Petitioning Technology

I pointed out a couple of posts back that virtually the entire “spiritual” vocabulary we have inherited from scripture was derived from other socio-political institutional relationships: roughly, debt and slavery; testimony and judgment; treaties between imperial powers and vassal states, often including dire threats directed toward the latter; diplomatic messages; and the ceremonies surrounding kingship. I hasten to add that in my view this doesn’t delegitimate scripture derived vocabularies in the slightest—these vocabularies were revised and transformed so as to generate new disciplinary spaces making real discoveries regarding fundamental human paradoxes. Indeed, where else would such discoveries come from, if not from crises in social relations? The observation enables us to see patterns we wouldn’t have otherwise and vindicates the assumption that thinking is always embedded textually, in practices of translation that are themselves embedded in institutions, and not something we carry out inside our own heads. And now I want to reverse the relation of derivation and point out that the earliest forms of discourse and therefore of thinking were no doubt prayers, which would mean that all those economic, juridical, political and geo-political discourses were themselves translated forms of petition to the center.

Prayer is the paradigmatic articulation of ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative. Prayer directly addresses—“points to”—God; it makes some request of God; it acknowledges some obligation to God (some command that must be obeyed); it at least implies some question as to whether one’s compliance has been acceptable, and one’s petition accepted; and it will, grammatically, have the markers of a declarative sentence (forgive us our sins as we forgive others’ against us—there’s an imperative conjoined with a description here, even if the description is bordering on a promise). So, the “model declarative” I’ve proposed in some posts, aimed at addressing the “impossible question” (a question “demanding” a priori and impeccable credentials regarding the other’s qualification to answer the question) should really be modeled on prayer. An impossible question allows for no declarative mapping because it presupposes the existence of center which would make the question unnecessary. For example, “how will you advance equity” presupposes a shared and actionable understanding of “equity”—the “prayerful” answer (or, better, preemptive ruling out of the question) is something like “show us what we could do now that would that would produce and indicate a shared understanding of ‘achieving equity’.” Prayers are meant to make something happen—they’re performative—even if what they are supposed to make happen can be ineffable. There’s something circular about prayer, which always comes down to asking God for the wisdom and strength to know and do His will—and it’s the prayer itself which supplies the wisdom and strength. This makes prayer, which has its origins in ritual, intrinsically “technical.” It’s the first form of self-design—with the self not necessarily being a single individual.

So, what happens when prayer fails? The kind of minimal and extremely advanced form of prayer I mentioned in the previous paragraph is the result of a long succession of refinements of previously failed prayers. Here is a case where originary thinking is indispensable—in this case, what originary thinking entails is finding in the more advanced form a closer approximation to the original form. So, the originary “utterance,” the sign issued on the originary scene, was really quite close to something like “let us obey you so that we will be saved,” and it is later forms of prayer, subsequent to the incorporation of the practices of everyday life that would lead to prayers asking for rain, for success in the hunt, victory in war, etc. It is the failure of those prayers that would ultimately lead to a “reworking” of the prayer form to something “infallible,” like simply asking God to sustain you in your devotion to him—a prayer like that cant fail because the prayer itself is a sign of its success.

This ongoing approximation of prayer to its originary form can then be a model for design practices in any area, at any scale. Solving any technical or design problem is a matter of converting impossible questions into “petitional” forms—you’ve solved the problem once you have a self-sustaining petitional form that no longer needs the impossible questions to “prompt” us. We always want to get to the point where we can say something like “let each of us be where we need to be such that things can be as they need to be so that we can be in these places,” with “each of us,” “where we need to be,” “as things need to be,” etc., already having had their referents supplied by the ongoing approximation process originally set in motion by an impossible question involving how it could be possible to enable someone to do something that no one has ever imagined anyone being able to do before.

Now, let’s speak a bit more “technologically.” A, if not the, basic form of a technical device involves some articulation between sensor and algorithmically programmed response to what has been sensed. We could think of the exemplary thermostat here: when the sensor detects that the temperature has hit 77 degrees, a mechanism kicks in to lower the house temperature to 72. A self-driving car articulates data derived from sensors (regarding the immediate surroundings of the vehicle) with data derived from satellites in accord with an algorithm that “tells” the car where to go. We have here ostensives (“sensing”), imperatives which are “extended” ostensives (start pumping in cooler air, turn right, etc.) and declaratives (algorithms) that provide for the continual modulation of the relations between them. The mechanism itself has no place for questions, it seems (I’ll be revisiting this question, though), but the questioning comes in the thinking about how to arrange the entire set up. Not only can a lot of different kinds of sensing systems be set up, but any mode of sensing designed will “give off” more data than was originally desired or planned for; likewise, the of imperative sequences result in new ostensives that will confirm the process (measuring the adjusted temperature; arriving at your destination). Thinking technically involves an oscillation between multiplying the possible articulations between ostensives and imperatives, on the one hand, and filtering from among those possibilities, on the other. So, we could say that an “impossible question” multiplies possible ostensive-imperative articulations beyond capacity, but this ability, which generates unmanageable resentment in the social world, can be converted into a controlled process of probing in the technical or designed world. (And, eventually, since we must keep reducing the differences between “social” and “technological,” or, rather reduce the differences marked by our present discursive repertoire, “impossible questions” in the social world will be subject to the same treatment—indeed, once that’s the case, we’ll know we’ve made some real progress.)

