The first writing is the first designation of property and the first token of exchange and issuance of debt. Implications must follow from this. When an entry is made of “3 cows” (with 3 ideographs of a cow and then a single ideograph with the number 3) in a ledger, and this is copied onto an envelope or packet designating the contents of a delivery, and this same envelope can then be used to promise someone else a future delivery of those items then we have the origin of writing tied up with the origin of property, trade, currency and debt. There may be no necessary reason to treat this co-origin as telling us anything about writing, specifically, and trying to figure out, say, how jotting down a few notes for myself to develop later (maybe by texting myself) has an intrinsic relation to ownership, money and debt. For a long time, though, I’ve assumed there must be some relation, and I think now would be a good time to try and work it out. It would, I think, be very helpful to be able to think about the act of writing as creating a token that entails a debt that at some point, in some way, comes due.
David Olson finds a kind of originary grammar (certainly not his term) in that inscription of “3 oxen,” or whatever. We have the subject-predicate relation of the declarative sentence in embryo here. That basic structure prepares writing to represent speech acts, and once writing starts to represent speech acts, we are on the way to alphabetical writing. At that point we are already at quite a distance from a ledger entry, and it’s easy to see why one might assume the two forms of inscription, currency and writing, simply went their separate ways here. Which speech act would have been the earliest to have been recorded, though? Inscriptions on monuments, in the voice of the god-emperor, for one thing—assertions of power and immortality. Prayers, magic formulas and the like, preserved for pedagogical purposes within small priestly castes. But also, as Seth Sanders has suggested, and, even primarily, if Sanders is right, the graffiti on walls created by slaves working within imperial systems, appropriating the alphabets of their masters, perhaps even, out of ignorance of their hieroglyphic operations, creating them as alphabets. There’s no need to choose among these and other possible scenarios in order to assume that writing as the recording of speech acts retained its close connections to ownership and inheritance, marking spaces as one’s own for those who follow designated to or able to inhabit and extend them. The same set of associations and commitments must hold for the writing down of epic poems and scripture, also bound up tightly with oral, communal, pedagogical scenes. To read these texts, that is, to repeat out loud what others have said out loud, is to issue a token and take out a debt—one is obliged to be ready to live out those words in other situations, and to affirm them in the face of hostility.
There are similar trajectories here—to write “3 oxen” makes it possible to give that piece of writing to another, who will now have a claim of 3 oxen upon the issuer of the note, and the note can further be circulated along with other similar notes as a form of currency, without anyone ever necessarily going to collect the 3 oxen; while transcribing or simulating a speech act will be circulated as a text, become part of various rituals and pedagogical settings, be included in other texts, mixed in with other texts from other origins, and other versions of that same text. “Dissemination,” to cite Derrida, in both cases. Perhaps, to maintain, not so much the analogy as the identity of the two modes of circulation, we would have to say that the original speech act transcribed or imagined (but, if imagined, imagined from some, to use one of Eric Gans’s most felicitous conceptual inventions, “autoprobatory” event that had to have been experienced to have been imagined) remains as a reference point anchoring the entire circulation—perhaps it is writing that creates, not so much the sacred as the sacred as singular event of revelation. “Writing” creates “speech.” Even asemic writing, or writing that departs, as all writing of course does, from strict phonographic representation, is predicated upon an event of creation even if not quite a speech act.
We’d have to see writing as a kind of “ledgering.” Each piece of writing is categorizing and weighing debits and credits, in a way that that could ultimately be made “literal”—which, we would then have to say, is the task of criticism. In doing so, it must in turn be claiming a kind of authority and issuing a demand to be repeated through all the differences iteration involves and generates. Writing sorts out the doing and happening composing any event, and therefore the history of debt enforcement and forgiveness it is part of. Blockchain, then, must also be a kind of writing, and we want writing to approximate the qualities of blockchain. I don’t get a sense that promoters of blockchains are particularly aware of this, but the public verifiability and automated enforcement offered by blockchain represents death to victimary and even democratic agendas. There are many things it used to be possible to argue about but no longer are. Blockchain leaves open plenty of things to argue about, but they mostly regard protocols and questions of operationalization rather than unanswerable questions of fairness regarding differential starting points. As I have been arguing pretty persistently for a while now, the juridical, which means questions of justice and fairness, can never go away, but it can be singled out much more precisely across larger fields of entangled causes and effects. Other dysfunctional forms of power are also endangered—if bitcoin and/or related forms of blockchain technology and economy can eliminate capitalist power by removing from state and banks alike debt issuing power, they are to be unequivocally supported. Only what can be agreed upon and submitted to third parties, including automated decision-making mechanisms, in such a way that neither party can deny the terms of the agreement have been implemented, is really worth discussing. Our writing, then, should seek to approximate such discussions, and this includes demonstrating the implications and consequences of discussion that don’t seek to approximate blockchain conditions.
All this returns us to the declarative sentence, and the work of revealing its logic and perfecting its operations—tasks I have announced a few times without yet seeing them through to the end. The declarative sentence defers and converts an imperative threatening to break linguistic presence by eliciting a counter-imperative from “reality” (which it is the business of the declarative sentence to construct). A declarative sentence informs someone, at whatever remove, that something they are demanding or commanding cannot be produced or performed—it is not there or not possible. A declarative sentence can always map onto an interrogative, which is to say can always be presented as an answer to a question or, to be precise, at least two questions, one answered by the topic or one answered by the comment—and everything else in the sentence (adjectives, adverbs, etc.) are just answering other questions. So, a good sentence is one that packs in as many answers to as many presence-threatening questions as possible. Interrogatives are prolonged imperatives, converting the demand for action into a request for information, a conversion that is really the emergence of the declarative sentence. The further you prolong imperatives into interrogatives the more the questions pertain to various “meta” issues regarding how you have been able to answer other questions; at the same time, the originating imperatives remain in the background, threatening to collapse the structure built through the interrogative prolongation. We can now speak of this in terms of “prompt engineering.” Still, as a result of the declarative sentence, a new imperative, entailing a chain of imperatives, self-correcting as each of them runs the gauntlet of becoming interrogative and becoming sentence, must be issued. A sentence is only intelligible insofar as it tells you to do something, and that something is first of all to redirect your attention, to make it joint with some other you previously had no occasion to point along with.
