The Grammar of Technology

I’ve been stuck on my definition of technology (the primary one among others yet to be fully integrated) as the perfection of the imperative since I formulated it because, as I now realize, in part with the help of reading some work on Gilbert Simondon, I never thought to integrate the perfected (or undergoing perfection) imperative into the full grammatical stack. So, I’m going to try and work that out here. Hannah Arendt once described science as “acting into nature,” giving it a kind of political resonance, and thinking of technology as issuing imperatives to nature seems to me a refinement of that claim. But technology precedes the relation between “man and nature”: the first technology is ritual, in which words—prayers, imprecations, blessings, etc.—make things happen on a scene, assuming the participants on that scene are aligned with the materials arranged (props, furniture, scenery) to create the conditions for the happening. On the orignary scene itself, the gesture of each participant instrumentalizes the gesture of all the others to create the first form of artificiality and anthropomorphics. In fact, the relation between ritual and myth, wherein myth “accounts for” (answers questions laid out by extended because unobeyed imperatives) “failed” ritual, provides a model for thinking about technology and its function within the stacked scene as pedagogical platforms as well.

The initial and fundamental performative speech act is the ostensive—when, to use J.L. Austin’s famous example, the clergyman announces that “I now pronounce you man and wife” that is clearly like an ostensive, not an imperative. He’s not ordering them to become man and wife, he’s ordaining them as such. This means that technology will always be framed within the ostensive—it is originary, i.e., constitutive of the human, but not primary. It’s essential because the marriage ceremony is also replete with imperatives—telling the couple what to say, to exchange rings, etc., because this “hierarchy” between speech forms is inscribed in the ritual order itself. We have technology as soon as an imperative is extended past the immediate relation between imperator and imperatee, and therefore requires some kind of inscription, cooperation and enforcement. When an imperative puts people to work, makes them “part” of a “whole,” it has become technological. And I continue to insist on my assertion, derived from Lewis Mumford, that the first scaled up technologies were the slave labor armies of the ancient empires—and that to this day technology remains an analysis, replacement and scaling up of “broken down” human actions and interactions.

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Full exploitation or “optimization” of the grammatical stack would lead us to ask what would be the inappropriate ostensive that initiates the technological move and what would be the inappropriate technologized imperative that integrates technology into the declarative, which is to say, juridical and disciplinary, order. The center, whoever occupies it, most fundamentally distributes—this sounds “materialistic” and in a way it is, crudely so (without enough people getting a share of sustenance no community can subsist) but it is also a compression of ritual scenes affirming the sacred center as, for example, when a priest provides each congregant a wafer in turn. Center study, anyway, ultimately wants to override this kind of distinction between the material and the “ideal” or “spiritual”—that is what “compression” should do for us. But the implication for us here is that the extended imperative, given over to perfecting intervention, results from some break in distribution. In the creation of new technologies, then, this is where we would begin to look, and some failure or distribution might be close to the consumer end but will more often, I think, be found further up the line in the organizational chain, or the centered ordinality. Following up on my suggestion, a couple of posts back, that the problem of money is the same as the problem of delegation, suggesting that the extension of the imperative also addresses the problem of delegation seems a promising approach. This would certainly provide us with a helpful way of examining contemporary attempts to create technologies that make exchanges trustless. Technology locks its users or those it uses into unalterable and inescapable sequences of acts. This would also be why technological development is so closely associated with military developments and governance in general—it solves problems of coordination in some competitive field where others are working on similar problems.

The real challenge for this approach would be how effectively it helps us to describe the actual inventions that have defined the history of technology—the specific ways in which “efficiency” has been increased. This would oblige us to offer an anthropomorphic account of, for example, Simondon’s distinction between “elements,” “individuals” and “ensembles” in considering technological objects and forms. Elements can be combined in various ways in different technological enterprises; individuals are an ordering of elements in self-sustaining, coherent way (like a car made up of body, engine, the various parts of the engine, which I know nothing about, etc.); ensembles would be the way a technological object fits into a broader environment, e.g., an “industry,” and it is on this level that technology remakes civilizations. Any technology is reworking and departing from some existing articulation of elements, individuals and ensembles, and this involves a history of copying and design—trying to figure out how the existing articulation might be scaled up or extended, making the elements fit together in new ways into new individuals and then getting to the point, maybe because of the discovery of some new material or form of energy or even an influx of “human resources,” where you need to start looking for some new “fit.” All this would be included under “perfecting” the imperative, in part by breaking it down into ever smaller imperatives to have one piece of the machinery do what another piece “tells” it to do. “Elements” might be the remains of often repeated minor imperatives, separated (abstracted) and perfected from their history of use, “individuals” are imperative orders ordered by specialized declaratives created through the exchanges with a series of partially failed imperatives, while ensembles are something like “discourses,” or declaratives articulated through connectives, mostly causal and additive ones (“and,” “in order to,” therefore,” etc.) Anyway, all this is tentative and insofar as this discourse is technological, I’m still working (and invite others to work) on perfecting this arrangement of imperatives.

