Programming the Same

I am trying to provide programming language for bettering our relation to the center. Humans have never left the originary scene; rather, humanity has been an ongoing attempt to better the terms of that scene which, in fact, has never been “quite right,” having been improvised from the start (this observation alone should be enough to dismiss any nostalgia or desire to restore any tradition). The first problem of humanity is the problem still—to indicate by the same sign that we are all seeing the same central thing—rather than deism, the problem is deicticism. In a broken, non-linear way we have continually created greater distance between ourselves and such a center, introducing an ever more complexly articulated array of proxies which would, through a never completed series of delays, provide us with intelligence regarding required actions to ensure the center keeps providing intelligence. In this sense every human order is total, if not “totalitarian”—we are always, each and every one of us, leveraged. Capitalism, in Bichler and Nitzan’s understanding, as value determined by discounting against expected future earnings, is simply a particular, and particularly consequential, endpoint in this development. Everything move we make is a ritual gesture aimed at calling into being a particular array of gestures deriving intelligence from the center. In that case, though, we can relativize the concept of “ritual,” rather than using it counter-intuitively to describe “secular” actions, and speak in terms of establishing a durable same as opposed to some other across a field of likenesses—durability is key here, because what I say or do now must continue to be the same against whatever that saying or doing defers implicitly forever; which commits me to continually intervening in the infrastructural conditions that will make it so and generate proxies who will in turn continual to make it so—or make it have been so, which introduces infra-referentiality into the equation.

 

The assumption that at every moment we are engaged in an exchange with the center recalls the argument I’ve made previously that language is most fundamentally prayer, with the most fundamental mode of prayer in turn being a request to the center that one be supplied with the knowledge and willingness to give oneself over to the center. Here as well, though, perhaps we can generate a more precisely originary idiom rather than using, other than as a kind of index, terms claimed by vast inheritances burdening any new use. Peirce’s maxim that meaning is whatever you take to be all of the consequences of whatever claims you are making is still with us here, as long as the consequences of making the claim itself are included among those consequences. Technology is a breakdown of sacrality, or ritual, insofar as it allows the occupant of the center to treat human beings outside of any sacred framework, “untented,” as “pieces” or parts of some all that can then be used as a model for any number of configurations.  This has enabled scenic construction in which humans are both operators or props, in widely varying proportions, with operational presence continually prop-ized or puppetized. Media that represents our practices back to ourselves mediated by data that can be parametrized in different ways introduces an irreducible pedagogical dimension to scenic intension and extension that doesn’t sacralize but does deicticize. But the broader distribution of resources and, firstly, positions, is essential to such scenic design. Money is a result of scenic expansion and the articulation of scenes within scenes and once unmoored from a publicly sacralized center money is used to secure assets that can guarantee greater revenue flows better than competing assets. Such a guarantee of revenue flow requires metrics of performance, and these metrics of performance involve cutting costs and increasingly profits within the time that the asset is held, or the introduction of standards that are taken within some administrative or legal frame to indicate the cutting of costs and increase of profits, which has no necessary correspondence with the conditions ensuring the pedagogical continuity of any particular scene. There is a space for innovation here insofar as the relative monopoly provided for by innovation can provide for enhanced relative revenue streams but the legal and political means used to exploit and preserve the monopoly depress innovation past a certain point.

 

Technocracy has not only not replaced finance but has been even further subordinated to it. This means that distribution from the center, what I have called “centered ordinality,” cannot be technologized away. Whoever initiates or is charged with an operation assigns and allots, and in doing so continually acquires knowledge of what must be allotted per assignment and what counts as accomplishment. On ever larger scales this involves data, not simply or even primarily quantitative, but qualitative data. What kind of data? One could say the data obtained to constant observation of individuals in conditions of stress and text, but so far this doesn’t involve a scaling up. The scaling up comes with the study of idioms, beginning with the awareness that there is nothing but idioms all the way up and all the way down. Idioms are themselves virtual scenes, or scenic generators, with their own assignments and allotments, and they are always revisions of other idioms. An actor can be uttered by an idiom as well as setting forth an utterance from it and telling which is which is a more challenging matter than determining the competence of an individual under conditions of direct observation and tried and tested modes of assessment. This is data that has to be called literary or “inscriptural.” One is speaking in layers of the paradoxicality of ritual, of exchanges with the center, of intelligence gathered through interference or noted disruptions in either of the above, all of which have infinitely various forms. Idioms can only be known by participating in them, which means simultaneously speaking in the discourse of a rite, the language of justice, and the idiom of inquiry. What this has to do with money is that only idiomatization can replace it—what money tells us about the likely results of projected enterprises, which now means everyone using money to predict the predictions of everyone else regarding those likely results, and the reduction of likely results the securing of future revenue streams, which means what others will pay to secure as their own revenue streams, all as a way of coordinating the tributary economy at the expense of the constant rotation of occupants of the center, can only otherwise be told by counting on a future spread of individuals holding responsible posts of which one’s counting on them doing so is a critical component. Idiomatization means turning discourse towards denser self-referentiality, with meaning increasingly dependent on the constitution of the scene with the relation between scenes constituted by scenes of translation and transposition, which means ever more precise detection of sayings at odds with meaning and bringing saying into closer approximation to meaning. Liquidity in the circulation of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives replaces the liquidity of money.

