The Same Sentence

In the course of a recent exchange the discussion came to focus on whether the originary gesture of aborted appropriation could “scale up” all the way to global peace and cooperation, even if never completely guaranteed. My answer was yes, since there are not “others” left out on the originary scene, no group against which that group is formed and, therefore, there is no ceiling on the creation of new modes of deferral. The reply was that that was true in principle, but not in practice, just like it is true in principle that there is no limit to the length of a sentence but, in practice, Proust probably pushed the length of the sentence to its limits. This led me to recall that I know of at least a couple of books that are comprised in their entirety of a single sentence, one of which I have read (and which I love: Ronald Sukenick’s Long Talking Bad Condition Blues), and there are no doubt others. The idea then came to me of figuring the unending sentence (unending at least until there is no one left to continue it) as a social model—that is, seeing how far we might get treating the human community as co-composers of a single sentence which we are all obliged to keep adding to but can never complete and therefore shouldn’t try (that is, our contributions to the sentence should leave hatches open for continuing it). So, that’s what I’ll be working out in this post.

I’ll begin with a feature of David Olson’s model of writing and cognition that I haven’t dwelled on previously: the fact that he sees writing as the recreation of a reported scene, rather than of someone speaking himself on a scene (say, the writing of a speech). Writing would never develop the metalinguistic features Olson identifies if it were just a kind of script to be recited on a specific occasion (even if, in Greece at least, this may have been a very common early usage). Writing, “prose,” is then inhabited by the voices of others in a constitutive manner, even if I’m just writing down what I think about something. Even in the first person I’m reporting my own speech, representing some other scene which is being restaged in the text or, rather, in the imagined text’s ramifications through a spread of readers. And on that other scene I am an other. Whatever is implicit in a text is these other scenes, and most of what is “in” a text is these implicit (re)stagings. I have focused on the verbs representing cognition that are, in fact, most illustrative of the transformations Olson is interested in in which words indicating distance, placement, movement and so on are recruited as a “walking army of metaphors” to embed the mobile scene of writing and reading in a vast array of scenes, actual and possible. But the incorporation of scenic architectures in prose goes way beyond mental verbs like “assume,” “suggest,” “imply” and so on into all the ways one sentence entrains all the preceeding and touches all the contemporary sentences in its articulation. The hypothesis that in each sentence we try to keep all those connections and continuities in play, like one of those games where each player tosses a fragile object like an egg to the next one, can only enhance the meaning conferred upon present scenes. What is added here is the assumption of the incompleteness of our sentences, conceding that where we are putting periods someone else could put a semi-colon, colon, dash, some modifier, etc. We’d start to speak, write and think somewhat differently, as if we were very specially treated samples in data exchanges.

The dialectic of demand and command I’ve hypothesized in recent posts would also involve a process of continuing the same sentence, which has, after all, been initiated to institute that very dialectic. There is a single command to be obeyed since the beginning of humanity, to sustain the presence of the scene, which is also an imperative to design the scene, to lay the tracks, create the affordances, practice the gestures and incantations that create the singular paths to the center in any community, a path that has its shape so as to ensure all petitioners of the center are worthy of being heard and carrying back the command of the center so as to match the demands of the community. What I have been calling the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center is not so much resisted as raveled up by creating knowledge of use to cases in stacked scenes that keeps pushing cases asymptotically to their self-abolishing limits. That is, we place the juridical at the center—the juridical is the form taken for the settling of resentments and since it has become the indispensable form for doing so it has also provided the language in which resentments are formulated and felt. Resentments themselves indicate a disparity in obedience to the imperative of the center, which we can now speak about in terms of a violation of the nomos, or originary distribution. Resentment is when one’s own effort in sustaining presence is not matched by others, who nevertheless remain on the scene. The juridical relies on knowledge—every form of knowledge, humanistic as well and physical—in order to answer the demands made and questions raised by the disputing parties satisfactorily. This implies the maintenance of institutions dedicated to the production and preservation of such knowledge. The settling of a case involves an adjustment of the nomos, a re-establishment of boundaries, including by removing the offender from the community so as to prevent further violation of those boundaries. But it also involves the continual design of the scene—the building of prisons to hold convicts is scenic design, but so is the establishment of police and other security forces, fences and other ways of protecting houses, other buildings and neighborhoods, habits of scrutinizing others and reading situations which themselves get built into the scene. With the emergence of planetary scale computation scenic design has now come to include extensive surveillance, recording, data collecting and algorithmic-driven machine learning which, as I’ve been speculating in recent posts, will likely render certain kinds of cases obsolete while creating new ones—cases, though, that will center on modulations of the stack at one or another of its levels just as much as upon measuring the proper degree of retribution or reparation. Humans will still resent, and massive reserves of potential violence will still “power” the system, but deferral will increasingly be referred to learning to navigate designed scenes.

