Evil Media

Excellence

Excellence Metamodel, or Formalize, Virtue In other stratagems, we have noted the existence of a “grammar” for continuous reeducation, a grammar that codifies a set of software technologies, of machine environments , and thus offers the possibility of an algorithmic dynamic to thought and to becoming. Such a grammar points toward the possibility of a more parsimonious route into the operations of subject production, one that can be conducted directly on and through language.1 If we have a machine grammar—a technology—for continuous reeducation, embodied across a range of hardware, software, and wetware options, perhaps some more condensed formulations of the multitudinous syntax that such a grammar affords might be possible. In this regard, the set of techniques known as neurolinguistic programming, lately popular among management consultants and psychotherapists alike (the likeness not being entirely accidental) and redolent of the trend toward positive psychology, perhaps offers a suitable candidate for the pressing requirement of engendering new forms of subjectivity. As the experts put it, “These days we need the skills to develop personal flexibility to the extreme.”2 Only individuals able to adapt to, or acquire a closer fit with, the demands of the world in progress will gain the right to call themselves virtuous. In the guise of a practice of modeling— or, rather, metamodeling—NLP proposes an approach to reeducation that can, in principle , operate at the micrological level of linguistic form itself, through a disclosure of what its proponents call the “mental syntax” that orders experience. Better still, as a practice for the administration of the self, for minimum outlay (books, toolkit, webinars) NLP can be self-administered, although undoubted financial advantages accrue to becoming expert. While the notion of the model equivocates delightfully in its use of the armature of science when scaled up beyond the strict confines of the laboratory, in general it 148 Excellence condenses and essentializes pertinent variables and significant features in a highly portable, economical manner, even where the associated intellectual technology does not, a priori, require such fixity or closure. To develop a model of a set of events or situations in the real world is to purport to offer an accurate—if abbreviated—representation of those events or that situation. A model thus permits the exploration of scenarios, mapping responses occurring according to variations in the parameters defining the model.3 For a scientist, the model is a tool designed to capture an aspect of the reality being modeled. From a more strictly mathematical-logical point of view, models have to do with the interpretation of formulas in a logical system; that is, they go from being meaningless strings to having a meaningful value: a modeltheoretic semantics ensures that syntactically well-formed formulas in a natural language , for example, are susceptible to being considered true or false in a finite, parseable way.4 For the neurolinguistic programmer, the model is an underlying mapping, along the lines of a structural grammar (à la Chomsky) of the world, a formal-rhetorical device that, unlike a Chomskyan structure—which is not revisable at will—opens up the possibility of an infinite flexibility, a perpetually revisable relation to the world, the permanent reworking of “mind-body coding” or the structure of subjective experience . These oxymoronic “structures of magic,” as the founders of NLP call them, can be placed at the service of the modeling of excellence in all domains, facilitating the techno-therapeutic play of quasi-algebraic rewrite rules—now grasped as critical operators in the process of persuasion engineering—for a sophisticated, and in principle technologically translatable, practice of excellence in communication.5 On the assumption of the ultimate existence of some presumed formally adequate syntax, the rewrite rules that metamodelers discern—deletion, distortion, generalization6 —offer a way of improving communication and, crucially, a form of self-assessment that can be abstracted from the tacit habits of experience, that can be revised and recoded, ideally leading to the unconscious assimilation of patterns of excellence. Self-assessment using such rewrite rules clearly presupposes some abstract communicational machine, a virtual reservoir of well-formed formulas that our intransigence, our lack of excellence, our everyday inflexibilities, prevent us from accessing. The metamodel presides over such processes, in a position of gray eminence, the very existence of which implies, if not ensures, its own requirement to banish the possibility of the evil negativity of malformed language.7 The ease with which NLP practitioners flaunt a variable—and not always consistent —jargon, their invocations of Ericksonian “solution-oriented...