Programming and Visuality: Toward Inscipto-Punctual Cultivation

Technology is governance, and so is media. The study into the perceptual, cognitive, emotive, limbic and so on transformations wrought by the successive media, beginning with writing, then print, and then the acceleration of mediatic innovation in. the 20th century (film, TV, computers, smartphones, internet, platforms) should be undertaken as studies in mass mobilization—which may often take the form of mass neutralization. Each media provides new ways of cutting up and restitching experience, but this is so as to produce the kinds of selves needed to enter and manage or to reside their trust as clients in the disciplines. Modern technology—the perfecting of the imperative—has become the exclusive form of scenic design since the occupant of the political center has been placed on permanent trial; the corresponding development of capitalism as a mode of power has dictated the mobilizing uses of technology through the reciprocal capture of a particular sector of capital and the state. The most powerful sector of capital must drag in its wake other sectors in its struggle for differential accumulation through the use of state capacities to ensure the greatest relative discounting against espected future earnings of one’s own assets as against other sectors, and this is by now a global process whereby, for example, capitalists invested in China can soften up the American state for Chinese political and intelligence penetration (including, no doubt, sectors of Chinese capital). These struggles between capital-state articulations take the form of struggles between and within media, all of which can be brought with the compass of intelligence operations aimed at enhancing one’s own or undermining some opponent’s data security. Effective mobilization is when those in your own ranks know exactly what they need to know and no more, assuming what they know is in fact knowledge, however limited. (Knowing that your enemies can be hurt by the repetition of particular mantras is a kind of knowledge, regardless of the truth or meaningfulness of those mantras, and for certain ranks this may be enough.) But effective mobilization is also relative and depends on your ability to recruit to the point where effective mobilization is decreasingly possible for other sectors.

Eric Gans’s notion of the “screenic” provides us with a powerful way of making sense of mediatic domination, even if that is not his intention. In his Chronicle of Love & Resentment 615, “GA and Cinema,” Gans begins by describing film (the first “screenic” medium) as the 20th century equivalent of the “total work of art” aimed at by Wagner: “the cinema screen... was a transcendental “window” that could display images of the real world in a separate universe of human representation, to which the spectator can react with no need to accommodate the trappings of convention. Even before sound, seeing ‘reality’ on a screen was a radically new experience...” The total attention we devote to the screen is the equivalent of, and gradually replaces, previous modes of scenicity, like theater and ritual, which could never create an “ontologically other world.” Gans goes on to point out that

The screenic universe was the first full-fledged duplication of the ontological otherness of the scene of representation, the scenic world of human culture, the “vertical” dimension added to the “horizontality” of the appetitive-inhibitive animal universe, now freed by its technological independence from the artifacts of worldly framing. Dare we speculate that without cinema’s revelation of this radical otherness, the originary hypothesis would not have been conceived?

Gans then extends this ontologically other screenic replacement of the scene to all of our present day devices: “Today there is a screenic culture that corresponds to a desire to be both spectator and creator of one’s own spectacle.” This is no doubt an accurate description, and from Gans’s standpoint from, to use terms he introduced in The End of Culture, “consumer satisfaction,” this is an unequivocal increase in human freedom and well-being. I argued in Anthropomorphics for a GA grounded in “producer’s desire” because it provides the more comprehensive form of inscriptive commemoration—the producer has to take the consumer into account, while the consumer can be blissfully oblivious to the demands imposed upon the producer. (There’s also a kind of deception, and perhaps self-deception, in writing as a consumer.) And from the standpoint of producer’s desire, the ontologically other screenic is transparently ripe with opportunities for domination and control and hence represents a new mode of struggle over the human, now unavoidably considered as technologically constituted (systematically subjected to “asacral” commands)

As a “full-fledged duplication of the ontological otherness of the scene of representations,” the screenic is analog, but has come increasingly to be produced digitally. Movies create an image on a screen out of a recorded scene but computer visualization is done by coding the original image into programming language and then recoding it so as to appear on screen—a lot of decisions need to be made along the way regarding what will count as the reproduction of a certain part of an image. The screenic is likenesses, and programming is a series of decisions regarding oscillations between what will be determined to be the same and what will determined to be other. The likenesses are what “satisfiy” the consumer and the programming is what the producer “desires.” And programming is still writing and derives from the “arche-writing” of inscription. Likeness is an irreducible reality that must be “experienced,” even to program, but its production through writing “duplicates” the priority of the digital over the analog in our data-centric contemporaneity. Agency is located in some form of programming while the analog/screenic offers stupefaction.

