Originary Calculus

We have an interesting paradox that follows from the originary hypothesis: we need to describe deferral, on the face of it a negation of action, as a mode of action, or agency. GA is going to confound anyone who wants to base their political or moral thinking on action, understood as an expression of an intention, itself an expression of identity, and resulting in some determinate result reflecting the motivating intention. Yes, ultimately, if you do something, you want to know if you ended up doing what you thought you were, but since you’re “always already” doing things any articulation of doing and happening has its origin in a not doing so as to prevent something from happening. Deferring some mimetic crisis is always the obverse of any observable act which suggests that the measure of any action is the relative imminence of that crisis and the delayed and distributed effects relative to that more or less likely crisis of the action taken. One could always modify an action so as to correlate it a little more closely to the assumed imminence of the crisis as that assumed imminence is recalibrated through the actions taken to delay it itself. We thereby get fractals, actions within actions, and distant actions affected in non-linear ways by present fractalized actions, which places us within the field of infinitesimals and derivatives, which is the field of calculus.

What you are doing when you defer is aligning your gestures, posture, speech and formalized actions with all others who are deferring. Of course, everyone, even the most low-impulse criminal defers—no one carries out constant violent actions throughout his waking hours, finally collapsing out of exhaustion—but there’s a difference between deferring because the field of deferral is already set (you are late on the scene, and confront only obstacles to advancing your desires), on the one hand, and the job of deferring in order to set it, on the other. In the former case, you just need to mimic already formalized responses so as to lessen suspicion regarding your dangerousness. In the latter case the entirety of your action entails a “reading” of the imminent generalized grasping and erosion of boundaries which includes blocking the grasping and restoring the boundaries (taking into account changes on the ground). The implications for what everybody is saying are as follows: in the case of late-coming, deceptive mimicry, one occupies the field of the explicit exclusively—you’re following the rules, are beyond reproach, and there’s nothing more to be said. In the case of founding the field, you create and allow for a wide range of transactions between implicit and explicit: there is much more to what everybody is saying in this case.

In that case, what we derive from deferral are those transactions between explicit and implicit created by deferral. The appearance of the late-comer, who can be a parvenu or bureaucrat, and not a criminal, signifies the exhaustion of a field of deferral—even early on, then, one could anticipate this devolution, as it’s implicit in the various checks regarding what counts as saying the same thing in that field. Clearly, then, I’m writing this for those who want to anticipate, delay and reverse such developments, beginning with the founding gesture itself—in other words, those interested in working in the field of derivatives. There is an intersection of the juridical and the epistemological that makes a kind of calculation possible here (how possible is part of what is to be calculated). Anthropologically, we can identify shifts where, from the entire world being a source of what we can anachronistically call “data” regarding the advisability of one or another course of action (the movements of the stars, apparent anomalies in nature, the reading of entrails and other “signs”) to the bounding of an observable event with a narrative structure: that is, what someone did and what they meant to do. This represents an enormous advance in deferral capacities, as someone is placed at the center and subjected to the violence of the group not in terms of singular signs that draw in the crowd immediately but in terms of the creation of a scene with a line drawn between observers and participants. Here, there is an effort to ensure that all involved see the same thing, and therefore herein lies an indispensable origin of scientific, experimental practices.

One way of framing current impasses, often discussed in terms of the limits of modernity, and post and transhumanism, is in terms of the possibility of experimental scientific practices completely replacing juridical ones. There is an obvious logical possibility here: let’s posit the familiar critique of the juridical in “scientific” terms claiming that, well, since the point of addressing crime through open public institutional means is to ensure that the harm caused by what we deem criminal acts is minimized and maybe even eliminated, why not abandon the “barbaric” practice of “punishment” and treat crime as a therapeutic and medical matter? What matters is not that the rapist and murderer be punished, with the ostracism and horror evoked by the public presentation of the crimes, but that his impulse to rape and murder be neutralized, in advance, prior to the commission of any crime, if possible (and why shouldn’t that be possible?). We’ve all seen enough versions of this scenario in science fiction to imagine what it looks like. And to realize that with the replacement of the juridical by the scientific form, much of what we associate with the human goes too—it would be impossible to exaggerate how much of our moral and aesthetic thinking is bound up in reflections on the various paradoxes of the juridical form, including the ways in which the enforcer of punishment can come to look uncannily like the transgressor/“victim” of the punishment. But perhaps what seems indelibly human here is only transiently so, as we have found to be the case in other areas—maybe we could redirect our moral and aesthetic thinking, or subsume them as well into a broader scientific field.

