GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

The Big Man, in archaic social orders, becomes big by out-gifting his competitors. This out-gifting must be understood not simply as giving out goods, but as including “services,” and above all the service of “leadership.” The Big Man renders everyone dependent upon him, entirely for “merit-based” reasons, and this is a debt which can never be paid back. Out-gifting others therefore becomes a model for the initial power differential. The Big Man’s occupation of the center is always precarious, though—his capacity for distribution can lapse, or be out-done by some new competitor. Making the occupation of the center permanent, then, would require always already having given unrepayable gifts—such a gift must be cosmogonic, i.e., mediating between the cosmos and the community, providing for the good will of the gods, as manifested in sufficient rainfall, prey animals, protection from other communities, etc. This is sacral kingship, which is itself unstable due to the variability of all those conditions which are not, in fact, under the ritual control of the king. No matter how large the territories over which the sacred king rules, these conditions provide at least a residue of fragility—even if the king’s gift is making the Nile flow and sustain all of Egypt, it’s always possible that the Nile will dry up. Still, at a certain point, sacred kingship can provide itself with substantial hedges against being “refuted” by the cosmos.

These hedges also minimize the degree of testing to which the competence of the ruler is subjected to. He delegates, and since those to whom power is delegated are less secure in their positions, which is to say, have fewer hedges, they must be more competent—and more competent means obligating their subordinates in the manner of the Big Man. The king must at least be minimally competent enough to assess the competency of his subordinates—incompetence past a point would introduce instability at the top. Meanwhile, the more his subordinates are able to hedge against reverses in conditions that might undermine their power, the more they are able to target their mode of obligating their subordinates in coercive, rather than reciprocal ways. The most effective way of doing so would be to indebt them monetarily—indebtedness beyond the ability to repay, assuming that repayment can be enforced, is tantamount to slavery—and, eventually, becomes more than “tantamount to.” The introduction of money in the ancient world was first of all aimed at creating such a relationship between individuals bound to local communities with their own hierarchies and the imperial order, which required vast manpower for productive and military purposes. And the capacity to indebt and enslave entails a corresponding decline in the need for competence, which is to say, reciprocal, asymmetrical, obligation.

We can then see the periodic debt forgiveness in the ancient world (the “jubilee”), and the ultimately eschatological significance such forgiveness took on in the Axial Age religions in terms of the need to restore competency and clarity in the chains of command—as opposed, as its contemporary theorists tend to assume, to embodying some revolutionary, anarchic impulse (although, no doubt, such fantasies were often generated as well). What debt, and ultimately money, do, in other words, is represent hedges against direct accountability on that part of those in power—direct accountability, that is, to some competent (in the sense given above) superior. Those who can’t do, issue money and create debts. Of course, then, managing money and debts becomes something one can become competent in. Competence in this field is in that case a marker of the insecurity of the central authority. To the extent that total skunkworks is unattainable (or, at least, unattained), hedges against direct accountability will be created, and money competence will emerge to “measure” that.

The increasingly popular argument by Michael Hudson (https://renegadeinc.com/he-died-for-our-debts-not-our-sins/), upon which David Graeber’s argument depends, is that the Axial Age religions were really revolts against enslaving debt, in favor of restoring (or radicalizing?) the Jubilee Year of debt forgiveness. All that stuff about sin, repentance and eternal life is really a revision by the power mongers once Christianity (for example) became a state religion—that is, it becomes about making the poor accountable, rather than the rich. Anarchism must reject the claim that social hierarchies allow for the emergence of differentiated competencies: that some individuals can be closer to the center than others makes it possible to discover all kinds of new ways in which one can be closer to the center. But anarchists must also project back a modern egalitarian morality to the archaic, which is to say to elide the necessary relation between the community and a center. Debt is not simply imposed on a debt free “primitive communist” community, any more than kingship is simply imposed on a non-hierarchical order: as Graeber himself shows in On Kingship, “egalitarian” communities are in fact governed by the most rigid and demanding other-worldly hierarchies; similarly, the central object always obligates the community. The individual who occupies the center doesn’t create the center—to believe so is to throw us back into the most naïve Enlightenment accusations against “priests” as “tricking” the people. The logic of sacrifice needs to be broken, regardless of the need to restrain or abolish “predatory debt”—Graeber seems to be aware of this, to some extent, as his very ambivalent relation to Rene Girard’s scapegoat theory in On Kingshipseems to indicate.

