GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Sacral kingship is weakened, ultimately fatally, by the elevation of the king beyond the reach of the community—that is, once the king is no longer available as a scapegoat. If the king is no longer available as a scapegoat, he can no longer be held directly responsible for mediating the community’s relation to the divine and the divinely controlled universe (he may still be held indirectly responsible in a general sense, for ensuring the prosperity of the country, ensuring the gods don’t turn against it, and so on—but not for this plague, this earthquake, etc.). The king has introduced layers of mediation between himself and his subjects, with these layers of mediation being the “elites” to whom the king has delegated powers. If the king is now to be overthrown, that as well must be mediated through the elites. The structure is still the same, insofar as the king at the center is scapegoated so as to avert intra-elite rivalries, but the players are now a more restricted group, who furthermore must prosecute their resentments indirectly, in the name of some obligation the king has left unpaid. The king may have in fact governed poorly, indeed must have, if intra-elite rivalries have gotten to the point where they must be deferred, but very rarely poorly enough that the elites could not have deferred their rivalry by bolstering rather than subverting his rule. When the elites levy the subjects they control to remove the king because he has not respected their rights, or has the left the country undefended against an invader, or has favored one section of elites over another, or has wasted the resources of the kingdom on debauchery, they may have a point but are simultaneously producing the very violations they complain of: they are making it impossible for him to respect their rights, to defend the country, to refrain from choosing sides among the elites, or from wasting resources on his own insular projects or desperate attempts at saving himself. But we can see that the more layers that have been interposed between the king and his subjects, more the reasons for challenging the king must fall within the scope of things the king can actually do. There is a kind of rationalization process at work, but it is telling that the rationalization process rarely, if ever, extends to the act of removing the king—that still relies upon gesturing towards the sacrality of kingship, as the king must be charged with something like usurpation or treason (or inheriting the fruits of them). It would be impossible to make a case for removing the king on purely rational grounds (assuming such a thing exists): you could never show that the superior management skills of prospective king B outweighs in importance the disruptive effects of removing actual king A on grounds of inferior management. It would always be more rational for the prospective king to help the actual, to contribute his superior management skills (especially if that was his real reason for seeking the throne in the first place). The final residue of sacral kingship, which still invests our elected heads of government, is simply that someone must be at the center, and actually being at the center is a kind of a priori proof that it is you that should be there. The resentment toward the figure at the center merely confirms his sovereignty.

This means that genuinely overthrowing the figure at the center would require an equal and opposite sacrality. This is so difficult to imagine that you could make a very good case that it has never actually happened. Kings and governments have been overthrown many, many times, of course, but always in one of two ways: either the new figure at the center is presented as “always already” having been there (in which case the overthrow was merely correcting a previous one) or, in the modern revolutions, the central figure is overthrown, not in favor of a new figure, but in favor of a procedure for selecting rulers. Obviously neither Hitler nor Stalin ever contemplated surrendering the power they had seized, but neither declared himself the start of a new dynasty either—they were just holding power, for the Aryan people and proletariat respectively, in trust, until some form of rule (or transcendence of rule, in the case of communism) could settle the question definitively. Conservatives and reactionaries tend to dismiss and even despise “postmodern” thought and culture, but it might simply be that postmodernism recognizes, more explicitly than liberalism was previously willing or able to do, the absent center that nevertheless structures our frenzied political existence. The obsession in postmodernism with ghosts, traces, absence, silence and doubling might be read as an oblique commentary on the failure of the slaughter of the king. Democracy is an increasingly broken method of restoring the central figure—investing it once again with the signs of legitimacy, i.e., sacrality—only to smash and remove it once again. It’s not a surprise that this process has become more like an uncontrollable nervous tic than a genuine investiture. It’s as if the present day celebration of men who mutilate themselves and put on wigs is a parody of the once tragic process of bringing down the king—now, “cisgender normativism” is the best we can come up with for a figure to place at the center and undergo ritual vandalization.

We can see Moldbug’s formalism as a kind of “reduction” of sacrality to the simple occupancy of the center I referred to above—we can no longer believe in kings being placed on the throne by God, or in the integrity of imperial lineages, but we can see that we can’t get past, or transcend, or deconstruct, the simple fact that someone has to be at the center, and that actually being there is irrefutable proof that you should be there. If that’s the only criterion we can have for political centrality, or sovereignty, that criterion must be extended throughout the entire social order. If there’s a center, there are margins; every move made from the center reconstitutes the margins. If we assume the formalist principle that powers that liberalism has made implicit, all the better to carry on political struggles behind and under the scene, should be made explicit, the implication here is that absolutist rule involves an ongoing commentary on the relation between center and margin. If the center declares war, social institutions are recruited for this purpose and are therefore re-“baptized” as war or war-related ministries and industries. When peace comes they are renamed again. Here, again, there is a very illuminating parallel with modern and postmodern art. Traditional art, and this is the case through the realism of the 19^th century, is predicated upon the spectator or reader ignoring the means by which the artistic effects are produced. We all have a sense of how, for example, a narrative is structured—there is a hero, a goal, there are obstacles to achieving the goal, the hero overcomes them, and so on. It’s all fairly formulaic, and even great and original works of art stick to the formulas. But enjoying the artwork requires one to forget the formulas—to accept that the villain is “evil,” and to ignore the means used to produce the “evil effect” in the reader. The explanation of evil offered by the word might be very powerful and truthful, but assimilating the explanation is incompatible with directing attention to the “devices” the artist has used to produce an appearance you go on to interpret as an “explanation.” Modern and especially postmodern art just goes ahead and says this is the hero, this is what makes him look heroic—look, if I have him do this, he won’t be heroic anymore, but this also means that heroism is not exactly what it appears—and the effect of this direction of your attention toward the devices is that the “exchange” or conversation between artist and viewer/reader concerns your expectations of an art work, and the habits and traditions through which you engage them.

