The Same Sample

As I mentioned in “The Originary Hypothesis in Itself,” a participant in the recent GA conference (Dominic Mitchell) referred to the “non-fungibility” of language. He used this term in the context of language’s resistance to “scientific” reductionism, and it provides insight into both language and the originary hypothesis. I suggested that to be “converted” to the originary hypothesis—to take is as the point of departure of your inquiries—would require a sense of the “miraculousness” of language, or a constant wonder at its very possibility, even as that possibility is continuously affirmed in its reality. The “creationism,” or “ex nihilo” character of language which the originary hypothesis insists upon, is a scandal and stumbling block to the philosophically and evolutionary psychologically inclined. We can reduce the issuance of the sign on the originary scene to a minimal conversion of a gesture of appropriation to a gesture of deferral—we can readily imagine grasping for something and in the midst of it, slowing down, even slightly, perhaps opening up one’s hand in an only partially articulated disavowal. In a sense, that’s the easy part, because we just have to imagine someone suddenly confronted with previously unseen opposition. The tough part is the second person now imitating this new gesture, after having gone all in on the rush to appropriate the central object—and then a third, and a fourth, until the tide turns and enough on the scene stand ready to restrain whoever still approaches the object. At least one participant is playing against type here in imitating this new gesture, and that participant must be taking in the scene in a way we could never reduce to anything external to the scene itself—no animal “instinct” or “predilections” could account for the how the entire scene resonates in this single participant—the entirety of the event has overridden all that and created a new, immanent causality that we language using humans cannot so much explain as enact. Hence the scene’s, and language’s, non-fungibility.

If language as a whole is non-fungible, so is each particular use of language, each utterance. I don’t make this (or any other claim) in the philosophical spirit of inviting counter-arguments but in the generative spirit of producing pedagogies. Anyone can break their head trying to “prove” the fungibility of language as much as he likes—only a self-parody would result. I prefer to take the opposite route—to show the non-fungibility of every single utterance (including to any other utterance) even and especially when it seems counter-intuitive and counter-factual. The bored drone of the demoralized teenager working late night at the McDonalds and repeating for the umpteenth time “do you want fries with that” is surely fungible with every other instance of that quasi-automated phrase, isn’t it? Well, what would be indications of its non-fungibility, precisely to those instances of that phrase that seem most identical to it? Some tiny difference in tone, something in the surrounding scene to which the speaker’s body language directs our attention, something in the way it is heard (maybe it sounds, all of a sudden, hilarious, after having been heard for the thousandth time), something in the way it marks some transition in the biography of speaker or listener. At any rate, that’s the challenge that produces generative knowledge: treating every utterance in its non-fungibility to any other and thereby revealing the miraculousness of language. That’s the research project, or the assignment, and pursued consistently it will generate the samples of non-fungible utterances it’s seeking and working out: revelation bound up in a mobius strip with unremitting satire would be the result. The study of that “do you want fries with that” would produce both an epic of our present and a devastating exposure of the wasteland making that utterance possible. And more serious and profound utterances would, mutatis mutandis, produce equivalently non-fungible results. This is the source of writing strategies, some of which would no doubt converge with those of certain 20th and 21st century authors. But now we can know it to be a study of and participation in the origin in the present.

I don’t object to the “religious” overtones of the “miraculousness of the utterance,” but I also like to speak in more scientific idioms and would translate the miraculousness of the utterance into “the same sample.” All utterances are samples, of course, but all samples are also utterances, insofar as we can only identify, mark, collect and name them through language. The science vs. humanities division is thereby abolished in a single stroke. We have samples, which in its aggregate means data, and what counts as a sample, what counts as data, depends completely upon the disciplinary space wherein we are pursuing the answer to some question. This post is a sample, and each word in it is a sample, as is each sentence, and it can be sliced up into samples in as many ways as people can aggregate it as data with other samples, of American English, of contemporary prose, of Substack discourse, etc. And such slicing and aggregating would itself produce more data, of studies conducted for certain purposes, in certain kinds of institutions, with various criteria for creating data sets, and so on. The central problem in any shared inquiry is ensuring and establishing that we are all examining the same sample. What am I looking at here? The social, historical, mediatic, and disciplinary conditions of possibility for us to reciprocally demonstrate to each other that we are looking at and/or listening to the “same” thing, keeping in mind that that same thing is changing constantly and that determining its sameness also requires determining some degree of tolerance of difference (it’s the same for this purpose), are staggering in all that they entail. But only if we do it do we have a sample: we meet the miraculousness of the utterance at the other end. We’re always re-enacting and, even participating in and prolonging, the originary scene every time we do something like this, and we are always doing something like this: ensuring others that we’re “handling” the same sample. Each utterance singles out and presents for confirmation a particular hierarchy of relevancies, at the tail end of which lies an ostensive which it may or may not be for any participant in the exchange to finally issue. And this is indeed the central, even only, issue on the originary scene: are we all proffering the same gesture of deferral?

