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
I appreciate your comments. I guess I was stuck on thinking how one knows that one is shaping the algorithms or sustaining the threshold, allowing us not to disturb the originary distribution. I certainly appreciate that good government must somehow reproduce its inheritance, a long reiteration of an original nomos. And that we must know we are sustaining the threshold when things take and work without descending into retributions. Stuck in the meta language of literacy, I guess I am too indebted to desires to "see" this now. Thinking about this in terms of indebtedness certainly helps - and you are right that we can't get too far ahead of ourselves in staging our bets, least of all when we are not talking within an established institutional or team framework.
Trent's comment about tribal chieftains reminded me of an old Scottish joke. The clan warriors are out on campaign and they are settling down for the night. The chief finds a rock to serve as a pillow. The clan stare at this in amazement: "A pillow!" and quickly lose faith in the toughness of their chief. Maybe that is a specifically Presbyterian joke, though who knows when you start with the creamy centre. Anyway, where so much of our religion has been run over by a democratic spirit, so that now we have descended to a self-appointed priesthood of victims and "allies", Adam is right to question Western traditions' capacity for rebuilding the centre. But here's another question I have from rereading this post. What does Bouvard mean when he says "Various sects might have answers... but what would make them compelling to the infrastructure? They'd all be better off with the idiom laboratory I'm working on.... 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". Is this a suggestion that religious communities would be generally better off, internally, members networking with members, within markets in singularized succession, church heads choosing their successors, reducing or translating their discourse to these idioms built out of the semantic primes? Are we to assume that religious scenes must go the way of the Enlightenment project and Big Scenic thinking, and for the same reasons given at the post's outset - the affordances of the new imperial infrastructure - or is this more simply a suggestion about how they could influence the infrastructure, the algorithms when feeling a need to broaden their focus beyond in-house scenes? Maybe new "religions" of resentment donation could be constructed but how could the old survive such a shift? Well, you do say it is time to dump the Axial age assumptions... If you set about to singularize events, to make debt markets out of them, to unpack the declarative black box, are you any longer a "sect" however much involved in the paradoxes of the sacred?
I like Trent's idea of showing politicians what one is advocating is the same as their concern, with just a supplemental idiom that can win the market. Anyway, I would love to one day see an example of how Trent and friends are forcing themselves to trade in ostensives and imperatives.
Yes, you could say I am immodestly offering a challenge to all hitherto existing faithsand ritual orders. Insistence of "belief" is just a way of policing declarative statements; what really matters for any faith is whether you will affirm something when collective violence converges on you as you will when you are with the majority. And preparation for that must involve a study in the gestures of deferral that are most likely to arouse unanimous hostility--which is to say, a historical analysis, one involving an engagement with the technological means of circulating and intensifying violence along with the technological means of taking the vendetta and scapegoating off the table and creating data exchanges with the center. You can read any of this off directly from the sacred texts and ritual traditions themselves (you never really could, for that matter)--there is always the question of the vocabulary and idioms you will use to figure out what's going on now.
On the one hand: "You are always modelling 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"
On the other: "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."
Now modelling a juridical decision is not quite the same as modelling some idealized nomos, so I'm not crying about some contradiction; yet I'm wondering how one imagines maintaining THE originary distribution without recourse to imagining any default order, now that we have (don't we?) a (mal)distribution shaped by a return to the vendetta, the corruption of the juridical by resentful assertions of victimary rights. You have of course often had recourse to the formula, "From each according to his means to each according to his needs", with the needs of the producer being forefront. So that could entail all kinds of productive betting on the future.
Yet, what I can't quite imagine is how one can push bets to the close to fifty-fifty situations you suggest; as we delve into modelling decisions, in any juridical renaissance, aren't we also going to be unavoidably motivated by a resentful sense that we need to get beyond the present-day return of the vendetta, the occupation of many offices of the (deep) state by those who claim a victimary right to be there? Can these "folks" be simply retired away over time in a cascade of close bets or succession rituals (or does it have to be en masse, a la Yarvin, or maybe the new Trump?) without us imagining at least something of a societal default in which, say, those more inclined to Western disciplinary traditions, often by dint of their ancestry and upbringing, or by force of "sociobiological" (reproductive) imperatives, will be again a good share of the producers whose needs we need to serve? However, your comments on descriptions/prescriptions remind me of Gans' Chronicle on the Dao of Language. So maybe you are opening up to non-Western traditions as a way of doing in the victimary, in the non-revolutionary spirit you so importantly develop.