This transparency and self-reflexivity is central to absolutism. In constructing for myself some possible objections to absolutism I considered that someone might be horrified at all the people who would be disempowered by transference of power to an absolute ruler. The answer, of course, is that this is not the case: for the vast majority of people, nothing would change regarding their share in power within the social order. They have no power now, and they would have no power under absolutism. The difference is that now they are told that they have all kinds of power that they should understand, exercise, and seek to increase (because there are evil forces, whose evilness is constructed through such transparent narrative devices that only addiction to power seeking can blind one to them, that are always trying to rob you of them), whereas under absolutism they would be provided with a range of ways in which they can participate productively in their community. Under absolutism, we could freely admit that we’re working with formulas, which is to say traditions, all the way down, even in the very language that we use. Again, there are just centers and margins, subordinate to the constitutive center/margin relation, your role on the margin is (to invoke Derrida) to “supplement” the center and you do this by clarifying the basic command script articulating center and margin. As a thought experiment, we can examine the assumption that there just is a center, even if posited arbitrarily; but if there has to be a center it can’t simply be arbitrarily posited because organizing all social practices accordingly would surface the hierarchies constitutive of those practices and hence of centrality as such.

That residue of sacrality, which inheres in even the most everyday relationships and professions, is never eliminated by considerations of professionalism, managerialism, efficiency and so on. Calling it a “residue of sacrality,” though, suggests an unhelpful nostalgia—as if we’re trying to hold onto a few crumbs from a table that has long been overturned. It’s better to think, instead, in terms of constraints: foundational names and rules for articulating them that we can’t get “behind,” or place on a “rational basis,” because that process of “enlightenment” would just entail having to get behind and rationalize the tacit assumptions that enabled us to reform or replace the previous set of tacit assumptions. You can’t but preserve something of the center-margin relation that now allows you to reform that relation. It’s neither rational nor irrational: it’s like accepting that in one community men greet each other with a handshake, in another with a head nod, and in another with a high five. We can imagine a Swiftian comedy in which the social scientists in the handshaking community arrive at a proof for the rational superiority of the head nod, and seek to have this preferable mode of greeting enforced through society. It would be funny (if handled right, of course) because in order to institute the new practice, you’d have to draw upon the resources of solidarity contained in the old practice—you’d have to shake hands with the men you now hope will trust you enough so that you can instruct them that they are no longer to shake hands.

Once we realize that all our practices are constrained, though, we can make these constraints explicit, that is, formalize them. I think this may even provide a way for developing absolutist economics. In Jerusalem, for example, all buildings must have a specific kind of stone on the exterior. Of course, this takes away a lot of economic freedom—you can’t build a red brick building, even if that’s what you prefer. But any city would develop some generally shared sense of aesthetics, some sense of what kind of buildings belong and which don’t—the constraint simply establishes a general rule within which that “sense” can develop more coherently. Presumably, the constraint would be drawn from existing evidence of what the city is already comprised of. At any rate, once you have this constraint, you know that you will have a permanent market for a particular kind of stone. The market will expand and contract, because the city will not always grow at the same rate, but you know that you always want access to this kind of stone—and you need architects who are good at building with it, and perhaps other goods and skills as well(who knows what the implications of a specific kind of stone might have for the market for doors, windows, draperies, yards, etc.). A convenient and economical way to rule a city or any order is through constraints, with the trick being to make them distinctive, assessable and flexible: here, minimally, is what a “block” must be, what a “neighborhood” must be, what an “employer-employee relation” must be. This would encourage those on the block, in the neighborhood, and in economic institutions to develop complementary and corresponding constraints—the neighborhood is to have these subdivisions, modeled on the constraint defining the neighborhood—and so on, all the way down. The entire social order becomes an exploration in the ramifications of the center-margin relation constituting it. Economically speaking, this would introduce an irreducible ingredient of stability—much of what is needed, and therefore what is needed to supply what needed, and what is needed to…—can be known with a far greater degree of certainty than in the free market under divided power.

This means the social order is conceived as a disciplinary space comprised of disciplinary spaces. In the Kuhnian sense, a disciplinary space is held together by shared concepts and tacit practices that enable us to attend to the “same” thing. Think about the experience of being in a lab and having a scientist tell you to look through the microscope—whatever you’re supposed to see is there, but you won’t see it unless you’re primed to see it. You need to separate foreground from background. Again, this is the most common, everyday, human experience. You see a crowd looking at something. You go over—what are they looking at? Well, it might be obvious—a dead body, a wrecked car—but it may be that someone will have to single out something for you. Even in the obvious cases, everyone already there is looking in a way you don’t yet know how: some significant feature of the dead body, some sign on the car of how the crash happened, has already become an object of shared attention. You need to be shown how to “see” that dent. Again, this is neither rational nor irrational—it is a result of all attention being shared attention. You can only see what others teach you/learn from you how to see. Again, formalism just makes it explicit that this is what we are always doing. This doesn’t prevent change—it just means that change will emerge on the terms of the discipline, which undergoes a crisis once an accumulation of observations under the existing hypothesis generates a set of new hypotheses to try out. The dent then becomes one element of more systemic but more subtle damage we are now able to notice.

We can redefine “universalism” in these terms. Universalism is the fantasy that all humans are occupying the same disciplinary space. You’re a rational being so you already know how to see the dent. You just need to set aside all the other disciplinary spaces that have warped your view and made it invisible—that is, you must simply set aside everything you are. But this just means a particular disciplinary space has usurped all the rest. Which one? The disciplinary space focused on exposing the unjustified assumptions of all the other disciplinary spaces. But the assumption that all assumptions need to be “justified” cannot itself be justified. That’s why universalism is fraudulent—just like atheism can dismantle all the arguments for believing in God (what, exactly, is God made of, etc.)  but can’t explain why people believe other than their stupidity (they should have, from the beginning, “spontaneously,” seen the “dent” in religion that we now see), universalism can expose the constitutive constraint of all “particularisms” but can’t examine its own. All universalism is good for, paradoxically, is division—for power struggles against constrained order, i.e., all order. Liberalism is nothing but an endless war against all forms of humanity in the name of a humanity that not only doesn’t exist, but can only be imagined as the negation of all actual forms of humanity. This is not a new point—the stripped down human being liberal universalism defends turns into the literal stripping down of millions of human beings who must be saved from their particularities—from what we know as the “middle” which the elites target from all sides in their proxy wars.

A partial summary of David Graeber on markets and money, with some additions: Markets are created and maintained by sovereigns. Money is used first of all for internal bureaucratic accounting in the ancient empires. Money is then used to pay soldiers in the imperial army, and markets are created in order to enable soldiers to spend that money. The accepted currency is whatever is accepted by the sovereign for the payment of taxes. Debt is monetized (beyond the gift economy) when standardized payments for injuries are necessary in order to prevent violence—the sovereign as judge establishes standardized penalties and settlements. In other words, the introduction of money into the sovereign order coincides with a system of hostage taking overseen by the sovereign: human beings are exchanged in one way or another. Money and markets therefore accelerate that system, abstracting individuals from their social relations, enhancing the power of the sovereign, while generating new power bases that might destabilize power. It further makes sense to assume that the origin of technology is the military: the organization of large masses of men is the model both for mass labor and the technology that eliminates that labor, originating in Lewis Mumford’s “megamachine.”

