Continuum of Power

It is true that monarchy is the only real form of governance—everything else is either mimicking monarchy or predicated on the endless struggle to prevent others from installing “their” king (the “tyrant”). But monarchy itself can take a lot of forms, so for the sake of inquiries into possibilities we need the concept of “singular succession” to include all that we want to in monarchy without restricting ourselves to forms of governance “similar” to known forms of monarchy. Let’s say a tech security firm with contracts from the military, intelligence agencies, etc., gets more and more of those contracts, incorporates more and more of the other security firms and tech companies, establishes protocols of interoperability across functions that make the government increasingly dependent on it; meanwhile, the government becomes increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt, sensationalized, i.e., a joke, but a frightening one (or eve, for that matter, just falls behind this company in terms of competency)—at a certain point, in some crisis, would not that security firm simply assume with general, even if tacit, consent, the attributes of sovereignty? Would the CEO of that company be the king? A dictator? Let’s say that company directs, through friendly and remaining competent members of the official government—especially, I would think, the judiciary, which is far more likely than the legislative and executive branches to hold to its moorings—to go through the process of revising the constitution so as to make the transition from “liberal democracy” or “constitutional republic” to whatever we’re going to call this new form of government completely legal, and enable it to retain and reform whatever is still of use in existing institutions. There would be no reason to assume that this process will establish the position of “monarch.” And yet we’re assuming the abolition of elections (or their reduction to a far more ceremonial status). So, as per the hypothesis I’m presenting here, the new ruler would create and encourage others to create succession rituals; indeed, to move towards organizing the entire social order around succession rituals, and therefore all social thought and creative activity (i.e., the arts) to the central human problem, that of the continuity of order in the face of tendencies toward mimetic violence. But the multiplication of succession rituals would distinguish this order from monarchy, which has few and regularly set succession rituals (coronations). So, monarchy remains a placeholder concept, still indispensable in arguing with “democrats” and “republicans,” not to say “socialists” and ‘communists”—or, for that matter “fascists.” But we’re in uncharted waters here and must be prepared to think in terms of a continuum of possibilities of rule, from traditional monarchies with primogeniture on one end and rapid transfers of power from one figure to another based on the specific talents of particular candidates and functional necessities—much like one might see in a baseball game a succession of relief pitchers, sometimes each one facing only one batter, based on such criteria of left-handed or right-handed pitcher and batter, who needs to be saved for the next day, scouting reports on a particular batter, etc. This need not be seen as an indication of crisis; on the contrary, it can be a sign of deep reserves of trust and experienced cooperation. Occupation of the center would be completely desacralized and de-divinized in this case and reduced to functionality; but it would be just as easy to say that the forms of attention devoted to sacrality and divinity are transferred to all the disciplinary apparatuses continually generating a wide pool of well-prepared candidates, a process that will accrete its own ceremonial and commemorative features.

