Originary Style

Everybody is saying the same thing as everybody else: I’m going turn this into a theoretical starting point. It’s better than the founding principles or telos of any other mode of thought. It’s both paradoxical and pragmatic: we’re always saying the same thing as everybody else but it’s never quite the same; and, yet, we could posit degrees of approximation in any utterance or sample. ESTSTAEE is literally the case on the originary scene, even though it must have only been “posited” there—part of the paradox is that everyone is saying that everyone is saying the same thing. So, why does it sound like people are saying so many different things? Because we have to say the same thing as everyone else under the scenic or infrastructural conditions of the saying and those infrastructural conditions are part of what is said. We say the same thing as everybody else so that we don’t do the same thing as everybody else at the same time. Everything is like everything else, which is the continuous analogue world; the same thing that everybody says to everybody else is naming the other who commands us to refrain from doing everything at the same time—that is the digital world, same/other, discretized and present. But saying is always a kind of doing, and doing is always a kind of saying: we can trust the world’s languages, all of which, according to Anna Wierzbicka, agree that “say” and “do” refer to different things, while also finding those pedagogical points of undecidability between the two worthy of special attention.  

This string of “theses” is a step in a longstanding attempt to solve a pedagogical problem: how to instantiate the ergodic proposition that we are always only working with existing chunks or samples of language—that anything we might talk about as an “idea,” or a “belief” or an “argument” is to be directly and exclusively treated as a reworking, through replacements, modifications and combinations, of existing discourses, which is to say, trains of sentences. I have been working on something like this, vaguely intuited, in classroom practices for a long time—encountering some discussions of philology, as much a source of modern science as of the modern humanities, provoked me to try and push on towards some solution. It was a colossal mistake of modern literary criticism and theory to proceed on the assumption that the literary texts singled out for analysis were to be treated as very special artifacts irreducible to any extrinsic conditions—although it must be said that that was an improvement over the insipid biographical, normative and historical forms of criticism that were the main alternatives—rather than radicalizing philological practices and treating literary texts as made, through a process of filtering and rearrangement, out of the vast body of disciplinary texts (medical, journalistic, political, juridical, theological, etc.) available to an author. Maybe this is really only becoming possible now, with the digitalization and datafication of the world’s texts.

The kinds of classroom experiences that set me on this path were the occasions on which I realized that it would help students, not so much to “understand” (i.e., present a familiar summary of) a text, but to work with it, to speak its language, to have them do simple things like construct positions the authors would be disputing implicitly (this only requires a rewording of the sentence with a negation), to combine two sentences from different places in the text into one with a conjunction (and then explain why that conjunction), to restate a passage with some modification, such as an adjective turned into a noun and a noun into a verb, a declarative into an imperative or interrogative, and so on. The best class would be one made up of nothing but such exercises—perhaps I’ll get there before I retire. I’ve started a few blog posts attempting to lay out this project but could never establish a frame that would make it more than just something I really wanted to get right. But everybody saying what everybody else is saying provides that frame—and for a broader inscipto-punctual pedagogy as well.

Someone saying the same thing everybody else is saying interferes with someone else saying the same thing everybody else is saying, because what each has said came instead of everybody doing the same thing at the same time but in each case with someone else starting to do the thing everybody might in turn do. Each utterance imagines itself to be blocking its own mimetic convergence, and maybe even one initiated by another’s attempt to do the same. This recreates the scene and creates the infrastructure that needs to be said as part of what everybody else is saying. So, you translate what one person has said into what another person has said, or you propose or hypothesize a possible variant of what someone else has said which is more truly what they said, at least insofar as everybody else is saying it. What I say is always the originary hypothesis as interfered with by Wierzbicka and Olson, and Jousse, and some others whose language I keep recycling and renewing. (The opening paragraph of this post is also a translation into semantic primes of Alexander Galloway’s essay in the Winter 2022 issue of Critical Inquiry, “Golden Age of Analog”) “Thinking” is trying to make some commemorated piece of language fit a new frame, commemorate a new event—some deferral of everybody doing the same thing at the same time. One sign of having done so effectively is that the vocabulary you’ve generated can name your own actions as a writer—that’s a way of enacting the simultaneity of saying and doing.

