Debt and the Stack

Here I’ll attempt to synthesize a couple of fairly new concepts that I’ve so far introduced separately but must be made part of the idiom of Thirdness: the definition of the modern (only the modern?) state as a debt enforcement and forgiveness agency, on the one hand, and the transference of political attention and agency to modifications in the surveillance, mapping, recording and simulating stack of scenes. Since publishing Zack Baker’s and mine There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center (even a little before, in fact) I have been hypothesizing the modern state has its origins in the double move of the English monarchy to fund its operations through debt provided by the Bank of England along with its introduction of the two party system of governance, which is to say rotation in occupation of the center. The Bank is put in charge of the “outside spread,” or made the lender of last resort, removing money making power from the monarch or prime minister as center occupant; meanwhile, the “outside option” (terms borrowed from Colin Drumm’s dissertation), or the replacement of the center occupant in a manner at odds with the will of that occupant, is “internalized,” made part of the regular rotation. It follows, then, that the rotation system is tethered to the fluctuations of debt and repayment, which means that governance primarily serves to maintain a certain “spread,” determined by the financial class, and governments rise and fall depending on how close they are to the middle of that spread. All the issues that are contested in politics, then, do concern justice, but justice itself is constrained by the maintenance of the nomos (originary distribution), while the nomos is subjected to rearrangements depending upon proximity to debt availability.

So, we’re all indebted to the center—this is originary, not modern, but what is modern is that the value of our debt is determined by expectation of future earnings. You may, personally, be all paid up, but inflation fueled at least in part by debt expansion can whittle away at what you own so that you own very little, and perhaps require you to work longer and harder than you would have and perhaps even re-enter indebtedness. Borrowing done to invest in a new technology that is expected to be valued at X-amount Y years down the road and which can in turn be collateralized and borrowed off of and broken up and sold off in pieces will determine the value of whatever it is you are capable of doing—the value, that is, of your “gifts,” “advanced” to you by the center with expectations that your intelligence, upbringing, and endowments more generally will become part of the circulation of goods. We could say, for example, that the “gift” of being white, however we sort out the social, inheritance, and historical components, is a debt for which repayment is enforced especially ferociously under DEI regimes, while payment on what may indeed be lesser gifts to inner-city blacks is increasingly forgiven, even the most basic payment consequent upon being a gifted participation in a social order—not committing acts of violence in public spaces. Each court case is framed by the prevailing enforcement/forgiveness protocols and those protocols are in turn determined by the “differential accumulation” (Bichler/Nitzan) that is continually upending the originary distribution.

Which side is up in the rotation in central occupancy, then, is determined by the leading sector of capital’s competitive needs—which groups need to be mobilized in order to place which forms of property at risk and which groups must be provided with a steady and manageable repayment schedule in order maintain present or future levels of consumption. But the most powerful sectors of capital can never be left to determine this entirely by themselves, as they contain no inherent guardrails preventing the originary distribution being derailed and making even the adjudication needed by capital unreliable. This is why the intelligence services have accompanied the growth of the system of rotation in occupancy and been transformed from servants of the monarchy to an independent force operating through the media, education systems, technology development and the political parties. Since rotation in power makes governance impossible, governance must be done through other means—the police power grounded in intelligence agencies. Here we must work with hypotheses driven by incongruities and anomalies observed in governance practices, as direct observation is impossible, and even honest accounts by insiders must always be suspect because no doubt much of the work is compartmentalized. I like to follow deep divers into all the deep state networks but I never really think they’ve got it because they invariably focus on the nefarious doings they are uncovering from an imagined prosecutorial standpoint rather than considering the needs of governance under conditions designed to frustrate it—they share the liberalism of the system. But we can assume that all thinking has “always already” been recruited by intelligence, and we can accept this since such acceptance is the first step toward producing intelligence on governance itself. This is the endpoint of acknowledging the scenic origins of thinking—it never emerges from within the individual thinker but is always revising idioms. The better thinking, then, is that which places the most immediately available formulas in a kind of mirror so that the centralizing violence they make one primed for is deferred.

This discussion makes it clear how fragile and problematic the juridical is, but it’s for that very reason it needs to be centered—no order larger than a small hunter-gatherer community will ever be able to do without the juridical because disputes over the boundaries established in the originary distribution are inevitable, to whatever extent explicitly codified in law or cases are presided over in ways governed by precedent. Even the most totalitarian social orders cannot do without the juridical—show trials were an essential media form in Stalinist Russia. Our language is saturated with juridical idioms from top to bottom. This means there are constraints on both the central bank and the central intelligence—the former must work through property regimes where adjudication is possible and the latter must, if it is to itself survive and preserve its prerogatives, keep debt enforcement/forgiveness oscillations within limits that defer vendettas from below and the antinomic vendetta called “revolution” from above (of course, either can be supported in other countries, with greater or lesser risk of contagion affecting one’s own). Even an attempt at a purely military organization of society would end up relying upon military tribunals. Perhaps the USSR, during the 1930s, was as close as one could get to direct rule by secret police but, as I mentioned above, this rule was conducted completely through juridical categories like “treason,” “crimes against the proletariat,” etc., with very public trials for offenders. So, the oscillation between central bank and central intelligence “appears” within the juridical, and it is only there, including juridical elisions, that we can see and talk about this interplay.

