Thirdness and the Same Sentence

This will be an essay in method—the method of designing and mining idioms that serve as currency. As part of the case for Thirdness, I proposed establishing bets on curated judgments that are as close to 50/50 as can be determined in advance of doing the research and thinking that arrives at the judgment. If the bettor can trust the judgment and integrity of the Thirdness team, then the construction of the case creates conditions under which the bettor exercises his somewhat less informed judgment (necessarily less formed because the Thirdness team has tech and training unavailable to the bettor) to anticipate the judgment of the Thirdness team—it’s kind of a guess, but also a competitive guess because you are trying to outguess other bettors (at least over the long run), than whom you might be better informed. The Thirdness team, for its part, acts according to the logic of the bookie, who establishes odds or a point spread that evens the bets on both sides, allowing for a guaranteed profit through the vig. But this kind of prediction market also suggests a new mode of thinking, and therefore a new mode of writing, predicated on searching out the 50/50 in every topic of conversation, every referent, every propositional claim. This is an idiomatic logic—speak only of the 50/50, and continue your discourse by spreading the 50/50 through all the implications of the starting point of your discourse.

It would seem that to designate a particular judgment as 50/50 is to presuppose a lot of the world being far more certain than that. To take an example that is in the news as I write, I would not set up a bet on whether Benjamin Netanyahu will be arrested by some state, held by some state, put on trial by the ICC and then, if convicted, imprisoned by some state for some period of time—I would not set up a bet on any of the those event-points because I consider them all extremely unlikely (more so, of course, as subsequent events presupposes the occurrence of previous ones) and therefore resistant to a 50/50 set up. I might, though, think of setting up a bet over whether a particular media outlet, or set of outlets, will end up correcting certain factual or legal claims made in the course of reporting on the ICC’s call to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu—that might be a way of getting at 50/50. That might give you a sense of the kind of prediction market Thirdness would create but, more importantly for my purpose here, laying a bet one way or another here already presupposes a great deal that is known well beyond 50/50 about the world’s media, and therefore the political, corporate and financial governing groups whose imperatives they convey. In other words, much has to be held constant, as close to 100/0 as possible, for the 50/50 events to appear on screen. What I want to attempt now, then, is to abandon that logic and aim at 50/50 all the way down, both to test out a new way of thinking and to expand the range of Thirdness.

Linguistic interaction usually involves a dialectic of the known and unknown—two people in conversation will oscillate between touching base on the assumptions they share, on the one hand, and venturing forth into potential areas of disagreement, on the other. It’s very easy to see this in operation—for example, once the dialogue partners start to wander off into disagreements that turn into disagreements over the basic facts and ethical frames that would make any agreement possible you will almost always see one of the speakers shift back to some assertion of agreement—“but, of course, you will still agree that…” At a certain point this kind of move might be a basic prerequisite of continuing the conversation. This is the kind of interaction, then, that I am breaking from, towards full “differenda,” to use Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term for incommensurable utterances. So, we can disagree, then disagree about the terms upon which agreement would be possible, and then disagree about what would count as an agreement in this case, and so on. And yet we want to go on talking, or the reader wants to go on reading. Why? Clearly a discursive desire other than agreement or what Peirce saw as the main purpose of inquiry, reducing uncertainty, would have to be involved here. One would have to enjoy something like a pure exchange of hypotheses, with no certain way of distinguishing the real from the pataphysical among them, simply in order to keep generating your own hypothesis generation machinery. Every conversation need not take this path; indeed, only a tiny minority might; but, it would be the ever present possibility of the irruption of such conversations that would provide the “grounding” (or “airing,” or “sinking”) of all other conversations—rather than some philosophical position. This seems to me the only fundament adequate to the originary hypothesis, since it would involve an ongoing, never once and for all settled enactment of the infinite recursivity (to refer to Eric. Jacobus’s account) of the violence/language oscillation—we might be aiming at a way of continually straddling the boundary between the triggering of a chain of events leading to World War 3, on the one hand, and settling all outstanding antagonisms, on the other. It is testimony to the astonishing complacency that seems to be induced in many practitioners of originary thinking that no one, as far as I know (unless I did so somewhere along the line and have forgotten) has drawn the (fairly obvious) conclusion that accepting the originary hypothesis should direct all of your attention to precisely those “stitches” in the social “fabric” that seem marked by the most enduring modes of deferral and should therefore be endlessly scrutinized for even the slightest tears. Anything can happen anytime should be the default position of originary thinking, and that anything doesn’t happen anytime therefore that which is to be explained—which would mean studying reality as comprised of events that can just as easily go either way, towards the consolidation of deferral or the random access to the center. Orginary thinking would be institutionalized as a training center to inculcate precisely this kind of highly counter-intuitive thinking. It’s either too late to do so or just in time.