Money is invented to distribute to soldiers away from home who need to purchase goods since they are themselves bereft of productive capacities, and markets are established to provide the soldiers with something to buy. But buy for what? You didn’t just buy a steak and bring it home to fire up on the grill; you bought goods to bring to the communal sacrifice. We can assume every meal was communal, and therefore sacrificial. A strict division of loot would be carried out according to merit, with Achilles getting the most and others in accord with their past and expected contributions; the distribution of money would probably also be done differentially, but would already involve a derogation from the straightforward recognition of merit by an accountable leader. We can already see some hedging here. It is the derogation from competence represented by debt and money that encourages fantasies of a complete abolition of debt, obligation, and servitude in an apocalyptic revelation. We can see two tendencies here: on the one side, a more orderly sacrificial process, integrated into a more complex economic and social order, regulated by an increasingly conceptually sophisticated justice system; on the other side, an all-against-one recrudescence of scapegoating. The scapegoating would emerge more readily among the poor, who have less interest in preserving the imperial system, but such tendencies would be encouraged by sections of the elite—perhaps in the name of restoring competence, perhaps in the name of resisting such restoration. Meanwhile, among the elites criticisms of a necessarily improvised and “distorted” justice system would emerge, generating intellectual models of more “cosmic” forms of justice. These contending models both open intellectual space for questioning the sacrificial system and generate resentments that can be used for intensifying it.

This Gordian knot can only be cut by discrediting scapegoating through the exposure of the bad faith of trying to purify the community by excising some offending member. And this exposure can only be accomplished by individuals knowingly occupying potentially violent centers—that is, individuals who develop a new kind of “competency,” that of eliciting and attracting the resentments of those who wish the mimetic sources of their desire to remain occluded. These are first of all prophets, saints and martyrs, but as the threshold for dangerous mimetic violence is raised, such dispositions become more widely distributed, and are simply “morality.” Now, the Hudson-Graeber position is worth keeping in mind here, because money and debt are no doubt bound up in the question of morality. Once sacrificial logic is broken (or, to the extent that it is broken, or, more pessimistically, weakened sufficiently for us to proceed beyond its specter), we can examine systematically the relation between competencies and money as a relation between ordered and at least somewhat disordered imperative orders. What is moral is to determine what each is capable of doing, and to give to each the means of fulfilling the task—and to protect each—to stand in the breach for each—against sniping, undercutting, bluffing, addition of new, unworkable demands, and so on. This morality holds both for those who are capable of much and those who are capable of little, however much it will be manifested differently in each case. Judgments regarding money and debt will therefore be moral, in this sense: they might, immorally, be used to inflate the hedge against the deposition of the incompetent by expanding indebtedness and dispossession; or, they can be used to make visible, measure and minimize the hedges already there, by privileging competence over further hedging wherever possible.

In the contemporary world, we clearly see both tendencies in abundance. The connection between debt, globalism and victimary politics examined by Eric Gans in his first two and final “Unified Field Theory” Chronicles exposes this nexus of incompetence, debt expansion, dispossession and scapegoating very well. The movement on the other side is toward sovereignty, borders, protection of competencies from political contravention, the re-establishment of distinctions between moral and criminal behavior—new, nationalist economic models, privileging productivity over finance, correspond to this movement. Continued movement in that direction depends upon a widening recognition that liberalism has become incompatible with competence, in any field—to maintain competent practices you must either insulate yourself from liberalism or pay it ransom. This will become unsustainable and people will have to choose. It will be helpful to develop an economic theory that posits clear chains of commands and disciplinary spaces as the source of value.

Since it seems obvious to speak about liberalism as a derogation from a period of more secure and legitimate authority, it follows that we have had secure, absolutist rule, have somehow lost it, and must now try to get it back. But, of course, the further back you go in seeking the causes or crucial events in this derogation, the more it becomes clear that power has never been completely secure, there has never been an unqualified shared relation to the center and that even moments of good rule within teleologically articulated social orders contained the “seeds” of degeneration. One of the fascinating and instructive things about Graeber and Sahlins’s On Kings is just how varied the forms of kingship have been, and how obviously flawed each and every one of them. But what is equally evident in any historical survey is that there is always a center, and the fact that people accepted even such bizarre arrangements as some of the “divine” kingships Graeber discusses, where, for example, it may be necessary for the king to periodically carry out random massacres so that his people will know that he is alive, is if anything a demonstration of the unintelligibility of any social order without a center. Even a horrible center is better than trying to imagine its absence. In that case, we can reverse our perspective and replace any lingering nostalgia for ideal kingdoms of the past and see ourselves as participating in the single project that encompasses all of humanity, the revelation of the commands of the center. All previous relations to the center can be studied for their accomplishments and failures, and, more importantly than either, the possible terms and forms of a community’s relation to its center that each reveals.