The continual refinement of prayer I’ve been referring to is located within the monotheistic tradition: to put it bluntly, it’s a process of approximation available only to those who keep getting their worldly desires denied. If you keep losing wars, and those you considered your saviors keep getting killed, you have to revise your prayers so as to no longer request victory but, rather, that defeat be recognizable as a higher form of victory. The power of this shouldn’t be denied—Nietzsche would have identified it as “ressentiment,” but he also recognized its power, since in the end everyone loses (i.e., dies, but must also consider the possibility of losing what one loves), and will be “tempted” to call upon a God who promises nothing more than to always be with you, even in your darkest times, when everyone else has abandoned you. And the ongoing revelation of the “vanity” of desires and, ultimately, the mimetic roots of those desires, depend upon such prayers which emerge in the wake of defeat. Still, such prayer is ultimately anti-technical—in fact, it will assimilate the technical to the brutality of the “winners.” So, this presents us with a challenge: to “install” the tradition of petitional refinement, or originary petitioning, in the perfection of the imperative that I have been identifying with the technical.

I can test out the hypothesis presented here by treating or formulating this challenge as an “impossible question,” initiating a sequence that would lead us to a version of the model declarative that would generate instructions for participating in the perfection of the imperative on the way to installing singularized succession in perpetuity. I think the “same sample” practice promoted in the previous post but one can be mobilized here. Remember, this practice begins with the assumption of the miraculousness of the utterance, grounded in the “non-fungibility” of language, which only the originary hypothesis can account for. Every utterance is miraculous, but they sure don’t all seem to be—many of them seem banal, repetitive, automated, dull-witted, etc. So, we put in place a heuristic: demonstrate the miraculousness of the utterance by constructing the background that first of all seems to “falsify” but ultimately affirms it. It’s a way of thinking you can practice: the most stereotyped, programmed, utterance, like the salesperson’s greeting, seems utterly unmiraculous precisely because we can see the practices setting it in place, while the very possibility of all of those practices having been carved out of contrary inclinations and practices being brought into convergence with the life history of this person, saying it in her own way (different, however slightly, and in indicative ways, from the way anyone else would say it) “proves” the miraculousness of the utterance by way of a social analysis as thorough as our interest and patience allows for. Since the real “miracle” and the real non-fungibility of the utterance lies in the scenic participation, irreducible to anything extra-scenic, necessary to “pull it off,” we can hold in abeyance the overt religiosity of the “miracle” and speak of the “same sample,” since what is really remarkable here is the sharing of an ostensive indicating that we have all directed our attention upon a single point.

So, in any inquiry, which includes the solving of some technical problem, we start with a same sample and we arrive at another same sample at the end. We start with something that doesn’t “fit,” something not quite working along with everything else in some mechanism, or some possibility suggested by it that you don’t quite know how to “insert” or even create. The technical process involves beginning with an accentuation of the “at oddness” of the sample with its surroundings, with the sameness of the sample reduced to the very possibility of identifying and focusing on it against its background; and it ends with the same sample embedded in an exhaustive system of inter-reference with the rest of the system—you could say it’s the mere tip of an extended sample. That’s the imperative one is enjoined to perfect once one embarks on the practice. So, you keep asking the system to let you do this or that, with each failed petition leading to a reduction wherein materials, capacities of fellow workers, infrastructure, aligned projects, and so on become increasingly inter-referential so that everyone is in a place such that the place will be that place. Petitioning will then have been technologized.

And this petitioning technology then becomes a model for addressing the social and erasing the presumed boundary between human and technical. The samples uttered and dispersed all around us need to be taken through a similar process—a continual testing of the meaning of utterances by asking what and who would have to be in which places for the sample to take on programmatic effectivity—we start with an “I want” or a “this is terrible” (which just implies an “I want”) and we get to work embedding that sample in an infrastructure so as to see what same sample would arrive at the other end—that is, a satisfaction of the desire or resentment expressed that would invoke a full mobilization of all that would need to be mobilized so as to eliminate everything interfering with the installation of the desired state and in the end be acknowledge to, indeed, be the thing that was wanted even if necessarily in an unanticipated form—and, for that matter, at each step along the way, would be acknowledged to be at a step along the way. To construct a practice aimed at preserving the sameness of the sample would require singling out and including in those practices the preservation or enhancing of the continuity of power of those presiding over the supply chains. A practice of transforming the same sample as problematic anomaly into the same sample as possible center of a system must, then, include a continual approximation towards the naming and improving of the succession of one practice or practitioner to the next. In other words, a socio-technical transformation, or a design practice, is modeled on the exemplary personnel to implement it.