Wisdom as Searching the Central Intelligence

The simplest way of speaking about thinking is as an internal conversation (usually, I suspect, if not necessarily, a dialogue). You begin by taking issue with what someone has said and if you can produce for yourself what they might say back to you you are thinking. The quality of your thinking is then a result of the range and quality of the interlocutors you can imagine for yourself. Reading, of course, is what enables you to move beyond narrow and stereotyped modes of thinking and, even more so, writing, which allows you to look at sentence after sentence and consider ways one might take issue with each and every one. But a range of scenes must be imaginable as well: for many, if not most, the reading and writing they do is on some institutional scene of education, in which case the kinds of responses to your statements will be restricted to those you imagine coming from your teacher in the context of some kind of assessment. If you can’t imagine yourself on other scenes, you will forever be striving to be an A student, which does mean getting good at certain things that bring certain rewards, but is not really thinking. A sign that you’re getting pretty good as a thinker is that you can entertain highly unlikely, even nonsensical, claims, for the sake of seeing what else you would have to be willing to say to defend them. At this point, you’re creating whole new scenes, scenes that could never really exist, rather than just rehearsing the intellectual moves that will raise your prestige (or, more bleakly, ensure your survival) in already established settings. And it’s also likely that at this point you’re having fun.

What I’m describing here implies the ability to step outside of the existing ritual, juridical and disciplinary scenes—not to repudiate any of them, but to carve out scenes within these scenes. Still, carving out such scenes does depend upon them having been shaken, through the questioning of the efficacy of ritual, the justice delivered by the legal system, the knowledge legitimated by the disciplines. A mode of deferral is involved here: once these scenes break down the violence they defer becomes imaginable and even imminent, and when you’re thinking you may not be restoring the categories and institutions that have been shaken but you are at least resisting the rush to find a victim to blame. And, of course, this might put you in line to be the victim, and examining this kind of scene was no doubt central to the kind of thinking done by the ancient philosophers but also to the producers of ancient wisdom literature. “All is vanity” says the preacher, but the word really means something more like evanescent—everything you desire is temporary and will disappear. Conversations, even if internally constructed, with those who have been consumed with desire only to find that possession of the object of their desire did not correspond to the satisfaction imagined in the desire itself, are implicit in such formulations. The very fact that you desire something means that it will not be what you were desiring. There’s a kind of self-evident incommensurability between desire and fulfillment that is the ultimate “topic” of wisdom literature, which aims at teaching us to make our desires things to think about rather than causes to shut down thinking.

I will remind my reader that ancient wisdom literature was the primary means of training scribes. It’s easy enough to see memorizing, learning to recite and write the accumulated proverbs of a culture as the equivalent as the “Dick and Jane” readers children in the modern West are (were once?) taught to read from. We can imagine starting with the simplest and most “authoritative” sayings, and many scribes might stay at that level, if their tasks were to be mundane. But some students would have access to a wider range of sayings, would be allowed to notice that some sayings contradicted other sayings, that many sayings vary significantly in their formulations and in this way constituted a kind of conversation of the community, one the higher level scribes had privileged access to. The resources for revising inherited texts and creating new ones is implicit in this conversation, as one could flesh out contrary sayings, attribute some of those sayings to legendary figures that make it possible to develop the narratives implicit in pretty much any declarative sentence. The smashing of both ritual and governing centers would intensify this process and lend it an urgency as well as some latitude, as one is no longer maintaining but rather reconstructing a communal identity. Composing texts would involve soliciting, creating poles of attraction, for synthesizing material from the vast and fairly disorganized collection of traditional materials.

