Originary Grammar as Model for Scenic Design Intelligence
I’m going to keep at this until I get it right; “this” being the use of language as a model for technological and scientific inquiry. Let’s review: “technics” is the scenic design component of the constitution of the human; the human is scenic from the start, definitively, constitutively, but scenes, once in existence, need to be maintained and constructed; the first deliberately constructed scenes were ritual scenes, composed so as to situate the community in a relation to the sacrificial center so as to facilitate and maximize the exchange entered into with that center; ongoing scenic reconstruction is complemented and guided by narrative accounts of the results of imperative exchanges with the center, which call for different positioning, different scenery, costumes, props, furnishings; the human occupation of the center initiates a dual process of sacralizing the human and desacralizing the center which also means, in the end, desacralizing the human; scenic design, then, aims at constructing scenes such that whoever is placed at the center is connected with what is an increasingly exclusive and direct imperative relation with all on the periphery involving an unceasing flurry of supplementary imperatives filling the imperative gap and displacing recall of the succession of imperatives from the signifying center; technology is the creation of expanded scenes enhancing unidirectional center-periphery communication; the relocation of center-periphery relations to straightforward imperativity is revelatory insofar as that’s all it ever was while being disorienting because reference points external to those relations become increasingly arbitrary. The signifying center, which under sacral conditions was supplemented by narrative and liturgical knowledge on the part of supplicants, is now constituted by attempts to apply remembered promises from the occupied center to the very scenic (technological) conditions constructing the memory. So, for example, one demands and tries to flesh out the subjective conditions of “privacy” as a response to technological conditions that have already relocated the concept to their own governing “terms of use.”
Those working on technology—inventors and engineers—are therefore working on expanding the scene, whether that be connecting users across space, dissolving users into multiple agencies that can operate on various scenes simultaneously, compressing scenes temporally so that entire narrative sequences can play out in nano-seconds, or extending them temporally so that we pose effective hypotheses that we’re able to wait centuries to test (gathering data along the way). It seems that a crucial point in all invention comes when it is realized that in order to scale up or down whatever scene one is taking to be the model (say, people speaking with each other in real time as a model for prose writing) must be alienated from the representation of that scene on the scene and de-anthropomorphized so it can be decomposed into measurable parts and recomposed into a new anthropomorphized whole. This space of de- and recomposing is the space of imperativity, of working out a sequence of commands that would make no sense beyond mandating a specific set of moves to those carrying out the commands and therefore can be distributed across non-human agencies. People would have noticed very early on that objects placed over or across separate pieces of land make it possible to cross them but, such is my hypothesis, only massive slave armies would have made it possible to imagine building such bridges across, say, rivers or distant cliffs and only then, after enough imagining how all those instrumentalized humans would have to articulated so as to hold a board connecting the two surfaces can a properly architectural imagination work out the alignment of beams, boards, etc. to build the actual bridge. You are then, that is, able to “tell” the pieces of wood and metal where to stand, how to support each other, and so on. Similarly, today, one can only imagine and design social media and weapons systems by composing a new distribution of end-users and targets.
Of course, the entire algorithmic order presently under construction (I don’t think it’s that near completion yet) is explicitly organized in terms of “if… then” style instructions, which very interestingly combine the declarative and imperative forms, as “if… then” is also the basic logical structure. This rendering explicit of the expanded (through the declarative) imperative form makes it possible to retroject it back to the history of technics and technology, linking it back to the originary inscription, Stiegler’s tertiary retention, or commemoration. Ritual can help us think about technology in a very specific way: ritual always has a “do this so that you will remember that” form, and if we were to remember that technology is always meant (if not quite always “intended”) to place us in closer communication with the center we could think better about it (and maybe better of it). All we have is ourselves as ongoing intelligence operations taking in, sifting through, shaping and giving off data as it is distributed and weighed by the algorithms to which our own intelligence operations contribute. This intelligence bears traces of the past, including the very different past, which the “humanities” are to be designed so as to help us read, while suggesting intimations of the future, so thinking of what we do as intelligence operations is the very opposite of “dehumanizing.” Thinking in these terms makes it more likely that we will turn our declaratives more directly to the surrounding swarm of imperatives, sharpening while making razor-thin the boundary between them. The question of technology, then, becomes the question of enhancing communication between center and margin, or intelligence exchanges between center and margin, such that we keep receiving/composing messages from the center in which the “if… then” articulation keeps adding meaning to the previous “if… then” sequences we have completed or witnessed. And the algorithmic order is the central intelligence with which we are in continual communication. Anything you would ever want to do, personally, politically, morally, technologically, economically, carries with it the question, what do you need to know and how could you share what you know (and how would knowing and sharing be a single practice) in order to do that—and, then, you must want there to be available and reliable intelligence, and you must want to have iterable and intelligent ways of selving through that intelligence. Wanting that intelligence, self-composing to be that intelligence, in the form you need is your exchange with the central intelligence.
