The Tokenization of Resentment

“Donate your resentment to the center,” one of the first coined idioms of center studies, can now be given a more strictly economic meaning; i.e., it can be tokenized. “Resentment” remains an irreducible concept for center studies—indeed, one impetus for separating center studies from generative anthropology was the inadequate and impressionistic discussions of resentment in the latter. As with much of generative anthropology, the problem is with scaling up, or resisting the Big Scenic Imaginary, which reduces all social interactions to the model of the small group imagined to be present on the originary scene. The most basic form of resentment in a juridical order would be a feeling of injustice, which in turn presupposes a particular conception of justice, which is historically variable—GA would never go in this direction. The point is not that resentment must be rational—feelings of injustice can derive from a very tenuous grasp on how a particular scene would be “rationally” modeled. Nevertheless, implicit in my analysis here is that we always distinguish between more or less “legitimate” resentments or, perhaps it would be better to say, we position ourselves differently as potential adjudicators between the resenter and his resented in each case. There’s no pure, unmediated resentment, because resentment only comes into being in relation to the center, which means that the mimetic rivalry that drives the group toward the mimetic crisis is not yet resentment. So, even on the originary scene itself, the resentment felt toward the center for denying access will be distributed differently across the group, and expressions of that resentment will not draw identical responses. And those responses will always be from the center, through an “impersonation” or elicitation of the center. In human communities prior to the emergence of the juridical, resentment would have to be expressed in ritual terms, which means in terms of customary distribution, which might be more or less intelligible to or requiring of initiation by the observer.

Once we have an imperial order and the juridical resentment takes a wide range of forms—there are resentments within the ruling group, between the occupant of the center (and his clients) and the various “outside options” (and their clients); there are resentments between participants in the various exchanges constituted by the imperial order and handled by the juridical, or juridical-style settlements; there are antinomic resentments, more or less inchoate or organized, towards the nomos as such, which is to say revolutionary resentment, even in the perennial peasant revolts of feudal orders but much more targeted in modern revolutionary movements. Now, if we assume that all distribution comes from the center (the only alternative assumption being that somehow everyone was simply placed exactly where they are and with whatever they have in some unfathomable way—which would, paradoxically, make it especially difficult to deal with resentments, since there would be no nomos to refer to and no way to distinguish resentment from its deferral) then the originary distribution is itself a paying of debts to those who aided in the founding of the order, and a loan to those included in the distribution—all of which involves anticipating and fending off resentments while creating new ones in the specific form of indebtedness tying the various circles of distribution to each other. If we work with and extend the formula I’ve been proposing for the juridical, i.e., that it formalizes conflicts before they can ignite the vendetta while exempting those proximal to the center from such formalization since the occupation of the center is necessary to juridical formalization in the first place (the king as ultimate judge cannot be put on trial), then the juridical is a matter of measuring resentments. (The occupant of the center can be overthrown, of course, but this is never a juridical matter—unless it’s a question of an imperial center removing a vassal—but of a bid to remake the nomos to a greater or less extent. That there is usually a felt need to justify such moves with almost invariably patently ridiculous juridical forms—the king as a traitor or some lesser kind of criminal—just shows how far beyond “justification” such moves stand—the only real justification is a grave threat to the integrity of the nomos itself, and such actions can only be vindicated in the aftermath.)

Since the originary distribution eventually takes the form of money, or tokens issued and accepted by the center, then what money measures is resentments or, perhaps, deforming Bichler and Nitzan’s formulation, “expected future resentments.” In that case taxes already serves as a model for donating your resentment to the center, one which, like all such donations, might generate more resentment than it assuages. I’m testing out the possibility of “universalizing” the concept of resentment so that it can be tracked through as constitutive of all institutions. So, we start with debt as an anticipatory deferral of resentment that creates new possibilities of resentment—here, we might have to speak of the temporality of resentment, as gratitude turns into resentment insofar as forwarding some form of “capital” installs some form of reciprocity which might turn out to be more “extractive” than could have been initially anticipated. And in this case we could further say that gratitude is always a kind of anticipatory resentment. But penalties are also ways of tokenizing resentment—the determination that the commission of a particular crime calls for a certain number of years in jail also has no real “justification” beyond measuring the amount of resentment generated by uncompensated injuries a social order can bear. Part of the tokenization of resentment is also marking the recourses available to those passing some threshold at which notifications occur—so what if your daughter was raped and killed and in the name of social justice we let her murderer go free and, for good measure, settle his lawsuit for police brutality in the process of his arrest? What are you going to do about it? Kill him? Or the judge that set him free? The legislators who wrote the laws empowering the judge to or mandating that he do so? Etc. (An interesting novel by Sol Yurick, Fertig, plays with these questions in a more juridically precise and sophisticated way.) These questions have answers—past a certain threshold, those promoting the policies leading to such results might be replaced by whatever means are available, or a regression back to the vendetta will be seen to threaten the positions of those who discovered some interest in the original promotion of disorder, etc. Any of these developments would involve some way of measuring the resentments, expressed but more importantly anticipated, generated by such events, by those in a position to measure resentments, which is to say those exercising power which, as I argued in “A New Model of Power”, is exercised most effectively through adjudications. Such measurements will always be tokenized—in money, time, mandated forms of reparation, etc.