To be a “programmer” is to deconstruct the logocentrism replicated in the screenic and construct a line of writing back to originary inscription. Writing does not reproduce speech, it does not convey “ideas”—it distributes and articulates possible practices. And right in the middle of this line of writing as derivatives of deferrals are the ancient Hebrew scribes. Gans makes the very helpful observation that the experience of the Name of God in Exodus—the “I AM”—is “autoprobatory”—that is, it could only have been imagined if it had been experienced. But Gans doesn’t ask whose experience it is—surely not Moses’s, a legendary figure standing in for the only one who could have experienced it—the Hebrew scribe who heard the voice of God “internally” in copying but also no doubt revising the mass of inherited materials under conditions of national crisis and reconstruction—as well as repeating and thereby hearing the words attributed to God, for the sake of memorization and teaching of disciples. Brian Rotman argued that in reproducing silently a text in reading one experiences the voice as coming from nowhere and everywhere, an anonymous voice reduced to “I am/will be what I am/will be.” But other peoples had writing, so why the Jews, or, rather, a crucial distinction, that small group of scribes reconstructing Hebrew literary and ritual traditions so as to impose it on a “mixed multitude” or returning exiled elites and peasants who stayed in the land, in order to govern them as a small province of the Persian (and maybe merging into the Hellenistic) empire. So, how did they do it? I think it was through the force of having to construct a series of binary oppositions so as to carry out the needed national reconstruction while creating a historical narrative that accounts for their own survival under what must have seemed like fairly miraculous circumstances. First of the all the binary between Israel and Judea is constructed as the Kingdom of Israel is destroyed with some of its refugees certainly settling in the Southern Kingdom which internalized Israel’s laws and traditions as its own while “othering” Israel. Then the repudiation of Judea’s own history of sacrifice and child sacrifice in particular, which is projected onto the “othered” Canaanites. Then a series of oppositions between Judea/Assyria, Judea/Egypt, Judea/Babylon, Judea/Persian, and Judea/Hellenist (a pattern to be continued with Rome). (If we are to follow Ron Naiweld—The Age of the Parakletos: A Historical Defense of Rabbinic Knowledge—we should add the binary “Elohim” (the creator of a perfect world) and YHWH (the usurper from the cohort of Elohim who set himself to ruling the world and first of all Israel).) And we can assume various permutations of all of these binaries. Each of these oppositions left its mark upon—was “internalized” into—those traditions undergoing perpetual revision through emulative competition with these empires that Israel, merely by surviving and incorporating them must be superior to in some sense. This whirl of same/other distinctions abstracted a God who preceded, transcends and will outlast all empires and who chose Israel before any of them emerged on the scene. A God who, we might say, is the world’s first digital object. Now, there might be something infuriating about this simultaneous immersion in and disavowal of mimetic rivalries so as to produce a divine priority of which one is oneself conveniently the privileged bearer, But how else could it be done? And the “it” that was done was the creation of a writing before speech and writing that produced the world.

One initial metalanguage of literacy would have to have been derived from the juridical, replete with judgments, contracts, violations, rebellions against authority, justice and injustice, truthful testimonies and perjuries, betrayals, and so on. This is how the speech scene would have been fleshed out in writing, and many subsequent metalanguages of literacy would be “spin-offs” of the juridical one. But philosophy, birthed along with the emergence of “tyrants,” i.e., rulers other than sacral kings, in Greece, is another major source. The problem for philosophy is to derive a form of legitimacy from the intellectual activities of reasoning and calculating required by the universalization of money (not coincidentally coinciding with the emergence. of the tyrants). The metalanguage of literacy is always concerned with creating disciplines that can fill imperative gaps—the gap between issuance of the command and obedience to it. And they do this by spatializing, i.e., creating scenes or, rather, the infrastructures of scenes. In all of the metalinguistics of literacy concepts there are things above and below other things, inside and outside. of other things, around other things, behind other things, confining things, etc. The spatializations create pedagogical platforms, upon which things are shown, from which things are announced and something is placed at some center. Deconstruction of disciplinary languages by making explicit and enacting their spatializations and reconstructing scenes out of “primal” (i.e., Wierzbicka’s primes) translations is a kind of “hacking” of the disciplines. So, for example, when you “suggest,” you, according to the online etymological dictionary, “place before another’s mind” some “proposition” (but does it have to be so clear and complete as a proposition?). It comes from a Latin word meaning, among other things, “bring up, bring under, lay beneath.” There would be no “theory” without such infrastructures, which doesn’t mean that theory is not real because no longer transparent but that theory involves translating these infrastructures which are disciplinary, historical and technological as well as intellectual—a lot needs to be in place for a suggestion to put something before another to “consider.”