It seems to me that your asking, won't there have to be a confrontation at some point? And doesn't that confrontation imply some description of the attributes of those on each side of the confrontation? And, then, doesn't such a description imply some default assumptions regarding the telos or principle of that order? As soon as we name what kind of order it is to be (as we must, at least in a tentative way, if people are to line up behind it), then don't we have a "default order" in mind? I will first of all say that I was not thinking in terms of non-Western traditions; I even have doubts as to how useful the Western ones are at this point. I suppose I will answer this way: names of the new order to be proposed, and some will take hold more than others, and these competing names will enter into the creation of idioms constructing the new order. Confrontations will take place around institutions, as you suggest--some event where the deep staters are forced into a do-or-die mode, for example. But, then, that event will call forth the needed name--those involved will be able to say, I am defending X, and that will give X a leg up in the naming competition.
In many ways the Dao is at first, like all religions, approaching the paradox of formal language. Religions that embody the sacred embody the paradox of human formal language.
I found the focus of this article to be when Adam says we are kind of 'cracking open' the "black box" of the declarative, kind of like a Cadbury cream egg, to reveal and bring renewed interest to the use that the ostensive-imperative are imbued with -- like the creamy center that lies behind the choclate exterior. The problems you talk about are more oriented to a practical field of actors who have specific histories to specific institutions, and are trying to imagine a hypothetical scenario where we can almost "predict" the coin flip that the ostensive-imperative exemplifies (the faith a speaker has that the hearer is oriented to the same object the speaker is -- the declarative element of language, that necessary chocolate exterior) before that "originary bet" even happens.
I wouldn't say that thinking in the way you propose is pointless, as we're all trying to gauge the usefulness that this new currency of thought (the new way of thinking, as Gans would say; or the tastefulness of the cream of a choclate egg, like the metaphor i used before) presents to modern capital and political markets; however, to try to predict these markets would be to already be leveraging your own succession against the other suitors who are also trying to vye for the coveted position that our current juridical roles promise. (Love and hate among voters, money, power, some form of currency over the center -- much like a chieftains tribal attire separates them from their own people.)
If we were to leverage these bets to 50-50 scenarios, and eventually in our favor, this would be like offering idioms as tokens on a formal linguistic scene -- talking to a politician, perhaps buying their attention -- and then suggesting how what you're offering is the same as what they're already doing, but introducing a new scene where your new idioms (your new reworking of juridical power) already presents value, and thus some coveted power or money to be gained.
So it's less like the eastern Dao, or the western occidentalcentrism that Gans will put forth, but rather the introduction of a new market, where maintaining linguistic presence now extends to formal linguistic power and actual inter-subjectivity -- rather than an insitutional rule-set of declaratives.
You kind of have to eat a Cadbury egg to know what the hubub is all about. The goal of operationalizing idioms as samples is to take the value we have seen in this new market of idioms, and present little eggs for the current actors in power that we have today.
Much of Adam's opus so far has been the rewiring of both capital and bureaucracy through this market of idioms. This article is kind of like the top of the hill, of him reflecting back on the way he has operationalized his own idioms as samples, and is presenting the general "market of Katzian idioms" that they all work as currency for.
Personally I find it very satisfying, and have been using GA this way since I first started reading it: teaching my friends explicitly or implicit certain principles about GA or certain ways of thinking that force us both to talk in ostensive-imperative terms. I remember vividly talking about what I was reading about with Baudrillard one day with a friend of mine, about simulacra and simulations; they found it really easy to pick up and work with. Never read Baudrillard themselves but they understand the Baudrillard "currency" and use it to their benefit. I've done the same with mysticism having some friends remark how sometimes I have conversations with people, who don't follow a specific religion, and will tell me it sounds like we're discussing Gnosticism or something strange like Thomism. It's a rather unique way of thinking, and I feel like GA is entering a renewed era. The next few years will be very interesting to watch.
