GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

It may be that for some “absolutism” might simply be an argument for one form of government over others—as if an absolute monarch with complete sovereignty over a population with no power and no rights is “better” than a democracy, or a liberal oligarchy, or socialism, or anything else. But the argument for absolutism, compressed most economically in the principle “sovereignty is conserved,” is more a tautological maxim than a preference based on some other ethical, moral, economic or aesthetic principle. The conservation of energy is what R.G. Collingwood called an “absolute assumption,” not a preference for saving energy over wasting it, and the same is true for the conservation of sovereignty. Everyone really agrees with this, because everyone knows when we speak of “the United States” speaking with “Germany” we know this means Donald Trump, or someone appointed by Donald Trump, speaking with Angela Merkel, or someone appointed by her. We can argue over the real sovereign, and some Americans, for example, out of frustration, will claim that the Supreme Court really rules—but until Chief Justice Roberts starts issuing orders to the special forces I think I’ll stick with the sovereignty of the President. Now, given that the President is sovereign, the arguments about better and worse forms of government begin when we start to ask whether the President should be chosen through an electoral process (and if so, which one), whether he should be replaced regularly, whether he should require authorization from other branches of government for certain actions, whether it should be possible to remove him (and if so, how), etc. Still, in a genuine emergency, everyone would look to the President to act, and unless all sense of national unity and purpose has been drained out of the country, the states and courts would defer to him, and Congress would facilitate his activity with enabling legislation.

Now, once we have established the ontological claim of absolutism, we can further point out that absolutism enables us to structure in very productive ways the debate over forms of government. If someone is to be sovereign, it were best that sovereignty be clear and secure. We can think about this by analogy with just about any other task we ask someone to perform. If we ask someone to coach the high school basketball team, he must be given power over everything pertaining to coaching the basketball team—if we introduce a rule that the players must vote on the starting line-up, then he isn’t really the coach, and we are setting him to fail by introducing permanent conflict between him and his players. If he, on the other hand, wants to give us players that power, it may be wise or unwise, but within the scope of his authority. The same with mechanisms for selecting leaders: the sovereign can allow for offices to be filled through election; indeed, through a supreme act of self-abnegation, he can place himself up for election and risk being removed, without thereby losing sovereignty. We can argue, and I think very convincingly, that this would be a serious mistake and a destructive way of selecting leaders, but that argument would then take place on absolutist terms: the argument against it is that it makes sovereignty less clear and secure. So, if we would all defer to the executive in a crisis, we should make that explicit and gear all institutions to readiness to be helpful in serving the executive in a crisis. We might as well take the next step and acknowledge that the executive will decide when there actually is a crisis, and that other institutions should therefore prepare themselves by providing ongoing feedback to the executive on the ways potential pre-crises are registering across the social order.

The sticking point for a lot of people seems to be the question of removing a clearly unfit leader, which a rigorous absolutism seems to preclude, because any such mechanism introduces division into sovereignty by now making someone else sovereign—the doctor who determines the mental fitness of the ruler, the board of directors that gathers to assess his performance, the judges who would hear appeals regarding disqualifying acts of the president, the legislature that impeaches and removes him, etc. All the divisions and power plays that the clarification of sovereignty aims at eliminating would all then rush in through this open door. But absolutism can answer the question of removing an unfit leader, even if it’s not a very comforting answer. If a ruler’s unfitness manifests itself in an incapacity to defend the country or maintain the conditions of law and order, he will be removed by whichever of his subordinates is in the best position to do so—the best positioned in terms of readiness to manage the emergency, rally the support of other power centers, and command the forces needed to rule. And that subordinate will then seek to return power as soon as possible either to the once again fit sovereign, or whoever is next in line according to whatever tradition has been followed in ensuring the continuity of sovereignty. Maybe that subordinate will serve as sovereign temporally or even permanently. And if he fails to remove the sovereign, and no one else can either, then that suggests either the sovereign wasn’t really unfit, or sovereignty can no longer be sustained in that form on that territory—maybe it needs to be broken down into smaller units or aggregated into a larger one.