The originary relation to the center is, of course, that of the hypothesized originary scene, in which mimetic desire generates the mimetic fear that issues in the issuing of the sign modeled on the central object’s vulnerability and power to impose restraint. We resent the center for imposing restraint, while that resentment itself enhances the center’s constraining power, as it locks our attention on it, making it the source of meaning, of augurs of life, prosperity and death. In the most radical act in human history, the Big Man acts on this resentment of the center, appropriates the center, and becomes himself the object of resentment and source of life and meaning. There are no rules regarding how this relationship is to be played out, and the resentments and counter-resentments between center and periphery, and along the periphery itself, could not be mapped out in advance. All of the rich panoply of forms of rule explored by Graeber and Sahlins can easily be analyzed in terms of a particular trajectory taken by some field of resentments around the center—they realize something like this on one level, as Graeber periodically points out how relevant Girard’s theory of scapegoating is to so many of the arrangements he studies, while, of course, keeping his anarchist hopes alive by asserting that Girard’s theory is ultimately all wrong.

Those on the periphery model themselves on the center—so, in primitive communities with a sacred, ritual center the members of the community will participate in and inhabit (or be inhabited by) the mythological figures generated out of their ritual relation to the center. When a human comes to occupy the center, the members of the community model themselves on that, and come to see themselves as potential occupants of the, or, and this is crucial, somecenter. This is what the “individual” is: a center, and a possible center. To be an individual is to imagine vectors of attention directed toward oneself, and to imagine oneself arranging those vectors, drawing in some, deflecting others. The Axial Age acquisitions, which exposed the incompatibility of mass sacrifice with civilized order, aim at spreading centrality throughout the social order. Everyone must see him or herself as a center, and so everyone must be enabled to do so in a way that preserves a social and moral center. We can say that liberal and romantic forms of individuality were attempts to do this; we can also say they were disastrous attempts, because they set the individual against the social center, as if the individual could only stand out against the norm, thereby creating a social order predicated upon reciprocally hostile and centripetal centers. But the romantic individual, as Gans shows through his studies of romanticism, especially through the figure of Rousseau, is also trying to imitate Jesus, by displaying in his own person the universal hostility a universal benevolence toward all humankind inevitably brings upon one. The problem with the romantic individual is really that he wants to monopolize this attention, to exploit it politically and on the market. The moral use of attention centered upon the self is to display the possibilities for converting resentment into love, in which case one may accept, deflect, or reverse the slings and arrows, but in any case will do so in such a way that the one slinging and shooting sees and displays, if not the arbitrariness, at least the over-determination of his show of resentment. In this way, one converts one’s centrality into a moral and esthetic sign precisely by making space for other centers.

The more individuals turn themselves into such moral and esthetic signs, the more aligned they will be with the social center, and the entire system of “works” that ultimately signify that center. One thing that really enrages the liberal and especially romantic individual is the fact that an entire world consisting of institutions and technological imperatives pre-exist the individual and are essentially indifferent to his existence. This massive reality diminishes even the fantasy of killing and replacing the king, because it would all still be in place; and, if one intensifies one’s fantasy so as to demolish it all, what would be the point of being king? Part of the purpose of building up that imperative order is to ensure, in a world of spreading centrality, that the social center is clearly distinct from any individual one. The resentment toward the humanized center is thereby transformed into resentment toward the dehumanized or reified apparatuses supporting that center. This resentment is more easily converted into love, because it provides for a wealth of positions of responsibility tending to the apparatus. You can resent the one who got promoted over you, you can resent the boss who keeps screwing everything up, you can resent the fact that your sector of the economy is neglected despite the evident importance of the work done there, but all these resentments are made intelligible and acceptable insofar as they are framed as attempts to improve the system. Your resentment may be overwhelming your concern for clarifying the center, which is to say you might be wrong in your criticism, but you must, to maintain the level of centrality to which you have become accustomed, stand ready to be corrected in those criticisms (which means being willing to accept the centrality of others). A well ordered system would encourage these developments, while cutting off recourse to more desperate attempts to assert centrality, through attention grabbing acts of violence, for example.

