Modeling Thirdness

I’m planning to now transition into a series of posts that will be modeling the work of Thirdness, so as to make the project plausible and interesting, and highlight what is innovative in it. I have been highlighting the juridical as a kind of irreducible, if less originary, middle term between ritual (originary distribution) and the disciplinary. In pre-juridical orders, all reality is organized ritually—it is in ritual terms that practices and things are named, sorted and affirmed. Imperial orders introduce the juridical, and then all reality must pass through that—even ritual orders are subordinated to the ritual because they come under the authority of the imperial, which in turn provides a kind of ritual backing for the juridical. (For example, churches and other religious institutions own property.) The political project advanced by Thirdness is to transition the juridical—opposing claims lifted out of the vendetta by being adjudicated by an enforcing third party—into data exchange, and thereby bringing the juridical closer to both originary distribution and the disciplinary. What is difficult and new, then, about Thirdness, is figuring conflicts submitable to judgment in terms of data exchange—each party donating and/or receiving data from the center in lieu of such things as punishment or damages. Not only every conflict, but every imaginable or hypothetical conflict, must be figurable in this way—this is a construction of reality, one which departs from while being continuous with existing constructs. And every relationship bears within it the possibility of any number of conflicts—ultimately, we find ourselves drilling down to the basic mimetic substructure of human reality, rendering the elementary mimetic emotions like envy, desire and resentment adjudicable, and therefore available to analysis in terms of data exchange and examination in terms of idioms of the center. I’m appealing to a certain self-evidency here, “daring” you to imagine any action or relationship that is immune or resistant to juridical categories, assuming you will fail; and by the same token, asking you to imagine that this imaginary would not, in fact intensify tendencies towards hyper-juridification of modern life (constant lawsuits, incremental criminalizing of previously normal behavior, etc.) but, rather, would have the opposite, pacifying, effect, of enabling us to anticipate and therefore defer actual encroachments upon the nomos. We would be giving more substance to concepts such as “fairness” as buffers protecting cooperative, norm-governed endeavors.

I have written about technology in scenic terms along various lines, as the constitution of the scene itself or scenic design, as governance, as the perfection of the imperative and as the establishment of pedagogical platforms. These are all complementary descriptions, but still don’t yet ground technology in political antagonisms, specific to the modern, i.e., desacralized world, which I see as the effort to centralize power while accelerating rotation in center occupancy, on the one hand, as opposed to the severely diminished but never extinguishable attempt to singularize succession in perpetuity. I want to have ready answers to the reasonable claim that ‘technology is not neutral,” and I think the claim is best addressed through the notion of dual use. Coming at dual use in terms of a new model of power I can say that techno-scenes (or, really, just stacked scenes, because how else could they be stacked other than through materialized imperatives?) can serve to display human gestures and mimisms so as to allow for the further penetration and self-effacement of the juridical or can be deployed to wage war on those parts of the population seeking to maintain orderly successions. The development of vast new means of surveillance is an obvious example, as these technologies extend ostensives and attendant imperatives throughout all areas of social life and can be used to gather data aimed at making us healthier, safer, more productive more easily assessed for teamwork purposes; or they can be used to gather information to compromise, subvert and unfairly target regime opponents (and benefit regime friends). This distinction, between the display and enhancement of deferral capabilities on the one hand, and the interference with those capabilities, on the other, can be demonstrated and inhabited with each new technological roll-out.

