If Part One considered Compulsion and Prohibition in those twitching corporeal habits of our public figures — snorts, clicks, blinks, grunts, winces, gurgles, hiccups and jerks; interruptions and intrusions which seem to unwittingly cement our connection to and fascination with them — it might still seem far-fetched that these bodily moments of drive and satisfaction signify anything essential to the way we inhabit language. How could it be that precisely where the body gets in the way — interrupts the smooth, abstract and tidy flow of words — there lies something indispensable to uttering sense into sentences? Perhaps these extra-logical, involuntary gestures ensure a certain sensibility to words that words alone cannot affect. Why scream a threat when a whisper could be even more menacing? In this vein, we inescapably and incessantly say more than we intend in speaking, while at the same time groping for words that perpetually seem just out of reach. So the synthesis of body and language is complicated, incomplete, and symbiotic — marked by disruption and incident. What better example of the scandal that ensues when this is missing than the drone of ‘teleprompter talk’ — it’s easy to tell when this machine is around because it’s just so hard to pay attention to the polished voices that read off them. Sapped of errs, umms, sighs and scansions that fill commonplace speech — extra-verbal cues which seem to embody our failure to live-up to some ego-ideal — the spotless delivery of newsmen, commentators and many politicians does what perfection always does; renders content abstract beyond recognition, tuning us out instead of in. Of course it’s quite possible that verbal impasse and interruption are simply antithetical to meaning, as we commonly take them to be — pure accident. But on the other hand, in their absence, having no vulgar and immediate connection to the body, the strings and sentences we speak would simply become random and detached. To use language is to engage in a physical act — we become out of breath when speaking fast about things that excite us. Consider the more indicative sigh or yawn which are not-so-subtle attempts of the body to extricate the mind.
Tied into all of this might be that every utterance — verbal or tic — has attached to it an addressee; we seem to constitute ourselves by speaking to others especially in our solitary moments. Much can be said about the pesky inner monologue which accompanies many of us throughout the day — one such thing is that it tends to disappear in the act of conversation, and seems to ring loudest when we feel we must stifle our expression. And so one role of this invisible addressee — if we presently identify it with the inner voice — seems to be in judging our speech as imperfect and accepting our tics, sighs and yawns as compensation. We always and inevitably speak to someone even if this means serving as our own audience; our words require a registrar, or perhaps cosmic ledger keeper, in order to take effect (or perhaps affect). What makes an event or utterance random in this sense might then be that it’s presumed to occur with no such notary, not registered by/in this Other.
But contrary to popular (and perhaps expert) belief, ‘random’ is not synonymous with ‘meaningless,’ ‘groundless,’ or even ‘without-cause’. At least mathematically, random events are very much “registered in the domain of the Other”. Random events are delimited within a scope — a probability space is introduced — represented most simply by the denominator in a fraction, a tally over all possibilities.
Exactly why fractions are the mathematical representation of random events, and how to interpret a statement like “3 out of every 6 rolls of a dice will land on an odd number” seems a daunting question to answer — think of the poor schmo who never knew anything more than the division of whole numbers, or how we’ve gotten to the point where he is a schmo to begin with. It’s no surprise that probability — a concept bursting at the seams with ‘metaphysical’ stuff — first appears in the work of proto-Enlightenment schmos like Blaise Pascal and René Descartes. Doubters extraordinaire, no doubt, but wagers with God seem to leave stuff unsaid about the very simple and profound shift of meaning involved — from fraction to probability, divided-whole to likelihood. This reinterpretation of old symbols might be the mark of any mathematical or scientific discovery. And this particular reinterpretation reveals something strange about what it means to be uncertain. For what lies under the bar in a random event is the Other, tallying all outcomes, guaranteeing that we have considered all possibilities (even when the chance of attaining a single possibility grows infinitely small). At least partly, a doubt as profound as Descartes’ depends covertly on a faith in an entity capable of registering this drastic, if not Oedipal, protest; someone must still register the doubt of the doubter. In the realm of personal speech acts, often our garbled, fragmented, and slip-ridden utterances express a fundamental relation to the Other, messages sent out that register ‘under the bar’. Isn’t there a bit of a ‘topological’ character to thought — we can feel when a companion is talking around something, it occurs not just in their words; avoiding speaking certain things or in certain ways seems to take its own toll on the body alongside affecting the whole of one’s speech. Presumably, to confront such omissions head-on would precipitate a dramatic alteration of personal discourse. The slip or tic and the finitude of our breath, come to represent — or even cause — the always-truncated character of thought, erecting the very barriers that these moments constantly flirt at transgressing. The eternal presence of something left unsaid is our relation to this formal Other, propelling us to produce more speech like some kind of heat engine. Even our most logical arguments must be voiced or bound to material stuff — spoken between breaths, printed on a page or flickering from a screen — logical arguments work because they are finite, and they are finite because they are bound to a material substrate. Paradoxically, acknowledging this seems to be the biggest pointer beyond the dumb material of the page.
