Literature as Para-Data and Intelligence Exchange with the Center
The purpose of scenic design is revelation: scenes should be designed so as to maximize information coming from the center, which is to say anomalies generated by the selvings across those scenes. We create fields of likenesses, as widely and densely as possible—we generate worlds out of samples—and then we establish parameters that lead us to determine that some of those likenesses are more likely, and eventually the same, against some other. Take a text, institution, or person, and say, “I want more like that”—your process of inquiry will be as outlined here—you will conjure up a range of texts, institutions or people (let’s just say “things”), actual and hypothetical (an increasingly useless distinction), that are like that thing in various ways, kind of like a funhouse mirror showing different features of the thing, and you will tether or align some of those things to your sample, then some of them increasingly closely and then you will arrive at actionable criteria for distinguishing that thing and new forms of that thing from other things. The same/other distinction will often be drawn through things that are in many ways very much like each other. And you will in the process have set up a way of refining and updating that distinction as new intelligence comes in (having also set the same/other distinction to work in a field of likenesses such that it brings in a steady flow of helpful intelligence).
What will never cease to be the case is that the choice of sample and the terms of likeness determining your search are ultimately human ones, even if you design an algorithm for selecting samples and establishing revisable protocols for establishing terms of likeness. Dealing with artificial intelligences is really, as Elena Esposito points out, Artificial Communication, and I see no difficulty in saying that this is the form communication with the center now takes, an update from ancient soothsaying and prophesying, and more recent statistical analyses. There is always the programmer and the programmer of the programmer. Artificial communication is scenic design and the creation of modes of deferral—the results of the algorithm create constraints on our deliberations and inquiries, making a defense of the integrity of data collection, preservation and analysis a defense of civilization. And what counts as “integrity” here is also intrinsically human—“human” in the sense of that being that poses a greater threat to its own existence than is posed by any external danger, and which therefore defers violence through representation. The databank, far more than the “market,” vindicates the originary hypothesis. And here’s what I mean by the “integrity” of the data and its irreducibly human dimension: let’s say you are in the midst of a pandemic (once the spread of a certain pathogen has reached the threshold at which governing institutions determine it to be a “pandemic” for reasons of funding and bureaucratic activation), and some group of scientists has developed a vaccine aimed at immunizing people against the pathogen being spread. Now, they’ve done their laboratory tests on subjects and used the available data to simulate the various likely outcomes of the use of the vaccine but none of this is a substitute for seeing how it will actually work in the field where there are still incalculables—so, of course, the population, even if you’re very confident about the vaccine, is to some extent a testing subject population—at the very least, you’re going to be gathering data from the varied responses to the vaccine over time, continually revisiting the data. If, that is, you are really and only interested in seeing to what extent the vaccine works as hypothesized.
The decision to develop a vaccine in the first place is a human one, though, even if that decision could to some extent be automated (any decision can be and, to reference Derrida, in some sense “always already” is, automated). It might be a very easy decision, but whether it is an easy decision or not is also humanly determined. There is probably a case to be made for relying upon the human immune system and directing resources to making the human immune system more robust, rather than getting into the habit of immunizing against more and more diseases. The enormous pool of test subjects you now have at your disposal is also human, and they will not all equally embrace being test subjects, or having immunization prioritized over immune system robustness, or they may have questions about this particular vaccine or the institutions producing it, or they may just not like being told what to do. All these responses are also data and provide information regarding that test population and the “experts’” own way of handling the pandemic—and, more broadly, indications of levels of trust in political, media and medical institutions. And these responses are mediated by ritual and juridical institutions, which might consider certain medical interventions to be off limits, or certain kinds of consent to be required—these ritual and juridical institutions are already embedded in the scientific or disciplinary institutions. Here is the real test for those charged with designing responses to the pandemic: can they get just as interested in this entire range of responses as they are in the narrower question of the efficacy of the vaccine? In a genuinely “information” order, the answer would be “yes”: the medical experts would naturally view their administration of the vaccine as also a form of communication with the population (otherwise, you must ultimately come to see yourself as “defending” your hypothesis against “opponents,” in which case you have left the disciplinary scene for a very poorly designed pseudo-juridical one). This wouldn’t dictate any particular response to these responses—it’s easy enough to imagine a pandemic deadly enough that rapid and coerced vaccination, overriding normal concerns about rights and processes, would be necessary—whether something is indeed necessary can sometimes only be meaningfully judged after the fact (and having institutions that can perform those meaningful judgments is also part of an information or “revelatory” society). But prior to and encompassing these practical decisions must be the continual enhancement of the broader “sensorium” taking in the human dimensions of new scenic designs.