Now, I would like to use this more expanded analysis of centrality, or centered ordinality, than I have yet given, to solve another problem I have been working on in these posts. That is the problem of the (meta)linguistic boundary, the boundary between using language and directing attention to the use of language. I am hypothesizing that the specific kind of metalanguage that emerged through writing, as a part of the emergence of “classic prose” as the ideal form of discourse, is the source of the “metaphysics” that pretty much all post-medieval thinkers have been trying to dismantle, and for good reason—regardless of how aware any of these thinkers may have been to this dimension of the problem, “metaphysics,” or the assumption of the primacy of the declarative sentence, represents a permanent imperium in imperiothat irremediably hinders attempts to construct centered orders. The power of metaphysics lies in the assumption that certain truths stand outside of the centered order, and can therefore be used as a standard to judge any such order. This shifts sovereignty from the occupant of the social center to whoever makes the most compelling claim to represent the superior metaphysical order, whether that order is called “God’s will,” “human nature,” the “laws of nature,” the “laws of the market,” or anything else. So, the problem, in equal parts moral, political and spiritual, is to have a way of commenting on uses of language that feeds back into the centered order, that clarifies the center itself, and draws out its commands, rather than setting up an external standard.

The way I have framed the question is in terms of the metalinguistic dimension of natural semantic primes like “think,” “want,” “know,” “say,” “good” and so on. These words seem exclusively words used to refer directly to things in the world, in particular, human activity. “Consider,” for example, is metalinguistic because it tells us about how someone is “thinking,” and is therefore an implicit commentary on the use of “think.” The metaphysical reading of such words is to posit an essential reality in which they represent an internal or transcendent quality or activity of which the word is a secondary reflection—but this is just a case of commentary or “mention” overriding use, which in the case of all these words is far more variegated than any essence posited could suggest. But the simplest way of eliciting the metalinguistic dimension of any word or, more precisely, any utterance, is by deploying it as a comment on a previous use of language. When one person responds to something said by another, the metalinguistic element of the reply lies in the way that response singles out, accentuates, draws attention to, some elements of the previous utterance rather than others.

Left at that, we could see this as an endless sequence of responses which, for no discernable reason, highlight some feature or another of the previous utterance. But it’s not left at this, because any response is seeking to maintain linguistic presence, and that will determine the nature of the response and the commentary on the previous utterance. And the way to maintain linguistic presence is by showing the previous utterance in its relation to the center, or some center, a center to which the new utterance also claims some relation. On the originary scene, whoever first emitted the sign couldn’t have quite known what he was doing until others iterated (responded to and commented on) his sign; even more, his own sign could not have been anything more than a more formalized version of another’s more instinctive hesitation—the non-instinctive hesitation is a “reading” of the instinctive variety in relation to a shared center. So, when I respond to another’s utterance, I see them in a relation to the center, which I can share, while in seeing them (while they don’t see themselves), I attend to something new in that relation to center, making that my relation to it. We develop abstract concepts around which disciplinary spaces can be constructed in this way by putting some words to a specialized use, for the purposes of that disciplinary space, in drawing attention to uses of language in relation to a particular center.

So, the primarily “useful” primes become metalinguistic, or their metalinguistic dimension is elicited, when we think about thinking, or want to want, or know about knowing, or say things about the things we say. We can, in each utterance we hear, imagine or hypothesize what that utterance is responding to, how the words it is using, the way it is piecing together chunks of language, are themselves implicitly commenting on another utterance. Here we can conduct all kinds of thought experiments, in which we imagine two or more utterances identical in every way but one (perhaps some subtle difference in tone or context), and that difference would comprise the point of creation of the shared center in which the utterances participate. All of our disciplines, even those in the physical sciences, operate this way, because they are all predicated upon revising existing hypotheses and the paradigms enabling them. We can be aware that this is all we are doing, and that this is quite enough. The center wants us to enter some proximate field of utterances and generate a new shared center, one that reveals something not yet visible in the center enabling the utterance. The shared project of ordering our centers therefore has its linguistic grounding, which means its grounding in meaning, and in thinking and knowing—a grounding with no ground other than the inquiry into the center itself.

