Selving

For a while I’ve been working with a notion of “practice” dependent upon Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition, which views practices as intrinsically normative and embedded narratively in communal structures. More fundamentally, though, I’ve been thinking of practices as continuous with ritual, in which something is done in such a way as to elicit a response from the center such as to enable an ongoing revision of the practice. I’ve paired practices with hypotheses, analogically with the pairing of ritual with myth (wherein myth supplements the “failures” of ritual), so that part of the practice is the generation of hypotheses regarding possible responses from the center and their implications for further articulations of the practice. Practices are both grounded in language and technical: the examples I used in Anthropomorphics and since have usually focused on single words, much like some Platonic dialogues, with practices aimed at redeeming the meaning of the word. So, for example, what would a practice of “honesty” be, under specified technical or scenic conditions? Even more: what would maximize and exemplify “honesty”? I’ve deferred the next step, which would be think in terms of sentences and discourses which position us—issue imperatives to us—under certain scenic conditions and call for articulations of signs. This would essentially be a way of turning all of language into scripture, as if it were nothing but a giant prayerbook. Not only should we always mean what we say, but we should only say the things that we can mean, under a fairly rigorous regime of meaning as institutional and historical enactment. At least we should do this if we want to be taken seriously, and we should expect others to do this if we want to know who to take seriously (and who are therefore the ones we especially want to take us seriously).

Part of that next step is setting aside the terms practice/hypothesis, and synthesizing the dyad into a single term which which draws upon another line of inquiry I’ve been committed to: “selving.” I have for a long time preferred the word “self” over near synonyms (in some contexts) like “individual” or “subject,” because it’s more minimal, the word “self” really meaning nothing more than the “same” (hence its use in reflexive pronouns like “itself,” “himself,” etc., which really just means the same thing that was just referred to). So, to be a self is to be the same as you were in some other situation where you were also that self. Instead of looking for some “deep” or metaphysical foundations of selfhood (like a soul), we can just direct our attention to the ways in which selves are maintained across time and space. Through names, for example—or social security numbers. Such inquiries can be as far ranging and differentiated as we need them to be, and anyone might embody various selves, recognized in varying ways for different purposes and “addresses” (and we might start talking about “meta-selves”). And maintaining ones selving requires doing things to continue constructing those forms of sameness in a sea of differences, which is to say mere likenesses, juggling a whole set of reference points—hence “selving” (which I’m a bit surprised to find has no authorized use as a verb).

These considerations are informed by a book I’ve mentioned a few times: Paul North’s Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: A Logic of Likeness. An important part of North’s project. is convergent with my own: to render philosophy obsolete, in his case by starting with the familiar and both unprovable and irrefutable intuition that everything is like everything else in some respect. The universe, then, is held together by vast networks of likeness, constantly shifting in accord with the “quality” taken as the point of similarity in each case. Part of my attraction to North’s argument lies in the fact that “like” is one of Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic primes, and hence universally human—in any language you could say one thing is like another, which frees us from worrying about what counts as “legitimate” terms of similarity or metaphoricity or analogy. “This is like that” is enough to get any conversation started with little more than an ostensive gesture. North shows no interest in that equally primitive word “same,” but for me this makes it possible to articulate North’s “system” as follows: within the constantly expanding and shifting field of likeness we can create centers of attention by treating selected things, when doing specific things, as the same. And anything we do can be spoken of in terms of what, in doing that thing, we are taking to be the same.