Even in such a “sensitive” information order, scenic designers would be making decisions aimed at maintaining linguistic presence (at aligning ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives) on terms they don’t fully comprehend within those decisions. There’s always a constitutive outside to any scene, and any scene generates anomalies. This is far more the case now, when we are very far away from such a “sensitive” order and are not necessarily even progressing in that direction. Discrepancies between practices and hypotheses need to be brought into view, because institutionalized practices will aim at restricting hypotheses to those that maintain the institution thereby excluding some that would address anomalies generated by those practices. This should be the role of artists today. The ideal artist today is one fascinated by those anomalies that those immersed in the practice (that is, the most skilled and dedicated practitioners) simple can’t see precisely by virtue of being so, and so necessarily, immersed. The artists are interested in why the medical experts can’t get interested in vaccine hesitancy as crucial data. For the artist, this inability is data, even if immeasurable. There is some very interesting visual art being produced today doing this kind of thing (Trevor Paglin’s work—dealing with recording/surveillance technologies—is the best example I can think of now), that is, getting under the skin of the infrastructure, but I’ll focus on the art I’m best equipped to speak of: literature.
I want to call literature that inhabits the anomalies of ritual, juridical and disciplinary spaces “para-data”—it’s certainly not “meta” data, which is already a familiar term and refers to developments intrinsic to data collection and “registration” itself. It might be “infra” data (I’m very partial to the “infra”) but I’ll stick with the para and paregonal for now. The role of literature is to frame the framing of data—and then to frame that framing. Only literature of some avant-garde tradition is going to be useful here, because what defines the avant-garde is precisely that it doesn’t take the frame of author-reader communication as given and hence best left invisible. If you assume literature occupies the space of classic prose, where reader and writer share a scene wherein the writer just describes actions that could very well be taking place on that scene in full view of the “spectators” then the game is lost from the start. Such an understanding of literature treats literature as another disciplinary space, one that provides us with knowledge of “human nature.” But even the mode of knowledge of human nature I’m naturally most sympathetic to, i.e., that we are all mimetic beings and that mimesis leads to rivalry, etc., is essentially bureaucratic knowledge if the writer’s own place within the operations of mimesis is not included in its articulation. If your writing is not enacting an engagement with the forces of mimesis, presented as a testing and fortification of the institutions of deferral, you are refuting your own thesis and encouraging complacency in your reader who now has this special knowledge making him better than others (i.e., more cognizant of their mimetic compulsions, which in turn proves my own greater control over my own).
Literature or, to make more explicit my retrieval of the more advanced mode of literacy I take the “post-structuralist” theorists (and “postmodern” authors like, to take just one example, Christine Brooke-Rose [also a post-structuralist theorist]) to be aiming at, the “literary,” is para-disciplinary as well as para-data. Mimesis, resentment and deferral present differently in every case, and they are infrastructurally mediated, so if you’re going to detect by humanly registering them you need to be alongside (“para”) those infrastructural mediations. Writers can be “para” in lots of different ways, but I feel pretty certain that describing “realistic” characters, depicting their “inner lives” with care, and situating them within “plausible” plots leading to some kind of revelatory and satisfying “climax” is not going to be the way. All of our inherited literary devices were designed to address specific infrastructural conditions—melodramatic degenerations of tragedy might have made some sense in, say, the transition to industrialized settings, but events and conversions take place differently now because we have different recording and measuring implements. It is language itself that must be probed—language is the “black box” of the current order. What is language other than a means of programming? Theories of communication and semiotics will have no answer. Here is where the centrality and indispensability of the originary hypothesis lies—all of the relations between what anyone says and what anyone does involve exchanges or negotiations regarding the construction of more or less complex labyrinths designed to ensure we don’t all do the same thing at the same time. In order to avoid everyone doing the same thing at the same time (which would entail a kind heat-sensor directed search for the one who is not doing the same thing right now) we all try to say the same thing, translating and transcribing our utterances (“samples”) into as many different forms as possible. Saying the same thing as someone situated elsewhere on the scene involves activating all of the infrastructural resources of that scene—identifying and eliciting the signs of those infrastructural resources and the meanings they might take on beyond that scene is the work of the literary. Learning new ways of taking phrases for a walk might be the future of literature. And this would mean endlessly renewing the Name-of-God.
