Imperatives for Idiom Creation
My writing is heading toward total, wall-to-wall idiom. Think of language as tiles and every space as walls. Perhaps this can be seen and shown in my recent posts, especially the ones not explicitly about idioms. The point here is create a language that will remain so ergodically sealed as to be generative without limits. That last sentence is one “material witness” regarding how to proceed. Normally, one would assume that “ergodically sealed” and “generative without limits” are opposites—they either exclude each other, or they must be “balanced,” or they oscillate with each other (the more sophisticated approach). So, here’s a rule: place opposites in causal relations with each other; figure out how they lead into and convert each other. Do that before you have the “ideas” all worked out—only by creating the new relationship will you work out the ideas. “Ergodism” is itself a framing, not an observable “fact”; the same, for that matter, goes for the opposing claim regarding the infinite possible linguistic combinations enabled by grammatical rules. Insisting on ergodism leads you to see and accelerate the recycling and recirculation of phrases, including in your own writing, once you’ve accumulated enough to start cutting out fat. It will also alert you to forms of repetition that are tied into chains of “as I’ve said” and being thus alerted institutes a distance between the “I’s” saying these things and hence a kind of deliberate selving.
Do battle with the metalanguage of literacy so as to cut new pathways through the disciplines. It’s possible to cut down drastically on the words and phrases that place you on a scene of writing pretending to be a scene of speech—the “suggests,” “indicates,” “understands,” “assumes,” “mights,” “should,” formulaic oppositions like “on the one hand… on the other hand,” “even though…” and so on. Look for them—you’ll see them popping up all over the places. If you eschew them, you are compelled to initiate a series of staggered scenes in place of the one upon which we are all presumably conversing deferentially. But here’s a more idiomized rewrite of the previous sentence: eschewing the metalanguage of literacy locks you in to initiating a staggered, less deferential and bloated, scene. “If” is a prime and therefore not really part of the metalanguage of literacy, but the “if… then” sequence implies a distance from which one notes causalities rather than directly acknowledging oneself to be the cause, right here and now. And then you might want to cut a little deeper into the description of the scene you’re eschewing. Yes, there is a “might” in the previous sentence—the battle against the metalanguage of literacy (MOL?) is endless and to some extent futile, but it is also a kind of victory when you are constrained to let the MOL in and isolate the precise necessity of its use. And, there is a kind of dialectical movement here in those occasional sentences that saturate the field with MOL, verging on parody, in such a way as to adumbrate the extended infrastructures and stacked scenes through which one’s idiom must travel.
Eliminate all optativity: all the “hopes” and “wishes.” Perhaps I’ve done it myself (but I hope not!) but “hoping” in writing is disgraceful. It means you’re abandoning your inquiry right when it might get interesting. There are things out there in the world that make your hopes more or less likely to come true; insofar as it is either likely or unlikely your hopes are cancelled because if it’s unlikely you owe your reader an account and weighting of the unlikelies and the provisioning thereby called for; if it’s more likely, why aren’t you transitioning into planning rather than hoping? In the space between wanting and happening there is prayer, and “hoping” is a pathetically weak substitute for prayer. Why not compose a prayer rather than hope? Prayer is a model for the generation of idioms, which are designed to give voice to God, who fills exactly that space between wanting and happening. But, pray to whom—especially if we’re composing prayers, rather than relying on traditional ones? To the center as origin of idioms, whom you ask to help you find shorter cuts between wanting and happening, thinking and doing, seeing, hearing and knowing. If what you want to happen were in fact to happen it would anyway be different than what you wanted so why not compose a prayer qua idiom that designs your wants so as to better fit a range of happenings of various degrees of likelihood? This is not strategizing—it is pre-strategizing and infra-strategizing aimed at making yourself the kind of person who could contribute with increasing effectiveness to a discipline organized around strategizing.