Late in his book, North makes an argument against the notion of “practice,” which I naturally wanted to think about. For North, this refusal of “practice” is part of an argument made in this book for the discovery of fields of likeness as a form a deceleration, which is in turn part of a broader argument he also makes in his book on Kafka, The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation and in his The Problem of Distraction (in which Kafka also figures prominently), an argument that I take to be one in favor of indefinitely prolonged modes of deferral—and to which I am therefore very sympathetic. He doesn’t really say much in his refusal of “practice,” but I see the point: to speak of “practices” is to presuppose control over the conditions of your practice such that you could show the results of that practice to indeed be the results of that practice. And this is a very important issue, because if you are thinking of all activity in terms of practices, and your concept of “practice” implies a form and degree of control over your scenic conditions that cannot be ascertained, you will end up either restricting your activity to situations where you can pretend to have achieved a sufficiently closed space of “causes” or indulging in fantastical claims regarding the causal chains between what you do and what happens. The paradox in imposing such a “praxical” regime, first of all upon oneself, is that it aims at anticipating and helping to advance movement toward a social order in which all activity would become increasingly praxical, as in Bachelard’s conclusion to The Scientific Spirit where he calls for the reversal of the relation between school and society—rather than school existing for society, society should exist for school, that is, endless teaching, learning, practice and innovating with new forms of teaching, learning, practice and innovating. But, of course, this presupposes that we are currently far away from a social order organized in terms of practices, so why should we assume that creation of islands of practice here and there would somehow “add up” to such a social order?

Enter “selving,” which, I’ll mention right away does not apply only to human individuals but to anything about which we could say “itself”—social orders are selved, institutions are selved, things are selved. But certainly human beings as well, and all the others only in human discourse. Selving is more minimal than practice, as it involves anything that makes something itself within a field (not against a “background”—North also demolishes “Gestalt” thinking) where it is like many things (everything, in fact), including “itself” but never the same as any (including “itself”) except insofar as some “we” sees, hears and says it to be so in order to selve that “we.” So, the question one can always be asking oneself is what to do so that it happens that the field across which the one asking is the same as the one answering can be spread as far and wide as possible. Such a question is self-centered, but not only for oneself—lots of other things need to be selved to maximize that spread, including others who are equally necessary to “verify” the sameness across the field. Selving obviates and includes the command to be in control of the conditions sufficient for one’s practice because before your “means” can be means they must be the same as themselves as things you are doing something with and doing something with them is really just ensuring they remain the same across the field in which you are doing whatever you are doing with them. To put it another way: you could find out a day later, a month later or 10 years later (or someone else can find out centuries later) that your practice was not really, in the end, a practice: but, if you gathered some things and people in such a way as to make apparent a field of sameness, that could never be falsified, even if you thereby relinquish control over how that field might be dispersed and made part of a new assemblage . All you can do is try to make your field of samenesses capable of both shaping and fitting into a number of different assemblages. What you’re trying to do is reach the undecidability of “doing” and “happening”, where putting your own mark decisively and distinctively upon a field is indistinguishable from letting things come to be whatever they are.

Selving returns us to language as always fundamentally ostensive—in the end, signs “work,” and even only exist as signs, insofar as at the end of an however long chain of signification at least two people can know themselves to be pointing at the same thing. Selving is the answer to the Girardian crisis of indifferentiation, where only the possibility of singling something out can preserve the community and if what is singled out is not to be conveniently othered by the crisis it must be a new field of samenesses within a field of likenesses. Scapegoating is a practice of subtracting likeness from the othered, making likeness among those who do the othering less threatening; to acknowledge various ways of identifying the same amongst the like is to make it possible to lower and raise the threshold of differentiation as needed. It may seem an obvious but it is nevertheless a potent observation that even those you hate are like you in some way, and to add that this likeness can be selved. And moving above and below the threshold separating likeness from sameness and thereby raising and lowering that threshold (by working on the infrastructures undergirding it) is a good description of what we do as language users. We’re selving every time we open our mouths or arrange ourselves amongst others, even before we could think about constructing a practice or hypothesis; indeed, any practice or hypothesis would pertain to the field of the same already being assembled. Meaning what we say and saying what we can means involves moving around that threshold, to the point of being it.

