Downstream of the Imperative

The imperative is a vast, unexplored territory. There is first of all the enormous continuum, from precise imperious command, backed by unimaginable force and the will to use it and supervise the results, through requests and demands containing various loopholes and room for interpretive maneuver, all the way to pleas, perhaps for nothing more than the strength to endure what one is suffering, which perhaps contains a kind of feedback loop wherein the weakest imperative constructs the entity capable of offering relief from the strongest one, thereby shifting the terrain of the imperative to the constructs of selving. All along this continuum the “panel” of reciprocally empowering agencies shifts, in a vast array of high/middle/low “settings.” I’ve spoken about this on a general level many times before (but maybe not in a while, so it would be hard to find a good link), looking forward to a more precise and layered study, along the lines of Peirce’s enormously complex semiotic systems (stacking icon/index/symbol in as many ways as possible), but perhaps it would be mistaken to demand or command that (but, not to be discouraging, perhaps it would be a generative mistake). Another thing about the imperative is how hard it is to step outside of it—attempting to do so simply involves obeying another imperative—since the imperative is completely bound up in its fulfillment, and in its raveling up with convergent imperatives eddying off from the center. The reliance of any utterance on the possibility of a verifying ostensive somewhere down the road is what makes language irreducibly performative (and therefore demands that performativity be made explicit and central) but the imperative amplifies and activates that performativity and makes it technological. So, it might be better to get into the habit of excavating the protocols implicit in our samplings than attempt an extensive mapping of the imperative.

The Nietzschean question here is how we issue imperatives to our successors, which is the only way of making life meaningful, in the strict sense of the signs we emit finding their ways toward shared ostensives (which is what “meaning” means). The only way to do so is by hearing and acting on imperatives from our predecessors, which might mean retrieving imperatives not meant for us (and, then, issuing imperatives for we know not whom). The most basic imperative our predecessors issue us is not to forget them, which means to commemorate and imitate them. This is an overwhelming and impossible command, not only because of the vast (and by now disappeared, or dispersed in traces) databanks required, but because so many different predecessors are demanding so many different and incommensurable modes of attention. The destruction of kinship and gift relations by the articulation of the central bank and intelligence agencies in the “Anglican” world offers the possibility of writing off these more archaic debts in horizontal exchange relations where you only need to maintain creditable books in the going currency. This has left the field open for that massive vendetta against civilization using all the means afforded by civilization that we call the “Left,” which leverages debts from the past in the form of retrieving the pleas for remembrance and commemoration deposited in the margins of the historical record designed to consign them to oblivion. This is the energy source of resentment on the Left, one which is easily accessed in the present and projected into the future in the form of speaking for those we will not allow to be forgotten today. This practice is what makes it possible to keep producing new excluded, oppressed marginalized agencies with entire backstories to be constructed regarding “our” failure to have recognized them. In this way, one end of the imperative spectrum—the mere plea for remembrance—gets played off against the other, the unilateral, “tyrannical” regimentation and discarding of those we are commanded to forget.

It is usually the “Right” that is taken to be more locked into memories and commands from the past, but the Right, in the post-monarchical world (there is no left vs. right in monarchy, as how could the king be either one or the other?), is really just the anti-Left, and so commemoration is mostly reactive—and the proof of this is that such memories never become slingshots hurling imperatives into the future. The terrain of Left v Right, still an unavoidable frame, can be sorted out on the terrain of the imperative more productively, though. Most minimally, the Right places order and authority first, before (or instead of) such imperatives as equality, justice, rights, and so on. From the standpoint of social ontology, this is obviously correct, and is just a way of saying the center precedes all. But, to continue the commemoration of Nietzsche, once order and authority are simply responding to the ongoing revolution, they are turned back on the past and can issue no imperatives to the successors. Of course, at the center of the revolution there is always a kind of order and authority, articulated precisely through the commemoration of leaders and, especially, martyrs, of the past (look at how insistently and fervently leftists ritualize the memory of those who have purportedly been sacrificed in their name; the closest the right has come to something like this was a spate of Reagan-namings the Republicans managed to muster up the energy to push through over a couple of decades). This is how you commandeer the entire language.

The Right has its own revolutionary origin, though—the Big Man revolution, which involved the astonishing usurpation of the center by an individual who then becomes a center of distribution. The Big Man revolution is one of the great centerings in the early years of GA by Eric Gans, who took over the concept from Marshall Sahlins (a mentor to and collaborator with David Graeber, so we have interesting affiliations—debt relations—here) and then—did nothing with it. But we can trace history (with infinite variations and complications through, e.g., media history, of course) from the Big Man, to the chief, to the sacred king, to the divine emperor, and then to the Axial Age which, for my purposes here, can be seen as the furthest extension of the imperative continuum where pleas to the King beyond earthly kings become a new generative ritual and juridical kernel. I can then say I’m continuing the Big Man revolution so as to provide for a meeting place with the leftist enemy on the field of the imperative. The imperative is the space where there is only non-adjudicable accountability, i.e., accountability irreducible to compensation (irreducible to the debt and money form), which is to say accountability that takes the form of removal from power. This is the terrain of the police power, but also of administration, and of “special operations,” where, however extensive the legal guardrails, at a certain point one makes the law one’s own—which means it’s not really “law” anymore.