What sustains the value of any currency, in that case, is the stability and reliability of the sovereign issuing and approving it. Rather than labor or subjective desire, currency reflects the “value” of sovereign security. If the sovereign will accept a certain amount of money to settle your tax bill, and maintains an orderly circulation of money, the value of money will reflect that. Sovereign security itself, though, is determined by the oscillation between the abstraction of individuals and the hierarchically ordered pyramid of power articulated by the sovereign: the acceleration of abstraction destabilizes money, the ordering of power stabilizes it. The problem for an absolutist order is to re-embed individuals in ordered hierarchies, which is to say “de-abstract” them. The liberal argument is that the abstraction of individuals (the “free market” or “economic freedom”) has been necessary for the massive increase of wealth and technological development over the past several centuries, and I think there is some truth to that.

Let’s say I’m ruling over 1,000 people. They are all ordered hierarchically, with well-defined roles and obligations—landowners, farmers, soldiers, craftsmen, teachers, fathers and mothers, etc. They live within the kind of reciprocal, pre-money, system of credit described by Graeber. The shoemaker makes shoes for everyone because he knows the farmer is growing food for everyone, the teacher teaches everyone’s children, and so on. Marriages are arranged through families, children tend to enter their parents’ professions. The sovereign and his appointed officials intervene in any disagreements that threaten to get out of control. Now, one day I tell them all: you are all free individuals. You have only those obligations you choose to have, only those reciprocities you have contracted for, you can enter any line of work you want, sell your products and labor for whatever price you want, etc. Whatever land, homes and tools you have right now you will receive a property deed for. Whatever happens to you is because of what you did or failed to do.

After the initial shock and confusion, what’s going to happen? A large number, let’s say 250, will very quickly lose everything they have and fall into debt, destitution and criminality. Let’s say another 400 will hang on indefinitely, maintaining some property and the ability to become good enough at something to gain employment and have families, while never quite freeing themselves from the fear of falling into the “underclass.” Another 200 will become useful to the elites within the state or the new private economy, as managers, merchants and bosses of various kinds. That leaves us with 150. 100 of them become “elites,” on boards of directors, high up in the state bureaucracy, running institutions like banks, schools, and prisons. But the remaining 50—they will do great things, for good and for evil. For them, the revelation that they are free individuals, for whom everything is possible, who are limited only by the breadth of their imagination, etc., will be an inspiration to invent, explore, innovate and create. They will be the source of economic dynamism, abstracting themselves and everyone else ever more thoroughly, and generating new forms of technology out of all the newly possible configurations. Yes, they will depend upon the state, creating subsidized technology for the military and turning spin-offs of that technology to commercial uses—but not just anyone could do that. They will create everything that the elites will divide up among the others, and the pressure from all the newly abstract individuals and their recognized class interests will give the top 50 and the elites the incentive and models for including enough individuals in the economy to maintain enough stability to keep the process growing—especially if doing so gives the social order a founder’s advantage over other communities now forced to play according to the same rules. There will be some hope for societies based on divided power as long as that top 5% or so, and some means of distributing the benefits of their activities to a substantial majority, are not completely shut down. Political arguments and struggles will focus on whether the “freedom” of that top 50+100 is beneficial to the other 850, and will be fueled by struggles between the 100 (the 50 will, for the most part, be disgusted by power struggles, but may show some surprisingly sharp elbows on occasion).

There may be sovereigns willing to sacrifice that economic dynamism for restored order, and no other sovereign genuinely interested in getting their own house in order should be concerned with or interfere with that decision. I want to think about those sovereigns who would like to combine secure power with continual wealth creation. For one thing, taking that approach will give us more to say about the strategies and results of wealth creation and technological development in the societies we hope to transform. Now, that markets are created by, and maintained for the benefit of, states, only “taints” markets for anarchists and leftists, but not at all for absolutists. Nor does this dependence of markets upon states mean that markets don’t operate in certain ways that we can identify, and that rulers can try to improve. If I tell 5 subordinates to get some job done, part of getting that job done will involve studying the reality of the situations, the necessary means for accomplishing the task, the best way of acquiring those means, the various possible ways of dividing up the task, and of cooperating in various ways. Clearly at every point along the way there are choices to be made and those choices depend upon elements to be brought under control, and therefore as yet under the control of something else. These things can’t be done in an unlimited number of ways. So, we could speak about something like “laws” within the limits determined by sovereignty, and we should try and understand those laws.

But all this looks very different from within an absolutist rather than anarchist ontology. Let’s say the task is to build an outhouse, and we need bricks in order to do so. We need, then, to buy 200 bricks. From whom? From a range of brick sellers—let’s say 3. Those 3 (not 10, not 1) brick sellers exist because they have been more efficient in moving volumes of bricks than other sellers, and also because they have followed the rules set by the government for selling bricks better than others, and quite likely because they have cultivated patrons within the state which helps them to write, follow and where necessary skirt the rules. And also because there are enough people doing enough building who need a steady supply of bricks. It also means that if the building industry slackens, the state might step in and carry out some “internal improvements” to help the brick business through the rough patch. What absolutist ontology adds to this is that all this depends upon a certain “amount” of order, and therefore hierarchy, which can be qualified if not precisely quantified. It should not be taken for granted that the owner of the brick business applies for a permit, has it approved, has that approval acted upon (it’s not ignored, for example, by some lower level bureaucrat), that this owner orders a certain amount of bricks to be sent out and his employee carries out the order (and if the employee doesn’t, the employer will be able to fire that employee and count on hiring someone who will), that the employee tasked with receiving the bricks does not abscond with them and sell them on the black market, etc. The real source of value is a well ordered system, and a well ordered system is absolutist. We should be able to find a way of calculating economic value in terms of the relative dominance of anarchist vs. absolutist ontologies within a given social order. Think of all the forms of disorder that would make it impossible to obtain or rely on permits, to assume the honesty of employees and of employers, of the stability of a government that won’t on a dime start agitating for workers or subsidizing their defiance, or cede ground to various illegal and semi-legal enterprises that have their own patrons within a divided government. (Of course, many of these forms of disorder were previously forms of order, within some kind of honor system. Order being brought into these systems which at some point produce scapegoating crises—the origin of power struggles within the state—undermining the sacral mode of kingship they depend upon is what creates the possibility of economic calculation in the first place—that is, economic calculation depends upon deferring the convergence upon the central figure.)

