Infra-Humaning

I return to the question of what, exactly, is the originary hypothesis, and what kind of discursive (or idiomatic) possibilities it initiates. My longstanding position, while I was working within GA, was that GA (as the disciplinary form of the hypothesis) had to be a transdisciplinary, all-encompassing theory aimed at displacing contenders, on the model of Marxism, psychoanalysis and cybernetics—at any rate, what Foucault called, in “What is an Author,” an “inventor of transdiscursivity.” This position gained zero resonance with GA, of course, which is designed to be a mode of textual appraisal with some of Eric Gans’s (generally unwelcome) counter-resentful politics dropped in on occasion. My thinking about the originary hypothesis has become, if anything, more ambitious, but a transdisciplinary theory involves the kind of explicit metalanguage that should be avoided, as it almost inevitably degenerates into terminological disputes and factionalism. That’s why I’ve moved increasingly toward the more subtle and tacit cybernetics model, without necessarily reducing center study to cybernetics (if anything, I would want to effect the reverse)—it’s true that there have never been, outside of the Communist countries, departments or schools of Marxism or “dialectical materialism,” or of psychoanalysis, but there have certainly been schools of Marxist and psychoanalytic literary criticism, semiotics, cultural theory, etc., while cybernetics never even gets that explicit. It’s more of a rumbling underneath the surface, well suited to its own roots in para-academic conferences, ingenious amateurism, and military and intelligence research.

But the originary hypothesis is even more resistant and immune to discourses in the humanities and social sciences than cybernetics, and for reasons that make the confrontations with philosophy I periodically stage especially important. You really must clear out all foundational categories to take on the originary hypothesis—you have to make a kind of (negatively capable) leap of faith that sets aside “irritable questioning” (does it match this or that archaeological evidence; is it materialist or idealist, etc.) to see that there’s simply no other way to account for the simple fact that humans can point to something and affirm that it is the same thing. We start with a scene, an event, a threshold, and an iterable gesture. The composition of the scene raises all kinds of difficulties, as I’ve discussed in my recent The Contingency of the Hypothesis and in my engagement with the ongoing work of Eric Jacobus (tying the emergence of tools to the possibility of the kind of community-threatening violence we presuppose), but these difficulties all emerge from the basic question of how best to conceive of mimetic rivalry issuing in a crisis, and identifying the resources within the scene for derailing the crisis. As such, these questions in turn provide us with resources for entering the idiomatic field and treating all the idioms we enter as little elaborations under specific historical conditions, of what was done once and for all in such a way that it always needs to be redone on the originary scene.

I’ll say a little about the notion of “idiom,” as opposed to terms like “theory” or even “discourse,” but first a little on the word “treat,” which I’ve come to use increasingly often. I stumble upon words, looking for the best fit, identifying or just feeling what’s missing in a more conventional word or phrase, or one I’ve become used to. You treat something as something, i.e., the word “treat” is a way of specifying an attitude of inquiry, singling out an “aspect” of whatever you’re studying. But there’s also the most specific, laboratory meaning of “treat,” to add something to a sample to mark some feature you want to follow through the experimental transformations of the thing. Treating an idiom is the other of a theoretical metalanguage—for one thing, it’s done differently each time, and the treatment has to be extending to the terms of one’s own inquiry. An “idiom,” of course, is a singular use of language, meaningful in its particular and always changing uses—speaking in terms of idioms, speaking in idioms finally lets metaphysics go and completes the linguistic term by accepting and entering the flow of language without trying to fix it in some form you then try and convince or, if you can, force, others to accept. There is nothing in language but idioms, so the originary hypothesis is the idiomaticity of idioms. The originary event worked in that way and could only have worked in that way because of the specific convergence it diverted and rerouted and every subsequent scene and event (and we only have scenes and events and, in fact, now that I think about it, the undertow in originary thinking toward “scene” over “event”—I’m sure a word search in the GA corpus would confirm this—despite my own at least declared efforts to the contrary probably follows from the fact that “scene” contains “event” insofar as “making a scene” already involves acting within an event) also only works “that way.” (Did my own theoretical preferences prior to my learning of the originary hypothesis—and that, no doubt, opened me to it—incline me towards the reading I’m presenting here? Of course, but that just makes me lucky, in this regard at least. Then again, where might I have taken it otherwise?)

