Credit-Idiom-Imperative Perfection: Expectant Scenes

Let’s start with a little utopian vision, one which I’m borrowing from someone who gave a talk at a GA conference some years back along those lines. He wanted to argue for the possibility of non-hierarchical relationships, at least within a single space—whether he was arguing against me specifically or what he took to be GA’s conservatism I don’t remember—and he had a case study which involve advanced forms of cooperation within a high-tech environment populated by very well educated and civilized team members. So, of course the presentation was convincing—a group of highly motivated people guided by a shared goal which they have the means to fulfill will certainly not need to be bossed around and can more or less work spontaneously on their own. This is the kind of post-capitalist imaginary that Veblen had in mind with his engineer-run social order, once the financiers were dispensed with, and that Bichler and Nitzan (Capital as Power) deploy as their own possible future (they are taking it from Veblen). I see no reason not to stipulate to the possibility of such an order, but its possibility derives from the prior possibility of so thoroughly inscribing imperatives from the center into the scenes occupied by the citizens of this future order that they are essentially taking dictation from the machinery itself, which they themselves have been intricately fitted to. This, in fact, is a good way of thinking about what we might be working towards, with the qualification that the machinery itself might “insist” on certain hierarchies and gradations. But we’re not talking about “utopia” here; rather, we’re talking about an “installment,” a paying down of originary debt. And the proof of that is that precisely such an order would invest heavily in succession, in the sense a great deal of organization would be put into pedagogy so as to ensure there are future generations to replace the present one.

I would also like to return to an old and radical argument of mine and bring it into the discussion—the assertion that all of the disciplines, starting with the original discipline of philosophy, are further inquiries into the metalanguage of literacy. All of the indications of stance in the representation of the other’s voice on another scene is where, ultimately, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, aesthetics and so on come from. This analysis needs to be expanded across all the disciplines, including science and technology, and turned into a technological, i.e., scenic design problem itself. All of the words central to all the disciplines, whether it be “value,” “ritual,” “communication,” “society,” “cognition,” or “electron,” “function,” etc., are all virtualizations of someone on a scene pointing to something at the center of that scene and affirming along with other members of the scene that they see or hear or touch the same thing: the words themselves involve taking on trust, or crediting, that such scenes have occurred, or are possible. Words are more or less dense articulations of a spread of scenes upon which one could say “this is the same.” My hypothesis here is that a philological history of the disciplines will bear this out, but we can see how generative it is before we have such “proof.” (What other explanations for where concepts come from, starting from an elementary anthropological and semiotic mode of inquiry, could possibly be better?)

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“Credit,” “debt,” and “ledger” are very elementary terms—not Natural Semantic Primes, of course, but easily traced back to the most elementary social forms, and in such a way that we can use them to track the transition from pre-money to monetized communities. What is happening, then, in terms of those constitutive relations, when a scene is constructed in accord with an imperative from the center, involving the imperative exchange between center and periphery issuing in a declarative order produced through the metabolism between declaratives and ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits? An imperative, whether it be a command, demand or anything in between, always looks forward to some exchange—even the most imperious, uncompromising ruler expects petitions from his subjects, who he knows needs to eat, be clothed and housed, or even require clarification on occasion. Every transformation of the environment or setting of the scene is aimed at objectifying or, better, tokenizing, the terms of that exchange, in the process necessarily modifying them as well. We want to get to a point I have approached or circled about many times, which is a direct “creditation” of any utterance, which is to say its conveyance and iteration across scenes at various levels of the stack, including its transfer translations at each point along the way and, what most interests me here, getting a measure of the scenes the utterance or contributing sample can command, in the disciplines above all. Technology is at least potentially solid and enduring—we can tell how long built things will last—but finance is exactly the opposite. Obviously a project that is fully funded, with more backers getting in line behind the scenes can see that support evaporate overnight, with the result having technological ramifications in the form of research enterprises abandoned, factories left to rust, maybe data in centers being unextracted, etc. What we would have here, then, is an imperative exchange broken off, in ways that probably implicate the juridical order in some way, but that also suck the meaning out of a whole range of utterances which now become empty talk, platitudes, wishful thinking, etc. So, I’d like to get a read on that so that we can bring all of the discussions of money, technology and governance back to language, which is where all the indications of effects of those relationships must always turn up. A collapse of a regime is most reliably registered in a command lapsing—someone would have obeyed promptly yesterday but laughs at it today: in the surrounding declaratives will see the “radiating” of the compliance or contempt.

To recall yet another concept I’ve left in abeyance for a while, I am speaking about assetizing discourse (any utterance or sample) so as to prepare it for the conversion of assets into data. Here’s a new concept that I think can help us tie all this (originary grammar threaded through technology, media and finance) together: the expectant scene. I’m drawing further from the source of “expectations,” representing the open field of ostensives resulting from the ostensive-imperative-ostensive loops issuing in imperative exchanges rolling out through interrogatives into declaratives. That’s what the declarative does: generate new possible, hypothetical, potential ostensives, which also means new scenes upon which we might say “this is the same.” Discourse and idioms are “assemblages” of declaratives which leave us always expectant of encountering new fields and which are built into scenes to the extent of being the components of scenes and stacks. The expectant scene is, for center study, the equivalent of “smartness,” as in the smart city, the smart institution, the smart phone, etc.—smartness seeks to optimize, but expectancy is more a set of affordances to fit a given scene in its ramifications and unfoldings. Optimization is doomed to fail precisely because it can’t account for investment because the relation between the outside spread and the spreads further inside can never be optimized—the entire financial order is dedicated, on one level, to ensuring such optimization and, on the other hand, to arbitraging all the differences in likelihood that optimization will actually be approximated. Optimization has to pretend this isn’t the case, but expectancy can toggle between the need to survive arbitrage waves and the attentions of those interested in succession. We have, on one side, expectations of future earnings, i.e., capital, according to Bichler and Nitzan and, on the other side, expectations of scenic transmission, in which the ending of one scene is the middle of another scene and the beginning of yet another one. Every scene has both sets of expectations built in.

