A Bit More Granularity for a Cybernetics of Judaism and Thirdness

There’s an important critique of Israel that I’ve seen circulating for a while and has been detailed in several books (which I haven’t yet read)—it’s a critique I think I would agree with but treat as exactly the opposite of a critique. Here it is: Israel, due to its “supervisory” relation to the Palestinians has been a pioneer in surveillance and policing technologies that are then distributed globally for governance purposes. Israel, then, is at the center of the new surveillance and data-driven (like facial recognition) forms of governance or, if you like, “repression.” This argument, for example, is what lies behind what otherwise might seem the bizarre claim that the IDF trains American police forces—there is mostly likely a lot to this, especially if one considers that if you sell military equipment, you probably have to include in the sale demos and training. I don’t know for sure, and I don’t know who does know, but I would not be at all surprised to find that Israeli intelligence from the Middle East and beyond plays a critical role in global intelligence gathering networks. And since much of this is due to the Israeli state’s confrontational relation to much of the region it becomes very easy to take the next logical step and say that these conflicts are kept in place precisely in order to maintain Israel’s edge in such governance technology. (This was written before the recent barrage of missiles from Iran intercepted by Israel with some help from its friends but I think it’s easy enough to read that event in these terms.)

There can be various processes that keep conflicts going, and those who profit from their continuance certainly make their contribution. It’s also the case that inducing or risking minor conflicts might be a way of deflecting a larger conflict or testing the enemy’s readiness and capability—it becomes a means of communication between enemies who are still deterring each other for the time being, a time being that can continue indefinitely. To see a critique of Israel in all this one must revert to an anarchist anthropology, where men are born free and are only in chains due to the rise of inequality or a small minority of enslavers or some other exogeneous cause—but, if such exogenous causes are to be resisted or reversed, wouldn’t the means of opposing inequality or enslavement involve use the of force and all the technologies needed to make force effective? The other approach is to take governance as a given, which means, in one way or another, defending the “Big Man revolution” (centered ordinality, primarchy, tributarianism). The center is occupied, the center distributes, the center attracts and must defer resentments, and the means of doing so and acquiring the information needed to do so effectively will change along with the means of interfering with or thwarting the fulfillment of such obligations. An interesting trope of dystopian science fiction is the system that governs too well, so well that you don’t even notice you’re being governed and wouldn’t be able to form the intention to resist. That there is some, perhaps the most irreducible, ingredient of residual humanity, to be found in the inextinguishable desire to resist governance, is a non-negotiable component of all liberal thought. The Forbin Project, a very interesting and well-done film representing an AI takeover of global governance made in the early 70s failed to make much of an impact, the reason being, I would assume, aside from having no big stars, that it doesn’t conform to this liberal desire (although I think it tries to). Much of the movie is taken up with attempts by high-level figures to conceal themselves from and resist the AI, and we find out (spoiler alert!) at the end that they were all futile, and obviously and pathetically so. (This is, of course, a problem for the movie—action in which we are encouraged to take an interest has no impact on the plot.) And when the final victory of the AI is made clear at the end, it’s very hard to see how anyone will be worse off.

