We are always on a scene, but any scene is at the intersection of any number of other scenes, and we can describe this fairly precisely and embed it consequentially in idioms. The problems of time and space in center study have identical solutions—both come down to overlapping scenes; more precisely, in the case of time, the middle of one scene being the ending of another scene and the beginning of yet another; when it comes to space, the occupants on the margin of one scene are at the center of another scene. Our knowledge of our own and others’ presence on these distributed scenes, which can be multiplied as needed beyond the simple model I’m presenting here, is in varying degrees ostensive, imperative, interrogative and declarative. I’d like to situate Michael Polanyi’s model of tacit knowing in originary grammatical terms, as our distribution across scenes is also our distribution across the various speech acts we articulate, are addressed by, and “give off” to various recipients.
Media, beginning with writing, complicates the scenic architecture because, for starters, the scenes of reading and writing don’t coincide. In some sense I am on the scene of reading with you right now, even though I’m no doubt busy with something else at the moment. One of the questions raised by automated text generation is whether the lack of an author’s presence as a kind of presupposition and even feeling of reading (as the author speaks in your voice inside the scene of your rehearsal) is a difference that makes a difference. The way to answer such questions is to keep in mind that the relation between writer and reader, however apparently or intuitively intimate, is institutional and historical—this text is, more minimally or greatly, interfering with the chunks of discourse, the commonplaces, the idioms and templates, into which you integrate new bits of text in the course of your “selving” across several scenes. The purpose of reading is to displace that array of idioms called into presence by the appearance of any new text of any kind—whether in order to reinforce an existing hierarchy of affective responses to text signals or to make space for new idioms to potentially remake all of the existing ones will determine what and how you read. You as reader are plugged into systems of language this way and so am I as writer and the act of reading conjures a virtual scene upon which we converse even if I’m otherwise occupied at the moment and this scene is scaffolded over innumerable other scenes of reading, writing and every other sampling in which you engage. We can now compress these scenes into one in which I present some data which I have gathered, curated and submitted to the center precisely by sending it through readers like you, and you further curate and resubmit with your own contributions that data.
I can now speak about style as the way in which the array of scenes are registered in any utterance—style is one’s stance towards a world of ostensives at varying distances and degrees of “moment,” or deferral, accessed through imperative exchanges, petitions advanced to various addressees with varying degrees of deferentiality, and declaratives registering the more or less satisfying conclusion of the imperative exchange as it confronts, albeit tacitly, or ostensively, the operator of negation calling for (demanding) the creation of a new ostensive (data). Style is a response to demands that one adheres to certain forms, ultimately rituals, even if transformed into juridical or disciplinary norms—one demands, in turn, clarification of the terms of adherence or their modification—even demands for modification are better seen as clarification because in the end everyone wants to say that they are most strictly obeying the commands of the center. The most rationalistic scrutiny of “reasons” presupposes an arbiter whose decision both interlocutors will accept because that arbiter is taken to be the master of reasons, or “Reason Central.” Right now I am erecting a scene upon which questions, prolonged demands for further information on previous answers to previous questions, flow toward me in some way I can order so as to perhaps answer several and defer while acknowledging several others simultaneously. To lay all this out would require a post far longer than this one and would generate at a larger scale more questions that would require posts exponentially longer in order to answer and so one. And so the scene of writing here must be curtailed in the name of something like a sense of the state of the discipline, which is located upon an expectant scene, a scene tuned as precisely as possible to the most relevant signals arriving from other scenes (and the determination of “relevance” or, for that matter, what counts as a “signal,” are questions for other, deferred, disciplinary scenes). I think the state of computation and therefore any eventual artificial intelligence corresponds precisely to this “dilemma,” if we want to call it that (but which it only is from the standpoint of some utopia of perfect or complete knowledge, a world exhausted by declaratives).
The anthropomorphic style is the articulation, Mobius-strip like, of the “presental” and “absolute satire”—which comes down to a kind of suspension between different elements of the scene, between beginning, middle and end and margin and center. If we set aside tragedy as a genre and spoke of a tragic style it might be one that holds together the beginning and the end of the same scene. That’s just an accessible example—I have no particular investment in that very historically specific aesthetic form which, once it becomes valorized, loses its profundity and veers off into psychopathy. The place to be is precisely at the beginning of one scene, the middle of another and the end of another, all simultaneously, and oscillating between center and margin of all scenes. We can now draw upon what Benjamin Bratton has called the “accidental megastructure” comprising planetary scale computation to construct a style adequate to our emerging scenic architecture, the expectancy of our scenes.
