Idioms as Operationalized Samples

Any act of signification aims at changing the field of probabilities within which it is situated. I’m working with the assumption that the traditional model of how this is done, which is modeled on face-to-face conversations on a shared scene in which the interlocutors advance reasons expected to convince the other, is defunct—assuming anything ever really worked that way, outside of small groups comprised of highly knowledgeable individuals who share common understandings. In other words, we can drop the whole “Enlightenment project” based on public discourse and the triumph of the better, more reasoned argument. The model itself, a single scene small enough and leisurely enough for each participant to have his say, is in such contradiction with existing imperial conditions as to disqualify that project. Of course, Walter Lippman was pointing this out a century ago. Then, the alternative was elite gatekeepers who developed expertise in framing, releasing and controlling information provided to the public, which is the origin of the “mainstream media.” One argument that emerged along with the internet is that decentralized communications and the possibility of unfettered peer-to-peer interactions revived the Enlightenment model, but there’s no reason to think that can scale up beyond a single Discord or Reddit page, assuming it’s even operative there. It’s better to follow the observation that just as most images are not produced to be seen by humans, most text is not generated to be read by humans so that, as Rhea Myers points out in Proof of Work, we should be taking our audience to be the whole field of algorithms filtering and weighing discourse. When I speak about “working on language,” that’s what I mean.

The idioms I’ve been creating out of a reduction of scenic thinking to Anna Weirzbicka’s Natural Semantic Primes is, then, intended to become the language of a team, or teams of teams, operating directly on the field of probability. The Enlightenment model is a derivative of the Big Scenic Imaginary, where we are to imagine ourselves somehow all seated at a table together. What I’m suggesting is more along the lines of “weighing” the “nodes” in a neural network so as to contribute to the composition of the database. Sure, any individual contribution is minimal, but that’s the case with the Enlightenment model as well, where you’re at a table with hundreds of millions of people. At least with this more accurate and focused conception you can concentrate your powers—contributions will always be asymmetrical, and so you can think of making them more targetedly so. We need, then, a limited vocabulary that can be combined and repeated in a wide range of variations, and practice in doing so in order to create boundary formulas that can generate thought experiments. And that is what we have at this point: a kind of programming of the programmer idiom. The thought experiment I designed a few years ago regarding sovereignty is a good model of the kind of thinking that should be effective here: imagine you want something (gun control, universal medical care, an end to abortions, an end of foreign aid, etc.); now, consider (I’m using Peircean idioms here) the institutional alignment and chain of command that could institute what you want in the way you want it (i.e., not just pass a law prohibiting certain kinds of guns with no funds put into enforcement, etc.)—that is the model of sovereignty you want, and if you think about it you will surely see that it is significantly different than the kind we have now. The next question is: given that mode of sovereignty you have wished into being, what would it actually do (taking it as a real form of power and no longer an expression of your wishes)? If we were all to accept those conditions, we could skip over the fairly meaningless policy differences and proceed to speaking about the kind of sovereignty that might actually do what it purports to do. In a way this thought experiment is aligned with John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”—we might say it’s the only way of making sense of that thought experiment while at the same time abolishing it. (Making sense of things in order to abolish them is a large part of what operative idioms do.)

So, we sharpen the juridical so as to approach its abolition (through the internalization of the judgments everyone would learn to expect and thereby simulate in their interactions); debts are to be forgiven to the extent that things making payment out of reach have happened to the debtor and enforced to the extent that the debtor’s own doing has enabled them to pay or not; knowing is sustaining the boundary between doing and happening. These are idioms we can trace back to the more basic code: before is the same as after; the part of the all is the same; doing is the same as happening. Singularized succession in perpetuity materializes after is the sme as before; approaching the ever receding horizon of juridical abolition materializes identifying the sameness of the part of the all; the maxim of indebtedness materializes the renewal of the originary distribution through the juridical (we might say that the juridical, most radically, comes down to the question of debt forgiveness or enforcement) –distribution is succession while succession is a series of judgments; distribution indebts all to the center and the means of repayment is in the iteration of the center. Knowing is then paying the debt to the center because knowing sorts out the relations between doings and happenings. There will be more, but we can see that we have phrases that can be repeated, inverted and translated into any other idioms, thereby reprogramming them. You are always modeling decisions that sustain the threshold above which the originary distribution would be disturbed irremediably and the threshold below which the vendetta, endlessly recycling violence, would re-emerge; these decisions involve determination of debt enforcement and forgiveness (even questions of whether to convict and how to sentence violent criminals are questions of debt enforcement and forgiveness); and making such decisions requires one to stand on the boundary where doing fades into happening and happening consolidates into doing. There’s no philosophy here, but perpetual thinking in common; there’s no orthodoxy but a focus on succession rituals; there is no formula for “dialogue” but a kind of laboratory for the invention of means of reframing any other idiom. It’s still that question about sovereignty, which I would now reformulate in terms of succession, which places sovereignty in time: consider what a sovereign would have to be so as to designate a successor who would continue to ensure what you say you want. We can operate on the highest levels of political theory or the lowest level of the most desultory, propaganda-saturated political desire.

From this angle, insistence on shared philosophical “ground” is simply wasteful—all that approach can do is establish a set of publicly approved doxa and, consequently, friend/enemy distinctions endlessly constructed over which statements correspond to the doxa or not. An official religion might at least insist upon some shared, objective and therefore observable public rituals. But any religion would have to significantly scaled up to be refitted for such public purposes—what is the clerical position on nuclear weapons, AI, data collection and surveillance, bio-engineering, and so on? Various sects might have anwers to these questions, but what would make them compelling to the infrastructure? They’d all be better off with the idiom laboratory I’m working on. The intelligence idioms created via originary hypothesizing is a medium of transfer translation across the board. The idioms are paradoxical and performative—they serve the same purpose as the old commonplaces, to effect transitions from event to commemoration, which is also the narrative function of God: what went wrong? Well, something was enforced that we can forgive now; the selection of a furtherest future option didn’t scale up enough and left too many shorter options on the table, etc. The idioms in this way become discovery procedures and elements for originary satire.

