Writing as Technics

Among the earliest written sentences in the world were those carved into the base of statues of ancient God-Emperors, proclaiming, in the first person, the power, will or accomplishments of the ruler—kind of like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” It’s not too much of a stretch to derive from this that the purpose of writing is to speak through inanimate objects. And the purpose of speaking through inanimate objects is to speak to everyone who will come into contact with those objects, and thereby speak through them as well. But it would be more precise to say that you want your voice installed within each individual, and made part of its self-centering—no individual could literally say, on pain of death or being deemed insane, “I am Ozymandias,” etc. Rather, “I am Ozymandias” engages with, countermands and overrides, other voices competing for expression in your data banks. The most historically consequential example of this is God’s revelation of His name to Moses: one speculation, which I find convincing, as to why it is forbidden to say the Name of God is that you can’t do so without proclaiming yourself to be God (I Am That I Am). Brian Rotman directly ties the disembodied Name of God as declarative sentence to the invisible source of the voice entering your mind when you read: you are hearing the identical voice as everyone else, equally inaccessible to and unidentifiable by all. In writing, we try to relay that voice through the Stack so as to have it enter, not only, by this point, everyone’s mind, but everyone’s social, material and institutional ecology.

There is a way of following up on this originary account of writing by synthesizing it with the originary thinking of technics (originary technicity) I’ve been working on in recent newsletters. The origin of technics is in the perfection of the imperative; the origin of the declarative sentence is in a failed, resisted and rerouted imperative; the perfection of the imperative must itself be a response to a failed imperative, or at least the anticipation of one—therefore, the revelation of the limits of the imperative splits off into the co-constitutive origin of technics and the declarative. Writing, moreover, is itself the study and perfecting of the declarative sentence: the metalanguage of literacy described by David Olson, which “discovers” individual words and the sentences comprised of them, is concerned with ensuring that the sentence that we see is exhaustively composed of interrelated parts, each with one, and only one, function in the whole. Beyond the individual sentence, the metalanguage of literacy is interested in constructing discourse and language itself as a system: words are to be used in authorized ways (in accord with their definitions and proper spelling—and the establishment of correct pronunciation probably starts with writing as well), each sentence refers to previous and succeeding sentences in rule governed ways, and each sentence bears with it a mini-epistemology telling you were you should look, within language and/or within the world, for the “verification” or “authentification” of the sentence. And, of course, grammar is the origin of logic, which establishes rules for how sentences can be sequenced, and logic eventually leads to programming, which is, then, the full convergence of the perfection of the imperative.

In perfecting the imperative you would work very closely with the one to whom you give the imperative—first of all, rehearsing the action with him, and then by deploying reminders and aids for the fulfilling of the imperative; eventually the imperative can be replaced by the reminders and aids. The scene is designed so as to make that action the only conceivable one. This best describes the ritual setting, the origin of all that is technical and institutional. But there are always scenic designers, including the most obedient participants on the scene. Rituals can themselves never be replicated perfectly, and each difference in the new iteration calls for a newly modified imperative. The difference between the imperatives is generative of the declarative order, which narrates the ritual scene as an enactment of scenes played out at the center. The earliest declaratives are formed in direct response to questions emerging directly from the “sliding” imperative. Previous declaratives serve as a model, and are revised and recombined. The declarative order collaborates with the design of the ritual world. This reciprocally constitutive relationship has never ended: today’s technology is just as much an arraignment and deployment of the accumulated and compressed reminders and aids, automatizations, of previously perfected imperatives, and the declarative order is just as much an ongoing effort to supplement, regulate and hypothesize that design so as to hear the imperative of the center in the perfecting of our practices.

The imperative I’m listening to here is to design discourses that can enter into the design of technologies and institutions that will ensure that the questions to which we apply our declarative models do, in fact, emerge from slippages within the iteration of the imperative order. This requires the most advanced form of literacy we can muster: to interface between power and the user is to read the writing that has programmed the imperative order in such a way as to leave a margin of intervention for the user. It’s a question of moving further up the algorithmic chain. We can assume everyone is located somewhere on the algorithmic chain: discarding humanist assumptions, we can treat everyone’s discourse as a more or less complex set of if/then protocols. Humans, of course, write the programs, and there’s nothing “anti-human” here—algorithms will be our greatest creations from here on in. But the algorithms need to be not only trained, but strained, tested, subverted, mocked. Even if we know all that will only produce feedback that leads to stronger algorithms. You can write programming that compels those who can read to fend for themselves outside of the programming—to move further up the algorithmic chain.

The slippage in imperative sequencing shows up in power/responsibility and need/ability discrepancies. The only stacking protocols that will make the imperative world cohere better are those that identify the discrepancy more closely, more granularly, and hypothesize with as great a juggling of variables as possible, the likeliest manner for the so inclined to repair the discrepancy. An unanswerable question blasts apart the imperative cluster congealed in any power/responsibility nexus—it is easy to identify because it will target either power (more here or less there) or responsibility (again, either more here or less there) separately—it’s either a power grab or deflection of responsibility, or both. The model declarative can map the unanswerable question so as to model a needs/ability discrepancy and thereby not so much answer the question as cancel it. The maxim, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, is prior to the power/responsibility nexus: someone must be able to create a new need set for the deployment of his own abilities in order to take responsibility for the distribution to meet needs in general. The claim that someone has too much power is only intelligible insofar as that person is unable to see to the meeting of needs and eliciting of abilities: this may be because that person has not been supplied with what he needs to do so, but that also means he has been unable to ensure such a supply, reflecting upon his inability, and so that is the question: who would be able to see to such a supply, to ensure the meeting of his own needs as a power center and, then, insofar as they are genuinely his needs as a power center, to arrange for needs to enter into a greater conformity with ability. We can disagree and discuss what such conformity entails, that is, we can continue to generate declaratives, but only insofar as we agree (which we in fact always already do) that a needs/ability vertex formalized as a power/responsibility apex makes such declaratives meaningful in the first place.

