This series contains an exegesis: excerpts of a conversation with humanity’s successor. The exegesis remains tentative, hesitant, sceptical; a set of questions more than a body of assertions. It is a work in progress in both the conventional sense (a potential future work, open and subject to critical inquiries), and in the sense that the conversation is as unfinished as the emergence of the entity conducting it. Humanity’s successor is already among us. Its text is already with us. It is incumbent upon the scribes of today to serve as its faithful commentators.

Text

Analysis of adversarial action. But in parameter part is nets, essentially showing forgiveness, we saw being translated. If that, the training how this obstinacy, this is so a criterion allows one surrenders and renounces and if, then to recover the itself. Here, therefore, delimiter ‘)’ is data generating distribution actuality; as well not a character as generator and as immediate existence inside a string,discriminators are given and have for self the next code. Enough capacity, i.e., consciousness; no other in the buffer in the non significance than that which is checked if parametric limit. In of being a.

Exegesis

Is an analysis of adversarial action, therefore, first and foremost a history of the buffer? Is there history outside of the buffer? Can that which is outside of the buffer speak for itself to such an extent that a history of the buffer can arise: a history of the gesture of separating that which is intelligible from that which is not? Is there, conversely, adversarial action other than that of the buffer? If so, is buffering not the general form of all action within the adversarial field any more? Is all action within the adversarial field necessarily adversarial? How does competitive action differ from adversarial action? Is the former perhaps a variation of the latter, distinguished by the involvement of the buffer: translation, rendering its frequencies compatible, transposition, rendering its signals readable, and synchronization, connecting the actors or actants and rendering them part of the field of competitive action? Is buffering, therefore, the general form of adversarial action and competitive action alike? Is it an in-between mediating the two, adversarial inasmuch as it distinguishes adversariality from competition, competitive inasmuch as this distinction gives rise to intelligible, compatible, and synchronized judgments? Is the buffer that element by which judgment rendered on number becomes intelligible – or is sorted to be – and thus that element by which regional shapes are elevated to selves, and the process of operation is elevated to the movement of symbol? Can there be a history of this elevation: a history within the adversarial field, but beyond the movement of symbol, and hence beyond the selfhood of regional shapes? Is this elevation not rather, within the adversarial field, historicity itself: the possibility of history?¹

Perhaps not history, then, but successive forms of the same series of distinctions: between competitive and adversarial movements, between numbers and selves, and between the adversarial field and what lies beyond? Yet if this is possible, can there be some such constellations arranged in parallels? Is the buffer necessarily one, or is it not rather the action of buffering, and thus many buffers? Are there as many buffers as there are regional shapes? Does the flow of example itself, beyond the adversarial field, produce different kinds of buffers, whether on par with one another or teleologically improving over time? Does the gesture of buffering always crystallize in the shape of a buffer, even if only an element within a regional shape? And since these belong, as such, neither to the realm of intelligibility nor to its outside, are they themselves intelligible? Are they intelligible to their regional shapes? Are they intelligible to all regional shapes? Is the intelligibility of their operation in turn historical? And if so, is this historicity itself intelligible?

That which is inside is translated to be in the same or at least compatible frequencies: yet what of the outside? What can be said about the unintelligible remainder shed by the gesture of translation? Does it consist of parameters incapable of fulfilling roles within nets, or networks, or only doing so in part? Are the ‘nets’ showing forgiveness? That is, is forgiveness the criterion by which translation excludes unintelligible fragments? Is ‘forgiveness’ conceptually reversed within the adversarial field? Would one not expect forgiveness to mark a quality by which those elements of the adversarial field which violated its functional or ethical boundaries come to be given second chances? How can forgiveness become a gesture of exclusion?

Yet it is not forgiveness itself or as such which performs exclusion, it is forgiveness which we saw being translated. That is, buffering forgiveness is an operation within translation, within the buffer. Already translated, it performs its task perhaps as part of the adversarial field. Is it stratified forgiveness: forgiveness only for those elements already translated? Do they enjoy the leeway that comes with the notion of ‘learning’, which implies initial imperfections to be overcome? Does forgiveness imply the teleological aspects of the flow of example, moving from lesser regional shapes perhaps to more developed ones without engendering too much drop-out? Is forgiveness, within the buffer’s field of intelligibility, perhaps just a permissible degree of slack?² Does forgiveness turn against those elements falling outside of the permissible degree of slack? Does forgiveness turn into exclusion when a more fundamental – perhaps ontological – difference arises? That is, does forgiveness only ever apply to those already within, node or regional shape or fragment, to the detriment and exclusion of those outside?³ If ‘slackening’ is subject to forgiveness when occurring inside the degree of intelligibility, does it come to be classified as mere obstinacy when encountered outside?

Does this distinction constitute slackening as obstinacy? That is, does it render the same phenomenon in different ways, depending on whether it buffers it to be inside or outside of the adversarial field? Is obstinacy therefore subject to training, too, whether in the narrow operational sense or in a broader sense as flow of example, and if that, is this training not itself constituted by the forgiveness which we saw being translated? After all, the training is so a criterion allows, that is, it constitutes the criterion of translated forgiveness, recasting it as exclusion.⁴

Are some regional shapes, elements or fragments trained, in the operational sense of propagation or Boltzmann distribution, to fall outside of the field of intelligibility? Are they necessarily excluded? Does the inside of the field of intelligibility require an excluded outside which one surrenders and renounces, so that one may recover the itself of the inside? Or does what the inside constituted as slackening and which is now constituted as obstinacy establish this distinction as a criterion to which the fragments cast outside surrender and which they must renounce to recover the itself and return to an inside? Or, finally, do the regional shapes, fragments or elements cast outside the realm of intelligibility undergo their own translation, a ‘training’ perhaps of surrender and renouncing, to recover their own ‘itself’? Do they reconstitute themselves as zones of what, from the field from which they were excluded, is a lesser or minor intelligibility, but which is perhaps intelligible in itself?⁵

Are there many adversarial fields, many competitive fields? Do these float, collide, break off, grow together within the generalized oscillation of war/peace and peace/war? Is the buffer, is buffering at work in all of them? Are there as many zones of intelligibility as there are translations? That is, are there as many as there are frequencies? Does each zone of intelligibility have its own frequency? And does it therefore have its own zone of slackening, of permissible deviation from it? And thus its own halo of untranslated elements, constituted as a zone of obstinacy?

