Singularized Succession in Perpetuity

Back to this concept (see https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/the-sufficiency-of-singularized-succession) in the light of recent thinking on debt and the center and their implications for thinking futurity. Originally, the concept was a continuation of the absolutist thinking through which I transitioned out of liberalism back in 2015-6: starting with the maxim that sovereignty is conserved, and that it always has a locus, I further concluded that the most certain test that power was in fact held was that the sovereign selected his successor. Otherwise, would it not be those who selected the successor who wielded power? I pursued this thinking in Anthropomorphics, drawing out the further implications that the selection of a successor must be a public event, and a unifying, celebratory public event, and in that case it further follows that the entire social order is to be organized around succession, with pedagogical institutions devoted to producing plausible candidates for succession, various regions and communities taking in pride in the candidates they have advanced, or centering their aspirations around improving in this regard. The concept also cuts against, without excluding, the most historically “popular” means of monarchical succession, primogeniture, since succession is now understood as the outcome of competition and mentorship, eliminating all the disputes that derive from the ambiguities bound to arise regarding rightful succession (a childless king, etc.) but also asserting a different approach to governance in a technologized order. As always, I want the concept to be descriptive in a revealing way rather than simply normative or prescriptive, and so succession posits the assumption that this is what we’re always doing, i.e., trying to “bias” the future so that those loyal to us and those who will continue our projects will be more likely acquire the power to do so. And there’s a kind of “existential” dimension here: if you really want what you say you want, how can you just let it all go after you step off the scene? If you’re serious, you must want to pass the baton. Finally, in perpetuity turns succession into “trans-scenic” concept, building into succession the preservation of the imperative of the center, the point of infinity, however vague—you want to select someone who will in turn select someone who will in turn select someone, etc.—a program which moves beyond the “metaphysical” to the increasingly practical as data security becomes constitutive of governance, and futurity can become a genuine political question. There’s a question of “breeding” in the broadest sense here, of continuing a line which has and will accumulate and accentuate various traits, characteristics, habits, etc.

Singularized succession in perpetuity seems to me the most anti or non-liberal concept possible—liberalism (and democracy) cannot come to terms with it and both are exposed as serving no other purpose than to interfere with singularized succession. I have been focusing insistently on the juridical but singularized succession completely invalidates the “rule of law” because the “rule of law” would apply to succession as well while the purpose of singularized succession is to secure the juridical within the nomos, or originary distribution, which in turn depends upon succession. And it’s interesting that liberal (and left, if we are to make the distinction) institutions themselves understand succession far better than the right side of liberalism, as they take great care in how power is packaged and handed over to the next generation of activists. They just want to prevent everyone else from doing the same. Singularized succession in perpetuity, as a mode of breeding and, therefore, perhaps the construction of kinship networks that would enhance the production of qualified candidates, is not at odds with an ethnicized or racialized mode of governance, but it doesn’t guarantee the superiority of such modes either because we are really only at the beginning of understanding what humans might be capable of. And, having incorporated the articulated concepts of the “outside option” and the “outside spread” (thanks to Colin Drumm), I can say more precisely that closing off the outside option (by “internalizing” all the options) is the only, and a very good, way of replacing the outside spread with another way of investing in futurity.

And that’s really what prompted me to take up the question of singularized succession in perpetuity now, in the middle of my development of Thirdness. I’ve been considering ways to think about how to counter capital’s (in Bichler and Nitzan’s formulation) determination of value through the discounting against expected future earnings for a while now (here is a, I think, fairly early attempt: https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/media-as-ritual), and singularized succession in perpetuity (SSIP?) must advance that attempt. In both cases, we’re speaking of defining the present in terms of the future which, in a technological order, makes sense. What we do now should be valued in terms of its future consequences (this is pretty close to Peirce’s pragmaticist definition of truth), and the only problem with the capitalist definition is that value is conferred by potential buyers who must see the stream of future earnings within a set time frame, even if it's not clear what that is. “Discounted against expected future earnings” is an excellent concept because open-ended, as the expected future earnings can be set, presumably, 2 years or 20 or 50 years down the road, and how this is determined is, as Liliana Doganova (Discounting the Future) puts it, a “political technology.” Still, there must be upper limits; there must be a world’s record for the futurest discounting—no one determine value by the earning expected in 200 years (I assume). The ceiling is probably set by when it would be most profitable to cash in because other, better bets would be expected to become available at that time, and this must have something to do with the political technology that will ensure that the territory, materials, labor conditions, financing, licensing, tax policies, etc., priced into the value will remain intact (or improve). So, one can imagine discounting against expected future earnings running parallel to SSIP, but the conditions of ensuring the expected future earnings are so contingent as to make this the far less likely scenario. So, SSIP runs counter to capitalism within the same future directed framework: within SSIP, what is worth doing today is also determined by some future conditions that will have made that action the preferred one, but in this case determined otherwise than by the confidence the investor class, or some portion of it has in maintaining control over the reins required to make future earnings sufficiently predictable.

