Measuring Deferral

Continuing to pursue the Holy Grail, or the white whale, whatever the case may be: a complete, self-generating, perfomative discourse on language drawn entirely out of the originary hypothesis and originary grammar. Maybe it’s the philosopher’s stone, or the quintessence. Language, or sampling, as the ongoing measure of deferral is the path forward here—we are always measuring our respective measures of deferral, in the process building new. Infrastructures of deferral. I’ve been reading through the first issue of Antikythera, in particular Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s discussion of life as computation, which I defer while being prompted by, and so I want to lay a little “ontological” groundwork—that is, an attempt at a minimal account of the most minimal categories we need to think, and whose interrelations and articulations can produce everything. The key to doing this in such a way as to defer dualism is identify categories that are necessary to representing and “computing” reality while also being part of reality—in that case, we’re engaging with reality as just another part of it. For a while the most basic category that I thought fit this description was “measure,” since that’s the first thing we must do in dividing reality so as (going back to the originary event) distribute it. We could, it seems to me, think of reality as always measuring itself—for example, one object affected by another is weighing that object through its own modifications under its pressure; objects measure one another by existing at a certain distance from them within space, and so on. But then it occurred to me that even more fundamental than measure was marking—one piece of reality must somehow be separated from other pieces in order to be measured and, we could say that a measurement is really at least two marks, with the distance between the marks between the measure. Both mark and measure are fundamental to writing, with its origins in inscription and accounting, so I would continue to credit Derrida’s “arche-writing” here. One more category might be enough for a “fundamental” or “originary” ontology: threshold, meaning that a certain articulation of marks and measures becomes something more than those marks and measures themselves (which themselves, therefore, must have “always already” have passed some threshold so as to become marks and measures). More minimally, instead of “threshold” we might say “boundary,” because once a boundary has been drawn around something or between two things, that boundary creates something new and more complex on both sides. And a boundary is itself a mark and a measure. But it seems to me that one more category is needed, so as to produce the relations between these others: “fit.” Things tend to fit together in some way, to occupy space so there is place for each thing, and marking and measuring might be first of all ways of fitting one thing in among others. All of these categories seem to be directly constitutive of language, and therefore of language’s way of mapping over whatever is not language so that language is also part of non-language. This is all subject to revision, even though I will be very resistant to adding more categories and, anyway, I’ll have to see how necessary I find all this. I’m working on it now because it seems to me that these categories seem to me to provide everything necessary for computation without saying that life or the universe is computation, which I defer because who, then computed the emergence of it all? That the universe is, first of all, some set of things oriented toward each other in some way, seems the more minimal hypothesis.

Language, then, measures while effecting deferral, and language is deferral, which is important because no true measure of anything human can come from something non-human—we are always speaking in terms of one part of what is human measuring another part, for the purpose of fitting and bounding. One utterance, or sample, can only measure another utterance or sample but that means a whole field of possible and actual samples—whatever anyone says has deferred and thereby measured all the other things that could have been said instead. But this marking and measuring extends across the whole stack of scenes. It may be necessary to invest heavily in deferring some local rivalry so that some other means of deferral can be assaulted or protected; or, it might be necessary to undermine established means of deferral within a small group so as to prepare that group to participate in wider circles of deferral. We can say that the best enactment of deferral is one that extends sensory receptors as widely as possible across scenes and thereby most approximates measuring the entire human field and updating the measuring rods accordingly. We’d be thinking here of measurement less in numerical terms than in terms of a kind of mirroring that shifts perspectives so as to show how something looks, feels or sounds from a particular point within a particular scene. This is unsatisfying for those who want a separate scene upon which measurements could be conducted unaffected by the scenes being measured, but this is a possibility to be infinitely deferred. There are kinds of calculation and computation involved in the measurement of deferral, but they are of the type that tries to sharpen questions like what kinds of rivalries might require some thus far unimagined mode of adjudication given the further development of a particular technology. And this involves embedding the adjudication further into the situations where the need for adjudication might arise, thereby making those situations more auto-adjudicable through, say, protocols and software. Or, how might fields of candidates for succession be drawn out of institutions, ranked, placed in competition sufficiently unrivalrous (or rivalrous only in the “right” ways) so as to have all contribute to the selection process—which, in turn would have us hypothesizing institutions focused on highlighting and cultivating the features such selection processes would eventually come to focus on. Or, how do we, to refer to that Peirce statement I often recur to, price into existing credit systems (the “outside spread”) the collapse of the existing lines of credit to that point where “all insurance companies go bankrupt” and we have no recourse other than that originary line of credit—hope, love and charity or, more minimally, deferral itself. One’s utterance, or samples, would elicit other like ones that in the end become a kind of planetary scale computation.

