The Center, its Affordances and Issuances, and Time.

I’ve been insisting for some time that what makes language language is that we can say “this is the same.” No non-human form of communication allows for this. I’ll leave aside for now the question of whether an AI can “really” say it. Part of what makes “this is the same” distinctive to human language is that nothing is “really” the same as anything else, or even itself—saying “this is the same” is our distinctly human way of world building. And there is an implicit “this is the same” in everything else we say, which also means there is an implicit “we are saying the same thing” in everything we say. The first thing we nominated for sameness was the object at the center, and the maintenance of sameness is what Gans in The Origin of Language calls “linguistic presence.” It follows that building samenesses across differences is the way we “endorse,” or donate our resentment to, the center. To make it possible for anything to be the same as anything else, under certain, provisional, transient, conditions, we must also learn to find similarities across vast fields of differences (differences insofar as they have not yet been samed), and this also means dissolving previous fields of samenesses into new differences and new similarities. Herein lies the digital/analog complementarity I discussed a few posts back: the dissolution of concentrated blocks of sameness is effected through same/other operations across the various scales that must be set aside in any assertion of sameness—indeed, “difference” is not a natural semantic prime, but “other” is, so by “field of differences” we really mean a practice of othering.

The above sketch of a practice is aimed at bringing the distinction between occupied and signifying center into language—that is, making the distinction into a way of listening to and affording the voice of God. I’ll begin by reviewing the way in which the differentiation of the center is already within language, which is in the form of the imperative gap. The “imperative gap” is my way of referring to the simple linguistic fact that there is a difference between the imperative uttered and the imperative obeyed (or, for that matter, defied). In “filling” this gap by trying to make the performance of the imperative a mere prolongation of it, the obedient “informs” the imperative given by the occupant of the center with the staged social continuity implicit in the imperative given.  Whatever is involved in fulfilling the command but is not explicitly detailed in the plan (and that there is always something so involved is the meaning of “imperative gap”) is supplied by the imperatee, and this “supplement” is an inscription of the imperative infrastructure enabling the imperative as one in a chain of imperatives pointing backwards and forwards. Here is where, to draw upon my recent posts, the scribal/programming discipline makes its mark. And it within this disciplinary space of “wisdom” that I would like to deposit the differentiation of the center.

The imperative gap addresses what political theorists call the “problem of obedience”—for modern political theorists (at least) the problem is explaining why people obey; I address the question from the standpoint of the presumption of obedience, since we are created as humans in obedience to the originary center. If we disobey one occupant of the center, it is only because we have shifted our obedience to another—it is the responsibility of the occupant of the center to make this an unlikely and undesirable choice, and to ensure it fails and doesn’t become a pole of attraction. Prior to any such shift in allegiance, though, there is the intrinsic possibility of disobeying any imperative—a possibility inscribed in the imperative itself. I am interested in showing that any such disobedience is “ungrounded”—that it, it cannot be justified by the supposed “illegitimacy” of the imperative or the one who issues it, because no territory has more than one supreme governor. But this doesn’t mean that disobedience is simply irrational or arbitrary; rather, we could say insofar it is neither of these things it is because the attempt to obey the imperative has rendered the self in its scenicity inoperative. The imperative, that is can’t be obeyed, due to its form, its object, the position and abilities of the recipient, etc. The way to disobey, then, is not to make abstract arguments about the sources of authorization of the command but to display the full inoperativity of the self in its scenicity, and to thereby maximize the data produced by one’s engagement with the imperative. It is the subsequent securing of such data by agencies picking up falling sovereign functions that might enable future operationalizable imperatives. (Of course, the disobedient can be wrong, in which case he will still be sending out data, albeit more as message than messenger.)

We can now say more about what is entailed in the operativity of the self in its scenicity—this operativity is what I have been calling “selving,” the creation of a system of “sames” out of a field of “likes” by generating same/other distinctions. Creating sames is the creation of a scene within a scene, a meta-scene that idiomizes a new array of props, scenery and staging by othering the previous uses of those materials. Among the most basic imperatives are those involving seeing to the maintenance of institutions, like provisioning and keeping records of provisioning, assigning tasks and recording the assigning of tasks, the transformation of materials into new forms and the recording of such transformations or attempts at transformation. Keeping records is the common denominator here, is ubiquitous, and is the most scribal of activities and responsibilities. Herein lie the origins of writing. Recording presents a series of selvings into a single program and refers back to the originating imperative of the program. It accounts for the provenance of the materials—how they have been brought into and distributed within the organization—and the nomination of individuals within the division of labor. The more the attention to the intention structure of the originating imperative is recorded the more other articulations by other actual or possible organizations, and this same organization at other times or under other conditions, are othered as a condition of realizing this imperative ordering. The likeness of all these actual and possible organizations (tacitly assumed in everyday practices) is reduced to a set of same/other distinctions.