Establishing justice overlaps with bookkeeping, or what I’ve started calling “ledgering,” which in turn keeps the accounts of originary indebtedness. And all this is preceded and made possible by the originary distribution established, ultimately, through conquest and maintenance of the gains of conquest. Post-WWII international and human rights law can’t negate this fact any more than liberalism’s grounding of legitimacy in the consent of the governed can. If conquest is forbidden soft power and color revolutions perform the same function, far more dysfunctionally. So, Israel is sovereign over what was Mandate Palestine because they inherited the territory from the British via the UK’s withdrawal and therefore acquiescence in the UN resolution dividing the territory into two states and then defending the territory in a war, at least in part of conquest, against the Arab states; moreover, the British acquired Palestine through conquest in war with the Ottoman Empire, which several hundred years earlier had conquered it, etc. There’s a chain of custody, and there’s no other coherent way of determining sovereignty. The alternative, upon which the Palestinian case depends, is the spontaneous generation of sovereignty from the consent of the people to their government. The liberal understanding of sovereignty is designed to undermine the understanding of sovereignty as grounded in conquest, because on this theory no matter how many times the government chosen by the people might start wars with its neighbors the rights of the people can never abrogated, with the bizarre consequence that there can be no consequences to starting a war. Liberalism, then, encourages people to eschew any model of sovereignty, and to resist endlessly on the grounds that the preferences of the people have not been implemented. And that is exactly how the Palestinians have acted, or been programmed. This approach keeps the people involved and whatever government they have from real power and governance, but sovereignty is conserved and the permanent minoritization of a people (in the sense of never attaining “majority,” i.e., responsible maturity) transfers a kind of regulatory and arresting power to diplomatic and legal machinations through which the larger liberal powers work at centralizing power by accelerating turnover in occupancy of the center.

So, a judgment between the Israelis and Palestinians (to start with a crude formulation) must be framed in terms of Israeli sovereignty over the Mandate territories, now including Gaza, which precludes anything like national rights being vested in the Palestinians but opens the possibility for individual claims by residents of these territories against the Israeli state, its organs, and Israeli individuals. We can speak about the responsibility of sovereign power to maintain the juridical order, which means transferring conflicts tending toward the vendetta toward adjudication, on one side, and preventing the legal system itself from becoming a site of a more refined vendetta (“lawfare”) and thereby infringing upon the originary distribution and sovereignty itself. So, the space is open for Palestinian individuals (leaving aside the question of whether the state is to recognize that designation) to demand signs that the Israeli juridical order is open to their claims, and once sovereignty is placed beyond contestation there is no reason such claims couldn’t include property claims going back to 1948 (just like the Israeli legal order is open to legal claims by those dispossessed by Jordan in Jerusalem in 1948). This is then data provided by the Israeli government, in the form of samples of cases in which Palestinian or Arab individuals are given such access to the legal and broader institutional order as to render the ongoing national vendetta moot, or “moot enough,” i.e., incapable of mobilizing the violence that would tilt the stack of scenes into a war footing against those deemed most probable threats. Palestinian/Arab individuals would in turn be asked to provide data indicating disavowal of the national vendetta, with such data being taken through intelligence gathering regarding the kinds of contribution to and participation in resistance to the juridical order that, past a certain threshold, would modify the access of individuals to that order, or disqualify them altogether. These modifications and disqualifications are also data, instituted so as to refine and publicize the boundaries between behavior that enables the continual inclusive unfolding of the originary distribution and behavior that blocks extension of the nomos.

This is a rough sketch, but it allows us to move on to the real question, which is what would the patrons of Thirdness be betting on here. Anyone familiar with Thirdness would be able to anticipate this broad sketch and so there would be no one betting on a judgment of “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free.” The game would therefore be for professionals who would be able to bet on, say the degree or mode of modulation of particular surveillance, intelligence and media apparatuses in instituting the data exchange which, in turn, would imagine more specific cases than “Israel vs. Palestinians.” Thirdness would, say, flag a particular media story involving some conflict over, for example, property claims in East Jerusalem, or even draw upon reports by human rights groups (against whom claims might in turn be entertained) so as to set up a case that can be reduced to an either/or, with two data exchange scenarios involving a decision uncertain even to the operatives of Thirdness because both scenarios are equally plausible pending further study. Someone betting on this outcome has access to evidence of past thinking by Thirdness agents as well as to the facts of the case in question, which Thirdness would open source. Thirdness agents should be sufficiently ahead of the game so as to satisfy losers in any particular case that they themselves gained a more precise understanding of the case from the results of the deliberation. If they are not, and are out-analyzed by a particular player, then all efforts should be made to bring that player onto the Thirdness team or, failing that, a full auditing of his own thinking and methods of computation undertaken.