The same sentence is then continually making such referrals, registering the demands placed upon us by various modes of training for entrance onto teams. The same sentence, really, inscribes the possibility of making such referrals, by countering the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center. The kind of “politics,” or exercise of power, implicit here is the occupation of strategic nodes in the stack of scenes, juridical order, and knowledge producing scenes. Through the occupation of such nodes and the creation of networks mapping out these scenes into a meta-scene always concerned with data security everything can be made meaningful—in the precise sense of being semiotically operational. Every relationship, every move, every decision, is “ordained” in a way best described as ritual, referring back to precedent and the needs of singularized succession. This means some kind of eugenics, arranged marriages, responsibility arranged through kinship and so on, in a manner befitting people who are engaged in abolishing old and creating new levels of the juridical. As always, the counter to liberal objections here is to point out that such arrangements have never really disappeared, and have recently taken on more online forms—people have always thought of the offspring to come from a particular matching, our social circles always channel us toward certain matches over others, we are still mostly, more willing to take a call and be sympathetic to the appeals of a cousin we haven’t seen in decades than of a stranger, etc. We’re always speaking of further formalizing and making explicit permanent features of human organization.

The same sentence further advances the project of converging currency and language proposed most recently in Tokenization. Very explicitly, I want words and other signs to replace money, the debt to the center to replace monetary debt. This must sound deeply utopian to most, and I don’t mind thinking of it as something to approximate—if you approximate something enough, you are it. We can call this practice of approximation “inscripture”: referring to the originarity of inscription, the simple making of a mark that differentiates that mark from what surrounds it, as the most minimal form of signification; but also to “scripture,” the privileging of certain texts, treated as vessels of commemorated scenes and the distillation of textual traditions and in turn generative of the continuation of those traditions. This may be Derrida’s “archi-writing,” appropriated by Bernard Stiegler in his theory of technics—tertiary memory, the externalization of the depositing in memory which, taken to its conclusion, means the emptying out of our interiors and leaving us with practices of literacy prompted by an ever more intricately designed environment. Commitment to a project—a building project, a travel or exploration project, a colonization or terraforming project, a research project—that can only be conceived of as multigenerational cannot be funded under capitalist conditions—at any point its continuation might be estimated to be of less value to its investors than some other potential investment; the support of a state, meanwhile, depends upon changes in leadership, which is radically discontinuous in “liberal democracies” (or debt enforcement/forgiveness agencies), and so far not at all guaranteed in a party system like China’s. But such projects are essential to singularized succession in perpetuity—the hand-off from one leader and his team to another must involve a promise to continue and branch out such projects. In that case, if the entire social order, as I’ve been arguing for a while now, is to be organized around succession, that includes these trans-generational projects. We’d have to imagine the entire process of discounting against expected future earnings as both prolonged beyond an imaginable expectation of future earnings and as externalized (inscribed) in institutions top heavy with expectancy. There is nothing more important to think today than this inscripture.