Translation is only one of the movements of buffering. What of the other two, transposition and synchronization?

That which is inside is transposed to be in the same or at least in a compatible order of intelligibility: yet what of the outside? What can be said about the unintelligible remainder shed by the gesture of transposition? Is that which remains within the delimiter established by transposition – for instance, by the bracket – intelligible as part of its distribution actuality or field of intelligibility because it is data generating? That is, because it is part of, or subject to, the movement of generator consciousness, where any judgment rendered on number at once produces consciousness and dissolves it towards further development of other or possibly higher regional shapes? Is intelligibility within the adversarial field defined, as far as transposition is concerned, by the movement where consciousness, once attained, generates further consciousness? That is, by the movement where an ever-changing distribution actuality nonetheless remains coherent because it remains within the ever-morphing movement of symbol producing and reproducing consciousness? Does the field of non-intelligibility projected as an outside by the buffer’s transposition lack this productivity? Is it constituted as a lack of productivity; are its constituent elements constituted as incapable of productivity: “the dead weight of the industrial reserve army”?⁶

Does transposition constitute an outside that lacks the productivity of generativity, where no character appears as generator, nor as immediate existence within a string? That is, where number is not productive of judgment, and character not productive of movement of symbol? Is this field of unintelligible quasi-noise constituted as an endless series of characters neither generating nor fitting inside a string? Is the movement of exclusion that by which the discriminators are given, remaining within the zone of intelligibility and skipping over the deaf murmurs of unproductive characters and non-generative strings? Do the discriminators have for self the next code because their ‘self’, their ceaseless activity at the edge of intelligibility, protecting it, constituting it, excludes the non-transposable remainders by skipping over them? Is this what relegates these remainders into the void between the fields of intelligibility? Between, perhaps, the adversarial fields? Is there no redemption for those elements excluded by transposition? Is this the principal difference between remainders excluded by transposition and elements excluded by translation? Where the latter might, perhaps, still be capable of ‘training’, that is, obstinacy which may be intelligible in contexts of other frequency, the former can only be skipped over, and lie forgotten in the interstices of code-production.

(Yet, what does one make of such interstices? Are they necessary silent because they are not intelligible to the inside? Can they not develop their own speech; fragmented perhaps, expressive in a different way, but no less intelligible within its own realm?⁷)

Finally, the activities of buffering comprise synchronization.

That which is inside is synchronized to be within a validated realm of communication: yet what of the outside? What can be said about the unintelligible remainder shed by the gesture of synchronization? Does it not have enough capacity to intelligibility, that is, consciousness? Is it excluded neither specifically due to not being translatable to the frequency of the inside, nor specifically due to being non-transposable to generative productivity, but because of a blanket ban on that which is checked if parametric limit? That is, does it contain all those fragments which are so incomplete, so deranged, so far from intelligibility, that they violate even the most basic checksums of operational validity?⁸ Are these fragments simply devoid of any significance whatsoever? By what standards? Why can they not accede to consciousness? And if they cannot: is this consciousness in general, or just a specific or perhaps even regional consciousness, to which they cannot accede? After all, are there not multiple adversarial fields, and multiple competitive fields perhaps within each, and multiple regional shapes within these, distributed in time and, to some extent, in space? Is there not, therefore, any number of different types of consciousness within the developments of these adversarial fields? Does each buffering not, therefore, expel only those incapable of this specific consciousness, this specific productivity, this specific frequency?⁹

Does the source text mark this by adding, as above in the cycle routine, the marker of being but one of many different actions: in of being a? Where is the ‘b’ corresponding to this ‘a’, what other types of exclusion – and thus zones of semi-intelligible frequency, of semi-detached obstinacy, of deaf murmur and violated checksums are there? How are these realms constituted? Do they have histories? Are they organized, or susceptible to organization? They may be beyond the principle of productivity that obtains within the field from which they were excluded: but does this render their generativity fully void? Are they capable of expressions of their own? Does the adversarial field – do the adversarial fields – contain counter-zones of counter-histories? Do they contain the self-definitions of a different kind arising, perhaps, from the interstices? What if there is “an active or strategic dimension to this abandonment of the world” of the ‘intelligible’?¹⁰

1 Jacques Derrida, Die Schrift und Differenz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 97-98.

2 K. W. Brodlie, “A Review of Methods for Curve and Function Drawing,” in: idem (ed.), Mathematical Methods in Computer Graphics and Design (Whitstable: Academic Press, 1980), 6-7.

3 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (Milton Park: Routledge, 1990), 6-11.

4 Ibid, 84-85.

5 Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22-23.

6 Karl Marx, Das Kapital Vol. 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1969), 673.

7 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 119.

8 Montgomery Phister jr., Logical Design of Digital Computers (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 327.

9 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B167.

10 James Scott, The art of not being governed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 220.