A second inversion still awaits — which might be called a statistical understanding of randomness. As it turns out, a series of measurements which we might wish to describe as randomly distributed across a range of values needn’t have to refer to ‘all possible outcomes’ at all — at least not directly. As any pollster knows, the Law of Large numbers promotes sample means, variances and histograms to faithful representatives of some missing probability measure, a mathematical entity that strictly speaking isn’t there. So an empirical data set can be viewed in such a way that its own structure (of means and variances for example) points or alludes to some vanishing mathematical idea (a probability measure dictating the random appearance of measurements). The way we view the data in the histogram defers, so to speak, a discussion of underlying totality. Presumably, at some indefinite point when the size of our data set approaches the infinite we would have to confront head-on whether the correspondence between mathematical form and the stuff of our direct measurements is fitting at all. But the effectiveness of statistics is arguably the fact that this ‘limit’ will never be attained. This is also perhaps the fundamental tenet of science — its arguments are always truncated a bit too abruptly. Laws of motion and other abstract theories are terminal; they insist that nothing be elaborated beyond them on one hand, but also act as simple deferrals of more dogmatic kinds of explanation. Scientific arguments are a bit of a grift in this sense — only providing answers for questions that science itself defines. Of course, it takes our imperfect description of the natural world in order for science to defer anything — our theories are always imprecise, rough-hewn, approximate, and they might be this way for a reason.
For good measure, only an act of signification can be properly random. The quintessential random entity is a string of characters or digits — license plates, credit card numbers, test scores. It’s not just that numbers unlock or quantify uncertainty in nature, but that randomness is a feature of language which is bound up with the material itself. While written language consists of an alphabet of finitely many characters, it gives rise to an infinite potential for forming new strings (which is also infinite in the way that old words can always take on new meanings). Strings of characters have the peculiar feature that most of the time they are arranged nonsensically. After all, how daunting it would be if any assortment of letters howled with definitive meaning. Richard Feynman even said it
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight… I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!
Truncation seems to be necessary for thought, in a strange way our thoughts proliferate because any particular thought suffers from not being it — whether interrupted by time, another thought, an interlocutor, or our own physical presence. The very ways we are compelled to speak — to others or via our internal monologues — are quite directly the result of not having said it all, of there being still an elusive item unarticulated. This mechanism of speech might be something instated in early childhood via some prohibition (think of the double bind that a child must find themselves in when acting rudely, impulsively, or inappropriately — the parental ‘No!’, perhaps prohibiting a bodily act on the part of the child, might lead to outright protest, but even this protest takes the form of a question — how and why is the parental authority able to truncate a certain gesture?). The classical Freudian story seems to be that this ‘why’ begets our adult compulsion to express ourselves through language, but never fully. To fully express ourselves is a fantasy taken up in many trendy marketing schemes while a scientific act in its purest takes up this eternal act of deferral from an opposing angle — ‘feigning no hypothesis’ at the possibility of attaining occult knowledge or finishing off it’s own project. In this way, while science can never tell us anything about entities that it does not predefine, we often continue to participate in the grunt work of empiricism under the vanishing impression that it can. Perhaps the more compelling reason to undertake the infinite process of science is rather that what is fundamental is that satisfaction is never complete. An experiment in a laboratory seems to take the form of this parental ‘No!’ — always confounding our seemingly settled descriptions. Forget fundamental particles, it’s mommies and daddies all the way down.
With cryptocurrency at the tip of everyone’s tongue, it’s tempting to draw the analogy between our speech acts and the computation of a cryptographic hash. After all, a blockchain is itself a message to an Other — the hypothetical guarantor of value in the transactions contained therein. And the computational effort of mining takes place by means of sifting through an enormous amount of random digits — work which is, like any other sacrifice of time or labor, performed for the Other. We might trace the same kind of deferral through a scientific argument, a digital ledger, or our hmm’s, haws and errs.
WebSludge 