So, the idea that we don’t want governance to get too good is deeply engrained, and this resistant desire converges with the threat posed by the maintenance needs of the Stack, reliant upon a high degree of competence, to existing systems of governance that rely upon continually disrupting any stable occupation of the center, of any center. Cities must not be made safe precisely because they so easily could be, rendering redundant vast layers of the state bureaucracy (understand in the broadest sense, to include media, educational institutions, etc.). There is no more important political agenda, indeed, there is no political agenda, other than to counter and neutralize this resistance—it’s also probably the most difficult political project imaginable. From this standpoint, then, Israel is less of a pariah (or hoped-to-be-made so) than a model—and it would also not be surprising if, in fact, it fulfills both roles at different levels of the social order (it’s obviously a model for all those other states interested in its governance technologies). That the Jews are a kind of governance technology resonates deeply with the cybernetics of Judaism I outlined a few posts back and would help to explain much regarding the historical vicissitudes of this “nation of ledgerers.” It also helps to explain the liberal and leftist tendencies in modern, secular Judaism as, first, a kind of revulsion from this very unliberal historical inheritance and, second, as an “unconscious” attempt to find a new way to fulfill the vocation subsequent to the fall of monarchies. And it further reinforces the “solution” to the “Jewish problem” I worked out a while back: the historical responsibility of the Jews is to make governance good, which is to say to advance the practices that make the operations of justice and judgment so attuned to that middle ground between the recrudescence of the vendetta on one side and the attempt to “place on trial” the nomos or originary distribution on the other side that both possibilities fade from historical memory. This is to locate ourselves in a hot spot, but it also gives Jews the best position in which to keep their heads, in every sense of that phrase. (I am here seemingly at odds with another way of accounting for the widespread international antipathy toward Israel, which is that Israel represents an “outmoded” idea of the nation-state, even the ethno-nation state, which makes it a target of those working to replace the nation-state order with one organized in terms of the Human Rights World Picture. I have some sympathy to that argument, which I have at times nodded to myself, but there’s no real contradiction here since the kind of global governance I’m speaking of here has nothing in common with one based on human rights adjudicated by diplomatic-media-bureaucratic complexes—one that has at any rate no chance of being installed, however much destruction the attempt to do so might cause. So, I think it makes more sense to say that Israel stands at the intersection of opposed directions for global governance.)

During the Gaza campaign many have remarked on the inadequacy (to put it mildly) of Israeli propaganda. Israel can present only a very limited victimary narrative, and therefore cannot possibly compete with the absolute victimary narrative produced for the Palestinians. Therefore, Israeli propaganda should not try to compete and should probably cease altogether, Just give military briefings, contradict false claims from the enemy and its supporters, and demonstrate technological and organizational capacities in verifiable ways—that is, “public diplomacy” should just be a simplified version of the inter-state communications Israel is surely already providing to allies and neutrals. Say only what you can do and do everything you say. Such an approach hasn’t been tried in a while and, maybe, like a deflationary approach to currency, it will reset informational values, not only for this conflict. Make military and political operations advertisements for your equipment and intelligence, but without hype—simply demonstrations of what everything can do. Emphasize innovations made in the course of action, in the face of exigencies—rewrite the book on urban warfare. Make yourself as indispensable to as many governing entities as you possibly can.

We see discussions about the percentage of this or that nation’s budget that goes to defense spending, but 100% of every nation’s budget should go to defense spending, properly understood as the creation and maintenance of teams dedicated to ensuring, first, the covering of the threshold of the vendetta from below and the prevention of antinomic agencies (anti-nomos, bringing charges and accusations that can only be remedied through the removal of the accused from the originary distribution, i.e., their excision as property owners and authorities) above and “occupying” the justice system; and, second, the insertion of the nation’s forces into some international (imperial) system of forces. Israel might be in a “privileged” position here as well, as a perpetually mobilized country that is simultaneously advanced technologically and constantly acquiring new data regarding technological and human capabilities and challenges. At some point, Israel would probably be able to make explicit, and then increasingly explicit, the exact modes of data exchange that would convert its intelligence system into practices of shared governance across the region and beyond. Specific redirections of military capability, specific transformations in public rhetoric, specific modifications of education and media systems, and so on, would trigger specific forms of reciprocity across governing institutions, understood in a broad sense. We could then see the precise boundary between deterrence and reprisal, on one side, and collaboration on the other side—signs indicating the initiation of hostilities could be seen to become signs indicating the initiation of some project in shared governance, and all this shown on something like a big ticker. A prediction market might be established accordingly, in which even those betting on war would contribute to peace by detecting interference with the conversion of retaliatory tendencies into modes of deferral. Think about this passage from a recent post by Eric Jacobus:

There’s no real difference between Violence and Language. They’re just different kinds of recursion. ROBA is more of a solid state that can be wielded, while language is more of a liquid state in a petrie dish that can be divided, analyzed, and remixed. The Unoptimized Strategy is how to keep recursion in its linguistic state even when it is actively creating world-destroying technologies like iron, gunpowder, nuclear fission, and now AI.

