Toward a Unified Idiom

I want to bring into a single idiom the discourse on “media” developed in Anthropomorphics and the discourse on “technics” initiated there but currently under significant refinement and expansion—this latter discourse has been organized around the perfection of the imperative. The perfection of the imperative can be further clarified or perfected by identifying the end point of the imperative, or the relay of imperatives, to be the perfection of the practice of the user. The perfection of the practice of the user is manifested in the provision of the successor practices to your own, which in turn brings the discourse of technology into the singularized succession in perpetuity composing the central intelligence. Think about composing your practices so as to ensure they are continued in a way consistent with your own construction, and that those who continue them will be such as to continue them in a way that will be consistent with their originary constitution in your own practice, and so on, for as far ahead as the mind can imagine (and part of your practice is to increase the mind’s imaginative capacity)—and making that constitutive of your practices. The question of the media has been set aside during this theoretical work, and now needs to be integrated, and the entire distinction between “media” and “technology” abolished within the discourse of scenic design practices.

I proposed as the best way to think of media as the setting of the scene within which the sign can be issued—in fact, this notion of media was the starting point of the concept of “scenic design practices.” On the originary scene, we must imagine a continuum between scene and sign: if we identify the sign as the gesture of aborted appropriation, then we can bring this to a very fine point in the shaping of that part of the body that most singularly suggests a transformation of the animal grasp into the newly human gesture. The attention of all will be drawn most powerfully to the most evident conversion. But the most evident conversion will be embedded in less completely or obviously transformed postures and reciprocal positioning that allow the sign to be set off; and, beyond that, whatever in the background is set off or employed in such positioning. For example, how far each member is from the central object will be part of the way the sign is received—we can imagine someone having to back up a couple of steps before his iteration of the sign can be “read.” If we think of increasing care being taken to ensure the iterability of the scene by arranging for positioning and posture along with gesture with “props” taken from the natural surroundings and the remains of the central object/meal in the ongoing construction of the ritual scene we have our originary “media.” But this also means that the initial technics will be directed towards media, because the imperative exchanges with the center will first of all be directed towards bringing the entire ritual scene into greater conformity with the increasing complexity of demands taken from the center. So, the media is nothing but the means of generating scenes, and once the relation to the sacred center is broken, the possibility of generating, through the arrangement of a single sign on a single scene (say, in a studio), an unlimited succession and distribution of scenes coincides with the turning of technics from operating “magically” on the ritual scene to eliciting, manifesting and making continuous and worthy of continuance the power and intelligence of the center. So, again: scenic design practices.

More discursive and conceptual elements are to be impressed here, among them “mimological impressments,” a concept I proposed at the beginning of my rethinking of technics and which has so far remained abortive.  To get to that, though, the model of cultural continuity derived from Eric Gans’s deduction of the succession of speech forms in The Origin of Language needs to be reiterated and repurposed as a model of cultural continuity (which Gans never claimed for it). This is a model of cultural continuity generated through what I have called “mistakenness,” drawing upon the creation of new forms around “inappropriate” deployments of existing forms along with the constitutive participation of others in the maintenance of linguistic presence. The imperative is created out of an “inappropriate ostensive,” wherein the naming of an object which happens to be absent is treated as a demand to produce the object; the declarative is a product of an inappropriate imperative, through the relay of the interrogative as the prolonged and converted imperative, as a doubled command to cease demanding because the center has itself commanded the object to render itself inaccessible. My first thinking of firstness, or the first issuer of the sign, was completely (if not completely consciously) indebted to this model insofar as the first member to display hesitation could only have known a small portion of what he was doing—he sees the impending disaster before or more clearly than anyone else but certainly has no “solution” in mind (he has no mind to have anything in—he “has” and “is” nothing more than whatever correlation between his own felt movements and the movements of others on the scene he can continue reproducing in his own movements); that “solution” is provided by everyone else (and no one in particular) imitating that hesitation, which has brought their own attention to the implications of their push to the center.