Here’s why I talk so much, and so abstractly, about language: my goal is to develop a way of thinking that would really be a way of speaking and writing that would dismantle and reassemble the utterances in which it participates and would do so in the process of participating; while at the same time just talking. This implies the possibility of people who would want to train themselves and each other in this manner of discourse. Why? Because it would make it possible to apply more focused and concentrated force upon all the weak points of the reigning ontology and construct a solid one out of its ruins. Central to this project is an account of technology, and ultimately contemporary technology, in terms of originary grammar. I touched a bit on this in a recent post (Technology and Magic, Doings and Happenings), but that is still preliminary. Ultimately, we need a way of creating an absolutist ontology out of the ways people already speak about communications and information technology. I’ll take another run at it here.

I must first review the concept of “imperative exchange,” which I have made much use of and still see much promise in. I should emphasize that this is not a concept of Gans’s, but one I have developed through a reading of some of the early chapters of Gans’s The End of Culture. An ostensive culture is one that takes for granted the presence of the object, so only gestures are necessary—the most basic elements of ostensive culture are warnings which can be assumed to be immediately intelligible, like “look out!” These kinds of utterances can sound a lot like imperatives, and can even be imperatives, grammatically speaking, but if I tell you to “look out!” because there’s a bee flying around your ahead I’m not telling you what to do; it may not even clear what you should do, other than be aware. Human culture was originally ostensive, but it’s clear that it still contains a thick ostensive layer, and always must—the fact that we still have names testifies to that.

The imperative emerges (is discovered/invented) when the ostensive fails, or is issued “inappropriately.” One person names or refers to an object assumed to be present—the situation here must be less immediately urgent than “look out!,” perhaps involving some kind of cooperation—when the object is in fact absent, leading the other person, who wants to maintain linguistic presence, to retrieve it. Now we have an imperative. There is a lot involved here—to see how much procure the forthcoming re-issue, in streamlined form, of Gans’s seminal The Origin of Language—the beginnings of social hierarchy, but also a kind of intellectual hierarchy insofar as the person receiving the order understands the desire of the other better than the one giving orders does; we also have the beginning of a specifically human temporality, because, unlike the immediacy of the ostensive, here there is at least some lapse between the sign and its “completion.”

On the originary scene the center doesn’t “speak,” but for the members of the group the center is repelling their desire—that is, a kind of intentionality is attributed to the center, and registered in the sign, but this intentionality cannot be given “voice.” This becomes possible with the imperative. It becomes possible to make requests of the center, and to construct commands coming from the center. It’s impossible to imagine the members of the group making requests without framing that request in terms of their response to a command, since doing so would be tantamount to placing themselves outside of the sign and community. By the same token, compliance with any command from the center must be considered as looking toward an ultimate reward—first, it was the consumption of the central object itself, but as new imperatives are developed, the rewards to be expected from obedience will become more varied. Hence my claim that all interactions with the center take the form of an imperative exchange.

The next step is to posit that imperative exchange constitutes all of our relations with objects. If I work with a hammer, I am commanding the hammer to drive in the nail, while the hammer is constructed in such a way as to command me to hold it and swing it in just such a way. We see this most clearly when we make a mistake, or misuse a tool, and are forced (commanded) to ask, in essence, what does this thing want me to do with it? If we fix, refine, or improve our things, we are stepping back and giving them second order imperatives: we are telling them to work a certain way so as to tell us to work a certain way. With the development of technology, “we” (this “we” becomes increasingly problematic) create an imperative order, in which we command things to command other things to command yet other things… until, finally, the command makes its way to the end users. The end users then engage in imperative exchange with the technological object as it presents itself to them, which of course occludes the entire technological or imperative order that brought it to them. Facebook or Twitter users could, of course, propose changing some elements of the social media they use, but only a very few could ever do so with the entire medium, and all the decisions made along the way, present in their thinking—and even if they are aware of it, there’s nothing they can do regarding the longer decision chain, and will ultimately end up busying themselves with the available options.

