Paradox and Post-Dox

If we are no longer to think in terms of the liberal social contract in which we are each of us free individuals whose protection is guaranteed by the state on condition of law abidingness and not reintroducing the vendetta and thereby reject the revolutionary (i.e., large scale vendetta) implications of that conception, the question of how to account for and practice our exchanges with the center is reopened. Insisting on pure obedience to the absolute power that is sovereignty, regardless of whatever mediating institutions are said to allow us to make claims on the sovereign, is at best limited if for no other reason than the unavoidability of what I’ve called the imperative gap, which is to say the difference between the imperative issued and the one obeyed. In other words, the “here and now” of how to obey can never be fully specified in the imperative itself, and if we crowd into that space all the considerations and calculations we might ordinarily assign to the free subject at large, we have a formidable space of ambiguity and proliferation of possible decision paths. Embed the potentially infinite space of the imperative gap in the new norms and technological capacities of recording and surveillance and the stakes and challenges increase, especially once we price in the double-edged nature of every technological development, which always will provide means of evasion, subversion and redirection along with the direct exercise of power from the center. The expectant scene, into which we can compress the stack of scenes and the embedding of the entire stack in the credit and accreditations installed in any particular scene, is a terrain on which we will all be making the most consequential decisions, those regarding the provision of data to the center.

The sovereign, or pointman, or dictator, can be seen as the origin and continuation of the nomos, which is to say the originary distribution, which can be traced by a series of successions, however crooked, from some appropriation of a territory to its current governance. Yarvin’s “sovereignty is conserved” maxim is true in the best sense, that of enabling us to study any institution or event in terms of who, exactly, is sovereign at any particular point—for example, part of the reason why crime is so scandalous is that sovereignty is ceded in various patches of territory to some thug with a knife or gun (we could call them little big men); and it’s even more scandalous insofar as this sovereignty is ceded as a delegation or a “short” (i.e., sovereignty strategically ceded so as to be recovered at a lower value) so as to allow for the terms of governance to be redesigned surreptitiously. This also makes the sovereign, or occupant of the center, the final judge in any dispute over the exchanges and inheritances constituting the ongoing exchanges within the nomos. The lurking anomaly in theories of sovereignty has always been how to situate the sovereign in relation to the law: if within the law, the sovereign is not really sovereign; if outside the law, the law is nothing on than the sovereign’s arbitrary will—we end up with an endless oscillation between monarchical and republican forces since the “instruments” (very much including human instruments) of rule will always have some say within the imperative gap and the monarchical/republican binary leaves the question of that say up to the hostage taking stance of imminent civil war or even the surrendering of sovereignty altogether. My proposed answer to this question is that the occupant of the center does, indeed, make himself available to suits by members of the order, in accord with their standing and registered reciprocal obligations, but he does not make himself vulnerable in terms of stripping himself of his powers in the face of accusations—that is, you can sue the sovereign, but you’d better have a very good case and probably a class action, because it’s a perilous undertaking in which the sovereign will not only defend himself but countersue. A certain lurking of civil war in any order cannot be excluded a priori but we can minimize it here insofar as the intensity of the struggle over the occupant of the center’s removal, if it comes to that, is moderated by the chain of succession which must eventually get to a point where we get a successor who was not a “co-defendant” in some sense with the sovereign removed under cover of law. This would require creating a level of trust wherein, say, one could accept that an impeached and removed president could nevertheless be trusted to appoint a successor who could in turn be trusted to appoint a successor and so on until we get to the sufficiently unimplicated sovereign.

The imperative gap is where the imperative exchanges get worked out and where credit is granted, extended, retracted, forgiven and enforced. It is where tracking and tracing takes place and therefore the interplay of transparency and opacity. Here is where the questions of “citizenship” and “subjectivity” get worked out, as imperative exchanges increasingly take the form of data exchanges. Peirce’s “each and every one of us is an insurance company” remains largely true in this new form, as you prepare, generate, curate and emit data for all the tracking and tracing devices on every expectant scene and in return data assessments are made and disseminated on your behalf by the institutions through which you’ve circulated, providing you with access to positions within those and other institutions. This can best be studied on terms derived from ritual, which is to say, those of petitioning, perhaps the typical form of imperative exchange (as it includes without being limited to prayer), but also poised to appropriate the idioms of data exchange itself, as our vocabulary becomes increasingly fintechy, as we come to speak in terms of “latent spaces,” “vectors,” “calls” and “puts,” “shorting,” “derivatives,” and so on. In finance all reduces to credit and the ledgering of credit, which is most directly transferable to petitioning, but the language of algorithms and machine learning also involves indirect petitioning, as one comes to behave in ways intended to move the needle one way or another on various accrediting scoring systems—here, one is simply petitioning an even more unseen agent of the center, a kind of virtual representative of the current terms of centered ordinality.