I appreciate your comments. I guess I was stuck on thinking how one knows that one is shaping the algorithms or sustaining the threshold, allowing us not to disturb the originary distribution. I certainly appreciate that good government must somehow reproduce its inheritance, a long reiteration of an original nomos. And that we must know we are sustaining the threshold when things take and work without descending into retributions. Stuck in the meta language of literacy, I guess I am too indebted to desires to "see" this now. Thinking about this in terms of indebtedness certainly helps - and you are right that we can't get too far ahead of ourselves in staging our bets, least of all when we are not talking within an established institutional or team framework.
Trent's comment about tribal chieftains reminded me of an old Scottish joke. The clan warriors are out on campaign and they are settling down for the night. The chief finds a rock to serve as a pillow. The clan stare at this in amazement: "A pillow!" and quickly lose faith in the toughness of their chief. Maybe that is a specifically Presbyterian joke, though who knows when you start with the creamy centre. Anyway, where so much of our religion has been run over by a democratic spirit, so that now we have descended to a self-appointed priesthood of victims and "allies", Adam is right to question Western traditions' capacity for rebuilding the centre. But here's another question I have from rereading this post. What does Bouvard mean when he says "Various sects might have answers... but what would make them compelling to the infrastructure? They'd all be better off with the idiom laboratory I'm working on.... 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". Is this a suggestion that religious communities would be generally better off, internally, members networking with members, within markets in singularized succession, church heads choosing their successors, reducing or translating their discourse to these idioms built out of the semantic primes? Are we to assume that religious scenes must go the way of the Enlightenment project and Big Scenic thinking, and for the same reasons given at the post's outset - the affordances of the new imperial infrastructure - or is this more simply a suggestion about how they could influence the infrastructure, the algorithms when feeling a need to broaden their focus beyond in-house scenes? Maybe new "religions" of resentment donation could be constructed but how could the old survive such a shift? Well, you do say it is time to dump the Axial age assumptions... If you set about to singularize events, to make debt markets out of them, to unpack the declarative black box, are you any longer a "sect" however much involved in the paradoxes of the sacred?
I like Trent's idea of showing politicians what one is advocating is the same as their concern, with just a supplemental idiom that can win the market. Anyway, I would love to one day see an example of how Trent and friends are forcing themselves to trade in ostensives and imperatives.
Yes, you could say I am immodestly offering a challenge to all hitherto existing faithsand ritual orders. Insistence of "belief" is just a way of policing declarative statements; what really matters for any faith is whether you will affirm something when collective violence converges on you as you will when you are with the majority. And preparation for that must involve a study in the gestures of deferral that are most likely to arouse unanimous hostility--which is to say, a historical analysis, one involving an engagement with the technological means of circulating and intensifying violence along with the technological means of taking the vendetta and scapegoating off the table and creating data exchanges with the center. You can read any of this off directly from the sacred texts and ritual traditions themselves (you never really could, for that matter)--there is always the question of the vocabulary and idioms you will use to figure out what's going on now.
On the one hand: "You are always modelling 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"
On the other: "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."
Now modelling a juridical decision is not quite the same as modelling some idealized nomos, so I'm not crying about some contradiction; yet I'm wondering how one imagines maintaining THE originary distribution without recourse to imagining any default order, now that we have (don't we?) a (mal)distribution shaped by a return to the vendetta, the corruption of the juridical by resentful assertions of victimary rights. You have of course often had recourse to the formula, "From each according to his means to each according to his needs", with the needs of the producer being forefront. So that could entail all kinds of productive betting on the future.
Yet, what I can't quite imagine is how one can push bets to the close to fifty-fifty situations you suggest; as we delve into modelling decisions, in any juridical renaissance, aren't we also going to be unavoidably motivated by a resentful sense that we need to get beyond the present-day return of the vendetta, the occupation of many offices of the (deep) state by those who claim a victimary right to be there? Can these "folks" be simply retired away over time in a cascade of close bets or succession rituals (or does it have to be en masse, a la Yarvin, or maybe the new Trump?) without us imagining at least something of a societal default in which, say, those more inclined to Western disciplinary traditions, often by dint of their ancestry and upbringing, or by force of "sociobiological" (reproductive) imperatives, will be again a good share of the producers whose needs we need to serve? However, your comments on descriptions/prescriptions remind me of Gans' Chronicle on the Dao of Language. So maybe you are opening up to non-Western traditions as a way of doing in the victimary, in the non-revolutionary spirit you so importantly develop.