Now, the digital oscillation between same and other involves the convergence upon a single point where some discipline can determine it to be the same as distinguished from some other—this is located on the originary scene where, as Gans says, one thing is significant and everything else is not. But then another thing can be determined to be the same as distinguished from everything else and so on as we lower the threshold of significance. This kind of practice then generates the degrees of sameness we call “likenesses.” You create a map out of a range of identified and recorded thing-events, and this map is one way of mapping overlapping all the other actual and potential mappings across a field of likenesses. Agency is dissolving fields of likeness into oscillation between singulars determined to be the same and others. A way of putting it, derived from my previous posts, but also explored in Anthropomorphics, is to introduce the scientific into the juridical, the juridical into the scientific and the ritual into both, or, further, to judge the terms used juridically and experiment with the concepts used scientifically. These are ways of “treating” samples so that a single likeness might become a set of same/other oscilations. But it’s all writing, and all writing is transmitted through scribal traditions, tutorially and it’s all commemorating a series of deferrals through more or less idiomatized designations that one’s writing makes more the. center of a self-referentialsystem. As a marking, writing is self-commemorating, creating pedagogical platforms, as every time the same words (now ascertainable because written) are repeated they are different and we are always trying to catch up to the difference in our next inscription. These successive differences are data and creating disciplinary collectives that can identify a range of ways of making new oscillations of same and other out of them is data security because this is how names, designations, contracts, agreements, records and recordings are archived. Agency is producing data by collecting it and collecting it by recording it and becoming data by producing it and becoming it as the only way to reliably record it. 

The Hebrew scriptures are guided by two fierce and hard-won polemics: against child sacrifice and against humans being gods. Both are broken by the Name of God as declarative sentence which ends all imperative exchanges by imposing the imperative to donate your resentment to the center, which is “exchangeable” only with being granted the ability to do so. “I will be that/what I will be” is an answer to the question Moses poses: when the children of Israel ask me your name, what shall I tell them? The answer is “presence”—whatever linguistic presence they will need (but not necessarily want) when they call upon Me. A human saying the name of God would have to be claiming to be God. As a “declarative sentence,” or, as Gans says elsewhere, a template for declarative sentences, God announced himself as a distant presence, or we could say an absent presence, the vowels in between the consonants that makes each utterance, understood as the reading of a text, the same and other from the one it’s iterating. This introduces a permanent difference between the occupied center and the signifying center, which has become a permanent problem for, first of all, the West. The king cannot be God or sacred, and all the ritual apparatuses, formulas and doctrines created to have the king approximate sacrality were bound to be flimsy—they always contain the very criteria that enable a king to be rejected for not meeting them. Needless to say, the ancient Hebrews didn’t solve the problem of a “theocracy,” or direct rule by God, any more than the Greek city-states solved the problems of “democracy” or the Romans the problems of a “republic”—because these problems can’t be solved. There are no models there to work with. As designers, though, we can program the forms of linguistic presence that will have one here saying the same thing as one there so that they can do what others will be able to say is the same thing (but at a different time). The digital dynamic here is the oscillation between the most extreme expression of probability (given our best reading of the data, these vaguely conceived kinds of people will most likely have to do something like these kinds of things at some not quite determined point in the future...) and the relentless approximation to this individual positioned here to do this thing at this exact moment. This oscillation could no doubt be programmed and algorithmized, while simultaneously requiring the highest levels of competence, reliability and judgment under pressure to repeatedly, continually act upon in any present. This would have to comprise the world but could be initiated and advanced right now at any point. We might have a hypothesis that genuinely has no need of God because God has been integrated as the linguistic operator (still, first of all, of interdiction, so as to grammaticize datafied ostensives and algorithmized imperatives through human interrogatives into declarative sentences) into all human systems. (Perhaps the human can then be specified as the interrogative interval—what I was once trying to call imperative interrogativity/interrogative imperativity. You must pose the question/be posed as the question. Something to return to.)