Inscripto-punctualism

The concept of data is extremely generative. Any time you focus on something with a question that brings some things into view and suspends attention to others, you generate data. When you generate data, you generate more data, for others, regarding your means of generating data. When we construct machinery, devices, or new modes of social organization to detect, record and sort data, we generate all kinds of incidental data that will be interesting in ways we can’t anticipate. Johanna Drucker rightly points out that a better word for “data” would be “capta,” which is to say, we’re “taking” rather than being “given,” the information we want from our surroundings. But data is a gift as well—we open ourselves up to it without knowing what we’re going to be “taking” from it. The origin of data is in inscription, that is, materialized commemoration. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “data” was first used in the sense of a “fact given or granted,” during, unsurprisingly, the 1640s, at the very beginnings of British empiricism and the organization of scientific activity; while not being used in its contemporary sense of "transmittable and storable information by which computer operations are performed" until 1946. I’m still fairly comfortable backdating “data,” because data derives from the ostensive, from members of a group being able to point to something and say it’s the “same.” There cannot be a human order that doesn’t need to place things at the center and say what it is in such a way that can be iterated. Our current data driven order is a direct descendant of the priest ensuring the ritual has been carried out precisely according to specifications, as well as the seers and prophets that studied the consequences of laxity and transgression in carrying out those rituals. In every case, some ascertainable relation between what is done, seen and said is enforced, and some path from ostensive, to imperative, to interrogative, to declarative and back to ostensive established. There’s nothing more important, ethically, morally and politically, than participating in these efforts, precisely because “spillage” from these orders is becoming increasingly obvious and consequential. It’s getting harder to fake, lie and conceal, and if you tell me, with very good reason, that there seems to more, and especially egregious examples of all these activities than ever, I would simply respond with “yes, and how do you know that, and how much of that despicable activity results from the difficulty of covering up previous instances of it?” You can try and re-install honor, virtue, sacrifice and other values effaced by modernity back at the center, but since modernity has enabled us to see how easily all of that can be simulated and fabricated, we would still be insisting on and learning to assess (including the use of algorithms to do so) the data emitted by actions meant to display those qualities. The optimal human-machine relation is that increasingly well-trained humans program machines to collect and automatically analyze data so as to present it back to those humans as reciprocal, anthropomorphic data collectors and interpreters of each other’s latest efforts at machine-aided design. Each element in this process can be continually improved upon without making any of them less indispensable.

Implicit in this devotion to putting order into the proliferating world of ostensives is a kind of fanaticism regarding questions of provenance and chain of custody. Who saw what, mediated by what devices and from what platform, transmitted to whom, through which media, stored where, in accord with which security protocols, etc. You’re imagining an entire social order in which a single weak link might contaminate all the information headed your way; or, more precisely, generate lots of new information regarding breakdowns in protocols, chains of command, and training practices, but information which interferes with the data you need right now and which might only be “handlable” by some special prosecutor or historian down the road. But this means, in judging this information, you need to internalize the practices of the special prosecutor, future historian, and others, in the best way you can estimate on the spot, which might mean nothing more than keeping careful records and leaving traces others might follow up on. In this way, the “horizontal” distribution of data, carried out with the degree of scrutiny needed to ensure one is actually handling it as it “demands,” directly takes on a “vertical” dimension, as the data can only take on its meaning against the background of who’s in charge and whether those in charge are really in charge. To the extent that those in charge are not in charge, data becomes kaleidoscopic—lots of patterns, and possible patterns, but without taking on any definite, “actionable” shape. At a certain point all on could do is “testify” to and “enact” the uselessness of the vast stores of data available, like a kind of performance artist—that would be the most reliable information one could provide.

So, handling data in the most careful, thoughtful, thorough manner possible, even if it’s just a matter of reporting someone else’s speech, is intrinsically bound up with social ordering, or centered ordinality To whom you release or with whom you entrust that data, in what form, how much of it is held back, how it is framed, how much one’s sources and methods are revealed, and so on, become increasingly relevant questions the higher up the data chains you go and the more you need to be the kind of person to whom people reveal and entrust data, or some specialized packaging of it. The fear that with greater inscription, or technologization, the significance of humans recedes is ridiculous because as the data-recording, preserving and analyzing becomes central to our civilization the more obvious it is that humans will always be, overwhelmingly, the primary source of data, because all other data has to flow through us and because it flowing though us adds, exponentially, to the “quantity” of data itself. What is really terrifying is that, if properly ordered, the datafied world would make it impossible to bullshit, lie, slack off, make excuses, throw others under the bus and all the other last resorts we humans have when we fail to live up to our responsibilities. And maybe even more frightening is that we’d also have to show new levels of tolerance, patience, compassion and understanding because we’d all see who really needs them. And this in turn exacerbates the verticalization inherent in enhanced inscription: the very slight degrees of difference in insight, expertise, even intuition between individuals in positions of responsibility could have enormous ramifications—which means this is also the case for those charged with detecting these differences and acting upon them.