If the state always creates and sustains markets, starting first of all with meeting the needs of the state (provisioning its soldiers, etc.), an observation confirmed by the rise of the East Asian “tigers” (S. Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) which not only had authoritarian rule but deep involvement in the production needs of the US Cold War military economy, then we can think about those enterprises most directly associated with the state as the epicenter of innovation. Here, the state is the customer, and here is where we can see the defects of divided power most forcefully in the kind of cronyism that accompanies, for example, military contracting in a democratic society. With the state a single-minded, discerning customer, which it must be given a sovereign whose mind must always be on his own survival, we can expect a heightened focus on accomplishment and qualifications—this part of the economy would create an aristocracy of both management and labor. The graduates of the best schools and the most accomplished military men would gravitate toward these industries. More distant from the center, in successive concentric circles, would be other industries, working with spin offs from military technology (as has always been the case to a great extent), with less urgency and with less demanding tasks. Not everyone will be a top tier engineer or scientist. It should be possible to synthesize the production of consumer goods with respected and meaningful work for most of the population.

Buckminster Fuller asserted that it was worth it to provide free education to 1,000 children because one of those children will end up invented something that pays for the education of the other 999. Massive investment focused on generating singularities will in the end take care of the masses as well. Of course, investment might be focused more precisely on those segments of the population most like to be the source of singularities, but this kind of decision will itself be a marker of the wealth and risk-aversion of the center. Under conditions of extreme scarcity, investment might be focused on those communities likely to produce one singularity out of 400 students, and those where you could reasonably expect only 1 out of 1,500 would be left aside. Gradually, the sovereign could reach further afield in the search for singularities, and also widen the scope of what is to be considered a singularity, which is to say open up more fields. At first the 1/400 communities might be both bulwarks against and mentors to the 1/800 communities, which in turn would play this dual role for the 1/1,000 community, and so on. Securing rule would look towards privileging the mentor role over the bulwark function. Everyone is ultimately oriented toward the center, but in a way that makes convergence upon the center unthinkable. Resentments are contained so as to apply only to those directly above, and are framed as requests for a further shift toward mentoring. Limited competition between regions in attempts to move up the hierarchy would allow for the expression and containment of resentments.

In this way, the articulation of centering and de-convergence, which I have posited as the logic of post-sacral kingship sovereignty, can be turned into an economic concept, a measurable proportion between singularity and the recirculation of the products of singularity into the production of further singularities. We could define singularity in terms of both monopolization and models of “centered ordinality.” How singular an innovation is (and, therefore, ultimately, how singular the innovator) depends, first, upon how long the implementation can maintain a monopoly position, first of all for the sovereign himself, as prime customer; and, second, whether it models a form of social relation that is both center-oriented and productive of hierarchy. For example, in a recent interview, David Gelernter, who invented an early version of what eventually became Twitter, argues that the Internet “should be structured like a recursive net, so that you’re encouraged to return to what you were looking at. Instead, the way it is, if you click you’ll probably never go back.” This addition would make Google a more singular invention, requiring more complex algorithms that account for items that initiated inquiries, were at the center of networks, rather than just the number of clicks. Google would create more value because it would encourage the development of more structured minds, in part by providing access (indirectly) to the results of more structured minds, which means more singularities, and so on. Other technologies could similarly be judged on how they directly organize workers and consumers, and indirectly structure communities—every technology models and is modeled on a mode of human interaction, and human interaction is the ultimate source and measure of wealth.

The destruction of sacral kingship, “the political common sense of humankind,” has driven us mad. That’s what happens when functioning common sense is destroyed. We need some way of restoring a political center, a clear chain of command, an articulation of political, communal and personal order, and of social with natural causality. We cannot do all this, though, in the manner of sacral kingship, that is, by holding the center responsible for everything that anyone might imagine someone should be responsible for. If the king can be held responsible for a drought, or a devastating storm, or a flood, or a plague, then anyone—a “witch,” a “demon,” the “deformed,” the “weird,” etc.—can be held responsible for anything for which we feel compelled to attribute responsibility. And, of course, the king himself might very well deflect responsibility this way, setting up an extremely dysfunctional system.

Now, we can of course hold the king responsible for not preparing for the drought, not effectively organizing rescue and rebuilding efforts in the wake of the storm, not enforcing proper hygiene to prevent plague, etc., insofar as all these methods of preventing of minimizing catastrophes are known. But the hardest thing to do in thinking about how we got to where we are is to avoid projecting the things we know (and think we know) back to those in the midst of the process by which we ultimately came to know them. The sacred center first of all not only ensures peace in the emergent human community, but maintains and even completely defines it as a community. Language is only meaningful insofar as it refers to the center, which means that the history of humanity, considered as a (language) learning process, is the history of dialogue with the center, differentiating the various things it has to tell us. There’s no position outside of this process from which we can say “this is irrational,” “this is stupid,” “ridiculous!,” “how could they not know better,” etc. You can say these things, of course, but all you’re doing is removing from scrutiny your own assumptions about rationality, intelligence, common sense, obviousness, and so on. And the fact that we are so chock-full of accusations of irrationality and all the rest is itself just part of the madness I referred to above—we are all trying to sort out clear lines of communication and command with the center, trying to ensure there is a worthy occupant of the center, trying to make ourselves worthy of a center deserving of the name, and keeping in mind both the difficulty of doing all this and the frenzy that this uncertainty can drive us to is the best way of restoring  some sanity and continuing the learning process.

The only way anyone could have come to consider that good hygiene is a way from preventing plagues is by resisting the compulsion to locate the source of all events, good or evil, in the sacral king occupying the center. This was always possible, to some extent—alongside of, and more or less approved of, appointed by, and subordinate to, the sacral king, was some kind of “shaman” or priestly figure, who established some kind of divination and curative method that to some extent relied upon “observation” and “trial” (primitive tribes, for example, have very extensive knowledge of the harmful and curative properties of plants and animals). And it might also be that often the ritual practices associated with the application of various medicines was therapeutically helpful as well—being ritually assured that you indeed remain within the community can be expected to improve your mental and physical health. But none of these ritual practices eschewed the use of scapegoating when the limits of control are exposed, and none can remain effective in mitigating events that irrevocably shattered or transformed the community, especially social events like wars and conquest. They can’t establish traditions that transcend the local community.

