Promise, Fraud, the Options on the Imperative, Messiah

The question of speech or, to evoke post-structuralism, the sayable, is now to be pursued more thoroughly on the terrain of the expectant scene, credit and originary grammar. Obviously free speech rights, guaranteed through whatever legal documents and history, represents a very marginal corner of the stack determining what will be said and heard, by whom, for how long, amplified or dampened by what other utterances, etc. A part of my interest here lies in the conviction that has strengthened in me over the last few years that publicly lying in order to damage people’s reputations, to persuade them to give you money for dubious purposes, or incite others to violence or lawlessness more generally, should be vigorously suppressed and penalized. This is all very difficult and therefore interesting, but we do have vast legal traditions to draw upon here. The informal gatekeeping done by the major newspapers and networks, especially post-Sullivan, has really been a way for those outlets to monopolize defamation, incitement and fraud, and now that that monopoly has been broken the main effect has been to distribute those forms of speech more widely and to lower even further the standards of the sayable. This is a question central to governance, and, of course, any government that wants to combat this degeneration will have to be much more truthful itself. Other countries, without traditions and expectations of public officials being held accountable, have managed to live without believing anything the government says, in part by developing alternative networks and codes of information transmission—but this may not work for the world’s major power, which relies upon some reliability and coherence at least when it comes to commerce.

I have argued many times for a very robust regime of legal action against defamation, incitement, fraud and even obscenity, in part because truth ultimately needs to be determined by courts, which then in turn provide the model for scholars. I’ve also maintained that such a regime would make almost the entirety of our current media illegal, and that this would unequivocally be a good thing. Media should be rerouted to reporting the results of legal processes and replaying the process to check for flaws. This would mean that politics should be redirected to repair of the judiciary and legal system, which would involve targeting systems of patronage, educational institutions, think tanks, congressional approval practices and so on. Since no electoral politics could focus on such boring topics, the politics in question must be carried out through companies engaged, first, to advance lawsuits of particular types, and, then, to use the same means to target fraud all along the lines of the judicial and legal establishment. This means finding good judges, channeling cases toward them and leveraging the results of those cases to get more good judges. A political arena focused on establishing such things as what is to count as a lie, what is harmful to one’s reputation, what counts as an attempt to deceive, how should we judge the distance between a particular utterance and a particular violent act, etc., would be far more civilized than the politics we have now.

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One could easily mimic the now well-worn phrase “we’re not going to vote our way out of this” as “we’re not going to sue our way out of this,” and I will explore the problem this poses a bit further. A part of Lyotard’s discussion of the differend involved a shattering of the very norms by which we would judge—the way he put it was, imagine an earthquake so powerful that it destroyed all the instruments for measuring earthquakes. The implications of this metaphor for any one of a number of recent events should be obvious. Here we touch upon the sublime, and perhaps origin, of politics, insofar as the nomos is put at stake. A juridical order depends upon a prior allotment of property, and therefore authority, first of all so that people can even have standing to be represented in court. If those allotments can all be subject to lawsuits that would strip ownership over them, once we get to a certain point it’s not even clear what lawsuits can decide. Of course, the same would hold for populists who proclaim no interest in whether any of the elites hold on to any of their property—other than falling back on the mystique of “the people,” what kind of allotment can the populists claim to hold? Whose home, bank, account, investments, etc., could be considered safe? Whose freedom guaranteed? We would have to revise Lyotard’s metaphor and say that there are always measuring instruments and even if there are none that can measure the earthquake there are some that can measure the debris. And someone will always be cleaning up, collecting and rebuilding from the debris—and they will have some interest in expanding measurement outward. So it might be best to start, very literally, with all the means and methods and instruments of measurement we have and lend enough trust or credit to whoever can enforce an allotment and non-violent disputes over it. But that means those instruments of measurement should be built and maintained now, and the skills need to apply them cultivated, and the kind of nomos-oriented class action I’ve been arguing for would be drawing upon and trying to render more precise such techniques. Even such things as militias and self-defense organizations can be established within the framework of class action, in the form of lawsuits on behalf of those defending themselves against criminal organizations, rioters and even rogue elements of the state itself. You will be able to build such organizations, and to do so responsibly, if you know you have the legal backing to do so. (Obviously, money directed toward such efforts would pay off 100x compared to money given to politicians, activist groups, think tanks, propagandists, etc.)

Such a system of crisscrossing lawsuits would itself, without the assistance of the state, build up extensive tracking and tracing machinery—those expecting others to defame or incite against them will be recording not only speech and writing but movements and associations; the specter of such lawsuits will lead people to take out insurance against them, and insurance companies will likewise want extensive records of the doings of everyone even vaguely associated with possible cases. The condition of the leader of an organization who has to run every statement past legal will become the general condition and this will also mean that genuinely truth-telling individuals who can successfully defeat lawsuits against them will come across as especially free, uninhibited, and trustworthy—and enormously admirable. We will be returning speech back to its most originary condition, the promise, to which one will be zealously held (albeit with vehicles of forgiveness). A promise draws credit from the promisee and places one in debt. A promise derives from the most originary imperative, to sustain the scene by deferring the rush to the center, and this also means sustaining the nomos, which is nothing more than a scaled-up scene with a dictatorial center—what I may start calling “centropia.” A promise discretizes the imperative from the center into an imperative chain and series of imperative exchanges, as it solicits others to share the promise and requires feedback from the promisee. Even in a completely oral setting, the promise will have a technical component, in the form of some kind of material memorial, especially in the case of mutually exchanged promises, i.e., pacts. A promise is meant to lock you in and now we have blockchains for that, which should encourage greater precision and calculation in making promises, in determining what, exactly, is to be recorded as evidence and what, therefore, must be treated and framed for presentation (and what may be withheld), while requiring the inscription of their renewals and machine-human interfaces for judgments regarding enforcement and forgiveness. The further the stacking of the scenes, the more layers of recording and authenticating and checking and measuring the promise will undergo. Every institution has its allotments as a result of a commemorated promise, and its norms will ultimately refer back to the means of fulfilling it. I will also point out that promising, indebting, and issuing credit are speech acts that cannot be reduced to computation, and are therefore the domain of decision. (A promise includes an articulation of predictions, just like, for the legal realists, the law was a prediction of what a judge would decide, but in both cases broader conditions of predictability are necessary for these more localized predictions to be possible and those broader conditions require humans to be reliable before they are predictable.)

