**Links to**: [[Pronoun]], [[Metalearning]], [[Neologistics]], [[Dialove]], [[Dialogics]], [[E Pointing]], [[Reference]], [[Self-reference]], [[03 Semantic noise]].   # 𝔐𝔬𝔡𝔲𝔩𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔰 >A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus _formless_ is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only _formless_ amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. > >[[Georges Bataille]], _[[The Solar Anus]]_, p. 31.   ### [[Postulate]]: Language can be modulated. ### [[Question]]: What comes _after_ modulatory control? ### [[Postulate]]: A glimpse into that question requires mapping techniques which can be greatly enhanced by the use of predictive technologies such as language-modelling. By sketching images of the future, modulation is brought to the foreground: instead of a tacit condition, it becomes a predictive space of possibility-mapping. See: [[Language-modulating]], [[Language is music]], [[Song]], [[Music as permanent revolution]], [[03 Semantic noise]], [[Language models]] for different ways to access this statement.   The banality of the first postulate, above, is intended. It is not meant to be a groundbreaking revelation but a reminder of the infinite powers at hand.^[It is as banal and as tautological as the FEP, or as the nature of social, institutional systems, as presented by Beer: “...systems; because they consist of related parts, and the relations [...] between those parts. Obviously, too, they are dynamic. [And:] if they were not surviving, they would not be there. And having taken the point that we are talking about such systems, it is too natural to pass it by—topass over the point, pass around the point, pass through the point—without ever grappling with the real meaning of the point at all.“ (Beer 1993, p. 2).] Consider it a [[Refrain]] which keeps on singing itself. The modulation described in Deleuze’s 1990 _Postscript_ (see [[11 Post-Control Script-Societies]]) is but an example of the modulation we refer to here. This general sense of modulation is in the _manner_ of (dis)attunement, variation and the compression (exploitation) and stretching (exploration) of patterns, such as rhythm in music, or polysemanticity in NL and NNs. Below are some examples of possible language-modulations, but these are in no way exhaustive. Indeed, if language is music, we can observe eternal variations (the finitude of this set is irrelevant, more on this in: [[Finitude]]). >Decision- making and behavior control of higher-order information in human beings, in other words, are often conducted by **coding and recoding**, **integrating and reintegrating** internal and external signals into increasingly general types of processes held together by analog-coded interlocking constraints. These transmit meaningful path-dependent information; they incorporate history and time. They remember, but they can also be modified by current context and as a result of learning. It is only because decision-making and control processing are **analog** that, in context- dependent, timely, and appropriate manner, organisms can increasingly regulate and direct attention, inhibit impulse, remember and anticipate, and, especially, act in a more **flexible** and **long-range** manner ... Without burning out. > >Juarrero 2023, pp. 173-4, our emphasis. See also: [[11 Post-Control Script-Societies]] for additional musings on _modulation_.   ### Pointing at people (see also: [[Self-reference]]) As shown in the context of the [[03 Semantic noise]] exposition: [[Pronoun]]s are crucial mediators when it comes to organizing sociality and identity through linguistic means. Pronouns not only delineate the dynamic borders of what seems to imply some kind of “agential” possibility space, they also set up the structure of predictive engagement in sentences by pooling attentional resources in a specific direction. When they are unclear (who is/are “they”?) or change (“they” as in a non-gendered individual), the inability to predict what it is we are talking about, and the ensuing experience of disorientation, becomes rather salient. One of the most prominent examples of this change in our current landscape is, indeed, the social implementation of non-gendering pronouns such as “they/them.” While awkward when initially implemented (because radically new predictions are difficult, costly: habits are _stubborn_), **they** _work_. Ascribing high precision to sensed “prediction errors increases their gain (cf. attentional gain),” computationally: “they have a greater effect on subsequent processing. Physiologically, this gain control is thought to be mediated by neuromodulatory mechanisms that control the postsynaptic excitability of neuronal populations encoding prediction error. ... Psychologically, this ‘selection’ means we have attentional control over what features to select, thereby equipping us with the active choice to attend or ignore prediction errors at different levels...” (Koelsch, Vuust & Friston 2018, p. 65). Attention to gender, as a biopsychosociopolitical issue, is currently very prominent in academia and certain areas of the world and the internet (FYI: the frames referred to here are an English-speaking international academic context, a South-American Spanish-speaking familial and cultural one, and a daily, local Dutch-speaking cultural one). Marginalized topics (gender asymmetries) and their ensuing conditions have become more visible anticipations and tacit expectations: it is now more or less normal—though it remains difficult and laborious—to call garbage behavior out. This is good, and much of it is due to pushes stemming from calls to attention in the gendering structures of language.