What is ignored by this scientism is the anthropological origins of the juridical form, which lie in the suppression of the vendetta (which would mean that the discussion of appropriate punishment must always find reference to some lower threshold that might reignite the vendetta). There is a larger violence involved in this expropriation of power from kinship networks and tribal orders by new imperial centers but remembering this makes it all the more important to remember the explosive potential of tinkering with and trifling with the juridical form. Indeed, scientistic superventions upon the juridical form threaten precisely such a re-ignition by acting “arbitrarily” (without the formal distribution and exercise of rights), thereby exposing imperial power in a “naked” form and in such a way that discredits scientific pretensions, because the laboratory methods taken as definitive of science can never be matched in the public world. Demands that all, or a selected “some,” submit to some medical procedure in a manner unmediated juridically necessarily appears “tyrannical,” even to those who see it as benevolently so. Any particular experience of “bio-medical tyranny” might be impotent (then again, it might not be), but such “tyranny” wrecks the always tenuous articulation of the juridical and the epistemological. The juridical form does confront increasingly unmanageable anomalies with the receding of sacrality from the social center, but the only way the scientific disciplines could replace it would be by including all within the disciplines. This is a worthy, but daunting task, one that requires the generation of disciplinary spaces focused on the manifold interfaces between the juridical and the scientific—interfaces which involve, among other things, differences in scale between the individual case examined juridically and the general process examined scientifically. To put it bluntly, releasing violent criminals in the name of a scientific hypothesis is both bad government and bad science.

The generation of disciplinary spaces focused on juridical-scientific interfaces is as important an act of deferral as any one could undertake today. The juridical is essential for ensuring that those authorized to generate scientific knowledge are handling their data and its ramifications for the public with probity. The juridical still provides us with our evidentiary standards for wrongdoing—the transference of the establishment and enforcement of those standards to disciplinary institutions themselves will be a long and uncertain process, and we won’t know that it’s been accomplished until no one feels a need to talk about it—polemical assertions that we have made the “switch” would themselves be signs that we are far from having done so. The path to doing so, and a sign of good faith on the part of a new officer class, would be the use of techno-media infrastructures to revivify kinship networks, locally scaled economic units and ethnos, as sites where responsibility for norm-setting, surveillance, policing, pedagogy and so on can be “off-loaded.” It is this space of deferral that generates the derivatives that we use to “up-load” the resentment we donate to the center. The (non-mathematicalizable) calculation involved here is as follows: acting and speaking so as to support the comportments needed to restore and preserve the juridical forms providing for transferability and reciprocal strengthening across juridical-scientific interfaces. We try to figure out what, in any case, and in any case within a case, or potential case within cases, make that more likely. The scenic continuity from ritual, to the juridical, to the scientific can only be sustained by ensuring the integrity of each and every scene, organized around an ostensive, even if virtual, center, which means sharply scrutinizing and when necessarily resisting the tendency to treat anywhere in the world as conditions easily made suitably “laboritorial”—a tendency, it must be said, indulged in less by scientists or engineers themselves than by politicians hoping to leverage the scientific to justify their own violation of juridical scenic norms.

The means of generating this kind of disciplinary space, the kind occupied by a new officer class, scientifically and technologically competent while engaged in the revivification of their various sites of origin and modes of entry into juridical form, is grammatical—the sentence is to be leveraged. Language remains, and I think will remain, our most powerful form of data processing. The declarative sentence, in its literate form, with its constituents made explicit, is one of the great human accomplishments. You have a subject, or topic, what we are talking about, involving an at least imaginable ostensive; a predicate, or comment, what we are saying about the topic, whatever singles it out, as either a target or site to be protected; and we have the modifiers, each of which provide us with information about the subject or predicate, or something that is itself providing us with information about the subject or predicate. And by “providing us with information,” I mean answering questions, actual or potential, all of which is involved in constructing the space of deferral that is the declarative sentence—the modifiers create a thicket of obstacles and considerations we’d have to get through to obtain or get a clear view of the “subject” or “topic.” The declarative sentence is the infrastructure of a disciplinary space, however momentary.