Mimesis is the way we measure each other. Invisible components of human activity, like “intent,” can only be marked and measured by some complementary or counter action—you fit into someone’s action through imitation or you see what it’s made of by opposing, inflecting or deflecting it. Escape from the Big Scenic imaginary involves imitating and measuring others’ actions so as to change the fit—rather than just fitting both actions into the present scene, fitting both actions into the present scene so as to fit that scene into a network of scenes: presenting the other’s and your own actions as signs or, here very directly, samples, submitted to other scenes where those samples can be marked and labeled and recomposed. This means that you are always marking the scene you are on so as to prepare it for measurement. You are always on some other scene of measurement while being on whatever scene you’re providing samples on. As you mark and measure your power of detection grows. Within language, the present tense becomes a measure of the field of samples, a sharpening of the means of detection. Everything past must be projected on the field of the present, processed through a current reckoning of the way previous events have been recorded and continued up until now; everything future is some ranked or weighted probability of the present, some marking of the present as a will have been of some likely extension. The entire present (the English language allows us to do quite a bit with the various forms of the present tense but I think any language could be put to work this way) shrinks down into a constantly modified measurement of likely filterings of the past into the future—have beens into will have beens. To just say something “was” is to slip into the mythological “voice,” to say something “will be” into the prophetic or oracular, and both voices are easily undercut through satirical iterations, or just iterations which will have been satirical.

The tracing of mark, fit, measure and bound lead us to speak in a way I’ve always deferred while knowing it was possible and even unavoidable—that of “us” being nothing more than the center speaking to itself. This always sounded to me too mystical or Hegelian or too something, and so I’ve set it aside—there’s also the question of what the center would have to say to itself in the first place. It is the final oblivion of “freedom” and related concepts. The center is always marking, measuring and bounding itself, and this only sounds like a kind of divine solipsism if we leave out of account that there is no center without this dialogue, one which takes place across all scenes and even “inside” each of us. The better samples more closely approximate the center speaking to itself, which maybe involves something like acquiring and transforming external material (whatever is not in “orbit”) into ways of iterating itself. We’d be aiming at the vanishing point of intentionality, where intention becomes the marginally different/deferred iteration of the stack of scenes. In our samples we try to make the smallest mark that would call into being a whole new Department of Weights and Measures. And that’s what the entire stack of scenes encircling the globe now amounts to, and the problem is how to become an ostensive sign, attracting and deferring even some little bit of resentment, so as to become an imperative, directing attention elsewhere, prolonged into a question, or inquiry, yielding a series of declaratives inverting the question in various ways—ultimately to be subsumed as so many data points within informational circuits, yet always retrievable as a sign contributing directly to maintaining linguistic presence upon some scene, which is also a meta and infra scene.

A further degree or increment of deferral, then, is measured through a taking up of what is deferred into a new assembly, in which what might have been said, what would have been the previous increment of deferral, becomes part of the scene upon which the measurement takes place. We can go back to the scene of reported speech upon which David Olson erects his theory of writing: saying what someone else has said in a different tone, with that difference in tone marking the reported statement as a commentary, enacted from some stance. And we can get more precise, if not more numerical, by drawing upon originary grammar and thinking about how what I’ve been called the ostensive-imperative-ostensive loop, as a kind of unit of discursive material, involves taking up separate signs and fitting them to each other as measures. Declaratives are essentially answers to questions about actual or presupposed O-I-O loops, and any such loop leaves plenty of room for questions, because the scene supplies a lot of the tacit reasoning behind responding to this ostensive gesture by issuing or obeying this imperative and confirming the carrying out or failure to carry out of that imperative in this way. The declarative measures O-I-O loops so as to fit them into strings of declaratives while maintaining access, at any point along the way, to any particular loop, however tacit or buried beneath innumerable others.

Measuring is maintaining linguistic presence, keeping at bay whatever in the present might collapse the scene through an opening into incalculable escalation which is itself possible, as Eric Jacobus shows (in my reading, anyway), because of all of the elements on the scene that might be turned into weapons against the scene, or first of all against its current configuration, but failing that, the scene itself. Maintaining linguistic presence means seeking the gesture that will defer implosion, and then who might make that gesture, how, with what kinds of markings from others on the scene, and so on. This is source of all novelty, even in the form of a slightly different tonal inflection, which results from one scene intruding upon another. We can mismeasure, and every measure is a kind of mismeasure as well, but it’s impossible to avoid maintaining linguistic presence, so something is getting measured in a way that can in turn be measured. Now it is possible to say is that what is getting measured is also originary debt, of which debt measured in monetary terms, or, for that matter, in gift economy terms, is itself a kind of measure. What I owe to the center is precisely the measurement of deferral, to contribute to the infrastructure of deferral slightly more than I would have otherwise without cognizance of the debt. The measure of the difference between what I own and am owed, my credit, given and offered, in monetary and originary terms takes the form of what I forgive and what I enforce, and what is forgiven me and enforced upon me. The political form taken by the maintenance of linguistic presence is singularized succession and the more I’m contributing to that the more others lend me credit while enforcing the debt of that contribution—according to my abilities. Eventually we’d reach a threshold where monetary debt would be forgiven and I would forgive whatever others owe me, so what my samples measure now is the distance from that threshold—the threshold where monetarily measured credit is converted into the recording of all aptitudes, capabilities, accreditations, authentifications, etc., onto the blockchain, revised retroactively with each new recording, made by those likewise all recorded up on the blockchain. If we had recorded, and knew how to record in increasingly precise and farseeing ways, exactly what everyone was likely to do under all imaginable circumstances, so as to participate in which institutions and activities, and could even regularly intake everyone’s feedback on such computations, what would we need money for? The answer would be that there would always be gaps in such knowledge, which is true, so there will always need to be a diminishing store of tokens, under increasingly restricted protocols of issuance, situated at the furtherest bounds of our knowledge, what will prove true (or a proper measure) in the long run.