So, there is a logic of cultural continuity and transmission here, one which is neither accidental or meaningless nor fully intentional (as we are with great force compelled to represent such transformations retroactively); which recognizes unevenly distributed responsibility while implicating the “buy-in” of the entire group. But we need to add something: repetition, without which the sign could not become sign. There is a repetition in the “dialogue” producing each new sign itself (in bringing the retrospectively demanded object the recipient of the new imperative would likely repeat the name, as in Gans’s example of the “dialogue” between surgeon and nurse in the operating room: “scalpel”… “scalpel”), but the sign could only be carried beyond that scene if there is an audience participating in the repetition (otherwise, how could anyone else “understand” that naming something can now be treated as a command?). The way to understand a new sign is by repeating it as a practice in a controlled situation or scene; we must assume an almost unbelievably high level of mimetic responsiveness in these early humans learning language from each other, and immediately after seeing the ostensive treated as an imperative others observing the interaction would start demanding objects from each other in lower stakes, lower threshold of significance (I‘m, of course, retrieving another absolutely crucial concept from The Origin of Language here) interactions aimed less at obtaining objects than at practicing the new sign. From now on, every ostensive sign contains an implicit imperative; every object that might be identified is “demandable,” every action “commandable.” And every imperative contains within it a potential declarative reality check, so a kind of “always already” rehearsed character attaches to all signifying practices. And all of these new sign-practices must be made derivable from the center, integrated into ritual and made a source of ongoing commentary in (declarative) myth. Gans situates these linguistic innovations off center, assuming, correctly I think, that the ritual scene would have little tolerance for the invention of new forms; but I think, for this very reason, any innovation will quickly be repeated as part of the ritual relation to the center, and the innovation narrated as commanded by the center. So, whenever you invent something, you’re claiming to retrieve some form already implicitly contained in the center, and you are ultimately right to do so.

Now, we could say that attributing the order of signs to the center (the central being has told us to distribute things in this way, to request things from each other in this, to repeat certain formulas in this way, etc.) is a “delusion,” but we reach an irreducible anthropomorphism here: knowing it’s a delusion doesn’t help dispel it because, in fact, we will never reduce our “decision” to say or do this or that to a fully present representation of all things we didn’t say or do instead of this one along with a self-generated, unimpeachable reason for having said or done this. At some point you’d have to say: I modified a model available to (“compelling”) me in the face of a partially intelligible set of exigencies. A delusion that can’t be dispelled is not a delusion: it’s a command to acknowledge our irreducible historicity and sociality. Claiming to liberate oneself from a delusion is a way of maintaining linguistic presence on some new scene one can imagine oneself to be on, perhaps a scene upon which you say the first word to people who might join you on the scene decades hence.

But there is a delusion that can be dispelled, and that, in fact, my thinking of scenic design practices aims at dispelling: the delusion, lingering after-effect of our origins in ritual and sacrifice, that “we” all exist on a single Big Scene with a central object to be divided in accord with rules provided by that center. All “identities,” resentments, calls for “justice,” proposals for reconciliation, and so on, are captured by that delusion. Group A is being favored by the central intelligence, and Group B demands that this be redressed: regardless of the facts of the case (and, no doubt, Group B might be able to build a powerful case, in accord with protocols passed down from the center), this description of action can never match anything that happens. Whether this delusion is a permanent part of our human inheritance, and will need to always be “worked through,” like Freud’s “interminable analysis,” or can be eliminated with the abolition of the dysfunctional power forms now parasitic upon it we will only know post-abolition—for now, this primary way of maintaining linguistic presence is so deeply embedded in our practices as to be the obstacle any practice must construct itself against. If it can’t be eliminated, it can be marginalized, and there’s no reason to set limits on that in advance. Scenic design practices names the practices undertaken in thrall to the Big Scene imaginary and in doing so works to dissolve that imaginary.