Along the way, of course, the development of the declarative proceeds parallel to imperative culture. To recapitulate briefly several earlier discussions, the declarative identifies something that prevents the completion of the imperative exchange. The earliest discourse was myth, which involved narratives of the central figure—usually some animal. The animal-ancestor created the group, supplies the group with its necessities, punishes the group, fights against the groups enemies, offers words of wisdom, etc. If the people were saved, it was because they needed saving, and if they needed saving it was because they failed to uphold their end of an imperative exchange, or perhaps the central figure didn’t hold up its end (it must have its reasons), and the narrative comes along to demonstrate what needs to be done to bring the system of exchange back into accord. It eventually becomes possible to tell stories of members on the group, modeled on the stories of the central figure—what I have been calling “anthropomorphization.” Within the mythical and magical system, the distance between creators and end users remains very small—one could say it hardly exists at all. When we are nostalgic for “unalienated” conditions, in which all members of the community were in sync with each other and therefore with themselves, that is what we are yearning for.

And it is, of course, what we can’t have. “Alienation” begins with the usurpation of the center by a member of the group, the Big Man. All imperative exchanges henceforth go through the Big Man. The Big Man himself emerges out of the process of imperative exchange: in the gift competition, whereby various tribal chiefs try to best each other in showing their ability to provide for the community, the Big Man is the one who so out-gifts the others that the competition is rendered moot. The Big Man is first of all the center of distribution: gifts come to him and he recycles them back out to the community. This in itself won’t change the system of production, but once the Big Man must mobilize the community in battle against other communities, led by other Big Men, and once the victorious Big Man dislocates the “subjects” of his enemies and must find some use for them himself, new modes of production are initiated, first of all based on slavery and war. The new modes of production require at least some degree of abstraction, as the sovereign now acts directly upon subjects outside of their established social settings and traditional modes of life.

The imperative, as I suggested above, contains a double asymmetry: on one side, it is a command, in which one person obeys another; on the other side, what is for the imperator or commander already done (the imperative for the one issuing it is really just a time-delayed ostensive) is for the recipient of the imperative a mere possibility. The one who will compose a declarative exploring the conditions of fulfilling the imperative will be he who has to carry it out. This is essentially the relation between the king and the priests: the priests need to construct a reality that enables the king’s command. This was the function of astrology, the foremost “science,” physical and political, in the ancient kingdoms. The heavens represented a hierarchical, orderly world, just like the one on earth, and the high degree of predictability studies of the movements of the stars provided implied that such control was also possible on earth. The technological accomplishments of antiquity, their imperative order of things, comprised mostly extending the power and celebrating the glory of the God Emperor.

The axial acquisitions involved making the originary scene, rather than duplications of the worldly hierarchy, the model for both “priests” and “merchants.” The ruler must do justice and must give back to his people. The imperative order of things is gradually extended from massive hydraulic projects and war to industry. The model stays the same: the new proletariat is driven off their ancestral lands and atomized in cities, just like the slave hordes were once ripped from their now-destroyed communities. The industrialists are essentially generals. The command chain, leading from those who initiate the imperative order of things, and going through all those who extend the chain and standardize the “links,” until the end users, keeps getting longer. The end users are now located somewhere in the production chain as well, but the most constrained end users are also those most distant from the origins of the production chain. The chain becomes more communicative, as innovations at one end transform the possibilities for those at the other end more rapidly. A technological system, like a discipline, is self-referential: everything signifies insofar as it directs us from one element of the system to another. Unlike the discipline, which the absolute imperative retrieved in the axial age commands us to form, the origin of the technological system is obscured by the system itself.

This really is the fundamental problem of modernity, the one chewed over endlessly by Marxists and traditionalists alike: how to address the incommensurability between the constantly transformed and extended imperative order of things and those who occupy only one link on the chain? This really means everyone, even if the alienation is most evident with those who overwhelming receive, and rarely issue, commands. But one more thing: the development of post-axial imperative orders of things coincided with the post-axial deconstruction of the imperative order of people—industrial and post-industrial armies and reserve armies have also been pawns and proxies in the power struggles of the elites; and, just as important, the imperative order of things has never been made to conform to the imperative order of people. The state, in its process of centralization (creating an iron chain of command that somehow keeps producing broken links) has made itself a vehicle of masters of the imperative orders of things who want political order to be modeled on their own self-representation to the end users. The end users are locked into the liberal ratchet while the imperative order of things verticalizes and the imperative order of sovereignty sprawls (which sprawling in turn provides the model for orders to the end users). “Alienation” doesn’t quite cover it.