I can now say that a good sentence, then, issues redeemable tokens (here I am answering questions coming to the above discussion from my more recent inquiries into debt and power). A discourse (an institutionally recognized or potentially recognizable arrangement of sentences) offers words, phrases, sentences that can be used as counters within other discourses. They are on loan and are used to pay some other debt. Every sentence and every discourse issues the imperatives that will assert and clarify the originary distribution and singularize succession (expose and cut the ties between the holder of the outside spread and the outside option) by constructing juridical scenes that serve as pedagogical platforms. Idioms are currency and forms of intelligence. Centered ordinality takes on directly linguistic forms: in any form of social organization or coordination, someone will go first, simply because everyone can’t do the same thing at the same time—this is what “firstness” means. Someone initiates a conversation, someone shifts the conversation to a new topic, someone spots the impending emergency and moves toward it or others away from it first. Simultaneity is impossible, which is why it must be constructed ritually, which is to say institutionally and verbally. We all say the same thing so as to prevent everyone from doing the same thing at the same time—everyone doing the same thing at the same time can only be centralized, auto-accelerating violence. You can see this in every discourse simply by noting who the discourse thinks should be doing what, or what actions deemed necessary by the discourse have had the doer omitted. Discourse should in that case aim towards producing nothing but idioms that work as redeemable tokens—words that only have meaning insofar as they entail an obligation and lay out the terms of the receipt of that debt by its holders. I can assert one of my oldest idioms here: if you imagine the kind of sovereign who could do what you say you want done in such a way that you can acknowledge it has been done you are imagining a sovereign who wouldn’t care what you want and would do something different from it. So, cut to the chase, peg your desires to the center, and work on the balance sheet, the debits and credits, the forgiveness and enforcement, an occupant of that center capable of singularizing succession might take as a program.
So, writing can’t really do anything other than draw up ledgers. Let’s now push back beyond the speech/writing distinction that Olson works with (and that I accept as giving us the most precise account of writing and the declarative sentence) towards Derrida’s “arche-writing,” inscription prior to the speech writing distinction itself and really, prior to anything we would recognize as language. Arche-writing was a starting point for Bernard Stiegler in his inquiry into writing as technics and the way he uses inscription to mark the transition from animal to human is completely consistent with the originary hypothesis—it is only with the origin of language that memory can be transmitted generationally, rather than either genetically or through the learning experiences of individual organisms. The arche-writing for center studies is design, and first of all the symmetry in the arrangement of individuals on the originary scene. Everyone on the scene marks and is marked-up by everyone else, producing a kind of inscription on the ground. This inscription is retrieved and reactivated with what I have suggested earlier can be seen as a secondary, supplemental or “centripetal” event, the leaving and following of traces left on the hunt or gathering exercise. (Perhaps this is women’s non-violent entry into language.) This is a mode of inscription that immerses the human in a much broader world of inscriptions made by other animals and plants. Animals of course track and evade each other by sight, hearing and smell, but deliberately leaving traces for others to follow is something new and would transform the vast inscriptions made on the earth by other organisms and inorganic entities like the wind, fire, etc., into intentional marks to be woven into ritual, myth, and eventually science, which is really just the creation of controlled scenes for gathering traces. All of these traces are ancestral gifts, and hence part of the originary debt.
There is always that which doesn’t fit into the ledger, which doesn’t balance out and our inscriptions capture that as well. That which doesn’t fit is what happens to the indebted, so as to place them in debt, or make the debt exceed their means of repayment, and to some extent this is the case for all of us—who has not left things undone? The corresponding agency of a creator who has given us more than we can ever repay, hence cancelling all human sacrifice and calling for the complete devotion of the self, an invention shared by Judaism and Christianity, is registered in all those idioms in which someone does something without there being any way of specifying any “mechanism” by which he did it. To some extent, all of language is comprised of such idioms—even a simple description of an action, like “he went to the store,” leaves open a fundamental mystery of the creation of desire and its transmutation into action. The Natural Semantic Primes are on the one hand the simplest, most commonplace words and the most mysterious—how is it, exactly, that we “think,” “say,” “know,” “do” and so on? These primes are certainly late coming words, the distillation of declarative culture, polishing off and replacing more ominous names and commands coming from beings hovering overwhelmingly over the community and directly constituting every particle of its shared consciousness. These essentially unbearable first words mark a debt that can’t be remembered or recorded because too terrifying, marking reciprocal recognitions of tremendous violent capacity from which we were saved only God knows how (and therefore “God” remains the best word for designating the agency enabling such articulations, which it would be most accurate to describe as being done with, or in, or of, or for or at the center). The only way to mark these inscriptions is to place scenes within scenes, to keep moving the speaker of the declarative sentence into the center as ostensively gestured towards and then doing the same for the speaker who made that move, and so on. This would be equivalent to eliciting from one’s interlocutor an unspeakable mimetic memory that, if recalled in full, would call into question one’s ability to speak, which is to impose a burden that only in its sharing restores and amplifies the linguistic presence within which we speak. An arche-writing like that drawing of Escher’s in which two hands are drawing each other. The ultimate proof of work.