^[In English, for example, there are several proposed rehabituations: to make a person’s preferred pronouns explicit, to use “they” rather than “he” or “she”. In Spanish the use of ’x’ or ‘e’ to avoid “a/o” gendering, etc.] %% ![[baraka harris 9.png]] p. 322 %% A problem sometimes observed, however, which comes with demanding radical attention to pronouns, is counter-productive to the cause, and results in the hyperindividualization and depoliticization of phenomena which are of a systemic nature. “When political responsibility becomes invested in personal accountability or subjective characteristics outside of genuine coalition work, the space for transformative change narrows down.” (Aouragh 2019). When personal identities—as ‘pure’ subjectivities—are the sole locus which is supposed to realize the solution to systemic discrimination, possibility spaces turn radically smaller: everyone is alone, in their own domain, hyperspecified and unique, an irreflexive monad. A shift in attention takes place: from structural inequalities and the possibility for radical action, to navel-gazing; consumeresque personal ‘choices’ and voluntarist responsibilities. Wringing the fabric of language: from a collectively-woven tapestry to one massively suffocating vinyl. Both are interesting, though communist weavings are known to outlast plastic. It is not, however, a question of ‘either/or’. ### Pointing at conditions and constraints Pointing to general tendencies and conditions, as well as uniquely individuating trajectories, turns pronoun-modulation into material praxis. Womxn who experience discrimination in machista circumstances cannot help but find themselves encouraged to ”improve” and respond to the macho call to order. Instead of matching up with daily reality in a non-alienated way, contextually alienated subjects must permanently doubt their capacities, attitudes, to the point of questioning their own sanity.^[Combahee River Collective on the need for _specific_, hyperlocal methods: “There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black Feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives. Black feminists and many more Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. For example, we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being “ladylike” and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse by men. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening.“ As Aouragh tells us, it is important to also see that the CRC has also become misunderstood when contemporarily ”subordinated to a conceptual paradigm of identity”. Its rediscovery should be grounded in the historical context of the claim to “identity as politics – and the manifold (intersectional) nature of it … The focus on overlapping oppressions and advancing coalitions between groups was key. To the CRC, class (and anti-imperial and feminist) politics was one of the central components in the struggle against racism.” But as Aouragh’s argumentation shows, “today a redefinition of coalition-based intersectionality may also lead to the arbitrary separation of capitalism and racism.” (Aouragh 2019).] It is here where a tool like a pronoun, pointing to specific, local conditions, becomes the genesis of praxis. But pronouns cannot be the only media, lest we succumb to ornamental solutionism. It’s important to remember that solutionism is never the solution, because all development is permanent work. So, changing pronouns _and_ changing other structures go hand in hand, and again: it’s never ‘either/or.’ Having a vantage point, a perspective, an opinion, is an immensely privileged position (wherever it “mostly” stems from: resources, biology, history, etc.). This should never be forgotten. The _Combahee River Collective_ (an Afrocentric feminist group who split off from the _National Black Feminist Organization_) frame this quite clearly in their statement: due to disillusionment within other liberation movements, “as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left,” they saw “the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men.” Challenging the norms that perpetuate discrimination is sometimes almost impossible, when one’s perspective “does not exist.” When someone cannot or does not want to see a problem, how to show them this problem when the possibility of showing them the problem is exactly the problem? (See also: [[08 Active ignorance]]). When one is not considered worthy of attention: they will not be heard. No matter how eloquent, loud, visible and otherwise relevant they are. Pronouns help with this challenge, but they are not the sole solution. The resounding statement of this project, if there is any, is that capacities are always collective, never individual. Pronouns sometimes have the debilitating effect that they turn language into a shopping mall. At the same time, as Miriyam Aouragh also explains: the paternalistic dismissal of calls to attention in the realm of identity politics, for example, can also reflect a type of tacit, unaware discrimination which pays no mind whatsoever to what Du Bois already called “psychological wage,” that is: the idea even though the collective struggle in terms of class is more than valid and necessary, “exploited white classes are compensated by public, psychological advantages” (Aouragh 2019), and forgetting this forces the very present, very rampant racism out of the attentional frame. Aouragh also reminds: “Based on the logic that {privileged, white, majority, etc.