As I have arguing the last few posts, there is a continuum between the straightforward and consistent recording of where things are and who is responsible for them and the more elaborate and complex forms of “record keeping” we find ritual, art and, more generally, in juridical and disciplinary institutions. This is the scribe to programmer pipeline. Records need to be coherent—otherwise, they couldn’t become parts of a history of records in which each recording accounts for part of the infrastructure including (metonymically, we could say) the others. The inoperativity of the self in its scenicity results in a recording that doesn’t fit or work. All records fail to register something that might have been worth recording, or name some practice in ways that interfere with taking in all of the data it might have provided, even if such deficiencies don’t show up until other institutional lapses lead bureaucrats or historians to review them within a new disciplinary space. We could say that the best records have the longest temporal and spatial lapses in detecting their lapses as they become part of a world of study and art that produces memorable work through the strain of eliciting and exploring anomalies not immediately visible. The worst records (which are probably the worst for reasons other than incompetent record keepers) might produce equally memorable work, but it is more likely to be bitterly satirical, cautious and allusive or desperately apocalyptic.

The differentiation of the center (occupied/signifying) is found in the spread of the recordings as you try to minimize its anomalies to the irreducibly anthropological one of the distance of periphery from center. Insofar as you make the records fit and work (which also means, if you are not in any obvious sense a record keeper yourself, acting and doing in ways that can be recorded workably), you have created a field of sames, and are filling the imperative gap, even if with a figurative bucket while the gap widens into a flood. Insofar as the others insinuate themselves into the sames and such ordering of the record becomes impossible, the imperative gap cannot be filled and the self in its scenicity is rendered inoperative. The individual faced with an implicit or explicit imperative is testing the boundaries of operativity continually, while these tests find their judgment in the disciplinary scenes of scribal/programming culture as participants in those disciplinary scenes work on securing data for sovereign functionality. And the participants in these scenes are themselves individuals continually testing these boundaries, with the final judge being he for whom the records are kept, the figure providing sufficient intentional shape so as to arrest the drift (which will be evident to the future historian who can to some degree be anticipated by the scribe/programmer) towards total anonymity in utterance.

In my latest post but one I argued for folding knowledge into intelligence; I will do the same thing now for “wisdom.” Wisdom literature facilitated the ongoing reinterpretation of divine law and the application of the entire historical learning process to that reinterpretation so as to situate it firmly within the scribal pedagogical space. Wisdom, we can say, is the bringing to bear of the paradoxical nature of human existence as a means of deferral of sacrifice. An originary understanding of intelligence as the conversion of all elements of the scene into sources of information such that oneself becomes an especially informational element of the scene incorporates this paradox. The more one gathers information, especially indirectly, from elements of the scene that would seem inert to others and organizes and presents this information by conferring situational value on each bit, and on the possession of each bit by one or another situated agent within what can be grasped as a historical learning process actualized in pedagogical spaces, the more wisdom and knowledge converge in intelligence. You emit data in ways you are aware of and can become more aware of and in ways you will never realize and that might penetrate and subvert the means by which you make yourself cognizant of and in command of some data. Here is where we can relocate the imperative gap, and therefore the differentiation of the center—in the database that comes recognizably self-interpretable and hence a model for and partner with future users, surrounded by greater or lesser data spreads that disappear into their use.

The sorting of data becomes more intelligent and more conducive of intelligence the longer the time the programming of likely uses of that data. A single fact, ingeniously established against the resistance of (anti)juridical and (anti)disciplinary authorities with the use of uncustomary collecting, presenting and preserving of evidence suggests an entire social order yet to be established—only in anticipation of such an order could one persist in that kind of effort. If the fact is rendered beyond dispute, it turns all the falsities of the existing order into unwilling witnesses of that truth, and unwilling witnesses are succeeded by willing witnesses. This kind of work closes the imperative gap by prolonging the imperative, from before its issuance by the current occupant of the center to after all the authors and sufferers of this order are gone. The oldest and most basic imperative is to ensure the continuity of the center, which is maximized by the center selecting its own successor in perpetuity, while making the social order a celebration of this practice. Taken as a model of our own selvings, singular succession in perpetuity means assembling the materials available to oneself and distributing all the selves around oneself so as to ensure that the self that will continue reassembling those materials and distributing those selves is the same, even with, but retrospectively also because of, all of the mistakes and revisions in attention and accruals of knowledge. This means inscribing yourself across the scene so that you’re reading yourself and/along with others who have also been inscribing themselves. The inscription is the pressing of data into commemorative forms. Inscription means pushing your self to the limits of its operativity, so that the beginning of its inoperativity is legible on the scene as a potential performative element in the renewal ceremony of the center.