Before and after will have been the same; the part of all is the same; doing and happening are the same. This is the basic programming language, which we can articulate with connectors like “such that,” “when,” “insofar as,” etc. Before and after will have been the same poses the question of succession and options, and also our debt to the center; the part of the all is the same pertains to the decision settling a dispute retrieving the nomos or originary distribution; doing and happening are the same operates the sensing, measuring and computing organs and mechanisms so as to increase their power of penetration into the fate of the imperative: is what has been done what has happened? Establishing the same across these registers does not involve a reference to an ideal state but, rather, to the temporal and spatial measurements that would see to its installation. Perhaps the scope of a single country and a single generation makes the scenic realization of the same imaginable; maybe we need the universe and eons for the scenic design. Along with being abstract conceptualizations, the articulation of these phrases is to be prayer, uttered in the face of perplexity, as a reminder of the means of engaging perplexity.
The program needs to enter and generate transformations in the surrounding environment, which is to say, everything for which the various possible articulations of our phrases do not suffice to describe but can nevertheless be leveraged by them. So, we approach reality with our phrases as a kind of a priori (but also a reduction) and we then find that everything in reality is like everything else in reality in innumerable and ever new ways. But now we can say that everything is like everything else insofar as everything, with each thing presented to us through the grace of a historically extended deferral, is an articulation of the phrases, with a programming string long enough to effect the mode and degree of similarity measured by that historical deferral. The model here is Anna Wierzbicka’s translations of words into the natural semantic primes, only on an immensely larger scale, translating sentences and entire discourses. When the programming string gets long enough then the likeness is converted into a same/other binary, and we have our thing, like before but also like a whole new realm of things. Programming language and prose are to increasingly approximate each other here, so that learning to code will eventually converge with learning a language, or an idiom. The programming language enters “natural” language as a transfer idiom intertwined with it, as a kind of magnetic center of conversation. When someone is speaking, or when we are reading (either way, dealing with a text—even non-verbal texts can be included) it is always possible to ask what in the text or in a particular “voice” or “position” or word within the text will be what it is after we have taken in as much as possible all the ways in which it will not be what it is and has been as scene gives way to scene; we can always identify the givens or data enabling the intelligibility of the discourse, which is to say, who has what, who is commanded and who commands, in what way, what are implicit terms of exchange, etc., and ask in what way or requiring how much time and space, or upon what scenic expanse, would the givens be what has first of all been given; and we can always alternate between maximalizing and minimizing the doing and the happening of all nameable things on the scene, including the chemical and physical things. (Difference is relocated to likeness.)
Sensing, measuring, mapping, recording and algorithmic extraction and derivation—all of science and technology circles back to these constitutive products of the disciplinary space. We can identify all as features of the scene, going back to the originary ritual scene itself—a scene is designed so respond to movements, position movements in relation to each other, provide various standpoints from which the scene can be surveyed, serve as recipient of deposits and residues left by actions on the scene, and shape the activity of participants. To design a scene is to enhance those features, to place them in cybernetic exchanges with each other. Scenic design, extracting and deriving from the scene, is the event. When you work on the elements of the scene, you need to find out what they can do, and some of the things they do become leverage for establishing new scenes: this is the reciprocal convertibility of furnishings and scenes. A telescope developed to scope out the enemy becomes the lever of a new scene once it is pointed toward the stars; or vice versa—I don’t know the history of developments here. It is this convertibility that the transfer idiom targets, and it is a convertibility that operates at all scales, from the planetary to the molecular—on a disciplinary scene, anything can become a scene within the scene. The disciplinary inquiry, pursued to its limits, finds cosmic and atomic scenes of justice and finds in the requirements for the renewal of its own scene the elements of succession; just as the order of succession and paying back and forward creates an allocation and scenes of justice and the disciplinary inquiry into governance or the tensegrity of the imperative; and the scene of justice refers back to its origins in ritual commemoration and initiates all the sciences of human behavior, becoming the screen against which all desires and resentments appear and can be scrutinized.