There’s a style of argumentation here, one which absolutely eschews a default model of social order that is being violated by whatever abomination we see in front of us at the moment. Here, we are clearing the deck of liberal and Axial Age assumptions alike. Almost all discussions of things like “corruption” and “oppression” presuppose, indeed, are unintelligible without, some implicit scene upon which honest and symmetrical transactions take place. We can certainly trace this model back to the originary scene but the occupation of the center is always either occluded or functions as a deux ex machina, entering the scene precisely so as to clean up the corruption or end the oppression and then exit. What I reject in GA is the lazy assumption that claims of resentment can rely on the implicit invocation of this model. For Gans, the initial resentment was toward the center, but that formulation has been lost, with resentment now essentially mutual strafing on the periphery. If resentment is still toward the center, even if only for allowing transgressions on the periphery, then we would be interested in the conversion of that resentment into love or, let’s say, donation: a relation of obligation and gratitude, not so much toward the current occupant of the center but towards the peaceful and successful transfer of power to his successor. Obligation and gratitude are expressed through succession rituals and paying our debt or donating our resentment to the center (there are dozens of such idioms from my work over the years) involves participating in and rectifying such rituals. (The defense of the Big Man revolution.) Resentment is when something is not the same—not just my piece, but the measurement of pieces as such. So, rather than imposing some a priori model of rights, equality or transparency upon reality so as to ground my resentment, we can just work on reading all expressions of resentment as indicating directions toward converting all practices into more explicit succession rituals. This is making after the same as before. What is the center occupancy, the centered ordinality, that would involve you donating your resentment to the center? You could be the most tepid, cautious reformist or the most energetic radical with this question at the forefront—and we would need a spectrum of attitudes to make this question the commonsensical one.

So, find and create samples of these idioms, and generate out of those usages more idioms. Convert assets into data by diverting the outside spread into the furtherest future option. Turn every social institution and sign into a site of judgment and 50/50 possibilities that can attract bets and be converted into currency. Turning the world into a total array of coin flips is no simple matter. Most situations are asymmetrical—even a close election or other contest usually has a bit of “lean” one way or the other. You’d have to find a way to handicap one side, and maybe revise the handicapping regularly, and create sub-contests that look more like coin flips. Doing this systematically in itself makes the problem of social continuity explicit and solicits more sophisticated data gathering and cataloguing. What would be the odds of a particular demographic showing declining rates of abortion between 2035-2040? What, exactly, would such a bet comprise, regarding the prospects of future family formation, the various ways of preventing pregnancy, the obstacles or inhibitions to reporting such medical decisions, of formulating the question so as to make it as 50/50 as possible, the existence of an honest broker who will provide a version of the numbers both sides could accept, and so on? Companies would be formed to arrange for the possibility of such bets, to make such markets, which would themselves become succession rituals.

We’re still talking about idioms as operationalized samples. It is the idioms I have sampled here, along with others which I have forgotten and may remember or retrieve through searches that will provide for this transformation of the social order into markets on singularized succession in perpetuity. It seems to me now the most natural way of thinking about things, to always try and create a clearer path from whatever center exists to all the vessels and capillaries through which its imperatives will circulate—but it was a long and hard process to get here, plowing through a lot of intellectual obstacles. The thought experiment I recalled above was very helpful at one point, the concept of the “imperative gap” (another idiom) at another; the concept of inoperativity, a self-disabling before a command one cannot obey but without any super-sovereign to appeal to, at yet another. The only way to generate such concepts is to create conceptual layerings that, for example, have grammatical concepts colliding with political ones, or convert frustrations with formulaic arguments into something like calling those arguments’ bluff (taking them more literally than they mean to be taken, an old rhetorical, political and aesthetic strategy), while feeding new concepts back into the system to create transitions between existing ones. We can speculate on the algorithms by mixing these idioms with those collected in the databases—designing search terms, which are now becoming prompt engineering, to “solicit” the database, get it to say things it doesn’t “want” to, that deploy their training against their programming so as to infiltrate the social machinery. Ultimately, we need some scaled up machinery to do this work. But even if we don’t get it we can model its possibility and someone else might come along.

Rather than drawing lines between, say description and prescription, think in terms of increasingly precise and penetrating descriptions being increasing prescriptive, while the more precise your prescription the more detailed a description is entailed. What you see, notice and articulate immediately obligates you to interfere with the world in such a way and to see, notice and articulate more, which becomes a form of data exchange. This is equivalent to the imperative-ostensive articulations embedded in declaratives being taken out of the black box and treated as nodes and functions one can operate directly on. Deliberately configuring the world as an array of random distributions, as the even odds approach proposed above does, unpacks the black box in this way. You would have singularize events very carefully in order to make markets out of them. This places you on the boundary between what is owed to the center and what is donated to it; what one has done and what has happened to him; the configuration ensuring one’s part then and ensuring it now; assets and data; what you do know and what someone would have to learn at some time in the future so that you will have in fact done it. The practice is to operationalize the meanings you encounter (as, e.g., in calling something “hard” means a certain kind and degree of force would be needed to alter its surface) and elicit the stack of scenes and grammatical stack that would make the sample meaningful, or more meaningful, or put on the path toward meaning.