Mimological Impressments

Technics as Assignments

“Technics” is the perfection and generativity of the imperative. We issue and receive all kinds of imperatives, all the time, with varying degrees of explicitness, force, precision, and time-sensitivity. When you work on making a particular subset of your imperatives conform without deviation to a model you have attached to that imperative you are working within technics; and when you include in that precision the placement of that imperative within a chain or network of imperatives, you are engaged in technology. I have elsewhere referred to Lewis Mumford’s notion of the “mega-machine,” as the origin of technology, insofar as it involves the transformation of human beings into functional elements of a dynamic whole, whether it be a labor force or army—the implication I wanted to draw from this is that the first machines are comprised of humans, and only after that is the surrounding inorganic world pressed into service to supplement and eventually in part replace and in part make contingent the human parts.

What I will add now is that this is the case as well for pre-“technological” technics, reaching back into the earliest human creation of tools—for cutting, carving, grinding, etc. Rather than thinking about technics in terms of the relation between “man” and his “environment,” technics should be thought first of all in terms of one human “tooling” another, that is, issuing an imperative that is closely supervised and repeated in a standardized form. This would have first taken place within a ritual framework, and would have involved, first of all, getting the ritual “right.” In other words, we should think of the first technicians as priests administering rites. The imperative, which is also to say, pedagogical relation between the imperator and the imperatee, would also be enveloped within a ritual relation—that is, in an imperative exchange with the center. This special and specialized instance of the imperative form would be akin to initiation into a secret society, where, by the way, is where we would have to look, along with the various mysticisms, for the materials for a hypothetical history of pedagogy.

A perfected and generative imperative would involve a very close mimetic relation between the participants. To show someone exactly what to do you need to have them follow your every motion very carefully, with little tolerance for deviation, and a great deal of repetition. Since reproducing the pedagogical relation is a large part of the purpose, the mapping of one set of motions over another might be elaborated and accentuated for its own sake. Now, this specialization of the imperative serves the purpose of scenic design, or the translation of event into scene. We could think of the translation of event into scene as the sifting through of everything that might be said and done here and now so as to produce what is to be said and done here and now against the background of that range of possibilities. Technics, that is, serves the originary media of the scene—everyone positioned in a particular way in relation to the center so as to re-enact the originary scene. The “content” of the ritual scene is enhanced and modified by the various iterations and expansions of the sign, on and off the scene. The imperative exchange with the center is continually revised in accord with the relative success of previous exchanges, each of which would suggest new procedures for improving conformity, conveying requests to and obeying the imperatives coming from the center. That is, the originary tools are “props” for the scene, meant to constrain the scene in repeatable and enforceable ways. The refinement of imperatives and the more studied implementation of the pedagogical relation constructing them can be extended to other practices off the ritual scene as those other scenes are annexed to and made to supplement the ritual scene.

To make your imperatives more precise and generative is to extend yourself into the imperatee—that is, to create a mimetic relation approaching exactness. You watch the other fulfill your imperative, notice where it goes “wrong,” repeat his gesture with the “correction” of that particular move in mind, all of which means making the other imitate you while you imitate him—even to demonstrate the difference between the wrong move he made and the right way of doing it. And to extend yourself into the imperatee is to suggest the possibility of extending yourself into your surroundings, and imagining ways in which those surroundings—animal, plant and mineral alike—might be brought into that mimetic relationship. (In ritual relationships, the boundaries between the human community, its living and non-living companions, and the figures narrated at the center are not firmly drawn.) The role of the declarative here is to narrate this process of revision, and to bring figures at the center (gods, ancestors) into the story. Every innovation (and until very recently there were not all that many) would have been some transgression carried out to compensate for another transgression, and the creation of mythologies incorporates this dynamic. The specialized imperative relation would have to be abstracted from ritual communities and situated within broader imperial, urban and market relations in order to begin to think about the perfection of imperatives and imperativity outside of mythical terms—that is, to establish “craftsmanship.”

It is also at that point that it becomes possible to think about technics more systematically, that is, technologically—to think about how one perfected imperative could itself be subjected to and a source of other imperatives, and eventually an entire, potentially unlimited, network of imperatives. This technological practice relies upon the megamachine but also transcends it by creating the possibility of an imperative system with no humans actually taking direct orders. We are all dominated (if not to equal extents and in the same way) by technology because embedded in it is a history of accumulated imperatives which bring their collective weight to bear on the individual entering the machine. (Your devices keep telling you how to use them, and an order comprised of the interlocking of those devices is offering stronger or weaker “suggestions” for how to do everything.) And, of course, technology is designed in such a way as to give the individual operators, especially at the endpoints, as little leeway as possible. At this point, though, the declarative is “liberated” to examine the various ways one imperative or imperative order can be made “interoperable” with another. So, one can imagine commanding the river to stop flowing at a certain point, but issuing this command only becomes imaginable if you can imagine commanding stones and wood to join together in some permanent way and be put in place in the midst of the river, and this in turn become more imaginable once you can order one piece of something to stick to another piece, and so on. You imitate nature by bringing it into the network of imperatives, and you also impress it into your imperative order—mimological impressments are the means of carrying out scenic design practices—you want the river dammed so as to create a distribution of farmers who will bring tribute to the center.

Algorithms are imperative-declarative hybrids. Take the simplest kind of algorithm, instructing some instrument, like a thermostat, to adapt its functioning in response to feedback: if the temperature goes above 70 degrees reduce the heat input by X; if it goes below 65, raise it by Y. You have an imperative that transitions between two declarative statements: it is 70 degrees; it is 65 degrees. From here we can keep introducing new sentences presenting new conditions for the thermostat to readjust. If you learn how to think algorithmically, then, you learn how to think your declaratives in direct relation to the imperatives they produce and follow from, along with the ostensives upon which the application of the imperative is predicated—what it means for the temperature to go up 5 degrees is not self-evident, but requires decisions regarding how to prepare and calibrate the sensory and measuring device. It is possible to think all imaginable ostensive-imperative-declarative pathways along these lines, and the more technological we become the more we do so—but if the technological “reveals,” one thing it reveals is where ostensive-imperative-declarative pathways reach the limits of algorithmic calculations.