The resentment to be donated to the center is excess resentment that is incommensurable with the existing institutions designed to formalize and defer it—and there will always be such incommensurabilities, as justice is more of a rule of thumb than a precise science. So, you’ve been obeying the center, whatever that might entail—say, refraining from exacting revenge by taking your case to court and enduring the long, frustrating and at least to some extent unjust process—and yet the center rewards those who have been less obedient or, let’s say, have been letting the debts pile up that you have been punctually and fully paying (with interest!). Unless you’re the one benefiting from the injustice, there will always be some such residue (even then, you might resent even having to worrying about your “victims”). This means that the injunction to donate your resentment to the center only applies to “losers” who have no means of retaliating—“ressentiment,” in Nietzsche’s sense—here is where he locates the origins of the moralizing priestly caste. It is then reasonable or even obligatory to ask whether donating your resentment to the center is not mere “cope,” of the kind “true conservatives” are accused of, where you take you higher moral ground as compensation for your failure to achieve any political victories. That will depend upon how you tokenize the resentment you donate to the center. The tokens to create, accumulate and distribute are “quanta” or “chunks” of data and information that could be used by those as close to the center as possible to identify, formalize and settle cases in ways that create “synergy” between juridical and succession practices. Even if you are losing cases, find the cases to lose that will surface features of the dissipative rotation at the center hostile to succession across the board (maybe even increasingly in their own institutions). Organize and strategize your cases so that there are wins as well as losses. Tokenize resentment against the antinomic agencies pulverizing the juridical so as to reintroduce the vendetta through the juridical. Thirdness is intended to be such a mode of organizing and strategizing. And it’s also the case that no one wins all the time or, really, ever, completely, and so loserdom is spread across the board, albeit unevenly (according to which measurement?). The left sees itself as losing all the time, and, from their perspective, they have a point too—their resentments also power the system.

The center doesn’t resent—that would serve as a definition of the center. But, of course, any occupant of the center will resent and be the bearer of other resentments. Think about obeying even the worst commands of the worst president imaginable but in such a way, drawing upon the discretionary “margin” any imperative allows for, as to increase, even minimally, the likelihood that even that worst president will be in a position to choose his successor such that that successor would choose his successor, and so on. This would be donating your resentment to the center, because assuming succession in perpetuity is better than continuing to disperse and randomize succession options (even though sortition, imagined as an approximation to conditions under which succession could be randomized because anyone would be equally qualified might serve as a helpful metric to social and institutional robustness) and would even make the worst president slightly less worse. And this approach of hyper-obedience even positions you better for the replacement of the occupant of the center by a substantially better one, who could presumably see what you were doing. The heroization of disobedience has deep roots in modern revolutionary politics but has been consolidated by publicly entrenched commemorations of the Holocaust, taken to involve a set of commanded actions in which disobedience, regardless of the cost, is the only humanly possible response. And it is very hard, unless you imagine yourself waging eternal war on the Jews, to imagine a non-repulsive way of obeying the command to “show me where the Jews are hiding,” etc. There is no need to remove all possibility of disobedience from our thinking, since any imperative already includes that possibility; maybe we should all, for the purpose of moral hygiene, keep a brief list of commands we would refuse to obey no matter what. But acknowledging that there might be commands that leave no margin for deflection means sharpening our detection instruments for identifying such margins in places where we might not have thought to look, with singularized succession as the metric. A command you have to refuse must simply be a dead end, doing nothing but obstruct thinking of succession—the command to kill every member of a particular group confesses the impossibility of sustaining the scene without removing the protections of the scene for those members, thereby contaminating the scene and any succession until properly repudiated. The disobedience models that repudiation. To claim, though, under almost any conditions, that you are at such a dead end, will be self-evidently self-refuting, even in your ability to claim you are at such a dead end.

The tokenization of resentment lies, then, in the margins around and generated by commands, in the remainder of the demands those commands ravel up and abolish. Here we can loop back to Bichler and Nitzan’s definition of power as “expectation of obedience,” which I now notice has an interesting symmetry with “expectation of future earnings.” Everything that we have, whether it be freedoms, wealth or personal and even physical attributes, has been “given” us in some irreducible sense, which is to say “loaned” to us, because gifts always imply reciprocity. So, to recall Peirce’s “we are each and every one of us an insurance company,” we are each and every one of us a bundle of assets, most of which go unnamed and untokenized but nevertheless “backing” those assets that are (and the tacit assets might be made explicit at any moment). The ever-shifting valuation of those assets, very much a juridical matter, is the source of all resentments, as those valuations are derived from our approximating expectations of obedience—preserving, refining, specializing, distributing our assets in accord with institutional demands that represent debts enforced or forgiven by the occupant of the center. The bundle of assets with their shifting labelings and valuations represent a stock of potential or expected judgments, and each of those judgments is tethered to the expected future resentments and the expected effects of those resentments on the nomos. For Capital as Power, there would be, I assume, a strict correlation between the level of expected obedience and expected future earnings, at least for the strongest fractions of capital. The problem, then, is not so much to break this correlation as to reconfigure it by creating forms of obedience that would correlate with modes of tokenization that would represent earnings otherwise than monetarily. Originary debt is to be tokenized and enforced and forgiven differently—the starting point is to tokenize loyalty and usefulness to the governing order, i.e., to create modes of property (or assetization) that resist fluctuations in value because they are tied to continuity in governance, i.e., succession. Here, the donation of resentment to the center can be made visible and given a kind of measurement, through the demonstrated loyalty of servants of the center and demonstrated trust by the center in those servants models the settling of scores (resentments) throughout the social order presided over by the highest circles.