It would be easy to say that this is a recipe for instability, since any strongman can now come along and claim sovereignty if he can take it. But strongman who violently seize power almost invariably do so in the name of some other, presumably more real sovereign, which legitimates the takeover. He takes power in the name of the people, the working class, the dominant ethnic group, a restoration of the principles of some previous constitution, etc. In other words, he disclaims responsibility for sovereignty. Widely shared absolutist assumptions would make it impossible to get away with this—if you want to take power, you might be able to claim that a sense of duty impels you to it, but make no mistake—you are taking power, in your own name, under your own newly acquired authority, and you will be responsible for how you see it through. You can’t fob it off on anyone else. Such widely shared assumptions would be highly discouraging to reckless adventurers and utopian ideologues. What’s interesting here is that this supposedly most tyrannical approach to government would in fact rely more than any other of the thoughtfulness, knowledge, and clear-headedness of the people. If everyone understands that a particular interpretation of the constitution, or of the Bible, or a history of mistreatment, real or imagined, by the social or ethnic group you belong to, gives you absolutely no claim to power; that, on the contrary, power belongs to whoever can hold it within the political tradition of rule in that country, then there’s no problem. But that means we’re talking about a fairly sophisticated and disciplined people, capable of dismissing all kinds of flattering BS. Everyone would know that attempts to obligate the sovereign are attempts to weaken the sovereign, to subject the sovereign to the sway, not of “the people” in general, but of some very specific people with a very pressing desire for power, if not necessarily a clear idea of how to use it. All clamoring for “rights,” “freedoms,” a “voice,” etc., would lead everyone to look around and discover who is most ready to use and benefit from those rights and freedoms. And to shut their ears to any remonstrance coming from that corner.

But there must be something that prevents the complete, unlimited power of the ruler from being exercised unchecked upon each and every member of society! If liberalism is part of your common sense, or even a little piece of it, it will be very difficult to get past this kind of reaction. Of course the reaction itself, along with the pitiful devices put in place to calm anxieties, like “rights,” “rule of law,” “constitution,” “checks and balances,” etc., testifies to its own impotence and childishness. Who defends rights, maintains the rule of law, protects the constitution if not whoever has the power to do so; and whoever has the power to do so transparently has the power to violate and redefine rights, law and the constitution. As for “checks and balances,” what can that mean other than different institutions or power centers fighting each other to gain more power for themselves and stymie the others, and either one will succeed, or society will become one big bumper car ride, with everybody knocking everybody else into everybody else. And then you end up developing a social theory claiming all individuals are really out of control bumper cars.

All these devices seem to make sense because they presuppose a shared understanding of “rights,” “laws,” “constitution” and social ends (so the checking and balancing can all seem to be moving things in a more or less agreed upon direction). There can be a shared understanding of these concepts, and as long as that continues the harm done by their incoherence can be minimized. If several people are building a house together, and everyone knows that the roofer needs certain materials and a certain amount of time to work on the roof, it doesn’t matter much if the roofer wants to insist he has a “right” to those things. But these concepts become important in proportion to the shrinking sense of shared purpose, and at a certain point they accelerate that decline in common goals. The builders come to work prepared to defend their rights rather than construct the building as well as they can. If the members of society are for the most part engaged in productive and rewarding activities, in which the contributions of each are valued, then we would be speaking about how to ensure this remains the case, and talk of “rights” and all the rest becomes irrelevant. What is experienced or seen as mistreatment or unfairness either is or is not interference with or impairment of the cooperation required for the task at hand. If someone could be contributing more than they are being allowed or enabled to, there is a problem, but on extremely unlikely to be solved by some outside adjudicator deploying concepts drawn from legalistic or political discourses. One must appeal to those familiar with and involved and interested in the success of the project. Absolutism in government supports a little absolutism in each sphere of authority. To modify the conservative maxim, everyone is absolutist in what they know best, and an absolutist ruler would find such local absolutists to be the best guarantee of good order.