What I am describing here is a way of continuing the same sentence and providing the continual check that it is the same sentence; it is also a way of returning to the question of the conversion of traditional juridical remedies (penalties, punishment, compensation, etc.) into novel modes of data exchange. From a political standpoint, this is the most important and challenging part of the Thirdness program. I have been emphasizing as forcefully as I can the centrality of the juridical to the specificity of the “Stack” and “Absolutism” as understood by center studies, but the historicity (and therefore non-originarity) of the juridical, and therefore its possible transience (as compared, say, with ritual distribution) is part of that centrality, as it marks the fragility of the juridical. The juridical can always collapse back into the ritual, in the form of the vendetta and honor culture; but, as a way of expressing resentment (the more transhistorical category), the juridical could also be replaced or even supplemented by a more civilized way of doing so, a way capable of remedying the imprecisions and arbitrariness inseparable from the juridical. My own definition of the juridical, as located above the threshold of the vendetta but below that of the antinomic (placing the social order, in the form of the occupant of the center, itself “on trial”) itself, to the extent that it is accepted, tends to erode the juridical by undermining belief in its categories (for example the “zeal for justice” becomes less credible if “justice” is really trying to find the middle point between those thresholds). The generation of outrage over presumably violated terms of justice, what we might call “guiltmailing,” seems to be working fairly well but maybe that’s just a “dead cat’s bounce” and too many (obviously) bad faith invocations of victimary claims are sapping its power. It’s possible to work for a restoration of the juridical in accord with the many commonsensical axioms advanced against its corruption (crime should be illegal, illegal entrance into another country should be illegal, etc.) but since a snap-back to pre-civil rights broadly liberal understandings of justice is not possible (since, for one thing, it led to the civil rights agenda), such a restoration will have to involve attempts to shut down all kinds of “speech” and “assembly” deemed under more stringent interpretations, to fit such categories as defamation, libel, incitement, fraud, obscenity and so on. The new juridicality to be produced and therefore aimed at as a result would therefore be highly dependent upon the knowledge produced by the human sciences (think about how complex inquiries into what might count as “incitement” under specified historical conditions might be) which furthermore implies titanic struggles over the control and legitimation of what is to count as “human science.” And this means we’d already be approaching conditions of data exchange where, for example, both sides to a dispute end up sharing intelligence regarding the genealogies of their respective discourses and predictive analysis of their likely effects.

My two previous posts provide examples of the kinds of questions implicated in the transition from judgment as compensation/correction to judgment as data exchange: first, the question of the relation of the occupant of the center to the juridical order (can the king, president or whoever be put on trial within the system he presides over—a very complicated and longstanding question which we see playing out in the US, for example, in disputes over Presidential immunity); and second, in my highly qualified endorsement of the neoliberal counter-revolution precisely on the grounds (unaddressed in that post) that it removes conditions for complaint and contention, which is also to say conditions for juridical remediation. So, let’s take a look at these questions, on our way back to the pataphysical same sentence. The targeting of the occupant of the center is always extremely dangerous and is most likely the original scapegoating (the scapegoating of marginal figures and groups is very much a modern appropriation of the concept—those with real or perceived power are scapegoated [that “perceived” can do a lot of work, though])—it necessarily prefigures civil war precisely in the hope that it can be unanimous. Succession arranged according to familial descent provides a way of considerably softening the blow, by allowing for sophistic genealogies and close enough replacements—but that was always pretty dangerous nevertheless. When the occupant is placed at the center by procedural means, the procedural means for removing him in some extraordinary way must be compelling enough and managed expertly enough to prevent irreparable cracks from opening in the ruling group and below. But these are systems with formal and informal mechanisms, however imperfect; for singularized succession in perpetuity, which retrieves the tradition of the king as final judge within an order in which the juridical (and not honor system or bureaucratic measures) is given its due, we would have to both acknowledge the possibility of charges and suits being brought against the occupant of the center and extremely rigorous standards of accusation and proof, with the option of counter-charges if the charges brought don’t hold up—if you want to charge the king with treason be prepared to be charged with it yourself if he’s acquited. The same would have to hold for charges against the selected successor who, of course, would in turn be free to pardon his predecessor. A very high level of coordination among the ruling group would needed to pull off a clean removal, so much so that it would indicate either extreme corruption among the occupant and his immediate circle or a widespread malicious conspiracy—in either case, something very wrong systemically which would then restart the infiltration process within intelligence that I have hypothesized would have created this new form of governance in the first place. Which is a reminder that we would always need to maintain and archive those traditions. In any case, charging the occupant of the center involves intervention in the nomos, so it can be no ordinary case. Regarding thequestion of establishing justice and proper cases in the new “postneoliberal” nomos, that will likely need to be done through substantial revisions of fraud statutes so as to determine how the expectations regarding future earnings have been determined in such a way as to value assets for the purposes of selling them and using them as collateral: what kinds of promises get made, what kinds of claims get affirmed, what kind of data analysis, etc., is employed in such determinations? The conflicts are then internal to those engaged in currency exchanges—investors, lenders, regulatory and taxing agencies, CEOs, etc., rather than between “classes.”