These conquests, along with the mass killing, displacement and enslavement they bring, restore sacral kingship on what are on one level more secure grounds: a god-emperor is not going to have his residence stormed and himself cannibalized during a really bad patch of weather—that’s what palace guards are for. It becomes possible to plan, to differentiate communal and political functions, to create cults and ideologies that help perpetuate the existing form of power. On another level, though, new forms of insecurity are built into this form of sovereignty: for one thing, empires create war machines and massive automatons constructed out of humans, and these machines require markets, and marketeers, and marketeers poach from vulnerable communities, turning them into abstracted human resources which in the long run cannot support the imperial “superstructure.” As David Graeber points out, out of these “materialistic” social conditions materialistic and anti-materialist modes of thought emerge—both those who say that all human interests can be reduced to the “pragmatic” and those who respond by saying, no, there is some human value that is beyond all price. Both attitudes actually help in creating what we know as “rationality,” i.e., both calculation of costs and benefits (looking at a plant’s properties, say, without any reference to its ritual uses) and a skepticism about sacrificial rituals that lead to a disaffection with those rituals. Once social crises can be attributed to actions that might not have been taken, that can be located in a specific time, place and agent, it becomes possible to explore a range of plausible “causes.”

None of this guarantees secure sovereignty, though—on the contrary, once a purpose is posited for sovereignty—once it’s no longer simply a given—whether that purpose be conformity with God’s will, the salvation of the soul of the members of the community, or peace and prosperity, the sovereign can be judged in terms of that purpose, and presumably deposed—which means that someone must have the power to determine whether those purposes are being served—pretty much the definition of imperium in imperio, or insecure power. The “modern” world, considered as the unfolding of insecure power on the terms of a marketized social order and “Axial Age” intellectual and moral concepts (which is to say on the very terms on which the ancient empires tentatively aimed at accomplishing the transition from sacral kingship), has proposed a kind of compromise, a breakthrough attempting to resecure power. We could call this compromise, the “self-disposing subject.” The individual on the market, who nevertheless eschews slavery, sacrifice and hostage-taking in general, enslaves, sacrifices, and takes hostage himself. Each of us is both enslaver and enslaved, priest and victim, kidnapper and hostage. We drive ourselves, work ourselves, school ourselves, indenture ourselves, to work, community, family and country. Of course, this is “ideology”—it is what Foucault called the “disciplinary” institutions that ensure that we construct ourselves this way. And it is these disciplinary institutions that seek to secure the state on new, scientific and therapeutic terms. But the disciplinary institutions do work, and we do indeed discipline ourselves, and we endure insults, violations and even violence with patience and calm that would have been unthinkable for just about any other people in the history of humanity. In accord with the approach I proposed above, I have no intention of ridiculing the self-disposing subject—there is certainly an increment of discipline included here that represents significant historical learning.

But the self-disposing subject has taken us as far as it can. This subject can orient us toward a center, vaguely—there is some sense of “the good of the whole” in self-disposition—and it also introduces “relays” between accumulated resentments and the arbitrary targeting of whoever stands out at the moment. It takes some of that targeting on itself—whatever the social crisis is, at least some of it must be my fault. But what it could never accomplish, intellectually or morally, was the task Plato set for moral thought, all the way back at the birth of metaphysics—seeing the moral individual as inextricable from a well-ordered social order. The training we undergo as self-disposing subjects compels us to set the imperium at odds with the imperio—the disciplinary institutions continually disgorge reformist projects for disciplining the state that its most exemplary disciples undertake as careers. The state needs to be more educated, more scientific, more compassionate, more therapeutic, according to the pedagogue, scientist, social worker, therapist. And “pedagogue,” “scientist,” “social worker” and “therapists” are masks of virtue we are all encouraged to wear. They all devolve into a single form of priesthood that acquires holiness by excoriating the existing order for its sins. Once the sins have all been forgiven (by those we have sinned against), maybe sovereignty will be secured. This process is compulsively decentering, endless and spiraling out of control.

The way to affirm and clarify the center while defusing convergence upon centrality is to recuperate superseded and marginalized remnants of sovereignty. I agree with RF’s patron theory, contending that unsecure power and the consequent social conflicts result from rival power centers using proxies to undermine one another. I would add that the pressure points patrons end up pushing and the proxies they employ mostly reside in already existing cultural forms. There was already an “Islamic extremism” combating more “moderate,” colonial/Westernized and “corrupt” forms of Islam, even if it took the usefulness of jihadis as proxies in the Cold War to elevate their profile to world-historical agents. I think it is very rare that proxies are created out of whole cloth. But what are these “already existing cultural forms” other than former and latent modes of sovereignty still attracting adherents within a divided system? A modern Catholic with even the slightest devotion to the Church as an institution is reproducing the memory of the Church as a sovereign power at odds with “temporal” ones. That’s why it might be possible for some enterprising political entrepreneur to use Catholics, somewhere, sometime, as a destabilizing force in a non-Catholic (or insufficiently papal-centered Catholic) country. All dual loyalties, however quiescent, involve obedience to opposing, perhaps emergent and residual, perhaps real and fantasized, sovereigns. There are always levers for a patron willing to try and err a bit to pull.

The imperative, then, is to claim those sovereign remnants in the name of center, or (when absolutely necessary) expose them for their incompatibility with the center and thereby nullify their imperatives. This seems to me a way of dealing with all group identities, which may be worthless as governing principles (there’s no coherent way to make “race” a basis for a social order—but, then again, the point of white racialism is really to preserve a form of sovereignty overridden by immigration and civic nationalism) but nevertheless useful in restoring workable hierarchies and middle level forms of responsibility (and extremely difficult or harmful to try to eradicate). The implication of stereotyping groups, and holding all members of the group responsible for the actions of each of its members is that there are no lone individuals, and that individual responsibility on moral terms abstracted from social order is a chimera. If you’re in this group, do your part to improve their behavior, because we’re holding you accountable; if you disavow this group, to which you appear to belong, then demonstratively join some other group so we can know who you are. Insisting on everyone’s responsibility for the actions of groups they belong to is a way to start reversing the abstraction of subjects effected by liberalism. But it’s also a good way of flipping discussions around: OK, you’re for “X”—what would governance, national, regional or institutional, in terms of X entail? (It won’t always be a rhetorical question.) Most of all, though, it may be a way of competing on the field of proxy formation, by focusing directly on the form and “quantum” of power applied by each utterance, act, organization, concept or institution. (Who is pushing for this to be said about Jews, gays, Muslims, or whoever right now? What else can be said about them to expose that power structure, that imperative order, and reveal the possibility of another?) In this way we can act morally, in the sense of heightened responsibility to the center.