The path to order is to seek out a straight line of imperatives, as far back as you can go, and start obeying them. Let your declaratives expose the reciprocity that line of imperatives demands of you, and point out where those imperative exchanges have failed. At least some of those failed imperative exchanges can be reconstructed, and you can treat some power center as if it is more explicit about its place in the imperative order than it appears to be. That makes you a producer in the sovereign order, with some relation, however distant, to a possible end user. Producers attract other producers. Most of us will remain end users in the imperative order of things. Still, anyone can get to work on exposing the imperatives bearing down on the end user. Perhaps the most prominent one right now is to present yourself as data to be looted. But what could be more social than the data that regularly peels off of us? Our resistance to our conversion into data might simply the humiliation of having our final liberal illusions shredded. Data is itself converted back into the command to adhere to the norm, to contribute to the averaging out. Each such command can be placed on the boundary between absolutist and liberal ontologies: “they” want your data to sell you things, to sell you yourself as someone who transcends the data; but data unrolls difference after difference that the liberal order wants veiled but which can be so easily exposed with just a little nudge, a marginal inappropriateness in your obedience to some command. The averaging out has more than a hint of mob rule, in which the imperative follows directly upon the ostensive; that’s a time to hearken back to an imperative that has been raised above the ostensive and provides a little model of secure rule: a model, a norm, rather than an average.

For originary grammar, the history of civilization is the history of the distancing of the declarative speech form from the imperative. In the mythical and magical world, declaratives are subordinate to, and provide narrative structure for, imperative exchanges. To review: the primary relation to the center is through the ostensive sign, through which the community confers sacrality on the central object by deferring consumption of that object. The imperative speech form emerges from the inappropriate ostensive—one interlocutor names the object, but the object isn’t there, at which point the other interlocutor supplies the object. That accidentally discovered effect of the speech act can now be repeated deliberately. This takes place on the margins of the community, once the threshold of significance has been lowered sufficiently so that a variety of less than sacred objects can be named, for various purposes and not just the reinforcement of communal cohesion (although the accomplishment of any communal purpose at least indirectly reinforces that cohesion). Once the imperative has been discovered/invented, it can now be brought to the center and used to enhance ritual practice: requests can be made of the center, but if members of the community make requests of the center, they must imagine the center acceding to those requests only in exchange for obedience to a command from the center itself—a command that is a prolongation of the original “refusal” on the part of the object to be consumed, its repulsion of the desires of the group. This is what I have been calling “imperative exchange.” The declarative, as well, emerges on the margin, in the way I have examined in some recent posts, through the failed imperative, but also comes to be put to use in constructing narratives of “activity” at the center, activity that are in turn re-enacted ritually. In Gans’s account in The End of History, this is the origin of myth—narratives of the central figure surviving the predatory designs on it, conferring the gift of life upon the human community, and interacting through commands and benefits with that community. As long as we remain within mythological thought, and its magical adjunct, the declarative remains subordinate to the imperative—even if the declaratively constructed narratives, by virtue of the essence of the declarative, which is to at least defer the imperative exchange, must raise, in however muted a way, some question regarding its viability.

This liberation from the imperative is always relative: in refusing one imperative (in the first instance because one simply sees no way of fulfilling it), any declarative allows another one to be heard—an older one, but also one informed by the limits of the imperative exchange in question. To imagine we could be free of imperatives is to imagine we could be free of ostensives, which is to imagine ourselves outside of the world—a fantasy that is implicit in a more fully declarative culture. The imperative channeled by the declarative is, first of all, “don’t fulfill your side of the imperative exchange you have entered into”; but, second, this further entails directing your attention to something you couldn’t have noticed within that exchange—some consequence of continuing in that exchange that would ultimately cancel it. An imperative always comes from a center, so the more absolute imperative comes from a center both more ancient (reaching further back to the originary scene) and more powerful than the center one has been in commerce with. This absolute imperative is, over time, pared down to “don’t break linguistic presence,” and this entails bringing some repetition of the originary scene in to supplement the failing linguistic presence. The growing distance between declarative and imperative exchange involves the greater independence of the declarative linguistic form as such. Linguistic presence can be created in a greater variety of ways as the magic of words dissipates. Linguistic presence can be directly subordinated to attention management, which comes to include attending to the means of maintaining linguistic presence itself, i.e., letters, words, sentences, discourse more generally, but also the means of communication, the various possible positions taken by “communicants,” culturally significant layers of tacit meaning, and the institutions constraining discourse: all these elements of any utterance can now become the target of another utterance. The invention of writing in, of course, a huge leap in this regard, and the connection between alphabetical writing and the atomic (proto-scientific) view of the world has long been noted. More recently noted is the connection between the voicelessness of the written word and the monotheistic God to whom no qualities can be attributed. In very different ways, a single source of absolute imperatives is posited, and this in turn allows for unlimited analytical power: just as any utterance, and therefore any “piece” of reality can be broken down into its smallest, most basic components, so a divine voice speaking the absolute imperative that is both eternal and internal enables unprecedented examination of inner states of mind, conscience and feeling.

