Modeling Thirdness 2

Starting to answer the question of how to model Thirdness, in particular the justice realizing into suspending notion of data exchange, quickly led to the conclusion that in the place of anything like “policy” comes modifications of the Stack, or technoscene, or the global sensing, measuring, computing, mapping and simulating machinery. This is tantamount not so much to asking what “we” would like to see, hear and touch, as what kind of feedback can each of us, at various points downstream from those considering updates and changes in protocols as prompted by that machinery itself, provide to those upstream? Seeing, hearing and touching are only secondarily (at best) the point here—what passes through the technoscene, or stack of scenes is a range of probabilities regarding possible responses to data passing through machine learning algorithms. Justice is an essential point of intervention here because what pretty much all conservative and reactionary thinkers consider the problem of the present, “wokeness,” or, in the GA vernacular, the “victimary,” is really the conversion of the juridical order into a means of deploying the vendetta at the level of the originary distribution against anyone appearing capable of leveraging succession against the parceling out of the imperative of the center. The parceling out of the imperative of the center means that a calculated strategy of betting against those most dedicated to the creation and transmission of practices of data security can not only break those lines of transmission but can turn those very practices against them. Data can be carefully gathered curated and analyzed for the sake of criminalizing those who would further extend those practices. Hijacking the juridical norms against defamation, incitement and fraud is indispensable to this agenda, and so re-embedding those norms in the stack of scenes is a precondition of establishing singularized succession. Thirdness is to be designed so as simulate this process of transformation so closely as to eventually become it. And this now entails hypothesizing what kinds of information should be available at varying social sites so as to reconvert the vendetta against the nomos into readily framed disputes.

I’m going to bet that originary grammar can be scaled up (or stacked up) for this program. The succession of speech acts followed in The Origin of Language, which I’ve reviewed many times, is generated by the need to maintain linguistic presence. I’m going to retrieve the thread I’ve constructed (it’s in Anthropomorphics, among other places) that has linguistic presence tied directly to the present tense. This is not simply literal mindedness (although there’s nothing wrong with a bit of literal mindedness) because the declarative sentence, on Gans’s account (with my modest modifications) does function to freeze time within language, iterating the deferral effected by the originary gesture. The first sentence asserts that something is unavailable, is not here, as an answer to the diminishing demand that it be provided. Part of this deferral of the demand is the demand that the other cease demanding, because a supervening command has been issued to the demanded object. Maybe the emergence of the declarative should be situated in the difference between demand and command, as two modalities of the imperative. Demand is on the consumer end of the imperative continuum, far closer to a request (and complaint) than an order, while command implies hierarchy, even if momentary or usurped. Invoking a command is always available as a way of deflecting or refusing a demand: “I’m sorry, I can’t help you, those are the rules, I could get fired, etc.” The first imperative is really closer to a demand, as one participant on the scene “mistakenly” requests an object from another—in which case, the command is secondary, following the invocation of the central object as an authority in whose name one can speak (speaking in the name of the center in turn creates the conditions of usurping it). Any sentence, then, ventriloquizes a command to squelch a demand while rendering this entire arrangement implicit, or embedded in the scene itself. As relations between demands and commands are further built into the scenic architecture, new demands and commands can arise on those foundations which themselves are never guaranteed.

My innovation here is to take the need for linguistic presence as a broader cultural or scenic model, an innovation I have installed fairly unevenly so far. Perhaps this is a good time to stack it up. What I’ve advanced previously in making the present tense a methodological principle is an Oulipo-style rule of simply writing every sentence completely in the present tense. The effect of this is to convert any claims one might make about the past into claims about the array of evidence and consequences of that past we might refer to today, while collapsing claims about the future into promises, anticipations and preparations that can be referred to in the present tense. This seems to me to impose a salutary discipline upon any discourse aspiring toward disciplinarity, which is to say the taking and securing of data. Such discipline is convergent with the higher levels of rigor sure to be necessary as deep fakes contend with corresponding identifying technology and general narrative collapse leaves us with no shared pool of agreed upon fact networks. In other words, at stake is the creation of a new center (or excavation of the buried one), organized around whoever can curate data in ways indispensable for anyone interested in actionability. Disciplined declarativity (past and future tenses represent a lapse in discipline, a kind of pandering and coping) captures provenance and maps comprehensively onto the stack, which is all present, including its “memories.” And it promises to be distinctive stylistically, requiring circumlocutions that read awkwardly but enhance precision while, in English at least, and probably in other languages, raising all kinds of questions regarding what counts as the present tense (strictly speaking, the future tense or, more generally, ways of indicating futurity, in English, are exclusively in the present tense, English having no real future tense verb conjugation—still, using “will be” must be disallowed [how about “must be”?]; but not the present perfect).(The literary present is a model here—think of how we say “Tolstoy says..” rather than “Tolstoy said…” while discussing one of his novels—the assumption is that the literary or even textual world is a single continuous present.) It is the most direct way of fixing our attention on maintaining linguistic presence.

