The Sentence as Metric

I have relied a lot on the architecture of the declarative sentence, including for the purpose of parsimoniously accounting for the history of media, broadly from orality to literacy to whatever we have now—electronic? Digital? Digital orality? That’s the test I want to put declarativity to now—to offer a way of thinking our current media conditions, in particular in the context of those, like Andrey Mir, supportive of the “digital orality” concept, to which I’d like to offer an alternative. It’s easy enough to see the plausibility of seeing digital orality as the defining media condition of our time, as it reflects the dominance of social media, which prioritizes and incentivizes “polarization,” with the demolition of traditional media ‘gatekeepers,” presumably still drawing upon conditions of literacy in order to slow down response time, force resentments to be worked through various filters, and so on. Social media retribalizes us, on this account. But this leaves the Stack out of account, and the entire order of intelligence, which operates beyond and to some extent through digital orality. It’s a consumerist approach to the question.

The declarative sentence, under orality, would always approximate the imperative, in the form of oaths, curses, prayers, accusations, prophecies, threats, spells, and so on. It would be incorporated into performances that re-enact stories that are themselves made of those kinds of speech acts. The imperative is delayed just enough to be deflected. The declarative would become isolatable and analyzable as a speech form in the wake of writing, where an observation and clarification of its syntax become necessary and can be modeled on accounting records. The form the declarative takes in writing, what we might call “high literacy,” is what Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner call “classic prose” (I have discussed this many times, but we do have a new context here). Classic prose creates a fictional scene upon which the reader is placed—you describe, as a writer, what both you and your reader can presumably see in front of you. You can ask yourself how much of what is ordinarily called “good” writing conforms to this model—the very notion of “clarity” in writing presupposes that the language doesn’t get in the way of taking in the scene. Classic prose works because of what David Olson (who also needs no introduction for anyone familiar with my work and who, it should be mentioned, himself relies upon Thomas and Turner) calls the “metalanguage of literacy”: proposing that we see writing as the recording of another’s speech, on the model of someone telling others gathered on a scene what happened on some other scene, Olson hypothesizes that everything mimetic on the reporting scene (where the one reporting the events and speech from elsewhere would directly imitate all the words and actions) is filtered out by a new set of linguistic formulas that inform us more indirectly of the speakers’ relations to their words—so, instead of getting all worked up and shouting when the “character” in the story you are telling raised his voice you would say “he then exclaimed,” etc. My own follow-up hypothesis is that all the disciplines, starting with philosophy, are attempts to ontologize these formulas of implication (e.g., what are valid and invalid “assumptions”; indeed, what is an “assumption,” etc.) rather than contribute to their stacking in scenes.

The question I ask, then, is what happens to this model of declarativity in the wake of the emergence of new media over the course of the last century and a half or so? I would agree with the proponents of a new digital orality that the performativity of language, which is occluded under the “regime” of classic prose, displaces the objectifying and neutralizing pretensions of classic prose. But surveillance, information sharing, data collection and analysis, algorithmic governance, simulations, forecasting and so on are performative without marking a returning the hyper-alertness of orality. It’s easy to overlook these modes of performativity, or to examine them only in some kind of protest mode which pretends to imagine a return to an earlier form of liberty, and thereby remain focused on the predations of social media. Only the officer class can see the data exchanges between “addresses” and not only “users” (to recall Benjamin Bratton’s terms from The Stack) as a site of intervention, construction and decision making rather than threat and violation. I’ll take this opportunity to remind readers that one can make great use of many “leftist” analyses of the new media and modes of data circulation if one simply subtracts or filters out all liberal and democratic assumptions and thinks in terms of more deliberate and transparent data exchanges between teams of subscribers. The same is true regarding those on the republican or populist right: I read fairly recently an account by the pro-Trump conservative blogger Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse about how the supposedly environmentalist legislation being proposed in Congress has been written up by BlackRock because it has invested in Chinese companies producing the very electric vehicles whose sales would be boosted by this legislation. And, of course, he’s perfectly right, and, under present conditions, such arrangements are absolutely insidious and destructive. But that’s only because everything has to pass through the Rube Goldberg device of “liberal democracy,” requiring that those in command of resources must do their coordination amongst themselves under the guise of various forms of liberal and democratic ratification—and, of course, the credit system which is itself laundered through the same means. Otherwise, of course those in command of the resources required for one part of a production line should be coordinating with those in command of the resources required for other parts of the production line—how else, indeed, could it work? So, I can allow myself (and you can, too) to cut to that more basic question of how to enhance coordination amongst those best able to secure succession, in their own lines and in social orders more generally. The question of the media takes on another cast in that case.