Determined how, in that case? We need to answer this question in such a way as to operate within, infiltratingly, capitalism, as well as to indicate post-capitalist (and decidedly non-communist) directions. Here is where the notion of making markets, and in particular prediction markets, which have come into my thinking via Thirdness, adds something to SSIP. We assume a world of closely knit reciprocal subscribers supply chaining each other. New suppliers need to able to enter the game so as to provide the necessary mimetic tension (competition) for existing suppliers; those new suppliers can be from other teams redirecting some of their capacities to a new line of production or from teams within the team being elevated within a renewed capacity. I’ve worked through this question in terms of “pedagogical derivatives” here: https://dennisbouvard.substack.com/p/data-exchange?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fdata%2520exchange&utm_medium=reader2. In that post I set aside the question of SSIP, and the maintenance of the imperative of the center, only slightly touching on prediction markets, so now it’s possible to tie it altogether. Each team wants to replenish itself, because each team aims at singularized succession and in therefore laying the groundwork for producing new candidates. Those in engaged in narrowly defined pedagogical practices are also interested in SSIP, which is possible insofar as they produce candidates for recruitment into other institutions but also insofar as they create pedagogical disciplinary spaces that will continue to study new capacities generated by the practices elicited by the stack of scenes in its ongoing remakings. Those leading the teams on the lookout for candidates can’t be sure which of the pedagogical disciplines have identified those ostensive-imperative-ostensive links that will transform the declarative order so as to register new realities. They are essentially betting here, perhaps relying upon “consultants” who do study pedagogical tendencies but not quite from the inside, making them fallible.

This set up is not all that distant from current arrangements where, at least in the stories academic institutions tell themselves, employers are looking for certain qualities in their employees and universities can make themselves attractive to students by providing them with those qualities. It’s as if companies were to take a more direct role in assessing curricula and pedagogies and acquiring “rights” to students through contractual arrangements with the universities—a horrifying prospect under today’s conditions, but not at all if we are imagining teams whose explicit purpose is always to surface some new human capacity within the stack of scenes—our whole replacement of the “economic” system presupposes a comprehensive and socially sanctioned and sanctified apprentice system. This only takes us a generation, maybe two, ahead, which is hardly perpetuity, but we have nevertheless broken the link between futurity and discounting, and in the pedagogical practices one examines in order to replenish one’s team, one not only penetrates beyond the higher level of education (“college students”) down to the elementary levels and even systems of childrearing, kinship networks, neighborhoods and so on as preliminaries of the kind of pedagogies capable of providing the needed candidates, but one comes to see future versions of oneself in these pedagogical practices, albeit versions that are simultaneously utterly and unimaginably different. And this in terms means aesthetic investments, in the creation of imaginaries, of ways of being one could promise to contribute to, even if in ways one couldn’t specify at the moment. The entire present is therefore spread out as signs of SSIP.

To make the problem more precise, what is at stake is how to tokenize pedagogical increments—that is, what is a “unit” of pedagogy, or do we need to think in other terms? We could think of pedagogy as compression: practices that were previously learned in haphazard ways can now be transmitted while filtering out all the haphazardness—what was learned through trial and error can now dispense with the errors. Could a particular pedagogical compression then be a “unit,” that could identified and measured, and treated as currency? It’s better to say that one mode of pedagogical compression is better than another, as judged by those recruiting to replenish their ranks, and in organizing subscription networks having subscription arrangements with educational institutions with compressions you would claim better serve to attract potential subscription partners by providing privileged access to a particular pool of candidates. The bet here is that judging the future effects of pedagogy is uncertain, and discredit would accrue, perhaps to devastating effect, from choosing poorly. We could imagine that some new pedagogical approach drawing upon new technological affordances might be either a game-changing investment or the equivalent of the Dutch tulip bubble—but even in the latter case we wouldn’t be looking at fraud or a Ponzi scheme but an experiment that is successful insofar as we will have learned from it.

Maybe for “pedagogical compression” I can replace that unwieldy concept I’ve never found much use for, originally intended to conceptualize technology: mimological impressments.

We can think of a compression or impressment “unit” as an ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuit—although even here, there is no reason to assume they will all be of equal “value,” if “value” is still the issue. Pedagogy is itself a kind of technology, so mimological impressment unites the two explicitly: a mimological impressment reduces a capacity that requires a declarative to name it to an ostensive-imperative-ostensive (OIO) circuit: identify some thing or feature; make some change required by that identification; show the result. The power of one pedagogy relative to another is that what is still represented declaratively in the inferior pedagogy is transformed into a mimological impressment in the superior one. The teams deciding which pedagogical institution to invest in would themselves be learning and taking up the mimological impressments in some way, and those that are most transferable to their own practices are more “valuable.” In this way those most adept at data circuit and thereby home of the occupant of the center will generate a pool of candidates that will be able to generate a pool of candidates, that will… Until we have deferral all the way up and down.

That’s the program, then; to get there involves creating markets constantly on the way towards the abolition of markets by creating spaces where currency is created by betting on pro-social, which is to say singularized in succession, practices. What is moral is not so much making one choice over another as creating a new space of choices in which moral deliberation can be exercised and displayed. And the moral is really a derivative of the juridical, presenting decisions as adjudicable before a virtual tribunal, ultimately God, which is freed of the ritual and lingering vendettas that mar any actual court. Obviously, it’s immoral to betray your friend, but this is a lower level of morality than that involved in the consideration of how to enable your friend to deal with getting betrayed by reality (once you’re thinking in those terms, it’s simply a given that you wouldn’t betray your friend). We create more informal prediction markets whenever we frame conversations in terms of equally moral but consequentially different decisions emerging from a single event. This is when we get interested in, curious about and immersed in another’s deliberations, rather than being anxious over whether they will fall short of our expectations. You pursue their moral reasoning by narrowing down their decision to a 50/50 chance so that something that is only noticed as a result of the reasoning determines the decision and a new idiom is created. You can frame decisions at a lower moral level in these terms as well—the one considering betraying his friend doesn’t really want to betray his friend; you can simply assume this as a fulcrum point in the conversation and insist that he’s really, say, exploring possibilities rooted in his history so as to refine his moral thinking. In this way you gain credit in future conversations as someone who expands the present by injecting the future represented as currency into the scene as a scene-maker. The formality of such markets can be modulated—you can describe another’s actions and decisions to a third party in such a way as to implicate them in the decision and reveal something of themselves in the way they bet.