In both of these hypothetical scenarios (are not all scenarios hypothetical?) we can see the beginnings of a transition to data exchange. What is wanted from the occupant of the center is good governance, and evidence of good governance, and so part of the demonstration of good governance is the collection, organization and provision of evidence of its goodness—only significant gaps or failures in this exhibition of evidence would motivate the initiation of a process of removal or hampering of governing operations. And all disputes, likewise, refer back to governance and one’s role within it: if one person defrauds, defames, incites against, etc., another, he is doing so as part of a team and against a member of another team and so the issue necessarily gets referred upstairs. Unlike tribal conflicts, the impulse will not be to defend the member of your team or, for that matter, to simply treat him as a hostage to the deal struck with the other group; since your continuation and success as a team depends upon serving some need within the subscription network your primary imperative is to demonstrate you’re suited to doing so. This implies some combination of discipline and compensation where warranted but also the insistence on a forum where the “warrant” can be examined but this in turn implies recourse and contribution to databanks determining the implications of the dysfunction in question for remaining within the two thresholds. This already starts to look like the contribution of data is the term of settlement, and this might include some “proof of work” on the part of the offender demonstrating the needed levels of civility and honesty. Each case turns into a singular practice of inquiry. (A study of decisions regarding penalties and settlements would involve converting juridical decisions into data which is itself a step toward turning penalties and settlements into data exchanges.)

We students of the center can always then see ourselves as straddling the boundary between the juridical and data exchange, assuming that the boundary will never be abolished once and for all or if it is only to create an analogous boundary within data exchange. This boundary mirrors the time lag allowed for judgments within the Thirdness prediction market, because what is presented in the initial state is a conflict in some juridical form while the outcome is some invented data exchange, with the obligatory ruling in favor of one side a pretext for and justified by that data exchange. The work of Thirdness, then, is idiom mining in the sense that its generating singular hypothetical data exchanges that would be oscillations between 50/50 microdecisions carved out of the formal case. To settle a case is to have each side know something about the other side’s likely future actions that they didn’t before. Again, this is not so different from judgments in the conventional sense: to be awarded some sum by the court against someone who damaged your reputation is be given assurances that that offender along with possible imitators are less likely to attempt such damage in the future—and, for that matter, that those who decide whether or not to trust you are less likely to do so based on representations from that party. So, imagine such assurances can be granted without money—by promises of enhanced supervision by the offender’s team(s) along with, perhaps, guarantees of providing retractions rapidly in these and “similar” cases or, for that matter, revisions in the algorithms determining attention to one or another story. This would provide expectations of future boosts to one’s own reputations that might be worth more than a cash settlement. Such data exchanges would rely on formulas, no doubt, but they would also have to singular enough to fit the case at hand—a great deal of culture, including “entertainment,” might be absorbed in the representation of such cases. Whole lines of probable courses of action and reaction would be laid out and compressed in sentences aiming at being exceedingly precise and hypothetical, including lots of seemingly improbable if… then scenarios that can be algorithmized but only so as to make their implications even more complex and wide-ranging. Currency can be eliminated from the settlement insofar as the settlement itself becomes currency: the language of a good settlement would, for example, be adopted into the public documents of teams, with an ongoing transparent record kept of adherence to that language. This would be “capital,” and its “value” would be determined by its tethering to a growing archive of 50/50 cases the judgments of which at each point along the way our capital language iterates within a space of inquiry.