Media, Technology and Originary Grammar

The last (Grammar of Technology) post suggests avenues of inquiry that would tie together on a higher level all the center study idioms I’ve been developing the last few years. First of all, it opens the possibility of returning to the problem of originary grammar, a problem I never succeeded in solving, even though I began working on it back in 2007. I had essentially abandoned it, without ever acknowledging as such, and maybe withholding such acknowledgement was right—this too might be a technological problem. 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. If you think about the extensive reach even the simplest discourse has into ostensive and imperative realms, you can see this would have to be a computational project, as vast connections would have to be made, in very discrete ways, which would then have to be abbreviable for everyday use, which is to say for actually learning to think and speak in the ways which first of all would require very disciplined analysis. Some of my initial musings about working with LLMs with a few colleagues several years involved trying to map out such an approach to computing the originary grammar, but while that led to some interesting work with Anna Wierzbicka’s primes I certainly didn’t succeed in designing a proposal that might interest anyone willing to provide resources. To give a sense of how we might come to talk in these terms, my knowledge of critical theory and ideology critique or, more broadly, semiotic “decoding,” led me to want to try to get to the point where someone would speak a few sentences to you and you’d be able to respond by pointing to the chain of imperatives hierarchically organized and deferred through the creation of a new, potential or virtual ostensive and, not only that, obey those imperatives more precisely and loyally with a more readily available set of potential or virtual ostensives. Obeying the imperatives would simply be their exposure.

To now see this as a technological problem would mean articulating it in terms of the stack of scenes which make the string of sentences possible—on the simplest level, are we engaging in a conversation, watching a movie, a TV show, blockchaining some evidence, posting on social media, etc.—the media, or the scenes, itself, we can now say, has a grammatical form in the working through of some imperative to position people on different scenes as if they are on the same scene. This goes back to my use, not often revisited, or at least not recently, of David Olson’s model of literacy to talk about media in general. Again: Olson sees writing as representing the speech of others when you are not on the same scene with those people and therefore haven’t access to the mimetic “clothing” that would come into play in a face-to-face conversation. We’re skipping past McLuhan and, for that matter, more subtle theorists of media like Vilem Flusser, but we can always bring them back into the machinery at any point. Right now we can just see each media as supplementing in some way what it can’t supply, but within a media environment where each media is doing this not only or not at all in relation to some non-mediated condition but in relation to all the other media. The declarative sentence, with its creation of the virtual or potential ostensive, is the model here: every media is doing something like that. A potential ostensive to supplement an absent scene—that’s a very minimal way of thinking about media. Of course, with the media we have much more than linear, written or printed discourse: we have sound and images of all kinds—all the senses are involved. And what we can add to Olson’s model is that even his “originary” speech situation is supplemental, because the sign is always supplementing some blocked desire, or the dead-end or “knot” (to dip a bit into Lacan) of any imperative exchange. 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.

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We can now go narrow and go wide, be immersed in the scene or sitting several scenes back, doing some ledgering for another scene. An image/sound combination is commanding, or requesting, or implicitly suggesting, that you move forward, retreat, move laterally or adjust your posture at some pace, to some extent. On this virtual scene, which you share with others across various scenes, and maybe with yourself across successive scenes, you have been compelled or invited into some imperative exchange that in some way intervenes in some imperative exchange in which you are already invested or with which your familiarity and hypothetical affiliation with is assumed. Language and discourse still provides the strongest model here, for we can describe all this in terms of connectives, subordinate clauses, parataxis, recursion (scenes containing other scenes, perhaps embedded in such a way as to require effort to access)—in short, the single sentence of humanity. But now we can use “sentence” less metaphorically because we’ve determined that technology, as the perfection of the imperative, requires precisely the generation of the potential or hypothetical ostensive precisely for that perfection—an imperative is not perfected until it is not only complied with but seen to have been complied with and affirmed as completed—kind of like the signature a delivery man requires or the photo the Amazon guy takes of your package at the door.