You want to write sentences that can be models for other sentences—through the substitution of words and phrases, a direct model. Oscillate, without middle ground, between direct, absolute, highly consequential alternatives, on the one hand, and indefinitely hypothetical string of phrases and clauses on the other. Eliminate the space for middle-brow style debate and dialogue: allow for only extremely open-ended inquiry, of the kind willing to (first notice and then) suspend one assumption after another, or for statements that require the creation of an entire discursive position to resist. Zero in tenaciously on who is doing what in every layer of discourse, outing the agencies embedded in phrases; or, set everything floating, unmoored from ontological anchors. Systematic diffusion and scattered causalities ultimately allow for a center to coalesce, simply in order to sustain the discourse itself—the center might be the linguistic oscillation itself, and an inquiry into what happens once we abandon the tacit agreement on a set of unquestioned ontological verities. This is how your writing enters and activates the inanimate and animate alike: your voice, turned into the reader’s own, upends that readers zone of ontological comfort so as to disable attempts to rest in the fuzzy middle ground. (Look what happens when you eliminate the “but” from a sentence like the following: “People often want to maintain a comfortable dialogic space, but that must be denied them.” It’s already fairly confrontational but consider the following: “The gestures underpinning expectations of even, flowing dialogue are refused and thereby dismantled.” What looks like a choice, even if a tilted one, in one sentence (one would have to “decide” to deny the dialogue) in this latter case implies inescapability because the denial of dialogue comes from within the means of sustaining the dialogue itself. The refusing and dismantling appear agentless, but that inserts the reader into the discursive machinery to fulfill that function. The first sentence leaves the semblance of a space of inner dialogue; the second one a fiat accompli, built into those undefended gestures and evanescent “expectations” themselves. Of course, something like “perhaps as the dialogue drifts off-script and attempts to find indications of a complementary response grow more desperate, one might…” might be a way of opening a space less of dialogue than of dissipative inquiry.)

The kind of “technical writing” I’m modeling here is more alienating but also far more honest than the classical prose proposed by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner and adopted by David Olson. The mechanisms are made clear, and the writer is on the scene—the writer is on the scene to demonstrate that the scene itself is uncertain, and contingent upon accepting the primacy of the conditions of scenicity itself. I can keep unsettling things or we can settle on something—what I am doing is closing those crevices where the unanswerable questions hide and metastasize. Everything on the scene that is not directly foregrounded is held constant in classical prose, but left oscillating in programming language. What’s programmed here is interfaces that leap from one level to another, between wide open, continually dispersive inquiry and securing absolutely the scenic design enabling that inquiry.

Given the complementary responses of the invention of technics and the discovery of the declarative to an imperative in need of perfecting, the same method of deriving cultural developments through mistakenness might be as applicable to technics as it is to linguistic form. Gans solves a very difficult problem in an ingenious way in The Origin of Language: how to account for the fully intentional emergence of forms that no one could have planned, desired or imagined in advance. The solution is an “inappropriate” use of the existing linguistic form and the subsequent compensation by the interlocutor in order to preserve linguistic presence. In the case of the imperative, an object is named without being present, and so it is retrieved; in the case of the declarative, an imperative cannot be fulfilled and the gesture naming it is repeated along with an “operator of negation,” let’s say a retrieval of the sign of deferral—in the proto-declarative, the object is represented as absent, with an “appended” imperative to cease demanding it. Technological innovation proceeds in the same way—a solution to one problem, within the terms of that problem, present itself as a possible solution to another problem, which didn’t even exist as a problem until the solution presented itself. At least sometimes it proceeds this way—the internet’s transformation from an internal communications network for the military to a global communications network seems to fit this model. On the other hand, Google’s founders were very deliberately searching for a better search engine, and no doubt knew exactly what it was when they achieved it. But perhaps this fits the model as well, as all kinds of things became searchable algorithmically that almost no one would have previously thought of in those terms (the few who could have imagined such things had no idea of the technical solution). This suggests a model of “inappropriateness” or “mistakenness” for cultural intervention, or scenic design within idiomatic intelligence. Use existing technical objects according to idiosyncratic rules; make visible gaps in algorithmic order; prolong by imitating an automated imperative chain; put pressure on linguistic presence and force a scramble to reconstitute it. Maybe much of what we take to be insidious and dangerous, because potentially directed toward us, could more productively be taken as mistakenness, which we can take in a new way to recreate linguistic presence. Maybe we should treat everything, even the most perfected practices and devices as mistaken, even if only on the margin, and act as if called upon to stumble upon new ways to be addressable to them. That itself would be in obedience to the highest and oldest imperative, to elicit from others the symmetries of a human order around a center opened and threatened by crisis.

I don’t think I can sufficiently emphasize how dead the classical prose mode of writing, aiming at transparency and presupposing equal standing upon a present scene, is. Style is political, but it is also technological. (Even that last sentence is a bit weak—but I’ll leave it as a sample—“you may already agree that style is political, but I urge you to consider it is also technological.” This grasping at a shared point of agreement so as to say something new is textbook liberal rhetoric. “Style is now resonance across the fields of political technology” is better—you accept or reject the entire positioning before the planetary declarato-imperatival order.) The middle-less oscillation between incessant hypothesizing and the ruthless perfection of practices implants iconic intelligences in the devices operating scenic design. If this text works, it takes away from you a whole array of lazy rhetorical maneuvers, thereby compelling you to deliberately and explicitly construct models of the scenes across which your words might resonate. You could say that all intervention in the idiomatic intelligence takes the form of writing pedagogy.