The previous paragraph serves as a reminder that the Natural Semantic Primes can never be far from our minds when designing idioms. For originary hypothesizing, or center study, they simply replace philosophy, providing the originary meaning of the words out of which all other meanings can be produced. We can use the boundaries between the words as sources of idioms—when do we “think” and when do we “know,” when is someone “doing” something and when is something “happening,” how does “feeling” accompany “moving,” when have two things shifted from being “like” each other to being the “same,” etc.? We could construct numerous sequences, say, from “see” to “want,” to “think,” to “say,” to “do” and to “have.” Overlaid on such boundaries and sequences are the entire vocabulary of any language, and you have an extremely effective way of cutting through MOL and then reconstructing it satirically or with a specific direction of inquiry. This work is equivalent to stacking and then decomposing and then restacking scenes. It’s a collection of very powerful lenses, telescopes, microscopes, funhouse mirrors, to bring to bear on any sample of language. The primes measure boundaries and thresholds, the source of all thinking—and, let’s think about thinking as follows: you say “I think” when you don’t know, which means that thinking is the interval between hearing or seeing and knowing and this is an interval that can be prolonged indefinitely. The interval, as, perhaps, part of a seeing/hearing>wanting>thinking>saying> knowing and/or doing sequence, also means holding the wanting in abeyance in the meantime, while fending off the demand to know and do—or, for that matter, be overwhelmed with seeing and hearing. A discipline or scene of thinking, completely independent of philosophy, emerges here. Weirzbicka’s primes are both universal and the proof of the relativity of any particular language, which syncs perfectly with the program of idiomization, which insists on the irreducibility of any idiom along with the universality of idiomization as such and conversability of all idioms with each other.
Michel Foucault, in his “What is an Author,” spends quite a bit of time, oddly for an essay aimed at dispersing the author-function across institutional sites, on what he calls the “initiators of discursive practices,” or what we could call the founders of disciplines. He mentions Marx and Freud, who would have loomed large in 1960s France, but we could since say that the subverters of authoriality like Foucault himself and Derrida came, at least for a while, and perhaps still more than may appear, to figure in such roles. The seeming irony of indispensable authorial reference points demolishing the notion of such reference points is worth noting but less important than following Foucault’s still preliminary remarks of how such modes of “transdiscursivity” work. If you have a theory, and you think it’s true and important, transdiscursivity is what you want, isn’t it? If not, your theory is infected by a paradox of a particularly disabling kind, asserting, in effect, that its truth means not all that much attention needs to be paid it. Foucault focuses only on the human sciences, pointing out that, while exploring the laws of physics requires no reference to Newton or Einstein, there is not “historical materialism” without (the text of) Marx or psychoanalysis without (the text of) Freud. In these cases, we have bodies of text that must serve as the ultimate point of reference for any move within the discipline to be legitimate. All arguments within the discipline involve a return to the origin, a leveraging of one text of the founder against another, distinguishing between the more authoritative, governing statements, and those that reflect the pre-Marxian Marx or the. pre-Freudian Freud. This is because these disciplines claim to make an epistemological break with some pseudo-scientific discourse on economics, history, sociality, psychology, consciousness, etc. Thomas Kuhn made his argument regarding scientific revolution with specific reference to 20th century physics, but it is the human sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries that applied the notion of a paradigm shift most insistently to themselves. The paradigm shift, when applied to the human sciences, which is to say, the sciences used to govern humans, necessarily takes on a cult-like character: you are either inside or outside the discipline, either framing all events in terms of the hierarchy of concepts constantly being reordered through theory and practice returning to the origin so as to leap forward or you remain within the cultural commonplaces, themselves simply the residue of various pre-sciences. Needless to say, the originary hypothesis makes such an assertion, with potential consequences that go way beyond even those of Marx, Freud, or Foucault’s transdiscursivities and so it’s understandable, if still tedious, if adherents recoil from the daunting task of planting the flag of the founding of the idiom.
