Perfecting the Imperative and Imperative Exchange: Originary FinTech

I have been using “perfecting the imperative” as an idiom for technology for a while now and have started to pursue it further in some recent posts, in part by refining it through the concept of “imperative exchange.” Imperative exchange is an extremely important concept for center study, as it, along with the ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuit, constitutes something like what Plato called (although I’m drawing on my memories of Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language) the “chora,” a space where desire emerges and contacts without yet reaching the threshold of language. Here, though, we’d be thinking of a pre-declarative, not pre-linguistic, stage, but we still have a space where the unarticulated interfaces with the articulated. I have taken the ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuit from Eric Gans’s examination of the dialectic of the imperative in The Origin of Language, where he imagines the surgeon needing and then requesting a scalpel from the nurse with the nurse handing it to him and repeating and confirming the answered request: “Scalpel…Scalpel.” I’ve generalized this dialectic under the assumption that every met imperative includes an at least tacit confirmation, and that this helps us understand the transition to the virtualization of the ostensive in the declarative. I have always associated the imperative exchange with prayer, which is always undertaken in obedience to an at least implicit or, rather, “lingering,” imperative to seek “information” from the center and constitutes a request for another imperative (“tell me how to do Your will”). But this is also to say that the space of prayer is also the space of desire, insofar as desire is the unfulfilled imperative, which we could say is deferred rather than insisted upon through prayer. Perfecting the imperative, then, is building bridges over desire.

Ritual is the first technology, as it involves each instrumentalizing all the others so as to effect an event, that of constituting the community in its imperative exchange with the center. Ritual is designed so as to enhance the channels of communication, which is better considered as sign exchange. Technology becomes recognizable to us as such once it takes the form of one commanding many, which is to say under imperial conditions, as with the armies, military or slave, of the ancient empires. Here is where it becomes possible to step back and hone the form of coordination in question, which is a prerequisite to replacing humans with (to retrieve a semi-lost concept) “mimological impressments,” or “drafting” the non-human to mimic the human mass. I’m speculating here but can hopefully come back to the hypothesis that the smaller scale “technics” of the artisan or craftsman is also post-imperial, as the more individual-sized “impressments” are subordinate or “orbital” to the large-scale projects and the markets produced by large movements of people. Artisanship or craftsmanship, in that case, would replicate ritual as a branch off of imperial projects: such “professions probably began as supplements to ritual staging. Perfecting the imperative then means extending it to further forms of coordination by replacing the current form of coordination with mimeological impressments and thereby creating a new form. At each point along the way in this sequence the imperial ordering will be reaching further into the existing store of communal wealth and issuing further calls for authorities to stand by and mobilize forces. This means drawing further upon credit and issuing more of it, in whatever form “credit” takes—but it will eventually take the form of money.

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More of the past and future is then compressed in the present with each perfection of the imperative. We can see, then, a bifurcation within the imperative exchange, allowing us to see both finance and technology as having a shared root—I’ve suggested before, along these lines, that money is best seen as addressing a problem of delegation, which is to say a fundamental problem of governance, and at this point I am fairly close to seeing governance simply as technological, as a matter of scenic design and perfecting the imperative. Keeping prayer in mind as the linguistic form of imperative exchange will guide us here. Perfecting the imperative means deriving further imperatives from the center, precisely through the refinement of one’s own side of the imperative exchange and this is done by making cases that make the nomos more explicit in forms of coordination. The ever perfecting imperative, meanwhile, requires credit, i.e., resources held in reserve and readily available, from the center, and the drawing of credit involves questions thrown off by the extended imperative with positive answers required for the declarative completion of a new “accredited” scene in the stack. As Lyn Alden points out, money is also ledger, and this includes a technological component, which is to say, money is recorded in the perfected imperative—the creation and maintenance of currency is part of the perfection of the imperative. And credit, moreover, is always a bet on succession, on the continuity of governance maintaining the backing of currency and the juridical order ensuring debts will be enforced and forgiven in ways that can sustain juridical scrutiny. All this plays out in the expectant scene, which we can best represent as everyone trying to accredit themselves as issuers of credit in increasingly blockchained form or, we might say, in ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits within which all can say, “this is the same.” The infinite chain of credit is to be declaratively ledgered not only in money and credit instruments more generally, but in every bit of actionable data, which further means that all data is to be made increasingly actionable. And this brings us back to the conversion of assets into data (once data has first been assetized) and the conversion of currency into data exchange: each of us supplies all of ourselves as data to the center, which is to say the open performance of succession, and the center in turn supplies us with data attesting to our performance that we then advance to teams occupying a particular place on the supply chain, or subscription network.