 

To say that a specific practice of language can replace money is not exactly intuitive, so I’ll have to keep coming back to that. (I’ll point out, though, that notions of money as media and sign system have been around for quite a while, so why couldn’t one media or sign system be replaced by another? The standard argument is that only prices can provide the information needed to coordinate the activities of producers, distributors and consumers—no wholesaler could just know that he needs an agricultural firm to provide him with 300,000 chickens over the next year because he doesn’t know what the retailers, who don’t know what the customers will be willing and able to buy, etc. But if everyone in a given order is included on teams, the leaders of which want to keep their members supplied and in good shape, information might be provided by leaders of teams.) An idiom, then, is always designed so as to make it that some initializing gesture will have been the same. Public rituals, whether they be improvised mass rallies or formal events like coronations or inaugurations, are taken to iterate some founding event. “Design” might not seem the right word to use here, insofar as idioms must be collaboratively and unpredictably constructed out of the very materials of centered ordinality—one or another “op.” But think about design as singularized succession in perpetuity, with each participant creating a spot into which one’s successor will fit, and that will make that person, once he comes along, recognizable, even if unexpectedly so. Everyone, then, is designing the idiom with everyone else’s design as the materials with which to do so, albeit unevenly, even extremely so. The duality of props and operatives is transformed through the idiom into one between being designed and designing, a duality that is progressively minimized insofar as the difference is really a question of scale and time—the most assertive and dominating designer is really only the material of some prior designer who designated him as successor, and the most powerless puppet can always make some marginal gesture that affects in unforeseen ways the entirety of the design.

 

Finance continually seeks to shorten the time span within which expected future earnings can be bet on—if most people think that the future expected earnings of a particular company will go up 100% over the next decade but you have good reason to believe that the company will in fact go bankrupt in a couple of years you can, if doing so will further elevate the profile of the company, buy it at its valuation, increase momentarily its valuation by virtue of having bought it, quickly, let’s say simultaneously, or as close as possible, and make an arbitrage profit produced solely by the interference in the market your purchase of the company introduced. The further the less powerful and less knowledgeable (in great part because less powerful) look ahead to value possible investments the more arbitrage style thinking on the part of the more powerful and knowledgeable is advantageous. The institutionalization of such thinking and practice will further install such power and make such knowledge accessible—control of politicians, media, and therefore laws and courts, as well as the financial institutions and people trained so as to staff them that determine that a particular mode of austerity will increase value rapidly. The regularized flipping of occupants of the center is indispensable to this process. There’s no way of opposing this order without entering it—I won’t bother to argue against a “proletarian” revolution, but it’s worth making the point that a revolt of the engineers is just as much of a fantasy—to take just one obvious example, what would be the correct, indisputable engineering solution to the best form of energy to rely on in the coming decades? Scrupulous engineers and scientists could likely form a rough consensus regarding a range of possibilities, but disagreements, and very consequential ones, would remain, since we’re always working with estimates here. So, companies would need to be formed, and would need to be valued, and would need to therefore protect themselves against the ruin of financialization while participating in it. This, then, reduces to the problem of forming data security companies—again, data in the broad sense described above—that would provide indispensable information but also the personnel suited to interpret and apply that information to sovereigns who are willing to give up one kind of sovereignty so as to preserve the means of governance. It may very well be that the whole unholy alliance of intelligence agencies, propagandizing media, and politically compromised social and physical sciences (MKUltra and all that) reflects nothing other than a realization that authority hand-offs must be organized in ways the formal political order disallows. The point is not to continue with such skullduggery, which I strongly suspect is completely screwed up even from the standpoint of the agencies involved themselves, but to make overt and aboveboard the problem of succession.

