Idiomclining

I’ve been reminded lately of Goodhart’s Law, that once the measure becomes a target it becomes useless as a measure. I can say that my incessant focus on the linguistification or semiotization of everything has always been in adherence to that “law”—every single word, expression or sentence is or contains measures that are liable to become targets. This is the reason for my hostility to words like “cognition,” “consciousness,” “belief,” “communication,” even “memory” and many others, and my insistence of constantly returning to the more primitive elements of language, either in the form of Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes, David Olson’s metalanguage of literacy, originary grammar, or that of the scenicity of every use of every sign, which finds its expression in my reduction of all utterances to the disciplinary space within which they are produced. Almost every political concept is vulnerable to Goodhart’s Law, including “rights,” “sovereignty,” “justice,” etc. Goodhart’s Law gives us the logic of bureaucracy. My focus on pedagogy derives from my extreme suspicion of the drifting of measure into target, because any pedagogical outcome is measured by those who know how to do that thing or to judge that thing in specific circumstances. (And, of course, education is one of the worst offenders of Goodhart’s Law, as can be seen in the tendency of education to be reduced to teaching for tests. We supposedly want students to become “critical thinkers”—setting aside for now where that phrase comes from—and so we have to establish markers of critical thinking: a critical thinker does X, Y, and Z. Fine, but, now, we have to determine what will serve as a measure of X, Y and Z, and in the end we have to be able to look at a sample and agree that we all see “Y,” but there will always be enough remainder as to send us back to the drawing board—and, have we been thinking critically through the process? How would we measure that? And if we found a measure for our own critical thinking in the process of assessing others’ critical thinking could we then name the things that we were doing so as to think critically in such a way as to increase the likelihood we would do them again? Such a thing are, in fact, possible, because learning does take place, but only through a mapping of iterable linguistic moves that would be practiced and articulated mistakenly until a new idiom is created in conversation with the idiom we started with—and neither idiom would find arbitrary, bureaucratic abstractions like “critical thinking” of any use.) The most important measure I have taken in this regard is centering the concept of idiom as the condition of all discourse: the protection offered by “idiom” is that it ensures that we don’t forget that any measure is an idiom, a naming, a labeling, a designation that depends on those who can look at that thing and say “this is the same,” thereby iterating the fundamental gesture of language and that, by the same token (tokens are themselves idioms) so is every target. What you want to measure follows from what you want to do and what you want to do rests upon a series of other measures. You are yourself a measure of the scenes upon which you are located, and that scene is measuring you in various ways and if you were to try and turn yourself as measure into a target (which is hard to even imagine) you would be rearranging the entire field of measurements, thereby ensuring you will “miss.”

The problem, then, is to make “idiom” generative as a concept, so that it would do the kind of work we want done by, say, “cognition,” which allows for identifying features of thinking and knowing that can be in principle broken down into elements and thereby measured, assessed and tracked. We want to do this completely within language, rather than stepping out into the metalanguage of literacy, of which “cognition” is an excellent example. We can now also keep in mind that such questions are also questions for the training of AIs, which “idiom” must prove its superiority in and according to measures intelligible to those working within the idioms of the “cognitive sciences.” I also want “idiom” to serve as an counter to “viral” theories of language, traceable back to William Burroughs, which subverts consciousness, cognition and subjectivity by radicalizing the mimetic tendency of language so as to make discourse something one “catches,” like a cold, rather than something one uses and masters or, for that matter, enters and organizes. I want to counter viral theories because they clearly carry a lot of truth (maybe more than the cognitive sciences) but concede what I would not—the possibility of deferral, which makes it possible to supplant virality with anthropomorphics. The idiom is conversant with computation, as coding is itself a field of idioms, while remaining one step ahead of and one step behind computation. This is a good time to return to my revision of information theory, which involves measuring meaning in terms of the greater the unpredictability of any utterance or sample the greater the distance from the idiom issuing the sample and the greater the predictability of the sample the more one is within the idiom, with the ideal, maximum information generating utterance being utterly unintelligible to those not conversant in your idiom and transparent to those who are, with ever greater distinction in the constitution of the idiom. This provides a basis for computation while indicating computation’s limits.

An idiom implies organization around a center such that there are ever new things to point to at the center and that pointing at those things increases interest in the center. This is what makes it unintelligible to anyone not part of that circle. But the more inexhaustible the idiom, the more translatable it must be, on the condition that it converts outer circles into conveyors or, let’s say, measures of the idiom. This transference of the idiom takes place through a series of exchanges—we can imagine a circle behind the first circle whom members of the first circle initiate into the idiom. Any idiom contains the possibility of all other idioms or stands as a measure of any possible idiom, but the deferral power of an idiom resides in the range of exchanges it implicitly refers or alludes to, So, the transference of the idiom across successive layers of exchange is actually constitutive of the original idiom, distinguished by the back and forth of the exchanges and the way they inform the original circle. We could measure, through hedges, contrasts, exemplifications, compression, etc., the degree to which any idiom of marked by anticipatory exchanges with other idioms. But this in turn sets off the more inclusive idiom from all the others, returning us to its original state. We are not dealing with stable factuality here—any idiom might be maximally inclusive or exclusive depending on the flows at the given moment of transfer translations across the idioms. The same idiom might be infinitely complex or extremely simple depending, to stick with our original metaphor, on whether the outer circles turn away or towards the inner circles (or vice versa). It is also in the nature of an idiom that it is never wholly present in some isolatable form—even those features I mentioned above can become so formulaic as to mark belonging to a impenetrable bureaucratic space. There must always be space for idiom generation within the idiom.

