature and in turn us. This right away gets as at the heart of a perennial question regarding the technical: the relations between tools, machinery, and humans. Imperatives are issued to other humans, while at the same time making those humans instrumental to the will of the one issuing the imperative. You can keep working on a technical object, selecting more suitable material, making it better suited to its task; you can also keep working on imperatives—you tell someone to do something, and see they haven’t done it in the way you imagined, so, you can punish them if it is within your power to do so, but you can also look at the imperative you issued and see whether you can ensure it is shaped so as to lead inexorably to the result you want. Once you do that, you are already thinking technically. You keep thinking technically by composing more extended imperatives, and imperatives that include subsidiary imperatives; along the way, the modifications you have had your “instruments” make in surrounding material (animals, stones, wood, etc.) serve as “impressed” imperatives—if it is the case that if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail, that is because the hammer commands you to look for nails. The hammer is a congealed cluster of commands, all of which have been made consistent with each other within this assemblage, but which might also be disassembled and made explicit if the hammer needs to be fixed, or taken apart to form a different kind of tool, or pressed into the service of some ensemble. This is all the case on an immensely expanded scale in machines and the current techno-order, or Stack.

Pressing the imperative into theoretical service in this way also provides us with a way of formulating the human-technological relation in all of its historical and social manifestations and dimensions. However mediated human relations are by technology, that mediation is always the means by which we issue imperatives to each other. Issuing an imperative always has a pedagogical component, at least if you are interested in seeing the imperative not only fulfilled but as a source of further imperatives. You need feedback to know whether you’ve properly fulfilled the command, even if you can defer the reception of that feedback indefinitely. So, the problem of the relation between technology and humans can be “reduced” to the problem of pedagogy, which allows us to reduce “society” (more on this in a moment) to the ever-changing totality of teaching and learning, which is to say instruction, guidance, initiation, leadership, demonstration and mentoring—all of which takes its most advanced form in the assignment—an imperative, or sequence of imperatives, by which the learner will discover the ostensives that will issue the imperatives that will integrate him into a ostensive-imperative world presided over by declaratives reintegrating the unanswerable questioner.

Another problem that offered itself up for a solution within this imperative network: the problem of “society.” Human orders were once “kingdoms,” or, rarely, “republics”—republics, not to say democracies, are degenerate, but at least imply the possibility of a general naming. “Society” derives from the Latin “socius,” which meant, and continued to mean in its English form at least, an association entered into voluntarily for some common purpose—like a Society for the Advancement of Temperance. In the application of the concept to the entire human order, the “mission” element gets lost, and all we have is a “voluntary” association of anons, which creates the perpetual problem of social science: what holds it all together? We need to work through all these concepts, even at the price of inventing intricate, difficult to understand and even difficult to say concepts (Charles Sanders Peirce deliberately changed the name of his thinking from “pragmatism” to “pragmaticism” once it had been appropriated by epigones so that the harder to pronounce word would make the field more forbidding), as I am now going to do.

A “society” is a field of naming—in a genuine socius, everyone would have their “office.” The best word for language as a field of naming is “idiom”—“our” language, with “our” name for each and everything. A human order, therefore, is idiomatic. Sovereign is he who decides upon the proper idiom. But I have wanted to be rid of that other intransigent term, “sovereignty,” for a long time as well, for reasons I outlined after reading Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State. So, what “modifies” (or is modified by) “idiom,” if not “sovereignty”? We need to name a center that issues imperatives and receives interrogatives as those imperatives play out in the ostensive field. “Intelligence” should work here (I’m not going to go through—assuming I could—the trial and error process of arriving at these two to be conjoined terms)—intelligence would survey the idiomatic conjugations and permutations it supervises and continually select certain idiomatic paths over others; the center is the source and destination of intelligence. Why should a particular practice be given one name rather than another? The better name generates names for the vertical links to the center along with horizontal links to other “orbiting” centers. Naming is (if I may) “central intelligence.” So, instead of “society,” “state,” “sovereign,” and so on, we have idiomatic intelligence/intelligent idiomaticity (getting confused, long ago, on Eric Gans’s “gesture of aborted appropriation,” calling it—I wasn’t the only one—“aborted gesture of appropriation” led me to think that grammatically paired concepts might replace the single word or phrase concept as being more generative [I did the same thing, accidentally, with interrogative imperativity/imperative interrogativity”—why not keep both?). 

Idiomatic intelligence/intelligent idiomaticity can be scaled up and down as much as we need—an individual is a site of II/II, so is an institution, so is the commander of the armed forces. The closer we get to the center, the more intelligence is gathered and the more tightly woven the idioms—or that, at least, is a test of the centrality of the center. Intelligence is released from the center in distributed idioms. And this brings us back to the model declarative, because the answer to the unanswerable question is tracing the convergence of idiom and intelligence to the center. The unanswerable question is posed in an idiom that it simultaneously accuses of having no “ultimate” declarative backing, and it presupposes intelligence not in its possession. Whence the question, in its current formulation? That sets us on the trail of precedents, establishments, and modes of succession, leading to the vertex where idiom meets intelligence. And we’re not always sure where we will find this vertex—what we call the “state” is certainly the most heavily named institution, but the system of naming can lapse, involving a decline in intelligence and a loosening of the idiomaticity of the system. Provisional convergences of idioms and intelligences can name these lapses, and create new idioms and intelligences: think of it as a party (I’m borrowing from a recent post of Curtis Yarvin here) interested only in taking power to the exclusion of all other parties and thereby developing an uninfiltratable idiom of infiltration that would dissolve the party upon its success in the intelligent institution of that idiom. Along the way, that idiomatic intelligence might be resonant in various locations, producing samples to be uploaded to the stack and downloaded elsewhere. The marker of such developments would be a growing richness of pedagogical relations, of the refining and testing of imperatives, contracted and extended, all along the order of idiomatic intelligence.