Perfecting the Imperative

I’d like, here, to think through more thoroughly than I have so far the problem of identifying technology with the imperatives and doing so within the terms of originary grammar (the sequence of speech forms). Associating technology with scenic construction and design, while still critical, has been a bit of a deflection from this more fundamental thinking. As questions of “AI” and infrastructure become increasingly central, a powerful mode of thinking about technology grounded in GA will be indispensable. I also see a need to counter (but also appropriate) a powerful tradition within theory of technology—that which, like McLuhan most famously, sees technology as an extension of the bodily organs, senses and even nervous system. This approach situates technology in relation to desire, rather than governance, and assumes the Big Scenic Imaginary whereby humanity can be portrayed as one big human. After all, who is doing the “extending” or “prostheticizing”? Whose organs are extended? Why, for that matter, would anyone one of us want our central nervous system extended across the earth? The surveillance systems now built into every bit of infrastructure aren’t an extension of my eyes, or yours. To say that human senses and motions serve as a model (and not the only one) for technology is not the same thing as saying technology is an extension of human senses and motions. Nor does a prosthesis utterly transform the organ it is meant to “supplement.” By foregrounding the imperative, we also make explicit the centralized and collective nature of technology: the technology that enables me to “reach” across the world and bring back some goodies produced in China more fundamentally organizes the motions and the interconnections of those motions of millions of people from here to China—and, for that matter, to the end consumer himself, who must position himself in relation to the circuit in prescribed ways. In terms of GA, or anthropomorphics, this is once again a question of producer’s desire vs. consumer’s satisfaction. If technology is a prosthesis, it is a prosthesis of the center, and more proximately the occupant thereof, who benefits from having eyes, ears, and limbs all around; but this also requires brain proetheses to handle all the data and intelligence brought in by those expanded senses—this doesn’t simply add up to a more intelligent, insightful or better calculating human because we’d then need a distribution of others to be our prostheses as well, and we’d have to instruct and rely upon them in a way we don’t quite instruct or rely upon our eyes and ears (which won’t hide things from us, or tell our enemies what we’re “seeing”). There’s not much thinking of technology within GA, so I can’t attribute the prosthesis metaphor to GA in particular, but I can associate it with the consumerism made foundational by Gans and take this moment to insist that the allergy within GA circles to thinking in terms of governmentality requires a very strong dose of antihistamine, and thinking through technology via the imperative might provide the requisite dosage.

To issue an imperative is to instrumentalize another. This could be interpreted as making that other my prosthesis, but in that case we are all one another’s prostheses from the start, and the originary community a large, artificial body—which is true but the theory of technology would in that case be an adjunct to anthropology, which accounts for how we could be reciprocally prostheticizing each other in the first place. We are all prostheses of the center. Imperatives get prolonged and modified along the way, and the instrumentalized insttumentalize themselves and others, including the issuer of the initiating imperative. When the. imperative is part of a pedagogical relation, as with an apprenticeship, the notion of a “prosthesis” seems vitiated: a prosehtesis is not created so as to eventually replace the possessor of the organ in question. When you send out a scout you don’t know what he might find—and it’s an odd extension of the eyes and ears that can decide what to disclose. Imperatives are easily repeated, and can be stripped down and refined to make them more effective. And they can be subdivided into smaller imperatives, covering less ground or, of course, prolonged or made open-ended. The scout can be told to send back reports or signals periodically. And then the participants in the activity can issue imperatives into the environment that shape it and enable it to participate in the imperative order. If, drawing upon Eric Jacobus’s supplement to the originary hypothesis, requiring the weaponization of some tool in order to arouse the level of “expressiveness” (to refer to Andrew Bartlett’s recent essay in Anthropoetics) needed to turn appropriation into gesture/sign, we see a kind of war and peace oscillation in the originary community’s exchanges with nature, then the scope of the imperative is further widened—imperatives are given to and taken from the surrounding beings, however they might be named and animated.

