AI and Large Language Models in Center Study
Center Study approaches AI and large language models not as a purely technical phenomenon but as a realization — and stress-test — of the originary sequence of speech forms. As Katz writes in The Algorithm as Originary Stack, "Algorithmic governance renders transparent the succession of speech forms hypothesized in The Origin of Language : ostensive>imperative>interrogative>declarative. The algorithm turns the sequence of speech forms into a stack."1. The algorithm is not merely a computational tool; it is a formalization of the same structure that underlies human linguistic emergence, compressed and made explicit.
The "if/then" form that governs algorithms maps directly onto how Center Study understands declaratives as emerging from imperative pressure. Katz explains that an algorithm "designed for airport security" begins with "a sentence representing a state of affairs, which is taken to be a merely possible state of affairs, which in turn implies a field of declaratives with varying probabilities of being the case"1. This is precisely the declarative's originary function: to propose, against an imperative background, which ostensive field is most likely to restore presence. LLMs, which generate probabilistic outputs over a field of possible sentences, can be understood in exactly these terms — they are engines for navigating declarative probability space under implicit imperative pressure.
The Substack essay Stacked Presencing develops this further through the concept of tokenization. As Katz writes, "tokenizing NSM primes involves turning the declarative sentence into or treating it as an output of the linguistic data stored as ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits"2. The token, in this light, is not just a statistical unit but a compressed sample of the originary sequence: each token carries the residue of ostensive attention, imperative demand, and declarative resolution. LLMs, which operate on tokens, are inadvertently mining that originary layering.
The project of "originary grammar" — articulating any utterance into its constituent ostensive, imperative, interrogative, and declarative dimensions — was, Katz acknowledges in Media, Technology and Originary Grammar, a problem he "never succeeded in solving," but one that he came to suspect "might be a technological problem." The original goal was "to articulate any sign, utterance or sample out of the ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives into which it could also be dissolved"3. AI, in this reading, may be the instrument that finally makes originary grammar computable — not because machines understand originary theory, but because their architecture inadvertently replicates its structure.
What AI reveals, however, is also a limit. As Bouvard notes in Mimological Impressments, "if the technological “reveals,” one thing it reveals is where ostensive-imperative-declarative pathways reach the limits of algorithmic calculations."4. The crystallizing passage for Center Study's analysis of AI is therefore this: the algorithm makes the originary stack visible precisely at the point where it breaks down — where the chain of if/then protocols cannot resolve which ostensive field to restore, and where the imperative of the center can no longer be heard through the declarative output alone.
Excerpts
"Tokenizing NSM primes involves turning the declarative sentence into or treating it as an output of the linguistic data stored as ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits. I’ve taken the concept of an ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuit from Eric Gan’s example of the everyday working of ostensives and imperatives in The Origin of Language , which is the familiar “dialogue” between nurse and surgeon which has the surgeon requesting a “scalpel” with the nurse providing it while repeating the request: “scalpel.” My reading stretches this example, which only involves an imperative confirmed, in its fulfillment, by an ostensive, but nevertheless suggested to me a version of a kind of base reality (replacing talking of “percepts,” “sensations,” etc. and other concepts drawn from philosophy and psychology) which involves the world continually communicating with us by presenting us with things for our attention which entail imperatives (respond to, handle, this thing in some way, attend from this thing to some other thing, etc.) which we fulfill and confirm (or authenticate, consecrate, etc.) through some ritual repetition of the ostensive."
[Stacked Presencing] · Substack Read →
"Through this constant churning or mining of the tokenized world some imperatives prolong themselves into interrogatives which concern the availability of a particular ostensive but this is mediated through some obstacle to fulfilling the imperative. Think about how often questions have a trailing off tone, a kind of bridge between the hesitation caused by a problematic imperative and the “hope” for some restoration of the linguistic presence that is put at risk. The declarative is a kind of proposed bet that something we could recognize as the restored ostensive is out there, somewhere, and at least potentially available, if certain ostensive-imperative-ostensive conditions were to be fulfilled."
[Stacked Presencing] · Substack Read →
"The original project was to articulate any sign, utterance or sample out of the ostensives, imperatives, interrogatives and declaratives into which it could also be dissolved. And this was part of what has prevented me from thinking through originary grammar past a certain point—a failure to sufficiently bring in, not just the imperative, but imperative exchange, the model for which is prayer (which is therefore also the model for desire). Media, or the stacking of scenes, is the anthropomorphics of imperative exchange. Images, still or moving, and sound, model forms of imperative exchange issuing in declaratives, in the sense of a scene completed with a potential ostensive."
[Media, Technology and Originary Grammar] · Substack Read →
"This doesn’t mean that you should refuse or defy the command implicit in the declarative sentence to “declarativize” more of the ostensive-imperative world. Sheer defiance of an imperative is never quite right—it locks you into a vicious circle. This is especially the case for imperatives deeply built into our language. We can, rather, hypothesize the origins of our declaratives in ostensive-imperative articulations—this is ultimately what the originary hypothesis itself does, and the originary hypothesis is necessarily formulated in declarative terms."
[The Algorithm as Originary Stack] · Substack Read →
"It is possible to think all imaginable ostensive-imperative-declarative pathways along these lines, and the more technological we become the more we do so—but if the technological “reveals,” one thing it reveals is where ostensive-imperative-declarative pathways reach the limits of algorithmic"
[Mimological Impressments] · Substack Read →
"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."
[Writing as Technics] · Substack Read →