The last clarification, for now, is regarding the appearance that absolutism is a retrograde or nostalgic project, inapplicable to contemporary settings. Absolutism is actually a highly innovative and unprecedented mode of political thinking. In looking for genuine predecessors, we find few—Robert Filmer, Betrand de Jouvenel (who, however, was a kind of conservative liberal in his own politics), Mencius Moldbug (whose rejection of “imperio in imperium,” but not his “cameralism,” is essential to absolutism), and that’s about it. Everything—economics, science, technology, art, philosophy, anthropology, history, etc.—remains to be rethought and re-examined on these new premises. Absolutism is not utopian, though, because, as I suggested above, it is always in fact assumed in any discussion of politics, which suggests it is an unspoken desire of all political thinking. When “Germany” speaks with “the United States” there is really nobody who would prefer that whatever agreements “Germany” and “the United States” arrive at would be irrelevant because those who represent either country haven’t the power to enforce them. (And if they have the power to enforce those agreements, they must have the power to enforce much else.) Or, if you would prefer it, it’s because you don’t like either or both countries very much and want to see harm come to them—you certainly wouldn’t prefer it for countries or institutions you care about. Just as it is always assumed, past governments have always approximated absolutism to some degree, especially when they especially needed to, and are therefore rich sources of insights for historical studies. We have no desire to reproduce the ad hoc and unworkable array of “estates,” institutions and rituals of medieval Europe, or the often times desperate absolutisms that tried to tame or abolish them, but we can certainly learn a lot from that history regarding difficulties of re-unifying divided authority. Ancient peoples killed their kings for not ensuring a successful harvest, a practice we won’t be reinstituting, but one displaying a very keen, if primitive, understanding of the centrality of power to any minimally complex social order. Contemporary absolutism wishes to learn from all this historical experience and deliberately establish an absolutist order for what will really be the first time.

Considered at its most minimal, language is grounded, as Michael Tomasello along with Eric Gans has shown, in joint attention—the capacity to pay attention to the same thing at the same time, to know that we are doing it, and to know that we know (to let each other know). It should be possible, then, to analyze all human, which is to say social, phenomena, in terms of forms of attention, articulated in ever more complex ways. I think we can reduce the basic attentional dispositions to three. First, one directs others’ attention toward oneself as the center, and joins in that attention directed towards oneself. Second, one directs others attention to something one has produced, and joins in that attention. Third, one directs the attention of others to something one is attending to and neither controls—which is both the originary disposition and, as I will suggest, a “late” one. Naturally, in each of these cases one could rewrite “one directs others’ attention” as “one’s attention is directed by another,” as both must be happening simultaneously and are really almost indistinguishable in their elemental forms. The first two dispositions can readily transition into the third, and beauty and human accomplishments are still among the most compelling objects of attention.

It seems to me that making oneself the center of attention is the basic feminine disposition and making one’s products the center the basic masculine one. These attentional dispositions can take many different forms and articulate and include each other in innumerable ways. The self-centering of the first mode can take forms ranging from frivolous, borderline hysterical narcissism to self-sacrificing martyrdom. The product centering of the second mode can range from idle boasting and bullying to striving for excellence and even immortality as a creator. If we think in terms of sexual relations, the self-centering woman desires the product centering man because attaching herself to him guarantees a perpetual source of potential attention to her; for the product centering man, the woman best able to capture attention best reflects the value of his own products. (And, no doubt, this adds to their reciprocal desire for each other in intimate relations.) We could analyze all manner of group dynamics (all female, all male, mixed—mixed singles and couples, etc.) in these terms. What women want in spending time with each other and appearing together is a broadened center of attention which each of them could hope to occupy at any point; what men want from association is a competitive space in which their productive capacities can be tested and displayed, etc.

If we were to imagine a social order organized solely in terms of these dispositions, it would probably be a highly hierarchical, tribal, patriarchal order that adheres closely to the “social-sexual” hierarchy represented on Vox Day’s Alpha Game blog. The “products” most valued would be weapons, fighting skills, along with organizational effectiveness and the domination and territory they would bring. No doubt many, maybe most, early societies did look something like this, which raises the question of how humans ever found a way to organize themselves differently. Here is where we must consider the third and also originary disposition, that of having attention directed towards something (here, the more passive formulation is more appropriate) that is attached to neither of the “attenders” in particular. There must have often been times when physical confrontations led to mutual destruction, or at least the loss of some of those goods (markers of status) that the confrontation was meant to preserve or add to. It may be obvious to us that such a result indicates that a different approach (retreat, surrender, negotiation) might sometimes be preferable, but it would certainly not be obvious to the fighting man himself, nor to his competitors within the order he dominates, whose response to a defeat would surely be to seize the opportunity to contest the alpha. The alpha, in turn, would have to turn his attention directly to defending his predominance. Remaining locked in a hierarchical combative stance has cognitive consequences.