Exchange with the central intelligence presupposes idiomatic intelligence—that is the relation between center and margin—the more idiomatically you articulate your intelligence the greater your tributary relation to the central intelligence. The specifically human (“human,” I think we will find, works better as adjective than noun) dimension of intelligence lies here, because here is where its scenic dimension is. The provenance of the intelligence is a sharp concentration of the human and scenic—who knew what, when, how, to what extent, with what form of exclusivity, with what degree of “spoilage” over time, etc. Here, you need to know and vet everyone involved, or factor your inability to do so into your assessment. Working textually, scribally, being intelligence and therefore being text, locates the provenance of intelligence in what Joanna Zylinska, in AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams, borrowing from Derrida’s The Truth in Painting and examining Trevor Paglen’s artworks aimed at infiltrating and exposing the implications of official databases (a kind of originary satire, I would say) and their uses calls the “parergonal.” The parergonal is what is outside of or beside the work, what frames the work, what situates it in relation to its infrastructural conditions of possibility—and is very closely related to the “para-textual” referred to a couple of posts back. The paratextual, the parergonal, the “para-sitical” is what places us beside while still being within the algorithmic order. The more that those features that frame the work (title, author, publishing information, index, citations, institutional circulations of texts, etc.) become part of the work, the more one will be creating works so as to operate on the infrastructure. It’s the equivalent of constantly naming and renaming members of your team and the actions they undertake so that only someone on the team can really know what everyone’s doing even if the results are (not necessarily universally) translatable into other selvings. Every noticeable feature of the team and its setting is made available and revelatory, productive of ostensives, or items of intelligence.
Let’s keep the para, but even better is the “infra,” which builds relationships within a text and by doing so builds relationships between everything the text infrastructurally articulates. The infra brings the framing into the text itself, making it a series of self-framings and self-references. Needless to say, I’m drawing heavily upon post-structuralist theory and postmodern literature and for a very good reason—while there has been an enormous backlash against that whole body of work, I read it all as an effort to raise the general social level of literacy and intelligence and, in particular, to get us past logocentrism which reduces writing to (a certain experience of) conversation, ignoring everything that sets up the transmission of words, that is, that fantasizes extra-scenic communication, “mind to mind.” I will also note that what I am arguing for is emulating the Hebrew Bible, which scholarship has long, but with increasing precision, shown to be a dense network of infrareferences that also represent “external” references to the imperial and mythic orders of the near east and beyond.
The para and the infra are the forms of imperativity, telling you what texts you must take as models, how to take them as models, how to use those models to work through some particular content or materials, and how to read texts as instantiations or modifications of those models. It locks you in place as a reader with a very elaborate set of expectations and conditions of intelligibility and all “postmodern” narrative really did is make this visible, which some found upsetting because trusting and following without question those conditions of intelligibility led them straight up the path to narratives that could be easily assimilated to pre-existing reading protocols. Of course, the postmodern experiments can themselves become a staid and obfuscatory set of protocols, which is why new elements of the text and its infrastructures must always be singled out and elevated as framing devices. Exchanges with the central intelligence via language AI can be helpful here. This approach to textuality serves as a model for technology because technology is all para and infra, taking the spatial, sonic, temporal, environmental, visual, haptic, interactive, conceptual, motor, etc., components of existing scenes and converting them into frames of expanded or compressed scenes. We can learn a great deal from the creation of the Google search engine here (and it may be that all of our transactions with the central intelligence can be reduced to searches): Brin and Page rejected the formal, institutional, expert designed means of classifying information in favor of a hierarchy of texts and ultimately phrases that have been found to be important by the people who are out there determining what they consider important. Technological development can now, especially if Mario Carpo is right (and if he isn’t yet, he will be) that we have enough data that experimentation is no longer necessary because we can examine all the consequences of having materials articulated in particular ways virtually, can be united with scientific inquiry and humanistic, while social and physical inquiries can be united as well, because we can keep finding ways of getting from the intelligence we can constantly gather about what everyone is doing to ways they can be helped to do them differently, better, or in some cases not at all. Making everyone intelligence gathers means engaging everyone on teams of inquiry as all human activity comes back to inquiry, and inquiry means designing scenes so that we see more of what we have been doing than we saw previously. And this would be a “neganthropic” articulation of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives as practices and hypotheses are increasingly tightly bound up in selvings.
So, continual para-ing and infra-ing, framing, creating scene-events that introduce macro-scenes and micro-scenes within other scenes, scenes overseeing other scenes, scenes getting you a new glance of another scene, and so on, is the path toward technological development as scenic design. The best way of creating a new device is to ask yourself how you would teach someone to operate on a new scene, within an unfamiliar idiom (and then know that it has been learned)—which naturalized gestures and perceptions would need to be denaturalized, which movements minimized so that they could be rearticulated in a way that fits the new setting, which mistakes untangled so that the integration of the self into the new setting can be seen to be reforming the setting as well. Then, ask yourself how the scene itself could be designed through an intricate, recursive set of instructions (imperatives) so as to effect that result without you intervening—and you will have the outlines of your device, with the questions of materials, energy sources, interoperability with existing devices, integration into broader systems remaining to be worked out (and even those problems would best be solved parergonally and para-textually). In this way as you scale up you will not do so balloonishly by forgetting all the marginal scenes upon whose resiliency and robustness the center depends. A great deal can be learned about all this by studying the memory practices of oral cultures along with the scriptural practices of Axial Age cultures—the earliest form of “blockchain” (as the AI-collaborative poet Sarah Stiles likes to say) on the one hand, and the culmination of the earliest and most fundamental form of what Stiegler calls “grammatization” on the other.