Selving is being the same sample which means presenting as the model sample articulating a data field organized by and soliciting scenic designers. Mario Carpo’s observation that now that we have passed the threshold of data abundance, traditional experimentation, conducted within closed spaces so as to control variables, is no longer necessary, means that we can proceed to using data directly to world build. If you have enough data to calculate all the outcomes of articulating materials in one way or another, and even eliciting from materials, including organisms, the kinds of adjustments that might anyway take place in order to mitigate entropic tendencies, so as to minimize external therapeutic interventions, then everything can be treating as selving. You would no longer have to repeat something over and over again to determine that if you do X, Y will happen, even under all the different real world conditions which might interfere with the path from X to Y. We could simply ask what would keep, say, a functioning kidney, the same (functioning as a kidney) in the midst of ongoing chemical and physical and metabolic processes in which things are like each other in all kinds of ways? You can start, that is, with an actual kidney, in someone’s body, which is like all other kidneys but only the same as itself—or that, anyway, is the problem we can set ourselves. Holding that one thing constant, not only hypothetically but in actuality, the more we know about all the ways in which it’s not holding constant, will become the most difficult and important thing of all. And only an ongoing selving can make it possible to hold all the other things, including oneself, sufficiently and suitably constant, so as to hold that one thing so.

I’ll test selving against the problem of resentment (and vice versa). We can say that resentment is when you see that something is not the same (as it was, as we took it to be, as was promised, as was expected...). Since we emerged as humans by confirming that we all issued the same sign to point to the same central object in the same “aspect,” our default position is that everything should be the same. This means that we’re in a constant state of imminent (at least) resentment. (Where our resentment is directed is a question of who interfered with everything remaining the same.) The deferral of resentment, then, entails allowing that whatever has refused to stay the same is, instead, like lots of other things—you refer what has become other back to the field of likenesses. To do this, you must become the same as yourself within this new field, and to do that you must bring a lot of the constitutive infrastructure along with you. Whatever has refused to stay the same has shaken up some of that infrastructure, which therefore requires at least a check-up to ascertain its sameness. Maybe a lot of that infrastructure has been shaken rather badly and maybe only a small portion of it can be checked and center the field of likenesses by being the same. Maybe resentment is a warning sign regarding the fragility of the infrastructure. But there’s always some infrastructure remaining, even if just the possibility of a shared gesture. However little you can do it’s still better than heeding the call of your resentment to make that thing the same again because it can never be the same in the same way—it will need to circulate through the field of likeness, which serves as a vast resource from which anything can be returned to the center of sameness from whence it originated. Nothing is “really” the same, even as itself, but it’s only possible to “realize” that because humans came into being by “pretending” that something was the same without having any way of constituting a boundary between pretense and reality, which therefore only comes into existence as a result. To borrow, invert and revise Gregory Bateson’s well-known definition of “information” (a difference that makes a difference), we can say that resentment demands that the like be the same, while the defusion/diffusion of resentment involves selving through a field of likes.

What about “singularized succession in perpetuity,” what we might call the successor concept to “absolutism,” and which, to anticipate (a few posts down the road), will be used as a counter to what Bichler and Nitzan call the “capitalist mode of immortality”? This concept certainly seems to rely upon the kind of control over conditions implicit in the concept of “practice,” so it’s necessary to ensure its compatibility (perhaps I should start saying: interoperability) with “selving.” It seems to me that singularized succession in perpetuity becomes more implicit and more precise with selving. Whatever you do to ensure you will be the same, say, tomorrow, within the total scenic design and its mapped out satiric undertow (to put it bluntly: you can sustain and even enhance your self through the most unrestrained and thoroughgoing mockery imaginable) is also the same kind of thing you will do to provide for your self to be the same tomorrow, the next day, and 10, 100 or 1,000 years from now, when its sameness will be in the hands of those who can trace their mode of intelligence (their selving) back to your own. This doesn’t preclude explicit naming of a successor, which is still to be highly recommended for high profile public figures, but it should also make it unnecessary: it should be obvious,to anyone paying attention, who will be enough like you to be the same under transformed conditions. And if it’s not, there’s more selving for you to do.