Someone else in the social order would have to notice that automatic response to physical confrontation leads to unwanted results. That someone would be significantly less alpha than the ruler or his main challengers, who would all be too focused on the struggle for power to think past it. That observer would combine the first two dispositions in order to direct the attention of others, and most especially one of the primary contenders, to consequences of their actions they would not notice on their own. This figure would draw attention to himself in various ways—by having flamboyant “visions,” or fits, or seizures, or ascetic rituals that would mark him as being possessed by some being not subject to the control of those locked into the first two dispositions. He would also produce a kind of “work” worthy of attention—spells, stories, prophecies, etc. (There could be no other way of redirecting the attention of those locked into the first two dispositions—you couldn’t just say, “hey, you know what’s interesting about what you’re doing…”) This articulation of all three dispositions is the line leading from shamans, to holy men and saints, to philosophers and “intellectuals.” (It’s worth noting not only that such figures are often sexually ambiguous but that women, and especially women off the “market,” such as old women, often play an important role in such proceedings.) The Big Man believes in the magic of words, because when he commands others, things happen; the shaman confirms, supplements and exploits this faith by divining new commands when those issued by the ruler fail to transform reality in the desired manner.

Eventually, the Big Man will take to himself the shaman figure for his counsel. In fact, despite the temporal order I’ve laid out for the purpose of exploring the relations between these dispositions, this “alliance” or synthesis would have been there from the beginning. There could never have been any “pure,” Conan-style fighting men who knew nothing but slaughter. War and internal ranking would have had their rites from the beginning. The first kings were priests themselves, guarding the shrines to the ancestors, and kings eventually became gods. But the early king-priests were vulnerable, as they were responsible for everything that happened in the community, and this vulnerability would have required the support of shaman figures who could “read” the signs indicating whether the king’s time had come. The far less vulnerable imperial god-kings would construct more elaborate systems of myth and ritual displaying and embedding their rule. Even more fundamentally, only as a result of the emergence of the human and language could the differentiation into these primitive attentional dispositions take shape and thereby recuperate natural hierarchies and complementarities in specifically human forms. The basic configuration, then—the alignment of the exemplary figure of the second (attention to products) disposition and the exemplary figure of the third (shared attention) disposition (which articulates the first two in a more marginal way) is the “attentional” basis of sovereignty. If the sovereign, most fundamentally, commands and delegates, then his first command and delegation is to the counsel he trusts to draw his attention to consequences of his own actions and even character that his immersion in those actions might blind him to. The ruler commands the shaman/priest/prophet/philosopher/sage/scientist/intellectual to, first of all, help me to clarify my commands.

The Big Man/Imperial order remains based on a “command economy” (I’m punning a bit here)—an exchange between the commands of the sovereign and the pleas of the subjects. This order is transcended once the representative of the third disposition is set against the sovereign and community as a sacrificial figure. The obvious examples here are Socrates and Jesus, and what they have in common is that the community as a whole sees that the centering of attention upon this figure reveals a violent resentment toward the center. Such figures reveal the foundations of social order, they remember the originary scene, when the community is ready to iterate it, but the community can only iterate it by murdering the figure who reveals those foundations. (Think about what Jesus’s impact would have been had he maintained the same teachings but died peacefully in old age as an honored member of the community.) Only in that way—through a community shattering paroxysm—could this revelation of something or someone that cannot be commanded, and therefore our reliance, for anything to be attended to at all, upon a shared renunciation, be made memorable. We see a similar configuration in Moses’s relation to the Hebrews he led out of Egypt, even if it never led to actual violence against Moses (Freud of course, would disagree, and one could see why). And, of course, the relation between the Hebrew prophets and the community and kings had a very similar structure. (As I’ve done before, I must confess my Western-centric bias here, and would be very interested in knowing how such relations have been historically articulated in China and India in particular. I hypothesize that every civilization has revered figures that spoke and acted so as to make themselves the center of attention in order to implicate the community in their desire to ignore the violent possibilities implicit in their participation in shared attention. But perhaps masculine figures who create enduring works synthesizing and de-ritualizing canonical modes of renunciation and deliberately eschew or minimize public reward or honor can play an equivalent iconic, civilizing role.)