And the supply chain or subscription network is itself a series of overlapping scenes with interfaces, the boundaries between which can be modeled similarly to the Peircean mode of understanding temporality I’ve been using. To recall: to answer the question of when one scene has become the next scene we construct what are in effect inter-scenes whereby the beginning of one scene is the middle of another scene and the ending of yet another scene. So, the boundary between two scenes, the transition of one into the other, is simply the middle of a scene with its beginning in one of the scenes and its end in the other. For the purposes of analysis we could easily populate these scenes as needed: we have to posit an observer certifying the end of a particular scene but for the observer that boundary is situated in the middle of the scene of his observation. Now, the original of this model was, in fact, as I recall, spatial: Peirce was posing the problem of the boundary between two objects next to each other. If you get close enough, applied a high enough resolution, you would find that the boundary is in fact an equal mixture of, say, red and blue particles (if we’re looking at the boundary between a red and blue object or space). The boundary, then, is where there are slightly more red particles on one side and slightly more blue particles on the other. We can think about horizontal and vertical (as opposed to successive) scenes in this way—obvious examples are boundaries between countries, physical and political, where we have, physically, towns on each side of the border speaking languages or dialects more closely related than either is to those further in the country; or, we can imagine every country has citizens with varying degrees of “particles” of other countries. So, each company along the supply chain is a scene or articulation of scenes with various overlaps with scenes in other companies, above, below and alongside it. It would seem that this model compromises sovereignty, but it just means that sovereignty includes provisions for various forms and degrees of foreign presence which would also involve specific forms of adjudication between these various forms of property and standing.

Part of the “tributarian” model of scenic design I’ve been assuming for a while, albeit it without mentioning it much lately, involves the replacement of the market with succession fluctuation: the sovereign, or pointman, or dictator (but maybe I’ll stick with “sovereign”) selects his successor but it is equally within his right to revise that selection which we could in fact imagine him doing regularly in accord with changing circumstance and changing assessments of candidates as those candidates are tested by circumstances, especially as the order becomes more high trust and fears of violent usurpation (or banishment resulting from demotion) recede. In that case, changes in succession selection would be assignments of value which would ramify throughout the system, especially insofar as this method becomes installed across the board. The same approach, in modified form, applies to setting values across organizations as each organization moderates its interfaces with other organizations by engaging in what I’ve called “controlled usurpation” across the boundaries of organizations. This, on one level, just makes more explicit what goes on regularly anyway while removing the scandal: if my supplier is too slow or his product has declined in quality I will feel out subordinates to see if they might be able to improve matters and maybe either split off and take much of the team with them or replace the current chief executive. This kind of interference across boundaries would just become part of the interface, which would therefore be penetrating all the way into each organization, in layered forms with varying degrees of granularity. This replacement of market forms of valuation would take on complex forms of tokenization as assessments of performance become increasingly precise and important and ways of measuring it take on forms accounting for tacit understandings in ways we are still unable to surface. And in this way values measured through tokens are, simply, data, which, on the blockchain, travels with people across institutions as part of the process of controlled usurpation.

We started with a bifurcation within imperative exchange: the imperative exchange tends both to further the command to perfect the imperative (the imperfection of which is the source of the exchange) and to solicit the nomos. The nomos, let’s recall, is the originary division of property, originally land, in accord with services rendered to the central commander (the centerarch). But the nomos doesn’t remain static: the value of the different pieces of property change, in accord with both the fluctuations in loyalty and usefulness to the monarch and the “creditability” of each property, its capability of serving as collateral—and this latter property of property depends on the relative care and maintenance of and investment in that property, or its owner’s participation in the perfection of the imperative. Even more, new modes of property and new ways of dividing, collateralizing and accrediting property emerge, to the point where we are speaking of “assets” more than “property.” So, by “solicit the nomos” I mean enhance the creditability of assets so as to attain a higher rank in the succession sweepstakes—i.e., becoming essential to succession. This makes one’s issued loans more likely to be enforced and one’s borrowed loans more likely to be forgiven. This bifurcation is what “backs” the transition from sacrificial imperative exchanges, in which the gods give us continued peace and prosperity in exchange for a part of our possessions and, eventually, our offspring, to the donation of one’s resentment to the center in which a complete devotion acknowledges the incommensurable asymmetry of the exchange and therefore only asks for further instruction and guidance in perfecting that devotion in exchange for further dedication in pursuing that devotion.

I wouldn’t say, though, that either perfecting the imperative or soliciting the nomos “corresponds” to one “moment” in the trajectory of imperative exchange; rather, both branchings off are aligned with both. There is a sacrificial element to both: perfecting the imperative can trend toward absolute domination, or at least attempts at such, i.e., the continuation in other forms of human sacrifice, but it can also tend towards accelerating pedagogical exchanges around an imperative from the center that empties itself out into the rapidity of those very exchanges. Soliciting the nomos, meanwhile, can either contract that nomos into maximal extraction of assets predicated on the most minimal increments in access to the enforcement/forgiveness ratio of the center; or, it can prolong the nomos by pricing assets as pedagogical futures, to be recouped after anyone alive today will benefit. Start-ups that bring more of the infra-computable past and the future into the present articulate the anti-sacrificial tendencies on both sides. Such start-ups are a kind of prayer, then: a prayer into the creating world (what Heidegger says has been made into “standing reserve” but we can see as echoes, mirrors, trails and imprints of our imperative exchanges) predicated on faith in the infinite convertibility of that world and a prayer to the nomos, to human organization itself, to the center and to deferral. And any prayer is a renaming, which is necessary because names eventually get mismatched to their objects because they become sites of rivalry—for the same reason there are always mismatches between the nomos and the juridical, which is the same problem at a civilizational level—and renaming is both a technical and financial (insurable and collateralizable) matter, that is, both perfecting the imperative and soliciting the nomos on the expectant scene.

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