The data exchange therefore involves actions that bear a family reference to such legal concepts as “penalty,” “incarceration,” “damages,” “liability,” and so on, while shifting attention to the operationalization of these concepts through the stack. Actors are encouraged by the judgments in question to respond in a voluntary and deliberative way, activating higher level of agencies, while the ledgers built into the stack will record those actions in increasingly comprehensive and granular ways—your actions will be your own, but escape from their consequences will be increasingly impossible. This doesn’t mean being “doomed” forever by some bad decisions but, rather, providing for transparency regarding those decisions and the kinds of decisions that would be needed to pay some of the interest on the originary debt thereby accrued. The model of data exchange makes some kind of redemption possible in just about any case, even if one has been deemed permanently unfit to inhabit spaces with unprepared fellow humans. But keeping our focus on how to modulate surveillance technologies so as to position people on the scenes they circulate within highlights the historical nature of all the categories of judgment and justice by vesting social agency in technological agency, in which teams, and individuals on teams, would, at various levels, be programming and programming the programmers. Technologies of warfare would also be influenced, and tendencies towards precision targeting and multi-layered warfare accelerated. Part of what is disturbing about the October 7 massacre is that, obviously, it should never have been allowed to happen, especially given Israel’s own efforts to institute more “prophylactic” means of warfare, like missile defense. I’ll risk sounding like a turn of the 20^th century progressive pacificist by insisting on the utter wastefulness and destructiveness of war at this point—part of the reason for working to maintain the integrity and continuity of the imperative from the center is to defer such violence to the point where it becomes almost thinkable, while remembering that it can’t become completely unthinkable lest it be made all to real by those who realize its unthinkability by some provides a strategic opening for those less occluded.

Surveillance technology (grammatically: materialization of ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits) seems especially important to me in this context in part because much of the resistance to it aims at defending the incompetence and criminality that contemporary governance relies upon but, more theoretically, because here is where the sequence from ostensive to imperative to interrogative to declarative is perpetually initiated. Surveillance technology first of all refers to such things as pervasive cameras and recordings, facial recognition AI, tracking of phone calls according to algorithmic determined searches, tracing of money flows, etc., but the pervasiveness of these technologies in turn trains us to be observant and perceptive in new ways. There is more and more that any one will be able to see, and this will further technological developments enabling us to see yet more. What is to count as good, or “clean,” data, out of all that is detected, recorded and archived? Taking on an “issue” like “israel-Palestine” will have to go way beyond the rights and wrongs as determined by some arbitrary category derived from WW 2 like “war crimes” to address the embeddedness of this issue in the larger nomos of the earth, where larger powers must determine where the conflict descends into a vendetta that threatens other sovereigns or ascends to major power conflict threatening existing distribution. It’s interesting how seldom either “side” enters into the intentions of the other side so as to examine, beyond what you might “indict” one or the other for, how they are negotiating a wider range of exchanges, only some of which can be made explicit. Surveillance technology will also aid in making inferences regarding that larger field, and this will include “decoding” actions and statements along with inaction and silences according to AIs trained on the documented history of the players. It may be that all policy can be reduced to refinements and modulations of surveillance technology along with humans posted at “gates” to affirm or deny particular imperatives drawn from particular patterns derived from such automated surveillance. So, maybe this is where Thirdness plants itself: in shifting political discussions towards proposed modifications in the Stack, proposing mini-regimes of data collection, analysis, mapping and simulation (I’m draw upon Josh Pang’s World Game, which draws out the implications of Buckminster Fuller’s proposal for submitting all world problems to the rigor of computation). The irreducibility of the juridical, the question of justice and, in fact, it’s explicit permeation of all social interactions, serving as the mode of measurement of data security and exchange—that’s Thirdness.