I am currently working with the hypothesis that since the fall of sacral kingship human beings have had no idea what we are doing, politically, and that post-sacral kingship history has been a sustained attempt to, first, reproduce the radiating centrality of the ruler constitutive of sacral kingship while, second, eliminating the violent convergence towards the occupant of the center that permeates all social centers until repudiated in theory and practice. We want a king that is a permanent reference point for all social activity without feeling compelled to lynch him, or anyone else taking on a vaguely king-like role, as a way of resolving every social crisis. Democracy, for example, can be seen as an attempt to allow us to lynch the king at regularly scheduled times, and to spend every waking hour agitating for his dismemberment and consumption, with less convulsive consequences. Anarchistic ontologies in general for that matter, result from throwing one’s hands up and declaring the problem unsolvable—you can then blame the attempt to solve the problem as the cause of the problem, so fighting those trying to solve the problem and betting on there being some secret source of sovereignty deep in the recesses of each individual seems like the only thing left to try. Until this problem is genuinely solved, the problem of unsecure power cannot be solved. After all, are we certain that we can point to any time in history when power was secure? (Of course, we can distinguish between more and less secure sovereignties.) In this case, the problem of unsecure power is a genuine one, not one arbitrarily caused either by kings who wanted to seize more power and needed excuses, nor by potential alternative rulers who unreasonably mistrust the present ruler. Nor is it just mismanagement. This hypothesis seems to me generous to all participants, which is important not because generosity is a particularly important virtue, in life or hermeneutics, but because it helps us to keep in mind a wide range of possible intentions and motivations on the part of our political opponents, past and present. It allows us to derive sustenance from a range of political traditions, not only the few bright lights like Robert Filmer, but far more unlikely ones as well. Along with being open-ended the hypothesis I posit here is very narrowly focused on identifying a specific form of centrality: in other words, it should enable us to pose questions that we can actually answer in a way that advances the discipline.

Coupled with this hypothesis is a hypothesis regarding the originary scene upon which humanity emerged. The anthropomorphic hypothesis (which I don’t tire of referring the reader to Eric Gans for): due to the advanced mimetic capacity of that higher primate that became our predecessor, the desire for a central object led to a violent convergence toward the center that overrode the pecking order of the horde, creating the need for a new means of keeping order. The new means was the sign, a gesture of aborted appropriation by which all members of what is now a “community” showed each other that they would cease their movement toward the central object (now God, repelling their advance). Now, a further consideration of this hypothesis makes it clear that the extending of this gesture could not have been unanimous and spontaneous: one member would have had to have gone first without, we must assume, completely realizing what he has done until the others, successively, followed his example in a kind of arrest and reversal of mimetic rivalry and crisis. So, everyone participates in the scene equally (with “equally” simply meaning participation) while at the same time a minimal hierarchy exists, as it must exist for every single human action and institution.

The two hypotheses converge insofar as this minimal hierarchy is repeated, discovered, and resisted until one individual is capable of taking over the center, in place of (almost invariably) the animal “ancestor” and divinity that had occupied it. This, then, is the model for all human action and institution building: there is a founder, a priest-king, and there are “seconds” who order the founding so as to incorporate those to be initiated into and organized within it: managers, bureaucrats and ideologues, to put it cynically. And there are the rest, who operate within frames constructed for them, and from among whom a few are recruited for staffing the seconds. It seems reasonable to assume an originary institutional order of priests, warriors and craftsmen, with the king at the top of both priestly and warrior hierarchies. These functions are split off of the power of the sacral king, while remaining subordinate to the occupant of that office. It’s easy to see how the needs of the king, representing the community, would lead to delegations of power eventually threatening the unity of sovereignty: most obviously, war, whether defensive or offensive (a fairly tenuous boundary to say the least), would give power to the warriors, and then to the craftsman who must be enlarged and empowered to supply the warriors, in which case the priests can think of exploiting their legitimating function to support the warrior elite against the king, one warrior faction against another, etc. And war leads to conquest, requiring the incorporation of new populations, the designation of new institutions, the delegation of new powers. In each case, the problem of representing all the new agencies as “always already” incorporated into the sovereign structure presents itself.

War, conquest and empire building lead to the abstraction of individuals and their reduction to objects of exchange I have spoken about in the last couple of posts in my discussions of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This regularizes practices of hostage taking and (human sacrifice). Again, the point is not to take the opportunity of displaying our modern abhorrence of these practices—that abhorrence itself had to be produced, and perhaps has had some unintended side-effects that should cramp our self-congratulation. The point is to explore the problem, as yet unsolved, of creating forms of centrality that preclude violent convergence. Here, I’ll suggest that the process of abstraction, under conditions (I’m speculating here) of loosened sovereignty, inter-sovereign rivalry, and relative advantages in transportation technology (like sea-faring) created a new figure, also placed by Graeber at the origin of the modern (European) world: the “adventurer,” a kind of synthesis of warrior and merchant (itself a further evolution of the craftsman).  The adventurer is delegated his power by the sovereign—this, in fact, is the origin of the corporation as a politico-economic form. (Not a little of the adventurer remains in our modern CEOs.) But the adventurer, in lands far away, under unprecedented conditions, needing to make decisions on the spot, is in a position to force decisions upon the sovereign. He creates a trading center far away; he makes deals with the local sovereign to protect that center; he kills and replaces a local sovereign unable to provide the requisite protection; in doing so he makes alliances with other surrounding sovereigns, etc. He creates conditions the sovereign cannot easily walk away from.