I’ve already introduced the declarative, and the system of discourse in which declaratives are themselves “elements,” and these speech forms would have to be on the ground from the beginning in technological development, but, more broadly, the declarative and discourse are the interfaces between the technological and “society” and “culture,” all of which, at this point, I simply designate the “pedagogical” which itself gets folded into “accreditation”—showing us how to do the things within our technological order. And in this case, seeing the declarative and discourse as “interfacial” fits seamlessly into one of my other definitions of the technological as “pedagogical platforms.” There’s something circular here, or paradoxical, which is a sign of being on the right track: technology creates the means of forming the kinds of people needed to operate and keep developing the technology. It is here, moreover, where the inappropriate imperative leading into the declarative becomes even more important than in the direct work on perfecting the imperative itself. I think we would find that most of the discourse on technology, throughout the history of industrialization and probably going back much further, is skeptical to hostile to the latest technological developments. Indeed, technological boosterism always comes across as shallow and naïve, while technological doomerism has a much greater chance of achieving an at least apparent profundity. This makes sense because technology first of all issues a massive influx of new imperatives to us that we could not possibly know how to fulfill. They are inappropriate because they interfere with the technological world we have already formed our declaratives and discourses to bound, juridically and disciplinarily. And, in fact, the pressure put on legal structures—questions of property, rights, evidence, procedure, etc.—by new technologies will invariably be a very productive, maybe the most (I think by far) productive way into studying the new imperatives which are really carrying forwards of old imperatives and seeing what they demand of us.

Those declaratives through which the pedagogical platforms being restructured by newly perfected imperative introduce counter-imperatives (those that, in my originary grammar, are issued by “reality”) are in turn valuable feedback to those working on further perfections of the imperative. An absolutely perfect imperative would be one you couldn’t even imagine disobeying, and so there is a kind of tension here with the declarative because a perfect imperative would leave nothing more to be said. This is the technological nightmare that has been haunting the technologized world for a couple of centuries. But that just means the perfect imperative is a chimera, but one spontaneously generated by the continual perfection of the imperatives at hand. A perfect imperative would also, for that matter, be one the obedients would have to keep extending and transmitting because it would keep causing transformations of the conditions under which the imperative was issued. We will always be puzzled by what the world of automated imperatives is asking of us, and that world is increasingly predicated on anticipating such puzzlement and factoring it in to its own imperatives. In fact, we might want to introduce here the distinctions between the imperative, the interrogative as the prolonged imperative, and the operator of interdiction, the final transition to the declarative order. It can be hard to distinguish between disobedience and puzzlement—either way, the imperative is not being fulfilled, leading to the choice, on the part of the imperator, even an automated one, whether to proceed to enforcement or clarification. Clarification would mean that the delay in implementation is being taken as a question, which would never be obvious—even a literal question can be a subtle way of disobeying. The operator of interdiction on the originary declarative scene I have always taken to be a response to a demand rather than a command, because it is the demand that could be deferred by a new ostensive attached to the operator of interdiction, a “negative ostensive” indicating the absence of the object. Someone commanding an action could not be put off that easily—you are in fact here and could do what is commanded. But, in addressing technology, we are dealing with commands, at least in addition to demands, so this raises the question of what would be the equivalent of the operator of interdiction. I would say that this is what the pedagogical platform is for—to design operators of interdiction indicating an absence of some piece of the imperative itself that would have to have to be available to operate the rest of the imperative and this would involve a inventory of those pieces and levers of the imperative that are available, much of which would be “internalized” or, better, disciplinarily installed, pieces of the imperative, or what we call “knowledge.” So, the completion of technological imperatives entails laying out that inventory of the pieces of the imperative that have been installed through one’s path through the disciplines and which are missing—the problem, then, is to give a name to those missing pieces.

I have started to introduce here the notion of “discourse,” where Gans stops his account of the linguistic forms because discourse is just a sequence of already existing linguistic forms (although in the original edition of The Origin of Language he does go on to discuss discourse, in connection with myth and in a way laying the groundwork for those early chapters of the The End of Culture I draw upon in discussing the relation between ritual and myth). What I’m finding interesting about “discourse” here is that we can see discourse as a kind of technologization of the declarative, as it involves piecing declaratives together through connectives, not only the causal and additive ones I mentioned above, of course, but also contrastive connectives, which function as hinges that enable one to piece together declaratives in unlimited ways. In a sense a “theory” is perfecting the imperative to articulate declaratives into a discourse via connective hinges, insofar as theory ultimately comes down to whether particular “becauses” and “neverthelesses” work as hinges, and this scrutiny shapes the declaratives themselves which, as a theory is developed, compress more and more of these hinged pieces of discourse (perhaps the declaratives are elements here and discourses are individuals, but we might make this kind of distinction at various points and levels of the discourse) so that we have implicit “becauses” and “neverthelesses” within words and expressions that need to be decompressed pedagogically as part of the work on the discourse or of the perfecting of the imperative to extend the interrogatives issuing from inappropriate imperatives which requires the use of those hinged pieces of discourse to provide answers. This would make discourse a meta-technology, a suggestion which is not original here but I can’t think of anyone who has “grounded” this suggestion anywhere near this “conceretely”—or, to draw once more on Simondon, in such a way that discourse as meta-technology is individualized sufficiently so as to remake the surrounding ensemble of (what we can now see as) meta-technological pieces.

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