So, whatever measure we are to apply must be applicable with each and every sample issued. We are always reconstituting the originary scene, which depended on everyone’s gesture, but the above paragraph, emphasizing the uncapturability of language might seem to be of little help. But let’s consider, in the most minimal way possible, the issuance of signs on a scene, imagining a continuum from the most imminently dangerous to the most safely buffered scene (always keeping in mind that such designations can change in an instance—don’t try and turn “safely buffered scene” into a target!). So, a scene in which the structures of deferral have broken down and the most extreme mimetic violence becomes imminent—which is to say every attempt to decelerate only accelerates the turn toward violence so extreme that even the formation of smaller groups that suppress violence within themselves faces overwhelming resistance—might require one of the two following types of sign: one, a completely improvised sign that manages to measure the incoming waves of violence in all their various strengths and variations and mirror them back to their agents in such a way as to interfere with the step-by-step acceleration; or, two, the most exact and easily repeatable iteration of the most traditionally effective sign issued in the way most likely to be effective way. Either one might have the best chance of deferring violence depending on conditions that couldn’t be predicted: the completely improvised and reinvented sign assumes that we are thrown back into a new originary scene while the exact iteration assumes we are thrown back into the originary ritual, and at moments of crisis there is an oscillation between those two possibilities.

Meanwhile, the buffered scene likewise presents us with a polarity: a sufficiently buffered scene allows for a heightened playfulness and awareness of the hypothetical, contingent and improvised nature of all sign use and replaces scenic caution with an attitude of endless rehearsal of semiotic possibilities; at the same time, the buffered scene allows for the most thoughtless, tacit, inattentive gesture, like holding your ID up to the sensor the 1,000^th time you’ve entered a restricted area—more and more of social reality can slide into this thoughtlessness, which can open up to playfulness but might also be where playfulness itself ends once one runs out of variations, routines and audiences. So, if we want to name what we might be doing as sign users so as to encompass these continua we need to think in terms of a mistaken measure of all of them at once; mistaken because once a sign or sample has been issued it modifies the field the sample was meant to measure—there is an originary debt here insofar as the effect of what sample one issues depends upon someone else picking it up.

The implication is that the issuance of a sample must somehow be hypothetical and high-stakes, distinct and iterable, all at once. It’s in the present tense while reaching backward and forward. The “as if” (combining “like” with “or”) comes into play here: you issue an improvised sign as if it is the most strictly enforced ritualistic gesture possible; you issue the endlessly and exactly iterated gesture as if it has just been improvised; you play on the scene as if all the buffers might collapse at any time and all the rehearsal finds its use in the oscillation on the dangerous scene; and you enter the dangerous scene by distinguishing on the spot between everything that can still be taken for granted (maximizing the tacit) thereby rendering the scene potentially legible while singling out the swiftest path to verticality. If we want to identify the “human” it’s going to be in the navigation of these rapidly shifting shoals. It is this navigation that creates the idiom, which is characterized by its affordance of these oscillatory relations.

What you want to do, then, is make your idiom both more idiomatic and more transferable—you want to be able to speak with the person you are speaking with so that you are speaking only to them, on the very topic that drew you into that exchange, in such a way as to make that topic the center of a scene that places only the two of you on it, while at the same time in such a way that either you or your interlocutor might speak with anyone and everyone about that newly created “topic” so as to generate new idioms in each new exchange. This kind of stance requires a relationship to the resources of your idiom and surrounding idioms, and to the relationship between those idioms and their respective resources, which means it requires a stance of semiotic research. I would like to call this kind of research “clining,” drawing upon an essay on something I called “upclining” I wrote quite a few years ago in an effort to engage with processes of “grammaticization” in language, i.e., the tendency of expressions to transition from semantic to grammatical functions. The general idea I had at the time was retrieving grammaticized signs and re-semanticizing them, in what was a kind of (Walter) Benjaminian sense that the grammaticized term crystallized a kind of “memory” that might “flash up in a moment of danger.” But the notion of “cline,” or gradual, imperceptible shifts from one state to another, which is preserved in “incline” and “decline” (but not “upcline,” which is therefore necessarily a neologism—or, for that matter, other ways things might “cline”) fits the thinking in terms of ever more discernable and discrete thresholds I’m trying to encourage here, and “upcline” seems a way of “resisting” the more passive “incline” and catastrophic “decline.” And dedicating oneself to setting relatively immobilized “pieces” of language back into motion seems a good way of thinking about operating within an idiom. You will always be mistaken in doing so, precisely because you’ll be violating some convention or expectation, but you also can’t go wrong because you present a opportunity for an adjusted response on the part of others—it’s a more semiotic way of speaking about stopping and thinking before doing as itself a kind of doing. So, “idiomclining” instead of “critical thinking” or other bureaucratized categories designed for mass test taking. Idiomclining is the interface between the human and computation. It is a way of working with signs as both traceable back to the originary gesture and marked with every usage thereafter and also as renewed with each iteration. You deepen your idioms but welcoming and “naturalizing” others and if there is a kind of method here it is in the treatment of idioms you must transfer translate into your own, as there will always be conversions (adjectives and nouns and verbs into each other—and even, why not, prepositions) and compressions that create metascenes upon which the various idioms can cohabitate. In the end the anthropomorphic idiom is nothing but this process of conversion and compression, moving through and translating the other idioms so as to derive imperatives out of declaratives and ostensives out of imperatives so as to deliver up to the central intelligence more and more samples around which researchers can virtually gather and say that this is the same.