Intelligence and Technics

I try to make the concepts I use include both the “is” and the “ought,” and to guide the transition from one to the other. So, when I speak of “singularized succession in perpetuity,” on the face of it I’m proposing an alternative to the near randomized leadership drift explicitly endorsed by liberal and democratic politics (and I am in fact doing that) but I’m also describing what anyone with any power, which is to say, any command over the attention of others, is already doing, more or less implicitly, more or less consciously, in however a convoluted way in conformity with existing mechanisms of succession. So, the concept simply enables us to make what is implicit explicit, to bring into focus everything that requires it to remain implicit, and to direct our attention to the possible means of making it explicit. So, the more thorough the study of existing conditions, the more visible and intelligible the way to transform them.

The decisive move in my rerouting of GA away from Eric Gans’s liberal humanism was to place the center at the center. Or, to return it to the center—because, where else could it have gone? This, I realized, was the aporia that blocked crucial elements of reality from view for Gans and those working within the “orthodox” GA he created: we are supposed to believe that somehow, as a result of the Christian revelation unfolding into market society, there was no longer a social center; rather, each individual was a center in a new, albeit still emergent, omnicentrism. It was obvious that this is why Gans has never had a single useful thing to say about the state: according to his model, it doesn’t really exist: at the most, it’s the field upon which redistributions in accord with a particular balance of resentments takes place. Why we should expect them to take place in a “satisfactory” way is never asked. What is at least one of the most important transformations on the 20th century West, the growing centralization of the state, its increasing intrusiveness into every corner of its citizens’ lives, also goes completely ignored. Now, it’s also possible to say that this is also why Gans has never said a single thing about technology (he does have one interesting essay on media), or, as far as I can tell, ever considered he needed to have anything to say about it: technology is part of post-sacral governance, and if you can’t say anything about post-sacral governance, technology can only be smart people inventing things that make life easier but can be “misused.” It’s not really part of the human.

“Restoring” the center implies that maintaining the center must be the source of human aspirations and humanity’s fundamental problem. We must have a center, but we’ve never had a really satisfactory one: keeping this in mind enables us to be unremittingly critical of the existing order without nostalgia for any earlier one. The sacred animal ancestor at the center of the hunter-gather community provided a source of consensus, and is no doubt the longest lasting human order by far, but the egalitarianism of this order was always vulnerable to the emergence of differences that would lead to the “usurpation” of the center by the Big Man. Orders organized around honor, which is to say, the vendetta, are always liable to degenerate into endemic violence, which also makes them vulnerable to imperial subversion and domination. Sacral kingship provides for a unanimously affirmed central figure, one sensitive to the shifting relations within the community and in the community’s relation to the divine, but the need to turn the king more or less periodically or impulsively into a sacrifice is not only de-stabilizing but is a source of corrosive cynicism—on some level, enough people always know that killing the king won’t restore fertility, or whatever. And the Axial Age imperial orders with the divinized emperor were really just monstrous machines, whose main virtue was in suggesting that, with one “divine” empire being successively replaced by another, there must be something more divine behind all of them. It’s not hard to see how the desacralized power of the modern West just ground up what remained of all these orders.

The problem of the center is the problem of succession, and we could examine the way even the best of the pre-modern solutions, primogeniture, doesn’t solve this problem, but I’d like now to turn attention to the fact that modernity, or desacralized power, exacerbates the problem of the center, represented in the problem of succession. We don’t need to rehearse the way in which conferring power on some imaginary entity like the “people,” or individuals with “rights,” simply creates new power centers claiming to speak for those entities, instituting a perpetual struggle over the center that is normalized as “freedom” and “democracy.” It’s more useful to examine what the real solution has been, and the way this constitutive suspicion toward any occupant of the center has inadvertently advanced this solution—a solution that, with renewed attention to the question of the center, we can inherit now. Technology is that solution, because technology can remain continuous, with one project giving way to another, and with resources devoted to specific projects over prolonged periods, regardless of who occupies the center for the moment.

Technology is a vast command structure that generates more and more implicit commands as it replaces what was once a ritual system of imperative exchanges: you don’t have to be told to drive a car—it’s just a condition of living under certain technological conditions, and since there are better and worse cars, and cars are indicative of status, you want to drive a car. And you want to get a job that will enable you to afford and maintain that car. And that house, and so on. But while engineers are designing vast scenes that will organize and distribute the entire population, they are not thinking in terms of implementing the commands of a ruler—their imperatives are so distant from whoever happens to be president or prime minister that they can dedicate themselves to purely scientific and technical pursuits. And whoever happens to be president or prime minister, insofar as he’s not simply sabotaging such work on behalf of his party and/or some fraction of capital, wants them to so dedicate themselves—especially since the starting point of all ambitious technological projects is some state imperative, whether it be military, infrastructural, or health-related.

The abstraction of the project from any “projector” encourages a way of thinking that we can call purely “declarative” or, more familiarly, “symbolic”: the declarative reconstitutes the ostensive as a field of possible ostensives bereft of imperatives, and symbolic logic abstracts away from “intuition” and reproduces reality as the result of a sequence of logical operations (an indefinitely prolonged sequence of statements that can be either true or false). This is the path to the present, digital, order. A sufficiently thorough representation of existing reality in all its probable future unfoldings would eliminate the need for imperatives: once we know reality to be so constrained as to make only one choice the reasonable one in each case, there would never be a need to issue another command. This is the technological utopia, bringing to its logical conclusion the declarative’s terror of the imperative (first formalized in ancient philosophy). We would have abolished the center, and whether that is through a technocracy run by disinterested technicians or a marketized order in which value is conferred on every object and every individual through an ever more refined calculation of the future expected earnings to be derived from that asset would be a secondary question.