You as a “reader” or a sampler of media must determine where to end a particular sentence. When has the hypothetical ostensive emerged? Right now I’m thinking of being on X and looking at the replies to a (usually fairly predictable) post and seeing a long string of virtually identical replies and moreover, replies that I have seen to many other posts. Maybe they’re bots, of course, and so here we don’t need to speak metaphorically (if we ever do) about the machinery of language. Maybe there are sentence breaks within the series of replies; maybe the entire reply section is a sentence; maybe this reply section is itself a verb or expletive in a much longer sentence including many reply sections, the bot farms and algorithms producing them, resentments amplified by those algorithms, and so on. And here is where the question of how to “engage responsibly” with media enters. Do I add a reply, maybe trying to short-circuit the sequence, or, by receiving no reply myself, expose the “botiness” of the series? Do I take notes, inscribe the latest adaptation of some meme in some more or less implicit way in my own posting, so as to play my own discourse off against such trendlines? Maybe one could make a pastiche of stereotypical replies, as another way of idiomclining. Here is a good place to reintroduce a couple of somewhat latent concepts—first of all selving. I use the word selving instead of “subjectivity,” or “person,” or “personality,” or “individual” and its variants, “soul,” along with other possibilities precisely to minimize and single out the most elemental, constitutive fact about the individual—that whatever we do we act in ways so as to mark ourselves and our settings so as to provide surety for remaining the same over time—if I’ve completely changed, it’s still me that has completely changed. “Self” means nothing more than “same.” Selving is clearly a weighted activity—ethical, or, as I would say, one involved in conferring and claiming credit. We selve in lots of different ways in lots of different places. Is the “I” that posts on X, that writes this post, that plays with my grandchildren, etc., all the same I? Are these different, unrelated selvings? These are often presented as deep philosophical questions, but the various forms of selving and their intersections are determined institutionally. My grandchild can interrupt me in the middle of writing a post and I can get an idea for a new post while pushing him on a swing, and, who, knows, maybe in 15 years or so he’ll get curious and read one of them, so clearly, the selvings do intersect in various ways even while it’s still the case that it’s easy to keep them mostly separate—and that it’s easy to do so is also a technological matter, which is to say the existence of a wide range of scenes, local and extended, articulated within the stack of scenes. But the more difference, the more of the other, you process your selvings through, and the more you keep track and records of those inscriptions as you selve your way through a scene, the more your selving will resist algorithm “capture.” Selving in this case is sentencing and therefore also technological—exhibiting an imperative exchange (embedded in any number of other imperative exchanges) issuing in a hypothetical ostensive.

Finally, let’s see if the concept of “transfer translation,” which I use but rarely do much work with despite its great promise, can enable us to enter the discourse of selving. To recall: “transfer translation” is a concept of Marcel Jousse, the priest, biblical scholar and theorist of mimetics. Jousse pointed to the way in which, in the translation of ancient scripture (say, from Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek) the words and phrases used in the target language often had effects on the concepts in scripture and these effects would show up in the narrative explications of scriptural passages. So, e.g., if a word generally used for “occurrence” is expressed through a metaphor drawn from a flowing river in the source language but a metaphor drawn from birth in the target language the scriptural tradition would then be inflected in the direction of birth and surrounding concepts as part of scripture itself. This seems to me a powerful model for cultural change in general, even within a single language (and no language is simply single). The current online meme discourses makes the significance of the notion of transfer translation even more evident. All the major memes take on discursive lives of their own, well beyond their immediate use to mock or compress a response. There are little mythologies of the various “jacks,” the meme of the guy standing alone in the corner of the party thinking “they don’t know that I…” has versions in which the other partygoers are thinking back at him, creating a kind of dialogue, the gigachad meme has become a legendary figure regularly “embodied” by actual men, etc. (It’s amazing that there has as yet not been, as far as I know, a serious study of online right wing meme culture.) But the same kind of transfer translation effect happens in conversion of a story or text from one medium into another. The more familiar the samplers are with various versions or realizations of a given narrative the more meaningful and difference between the versions become, which means the more meaning one can make by inscribing such differences. That heroism can be unalloyed in one version and problematic in another generates new narrative possibilities applicable within any new version. I often wonder how much of our vocabulary of such things as psychology and personality emerge out of the attempt to make stories work better. Everyone has probably had the experience of watching a movie where the plot requires one character to, e.g., betray a character he has so far been loyal to, but in a “bad” movie, there may be no real reason provided for the betrayal, perhaps because it really doesn’t make sense and was mere a device to push forward a haphazardly constructed plot. In watching such a movie, though, there is an inclination to supply some motive, and this may lead to a view of the character in question as containing hidden depths and complexities. This may not “work” for that particular movie but the possibility is now there and it’s easy to imagine a subsequent filmmaker designing a more effective plot embodying the motive that might have been there in the previous movie. This is a kind of mistakenness, as is transfer translation in general, that generates innovations in “human nature”: new possibilities for resentment and betrayal. This is also technological, insofar as it involves discursive incisions, cuts and recombinations and something left on the cutting room floor today might serve some unanticipated purpose later. But let’s take the next step and say that this is how all motivation is constructed, all the time—to fill in narrative gaps and cover up glitches. And this is because the form and outcome of any imperative exchange can never be given in advance: there is no natural or pre-arranged harmony between command and demand, request and imposed condition, etc.—each exchange is a disturbance of the nomos. The word that may best sum this up, and that can guide us in or idiomclinings across media, is “expectations”—vaguely imperative but also open-ended. Expectations might change before you get around to meeting or failing to meet them, which means you can also modify those expectations, which are never anyway singular enough for the specific case. So, stretch, contract, project, retroject, the expectations informing whatever imperative exchange you are operating within and which are inscribed in the samples you’re deploying and the sample you are. Expectations are the field of possible, virtual and hypothetical ostensives.