The sovereign, then, cultivates and institutionalizes this form of attention to that which transcends sovereignty. He does this in the interest of preserving his own rule, because otherwise the oscillation between reverence and hatred toward the figure at the center will always threaten to engulf him. The sovereign distinguishes himself, as the figure at the center, from the locus of the center (a distinction for which I am indebted to Eric Gans, if it’s worth singling out one debt among all the others), that will outlast and that backgrounds him. And the sovereign himself takes counsel from those “third persons” who have committed themselves to exploring that disposition. To a great extent the pre-modern history of the West is a series of attempts to make sense of the sovereign’s accountability to God. It’s “logical” to say that the king cannot be his own judge in assessing this accountability, but it’s equally logical to say that no one else can without being sovereign himself, which would lead us to an infinite regress. The way of squaring the circle is to direct attention to the ongoing elevation of subjects to third persons who present themselves as offering a kind of tacit counsel to the sovereign by being the kinds of subjects receptive to sovereign will. Not exactly the “nation of priests” of Scripture, or the “nation of philosophers” of some modern utopians, but a nation of seekers after God’s will as mediated by the sovereign’s consular relation to God. Each fulfills, to the best of his or her knowledge, the will of the sovereign as embedded in the entire chain of command directed towards oneself; and each prepares oneself and one’s works as possible centers of attention that will mitigate damaging and amplify promising consequences of those commands in their margins for choice, which commands always leave. And one stands ready to be corrected in this regard. You could say that an absolutist ethics entails “indwelling,” to use Michael Polanyi’s term for the participatory attention of the inquirer, within the consular relation between sovereign and center.

The relationship between the sovereign and the representative of third personhood is the most important and requires the most attention—we could say that all the devastating diremptions of modernity result from misbegotten forms of this relationship, one in which the sovereign is irremediably dependent. How can you know whether your advisor is giving you bad advice? Especially since his advice might almost always be good, but a little bad advice here and there might be enough to make things go off the rails. And if he is giving you bad advice, how can you know why? May be he’s just wrong about something, but maybe he’s conducting the ambitions of another power center. There certainly can’t be any formula here, and the sovereign is sovereign in his choice of advisors as in all things. The only way of mitigating dangers here is to turn attention to the process of production of advisors, which is to say a system of education, i.e., of the labeling of powers that increases the likelihood that advisors who gain access to the sovereign will dwell within the consular relation between the sovereign and God.

Modern history begins with the first elites to use the high-low vs. the middle logic first deployed by the king to question the legitimacy of the monarchy itself. The absolutist monarch consolidated power by reducing all subjects to equidistance from his own central power; the next, fairly obvious, step is to ask why we need the king to establish this equidistance from the center. Wouldn’t it be better to have a center actually chosen on the terms of, and thereby confirming, the a priori (and not merely bestowed) equidistance of all subjects from the center? This step, which introduces the public-private, state-citizen distinction (and all the others that follow, such as economics-politics, culture-religion, impartial-partisan, etc.) is also the beginning of the dissimulation of power. To be a private entity is to be officially bereft of any formal power, and hence free of responsibility for the power one exercises. We must see things this way if we see individuals as the basic units of society, in which case all private power is vaguely illegitimate while only being liable to criticism in terms of improper access to and use of state power—which is easier to discover or construct, the more powerful the actor (a major exception that proves the rule here is anti-discrimination law, which criminalizes unapproved of forms of association—but which has set in motion the implosion of the private-public distinction itself, because in the end there is no area of life where we don’t “discriminate.” For example, could anyone provide, in terms of anti-discrimination law, a convincing reason why marriage certificates shouldn’t only be granted to those who marry “others,” however defined?). In this way we all join in the modernizing project of trying to raze all “cabals” to the ground so as to release the free, self-determining, powerless and power-free individuals somehow enchained within them. Prior to this modern project of concealing and dissimulating power, though, the monarchies of Europe had sabotaged themselves by diluting power by entitling individuals who benefited the throne, rather than those who had proven themselves worthy of what should have remained hard won and rarely granted privileges.