Those who have been reading my work for a while might recall that I periodically have recourse to a kind of aesthetic criteria for, to be blunt, replacing the outmoded, philosophically compromised concepts of “ethics” and morality.” Eric Gans’s redefinition of these terms is a failure—as I’ve pointed out fairly recently, he ends up turning morality into a resentful subversion of the ethical—which is tantamount to redefining “morality” as “immorality.” I won’t review the intellectual process that, it seems to me, led him to this pass. It’s better to move on, starting with the simple fact of the existence of the word “should” (in English, of course—other languages, I suspect, are more likely to just have something closer to “must”)—how are we able to say that someone “should” or “must” do something or refrain from doing something? Well, let’s keep it simple, as Gans himself regularly enjoins us to do, and say that we demand of others (issue imperatives) that they say what they mean and mean what they say, which can be further reduced to doing what they say and saying what they do. There is a kind of universal claim here, but one that is instantly relativized because what can be said and done varies vastly across historical scenes. But we can always say that if what someone does is at odds with what they say I don’t really know what they’re saying. And in that case I don’t know how to say the same thing as them. (And what will count as such a discrepancy is part of the problem, and requires assuming a position on the scene.)
What remains is to put this to the test, and the aesthetic criterion I referred to in the previous paragraph would involve constructing scenes in order to do just that. The example I’ve referred to a few times is Hamlet’s construction of a scene wherein to “catch the conscience of the king”—the assumption here is that in watching a portrayal of his own act of murder Claudius will in his reaction reveal the discrepancy between what he has done and what he is saying—further implicit in this is that we tend to want to reduce discrepancies between what we say and what we do, which must be the case because even sociopaths must at least want to keep their lies as simple and easily remembered as possible. (On the originary scene such a consistency between “saying” and “doing”—putting forth the gesture and not advancing toward the central object—is of course absolutely essential). Hamlet’s scenic design works, and the tragedy of the play is that he abandons this “method,” which had the potential of inducing regret and confession from Claudius. Anyway, it is in thinking about generalizing this “method” that I arrived at the specific types of scenes that are already designed so as to elicit such revelations, and as I argued a few posts back, I don’t see any objection to reducing them to the ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes (as long as the ritual is understanding more broadly as scene-setting and commemoration). The literary, then, is “para-site” (alongside of) these scenes. A lower level of the literary, more suitable for entertainment for bureaucrats, accentuates the kinds of revelations these scenes prime us to anticipate and hope for, like the dramatic courtroom confrontation or confession. But literature in the proper sense is a mode of inquiry into the limits and anomalies of these scenes, especially through making explicit the way the scenes infiltrate each other in ways each must disavow and cannot see simply by virtue of being on the scene. Only through the literary can we sustain the kind of openness that resists the temptation to found scenes on expulsion, and some form of advanced literary training will be required for the new officer class, the programmers of programmers, the ultra-literate scribes. In my previous post I suggested rethinking the “cognitive” in terms of features of textuality rather than logic, and we could extend this across the infrastructure—speaking of the presumably “ethical” concept of “accountability,” for example, implicates us in juridical institutions dealing with economic exchange, administrative auditing and other very concrete practices of power and exchange with the center—but it is precisely through the literary that these infrastructural traces in language can be elucidated, which brings us back to textual infrastructures. Sentences, punctuation, paragraphs, indexes, etc., are all simultaneously administrative and cognitive and the only practices irreducible to one or the other and therefore “transcendent” are those making visible these infrastructures of literacy. The acquisition of this mode and level of literacy qualifies one for the kind of data security and programming of programmers practices that will set to rights our relation to the center.