Buckminister Fuller saw the world as being divided among and ruled by what he called the “great pirates” until very recently (the 19^th century). He would have included the sovereigns among the pirates. The novel development he was interested in (and saw himself as an exemplar of) was the scientist/engineer, whom we might see as a synthesis of all the previous castes: the scientist/engineer, who takes all of reality as a field of open inquiry and possible transformation to increase the power of humanity, has a bit of the priest, warrior, craftsman and adventurer in him—while being something qualitatively different at the same time. The scientist/engineer also represents a new form of sovereignty, over reality itself. For Fuller, the scientist/engineer has taken power away from the great pirates, first of all by making the pirates dependent upon him. He sees the decisive transformation taking place during World War I. Fuller was ecstatic about this transformation, making all kinds of utopian and sometimes bizarre predictions regarding imminent transformations in the human condition that would make all of previous history and thinking irrelevant. But we can be more modest and say that the “scientist” is a problematic figure whose precise role has yet to be worked out. Just as some persistent and distorting elements of the sovereign, like his priestliness, need to be burned off to solve the problem of centrality, the scientist needs to be shorn of some of his priestly aura, warrior combativeness and even pretensions to sovereignty. Maybe he’s just a craftsman, but, given the enormously expanded field of materials he has to work with, an extraordinary and unprecedented one.

One fairly inescapable refutation of free market ideology is the way each new technological development leads almost immediately to gigantic monopolies. No one even bothers to go through the motions of saying we should find competitors for Facebook or Google. But there are probably new innovations, creating new megaliths, yet to come, which might yet marginalize them—less by creating a better Facebook, though, than something rendering Facebook obsolete. There are certain predetermined trajectories to the seizure of centrality, and rule through adventurers and scientists encourages such seizures. The government could cut any of these new centers down to size, like it did to Microsoft in the 90s, but secure sovereignty would rule through these companies. How? Let’s return to our originary configuration: the central object “stops” all the members of the group from struggling against the interference of the others to appropriate it. It “tells” them to cease and desist, and they “listen.” In a sense, you could say they are talking to themselves, since the big dead bison doesn’t really talk; but something more complex is going on: they are communicating their intentions to each other through their common relation to that central object. It is the mediation of the object that “speaks.” The object is one step behind them and one step ahead. Behind, because it becomes meaningful by making itself vulnerable, by becoming the focus of their aggressive attentions; ahead, because it anticipates and thereby redirects their intentions.

When the Big Man and then the sacral king occupies he center, he deliberately uses this configuration—or, more precisely, the more effectively he uses it, the better he will rule. Everybody seeks out and demands the attention of the center, but not directly: in interactions and conflicts with other members, the form of conciliation or remediation promoted by the center is invoked; the center is there without being there. This allows for maximum influence with minimal risk, as convergence toward the center would have a series of hurdles to leap. The center evokes complaints and pleas, because it has established the forms in which complaints and pleas can be formulated and advanced. The center constantly takes in new information this way—all interactions between members of the group, and between different groups, cannot be planned by the central power, but they don’t have to be because the center becomes more and more like the network of relations formed by rules put forward by the center itself; rules that are formed out of the information attracted by the orientation of all toward the center. If I can tell everyone they have to act and speak as if I have the solution to all their problems, and I can get word of what they say and do, I will actually end up having the solutions to at least a lot of their problems, and they will be able to solve some of the rest.

So an absolutist state today would have to become a lot like the major power centers it rules through: information gathering and collating like Google, staging social interactions and networks like Facebook, efficient and productive like the best manufacturing firms. It’s kind of like those aliens in science fiction movies that mimic human beings. In order to do that, though, the activity of these corporations (and other institutions) has to be channeled to the center—everything each center does strengthens the sovereign, nothing they do must weaken or dilute it. The more this is the case, the more the institutions can be sovereign in their own sphere, and subordinates within those institutions sovereign in theirs. This is something the aliens never manage, unable as they are to refrain from proceeding to consume their model at the first opportunity. Sovereigns will grow wealthy and powerful this way, wealthy and powerful enough to keep looking past the current reach of explicit sovereign power to make the concept of sovereignty one put up for general inquiry and discourse. What does it mean for humans to exercise sovereignty? Over themselves, over their natural environment, over their traditions? Secure sovereignty would mean distributing the concern over secure sovereignty more widely, allowing for power to take on more and nuanced forms, secure in the knowledge that ultimately, even if extremely indirectly, all sovereignty exercised anywhere redounds to sovereignty exercised everywhere. It’s as if, spending years being obsessed with getting into the best physical shape possible, I can finally look around and start helping other people get into shape, because I’ve come to desire a more “shapely” world; and finally, I realize that the notion of “getting into shape” can take on all kinds of metaphorical meanings, that the world can be shapelier intellectually, spiritually, socially, aesthetically, etc., as well. Maybe these are the kinds of questions that would interest art and philosophy in a well order system.

To see yourself as an “individual” is to see yourself as a center of attention, with as many qualifications (titles, formal associations, histories) as possible obscured—the more stripped of qualifications, the more individualized. Liberalism projects the denuded individual back to the founding of society, but that individual is obviously a result of liberalism. In other words, liberalism’s self-legitimating misconception doesn’t detract from the reality of such an individual—but it has to change our assessment of its meaning. Individuals can be removed from their supporting and defining institutional dependencies, which means that the individual is defined against those institutions and dependencies. (Eric Gans sees this self-definition as the project of romanticism.) To be an individual is to be in a perpetual state of mutiny against whatever form of order most directly threatens to define one. Don’t look at me as a “_____,” the individual demands, look at me as… the other of “_____.” Individualism is a kind of negative gnostic theology.

David Graeber’s discussion in Debt: the First 5,000 Years emphasizes the violence intrinsic to this abstraction of individuals from their dependencies. Humanism posits the “human” as the highest value, and what makes anything a “value” is its commensurability and exchangeability with other values—and against what can human value be defined other than against other humans? Gans sees the romantic production of the individual as a means of enabling humans to participate in the market—the creation of an “anti-social” self-representation is a way of achieving value within society (Gans calls this the “constitutive hypocrisy of romanticism”). But in that case it is humans, rather than things, that are circulating on the market. We may not readily see or feel the violence of this competitive self-valuing, habituated as we are to it, but it becomes easier if we imagine removing the (also unnoticed) limits upon individualization that must still exist. What if we were actually to define ourselves constantly, indiscriminately, against every social dependency—friends, families, colleagues, acquaintances, etc.? Such behavior would be psychopathic. Moreover, defining yourself against dependencies don’t leave those dependencies unaffected—rather, it has a deeply corrosive effect. Our mutinies always target specific dependencies, and are aimed at extracting specific concessions—hence, they are best described as hostage taking. Not the market itself, but the “market economy,” is a system of hostage exchange, of more and less direct kinds. It is promoted by those with the most to gain by sowing discord and disorder.