The more you try to minimize room for error and judgment in one site along the imperative network, the more you open and reveal imperative gaps elsewhere. Addressing all the intellectual, moral and political questions associated with technology comes down to creating a way of thinking about the imperative, and the way the ostensive-imperative world has been reworked and subjected to the de-ritualized, post-sacrificial declarative order. A central part of that world now involves making each imperative in a gigantic network as completely unambiguous as possible, so that the results of the imperatives going through could be modeled exactly. A certain portion of this network is “discretionary,” i.e., can be reordered to meet specified purposes; most of it runs on its own and tells us what it wants. This network is the scenic design, and what we translate events into—the “technostructure” orients us to the center just as the enormous temples of the ancient empires did. Working out the algorithms generated by the system of planetary computation, the stack, is what listening to the center means today.

So far, at least, nothing in the technostructure is telling us how to produce the people we need to work within the technostructure—one look at schools and universities or, for that matter, at the kinds of suggestions coming from those located within the technostructure, is enough to convince anyone of that. So, the discretionary element may be relatively small—the proportion of addresses without users to those of users may continue to increase—but the discretion left to us users and interfaces is still decisive. A further confirmation of this is the discourse of those who assert otherwise, who think that the stack, or AI, or management can exercise sovereignty, or whatever would replace sovereignty—the more the talk about science, the less of a human science they have, which means they can only think about humans as broken pieces of furniture to be fixed or replaced. Don’t take more word for it—you can see that they will always refuse to answer the most unavoidable questions regarding the peopling of the machinery. Still, the books and articles Amazon and Google suggest are often very helpful, even for the serious scholar or theorist, and the algorithms producing such suggestions can be continually improved, and maybe even to the point where an entire essay or book would be implied by the totality of suggestions, which we can imagine eventually taking in feedback from the work you’re actually doing (“that last sentence you typed suggests that you really need to take a look at…”), so that margin of discretion needs to be constantly revised—this might now and for the foreseeable future be the central question for inquiry into the human. My next post will take that on directly.

For starters, though, we can lay down the rule (the imperative-declarative hybrid) that putting mimological impressments to work for the sake of scenic design practices involves composing imperatives that are both as perfected and as generative as possible—that is, each, by following them exactly, in the same way as everyone else, generates results that reveals an articulation of power and responsibility, needs and abilities. This is precisely what a pedagogical practice trained on the translation of event into scene would accomplish. Let’s say there is something you know how to do, and you would like to teach others to do it—a simple and common enough situation. But you learned it in what you can see was an unnecessarily slow, laborious, zigzagging manner, and you want to design a quicker, easier and more direct path to that knowledge. This poses a programming challenge, because it’s very hard to separate out, in examining a learning experience, what was necessary to the learning and what merely got in the way. It’s like trying to distinguish signal from noise without any established criterion for doing so—you know that a message has been received and you can translate it into usable terms but you don’t have access to the sender and don’t know his intentions and so maybe you’re missing and mistranslating things. Your first problem is to figure out what, exactly, you learned (what are you now able to do or see that you couldn’t previously?)—itself no easy question to answer. This means identifying a new practice you have emerged with: something you can do while knowing that the results are and can only be the results of that action.

You now have a practice to target, and you can present that practice directly and explicitly to the learners. But the practice itself is complex, and the entire articulation of its component parts can’t be learned in one leap, so you need to identify component parts and present them to and impose them on learners before those learners can see the results—they can see you do something, but they can’t see the connection between what you’re asking them to do and them being able to do the same thing (which, moreover, may not look exactly the same—what makes it the “same” needs to be determined as well). The learners (all, of them; each of them—how different the learners are, and how diversified the teaching needs to be, and how much coordination and reciprocal pedagogy amongst the learners  is needed, will vary) are all embedded in existing sets of practices, which will necessarily interfere with the one you seek to inculcate—even more, in attempting to carry out the component parts of the practice, they will inevitably bring with them those habits which they are not yet able to distinguish from the partial practice you are asking them to perform. The interference of those habits must themselves be separated out from the practice itself, and this itself requires a practice wherein the learner is presented with the results of this interference. You have to interfere with their interference. All this requires an ongoing modeling of previous modellings of samples of the entirety of socio-natural interactions.

Now, let’s take the next step, and assume that you are not directly instructing and supervising these learners (you want to scale up, potentially all the way, the pedagogical system); rather, you are constructing scenes in which they will be compelled to undergo the learning experiences described above. You have to set up things so that they will see samples of the privileged practice, will accept the imperative to learn it to the best of their abilities, and will be able to find the fastest route towards successively approximating it. At the highest, most distant level of design, you need to leave open lots of possible routes, with the possibilities to be narrowed down by authorities at each level. Imagine the entire society organized in this way—in a sense it already is, and must be, even if in the most incompetent and self-subverting way imaginable. You are yourself embarking on your design practices against this society, which adds new layers of interference to those already innate in any learning situation. You have come, through a long, painful, uncertain and complex learning process, to see the problem in these terms. This is how you look at history, or the event: as a field of learning for yourself and fellow practitioners that you are now determined to intervene in to turn it into a more expeditious and ascertainable field of learning. “Technology” is the infrastructure of that learning process—it is the site of translation from event (the revelation of a possible practice within a field of mistakes) to scene (conversion of a field of mistakes to an infrastructure supportive of that practice).