Every new sign form or cultural form, then, will involve an imitation of practices caught up in the fantasy of getting its chunk of the accumulated wealth upon the Big Scene, an imitation that will be so close as to be “off,” and interruptive, and therefore calling into being a new mode of linguistic/cultural presence. (My own attempts to describe the lineaments of contemporary practices free of Big Scenic fantasies counts as such an imitation, at least if I’m right about what we’re doing.) This imitation must extend itself so as to be co-extensive with all of reality, which is to say everything taking place under the aegis of the center. In doing so you give yourself over to maintaining linguistic presence, but an iterable, infinitely renewable linguistic presence, i.e., one given over to singularized succession in perpetuity. You have to stamp everything, all scenic arrangements, all the props, postures and positionings on all the platforms, with this mode of presence; but you can only do this through a singularized gesture, focused on a single point of the networked world, designed so as to exercise maximum resonance on the rest. This is the case if your “intervention” is an essay, a work of art, a conversation, or a technological innovation. Like the ostensive that anticipates its transformation into an imperative, you repeat something in advance of its happening. You make some arrangement of material, natural or human, into an imitation of what it already must have been in order to be most likely to maintain presence here and now. So, this is what I can call “mimological impressment,” both an imposition on and recruitment of some part of reality and a submitting of oneself to the form your impressment will take when it becomes authenticated by other interfaces as a mediator of presence. A model for this might be a narrative in which all the characters create each other through their own narrative activity: such a narrative would represent our reciprocal contributions to the constitution of reality by creating a model of the scenic design practices that must precede and make the model possible. If you design a device so as to make explicit what has been so far tacit, you make a claim about reality that only exists as an effect of the device you’ve designed, while that design marks any samples of the prior reality that might be collected as precedents. You can only claim that some part of reality is an extension or model for human activity by compelling it to imitate and mediate some form of human activity; and vice versa.

We can now speak in terms of assignments to engage in mimological impressments. These are always assignments to translate the results of a previous mimological impressment. You are going to leave unmistakable marks of what you’ve done, which means revising what you’re doing so as to remove everything that will interfere with those markings and accentuating everything that will point to them. The results of the mimological impressment impressing themselves upon you now still retain various interferences with the markings that have impressed themselves upon you, so your translation of that practice aims at eliminating such interferences and constructing a shorter path to a completely different mimological impressment that is nevertheless the same as its predecessor as a translation of another mimological impressment. You “show your work” so as to mark your translation and the innovation in your practice, and it is in fact those markings that turn your mimological practice into an assignment for others to translate it into their own. Markers of your own translation work will present or impress themselves as interferences to be marginalized within successor practices but also as a program to resist that marginalization when the originary form of the practice can be deployed against the infiltration of Big Scenic fantasies into the successor practices. This all sounds very literary, I know, and I’m insisting on the literary as a model for the technological, but if you think about technological innovation not only in terms of the mechanically describable operations of a technological form but as the generator of scenes, in terms of corporate organization, some form of “skunkworks,” and the array of possible deployments by and of end users, then you will equally find such markings of mimological practices there as well. In principle, technology and science involve a simultaneity of operations across fields any one of which is an equally appropriate entry point but, in practice, any thing has a point of reference and origin which marks it ineradicably.

Trying to invent something new involves trying to solve a problem within an existing field, and the initial approach is always to translate an existing, detachable part of the field into a new form that will eliminate the anomaly. Very often this works, and problems can be solved by improving or refining existing objects and mechanisms. When it doesn’t work, it will be discovered that the translation is staying too close to the original and to disturb the surrounding field as little as possible—the anomaly will in that case become more visible and pressing (within the space of innovation, at any rate). In this case, only a reorganization of the field will do. This reorganization of the field is the attempt to maintain linguistic presence under new conditions. I think that we can apply the model of the succession of speech forms very directly here: something that is just “there,” part of the field that can be singled out, must issue an imperative, demand to be put to use; something one “must” do, some part of the arrangement that demands to be included or used a certain way, must turn itself into a question; some incommensurability of demands must become formulable as a sentence. The attempt to force a resolution of the anomaly by drawing on existing operational sequences and thereby confirming and saving the field has the effect of pushing these signs or samples out into the open: some element in the field lends itself to a new use, which renders an older object or sequence questionable, and whatever use the new sequence offers must be repeated so as to address whatever the now questionable sequence was useful for. This issues in the construction of a new scene, which assembles elements in a way that can be repeated. The original attempt at translation becomes the transformation of the field, with the hypothesized, testable, iterable scene as the new center. Repeating the recruitment and assembly of elements set loose in the attempt at translation is “mimological impressment”; creating a new field which will order everyone in a new way is “scenic design practice.” Even if you were just aiming at a technical fix, you’ve laid out a field of imperatives with unknown ramifications, and if the inventor doesn’t promote a way to singularize the consequent practices in their successions in perpetuity, someone else (sometimes) will—even if just to restore the linguistic presence you’ve disrupted.