So, the perfection of the imperative, i.e., “technology,” is now to be “processed” through the imperative exchange eventually unfolding into the operator of negation concluding with the declarative doubled imperative (the target of the demand issuing a “cease and desist” backed by the imperative issued from the background ostensive field—“reality”) and the virtual or hypothetical ostensive. An imperative exchange can be more or less symmetrical or asymmetrical, but the perfection of the imperative, involving sustained lower order imperatives, convertible and transitional into each other, is decidedly asymmetrical: petition meeting command. Tell me how to do what you are telling me to do. This characterizes all our interactions with the stack of scenes, which always takes place on a particular scene constituted out of compressed other scenes. So, we can think in terms of a spectrum or continuum: the more swiftly concluded the imperative exchange and transition into the declarative “this is what I do now,” the more we will speak in terms of “technology”; the more prolonged and inconclusive the imperative exchange, the more sentences it generates and therefore the wider the field of hypothetical ostensives, or expectations, the more we veer off into conditionals and hypotheticals, the more we are talking of media. And there is a kind of telos built in in each case: working technologically is working to shorten the imperative exchange and working mediatically is working to prolong it indefinitely. In that case we want (we institute a new scene dedicated to a particular type of imperative exchange) to chart circuits where technological and media practice, respectively, maintain their logic, but can flow into and inform each other. We redirect media exchanges to the new scene, a system of ostensives, imperatives and declaratives, where whatever desires are generated on the media scene can undergo a kind of stress test, simulating various possible outcomes of the imperative exchange. And we look for technological blockages or glitches where a new set of expectations, new possible scenes, can be streamed into the more compact imperative exchanges. Originary grammar then becomes a fully technological problem, one in which we narrow the field of ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits that might be of interest by locating them within scenes we can access through the data trails they leave. We’re always doing what the scene commands or demands, and compliance with or defiance toward that command or demand (which can only be enacted in obedience to another) tests the scene and elicits data for the center, in preparing and curating which we turn the scene we’re on into a compression of the center and its imperatives. The more compliance is simple and easily confirmed and rewarded, the more we’re operating technologically, and the more in sync we are with the center; the more compliance is problematic (which is really what defiance amounts to), the more feedback from the center we are requesting—just as Peirce said the goal of any inquiry is the replacement of doubt by certainty, so in expanding our imperative exchanges on any scene we are seeking out ways of concluding them expeditiously and in a way given to authentification. Originary grammar constructs scenes overlooking the compressions of media into technology and the compressions of glitches into media scenes.

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