Paradoxes of Self-Referentiality as Algorithmic Practice

In my essay on “GA as the One Big Discipline” in Anthropoetics and again in Anthropomorphics I proposed turning the metalanguage of a discipline upon that discipline as a way of intervening in the discipline: transforming disciplines into disciplinary spaces. So, for example, one might ask how a particular sociological inquiry helps maintain social cohesion in sociology, how an essay in psychology enacts certain forms of cognitive operation, what are the rituals holding an anthropology department or journal together, and so on (and even more so, in this very discussion we are having within sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.). This approach has much more thoroughgoing implications which we can examine by taking into consideration that virtually all language in a literate civilization is disciplinary in the sense of being both historically and institutionally specific and authoritative while exempting itself from the discipline imposed on its subjects. If we start with the widest and wildest hypothesis, all the verbs, and the nominalizations formed from them, concerned with thought, speech, desire, ethics and morality, other than the Natural Linguistic Primes, are disciplinary. That’s the starting assumption, at any rate—we can remove terms that we deem pre-literate as it seems necessary.

Let’s take a simple, and certainly pre-literate example: the difference between “do,” which is a prime, and “make,” which is not. (There are definitely languages without a word equivalent to “make.”) Think about how hard it is to define “do”—anything you could do is something you do, and any words you could use to define “do” would ultimately themselves have to be defined in terms of “do.” But “make” is fairly easy to define: it involves moving and doing.(both primes) something to different things so that they become one thing. “Do” is absolutely simple, while “make” has a degree of complexity—that complexity is what different languages will formulate in different ways. It’s not surprising, then, that self-referentiality yields meager results when applied to “do” but interesting results when applied to “make”: you don’t really “do yourself” when you do something, but to say you “make yourself” any time you make something can be true and worth reflecting on. I think we will find something similar with other primes and the words that seem closest to them: “say” and “speak,” “hear” and “listen,” “want” and “need” and so on. In each case, the prime has a simplicity that repels self-reference while the non-prime has a degree of complexity that rewards it. So, we can treat such words as disciplinary and, in fact, in each case the non-prime word can be taken to presume a position of exempt judgment that does not apply to the prime word. You can ask or tell someone to say something and you can repeat what they said, but “speak” is used to add a layer of command regarding how one says something (one is told to speak more loudly, more clearly, more slowly, etc.).

All of language, then, is a field of play, and most importantly all those words by which one claims to say, think, see, hear, or know within a particular institutional setting. Zero in on the prime at the base of the word in question, and design the scene from there. Take a word like “understand”—a study of the uses of this word would be extremely edifying. One could, of course, offer definitions of “understand,” one could write philosophical essays and books arguing for what it “really means” to “understand,” one could nominalize it as “the understanding” and put it at the apex of a philosophical or theoretical system—but it seems to me (a precisely targeted corpus search could prove or disprove this) that “understand” is most often used to refer to what someone doesn’t do—it points to a lack. Of course, one might confess a lack of understanding oneself, but even in that case to “not understand” is mystified, whereas what we’re really taking about is not being fluent in some idiom. But one is always fluent in idioms that must overlap with the idiom in question, and to put it this way is to initiate a learning sequence, rather than erect a barrier that is as miserly when it comes to providing access as the officials at Kafka’s Castle. So, asking how we understand “understanding” here is a good way of exposing the mysticism holding up that barrier.

What I am presenting here is more practical than anything else anyone might do, whether it be organizing, fundraising, creating narratives, forming communities, establishing independent and resilient platforms, etc., as worthy as all those activities are. I am providing an app here, one which can be uploaded to any device, which is to say, deployed on any scene. This app is a means for subverting and satirizing the pretentious, testing the claims of the authoritative, working out the implications and limits of your own (and thereby creating a shared) vocabulary, and keeping your mind alert and in practice. (Try it out on one of my own posts—I won’t mind.) It is a way of creating a community of learners, in which everyone can remember and be reminded of what it’s like to not know how to do things you now know how to do—I think very few people have considered how extraordinarily difficult it is to remember that, and the power of a community predicated on those who do remember has never, I’m virtually certain, been tried out. If your struggle is against those who are certain they know it all, such power is not to be underestimated.

COIK: this acronym, standing for Clear Only If Known, used in discussions of teaching grammar (you can only explain to a student what a “dependent clause” is if the student already knows how to recognize a dependent clause), applies across the board to all our “explanations” and “understandings.” All you can do is invite people into a vocabulary—that’s all the disciplinary discourses themselves do—with whatever barriers to entry you might want, keep speaking it with them, incorporate whenever possible their mistakes as variations on this or that region of the idiom, and use the idiom to name the activities within the group. If you realize that’s all you’re doing—carrying forward other vocabularies that revealed some way of transcending an anomaly in a discourse you were previously immersed in into a new idiom—you can do it less obnoxiously and in a way that facilitates greater contributions from the participants. The app I’m proposing here is a way of doing that while and by cutting a swath through other idioms.