Now, let’s return to a conceptual round-up and plug the same sample into singularized succession in perpetuity, the perfection of the imperative, and data currency (I have a few other concepts lying around ad will get to them but these have busied me most of late) so that the same sample, guiding the actual practices of inscription, ties them all up together. Then we’ll have the basics of a curriculum.  Now, singularized succession in perpetuity is predicated upon a particular understanding of what a practice is, that is, what we are doing when we do things. And what we are doing when we do things, insofar as we are doing them, is produce signs that could only have resulted from doing that thing. So, if everything resulting from your action could only have come from that action, with no remainder, your practice was perfect. Every possible utterance, or sample, is the result of a practice, either “auto-probating” the practice or providing evidence of remainder. The more perfect the practice, the more that practice initiates the successor practice, by providing both model and preconditions for it. Governing, ruling, managing (leaving aside for the moment how we want to name the practices of the occupant of the center) are practices, practices defined by commands issued resulting in responses recognized by the commander as consistent with the commands given. So, I’ve hypothesized that, to the extent that this is the case, only the commander can issue the command to appoint his successor—only that provides a guarantee of the continuation of the practices initiated by the commander. This would, in fact, be the most important decision made by the commander, and the most important criteria would be that the one selected in turn select his successor, and so on. The basic continuity of the social order is placed front and center and made fully explicit. This is especially the case insofar as the selection of the successor would have to be continually reaffirmed, because changing conditions might always affect the criteria for choosing a successor. This practice of singularized succession would capture the attention of all and would be repeated at all levels of the social order, as practices of succession would be modeled on those conducted at the top. The entire social order would be a kind of pageant of passing the scepter or baton, with each day bringing fresh scenes against an increasingly rich background of transmitted habits and institutionalized norms. The defining function of the occupant of the center, then, is to maintain a steady and curatable data set of samples of futurity for the study of all.

The perfection of the imperative would involve the study of movement, which means separating specific movements from larger wholes and detecting new movements within the movements you have already analyzed. If you separate out and objectify ever more minute movements, you can off-load those movements into articulations of natural objects (themselves taken out of larger wholes and refined so as to be repeatable) and thereby extend the chain of imperatives into the natural world so that we are both giving imperatives to reality and taking them from some reorganized part of reality. The initial refinement of the imperative concerned the ritual scene, with imperatives taken from the center so as to construct rituals whose rigor can be enforced and can take in more of the world of practice in which the efficacy of the ritual scene is tested out. Technology can only develop autonomously, as a self-referential network of imperatives once the relation to the sacrificial center has been destroyed—then, technology comes into its own as a form of governance that competes with personally exercised and transmitted governance. Technology can never win this struggle because technology is incapable of generating events, and so on its own can only try to extirpate them when they emerge—a good example of the limits of technology in this regard is given by Sigfried Gideon in his Mechanization Takes Command, when he points out that, despite all efforts, in the mechanization of the hog slaughtering industry in the US (an early instance of automation), the actual moment of death, the killing of the individual animal, could never be mechanized—someone had to manually apply the fatal blow. But it’s not clear that technology, or the technocrat, can ever be convinced of his limitations in this regard. At the same time, personalized rule must embed itself technology but can’t do so without dramatically transforming itself—singularized succession in perpetuity is a modeling of that transformation.