I always want to compress the results of new inquiries into new idioms so as to continue to flood the scene with center study idioms because your thinking is not radical if it’s not creating a new language more compelling than the ones people are already speaking. How, then, to encompass recent inquiries into credit, the perfection of the imperative through imperative exchange and originary grammar, and the disciplinary, which, admittedly, I have not addressed for a while. Center study is held together by a sufficiently small number of concepts—along with the above, we have nomos and the juridical and surely a couple of others I’m forgetting now. Creating new idioms involves using one of the concepts as a platform for the others—this is itself technological and a kind of stacking. I want to center the imperative, in particular perfecting the imperative and imperative exchange, since that has been the object of the most significant recent theoretical development. The imperative follows from an inappropriate ostensive and it gets extended and ramified the more out of reach that ostensive remains or becomes and the greater the risk of initiating confrontation over the failure to produce the mentioned item. This will most closely describe ritual scenes, where something is needed to complete the scene, maybe something intangible, ineffable or transient, like the “willing” participation of one or more of the members. To be “willing” is to be fully in compliance with the founding imperative of the ritual—“you will…” The most consequential ritual in the stacked scene is that ensuring succession, so the perfection of the imperative minimizes non-compliance with succession ritual, leading to the technology/media oscillation analyzed in the previous post. “Media” is the “emanation” of imperative exchanges branching off into interrogatives and declaratives: in terms I’m working with now, claims of broken promises and deliberations over enforcement and forgiveness. The tracking and tracing of utterances and the media’s disciplinary inquiry into samples therefore aims at maintaining this oscillation but while ensuring that compliance spreads further thereby making grey areas more informative. (What, exactly, is everyone doing, if compliance is increasing and scenes are getting more stacked? Mobilization for space exploration is a popular proposal among the successors of NRx and some in the high-tech scene, but I’ll go for the more open-ended “terraforming,” which can take place anywhere and is essentially scenic design.)

Any act we could carry out, then, is some kind of continuation of the promise that has founded whatever imperative grounds the imperative exchange we’re currently a party to. Let’s say we want to be on the boundary between ensuring greater compliance and generating interrogative-into-declarative sequences. Choosing the spot located on that boundary constitutes a bet and a prediction or, in center study terms, a drawing and issuing of credit. The imperative to track and trace samples will spread and sprawl one way rather than another, and one is hedging and trying to arbitrage the various possible directions, insofar as they’re visible: this will mean identifying ways of both channeling other “streams” into greater compliance while eliciting from them more “nutritious” (to use a term of AI researcher Brian Roemelle) data. One models a way of maintaining the scene, while creating expectations conducive to successive scenes best able to search for needed resources from the data left from this one. This is essentially taking out an option on the imperative, obeying ostentatiously in a way one considers most likely to provide nutritious data for some scene projected and “lineaged” as far into the future as possible, with the awareness that, of course, the data provided might be completely “spoiled” by that point, useful primarily as data of a particular dead end (which is a kind of redemption and forgiveness nevertheless). The option on the imperative is a bet and issuing of credit for the furthest flung and barely imaginable mined human measure of the layers of the stack we’re creating the preliminaries of as we speak.

I want to make one final move here, which is to carry options on the imperative into more familiar territory of Messianic expectations. I have in mind here Peter Thiel’s thinking of the Anti-Christ, who comes offering peace and safety, but delivers only stagnation and tyranny. Thiel seems to me aware that historical thinking really begins, albeit paradoxically, with Messianic thinking, because the Messiah represents the end of history, thereby relegating all prior events to stages that serve as premonitions and preparations for us to exist the historical stage. All periodizations, including those distinguishing “modern” from “primitive,” or “civilized” from “savage” or “barbarian,” derive from this, as does the entire notion of “progress.” If we were to stop thinking Messianically, or apocalyptically, it seems as if it would all just be one damned thing after another. Thiel’s Christian eschatology wants to (in originary terms) defer the Anti-Christ, which would, I suppose, defer the Second Coming, which must follow the emergence of the Anti-Christ. It’s best to see this kind of “discrepancy” in terms of paradox rather than contradiction. Maybe Christ will return when and because we’ve defeated the Anti-Christ before he gathered up his strength, maybe without even realizing it. Thinking along those lines would cut apocalypses down to size—maybe what is revealed is further discretization. Maybe the Messianic Age will be eventful despite not being “historical” because we’re just absorbed in one layer of terraforming after another and will lose any memory of why life was supposed to have more “meaning” than the continual elicitation of human capabilities in various forms of collaborations with expectant scenes. The greater the compliance with the originary imperative the greater the expectancy of the scene—that is the option on the imperative we’re taking out.

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