So, re-starting the absolutist project means naming powers properly. This imperative unites our historical accounts, our analyses of contemporary politics, our ongoing political projects and a summative ontology and ethics of sovereignty. An absolutist history identifies the dilution and then dissimulation of names for power, along with seeking out the actions and accounts of those who, in the midst of the corruption of names, sought to reattach them to their proper objects—those people are our precursors and models, our “fathers” you might say. Political analysis involves tracing the relations between formal, political, powers, and informal, secondary and therefore unnamed and dissimulated powers. This is complicated because informal powers preserve their power by being informal. We might say, in good formalist/realist fashion, that the New York Times was the press agency of the Obama Administration, and we would be largely right—but if the New York Times admitted that that was what it was, much less if the Obama Administration had officially delegated such duties to them, they would have been completely unable to fulfill them, and hence disempowered. Similarly, if the Ford Foundation stopped sponsoring activist groups, funding academic organizations, various legal defense organizations, think tanks writing up reports on the future of democracy, etc., and called a news conference in which its leadership openly “owned” its power and declared its intention to start exercising it openly, it would lose all of that power. So, we must name the New York Times and the Ford Foundation as delegated powers (looking to the laws and political protection that enable their functioning) that can only exercise their powers (and can only use those powers to exploit and subvert the sovereign that delegated them) as delegated powers dissimulated as informal. The ultimate purpose of the analysis is to show how these delegated powers muddy the chain of command constitutive of sovereignty and, here as well, identify the kinds of actions and inactions that could help clarify the chain of command.

But what most interests me here is the final question, that of the ethics and ontology of absolutism, which can now be seamlessly integrated into history, contemporary analysis and political projects. The starting point of this post was the inaugural post of the post-Reactionary Future blog Neoabsolutism, entitled Neoabsolutism as a Contender for the Title of the Fourth Political Theory. The post is a review of Dugin’s book, in which Dugin distinguishes between the “subjects” of the main three political theories of modernity: the liberal “individual” subject, the communist “class” subject, and the fascist/Nazi nation/race subject. It’s not clear whether Dugin is proposing a new subject for his “fourth political theory,” and if so who it would be, but what is important here is the question of whether neoabsolutism is proposing a new political subject as part of its contention for the fourth political theory, and if so what would that be. After some give and take on our reddit page, I concluded that neoabsolutism (I still prefer “absolutism,” being somewhat allergic to “neos”) is a radical break from modern political theories insofar as, among other things, it eschews the nomination of a historical subject. The political subjects of the other theories are all constituted by some desire for “liberation” from some form of “subjugation,” along a line of “progress” that can never really be accomplished and ultimately serves as a pretext for piling up the body counts. The point of reactionary, and certainly absolutist, thinking, is to be rid of all that world destroying resentment, along with the illusion that the resentment can be harnessed for beneficial social purposes.

Part of the purpose of a historical subject is to generate a historical narrative that one can then enter—the individual struggles against the chains of censorship, persecution and superstition, then against repressive norms of sexuality, against racial prejudice, against the belief in binary genders, etc.; the working class struggles against the capitalist class and its state, and then imperialist encirclement; the nation struggles against formal or informal imperial power, against internal divisions and inherited backwardness, the race struggles against inferior races and the Jews, etc.—very compelling stories can be told using these templates. So, what’s the story of absolutism? It seems to me that what happens in absolutism is that tacit powers and the traditions they bear are explicitly recognized and titled. In a sense this is the fundamental attribute of sovereignty, since a precondition of its primary function of protecting the realm is designating and nominating subordinate powers to assist in doing so. The sovereign names powers and “seals” traditions by authenticating their transfer from previous or other sovereigns and their incorporation into his own sovereignty. Rather than a historical subject, there is an asymmetrically reciprocal exchange between sovereign and subjects, in which subjects seek further recognition and incorporation and the sovereign recognizes value and power legitimately acquired within the approved institutions by designating it and providing it with formal access and audience. This interaction addresses the fundamental anthropological question of resentment, which is always resentment toward the center (if another humiliates me, it is still the central power that allowed that to happen, and therefore failed to give me my due), by providing for public and controlled competition and ambition. So, our present day auditioning and requests for clarification regarding commands and the command structure transitions into a proper order in which such clarification, through an articulation of sovereign designations, is what sovereignty is openly comprised of. There’s no “progress” or historical guarantees here—there’s nothing but continuing attempts to become worthier and make actual hierarchies explicitly acknowledged ones, along with a cultivation of readiness for exceptional action when it becomes possible. No doubt there are and will be compelling stories to tell in accord with this template, however much we may have to rewire our narrative apparatus to tell them.

