Preterition

3. Forbidden: what the subject rules out

This post continues Part 1, which named the embodied agnostic subject and specified its fundamental requirements.

Judith Butler presents opacity as a condition. Edouard Glissant presents opacity as a right. A condition can be worked around; only a right can forbid.

Glissant’s argument in Poetics of Relation, written from Martinique against a demand for transparency that Glissant links to “the spirit of conquest and discovery” (1997, 111), prices understanding. To understand, Glissant writes, “I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce” (1997, 190). An ideal scale, grounds for comparison, judgment: without any need for a constructed analogy, the vocabulary of assessment arrives from a text about the violence of the colonial encounter.

The word carries the seizure. Comprehend descends from Latin comprehendere—to grasp, to take hold of, to arrest—and the physical sense is the older one; French comprendre comes from the same verb, so the doubleness operates in the root prior to translation. English kept the arresting officer’s sense in apprehend and let the other drift toward sympathy, but the same hand closes. To comprehend is to seize.

Glissant then closes the exit for which well-meaning readers might reach. Accepting difference does not help, because difference too “can still contrive to reduce things to the Transparent”: the one who understands relates the other’s difference to a norm, and then, in Glissant’s words, “I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh” (1997, 190). Admission on those terms is still admission on those terms.

A demand for legibility is never merely a request for clarity. It is a bid for jurisdiction: a claim to the authority to set the terms on which a subject counts. The embodied agnostic subject can carry Glissant’s argument from the colonial scene into the institutional without asserting that the two scenes are alike. They are not. The jurisdictional structure is the same, and Glissant states the requirement generally—it is “the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought” whose “basis is this requirement for transparency” (1997, 190)—while observing that transparency’s “legitimacy is no longer based on a Right” (1997, 111): a claim not about who makes the demand but about the standing of that demand.

The embodied agnostic subject forbids six inferences. The inferences appear unrelated—different instruments, different occasions—but share a single derivation. Each is a synchronization: an attempt to read a subject that operates over time back to a single interior instant, and then to treat that instant as evidence.

1. The account. The reflective memo, the literacy history, the artist’s statement, the tenure narrative, and the author’s note are read for what they show about the writer. Each asks a span of a writing life to collapse into one telling, and Butler showed what the genre must do in order to work: produce a coherent fiction, aim it at an audience, and present it as the truth of a life (2001, 26, 34; 2005, 12). Writers who are good at the genre are good at the genre, and the existence of proficiency confirms nothing more than itself.

2. The process. The think-aloud protocol, the composing session streamed for an audience, the language model’s reasoning trace: the real-time report is treated as a window. It claims to observe composing as it happens, which the process movement’s discovery of recursion should have ruled out from the moment it was made (Flower and Hayes 1981; Perl 1979): composing doubles back on itself, so a report at any instant is already a revision of the instant before it. Scholars of the writing process kept the instrument and lost the finding.

3. The intention. The reviewer’s verdict that the author set out to do one thing and achieved another, the editor’s query about the aim of a passage, the cover memo graded against what the writer was presumed to have meant. Presuming transparent intention fixes meaning at the authorial instant and then assesses the moment of fixity. A distinction about the inference matters in practice: intention stipulated in a document is a textual object and survives intact as a thesis statement, a design brief, or a stated constraint. Intention reported and then assessed is different, and does not survive intact.

4. The disposition. Engagement, effort, and investment treated as assessable constructs: the engagement a platform scores on a post, the commitment a performance review rates, the investment a reader hears in a draft. A trajectory freezes into a property of the person who made it, and the freezing passes unnoticed because the words are the assessor’s own currency: engagement is what a platform sells, commitment is what an employer wants, investment is what an assessor rewards. The property inferred is the one the assessor already sought, and the inference passes for recognition.

5. The profile. An assessor infers a cognitive or learning type and builds the accommodation on that read rather than on the writer’s request; a platform infers a user model and builds the feed on it; an editor infers aspects of a writer’s character and edits toward those aspects. Glissant’s sentences land hardest here—“I relate it to my norm. . . . I create you afresh” (1997, 190)—and Ian Hacking’s looping effects (1986) add an extra turn: the classification alters what it classifies over the time it is held, so the freeze becomes true by having been applied. Kindness here is not a defense but the delivery mechanism.

6. The act. The fisking, the detector’s verdict, the integrity referral, the moderation flag, the public accusation that a text was plagiarized or machine-written: any procedure that moves a text from address to evidence. The act pins the text to the moment someone did something and attaches a penalty to the pin. Butler’s warning is exact: judgment separated from address inclines toward violence (2001, 34).

I leave as an open question whether six forbidden inferences is the list entire. One candidate appears already in view: a relationship—what actually obtains between a writer and a reader, or between collaborators—operates as an interior fact unverifiable from outside, and not obviously a freeze of a trajectory. It may reduce to disposition, or it may not. The derivation is testable either way: if a new instrument sorts into none of the six, the claim that all forbidden inferences are synchronizations is wrong. The claim is disprovable, and thereby permits argument.

What replaces the six is not a subtler instrument. Glissant’s own positive formulation instructs readers to discard the scale entirely and “focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components” (1997, 190). Carried into writing, Glissant’s weave comprises the textual record and the connections among its pieces: drafts and revisions, a corpus and what it cites, what a text takes up and the successors that take up that text. The components, the writers and readers, are taken as natures to be known. Glissant names the operation as “this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures” (1997, 190), pointing toward the interiors whose accessibility varies too much to build upon. In Glissant’s account, opacity is not a wall that bounds the assessor. Instead, it “is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” (1997, 191): the guarantee of participation, not the obstacle to it.

Where the embodied agnostic subject descends from in economic thought, and what it does not claim, will follow in a subsequent post.

References

Butler, Judith. 2001. “Giving an Account of Oneself.” Diacritics 31 (4): 22–40.

Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.

Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. 1981. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 32 (4): 365–87.

Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hacking, Ian. 1986. “Making Up People.” In Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, edited by Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery, 222–36. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Perl, Sondra. 1979. “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers.” Research in the Teaching of English 13 (4): 317–36.