The left has a particular relation to the imperative—their MO is to insist upon the absolute accessibility of the imperative to the declarative, in the form of a judgment that is presumed to derive directly from a universally accepted principle inscribed in authoritative institutions. In this way the imperative, insofar as it must depart from complete legibility by any authorizing legal structure, is always already criminal (drawing, of course, on the by now unthought extensions of the post-war Nuremberg trials) (the reference here to the concept made famous by Derrida can serve as a reminder of his late and ineffectual attempts to delve into this area of law and politics). And it was the blood of those martyrs that made those institutions authoritative within the system closed by the US victory in WW 2, and which through further development provides the left with the margins of discretions it needs. As, in essence, a kind of traveling prosecution with an unlimited remit, the left is free to issue all the imperatives it likes (every utterance of the left is a kind of subpoena). So, it is this constellation that needs to be broken up, or perhaps deactivated, so as to continue the Big Man revolution, or what I called in Anthropomorphics “centered ordinality.” And this work must be done in this space downstream of the imperative, both widening that space of discretion and making explicit its intrinsically hierarchical (ordering) nature. We want posts whose occupants can only be replaced by a higher authority, not put on trial by those who cannot be their peers.

When you are, say, policing a violent protest and need to determine what kind of force is necessary to arrest some vandal or assailant, and you close in, assessing the situation… that’s when you’re stepping into that zone inaccessible to the law, which could not anticipate that particular situation in the necessary detail—so, any judgment after the fact will be more political than juridical, mediated by media power, precisely because you were authorized by the law in the first place. In pre-Axial Age terms, there is no reason the state wouldn’t just have tanks plow through the demonstration and flatten everyone—there would be no higher judgment to prohibit what would in a sense be the obvious move, and it would, after all, make such demonstrations far less likely in the future. One reason for not resorting to such a move now would be that states that have, let’s say, incorporated the full imperative spectrum into their operations, rely upon the feedback provided by public displays, or, more realistically (or cynically) have found such displays to be a functional mode of inter-elite communication; also, with a wider range of preventive and punitive measures available (surveillance, protection of targets, seizure of assets, criminal record interfering with career prospects, etc.) adopting such crude measures would, paradoxically, be a sign of weakness. It is precisely in those preventive measures becoming ever more widely available to states (and not only states), and that terrify in equal measure left and right, where the space of the imperative opens up. (I’ll mention that much of the populist, anti-establishment right has adopted the exact same demand for the full transparency of the imperative before the declarative that the left has monopolized for a century or so.) The operations of surveillance, in particular, which multiplies ostensives to the point of full social coverage, “calls for” (commands) the elaboration of a commensurate network of imperatives—constraints that would be governed by the imperative to make the data gathered through surveillance richer and more precise so as to enable the installation of the full spectrum of the imperative order (from unyielding rigor to mercy, grace and forgiveness).

The asymptotic abolition of policing and, for that matter, administration, imagined in a couple of recent posts would then be enacted through the matching of legibility and constraint. I’ll introduce here this reminder that this is what abolishing liberalism means—replacing endless suspicion of the government (which really just accelerates the competition over control of the government) with infiltration of the government and articulating the nomos, the juridical and the disciplinary. But what about abuses of power and authority! You will not be able to show that what even you see as abuses will run more rampant under some system you devise (or any present one you think you can describe) than under the one described here. One addresses “abuses” by treating them as imperatives that pose difficulties of fulfillment because they’re at cross purposes with other imperatives and you work to build spaces within the imperative spectrum so as to make the stream of imperatives more consistent and, indeed, sustain that full spectrum. And this will always come down to data security, which can now be formulated as the commensuration (the reduction to a common, albeit always adjusted, measure) of data (everything collected through screens, texts, and other sensory mechanisms) and the treatable cases they can or cannot be made part of. In this way we can issue actionable imperatives to the future even, if only in the traces we can with increasing deliberation lay out, the distant future—continue this work of commensuration, continue the work of data collection, differentiation and security (the way someone “felt” at a given, “unique” moment, is also data and can and has found its way into “storage” through memoirs, literature, film, and so on—all also data, requiring specific reading protocols). See more, feel more, experience more, while at the same time finding ever new ways of framing and drawing out the implications of it all in the stack of scenes. We can assume that the possibility of authorized figures having to physically close in on someone in unpredictable circumstances will also never be abolished once and for all—trying to do so only brings into clearer focus the anthropological and historical conditions under which the unexpected event takes place and training for even such rare occurrences will remain routine for a significant part of the population and will continue to serve as preparation for drawing wide ranging implications from those rare occurrences.

Machine learning or AI, especially in the Large Language Models, provides ways of entering the intentions of our predecessors and prolonging those intentions into imperatives inscribed in the stack for our successors. Those simplistic and easily caricatured questions, like “what would Jesus do,” in fact now become both answerable and potentially extraordinarily complex. Drawing upon all available data for a particular figure—their doings, writings, utterances, remembrances of others, responses by others, various legacies, etc.—and running that data through all the institutional transformations that have taken place since can initiate conversations with those figures that would both preserve their otherness and make them speak to us. The most important enterprises will involve training AIs to do precisely that, by filtering the curated data of the intention we wish to prolong through a series of weights comprised of other intentions—asking how, e.g., George Washington would address today’s federal bureaucracy would require drawing out a very long thread from Washington’s tenure to Biden’s. Where, exactly, would Washington be with us; or, with whom would he be? Would we be training leaders on the Washingtonian model? Building Washington apps for insight into various situations? Settling (or teasing out further implications of) some of the debates between his cabinet members, which after his Presidency exploded into partisanship? Might we create a kind of Washingtonian currency that would provide a language in which we formulate reciprocal obligations? We’d be getting at the proper uses of history for life precisely by asking questions that keep us squarely within the imperative spectrum. In prolonging imperatives into these kinds of questions that prepare us to make probing demands upon the data we join in prolonging the imperative of the center further into the future by commanding our successors to continue our building beyond what we could recognize by forgiving our unpaid debts to the center (forgiveness is really just calling off all the collection agencies because they tend to take on the form of new vendettas which lock us into issuing overly specific commands to our successors).