 

And the only way to do this is to provide qualitative, incommensurate advantages to governing agencies (not necessarily states—let’s keep all possibilities open) that preserve and enhance data security which, in a more traditional idiom, means centering virtues like honesty, conscientiousness, dedication to the truth regardless of consequences, courage and decisiveness, and so on. So, the meaning of what I say or do now is the likelihood of someone, decades down the road, manning reliably under difficult conditions some bit of infrastructure critical to ensuring the pedagogical conditions of succession within an emergent idiom. We know that however powerfully knowledgeable and knowledgeably powerful any set of financiers will be they will arrive at the point where the props supporting their valuations will be toppled because we’re still working with a system of circulation depending upon trust and revised valuations all along the line and not centralized, omniscient planning, and at some point those financiers will rely more urgently and explicitly upon some sovereign power, a sovereign power that might in fact tip over the financial system at a crucial point so as to induce precisely such dependency. In fact, we already seem to be living in such a permanent state of emergency where the state is constantly fending off the very crises it is also inducing. Which sovereign, or potentially sovereign, agencies, then, are marginally more interested in finding succor against the storm continually created by those best positioned to determine present expectations of future earnings? That’s really the only political question—that, and how to provide the service such governing entities are prepared to use. And this question transcends the more pedestrian one of how to keep such companies honest, because the answer is built in: if such a company becomes dishonest it will provide less data security and will be replaced by its partners, subsidiaries and spin-offs (who will first of all supply data regarding the infirmity of that company). To answer such questions we need to cut through all the standardizing idioms posing as metalanguages for the purpose of stabilizing valuations and which have been constructed by the disciplines. The most effective way to sell the kind of service I’m speaking of, in today’s world, would, I imagine, to be able to present a Power Point display of a checklist of qualities or capabilities, implicitly measurable quantitatively, that can predict or be manipulated so as to attain a promised outcome. This is good for the standardizing agencies and consulting companies and bad for everyone else. You can get investors if you have been vetted by some consulting firm, but the entire point of doing so is to have that consulting firm get paid for telling you what to do so as to attract the very investors who will make a great deal of money arbitraging the expected future earnings confirmed by the consulting company, whose own value is in turn confirmed by the profits of the investors. And the people at the top of the doomed company might make a lot of money by selling out as well. To design another path one needs to discard metalanguages for idioms, even while those idioms will in large be composed of pidgins and creoles composed out of satirized and broken up metalanguages (created by refugees of the disciplines).

 

The staggering difficulty of such a program is why I’ve tended to assume that only close association with a new kind of political party would make it possible. Of course, such a political party would arouse the violent resistance and all the immune systems of the guardians of the existing order, but at least there would be measures of progress in the degree of power obtained by the party. And it’s also why I’ve assumed that this party will have to issue a specially designed currency for its members and supporters—an even more allergenic innovation. Such company and party articulations would, to make matters worse, have to be transnational, while strictly preserving all the legalities involved in sovereignty. So, American and Chinese engineers would have to have a collaborative spirit as engineers while maintaining loyalty and propriety as citizens of their respective political orders—again, a rather neat trick, under present and likely future circumstances. The best way to do that is by being anti-war, on the simple and until recently widely shared grounds that all-out war between any of the major powers today would be insane. But utopian pacificism is as ridiculous now as ever—as long as there are different agencies and blurred lines of power and authority there will be competition, with all kinds of potential unintended consequences. The way past this is to convert rivalries into competition as peace brokers, which is to say as installers and enforcers of international juridical orders—a role the US could have played with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and in such as way as to increase its international prestige and power in the long term. This would even keep the innovation pipelines initiated in defense industries running, while giving new uses for surveillance and data-gathering technologies. These prospective forms of organization, none of which require the invention of arbitrarily designed institutions, and all of which can locate agencies and proceed through conceivable reforms which might be pursued through various routes within the existing orders, would in turn shape what must be for now preliminary idioms situated within the articulated scenes taking in central intelligence in compelling, interesting, literary, inscriptural ways. The only way to get started is as a pole of attraction for those who see the dead end of pretty much everything being proposed and imagined today and can discard the nostalgia for the natural by embracing the complete artificiality of our scenic order—which is to say, its complete dependence on our donations of our resentment to the center. Archivists of the future, I could say, to be a bit literary (and, no doubt, derivative).

 

Interestingly, the word “idiom,” according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, means “peculiar,” peculiar to oneself but, ultimately, it seems, “itself,” which is to say self-same, which is to say same-same. Think about what it takes to keep an awkward or aimless conversation going or, for that matter, to make an ordinary conversation more memorable—the perpetual recycling of words used earlier so as to turn them into reference points that can frame the conversation itself. An idiom is that, sustained indefinitely. Programming an idiom or, perhaps, programming the programming of idioms, then involves the creation of a transfer idiom, which keeps recycling the idiomaticity of idioms by creating patterns of repetition of idiosyncratic but transferable idioms. If you stick to the transfer idiom (which replaces things like theories and philosophies) you can keep making things the same within fields of likenesses because it will keep reminding you that what makes things the same is and is only this use of this idiom, inscribed indelibly on the culture. The idiom enables you to get closer and closer to, more and more like, any other idiom, bringing it to a crisis, even if only imagined, only to issue an aborted gesture of appropriation referring to the new form of the transfer idiom which both the mimicry derived from it and the mimicked idiom can install ostensives referring to, differentiating them once more, with an imperative to avoid crossing certain boundaries attached. The transfer idiom is our equivalent of prayer and programming.