But there is this odd fact, explored in different ways in a couple of very interesting books, that along with this tendency toward abstraction and the extraction of imperatives, there coincided a growing interest in the “primitive” that had been ignored or assimilated to bourgeois “human nature” through the dominant disciplines of the 18th into the 19th century. We could see this turn to the primitive as resentment or nostalgia, which would make it easy to dismiss it, but Erich Horl, in his Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication (a book I’ve already mentioned a couple of times) and Sarah Pourciau, in her The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science suggest less complacent and self-congratulatory approaches. Horl sees the fascination with the archaic as a result of the discovery and creation of new, predominantly electric, fields of communication that couldn’t be reduced to the “intuitive commonplaces of the human sciences—he shows how the descriptions of archaic orders by founders of sociology like Durkheim and successors like Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss are filled with metaphors drawn from the new technological discourses of electric communication. Pourciau, meanwhile, traces the way the structuralist linguistics of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and especially Roman Jakobson tried to replace the German language sciences of the 19th century (culminating in the aesthetics of Richard Wagner) by converting the (ultimately racial-national, although Pourciau doesn’t address this) “spirit” the German theorists saw (on the model of 19th century biological organicism) necessarily informing the inscription of any linguistic order into a silent, constitutive, principle of an autonomous linguistic order. Pourciau gets to the point, as does Horl, even if this can only be made explicit by someone unapologetically attentive to origins (Pourciau comes pretty close, though), where we can see that the autonomous, internally systemic and intra-referential language systems that can theoretically exclude from consideration any external “input,” simply reveal all the more unmistakably the need for an originary hypothesis of language. What the drive toward the symbolic or, in originary terms, the declarative, does is remove all specific ethnic or ritual or historical constitutions of any particular language so as to expose the co-constitution of language with the ethnic, the ritual, and the historic, as such. All those quasi-electric vibrations Horl finds to be disturbing Durkheim are the mimetic crisis simmering beneath the origin of humanity, and the return to the archaic makes it possible to hypothesize communication as such as constitutive event.

It's not surprising that the most uncompromising abstraction would lead us to the most singular scene and event because what was realized by, as far as I know, only Charles Sander Peirce, the precondition for the scientific and technological revolution launched in the 19th century was the creation of disciplinary spaces, in which relatively small groups of highly committed and intelligent individuals developed conceptual vocabularies that brought previously unimagined realities into greater resolution that could only be expressed mathematically. There are histories to be told here, and some of them have been and are being told, of the parallel emergence of science with secret and esoteric societies, including the occult, along with the parallels one will find in literary history (the trajectory from Poe’s articulation of the uncanny with the rationalistic through the French symbolists and through the modernist avant-garde and the dismantling of the boundaries between “life” and “art” would provide grist for many such histories), and the enduring need for disciplinary spaces no matter how automatized the technosphere is what can bring our attention back to the problem of the center. (One outcome of this articulation of the abstract with the esoteric enabled by the simultaneous self-concealment and expansion of the center, is the rich eco-system of “conspiracy theories” and conspiracies about conspiracy theories so prominent in contemporary politics.)

There will be a global center, and it will be a center predicated on the securing of data—it will be a central intelligence. The question is whether this center will continue the declarative utopian project of scenelessness, accomplished through the abolition of imperatives (which must collapse into a hysterical proliferation of incoherent commands); or, whether it will rely on the endless creation of scenes, of scenes within scenes, each with its own level of competence for gathering, assessing, preserving, recording and transmitting data, and each with its own disciplinary space and pedagogical order: its own set of “assignments.” And contemporary art (in the sense of art that will always be contemporary) is interested in precisely this problem, of generating scenes that could not simply have been algorithmically predicted, of putting scenes within scenes, which means making the infrastructure increasingly explicit, not just to criticize or “debunk” the claims it spontaneously emits but to show that each point in the infrastructure there is a scene which, as inhabitants of various scenes ourselves, we can enter and derive and contribute intelligence to if we just learn the idiom of that scene.

If our selvings create scenes within scenes because doing so provides a more secure data environment than the drive for scenelessness, because secure data (the field of ostensives) also means a more directive, transparent and accountable algorithmic (imperative-interrogative-declarative) order, then we can challenge that drive for scenelessness as resentment abolitionists confronting non-resentfully a kind of absolute, we might even say demonic, resentment. One of the hardest things to do can be to let someone learn how to do something, especially when there’s no time for them to learn how to do it because it has to be done now. But learning is precisely learning how to do it in the now. A scene is composed out of an event of learning—the contours of the scene must be felt out, tested, bumped against, jostled. To help someone learn you have to step in with imperatives, but you also have to learn how and when to do that. Without these apprenticeship relations, things don’t work and knowledge isn’t preserved. We all have to seek out teachers and students—that’s how we participate in succession as well as technology. We could even say that the meaning of any sign is in the way it prompts one person to learn something from another. And this always involves something specific to the situation, untranslatable until it wouldn’t really matter anymore. It’s easy to see why people who have their hands on things but are not so certain of keeping their hands on things would dream of a scenelessness in which everything happens within a knowledge that doesn’t even need a disciplinary space to be produced because the institutional certifications of the knowledge producers provide a warrant for the knowledge. In this immaculate conception of knowledge, those who designate the truths from which all institutional imperatives automatically follow can do so because they have been designated by those who have in turn been designated, and so on. It’s a kind of parody of singularized succession, because no one actually chooses—they check off boxes. For the rituals of reciprocal certification to work, scenes must be abolished. But even here we must say that these rituals are a form of learning, into which we can introduce felicitous, if not necessarily welcome, imperatives. In part, this is an aesthetic project—interrupting the hoped for scenelessness by making scenes. But they must be technological scenes, positing assignments across a field one doesn’t control in order to contribute to the central intelligence.