It seems to me that your asking, won't there have to be a confrontation at some point? And doesn't that confrontation imply some description of the attributes of those on each side of the confrontation? And, then, doesn't such a description imply some default assumptions regarding the telos or principle of that order? As soon as we name what kind of order it is to be (as we must, at least in a tentative way, if people are to line up behind it), then don't we have a "default order" in mind? I will first of all say that I was not thinking in terms of non-Western traditions; I even have doubts as to how useful the Western ones are at this point. I suppose I will answer this way: names of the new order to be proposed, and some will take hold more than others, and these competing names will enter into the creation of idioms constructing the new order. Confrontations will take place around institutions, as you suggest--some event where the deep staters are forced into a do-or-die mode, for example. But, then, that event will call forth the needed name--those involved will be able to say, I am defending X, and that will give X a leg up in the naming competition.
In many ways the Dao is at first, like all religions, approaching the paradox of formal language. Religions that embody the sacred embody the paradox of human formal language.
I found the focus of this article to be when Adam says we are kind of 'cracking open' the "black box" of the declarative, kind of like a Cadbury cream egg, to reveal and bring renewed interest to the use that the ostensive-imperative are imbued with -- like the creamy center that lies behind the choclate exterior. The problems you talk about are more oriented to a practical field of actors who have specific histories to specific institutions, and are trying to imagine a hypothetical scenario where we can almost "predict" the coin flip that the ostensive-imperative exemplifies (the faith a speaker has that the hearer is oriented to the same object the speaker is -- the declarative element of language, that necessary chocolate exterior) before that "originary bet" even happens.
I wouldn't say that thinking in the way you propose is pointless, as we're all trying to gauge the usefulness that this new currency of thought (the new way of thinking, as Gans would say; or the tastefulness of the cream of a choclate egg, like the metaphor i used before) presents to modern capital and political markets; however, to try to predict these markets would be to already be leveraging your own succession against the other suitors who are also trying to vye for the coveted position that our current juridical roles promise. (Love and hate among voters, money, power, some form of currency over the center -- much like a chieftains tribal attire separates them from their own people.)
If we were to leverage these bets to 50-50 scenarios, and eventually in our favor, this would be like offering idioms as tokens on a formal linguistic scene -- talking to a politician, perhaps buying their attention -- and then suggesting how what you're offering is the same as what they're already doing, but introducing a new scene where your new idioms (your new reworking of juridical power) already presents value, and thus some coveted power or money to be gained.
So it's less like the eastern Dao, or the western occidentalcentrism that Gans will put forth, but rather the introduction of a new market, where maintaining linguistic presence now extends to formal linguistic power and actual inter-subjectivity -- rather than an insitutional rule-set of declaratives.
You kind of have to eat a Cadbury egg to know what the hubub is all about. The goal of operationalizing idioms as samples is to take the value we have seen in this new market of idioms, and present little eggs for the current actors in power that we have today.
Much of Adam's opus so far has been the rewiring of both capital and bureaucracy through this market of idioms. This article is kind of like the top of the hill, of him reflecting back on the way he has operationalized his own idioms as samples, and is presenting the general "market of Katzian idioms" that they all work as currency for.
Personally I find it very satisfying, and have been using GA this way since I first started reading it: teaching my friends explicitly or implicit certain principles about GA or certain ways of thinking that force us both to talk in ostensive-imperative terms. I remember vividly talking about what I was reading about with Baudrillard one day with a friend of mine, about simulacra and simulations; they found it really easy to pick up and work with. Never read Baudrillard themselves but they understand the Baudrillard "currency" and use it to their benefit. I've done the same with mysticism having some friends remark how sometimes I have conversations with people, who don't follow a specific religion, and will tell me it sounds like we're discussing Gnosticism or something strange like Thomism. It's a rather unique way of thinking, and I feel like GA is entering a renewed era. The next few years will be very interesting to watch.