If we stay strictly within the terms of the originary hypothesis without rushing to make it acceptable to those working within existing social, economic, theological, etc., terms we find a powerful and fully satisfying telos already there. On the originary scene we see (or, perhaps, “hear of”) the creation of an idiom, one which everyone on the scene had to learn on the spot, and which we ourselves relearn in iterating the scene in the originary hypothesis. So, that’s it, that’s what humans are for—the learning of idioms which is simultaneously their creation. We can set aside all the tedious medievalizing of the “highest good,” “love of God,” or modern liberal mongering of the “common good,” etc. All of these worn out metalanguages are just attempts to reinvigorate long-dead institutions that would assert their power by arbitrating (and arbitraging) between different uses of these terms.  The learning of idioms is simply studying and creating all the ways we can show each other that we can indicate the same thing in unlimited ways. It takes us from the most micro gesture to the most densely implanted infrastructural scenic platform. But I am myself very concerned with power, authority, institutions, etc., am I not? I’m no anarchist, believing in the complete re-invention of all social relations at every moment. Well, we are kind of re-inventing our social relations at every moment, but in such a way as to show, first of all, one thing to others—and we need to leave quite a bit (at least provisionally) intact in order to do that. Pointing to the same thing means pointing to a center and the more precise and differentiated the central thing we point to is to be the more everything else must be held constant and so one redeems the idioms effecting that constancy in presenting to some community the sample. I don’t need to imagine a dictator or even necessarily a monarch stamping his boot on everyone so I can conduct my very interesting experiment; I just need to imagine the supervision of hierarchies of sensing and computing machinery that would allow for the vouching of the entire chain of custody of all the devices and material and information I depend on. If you think about what that entails, you will see it involves a far more comprehensive and integrated order than any “totalitarian” ever dreamed of, but also one far more “participatory” and “consensual” than any radical or liberal could bring himself to imagine. It’s paying our debt to the center so as to keep open a line of credit. It’s idioms all the way down—very closely worked over idioms, idioms tested in various crucibles, given certain degrees of “tolerance,” checked and rechecked, but idioms and not authorized metalanguages nevertheless. It is the metalanguages that introduce the leakage and create vacuums into which usurpatory disciplinary power rush in. All real scientists and thinkers need is to be able to say that for these purposes, we’re going to call this “A.” And those within the space anyone who can follow “this” will know well enough what we mean by “A.”

I’ve had recourse to the prefix “infra” on occasion, and I still like it—not only is it food for thought in the increasingly pervasive concept of “infrastructure,” but it’s a got a Duchampian lineage that points to what in musical terms (drawing upon the novelist Ronald Sukenick in a discussion of jazz, if I’m remembering correctly) is “notes between notes.” The reason we can never have a complete definition of the “human” is that we can always discover more notes between notes, more increments and degrees between previously identified “features” of the human. We are always “treating” the human in ways that elicit more of the “infra,” the in-between” of what has already been recorded and recounted. It is precisely this that is of interest in Artificial Intelligence, because the seemingly irresistible desire to insist upon some distinction between the human and the technological merely inspires someone to try and automate that distinctively human feature and in the process both give us a new treatment of that feature and create a new one, the human ability to simulate something human in technological form. The human is infrahumaning. Here there really is something like a “we” of the human, because if you examine anyone taking on a new idiom (forced upon us daily) you see them tacitly acknowledging its “automated” (iterable) character precisely so as to inscribe their own resentments within it. In doing so they create a new self-description, which is to say a new idiom of selving. The originary scene is never closed.

Do we need to review the tired old “relativism” debates and answer the question of how we can tell which idioms are “better” (according to whatever criteria, more life-enhancing, more civilization-friendly, more productive, less violent, etc.) without a master idiom telling us how to sort it out? Maybe we’ll never be done with that kind of thing as well, even if we can hope. The better idioms are the ones that have been entered into and treated so as to make explicit the idiomaticity of the idiom, which means more and more of the background enabling the idiom to direct its users to some thing at the center. The best idiom would intimate an entire trail or iterations taking us back to the originary scene and thereby make the originary scene present in the scenes we currently occupy. Of course there are all the “religious” and “philosophical” scenes generated along with the way—those are all idioms to be entered into and treated. Do you want to “believe”? In a proposition? Saying “I believe,” as David Olson has pointed out, just means affirming something you have already said. It means that what you said before is what you will still say now, perhaps under more adverse conditions. Isn’t that what one wants to get at with the notion of “belief”? Isn’t that the lesson of the Gospel (one which I almost never hear Christians talk about but, then again, I don’t hear a lot of Christians talking about the Gospels), in Jesus’s disciples “denying” him? That they wouldn’t say the same thing when the mimetic contagion of the crowd was directed at them that they could when comfortably protected by their master? Isn’t this among the most basic things we want to know about anyone, that they’ll say the same thing when it’s hard as when it’s easy? Don’t we all want to know that about ourselves? A good idiom is one that makes it more likely, both by giving you things to say that can continue to be the same across scenes, and by grounding your saying in the trail taking us back to first, very difficult, thing anyone ever “said.”

I’ve suggested before that center study (I won’t complain if anyone wants to continue calling what I’m doing “GA”) might best be seen as a kind of programming idiom to be made interoperable with other idioms. Less “meta” than “infra”—other idioms don’t need to be translated into a fully operationalized theoretical discourse; rather, the asymptomatically self-cancelling idioms designed within center study generate aligned idioms out of others. We can speak in any language, of wealth, justice, truth, beauty, holiness and facilitate hypothesis convergence upon an ostensive upon some scene. What, on this scene, or the infra-scene we can create out of it, would count as everyone saying the same thing so that everyone doesn’t do the same thing at the same time. I consider “everyone saying the same thing so that everyone doesn’t do the same thing at the same time” a pretty close to perfect translation of the results of the originary scene in a way that’s transferable to any other scene, but at the very least to activate the idiom we’d have to refer to what, exactly, everyone is saying and what they might be doing otherwise. And in determining this one would oneself be saying so as not to be doing, which is to say entering an extended version of that very scene, resisting its closure, even if it is long past. And so the idiom would melt into the new idiom created from this one, as what we might do increasingly modifies what we all say which in turn inflects our way of doing, only to re-emerge on other scenes as a residue of inquiry. Here we are operating on the level of the basic commonplaces of language, of proverbs and maxims, constitutive of more complex utterances (samples). And maybe the originary hypothesis, like its transdisciplinary forbears, would also “wither away” upon its general realization and acceptance, when we would all as a matter of course take ourselves to be working out the implications of the originary scene.