Some years ago, in discussing with my GA colleagues the topic for the next year’s conference, I proposed that we deal with the “digital,” and further wrote up a proposal that proposed that the “search” was the fundamental defining concept of the digital society. I’m not sure how I arrived at that intuition, and probably wouldn’t have defended it so well had I been explicitly challenged, but I must have had a “sense,” based on experience with Google and algorithms, e.g., on Amazon, that ultimately all intellectual activity will be reduced to this. Just the experience of continually refining your search terms so as to get what you want, even without exactly knowing what you want (hence the “search”), suggested that this was a new mode of writing. The rapid development of language AIs, which are obviously still in a very early stage, confirms the centrality of the search to digital practice, as the language generation operated by these machines is nothing but a search of the internet for language that would “match,” according to some parameters, the language one has provided it. The data accessed through the search is (or will be) the entirety of the culture, which obviously includes far more material than was transmitted by the ancient scribes. When you type some language into the engine you are organizing all of human knowledge around that language, skewing it in some way. We can see that the quality and importance of a piece of writing will be determined by the way it arranges the collected expression of humanity around itself in such a way as to enable a revision of the “search term” (entire books will be “search terms”) so as to elicit yet another, more revealing, display of human thinking. The equivalent of scribal education today, then, is the composition and ongoing revision of search terms.

Once you’ve written enough, you’ve generated your own interlocutors in the form of arguments at cross purposes or seemingly unrelated to the one you’re making now, and in fact a lot of theoretical development happens this way. In this case, the “assignment” is to articulate searching as wisdom with the derivative, or future presentism, and technology as scenic design. If these are all generative concepts, they must be reciprocally generative. It was bringing Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Sematic Primes to bear on the originary scene that enabled me to say that saying “this is the same” is constitutive of all language use. The sign has to be “certified” or “authenticated” as the same sign for all who use it (just like words in our languages are the same for all users even though we all pronounce them at least slightly differently) and the central object must be acknowledged to be the same for all, as both the desired and repelling thing. But there is a temporality of the scene, as participants follow up on the first hesitant, and at a certain point a threshold is reached at which the sign is indeed a sign because once one emits it one ceases advancing toward the central object. So, there is always a point at which it will have been the same, however dimly perceived by whoever gestures before that threshold has been reached. That (not yet) sign, then, is the same, has the same “value,” as the sign that marks the crossing of the threshold into the human community. So, there is the derivative on the originary scene. And whatever the not-yet signer is doing to enhance the likelihood of the sign being transmitted through the group (maybe he has to exaggerate his non-threatening posture in a way that latecomers won’t have to) is him hedging against the sign not being taken up; but one might also say that holding a threatening or retaliatory response in reserve is also a kind of hedging, and this maps out the scene in the same way as the contemporary market where risk reduction and risk intensification proceed in tandem.

There is a political movement in the US that, presumably realizing the futility of changing the Constitution so as to turn the presidential election into one determined by a national popular vote, has tried to circumvent the constitution by trying to get states to agree to elaborate vote-swapping schemes so as to attain the same result as a popular vote would. This seems to me to leverage the logic of the derivative. The starting assumption is that only majoritarian decisions can be legitimate in the election of officials, and so the pre-modern electoral system is a dangerous form of illegitimacy; rather than conceding the inevitability of this illegitimacy, and further conceding the illegitimacy of the Constitution itself, these sources of potential “volatility” can be addressed by introducing auxiliary institutional arrangements that would ensure the “legitimate” result. This is a mode of thinking applied to institutions, and could be used across the board—the assumption that only a straightforward popular vote is legitimate is arbitrary, and one could, of course, just as easily say that 17th amendment to the constitution is illegitimate and a source of volatility and try to create some institutional work-around whereby you would get the same result as having state legislatures select senators (this would be more difficult, but therefore more interesting to think through) or, for that matter, having only those owning a certain amount of property vote. In each case, one tries to find some way to ensure that the input is the “same” as the output: a “legitimate” election.

The derivative order heightens our mutual interdependencies and indebtedness and even reveals that at the foundation of any social order there is nothing but the exchange of faith in one another that constitutes sociality. But if the goal is arbitrage opportunities, there’s no reason why investment should flow towards any enterprise that serves any socially useful purpose. That also means, though, that if you want to get something productive done, you need to pitch it as a potential arbitrage opportunity—at the very least, some investor can get in first and make rapid profits before the field is saturated with investment and a few firms monopolize the field and proceed to sabotage competitors. Nothing that would benefit everyone, or that would not necessarily, in a pre-calculated fashion, benefit specific people, could possibly attract investment. This makes it pretty easy to understand why nothing much is done about our “crumbling infrastructure.” And which investor, in particular, would benefit from controlling the southern border? During the 90s, that is, during the launch of the fully derivative order, public-private partnerships were much touted, precisely in order to deal with such problems, but I’m guessing that never worked out to anyone’s satisfaction because since Tony Blair and Bill Clinton left office we haven’t heard much about it. (Although the whole “green credits” scheme seems alive and well.)