Every order aims at total saturation of naming—one of the many things liberalism forbids and therefore must pursue in roundabout and dishonest ways—every person, place, time and thing is named, by the onomastician-in-chief or someone named by him, and therefore refer back to the central authority. Any name outside of this system of inter-reference is an abomination. Converting disciplines into disciplinary spaces aims at producing a social dome, or canopy, out of language. Or, we can say it creates a set—the set of everyone whose name refers back to the center. The set is renewed with each act of naming, so the social order is the set of all the successive sets. Everyone is therefore outside of the system with each utterance (sample) only to be in placed right back in by all those named by the sample. You want to name so that the name will be transmitted in perpetuity, even if only as a trace in subsequent names. You convert mythical names into the names of hypothetical practices, which is to say what will be the signs that you have done what you are doing: so “explaining” a social process is turned into what someone, somewhere, would say if certain things were deemed to have been done and to have happened. Any reference to the social order, to the idiomatic intelligence, is the initiation of a series of actions issuing in one uniquely exemplary of it.

You can only understand what is understandable; you can only explain what is explicable, which means in your claims to understand or explain you’re enacting its understandability and explicability so we can read these features of reality off of you. Of course, they are not features of reality, but, rather, mythical projections of an epistemic practice circulated by some faction contending for the center—so, rather than explaining them, we can look for the translation in what the understander or explainer says. When you critique you enact a crisis, even if not the one you claim to expose; when you analyze, you break down yourself into the components of your object of analysis. When you argue you create a society of shills for hijacked traditions of thought; when you interpret you confirm the institutionalization of the text as part of the interpretation industry; when you proclaim you conjure an audience magically prepared to echo your speech. It’s not that these words are off-limits (who could forbid them?), but that when you perform explaining, analyzing, and so on you’re only renewing the names if you include your own performance within history, institutions and disciplines within your speech act. And this always means that you saying something now increases the likelihood of someone else saying something else on some other scene—something that, in iterating what you do now what results from what they say will be part of what was said.

How to repeat with some difference the other’s sample is perhaps the most important thing to figure out in any exchange. That you will mirror the other in some way is certain. You want to mirror, or iterate, in such a way as to found a new sequence that can supplement the voice of the center enduringly. This involves hypothesizing everyone’s input to scene to which the sample was contributed—everyone, say, at least implicitly contributing to the explanation of that which in turn explains them and their explanation. Then, everyone’s samples are being donated to the center—insofar as everyone is outside the scene only so as to be more firmly networked and embedded within it the governance of the scene is strengthened by a central intelligence that iterates the entire scene as a set that keeps trying to include itself. In maximizing the idiomatic intelligence of each scene you defer the authorizing of each term of the idiom to central intelligence, which is thereby made more intelligent. The endgame is the abolition of metalanguage, which would be the infralinguistic integration of literacy into a transformed media ecology. Imagine there’s no metalanguage! This would not reduce our vocabulary—quite to the contrary, we’d find there are dozens of ways of covering the semantic ground currently covered by “understand,” “explain,” “analyze,” “interpret,” “mind,” “consciousness,” “will,” “intention” and all the rest. All of these words come down to saying, hearing, thinking, knowing or seeing something on one scene that someone else (maybe another you) will say, hear, think, know or see on another scene, and that someone else could say is the same thing. There’s no more momentous utterance than that “this” is the same “it” as “that.” Everything is staked on such a claim, which can only stand for as long and as widely as it is iterated, which means you leave it up to the center to ensure such a distribution of selves. Paradoxes of self-reference has always been a political problem of the declarative, beginning with the treasonous Cretan who tried to curry favor with the Greeks by accusing all his fellow Cretans of being liars so as to prove his own truthfulness. Any declarative statement implies an exception because it must await another’s ostensive verification, which means any sentence is always held hostage: metalanguage, or disciplinary discourse, redeems itself by holding authority hostage to the ostensive-imperative paths it has inscribed (only our protocols can determine what counts as data—liberalism is really nothing more than a long, more or less successful, attempt to cancel its enemies for violating its terms of service)). Hostage taking ends when the sentence is performed, or designed as a script to be performed, on a scene set within an endlessly unfolding setting of scenes upon which the sentence will be displayed as a spread of people. Using someone’s discourse to demonstrate that he is part of what he says everyone else is initiates this unfolding. Who will watch the watchers is always an operative question—who certifies the certifiers, who regulates the regulators, explains the explainers, etc.?

The implication here is that if you want to immunize your own most important claims against the same kind of hacking you should ensure you could retreat, if necessary, into formulations derived entirely from the primes. So, my own insistence on power/responsibility interoperability can be reduced to: if you say you want someone to do something, you have to see to it he can do that something. Among other possibilities. What are discrediting circularities under liberalism can be reduced, under absolutism, to problems of converging primearchy and succession: saying and doing things so as to enable others to approximate practices most likely to see to the management of existing institutions so as to ensure deliberate transference of power from the top in perpetuity. This becomes algorithmic practice when you work as a translation program that distributes all practices into successionist convergence, on the one hand, and effacement of the center and defacement of anyone likely to occupy it, on the other. A strict binary.