I would like to call this immanent, incipient order, in which “we” are trying to translate all selvings of the present order, “inscripto-punctualism.”  The “inscripto” part is clear enough—that refers to conversion of all scenes from ritual ones, however residual, into explicit commemorations of newly generated ostensives that cancel resentments by refocusing our attention on the preservation of the center and practices of centering. The “punctualism” is new—by this I mean to make graphic the “verticality” inherent in the horizontality of inscription in the event. Eric Gans has written of the origin of language as “punctual,” i.e., a unique, irreducible event, and it is this above all that I want preserved and commemorated in the incipient order. The “punctual” is why there are things to commemorate in the first place—it is the source of all meaning. But I also like the implication of being “punctual,” i.e., on time, where and when you are needed. All the talk of the dehumanizing effects of technology, which supposedly makes us into machines, etc., prevents us from noticing how infinitely more important “punctualism” is than ever. I don’t see how anyone can look at today’s world and not see that everything that looks like problems of technology are really problems of human order. We should, in fact, be moving steadily to qualitatively different levels of inscription. The heated debates about the COVID vaccines, for example, distract us from the obvious observation of how crude it is that we still inject things into individuals. We should be thinking in terms of creating environments that boost our immune systems and in turn receive data from them that is fed right back into those environments—but as long as we have to deal with “politics” who will be free to explore such avenues? The more you know about your “unconscious” the more you produce both greater consciousness and a more generative unconscious as you become attentive and retentive in new ways—exactly the same thing can be made true of our relations to inscription, insofar as the. “punctual” dimension is made explicit and cultivated.

And the way to preserve and cultivate the punctual dimension is through what I have been calling singularized succession in perpetuity, which we can speak of in terms of decisions regarding to whom to transfer the totality of your data and access to data, and how. Who do you entrust with the “codes”? Ensuring such transfers is what institution building is for. You build endless chains, going all the back and all the way forward, and you gather together all the data transferred, through innumerable hands, directly and indirectly to you, and you try and put in some better order so as to transmit it to others. If you’re the chief executive of a country and therefore have a clearly defined role, this process is simpler, if not easier: you can set up recruitment and training institutions so as to generate candidates and appoint in an always revisable way your successor. Since most of us will never be that, we can model our own attention to our own successions in a way that is modeled on and meant to support the larger chain of command and chain of custody. If you occupy an “office,” you use the powers of that office, such as they are under current conditions, to narrow the possibilities of succession so that the work you deem essential can continue and otherwise shape your office in such a way that only those meeting certain specifications will be up to it. If you have no formal “office,” turn your activity, whatever you devote yourself to, into something approximating an office, creating for yourself “legacies” worthy of being passed down. If you’re utterly constrained, harried, subjected to a constant state of emergency, made the target of vilification for the enhancement of the power of desperate, unworthy power-brokers, you can still insist upon receiving the data needed to fulfill the commands imposed upon you, and in doing so you can generate data regarding the incoherence of those demands and by implication the chain of command and chain of custody needed to replace it.

The more that technology surrounds and enters us and becomes the immersive environment so that being outside of it is as unthinkable as being outside of the ritual order for archaic humans, the more we are inscribing our histories and destinies upon that environment. “Data security” may not be the most obviously inspiring rallying cry ever invented, but it’s marvelously compact and rich in implications. What inspired all those ancient men we now revere as heroes? Immortality—to live forever in the memories and emulative actions of others through the ages. This means acting so as to be recorded and commemorated, which until fairly recently meant a significant portion of the resources and energy of the community being devoted to such commemoration—the work of poets, historians, novelists, school teachers, artists of various kinds and so on. Now, everything we do is already being recorded and stored as a matter of course—it’s very likely that already (but if not, pretty soon), all of our lives will be retrievable for inspection by some amateur historian a couple of hundred years from now. All the more reason to take care what he will see and, even more, to make sure that the expanse of devices doing the data collection are asking the right questions and erecting “offices” in which one will be able to produce memorable inscriptions. One line of succession will dominate and shape others to the extent it secures data, which is to say masters arts of reciprocity, encoding, extrapolating, testing, concealing and revealing, timed release, and so on, and gives of data through its selvings that can only be made secure by iterating the practices that produced it.

The most ancient, indeed, originary, “code” is that what is received from the center must be returned to the center. You might take me to be suggesting that now we’re in a position to do the math. From the center we receive the distribution of positions giving us a certain degree of responsibility over some information or intelligence pertinent to the infrastructure. (Even the most “old-fashioned” physical labor requires precise measurements, adherence to codes, testing, the care and maintenance of tools, etc.) This includes the tokens we use to provide for our housing, nourishment, leisure and the rest, all of which is what we need to secure and project those positions of responsibility. What we return to the center is well-packaged data, which may include meta-data, data analysis, offering up of ourselves as data (being monitored for quality assurance purposes and all that). As always, I insist and emphasize that this is not some novel proposal that we start from scratch—we are already doing this, just with lots of slippage and spillage: our legal and. political systems have always been designed so as to gather reliable data and use them to recreate the scenes we occupy. And therefore we always begin by drawing attention to that slippage and spillage, which includes focusing on lies and untruths, propaganda, sloppy analyses, commitments that bear no reference to existing infrastructures—all of which are imperatives (to see, to repeat, to want, to do) which might have gaps so wide that pointing to the absent center is all one can do for now. Still, there are going to be more and less pointed ways of doing that, and there are also possible suggesting for repairing and creating infrastructure so as to increase reciprocity between center and margin.