I’ve been pressing with greater urgency toward a solution to the problem posed by ergodism for another reason: I’ve been reading a great deal of contemporary scholarship of datafication in its ramifications through media, economy, politics and institutions, and much of it is brilliant and enormously informative—much of it produced by people who must still be in their 30s, or early 40s at most—and they always get to the point where they have to say, regardless of how enthused or at least fascinated they have been by their object of study, that, of course all of this reproduces racism, sexism, etc., is the logic of neoliberalism, etc. and we must therefore resist it but we can only resist it from within it—and then they’re stuck. They’re stuck because for what are ultimately institutional reasons, they can only think of “resisting” in terms of more democracy, more freedom, more equality, more rights, etc., etc., even while their own studies show how irrelevant all these categories have become. (Even more—they are almost with exception stuck in the leftist media lore of “Russian collusion” in the 2016 election. And don’t get them started on Cambridge Analytica!) There is an enormous opening here for those who can speak this critico-theoretical language within the study of technological, thoroughly digitalized environments, without those interferences. This is the source of my insistence of something like “data security” as the “slogan” going forward: if we simply accept, as a starting proposition, that in any shared activity there is what I call “centered ordinality”—someone going first, taking some initiative and then being joined by/initiating others—and we must accept it because the other alternative is simultaneous action by everyone—then the only real “value” we need concern ourselves with is ascertaining the materials required by each “ordinalized” member of the team. Whoever goes first speaks for the center, at least until he doesn’t, and you follow him and try to determine with what he needs to be supplied in accordance with what he asks; if you are him, you are deriving your actions from whomever you’ve inherited the path and sizing up your team for possible successors. And if you’re a scholar, you need only consider the archival resources, modes of collaboration, and mechanisms of dissemination that make it possible for your own work to feed back maximally into the system. From then on, we can then press on to work on replacing capitalism on terms that would seize upon its assets by converting them into the data they already imperfectly are.

All social institutions are more or less primitive modes of data collection, storage and interpretation—aesthetics, laws, justice, war, business, technology, etc.—but they are specifically these forms of archiving; so to realize their true character (in both senses of “realize”) is not to discard their shell and making them directly productive of quantifiable forms of knowledge; rather it is to make explicit and enhance the specific form of ostensivity each yields which, if it goes to the point of transforming the institution beyond recognition an exhaustive narrative of that transition will inform the new institution and this narrative will be guided by the solution of the fundamental social problem, the succession problem, through singularized succession in perpetuity. An actor within, say, the legal institution, seeks to ensure the lawyer or judge who follows in his wake will be explicitly and implicitly selected as thoroughly as possible by further ensuring that this succession will maximize perhaps to the point of integration with other orders the institution’s contribution to singularized succession all the way to the top. The further you are from the top, the less direct can be your control over succession; and therefore the more you’re auditioning by offering samples of obedience to orders coming down from the top.

Converting all means of ascertaining into datafication models completes the work of deconstruction, which was impossible for Derrida and his followers because they confront the same victimary obstruction. Deconstruction takes a foundational binary, in which the dominant term is predicated upon the exclusion of the subordinate one and shows that the dominant term is really constituted by the narrative of that exclusion. Then what? Now we can say that we assess the distribution of data that can be included in one or the other category across commemorative sites. Since language, and writing especially, is the primary form of data management, what is in question here is a style, one that works with samples in which some “metaphysical” (logocentric) claim is made—that is, where a category of substance is distinguished from its antithetical/supplemental other. This same/other digitization is spread across a field of likeness, as all the ways the opposites are alike are put on display. But the difference remains, at least for the duration of this infiltrative inscription. So, the same/other binary returns, in the form of the distinction between practices that secure the data needed to relocate the difference, on the one hand, and those that blur the discrete cuts needed to decide on a data set. This dialectic then gets iterated within the research style itself. One way to do this, and what will surely happen anyway, is to take substantives you’re starting with (the logocentric oppositions are almost always between substances) and turn them into verbs and adjectives—they become like each other, at least, insofar as they are actions or qualities, which are more fungible than substantives.

This is a style of deferral, transferring oppositions from antagonistic convergences upon the center into possible collaborative inquiry into the boundaries of ascertainability, but that doesn’t mean it’s a “dry” or “boring” style. The main interest is never in the rules and procedures generated in the course of the conversion to boundary inquiry—those are the always revisable residue—but, rather, the gestures of commemoration that create a “topic” we can talk about in the first place. Here there is high, if not always easily detectable, drama: there’s always a mess to clean up, a mess created by novel mimetic configurations, and there are always those moves whereby someone occupies the center (maybe after some failed attempts) by attracting potentially dangerous attention to himself in order to redirect that attention to a program requiring that all donate their resentment to the center. All confrontations are resolved through ascertainability—even the most direct, all-in, mano al mano street fight comes down to each fighter determining what the other has and what he has in himself—the back and forth, the testing and probing and trials, all of that is data collection and processing and we can come to see the real drama and narrative in those liminal spaces where some added significance comes to be conferred upon a seemingly trivial move.