Paradoxically, the best way to determine the ways in which you will be trackable and traceable will be to continually update your vocabularies and idioms in ways that the databases upon which the language learning models will not have caught up with until you have once again updated your, let’s say, passwords. And here is where a new form of agency aimed at qualifying oneself for the New Officer Class (but all qualified agency will come to be modeled on the NOC) can be situated. Drawing upon new institutional forms and technologies to describe human interaction is a perennial feature of linguistic development, with a particularly obvious example being the notion of the mind as a “blank slate” at an early stage of print literacy when many more people faced blank pages (I assume the “slate” is a reference to the classroom, which suggests the ominous possibility of erasing it periodically) regularly than had ever before. One argument I could make for a kind of “accelerationism” is that this continual linguistic updating will likely accelerate with accelerations in the expectancy of scenes (the myriad ways operating on one scene requires reference to other scenes with devices planted in the one you operate on) and that, furthermore, participating in this process as intentionally as possible is what will count as “freedom” under enhanced scenic expectancy. Think of it as blockchaining (another obvious candidate for various metaphoric extensions) your idioms. AIs are extremely unlikely to coin phrases in ways that will be immediately recognizable and “contagious” within a shared space, unless, perhaps, they are very intensively trained upon carefully selected databases to do so—which, then, opens a space for new institutions, pedagogical and corporate, that would contribute to the coining of idioms for specific sites and groups.

Right now I think that it is the Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs that provides an avenue (or at least a trope) for such contributions Perhaps the best way to contribute useful data to the system is by striving to occupy the boundary between the categorizable and the uncategorizable so as to continually train the system on revising its categorizations. Are you a qualified “professor” of a particular trend within a particular domain of knowledge or have you been engaging in practices that don’t fit into that category without falling easily into another? If you’re doing genuinely important and innovative work this should always be a question, but now the question can be foregrounded and stretched across all the forms of qualification and accreditation. Fit the category as best you can while scrambling the terms of the category so that it oscillates between recognizing you and failing to do so. Be the GAN you want to see in the world. Make your selving a public process, raising the question of whether you are the same, and under what scenic configuration it would be slightly more likely than not for some “average” cataloguer to say you are the same. A company that helps you blockchain your idioms for advanced petitioning practices might build databases out of the latest research in AI, singling out terms of varying degrees of specialized use and obscurity to recoin as descriptions of selving.

Let’s wrap the imperative exchange (petitioning) around a revisiting of the origeneration of the speech forms, with succession driven by inappropriateness and retrieval. Since the best use of AIs will ultimately be to keep having them learn and then teach us new languages (idioms), let’s assume that the emergence of the speech forms is recapitulated with each new sign (sample) issuance. Every utterance includes an inappropriate ostensive retrieved by the creation of an imperative, an inappropriate imperative prolonged into an interrogative and an inappropriate interrogative halted (the declarative solves a kind of halting problem) by the array we find in the declarative: the imperative to stop the question (the operator of negation)+ the imperative conveyed from reality to an out of reach object of petition (the fact of the matter) = a new, virtual ostensive, to be in turn indicated to some degree inappropriately. In the heart of this I would implant, as a kind of stabilizer, the imperative exchange, whose own career from something like “here is the piece of food you demanded/now give me more food to find” through increasingly elaborate rituals and sacrifices culminating in the offering of the first born, to, finally, “help me know how to follow your commands,” in which the petition becomes a self-regulating oscillation where you’re demanding commands that enable you to make your demands clearer so they bring forth clearer commands. The imperative exchange shadows and informs the succession of speech acts, and, from a linguistic stance, a felicitous utterance will approximate the convergence of the two tracks. Maximum information about how the thing might be taken alongside revisable filtering about how the thing seems now and minimum commitment to any the possible futurities that follow. Maximum elicitation of the convergences heading toward crisis along with minimal sacrificial and maximal aesthetic inclination as they approach you. Maximum power attributed to the center along with maximal credit and delegation from the center and minimal direct command. The better the declarative the more parsable it is along these lines—you can see that these paradoxical, maxim-like utterances are right on the boundary of the self-regulating petition: let my declaratives be parsable along the lines implicit in this very request for assistance in forming the declarative.

Now, let’s think of clothing ourselves in these linguistic shields and mirrors in our petitional relation to center—we will both be providing enormously useful and prolific data to the center, laying out samples indicating fracture lines and reparative healing across the entire centered ordinality and protecting ourselves from intrusive tracking and tracing precisely by anticipating any collateral that might be taken from our own practices and used to short us. Anything the center might think needs to be protected from any of us has been preemptively turned into a call on a future derivative that even those invested in a center that is shorting the system must see as necessary collateral. What some occupant of the center could think to charge as subversion has been articulated as advice from which all cashable interest has been divested. If the center wants to surveil us within the terms of criminality and forfeiture it will not be able to see us because we have rerouted those categories into programs of deferral, pedagogical futures—to look at us is to see a deflection of interferences with petition learning, which accelerates the machine learning of the center itself. And this would mean deferring indefinitely our suits against the center while gathering evidence and identifying possible torts and complying with an enhanced and anticipatory practice of discovery.