Modern technology, or the stack of scenes, where divisions of labor can be replicated and replaced by automated machinery, is born (such is the hypothesis I’m advancing) out of the same desecration that demolished monarchy and the Church (as a ruling institution, anyway). Since technology involves transforming modes of human interaction and exchange into automatized scenic operations, it involves the ever more careful and penetrating study of human gestures and capabilities. I’ve therefore moved (leapt?) to the conclusion that the real “meaning” of technology is the erection of “pedagogical platforms” in which ever more complex modes of deferral are invented and tested. If there were to be a way of evading the juridical, the stack of scenes would be the place to look, because juridical decisions can, in fact, be automated, and so one might imagine this could be done “all the way down.” Perhaps, for example, rather than arresting violent criminal offenders, putting them on trial, incarcerating them, giving them parole hearings, letting them out on parole, policing them for parole violations, etc., institutions, companies and other establishments would record, through surveillance devices, transgressive behaviors, with those records shared across all institutions. Institutions would establish risk assessment and tolerance protocols which, past a certain threshold, would trigger the exclusion of individuals from those institutions, rendering them unable to participate in society, i.e., get jobs, go shopping, use banks, etc. They would then be left to throw themselves on the mercy of charitable or therapeutic institutions established for the purpose of supporting and not so much confining as providing the only refuge for those offenders, with those institutions designed so as to train and test (extract data from) those individuals, producing information that could then be shared with other institutions for the purpose of potentially revising their risk assessments and perhaps readmitting the individual. It would be easy, especially with blockchain, to imagine equivalent set-ups with financial and other white-collar crimes and imagine that such a system might be more efficient, effective and even “just” than anything humanly administered could be. And, as I’ve pointed out in recent posts, the end result would have to be a dramatic decrease in criminal behavior, once it has been made effectively impossible. The perfection of the juridical would be its abolition. But there would still be myriad disputes that would not call for the exclusion of either party from society, disputes which need to be heard before they are possible to judge, and which could be played out pedagogically, to the benefit of students of the institutions in question. Abolishing crime would bring such disputes to the fore, and they would concern something like property and contractual disputes but also the finer points of slander and defamation which, in an order in which one’s standing on multiple teams is all of one’s “capital,” might become all the more important. Durkheim’s analysis of the impossibility of abolishing crime is to be admitted here, as an ever more civilized social order would learn ever more rigorous discourse protocols. We could then speak very directly of these disputes as concerning the alternation of debt enforcement and debt forgiveness, as the juridical would be embedded in qualities that remain irreducible to the juridical, qualities belonging to the ritual like mercy and grace and those belonging to the disciplinary like calculation and “enumeration,” in the sense of translating the qualitative into the quantitative.

The thread through all this is, unsurprisingly, singularized succession in perpetuity and the prolongation of the imperative of the center. What is new here (not that it’s not worthwhile reviewing the idiom) is that prolonging the imperative of the center is maintaining justice and that maintaining justice involves the deciding on the distribution of enforcement and forgiveness called for in each case—in that case, that is the imperative of the center, the imperative reaching back to the originary scene itself. Deciding what to forgive and what to enforce involves assessing (ledgering) the gifts involved, identifying the donors in a chain at least hypothetically back to the center, determining the amount of “give” in the nomos, which is to say how much can be forgiven without the constitutive property claims referring back to the originary distribution being vacated and, for that matter, how much needs to be forgiven to avoid the same outcome through the accumulation of antinomic agencies; one needs to be prepared to determine what distribution of forgiveness and enforcement will settle an actual dispute without setting a precedent that makes it more difficult to settle future ones. Thinking the juridical through debt enforcement/forgiveness facilitates the transition to data exchange because it requires some mode of quantification, even if only metaphorical at times. Enforcement involves an extraction of some mode of data, whether it be money, or time, or some display of penitence, while forgiveness forgoes some data extraction or perhaps involves data provision (even if it’s data “interpreted” by one’s body); but, perhaps in each case, both enforcement and forgiveness are enacted simultaneously, with more complex rearrangements of data exchange.

The farther flung the deferral, which is to say the more prolonged the imperative of the center, the more the distribution of data exchanges can be distributed across the stack and, more importantly, organized through modifications in the stack. To require from an accused certain forms of display in order to be readmitted into society can be and certainly would be scaled up to classes and categories of expulsion and restriction that would lead to new demands upon the surveillance and machine learning systems and therefore the reprogramming of algorithms, with which our interactions would be increasingly complex. Perhaps debt and enforcement and forgiveness can be extended across kinship networks and other teamings, and over generations, as sins will not so much be visited on the children as the effects of sin from parent to child and so on can be given a kind of measure. Burdens might be shared as team members take responsibility for offenses committed by those that should have known better because we should have taught them better. Pedagogical platforms would be rewired as part or perhaps the entirety of a settlement. This would further enmesh the juridical in the stack and in the disciplinary. In the end “sentences” (strings of words comprising statements) will become “sentences” (penalties resulting from the trial), especially if we see writing, inscription, mapping, and so on as the programming of the programmers (with a sense of the proclamation of computational enthusiasts that “code is law”). Language will increasingly approximate programming, as is already happening due to AI. The internal will continue to be outered as any reference to internal deliberations, feelings, thoughts, intentions, and so on well be referred to the networks within the stack (landmarks, trails, paths) that are in a relation of reciprocal control with those internal rehearsals of scenic participation. That’s the way the idiom of Thirdness and Center Study coalesces around the enforcement/forgiveness oscillation.