Since technology emerges from the break-up of the sacrificial scene, it is from the start arrayed against the Big Scenic Imaginary—that is, ways of referring to the world and human interaction as if all included in some “we” were ranged along a single scene with an object at the center to be distributed “properly.” Our thinking has never ceased to be permeated by this imaginary, and the best way of thinking about technology is as a new mode of governance deeply distorted by its subordination to the specifically capitalist form of the Big Scenic Imaginary, the money system that reduces technology to assets that indirectly return to the center in such ways as to empty the center of intentionality; but, at the same time, as only intelligible once extracted from the Big Scenic Imaginary and resituated within the dynamic of hypotheses and practices. What we ask or demand of technology, in that case, is to enable us to perfect our practices within the ongoing perfection of chains of practices. When I do something, I’m providing data samples of what others are doing through me, of what they might be doing through me, and of what I might be doing through others, in increasingly prolonged time frames. As I perfect my practices, I reveal potentialities undetected by the practitioners upon whom I rely, and generate samples of potentialities which will be dependent upon and completely unanticipated by my own. The pageant of singularized succession in perpetuity and the perfection of the imperative converge in the ongoing formation of modes of attention, or sampling, directed at determining that which would make our present more fully consonant with our descriptions of it precisely by delivering that present up to our successors of whom all we could know is that we were a necessary presupposition. Anything I say now, taken in its fully technologized and mediated form—as a contribution to scenic design practices—is a program for where everyone will be situated at some undetermined future time, which really means a program for where one exemplary sample will be situated at one time as a sign of the whole. My utterance organizes a disciplinary space around that sample: to “make sense” of it is to provide samples of the kinds of successions that would articulate the dismantling of the Big Scenic Imaginary with more perfected practices which I can imagine being unimaginable.

I continue to insist that there are answers to the question, “what is to be done,” in all of these very abstract formulations. You’re doing various things, engaged in various practices, at various degrees of perfection, more or less explicitly reliant upon broader networks of practices—the thread that takes you through the labyrinth is the explicitness with which the terms of succession all of the practices to which you contribute are articulated—making the terms of the practices more explicit is to further perfect them. You can even think about how to make, say, your podcast a podcast that would enable others to make podcasts that would follow up on your own so that eventually this network of podcasts infiltrates other media, with those practices of infiltration seeking out their successors within media and other institutions, and so on. What it all might add up to regarding the conversion of all assets into samples can only become evident as your scenic design practices produce revelations of scenes of succession torn between the mire of the Big Scenic Imaginary and further perfection. You want to participate in those scenes, pushing the perfection of the succession practice, making it more explicit, more embedded in other practices, while exposing the big mess of the Big Scene. We are looking for new modes of exchange to replace those conducted through money, but if the samples we’re exchanging are non-fungible they can only be paid to the center so as to support other practices. Do what you’re doing in such a way that you can do more of it and so that it contributes to others doing more of what they’re doing; even if what you’re doing is wrong or bad, only doing more of it and discovering its sterility or its constant cross purposes with what others are doing will enable you to dismantle the practice and to package it as data for others because if you’re still doing it you haven’t yet assimilated the conviction that its bad or wrong. At any rate, all around us there are models of exchanges “in kind,” which are really incommensurable, and treating such exchanges as samples out of which we build data sets is the way of modeling the replacement of the entire social order through such exchanges.

To ask others to examine the same sample as you are examining is to open an array of overlapping data sets across the expanse of which we would have to continue to ensure it is the same sample. This renders the miraculousness of the utterance prosaic by representing the sequences of ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives that would have to be deployed in order to maintain the contours of the sample across these terrains. We are the ones behind the curtain, and once we start paying attention to what we’re doing there the real scene becomes the ongoing one of “adult learning” (a phrase we’d have to play off against its institutional circulations—the kind of thing we shouldn’t be afraid of, even if some comic banality attaches to our own utterances). These scenes of learning—that’s where we perfect the imperative and select our successors—where data is deliberately and incidentally created in the process of packaging and analyzing it are the non-fungible objects of exchange that will replace the world presenting itself as a vast accumulation of assets.