And we still do have the highly imperative ritual scene, very carefully choreographed so as to issue a shared imperative (petition) to the center and elicit imperatives in return; and, moreover, the originary scene itself which, while devoid of imperatives, is composed of preliminaries of the imperative in the form of movements that confine the other and channel their attention. (This might be included in the “originary rhetoric” Gans speaks of in Signs of Paradox.)  But the new work to be done here is to pose the problem of an imperative order that continues taking on new micro and macro imperatives and binding them together in a circuit of imperatives, with the imperatives being shaped into material forms such that one piece can “communicate” that imperative to other pieces. This in requires the ability to see reality itself as held together by chains of imperatives, even if one is not obliged (commanded) to see reality exclusively in those terms. I’ll mention briefly (because I’ve said this so many times) that this kind of technological imagination required the mass armies, slave and otherwise, of antiquity and then in the desecrated world of shaken kingship in Europe. But the real problem now is to ground this circuit of imperatives in the sequence of speech forms, with special attention to the imperative-interrogative link, mostly neglected up until now.  The guiding hypothesis here is that the logic of “inappropriateness,” or what I called “mistakenness,” can scale up, rather than just being a one-time process to be discarded once the declarative is up and running.

Each sign emerges from a disruption of presence, and is a restoration of presence, with “presence” being the deferral of some likely violence. We are to some extent in the realm of intuition here—no one can, in a given situation, be expected to accurately rank the likelihood, form, and time frame of every conceivable instance of crisis-inducing violence that might erupt within that scene. At the same time, intuition can be trained into habits, which lies squarely within the province of technics. Habit, of course, is also imperfect, and requires constant retraining. In the originary derivation of the imperative, someone—Gans suggests an inexperienced language user, perhaps a child—utters the sign for some object that isn’t there; once the object is retrieved, we have an imperative, even though the original sign user was not trying to invent one. We have a dynamic, or dialectic here, one which could be regularized—insofar as I approach the scene with desire, especially a producer’s desire, in a quasi-hallucinatory or, less provocatively, imaginative, manner, I produce absences that generate imperatives. In principle, any hallucination will do, but, here as well, “fancy” can be replaced by a trained imagination that can model perceived absences on previously generated presences. In this case, is the imaginer purposeful in trying to create a new form in a way that the “inventor” of the imperative (actually, co-inventors, as we must include the one who retrieves the object) is not? Yes, more so, but never completely so—if you knew exactly what you wanted to discover or invent you would have already discovered or invented it. There remains a residue of presence-maintenance. We will, then, have to come back to the question of whether and how this could be mapped out and prompt-engineered.

The world has been laid out with millions of “ostensivities,” sensing mechanisms articulated into a global infrastructure. There are more ostensive “uptakes,” which is to say more data, or incipient data, than will ever to recorded and committed to some kind of memory, much less analyzed and integrated into feedback cycles. Some of them, to pursue the current hypothesis, must be inappropriate or mistaken enough to register and elicit an imperative effort to restore presence. Those would be the data, or “givens,” that stand out in some way, that reach a threshold triggering some responsive mechanism, or that require the description of a new pattern, or answer some latent or manifest question. Unlike the originary scene, such instances of mistakenness are carefully and systematically prepared for—the ostensivities themselves are the results of untold iterations of the ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative cycle. They were created to answer questions, which means that we should see questions both as prolongations of imperatives into requests for ostensive marks that might themselves be prolonged into imperative complementing and completing the initiating one, but as intrusions of the imperative into the declarative. And the imperative can thus intrude into the declarative because the declarative itself, as an effort at presence-maintenance, requires a series of ostensive confirmations, and often ostensive-imperative oscillations, to be intelligible (which is to say, to be responded to with either a “yes” or a “no” in some way that can be repeated and commemorated).