In thinking through this problem I took note of another problem, one which has troubled me for a long time, and which is just as important as conceptualizing the replacement of money—the abolition of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy always seemed to me to be built into the relay of imperatives through the institutions, and with this relay comes inevitable delays as figures at various points along the way have to interpret imperatives and will do so, even unintentionally, in such a way as to make their own position and function indispensable and permanent. This seemed to me something that could be continually minimized but never eliminated, but this never satisfied me because I see no reason to believe that any form of social disorder is in principle ineradicable—or, no reason to operate under the assumption that this is the case, because doing so just becomes an excuse for tolerating bureaucracy. I’ve been thinking enough about the juridical for it to occur to me that bureaucracy is bound up with, complements and negates, the juridical, such that further theorizing of the juridical provides a model for the abolition of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is characterized by rules designed or, perhaps more often, “evolved” through settlements of specific cases, to “rationalize” interactions and regularize the functions of the institution. One might say (I have myself tended to assume) this shows bureaucracy to be a deformation of the executive function—imperatives aimed at specific actions and results are turned into rules that generalize regarding broader “classes” of actions and results. But the need to generalize and more generally, to “certify” interpretations of imperatives from the center, results from the possibility of conflicts at each point along the way. The settlement of conflicts is the domain of the juridical, once it rises about the threshold of ritual modes of settling conflicts, whether through various forms of revenge and recompense or more or less formal games with traditional ways of determining winners. And these ritual methods are inappropriate once we’re dealing with questions of the nomos, or originary distribution, under imperial conditions. So, we can say that bureaucratic rules pre-empt the juridical forms of settling—and also anticipating, reframing and defusing in advance—conflict. This is understandable, because how could we have little tribunals set up to address every disagreement between clerks in the DMV? But it’s also the case that judicial rulings generate rules, explicitly (more so in recent decades than previously?) or implicitly, insofar as one can draw conclusions from the way a court rules now to the way a similarly constituted court will rule in the future—so, avoiding acting in such a way that is very likely to get you on the losing side of a lawsuit is functionally identical to following an administrative rule. In that case, bureaucracies are fossilized legal traditions. But what would replace bureaucracy, then, is not endless lawsuits at every level of every institution, but a juridical order governed by anthropological awareness of the basic purpose of the juridical: to prevent the recrudescence of the vendetta from below and the emergence of antinomic agencies (those that would in effect put the order itself, its mode of property, on trial) from above. Again, we aim at the paradox that the perfection of the juridical tends asymptotically toward its abolition—but only the incorporation of any awareness of this paradox into juridical institutions can ensure this.

This abolitionism regarding bureaucracy further relies on the fairly traditional role of the occupant of the center as the final judge, to which we can add some considerations I don’t think I’ve explored, involving the broader management of the nomos or originary distribution. We assume foundation by conquest and the subsequent division into lots amongst the originary team, i.e., military leaders converted into landowners. The original 13 colonies that became the US fits this pattern, even if the colonies were allotted by the king to noblemen, which is to say inheritors of an earlier distribution. The occupant of the center oversees ongoing redistribution, as property is sold, consolidated, parceled out, contested, etc., and new populations (setting aside migration, just subsequent generations) need to be included, and all of this contains sources of resentment that need to be formalized juridically. The final judge wants to foresee these possibilities to the extent possible and thereby prevent cases from emerging. We can think of the entire order as established to perfect juridical conditions so as to make recourse to them as rare as possible, and this becomes a motor for the entire system as it involves the creation of data systems that produce the knowledge needed to adjudicate potential cases which at this point involves all knowledge, physical and human. This, then, is what the “sovereign” is doing: using his own resources (whether we’re imagining a monarch who is also the largest property owner or our data-tech-security company that has acquired a functional monopoly and therefore great wealth and power over markets) to identify and pre-empt tendencies toward the recrudescence of the vendetta and the higher order vendetta involved in antinomianism. The continual reassessment of lines of succession is a metric of all the fluctuations of incoming and potential cases, and the problems of personnel supplant the recourse to bureaucratic rules. And this enables us to see technology, or the stack of scenes, as the widening of the nomos, the creation of new distributions so as to both circumvent impending conflicts and create the possibility of higher order, more generative conflicts—conflicts over the further discretization and rearticulation of practices—and even these are included within the juridical insofar as tech decisions always involve disagreement over the deployment of resources.