In my understanding, this means that the only difference between violence and language is that language is violence before it has actualized, and, as merely potential, if imminent, violence, language suspends the time of violence, exposing and thereby deferring more of it potential and imminent forms. A difference both infinitesimal and infinite. A Jewish cybernetics would immanentize this oscillation of infinitesimal and infinite. In this way a Jewish cybernetics would reiterate what I see as a more fundamental Jewish oscillation: that between a fully political engagement with resentful enemies fitting a very specific profile in opposition to governance technologies (deriving from the origin of Judaism in the covenant with an earthly lord), on the one hand, and the embodiment of an ever-present threat of excessive injustice, issuing in either exile or extermination, as testimony to the eternal creator Name, on the other.

The biggest challenge for Israel here in becoming, essentially, a nation as mode of data currency would be in adopting the new model of power involved in becoming a trusted arbiter. Israel is too small, too mistrusted, with too many enemies and demands on its resources to take on such a role right now—it’s still stuck playing the game which, perhaps more and more people will come to realize doesn’t really work, of subverting first one side then another side, so as to weaken all possible adversaries. Sooner or later, you end up hardening a genuine adversary. But maybe it would be possible to start with faraway conflicts, where there is little reason to be hostile to Israel, and maybe where Israel already engages in benign forms of cooperation. It’s possible to look ahead to a situation where Israel’s intelligence capabilities and publicly demonstrated capacity for discernment and judgment makes it a trusted arbiter, perhaps first of all in more subtle or secretive ways. All that really matters is intelligence—defense is intelligence, as weapons need to be geared to their most likely uses—and whoever finds the most inventive ways of gathering, analyzing and using intelligence will occupy the center or, more likely, given the necessary division of labor in such things, being the most indispensable servant of whoever occupies the center. And the best way of gathering intelligence will not be the blackmail and compromat that contemporary whistleblowers are most often focused on, even if such operations certainly bring benefits—you can twist an arm here and there, but that won’t tell you much about the intentions of those who have their own “dirt,” probably on you. The most important intelligence for those aiming at singularized succession in perpetuity right now would be the kind that enables you to build cases, make law, and install the judicial functionaries to ensure it stays law—the kind of law, for example, that would make it possible to sue someone into oblivion for calling you a “racist” without having a thoroughly and clearly worked out, and consistently deployed usage, of “racism” and “racism,” with an explanation, capable of withstanding the most expert scrutiny, of how that usage applies to your specific case. (The same goes for charges of “antisemitism,” which should be replaced by building cases against instances of defamation and incitement that could stand up in court.) It’s easy enough to see the implications of having at hand the history of the uses of these and related terms, the range of application of defamation, incitement and other laws, the backgrounds and personal histories of various operatives and media outlets, and, perhaps most importantly, the kinds of doctrines and dispositions of legal professionals that would make them most reliable creators and protectors of such a system. And who better to take the lead than American Jewish professionals, hardened by preliminary struggles against those who defame and incite violence against Jews by claiming they control US and world governance, among other dastardly deeds?

This kind of Jewish cybernetics will land Israel in a position familiar to Jews: useful to governments and therefore hated by at least large numbers of “the people.” And by extension it will place Jews in the same position, as one thing made clear by post-October 7 developments is that the boundary between “Zionist” and “Jew” is thin and permeable—only Jews who essentially act as informants, like the Talmud understanders of the Middle Ages, will have a chance at escaping tarring, and such job openings are inherently limited. But the option, tried for over a century now by leftist and liberal Jews, of pandering to one mob or another, is now closed off. Contributing to transparent governance in which lines of succession are announced and preserved, is all that’s left. At least Jew-hatred might then be concentrated on a single point, with the possibility of attenuation over time as governance genuinely becomes good. This is best for a nation of ledgerers, to serve to surface and counter the recrudescence of the vendetta, including the mode conducted through the commandeering of the juridical, i.e., revolution.