} activists don’t really know what racism is since they don’t experience it, then they are not entitled to contribute to the struggle either.” (ibid.). This, Aouragh explains, is clearly counterproductive to the collective cause of abolishing racism. ### Pointing at this project In the context of this project it’s been a daily preoccupation to consider ways in which framing things differently, through language, can provide new pragmatic dimensions for action. Below are some examples of these pragmatics. The sentence which we will read in the paragraph below is what would have normally emerged to express a similar thing to the sentence: “In the context of this project it’s been a daily preoccupation to consider ways in which framing things differently, through language, can provide new pragmatic dimensions for action” if the modulating filter that it describes was not applied: >“It’s been a daily preoccupation of mine to consider ways in which I can frame things differently, through my use of language, so that I can provide new pragmatic dimensions for action.” Granted, the above is heavy on the first person. The reason this is so, is so that the point can be driven home with more pathos. However, it doesn’t read forced at all, it is otherwise a very ‘normal’ sentence. It is not the idea that by removing the “personal,” the pronouns, etc. from this sentence, that some sort of objective (academic/scientific) distance may be accomplished. It is rather that language becomes more _communist_. Less people, more masses. Less objectification, more ideas. Less individualism and singularization, more commonality and discourse. This is my personal choice though, you are free to do whatever you want.^[In case it is not clear: that sentence is perhaps the most sarcastic of all the sentences in this project. This project’s dream is to radically reframe voluntarist tendencies and individualist ‘freedom’ and ‘decisions’, see: [[Choice]] and [[001.1 The Poltergeist in the Machine/C is for Communism, and for Constraint|C is for Communism, and for Constraint]].] Saying “this project,” then, is the best I/this project can do, for now, as we search for new ways in which we can modulate this hyperindividualist,^[Thanks, mostly, to the primarily destructive monster that is “social” media. Which, it must be said, also propelled a lot of these important constructive conversations.] voluntarist, objectifying, anti-processual^[Perhaps process-oriented understandings of reality are countered by a desire for things to remain the same, by conservativisms which do not want to *see* process. This, too, is a process of _active ignorance_: predicting sameness at the cost of oppression.] moment of history (however, see: [[Metalearning]] for _why_ I (and you) sometimes need to use “I”). Inner dialogue, whether in one’s “head” or with a small selected few, is crucial for tweaking the ornaments that decorate a particular façade (ideology, a moment in politics, gossip, etc.). But the foundational, architectural restructuring, is done with the group: >Internal conversations are important, but people have to be together to have a conversation in the first place. Proximity and trust foster vulnerability and the sharing of experiences and open us to the truly transgressive realisation: that one liberation is bound up with the other. > >Aouragh, 2019. ### Other pointings and _punct_-uations Additionally, there are other methods of modulating interest, for example, Bazin’s enriching punctuation proposals from _Plumons l’Oiseau_ (1996), interpreted in drawing below: ![[Basin punctuation.png|300]] 1: Acclamation; 2: Authority; 3: Conviction; 4: Doubt; 5: Irony; 6: Love. #todo Or Bahktin’s dialogism as presented in this way: #todo ### (Sometimes) a camera, not an engine (but sometimes also [[An engine, not a camera]]) That language doesn’t reflect reality in full, or other usual “map is not the territory” criticisms are in place, sometimes, when fallacies of misplaced concreteness spiral out of control (see: [[Fallacy of misplaced concreteness]], [[Whitehead]]). But to ask of language that it does this impossible favor is like complaining about a video-camera not precisely capturing the inner thoughts of e.g., the human subjects it is capable of rendering for visual display. That is just not what the thing can or should do, it’s partially interested in dealing with varying granularities in the fullness of reality, but never in full resolution. #todo It is interesting to think about these and other resolutions when we think about concepts such as _atoms._ Despite the fact that nobody has ever witnessed such an event, an atom, in “full resolution,” a lot of us still find comfort in imagining these entities as stable, reliable makers of reality. Something more fleeting, such as a wave, is just as capable of scientific, material explanation, yet less widely intuited as comforting. *Continue reading*: [[Language-modulating]], [[Language is music]], [[Song]], [[Music as permanent revolution]], [[Prompt engineering]]. ### Footnotes