Clearly, my prioritizing of the juridical does not share “legalistic” assumptions about the independence of the judiciary and the autonomy of legal logic—a judge should be thinking anthropologically, or anthropomorphically, and be asking himself where along the continuum between the vendetta from below and the vendetta from above a particular decision lies—in the vast majority of cases, such decisions will be accepted as fair and reasonable (that’s really what we’re looking for in the first place—for the justice system to punish criminals consistently and effectively so we don’t have to resort to other measures). As I’ve pointed out previously, a robust juridical order would essentially eliminate the media, almost none of which could survive serious legal regimes dealing with defamation, fraud, incitement and so on. Instead of the media, or as the media, we’d have reports of court cases and succession rituals. In this way, language becomes explicitly performative—every utterance is doing something rather than just saying something. And this suggests another use of Marshall Sahlins’s discussion of “immanence” in his The New Science of the Enchanted Universe. Sahlins points out that every object in the world is an agent for “most of humanity,” and all of those agents are subordinated to others within a vast metapersonal “polity” with a single supreme ruler—that is, humans imagined and in their own way implemented “absolutism” thousands of years before it was a social reality (which makes, perhaps, monarchy a hyperstition). This means that all language is nothing more than transcriptions of imperatives from the center, with some backstories (myths) regarding the origins of those imperatives. Compared to the (transcendent”) language we’re familiar with, “immanence” involves a massive privileging of “doing” over “happening.” But I think Sahlins may be a bit off here—if everything is enchanted, nothing is (would the people Sahlins describes describe themselves as “enchanted”?—for them, it’s just reality), and in the end we’re just talking about language. The “disenchantment” involved setting the declarative at odds with the imperative and ostensive (or, more precisely, ostensive-imperative-ostensive circuits) and “enchantment” is the “normal” state of humans, as Sahlins contends, because it accepts the complementarity of these speech forms. In that case, it’s not a question of “re-enchanting” the world, much less of believing that trees, fish and clouds are telling us what to do or engaging us in complex exchanges. We can be explicit about the ways in which language animates the world for us because all we are doing is transcribing imperatives from the center. We just need to remember that our every utterance produces waves across the entire stack of scenes, affecting algorithms and processed through protocols governing infrastructures. To incorporate this understanding into our speaking and thinking, to see our every utterance as a sample, would rewire our entire systems and this would at present be borderline unintelligible. Which is no reason not to begin building such idioms.

The left has been here before us, with “ideology critique,” which interprets every sign in terms of the ways it contributes to the continuation of the existing “relations of production” without ever being able to explain which signs wouldn’t so contribute and how do they know—such questions just devolve into intra-left squabbling. To maintain coherence the left must posit, as tacitly as possible, some liberal utopia of individual autonomy and equality, from which we have somehow strayed. This just intensifies the antagonism between declarative and ostensive-imperative circuit, because the tacit utopia is an entirely declarative affair. But if our utterances are samples contributing to the expansion of the nomos, modeled on prayers, promises and absolute satire (when imperatives can’t be obeyed) and the making of cases, we can track our donations to the tributary order. To some extent, it’s a matter of refraining from proclaiming that entities over which you exercise no control “should” do this or that—even if they obey your command, they will not be doing what you thought you wanted them to do. Try it out—obey the constraint to not say that distant, abstract others “should…” It will open up all kinds of possibilities and compel you to seek out the intersecting levers that make things happen. Sahlins himself at one point notes the similarity between the metapersons of “most of humanity” and the transpersonal, abstract entities and agencies we appeal to now—governments, companies, countries, universities, “public opinion,” etc., which are all very real but, in contrast to the archaic metapersons, not at all tethered to our own intentions—they will not serve us and we are not conjuring them. How to make every utterance, or sample, performative, like a judgment or prayer or program, is the question. I’ll be coming back to this in the next few posts. For now, I’ll say that maybe more can be done with my notion of “originary satire,” understood as a kind of mimetic disabling of impossible imperatives. An idiom that constantly references power while deferring it for itself has a kind of performativity insofar as it serves as a measure for each exercise of power. I can show you how the command’s succession breaks off at precisely this point by following it especially closely to that breaking point. We can then rejoin the command as we see that break together and thread the command through it. If succession has been extended just a bit, the idiom commemorates that by extending the horizon further and hypothesizing a break down the road resulting from the ongoing failure to tokenize certain idioms through which the command might eventually run. We’re still perfecting the dynamic of sacral kingship whereby every practice is a ritual practice that centers the king so “circumferentially” that he can only perform his own ritual gesture felicitously—only we want to add to this the deliberate effort of deferring the sacrifice of the king in perpetuity by supplementing as we can the mechanisms of the certification of felicity in a virtuous circle with the gesture’s performance.