Now, the expanded economy of hostage taking follows the discrediting of the restricted economy of human sacrifice constitutive of sacral kingship and ancient imperial orders. Since there is no way back to sacrificial order, even if we wanted it (which we can’t, really), the central problem for absolutism is a non-sacrificial recentering. Absolutism extends the basic principles of absolutism—a rejection of divided power, or imperium in imperio; and the assumption that all that is said and done within a sovereign territory is commanded or permitted by the sovereign—to the entire social order. To give someone responsibility for a specific institution or task is to provide them with all the means for fulfilling that responsibility along with freedom from interference, as long as the responsibility is indeed fulfilled. As opposed to the abstractive process of liberalism, absolutism would involve a concentrative process—placing everyone within orders in which their responsibilities are made clear. All contemporary issues, such as technological development, “bioethics,” social media, etc., would be assessed in these terms: how does a particular possibility make it possible to concentrate rather than abstract. The elimination of the abstraction of “the human” removes all potential sacrificial targets. Imagine that instead of singling out individuals as celebrities or villains, or getting suckered by the mysticisms of “human rights,” we were to assign responsibility for the actions of individuals (whether praiseworthy or blameworthy) to the executive within the supervising institution. But it’s wrong to say “we” would do the assigning; rather, it would be the sovereign that treats any act that might turn an individual into a cynosure as a problem for the reform of some institution.

That, in fact, is the defining purpose of the sovereign: to maximize individual responsibility for the institutions that maximize the embeddedness of the individual in the institution. This process of individualization through embeddedness ramifies throughout each institution, and is the object of the discourses and dialogues comprising the life of the institution. What we would always be talking about is how to enhance each individual’s responsibility within an order that thereby comes to be defined by increasing degrees of responsibility, and in that sense complexity. Linguistically, this process takes the form of naming—baptizing, so to speak, new roles to be filled by individuals. To name is both to reify, to create a role independent of whoever fills it, and to singularize, insofar as we can always distinguish between those who more or less adequately or authoritatively “inhabit” that name. the reification is then less an alienation or objectification than the creation of a new set of capacities. Names are the most basic link between individuals and the social order—that’s why everyone must have one. (Try to imagine a social order in which most people have names, but there are quite a few without.) Intellectually, naming is aligned to conceptualization: concepts are names for previously unseen objects, actions and processes. Once such things are named we can predicate them in various ways; just as important is that we can receive commands from the name. The first command is to refer to the named object within the sovereign order of names.

A (there are quite a few) good way to think about names is as follows. A is the daughter of B and C; the sister of D and E; the grandchild of F, G, H and J; the cousin of K, L, M, N and O; the niece of… the great-granddaughter of…., and so on. The perfect name would reference all of these relations, in the relative importance they have in that social order (how distant from siblings are cousins considered to be, in marriage and inheritance law or custom, etc.); it would also reference revered ancestors, both familial and those of the community; it would affirm more recent heroes, like the general who won the last war (in both cases, really just more distant relatives, founders of lines, we might say). In giving actual names to children, parents select from among all these relations and references, and thereby position the child within the field of the system of names. To name the child after a pop star is to announce the priority of celebrity over reverence of ancestors—naming after an ancestor is a possibility that has been rejected. But the child will also be given a middle name, and might be called by a nickname, and might be drawn elsewhere into the naming field. Again, concepts operate the same way, reorganizing and centering a conceptual field which gives even an apparently familiar concept a new force.

Naming is the way the sovereign and his delegates (those who have been named by him) incorporate and authenticate institutions, authorities and practices. This is also why names are so important politically—it has often been noted how many political movements and even individuals have been named by their enemies, converting names intended as insults into badges of honor. Contemporary meming is essentially naming—each side trying to make names stick on the other (think about the origin of the word “branding,” and how it has come to be used). Whether or not a name sticks, and whether or not you can appropriate it provides a good metric for how likely your position is to endure. If your political enemies can shower you with insults that define you and you’re not able to transform them into badges of honor that’s a good sign either that you’re on the wrong side or your side is lacking in conceptual force.

The more “anti-fragile” your own position, the more you will be able to inhabit the various ways you have named yourself and been named. This is all part of the process of “auditioning,” that is, performing in such a way as to attract power centers interested in restoring order. What could be more desired by those recruiting an onomastician-in-chief than those proven in the study and deployment of names? This is not a superficial discipline, even if it works on surfaces—naming goes all the way down. The center is always named, and there is always a center. As soon as you take on or are given a name you have a persona, even if that persona is defined by the repudiation of the name. The name plugs you into the command order. Thinking politically is to a great extent the ability to think within the names imposed upon one or adopted. Any designation (e.g., “racist”) mobilizes a whole regime of commands that includes the named and others (what they must do to the one so designated). Thinking politically involves figuring out which commands to obey and when—some immediately, some in modified form, some at a yet to be determined future time (commands themselves are time sensitive, but not always equally so). Obey the ones that enhance embeddedness and extend the constitutive traditions of the institution (e.g., “which understanding of ‘racism’ are we working with here…?”) and defer to the extent possible those subversive of articulated obligations (“apologize!”).

Saturating the world with names saturates the world with sovereignty. Whenever one inhabits a name that can spread its shoots through the field of names and anchor it one imagines a sovereignty that would formalize that designation. Absolutism is interested in making dependencies and embedments explicit; liberalism wants to deploy designations as sites of conflict, which is to say inscribe them with loopholes providing for shirking and defection. The most formidable liberal names (like “racist”) are justifications for shirking, defection, and the parasitic blackmail one must live on as a result. Reactionary Future’s proxy theory, which designates political actors as proxies (“rebellious tools”) of some powerful actor suggests the need to distinguish between titles that are, we might say, “pre-proxified,” and those that are proxy-resistant because they are located within the pyramid of commands. The pre-proxified have the loopholes; the proxy resistant designations come with embedments built in and the means to create further embedments. It’s a difference between namings that demand further abstraction (disembed from your traditions, from the chain of command you find yourself in) and namings that command further concentration (clarify the chain of command, embed more explicitly in your traditions). Once we are saturated in names, there are no more abstract humans; there is the sovereign presiding over the field of names.