Now, this is where good government progressive types start saying, “see, we told you that the government serves an indispensable purpose and should not have been dismantled and it’s time to set the old New Deal state back in place”—but what is the government if not another site of speculation, in which proposals for public investment would work their way through banks, campaign donors and monopolies? And privately funded philanthropies and NGOs, staffed by graduates of elite universities on their way to careers on Wall St., McKinsey, etc.? What are the scenes upon which other scenes are coordinated? Somewhere along the way the nostalgic progressive will resort to metaphysical concepts like the ”will” with which government action needs to be infused, or the “popular energy” by which it needs to be guided, and then anyone can know they can be safely disregarded. But derivative thinking can provide a way of articulating a long march through the institutions with satiric exposures of the existing order. If what we’re interested in is the order becoming more of an order, with the ritual, juridical and disciplinary mutually shaping each other and the ostensive>imperative>interrogative> declarative forms being mutually clarifying and approximating reciprocal exhaustion we have advantages over those with fantasies of finally installing real democracy. There are specific levers within the ritual (scene-setting and commemorative), juridical and disciplinary orders that can be discovered and pulled in tandem.

And here is where wisdom, in the form of designing search terms, comes into play. What will have been the same is the “conversation,” or scene/event that is to be inscribed on the central intelligence as a bias or attractor. To represent a scene of thinking so as to ensure it will have been the same scene across, in principle, infinite subsequent scenes, involves a form of writing that programs its own receptions. This is what Straussian esoteric writing was addressing, as it was predicated on an ongoing pedagogical space in which the true doctrine would be continually retrieved from the deliberately seeded surface contradictions by those masters who, paradoxically, know that the true doctrine is really the preservation of the master-student relation itself in resistance to the mimetically generated illusions and turbulence of the world. And what was the writing between the lines Strauss claimed was practiced by philosophers if not the creation of search terms that would generate the retrieval of those suited to continue the tradition? The pedagogical relation is indeed the fundamental human relationship, one which needs to be scaled up well beyond what Strauss’s esotericsm could (or wanted to) handle. Search inscription now takes the form, rather of a radical exotericism, a rendering transparent of the infrastructures enabling any utterance. This means treating any object on any scene, or any scene as an object, as a transfer translation, itself inscribed with search terms distributing pedagogical sites across space and time.

“Belief” is for cultists; imagining yourself on single big scene, ranged against an enemy, is for cultists. Cults will continue to exist within disorder, but can be disregard in the articulation of scenes at different scales—except insofar as the cults might be samples of transfer translations themselves. When you inscribe a scene/event as transfer translation, you “bet” on that transfer being the same under a range of different conditions, including differences in the inscription itself (changes in idiom, deterioration in the physical means of preserving the text, etc.). All that can justify such a bet is the markings in the inscription that can be read as a sign by some unknown, projected other, working on his own transfer translation. Here is my most treasured borrowing from C.S. Peirce’s notion of the truth as that belief that will be confirmed in the long run—in that case, you can’t prove something to be true now, but you can arrange the means and media that are within your power to arrange in such form as to be maximally revelatory and participatory so that someone might do the same after you so that someone will do the same after them, etc. What brings this into focus is the question, what would count as a deferral of violence in this case, which at scale means a deferral of the multi-pronged threats driven by rivalries across the scenes to the ritual distribution from the center, the juridical order, and the disciplinary order. I’ll return to this question soon, but I’ll pose the following as a provisional “transitional program/prayer”: abolishing capitalism by working to make it compatible with a juridical order governed by the design principle of a supreme judge. A transitional program would be the term for a series of searches that would elicit and instruct those posted so as to determine that this decision would be the same as that affirmed by a court of last appeal expecting its decisions to be upheld by future courts of last appeal because they would minimize the resentments generated by distributive decisions. And this would be the form of wisdom literature today.