By creating a center with a mediated and modulated approach to it, the sentence opens up onto a space of differences and similarities, agreements and disagreements, distinctions and deferrals. The modifications—adjectives and adverbs—indicate a range of other possibilities that have been considered, perhaps unawares (they’ve been “considered” by the position one occupies on some scene) and denied or delayed. Pronouns create indexical relations within and between sentences, and the very fact that one sentence follows another for reasons that could never be completely explicit generates fields of the implicit. This is perhaps all elementary, but I’m laying it out to suggest the possibility, value and eventual necessity of speaking this way—which would mean speaking about the sentences we construct in a manner akin to the way we itemize laboratory materials and procedures. We all should be ready to talk about why we use one, say, adverb, out of a field of near synonyms—in many cases there will be reasons beyond what we can supply, and since we all know this there is no “gotcha” moment involved here, just an entrance into a linguistic field under formation.

The value of Anna Wierzbicka’s discovery of the Natural Semantic Primes lies in the power the primes offer us in tracing the creation of disciplinary spaces. Our entire vocabulary of verbs and their nominalizations referring to speech and cognitive acts are all more contextually loaded ways of referring to saying, thinking, knowing, seeing, hearing, wanting and feeling—or to not doing those things. And “all” a disciplinary space does is create a shared and very specific way of doing all those things, including in various combinations with each other. These disciplinary spaces are the derivatives of deferral, and the way to construct them is by deconstructing the existing disciplines, including the residues and wreckages of superannuated disciplines we find scattered in our “common sense.” The interfaces between the juridical and the scientific are what we can see, think and know through disciplinary spaces; and these interfaces are also between the securing of infrastructures of data and singularized succession. And these are themselves just ways of speaking about listening to the center and trying to figure out what would count as a way of obeying its commands that maintains it as the center that can prolong that and supplementary commands. The imperatives of the center first of all appear in your language, in your sentences, which are imitations and translations of other sentences which always raises the question we can make more explicit: how to imitate and translate, and why? Which elements of the infrastructure to make more explicit; which inappropriate demand or importunity to leave implicit? You find yourself in a field of language that you are always ordering, and that ordering can be brought into view. You can see, think, hear, know, say and feel what you do because you are in a “here” densely anchored disciplinarily, and you must do all of that more explicitly to create the derivative “there” where another might see, think, hear, know, say and feel the “same,” infrastructural adjustments allowed for, in this program of ongoing hominization. The derivative born of deferral, then, is practices and selvings most likely to ensure the continuation of the juridical/scientific, infrastructural/successionist interface made explicit here to some there.

Last post I tossed out a way of distinguishing the digital from the analogue, drawing upon Alexander Galloway’s recent essay in Critical Inquiry as translated into the Natural Semantic Primes: same/other articulations are digital, and “likenesses” are analogue. What we experience as intuitive, spontaneous, “movementy,” and so on is spreading across a field of likenesses, with ever-shifting thresholds for what registers as “like.” If we inquire into the production of these fields of likenesses, especially with the intent to construct new ones, supported by new scenic designs, we do so by inscribing a series of same/other articulations and oscillations. This is the practice of drawing derivatives out of deferrals. What is the same is what we can point to, indicate, mark in such a way as to return to and reinscribe; what is other is that we can produce ostensives within a space that is never given in advance, subsisting on sheer faith in data (the given) and the imperative to “handle” it. So, we can think in terms of a Turing style series: same-other-other-other-same-other-same-same-other, etc. This would represent the terms of oscillation between ostensives generated within a disciplinary space and ostensives that self-reflexively check the constitution of the space itself. In a court of law this might mean moving back and forth between examining evidence and testing and contesting the terms of evidentiarity. In a scientific space one moves back and forth between data gathering and analysis and checking the instruments and their settings, including the algorithmic settings used to process the data. So, programming a greater increment of deferral and therefore a lowered threshold of significance into a given space would mean tagging both evidence/data (same) and constitutive conditions (other) in increasingly hypothetical, even bizarre ways that have not yet been considered and introducing these derivatives into the existing, unfolding field. This kind of practice could not be quantified (except in provisional ways, for convenience at given junctures)—it could only be stylized, “literarized,” “indicativized” within sensitivized sentences and discourses. Such practices would contribute to the integrity and continuity of existing spaces while deriving from them other possible spaces found, say, in the implications of a phrase created to capture a possible data drift brought to notice by a particular sub-hypothesis (maybe even by creating a series of new adjectives referring to conversions modeled on existing adjectives).