I’ll conclude with a brief example. It has become very common in the more penetrating precincts of the right to see in all political activity the increasingly less hidden hands of various intelligence agencies—a particular media story is a CIA (mis)information campaign, this faction of this political party is Mossad controlled, these media figures are Russian funded, etc. This is certainly an advance over taking media narratives and political rhetoric at face value, but one gets to the point where one can say that these attributions of hidden hands make the sources that are presumably debunked and discredited thereby in fact more interesting and even creditable. So, we can deconstruct the implicit opposition between “genuine,” “independent” sources of information on the model of the “journalist” or “scholar,” on the one hand, and secret agent skullduggery, on the other. If this media outlet is telling me what the CIA wants me to think, and this other one is telling me what the Chinese government wants me to think, once I factor that knowledge in I actually have very useful sources of information—more so than if this is just what some guy on Twitter with 50k followers wants me to think. There’s no reason to assume all these intelligence agencies only lie, even if they no doubt do so often—and even if they do lie, they lie in specific ways, in ways that have to take into account the lies and truths of the other side, that point to doings and not just sayings, that are conveyed and reinforced and amplified by other agents who give off information in the process and that are therefore data rich. On this model, we no longer need to imagine ourselves to be crusading muckrakers, exposing the truths that will presumably make the walls of Jericho crumble and the people rise up, with the guilty exposed and led away in handcuffs, etc. (not that there would be anything wrong with that); rather, we’re privy to the conversation of the world, no doubt filled with all the boasting, misfires, stupidities, attempts at manipulation, failed attempts to make one’s discourse real, and so on, as any conversation. And one advantage of developing a style that can join this conversation is that one can address the scribal actors within these agencies, those who can themselves come to see their own program in terms of data security, in ensuring and ascertaining that those appointed to do certain things are in fact doing those things, and determining whether those things have turned out to be worth doing (have they made the provenance and chain of custody of vital data more secure?). Even the most idiotic and malevolent actor has to ask himself on occasion—well, how did that work out? So, here’s the implications for style: write in such a way that would be taking literally and formalizing addressees anywhere along the intelligence pipeline: imagine a mode of writing equally intelligible, albeit in different ways, to the useful idiot, the operative, the operative’s handler, the handler’s superior, those providing briefings for the superior and the political actor formally in charge of the whole show. More precisely: imagine addressing the entire chain as if it were coherent, or to become more so as a result of your writing.

(And this program of style, incidentally, gives a new way to talk about those menacing globalist entities like the World Economic Forum, currently plotting “great resets” and “building back betters.” Unless you imagine all the world’s nations locked in their respective silos, there will be some kind of global governance, even if it’s nothing more than tacit agreements amongst all the world’s nations regarding respect for boundaries, because even that would require the creation and maintenance of a class of diplomats who would, in essence, become a global governing class, through which the asymmetries of power among the nations would play out. Entities like the WEF, and the various mostly Anglo-originated projects for global governance going back to the late 19th century that preceded them are right to envision a mode of global governance that transfers military based to knowledge-based power. The real problem is that they want the governance before they have the knowledge and must therefore manipulate the knowledge to fit the particular mode of governance they consider themselves most likely to secure in the nearest imaginable future. The style by which this disastrous approach can be countered is not by positing the exact “opposite” values to those of global governance, but by participating in and spreading the program of data security, which is to say, positions from which ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative-ostensive chains can be authenticated and confirmed. And the strongest frame for doing so in going to be Everybody Says what Everybody Else Says So that We Don’t All Do the Same Thing at the Same Time—what is at once a stylistic, political, moral and aesthetic mantra.)

Back to style. Whenever you have some thoughts, which is to say, words, circulating in your “mind” (in your silent monologues in preparation for entrance upon some scene you imagine), you in fact are working on a text, which has some original which you can reconstruct by distinguishing the text you have from a particular sample of other variants of that same original. Your own text provides evidence of its provenance, in its vocabulary, in what it leaves undefined and taken for granted, in the insistence with which this array of words keeps assailing you, demanding some orderly expression. But part of the sample of variants you’ve selected (partly explicitly, partly tacitly) is also pressing upon you, adding to that demand—in the end, there’s one or two of those texts that is interfering with your ascension to some scene but the translation of which will facilitate said ascension. At some point along the way your own text becomes the original of itself as variant, as the terms you’ve taken over and reworked into context after context are differentiated form their uses elsewhere. You get to this point by targeting the metalanguage of literacy that marks the disciplinary space and the ostensives constitutive of that text. Remember that all the abstractions referring to verbal and intellectual actions are infrastructuralized translations of “think,” “say,” “hear,” “know,” and the other primes. You can reduce all of these terms to these primes, but then you have to get back to the abstraction, which is not “fake” or less “authentic” than the primes (well, some are fake, but you could only show that by granting the possibility that it’s not)—those abstractions are what is entailed in thinking, or saying or knowing under conditions where literacy in all its forms is mobilized to translate the imperative gaps evident in commands from the center (into those gaps slip everybody doing the same thing at the same time in all the ways that can happen). We can now say that the closing (always provisional) of some imperative gap is the staffing of some fragile and critical sector of data security. You want to write like you’re presenting yourself to be next in line to take charge of that staffing. You then approximate the convergence of saying and doing, with a saying that is insistently what everybody else is saying and a doing thereby properly distributed by that saying.