Still, the idioms infiltrate rather than replace. I could perhaps recall the moment when idioms like “everybody is saying the same thing so as not to do the same thing at the same time” or “donate your resentment to center,” or “whatever you would have the sovereign do such that you would acknowledge he has done it would require a sovereign with no need to do what you want,” but showing them to be a result of work and thinking process would ultimately be hypothetical, even for me. Everything is hypothetical, for that matter. But the hypothesizing would focus on the practice of taking on board as much of a set of disagreements as possible, to find the point at which the disagreement becomes unreal and can be dispensed with (which means some sense of the pointlessness of the dispute, of the sheer tedium of taking up one or another assigned position within it, might be an origin of such processes) and then a new field of possible disagreements in relation to an operative center established. This is really an iteration or the originary event and a kind of provisional ritualization or affirmation of the originary distribution. So, the descent into dogmatism (and, in the case of Marxism, violence) that seems so inevitable with at least those disciplines founded at odds with prevailing concepts can be avoided, or perpetually deferred—it is always from within a position at some distance from and orientation towards the center that such conversions and transdiscursivities are established. The “soliciting” of the originary distribution, which always takes on a juridical form and invokes the thinking and knowing of the disciplines, is part of everyday practice—the disciplinary claim center studies makes is that you can ignore that distribution by finding some rule to follow sufficiently plausibly to remove any guilt from yourself or you can initiate some kind of sequence aimed at affirming the it. This would remain the case even if the program of papering the entire stack of scenes wall-to-wall with idioms were to be installed.
Chaim Perelman, in his The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, makes a very interesting argument in favor of “epidictic” rhetoric as the privileged mode, not only of rhetoric (as against, say, legal rhetoric), but of discourse more generally (over, say, dialectic, or conversations aimed at uncovering the truth). Epidictic rhetoric is hortatory, aimed at praise and encouragement, as at a ceremony honoring some present or legendary figure, or in a funeral oration. Epidictic rhetoric is where the community’s basic assumptions (or idioms) are affirmed in a way presupposing unanimity, which means the speaker must properly identify and frame those assumptions while also being recognized as the kind of person suited to affirm them in that instance. Perelman sees epidictic rhetoric as the most immediate counter to the potential violence in any community, so that we can readily associate it with the ostensive and with ritual, and as the basis for any educational system worthy of the name. Of particular interest is that he locates epidictic rhetoric in the interval between decision and action—it is one thing to agree that we will organize ourselves to defend the homeland against the invader, but quite another to do the organizing and infuse the needed members of the community with the needed skill and will. Into that interval steps epidictic rhetoric, which persistently reminds everyone not just that the decision was made, but why it was made, and who the community committed itself to be in making it. The community has committed itself to being who it always has been, since its founding, even given the inevitable lapses. Indispensable to such a rhetoric is praise of those who have embodied the distributive idioms, and it is this lavish, detailed praise, which need not exclude remembrance of failings but must make those failings the failings of all which we can now redeem, that is a mode of speech but also of thinking and even knowledge. The idioms, we can say, are always to be designed as praise for the center in the form we are contributing to that center right now as we speak of it. Resentments, themselves a resource of idiom creation, come into that process of creation by speaking of the promise the resenter must claim has been broken so as to make the promise one that is in fact reaffirmed and fulfilled as we talk about it, even in the subject of resentment’s own words. It’s not a question of praising the resenter but, rather, bringing the resenter within the circle of praise. This approach transcends the distinction, which in a juridical order must be made, between legitimate and illegitimate resentments—even the illegitimate resentment triggers the system into an epidictic mode. The center is always praised, and here, in the epidictic, we have the basics of rituals of succession, and all idioms are praise for the rituals of succession transmitted imperatively to us; or, rather, a search for the kind of praise (in NSP terms, “say: ‘this is good’”) that even the most determined resenters would have to join in, even if begrudgingly. Subdue resentment peacefully with praise that applies as far back and as widely in the present as possible, completely devoid of malice, even towards those antagonistic to the object of praise. Forget no injuries or crimes against the nomos, but remember them solely in the praise of those suffering, resisting or testifying to them. There you will find idioms worthy of entering the database.