Continuing humanity’s single sentence is tracking the imperative of the center through all its windings, its subsidiary commands and the demands they incite and contain. Part of the Thirdness program involves constructing cases, to be adjudicated by a trained team, on the outcome of which one would bet. For the bet to be meaningful, you can give odds, but since we’re not talking about betting on ritualized events with a public outcome (sports, elections, etc.) it is better to construct cases that are as close to 50/50 as possible so that it is the deliberative process itself that is the focus of attention, not trying to guess at some hidden predilection or pattern of the judges. This means constructing odd and idiosyncratic cases like, say, whether the firing of some political operative from a campaign was a resentment-generating violation of, let’s say, the “customary rights” of that level of campaign operatives. The point is to use the concept of justice to systematically take the temperature of institutions and generate knowledge about them that would not have been generated otherwise. The Thirdness team then comes to represent the required juridical temperament. But there’s a broader way of thinking inherent in this approach—rather than joining some majority to weigh in on some “weighted” event constructed so as to program a particular form of division, look for those questions where no majority has or even could form because the question only exists as an especially good occasion to exercise specific forms of judgment. On any issue, then, try to find the 50/50 point on it—not whether someone is innocent or guilty, good or bad but whether, for example, a particular person positioned some specific way would consider that someone to be worse than someone else; or if someone is guilty, how far the implications of that guilt might travel if certain legal standards were to be retrieved or refined or, even better, the stack of scenes were to be modified in some way. Answers to the “easier,” “majority take” questions might be implicit in taking up these distributed questions, but the questions actually taken up can be designed to keep their relation to the originative question (if there is one) hypothetical. By making every sentence as hypothetical as possible while including “cuts” at which one would have to “punctuate” the hypothetical with the real (cases answerable to the center), one would be writing that endless sentence of humanity. To dwell in the hypothetical would be to be the most real because you’d be revealing the imperative of the center in highlighting the convergence on the center by diverging alongside that convergence. This will even turn into the best way of exercising power as it is the best way of forming teams to detect data leakages, which are really results of the rush to the center.

The idiom worked out here might seem esoteric but it’s not a writing between the lines—everything is open source, explicit. It’s more a question of replacing all those linguistic translation devices, like philosophy and its descendants, the human sciences, with an inscripture that translates not only discourses but obligations, which is to say becomes currency—currency as data. Is this something that will really happen, is it realistic or merely utopian, etc.—no use of language directly matches reality, and each is therefore an approximation inviting others to approximate it in turn. As with everything else, center studies just makes things more explicit—it outers, or utters. We are always, in every utterance, tallying up receipts, marking up our ledgers and ourselves as ledgers. I would want everyone’s language to eventually curve towards, be drawn to the gravity of, these inscriptural idioms—they should turn up as a better way of saying what you were in the midst of already saying. Inscriptural idioms are anti-resentment because they refuse to compare—comparison is itself always resentful, asking why the standard is applied differently here. Standards are always rules of thumb derived from a mixed bag of interpretable precedents and every case is singular. If a judgment in some case causes that feeling of resentment to start creeping into your utterance imagine some mode of deferral that would extend the one enacted in that judgment. Your idiom will then work to extend deferral indefinitely, to sustain the presence commanded by the center. Here we have all the “spirituality” some are calling for as a civilizational necessity as well as a program for the human beyond any “Prometheanism” or “Faustianism.” What arrangement of markings, aural or visual, will be referencable in a future beyond our imagining because it is inscribed within that future condition; what could we be loaning our furtherest descendants in such a way that repayment would be indistinguishable from forgiveness? What nomos might you be initiating? Such questions combine the most precise and disciplined attention and the most far-flung imaginings.

To be a little more precise: what I see distinguishing center studies from contemporary embraces of capitalism, cryptocurrencies and AI technologies (the singularity, accelerationism, etc.) is my insistence on the irreducibility of the juridical, of judgment—this insistence helps us to remember resentment, which is always essentially a contesting of some judgment, and therefore mimesis. All data, which is to say all information and knowledge, has as its ultimate destination the securing of judgments, whether formal in the case of actual court cases or informal, in what will always amount to some decision among contenders regarding succession. For the chosen successor, originary debt (to further secured succession) is enforced while the debt traced back to the outside spread (the recording of promises that guarantees rotation at the center) is forgiven; the further out from the line of succession, the more that distribution is reversed—for, say, common criminals, the originary debt is forgiven but the debt grounded in contemporary property relations enforced. Making this distinction, though, is the site of pedagogy, which is to say language learning and learncoin: commonplace, secular thinking is the simulation of the vendetta below and revolution above along with resentment that one’s enemies remain untouched and the “system” unmoved (in a way, commonplace thinking is a kind of implicit demand for funding). The idioms of singularity, meanwhile, convert all cases into selections of successors and it is this that bends the partitioning and parceling out of the imperative of the center towards succession in perpetuity: to decide a case is to appoint, even if in the abstract, someone to superintend its enforcement. It’s the way you would think in building a company that is meant to last forever, to incorporate all other companies, to issue its own currencies and create spheres of justice among its actual and potential yet to be incorporated partners: the ever more finely tuned medium of the juridical is the means of conveying the imperative of the center.