I’m going to develop the suggestion of a demand into command model of the declarative from a couple of posts back into the model of a new mode of declarativity as data exchange. So, let’s recapitulate, again (we can never do this too many times), Eric Gans’s hypothesis regarding the invention/discovery of the declarative sentence, with my own little additions. We have an imperative that cannot be fulfilled because the object is not present (an “inappropriate imperative”)—we assume this because if the imperative is refused we have a confrontation, and nothing new, linguistically, can happen, while if the imperative can’t be fulfilled we have the “agent” of the imperative (thinking in terms of the “principal-agent” problem) still interested in maintaining linguistic presence, and so the design of the speech form can proceed. Since the imperative involves the supplying of an object (there’s no way at this point to think in terms of an imperative aimed at an carrying out an act within a chain of command), we can call this imperative a demand. Demands come from the margin, presupposing some other has the means of satisfying it; the demand leaves the ‘recipient” of the demand intact, or even more powerful, as more responsibility is added to its “remit”; the command assumes the delegate is relatively interchangeable with other possible “obedients” of the command. In this case, considering the imperative in question a demand helps us understand how the situation is defused, since it is backed neither by hierarchy nor a threat of violence, while the agent of the demand more closely approximate the center through accepting it. The demand, then, is repeated in the face of continued failures to supply the object and, rather than escalating, the demand is prolonged until it trails off into a request and finally an interrogative, which becomes a proto-request for information about the demanded object insofar as the demands pending state continues to strain the bonds of linguistic presence, until the agent of the demand repeats, counters and completes it with a ”negative ostensive,” modeled on the “operator of negation,” retrieved from repellent “stand down” order issued by the central object on the originary scene. The operator of negation is itself an imperative, but in this case a command, as the object of the imperative to for the other to cease demanding. The command here is coming from the interlocutor of the demander, i.e., the agent, but only as backed by the center, or what we could call the “real” (itself created by the declarative sentence, which calls into being what can be referred to but not changed), which has issued its own imperative, also a command, to the object, for it to absent itself. So, the declarative, on this account, elicits a command to constrain a demand in the name of a prior command. We can see how performative it is from the start, but also how it opens a space for commands to be issued by what Marshall Sahlins called “metapersons” (upon whom actual persons can come to model themselves), and therefore for a world that resists our desires but with which we can “negotiate.”

It's hard to imagine a more powerful model of “objectivity” than being able to elicit and register all demands, across all scenes, whether made by humans or by some device activated on some scene, and channel them through questions so “executive agencies” can in turn be channeled through chains of command to “corner” those demands and convert them into information about the distribution of needs and abilities on the scene.  We could call this the metricization of the sentence. Any sentence might be taking in dozens, hundreds, even more demands, and commensurating them all to a single command capping the imperatives at the point where some disturbance in the nomos would threaten to reintroduce the vendetta. Any sentence is already designed as an answer to questions, with at least two possible questions informing even the simplest sentence: a question about the topic and a question about the comment or predicate. All the other parts of speech simply pre-empt possible questions posed to the presenter of the subject-predicate relation, i.e., the commanding reality: adjectives answer the question “what kind” or “which one,” adverbs answer questions like “how” and “when.” And every question can be traced back to its demand or network of demands. The design of a sentence is then one aiming at attracting all manner of demands into the dead end of a commandingly arrayed reality which, then, in turn supplies the questions into which the demands have mutated with knowledge (a new world of possible ostensives) with which to reformulate the originating demands. Our sentences are scraping the data field for demands to be converted into commands. Our bodies, for example, are comprised of a vast set of demands for pleasure, comfort, space and therapy, including anticipatory therapy or potential therapy, while all those demands made from throughout our metabolism are registered by data control centers which use them to create new networks of ostensives, then imperatives, interrogatives, and declaratives encoding demands conveyed elsewhere on the production lines so that bodies can in turn be supplied with data, in form of various treatments, that our organs know how to make use of.

We could say that desire is a demand made to the center—ultimately, a demand to be cradled and protected by the center, to have the attributes of the center conferred upon oneself, however that might be imagined. If I recall correctly, Lacan models desire somewhat similarly—you need something, and call out for it (i.e., demand it) and then it becomes desire insofar as recognition by the one upon whom you make the demand is overlaid on the need with which you started. Lacan is thinking of an infant, while I’m thinking of a participant in a scene governed by mimesis. And what is imitation if not attention directed so insistently upon another that the very maintenance of that attention requires the participation of the entire body in tethering (in the face of distractions) the attention to the other—the body becomes a kind of record or measure of attention to the other. That attention gets redirected to the center once it is broken up in the mimetic crisis. One’s demands to the center then compete with those of all the other members of the scene. All these reciprocally reinforcing and subverting demands supplies the most important data. The demands merge as data because the demand already presupposes and awaits the command—the entry of the command onto the scene is in fact part of the demand, as demands never quite know exactly what will satisfy them. This returns us to the paradox of governance as I’ve formulated it on occasion, here reformulated as follows: whatever your demand of the center, consider the kind of command that could limit and satisfy it better than it would itself know how to and then realize that your demand is really for such a command.

It seems to me that thinking of sentences as the recording or ledgering of demands that become in encountering some command the demands they always were provides for a very generative idiom. It provides for protocols of literacy, or modes of interpretation. The sentence can be mapped onto succession, very unlike any digital orality. Good sentences would not be the clear sentences that put you on a scene (while conveniently forgetting that the composition and sharing of the sentences takes place on other scenes) but sentences that interfere with each other by surfacing the demands informing them leading into commands calling them to order. There’s another kind of clarity in this. What is this essay if not the eliciting of all the demands I could dig up for a media theory of the imperative of the center, producing some rubble in consumer and market-oriented versions of the media? Media as the intelligence of the center, as data exchange oscillates with becoming data and demands are recalled to their origins in indebtedness. Demands become facets of commands as the forgiveness and enforcement of the debts they bear get sorted out. Commands carry a kind of succession in perpetuity with them, as any command can only be one in a chain, while demands are very time sensitive. This is why the commands of ancient emperors could be converted upwards into the eternal commands of God. The interplay between escalating demands and commands that draw strength from and further elicit those demands is the site of declarativity and therefore media today. But let’s think differentially here—the shift from a consumer’s satisfaction to producer’s desire economy means something like Bichler and Nitzan’s notion of “differential accumulation,” which is just a degraded form of centered ordinality—the defining command comes from whoever is first on the scene. The sentence that most creates a disciplinary space around a new idiom is best and here that means the point where the demand dissolves itself into command and command into a new field of demands, where the command is therefore to convert your most disabling resentment (the command you alone obeyed faithfully without recompense, the juridical space closed off to you) into a demand for knowledge of how to donate that resentment to the center. To use Bichler and Nitzan’s terms, to draw productivity out of sabotage.