A new journal:

https://thejournalofneoabsolutism.wordpress.com

Auditioning

Absolutism has its own version of natural selection. In his essay in the new journal The Journal of Neoabsolutism, Reactionary Future (drawing upon the poster/tweeter scientism) distinguishes between “the level of individual actors,” “the level of power institutions,” and “the political system.” The “individual actors” are, as one would imagine, “activists, academics, journalists, politicians…,” etc., and following them—their writings, their activities, their priorities, their rationalizations, etc., is a waste of time, because “these developments are a product of selection and promotion by less visible institutions.” These less visible “power institutions” single out particular activists, writers, academics, etc., for promotion, funding, and more authoritative positions within the institution. And these institutions in turn are both subordinate too and engaged in constant covert warfare aimed at influencing the state—they are all trying to influence the selection process, and having their own profiles raised within the sovereign structure, so that they are best equipped to continually replenish themselves with “individual actors.”

The truth of this, for someone who has toiled for decades at the lower rungs in the far corners of one of those systems, the university, is self-evident. Why does one particular literary theory, or trend within political science, or a new “studies” program achieve lift off and start dominating all the journals and producing a whole new constellation of “stars”? There’s always an attempt to explain such things in terms of some historical process or social need, or in terms of some immanent development of an earlier theory. It’s usually possible to construct such explanations in a plausible way, but it’s also always obvious that things could have gone in a very different direction. The answer always lies in the “selection” process, whereby power brokers employ interested “experts” to determine how to distribute their largesse. (The independent artist Richard Kostelanetz has written many excellent analyses, beginning with a “controversial” early book [1974], The End of Intelligent Writing in America, through Crimes of Culture [1992] and on, exposing the way various publishing and foundation “power institutions” prevent a liberal democratic consensus and conventional aesthetic standards from being disrupted.) It is really true that more often than not it would be more useful, in understanding a new cultural or intellectual trend, to trace networks of funding, hiring and patronage rather than trying to figure it out “on its own terms.” This kind of analysis has long been the province of the left, and it’s very good that reactionary politics is now taking a close interest in the dissemination of power and influence. What do the power institutions want? To be on the cutting edge of anarchist ontology—that is, to increase the power of the centralizing authority by further pulverizing subjects into free radicals, organizing apparently spontaneously and resistantly but actually in a highly choreographed manner against the “middle,” i.e., any functional command structure. To consolidate their own command structures by preventing competing institutions from pursuing their primary function.

So, what are we individual actors, especially those of us with tenuous or no connections to any institution, and interested in destroying rather than expanding anarchist ontologies, doing? All of us, those writing on blogs, fighting in the streets, wearing pussy hats or armor, digging up funding for an independent film or journal, we’re all auditioning for power. No one says or does anything that they don’t hope and imagine will be become official doctrine and supported practice at some point. This means we have to do two things simultaneously: one, get attention from someone right here and now (and, preferably someone who gets other people’s attention); two say the kinds of things, not necessarily that someone in power right now would say, but that someone who gets to power after more and more attention gets paid to us would say, both right now and at every point along the way to gaining power. Power institutions want to be on the cutting edge of anarchist ontology, but they also want power to be secure. Being on the cutting edge is a way of keeping control within the hands of oneself and allies, but if the competition for power could be stopped, each and every power center would settle for a clear hierarchy (Facebook, Google, Mobil, Pfizer, Harvard, Disney, etc., don’t want chaos for the sake of chaos). Liberalism auditions for those laying their bets on the continual subversion of the center, while reactionaries audition for those who would like to clarify the instructions coming from the center. To a great extent, we’re auditioning for the same people, but appealing to differing motivations, proposing different imaginaries.

Here’s a list of donors of United for Equality and Affirmative Action, a legal defense fund that supports BAMN (By Any Means Necessary), itself a supporter of the Antifa movement that represents the violent edge of leftist protest:

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/855789160770273281/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimperiuminimperio.freeforums.net%2Fthread%2F149%2Fabsolutist-anarchist-ontologies