The imperative being prolonged into the interrogative implies a potentially lengthy journey, with preliminary questions issued along the way that might add to the momentum propelling the imperative forward. The more the imperative order is systematized and automated, the more it spills over into all kinds of questions, some of which are channeled through disciplinary gutters into micrco-infrasructures designed to lower the thresholds at which ostensivities register and increase the pathways by which they convert into imperatives and interrogatives; while others get drained away, leaving unsystematized questions streaming along the stacked scenes. Here is where an anthropomorphic theory of technoscience as applied anthropomorphics can train our thinking most powerfully. Every question, indeed, every uncertainty, shock of surprise, or aroused curiosity, can be traced back to some chain of imperatives that has confronted the questioner, but that has origins that can be traced back to the usurpation of the center and the more recent thoroughgoing desecration of the occupied center. It is ultimately a command that everyone be at their posts and contribute to some future iteration of the occupant of the center what can no longer be contributed directly to the present occupant of the center. Desecration is simultaneously advanced and repaired through the creation of new rituals of succession that reference, break down, and micro-imperativize the imperative order—what I have referred to previously as the treatment of technology as the creation of pedagogical platforms. Scene-stacking is equally a social and technological set of practices.

The important question here is whether this scenic conception of technoscience can contribute to descriptions of and improvements in the thinking involved in these activities, primarily hypothesizing and constructing thought experiments. And here is where perfecting the imperative and ushering it into the interrogatory state comes in. This, of course, will be hypothetical, and not based on evidence from actual inventors or scientific discoverers, who from what I’ve seen anyway tend to see thoughts as just coming into their minds. But let’s say you see the entire world as a vast network of interconnected imperatives, directed towards you through those imperatives you feel most urgently pressing upon you. This could, of course, apply to personal situations, but I’ll stay focused on those situations where you are most directly taking orders from the infrastructure. Instead of trying to “liberate” yourself from these pressing imperatives, let’s say you try to further perfect, make them easier to follow, make them lead into other imperatives more fluidly, have them reveal their origins in previous imperatives. Whatever you’re doing, however much you enjoy it or feel you have chosen to do it, is done according to the most absolute imperative imaginable. Whatever you’re doing now is what you must do, with the fact that you’re doing it proof of that. As the imperative, under your own attempt to comply perfectly with it, is prolonged backwards and forwards, the fluency with which some of the imperative has to be obeyed flows into areas where various possible modes of obedience come into the field, leading to the question, how to obey? You select one way of continuing to obey the imperative, and perfecting it further along in its extension, and as a result, the field of possible compliance or application shifts. This generates a new imperative: to “align” the field with that hypothetical imperative, and then another hypothetical imperative, and so on. In each case, new imperative-ostensive links present themselves on an “as if” scene upon which you enter. A new question: how to make these possible imperative-ostensive links present? All the while, the only thing holding this practice together is the ongoing attempt to perfect the imperative one started with, which has taken on new shapes in the meantime but part of perfecting it is measuring its application which in turn entails composing it as the same. The more the imperative presents as the imperative of the center, the more imperative perfecting it becomes while the more differentiated the fields of possible prolongation of the imperative become. Part of your scenic design becomes conveying the imperative to others, who will have to collaborate with and carry on your work, but that also means introducing new imperatives into nature and the inanimate in order to install that imperative for others. Imperatives thereby generate scenes upon which they can be further perfected. And this facilitates your engagement with existing and potential collaborators, with whom your work will go better in every regard through the mediation of instruments, implements, and measuring devices—themselves the results of the translation of imperatives into imperatives issued into the inanimate. Every difference or disagreement calls for—commands—a new technoscene, hypothetical at first, from which one could narrow down the possible ostensives that would continue the imperative by answering the questions raised by the difference or disagreement one way or the other. These are pedagogical platforms, and so is the line of thinking presented here, which should itself be taken as a kind of technology, or programming language, creating terms on which some “we” might speak amongst themselves.