The scene I’m constructing here is following (not necessarily exclusively) the command to press to the limits the possibility of knowing things and what seems to present itself, in the course of an imperative exchange involving the request for further instructions because sometimes we do have to say “I know…” (it is a natural semantic prime, after all), as the consequent command to compress as much of knowing into style as expectancy as possible. But while I’m doing that further ostensives, more data presents itself, in the form of the succession of speech forms charted by Eric Gans in The Origin of Language and which charting is extraordinary in doing something I’ve never seen anyone in the “human sciences” do before: show how new cultural (ritual) forms are creating intentionally but unknowingly. In response to the inappropriate ostensive, no one “decides” to create the imperative; what they decide, both the “interpretant” of the inappropriate ostensive in retrieving the object and the inadvertent issuer of the inappropriate ostensive is accepting this retrieval as “appropriate,” and, for that matter, others in the community as this “solution” to inappropriate ostensives spreads, is to maintain linguistic presence. And, so, for center study and anthropomorphics, that is all we are ever doing, and iterating that commemorates both the fragility and durability of human language and the institutions built to house it—and we can’t know how or when that durability might reveal all the faultlines of fragility. Knowing things is just a particular way of maintaining linguistic presence over increasingly expanded and prolonged times and places.
Maintaining linguistic presence does entail something like “prediction,” and I want to return to this critical (expected) interface between center study and the discourses around Antikythera. Reducing everything to prediction, as Blaise Aguera y Arcas does (and I will set aside for now some dissidence regarding this position within Antikythera and adjacent discourses) presents a productive challenge, As with every principle or principal, a kind of Baroque exhaustion of the possibilities allows those within a disciplinary space to turn it into something like the opposite—through, really, stylistic conversions or transfer translations. Anyone could always be said to be predicting, even if nothing more than that the speaker who ends this particular sentence will be roughly the same as the speaker who started it (which comes down to predicting what I will predict). So there’s no reason not to inhabit computation and surface its boundary with uncomputability from within the disciplinary space—that is pretty much how traditions (prolonged linguistic presence) in the human sciences are built and sustained. This approach is almost always better than “arguing”—arguing based on what? Who will issue the better predictions? As measured how? Reducing the world to predictions means reducing it to predictability and the obvious objection is that you end up screening those events most reducible to prediction: sporting events, elections, deaths, stock market averages (although even here things start to get a bit slippery). And, moreover, insofar as you have to frame less amenable events as predictable you force them to approximate the more amenable events, so things that are not at all like sporting events or elections get framed as such, I.e., in straightforward win-loss terms. But there is no need to allow that in spaces one controls (are predicting continual control over by virtue of exercising present control), and one can seek to divert resources to such spaces by entering the space of predictability by offering a menu of predictions richer than the focus on gaming allows for. Part of any prediction is the supplemental prediction that one will retain one’s commitment to the prediction, and that one’s identification of what would count as proving or disproving the prediction will be revised, loosened or tightened along the way, or more or less shared by others and, in a properly originary prediction, these shifts will be registered in the predicted events themselves. If we really go fully Bayesian, but in language rather than numbers, then the example I gave above will serve as the best model of predictability: how will I finish the sentence I have just started, a prediction built into the way I started the sentence and that will influence the way I continue and ultimately end it, if I must.
Here, I’m predicting whether and how I will manage to maintain linguistic presence (perhaps becoming tenuous in this space of writing and reading), in which we can now include predictions regarding which scenes must be registered and through which signs, from what position within which scenes, and through what allocations of beginnings, middles and ends, centers and margins, such registering will take place. And my predictions, continually revised and checked, are part of the maintenance of linguistic presence. It’s not up to each of us upon which scene we will stand and where on that scene, because your scenic position now depends upon which props and furniture across the various scenes you have authorized access to—where you are situated within credit orders and surveillance systems (both are expanded scenes). Here, stylistically, in the name of maintaining linguistic presence, it’s probably best to take on the mantle of full paranoia while extracting the fear and realizing one’s own integrality to the systems. Wherever you are, you can know that your creditworthiness will be determined by each and everything you do, and in ways that you will not always be able to predict, but you can both strive to be creditworthy and to provide data to the credit system that makes it more worthy of determining creditworthiness. You can fail utterly in this regard, through no fault of your own, but that’s true of anything you do. The riskiest thing from your own position (unless you are located close to the center) is to do what you can to confer creditworthiness on options likely to go unrealized until long after the passing of anyone occupying the planet at this moment, and to do this you’d have to hone your predictive powers to see future imperatives and declaratives in the most minimally glimpsed ostensives. That’s a vocation worthy of a being striving for creditworthiness.