Now, how do all these corporations and foundations know whom they should give their money to? How, for that matter, do the Koch brothers, or the Mercers, know? They must hire the people who are holding auditions and doing the casting. How do they know whom to hire? That’s what the universities, media and think tanks are for. It’s helpful to keep in mind that these people get it wrong all the time, when they are funding terrorist groups that turn their weapons against their original supporters, when they dump hundreds of millions into a presidential “war chest” for a lemon of a candidate, and, no doubt, when they invest in this or activist group or human rights or anti-war organization—or an academic or artistic trend. Natural selection is no doubt just as profligate—in both cases, there is no shortage of resources. This further means that those of us auditioning need to outperform the competition while also generating reasonable standards for judging the respective performances, and part of this outperformance involves showing why these others can’t provide power with what it needs. We have to help with the selection process, by reducing the options to simple binaries, and then raising the threshold for entry into the competition; but first we need to lower the threshold to get the necessary attention. You very often hear people say that activists involved in local protests and counter-protests, not to mention street fighting and various seemingly esoteric partisan struggles are really letting themselves be played by power, as they are presumably distracted from the “real” issues by these secondary ones, consumed by the narcissism of small differences. No doubt that’s true, but it’s also false—anyone who wants to be useful to power needs to show they can work on various levels, that they can be sober and think in the long-term, and that they can be combative, courageous, and attention to the slightest chance for some advantage. You can’t take every bait, but you can’t let yourself be baited without consequence either. And, of course, there is always a division of labor here—I must confess, I will not be out on the streets (I’m too old and unsuited for it) but I hope some people who want to do that will find some of what I write helpful in guiding their own decision making process and that perhaps some of them will rise up to aid an emergent sovereign and one of them even become that sovereign—in which case, my profile, or that of those who come after me, will certainly be raised.

I think the best guideline for thinking through the problem of audition is one I have mentioned many times already: our discourse should take the form of a request that our instructions be made clear. What makes power unsecure is uncertainty of command: we don’t know what the sovereign would have us do. The reason for this is that those the sovereign has delegated power to (agencies both “public” and “private,” as I accept the Moldbuggian assumption that the distinction is meaningless and everything that takes place in the realm is at the pleasure of the sovereign) ignore or distort sovereign commands; but, then responsibility must be placed back on the sovereign for not making the commands clear enough and seeing to their execution according to specification. But who holds the sovereign responsible, and how? Those of us awaiting clear commands, by requesting them. We can think of this in terms of an analogy that is very common in the reactosphere: between the restrictions on discourse imposed by “political correctness” or the SJWs, on the one hand, and laws against blasphemy instituted by more traditional social orders. In effect, political correctness is just anti-blasphemy laws. But while traditional orders are specific and limited in establishing the doctrine and rituals one cannot blaspheme against, and provide a line of intellectual reasoning that allows one to determine what counts as blasphemy, the SJW dominated order is haphazard, arbitrary and ever evolving in its prohibitions and enforced affirmations. If you were to ask some diversity officer, official or unofficial (a distinction as meaningless as private vs. public), “OK, I don’t want to go wrong here, can you just give me a list of the things I can’t say, and the things I must affirm?” she would be stunned—that’s not what they think they’re doing at all. Which is precisely the problem. Or part of the problem, which is ultimately that they really couldn’t do it, because in the nature of “social justice” is that we can never allow things to settle down into a final, canonized doctrine. Anyone who tried to do so would be blaspheming against the next frontier in anarchist ontology.

Now, this approach, of requesting clear instructions which cannot be given, seems to me in many practical cases a very clever, irritating and subversive approach to subversion in power. It might show some of the directors that they’ve been casting the wrong people. It also allows for all kinds of ideas to be implanted in the minds of those who overhear, without the person making the request really being required to take any responsibility for them at all. It might be the reactionary version of the Cloward-Piven strategy. It allows for a mock and mocking servility that exposes and confounds the power structure in a way that it is impossible to ignore but very difficult to define precisely enough to punish. But beyond that, I think it’s a very good way of grounding one’s thinking in an absolutist ontology while continually refining one’s performance. Can a proposition or broader argument yield intelligible, consistent, implementable commands? If not, that seems to be an argument against the argument. But the question is not always so easily answered—doing so requires the construction of elaborate scenarios, possible chains of events, and models of organization. So, our requests for commands get further inflected by the scenarios, chains and models we embed them in, and the role we would have our interlocutor imagine us and himself to be playing in those scenarios, chains and models. This means we further formalize and nominalize our discourses and exchanges with others, who can be explicitly named as possessing a particular rank within a particular corps of our own or the other forces. All kinds of conceptual development and revelatory situational irony become possible. Our audition stands out, and we show ourselves to be ready to say and do what needs to be said and done now, and give evidence of our ability to continue to do so at every point until the commands in fact become clear.