Expectations of future earnings is a very generative concept because such expectations are self-confirming—if you expect future earnings to flow from ownership title of a particular asset then you will buy that asset thereby raising its price and increasing the expectation of future earnings. And, of course, it depends upon who is doing the expecting—the more the expectant can invest, the higher the expectations. But such expectations are always ranged across a field—one invests because it will provide a higher return than some other possible investment; or, rather, one portfolio of investments vs. some other portfolio, and this question can be re-asked at every moment. And all these expectations come with an expiration date, an expectation date that is in turn affected by the inflow of expectations. The ideal is, again, arbitrage, which therefore becomes a model for thinking through the conversion of asset to data. If you can sell the same asset in one market at a higher price than you are buying it in another market simultaneously you have made a risk-free profit. But I’m not so sure about “simultaneity”: maybe in the instant between pushing the button on the sale and the sale being recorded the prices have changed. And maybe this happens because you are constantly laying the groundwork for arbitrage and thereby shifting the market around so that someone with more computing power than you or smarter quants gets the arbitraged profit ahead of you. So, one instance of arbitrage doesn’t eliminate risk: you need to be big enough, i.e., to have sufficiently privileged access to the outside spread to arbitrage across the board, so that even your arbitraging in hedged. But this also means having your tendrils reaching out across the political arena, i.e., the nomos as mediated through the juridical, so as to create the surest possible conditions for your arbitraging spread—and this means bringing all the lines of succession into order with your arbitrage spread. This really means turning succession practices themselves into assets, subject to the same processes of arbitrage—e.g., investing in several politicians simultaneously so that the differences between them average out in your favor.

Now, one could argue that this is in fact the best possible way of allocating resources for future use because, despite the now familiar stereotype of financial institutions buying up functioning companies, breaking them apart, selling off the pieces for a quick profit and thereby leaving industries and communities devastated—a stereotype which I assume has some truth to it—it is probably also the case the companies vulnerable to such a practice had their own difficulties and may not have been capable of innovating in ways necessary without bringing in new loans and investment; but, even regardless of that, this is not all that financial systems do, and who knows how they might be reformable in ways that increase the benefits of free flows of capital while minimizing and mitigating the losses. And there is certainly good reason to be cautious in laying hands on these institutions—it would be very easy to fall into Bernie Sanders style idiocy in denouncing “finance capital” or whatever. But for me the question is whether the outside spread can be encompassed by the juridical, and it seems to me the answer is no; this observation, moreover, provides for a sustained, intelligible practice of transformation that raises rather than lowering the level of civilization. Larger and larger bailouts (and by whom, exactly?) of financial institutions that can’t help but extend their credit lines precisely in expectancy of being bailed out really is unsustainable—we can’t just do this every few decades. Debt must always be adjudicable, and to the extent that that’s the case the value of assets can be assessed in courtrooms, thereby relying upon some measure other than what someone would pay for it right now, pricing in its juridically assessed price and the outcome of the trial. That measure, as things stand now, I assume would be given by experts from the financial industry who would, in fact, try to make their best guess as to what a market price would be for the assets at the moment: we would be betting on the existence of such experts, on their selection by the authorities, and their continual incorruptibility. But I’d like to focus on a very singular, and I think currently impossible, kind of adjudication: one in which the lender of last resort cannot meet its own obligations to pay for the assets it has hedged itself with and must have all of its assets dismantled and sold off to pay its own debts. These assets would include money owed to it, so an exchange between its debtors and creditors would have to be mediated. Under such conditions, where the value of the store of value must be assessed, what criteria would there be? Everything would be up for grabs, and whichever court, backed by whichever sovereign, could pull it off, would institute a new regime of credit and credibility. Here the definition of the juridical I have been working with would come directly to the fore: judgments between parties that take the vendetta from below off the table by on average providing results better than expectations from pursuing the vendetta; and deferring the vendetta from above, against sovereignty itself by allowing for strictly limited suits against and appeals to the sovereign sufficient to prevent any critical mass of antagonists expecting a better redivision of the nomos through extra-juridical means. These would be thoroughly pragmatic and anthropomorphic determinations, without any external measure of “justice” or the “common good.” And I think part of the determination would have to go beyond the price for which the assets in question could be sold right now to the preservation of modes of possession and power that could be shared across companies, professions, kinship groups and, most importantly, generations. And then the assets start to become data as a new nomos is created out of the old.

How, then, is this eventuality, this horizon toward which Anglo modernity beckons, to be inscribed in the idioms of the expectant scene? You want to create novel idioms that will attract attention while still be durable, maxim and proverb like. You want to stay as much as possible in the present tense, while reaching, within that tense, for what has been, what might have been, what we have indications of having been, what is to be, what will have been, what might yet be, and so on. You want to identify ownership of assets and assess credit, determining who is up and who is down, for how long and on which markets, while simultaneously converting such identification and assessment into markers of the scene and the scene across scenes and within the stack. And, ultimately, these assessments, conversions and measurements must be tested as companies gathering data under the auspices of actual and possible disputes considered under the most rigorous juridical conditions to the point where the accumulated disputes empty out into a new nomos where everyone contributes to ensuring that imperative exchanges never reach the threshold of formal resolution. Try to see everyone in the light of a peaceful settlement of all the possible disputes over the obligations of an outside spread dissolved into distributed pedagogical accreditations.

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