The art of data exchange is therefore a way of maintaining linguistic presence—in the face of disruptions of such presence. Disciplined declarativity makes explicit where the command displacing the demand is passing the baton, so to speak, that is, transitioning to a new command presupposing the previous one. Returning to the Israel-Gaza scene, where is the imperative of the center here? What would be continuing it and what would count as parceling it out and discounting it? (Are questions allowed? Not really—get right to the answer with the “prompt” built into the sentence.) The creation of a new state modifies the global nomos and is therefore a sure sign of power transmission, while the extension and redrawing the boundaries of an existing state is not far behind, and it seems either one or the other must take place here. International law and institutions are unequipped to make such decision in ways that will last, which is to say the rigamarole of getting and enforcing (which never really happens) either Security Council or (much less) General Assembly UN resolutions really just launders more power through bureaucracies. The whole premise of Thirdness is the utter inadequacy of such pernicious institutions; it is the power laundered through them that is to be returned to its origins and exercised explicitly, which means the means of power are to be transferred by all available means by those who can rise from auxiliary to sovereign offices.

Israel, then, is to be expected to comport itself, not with hysterical denunciations based on inflationary interpretations of already tenuously grounded human rights law but, rather, in accord with the requirements of an international system reliant upon imperial hierarchies. Our judgment, then, would insist upon identifying signs that the Israel government is or is not so comporting itself, with creation of a prediction market registering and thereby incentivizing behavior that further approximates the demand-limiting commands of the center. All existing figures in all relevant governments, with government understood in the broadest sense, are to be assessed and solicited in terms of their likelihood of participating in such market-making and might therefore be included in the judgment. A complementary judgment is then to be levied upon Hamas, as the governing institution in Gaza, but might also reach individual Gazans, considered as part of that governing institution—in fact, part of the judgment might concern terminology, that is, whether to refer to the residents of Gaza as “Gazans” or “Palestinians.” An initial data search would look into evidence of governing capacities on the part of Hamas or successor governing institutions; if such capacities exist, then the question of repartitioning the territory of the former British Mandate might be taken up; perhaps signs regarding whether such evidence might be forthcoming, indicating some degree of likelihood, would be taken up. It seems to me likely that the question of a final judgment will be formulated in terms of where to fall on the continuum of direct Israeli sovereignty over the entire territory on one end and some kind of condominium of governance including countries having shown compelling proof of governing capacities taking responsibility (and gaining power and authority) participating in governance of the residents of Gaza (and perhaps the West Bank as well). We want to isolate the convergence of continuity with existing power, on one side, and the furthest possible approximation with more direct and transparent exercise of power, on the other (the point is to propose some way of making things better so as to point to something yet better, without simply inventing fantasy scenarios). We want to identify moves existing power centers could make that would have them betting that (by definition uncertain) new arrangements that have them shedding certain buffering and hedging auxiliaries would further secure their power. We then set up two possible forms of the bet, because we are so far genuinely uncertain, and then conduct a study, to be published along with the judgment, to determine which of the two bets is in fact more likely to be considered by the largest pool of power of the agents involved to be the better one.

Thirdness does probably need first of all to be a more conventional online journal, albeit with an interactive component aimed at incorporating feedback and recruiting writers and researchers. Since I don’t anticipate any substantial (or even insubstantial) flows of cash in the new future, the incentives would have to be non-monetary—the project would have to produce a transferable idiom that can be leveraged as power and money in other institutions. An obvious model is consulting firms, like Samo Burja’s Bismarck Brief, but it’s better to be more of an academy, training the new officer class. There’s nothing to do but continue modeling and mapping and assume that an extremely powerful, if seemingly esoteric (although really the problem is it’s too exoteric), theory will make its way in the world. In the meantime, maybe the demand/command entanglement in the declarative sentence can be idiomized further so as to do some of the work ordinarily done by economic vs. political equivocations. Gathering data involves measuring demand, in a sense consistent with its meaning in economic discourse but extending well beyond that to actual and potential disruptants of linguistic presence, with ostensives derived from those measurements then orchestrated commandingly, embedded in language across the board. To register a demand is simultaneously to activate the command that has allowed for and also constrains it. Demands become claims, and at that threshold they register juridically; but they can also remain passive, tacit, even unconscious: within the discipline we register them as measures of the extent and effect of the command structure. The project of Thirdness might be seen as the conversion of demands into demands for commands that would commensurate the field of demands—this is another way of speaking of donating your resentment to the center, now in terms of creating a market that selects demands as matches for commands. This even further urges the compression of represented events into the present as imperatives, demands and command alike, are intrinsically temporal, having their fulfilment in the future in ways that can never be entirely contained in the imperative itself, which leave the declarative to represent the entire field of demands as aspiring to and therefore already implicitly tending towards data seekers and carriers for the command from the center, refusing its parceling off and discounting.