In breaking down all expressions, linguistic and otherwise, to these articulated phrases or formulas, we set ourselves the problem of recomposing expressions in the world, or scenic reality, as signs and evidence of scenic design. It’s best to begin on the surface of things, flittering among likenesses, such as what one or another event, scene or figure reminds you of. This is Peirce’s “musing.” You end up, after circling around a bit, landing on a field of likenesses, interested in finding/founding the same in it. And then you start playing with the idiom, working on a translation by reducing the field of likenesses to some variant of after will have been the same as before insofar as the part of all is the same when doing and happening are the same. You can think of yourself as being on a disciplinary scene, miniscule, like standing very close to someone else sharing a rare instrument with great penetrative power upon which you must take turns; or gigantic, spread over centuries, with you pointing out something to someone who might be born a few hundred years from now. You can think about justice being done swiftly, visibly and to universal acclaim; or coming late, too late for the victim and known only to a few, but still enacting a retribution which the victim might have anticipated as posthumous vindication. So, we have new formulas, like “justice being done swiftly, visibly and to universal acclaim” and “justice coming too late, and yet coming and still being a kind of justice,” and these are a couple of variants of “the part of the all is the same,” which we need as a transfer idiom because what is the same in these two like experiences of justice is that the part held by the victim is the same, even while being fundamentally different, before and after. What is the part, which part, what is the all, how does the all circulate as parts and reassemble as all—with these questions, raised by the imperative to solve the formula, the idiom enters the general language and the infrastructure while also eliciting the claims of succession rituals and the disciplinary.
Note that the idiom is constitutively “optimistic,” here in agreement with Peirce again, because “meaning” can only be optimistic, presupposing that someone else will in some minimal sense “understand” even your cry of despair, because without such optimism you would not be able to shape and utter that cry. You can’t imagine justice without imagining it might be done, you can’t imagine knowledge without seeking it and therefore assuming you might find it, you can’t make a gesture without allowing for the possibility of a reciprocal one. The vast extremes the idiom asks us to imagine allow for the convergence upon the “middle” of action—justice might be done by a rigorous investigative team and honest judge tomorrow, or it might be done retroactively by some future historian, and it is in that margin that you can press for the former while hedging by leaving traces for the latter—and leaving those traces enriches your sense of tactical moves that might be made in the moment. I could say these things without the transfer idiom and have been for years, but it’s not the same without the insistence on positing and acting on some scene upon which more than one person could say “this is the same.” This is the irreducible component of ritual, of commemoration and scene-setting, which keeps recirculating the pointing out of the same on an expanded or relocated scene. The idiom can only be convincing, though, insofar as the prose becomes continuous with programming in the sense of guiding research into increasingly comprehensive databases in such a way as to distill new searches regarding the most expeditious way to register and ramify the imperatives of those who can only act insofar as they are seeing to their succession.
An array of articulations of these formulas can be turned into search terms by training them on a selected database drawn from texts inquiring into the thresholds and anomalies constituting each of them: so, various versions of a move made within a disciplinary space that would detect the threshold at which the juridical takes hold in some aligned space, and so on. The purpose of high cultural texts, especially literary and other scriptures, is now to serve as such a database. The training of the terms on the database would have to be done by “cultivated” readers but once machine learning takes hold in a satisfactory manner the database is used to cultivate readers at different levels and scales. And then, with the idioms thereby created, you start putting questions to all the databases, questions regarding law, monetary policy, knowledge, sacrality, law, succession and so on with a special focus on how these questions constitute each other. This would be a kind of sculpting of the databases, and an ongoing exchange with the central intelligence, and it will be an inexhaustible exchange because new decisions drawn from the exchange will transform the entire database. The database or central intelligence will become currency, because it will provide not only the information but the personnel capable of employing and reshaping in real time the information to meet the immediate needs of institutions strategically located within networks of interdependencies. It will be authoritative and sacred because it will be an institution of deferral, providing answers that no one exactly wants but that are nevertheless irresistible—an kind of oracle, but one whose underlying message will always be “I will be all and I will be there, with you, the same throughout,” which I think is a good, if free translation of the Name of God given to Moses before the burning bush.
That initial work of translating the formulas into purposefully curated language stores, the work of the transfer idiom, will always remain, and will always solicit participation from everywhere and everyone—from their abilities, according to their needs. There will always be a kind of leap of faith and judgment that the translation will be the same as the original, and this faith and judgment will have to followed by continual iterations that continue that gesture of saying these two very different samples of language are the same. And a fairly small number of people would have to make the initial leap, just because it’s more interesting and promises unimaginable benefits, before it has any really backing or can make anyone a profit. Once set in motion, it would produce at an exponential rate the new officer class whose services would be indispensable. The habits of thinking required can be developed now, simply by translating language back and forth into the transfer idiom, which involves reworking language so as to intimate some way in which, say, an incremental enhancement of deliberate succession practices brings a sphere dominated by resentment under the empire of the law, provides some confused disciplinary space with a tighter set of questions to ask, and so on. Our thinking and writing habits would change accordingly, as we would intentionally write as the creation of search terms aimed at rummaging through and reorganizing the databases, considering how to be unpredictable enough and in the right ways so as to widen and rank in a more informed way the options consistent with the current spread of reliable intelligencers. This, in fact, actualizes the originary hypothesis itself as a mode of deferral, and the successor to the very gesture it has hypothesized.