Such has been the trajectory of the Axial Age acquisitions and the modern scientific revolution (the laboratory) that is ultimately indebted to them. Many of the pathologies we can identify with modernization, such as rootlessness, alienation, and dispossession are also consequences of this trajectory. (And some would also trace these pathologies back to the Axial Age acquisitions.) We can’t know for sure that we can preserve the acquisitions without the pathologies, but I don’t see any plausible way of proceeding other than by assuming we can. I have suggested that the laboratory, generalized as the discipline, which both constitutes and is constituted by central power provides a way of targeting the pathologies while maximizing the acquisitions. The discipline is a social form that keeps “drilling down” below ever lower thresholds of significance, and this activity applies equally to the study of quarks and of conscience. The “solution” of the discipline is possible because the information age has introduced a new dimension to the “detachability” of the declarative from the imperative: the quintessential activity of the information age, programming, is a process of generating imperatives from declaratives. These are not the passive-aggressive imperatives of liberalism, which command you not to commit to obeying any commands (“Question Authority”!). If we think, rather, of a sentence that can be dismantled and reconstructed according to some rule, we can automatically generate imperatives that would bring us from the state of affairs represented by one declarative to that represented by one of its alternatives. The more independent declarative culture we have inherited is imperative-phobic, and “demands” (there are all kinds of paradoxes here) that we only carry out actions that can be fully justified on the norms of declarative sentences (reason and logic). We can develop a new kind of declarative culture that embraces imperatives by creating new ones out of the analysis of declaratives.

Let’s take a simple, descriptive sentence like “he had his main opponent arrested” and reverse engineer it. First, treat the sentence as composed of parts that could be replaced—“he” by “she” or “I”; “had” by “will have” or “could never”; “main” by “marginal”; “opponent” by “ally”; “arrested” by “executed” or “promoted.” We could right away see that the simplest sentence “contains,” as possibilities, dozens, even hundreds of other sentences. These sentences can be ranked in terms of their probabilities, given the original, sample sentence as a center around which the possible ones fluctuate. (They are all the things you didn’t say.) We can further treat the sample, central sentence as produced by or selected out of the narrowing of that field of probabilities, as a result of all the “paths” the sentence has, quantum-mechanics style, “always already” taken. This field-narrowing can be accomplished by converting the sentence back into the questions it might be answering: who had his main opponent arrested?; who did he have arrested?; which opponent did he have arrested?; what did he do to his main opponent?; etc. Each question would have emerged from a particular field of concern: everyone has been wondering what the president would do next, or what was going to happen to a prominent figure—the question opens up one or another concern. The entire field of probabilities is generated by the deferral of an imperative, one side of an imperative exchange that has been refused. The imperative is a set of expectations: be ready for what will happen to the main opponent/watch what the president will do next/look for that oppositional leader’s profile to be raised. Maintaining the expectations involves a kind of readiness—the sentence now relieves you from those imperative expectations by violating them at least in part and commands you to configure a new field.

Keep in mind that we are focused on the utterance, not the topic of the sentence—on who is making the claim about the (presumed) leader, and not the leader himself—but also that there must be a line between the imperative obeyed, respectively, by the subject of the sentence, the utterer of the sentence, and the hearer of the sentence—such a line is a condition of intelligibility. Configuring a new field of expectations means generating a new field of probable sentences, of which we look for the one that best promises to maintain linguistic presence regardless of which expectations are realized, i.e., which allows us to thread the absolute imperative through a broader range of actual outcomes. We can identify that imperative by making the imperative represented by the sentence, the imperative obeyed by the utterer of the sentence, and the imperative obeyed by the “recipient” of the sentence “line up” more closely. We then make that imperative available for further iteration—it could turn out to be something like “become a marginal ally so as to accomplish what you would wish to as a main opponent.” The historical form of the absolute imperative will be a “remix” of the materials provided by the field of possible sentences: in this way, something that is imaginable and yet seems extremely unlikely can bolster a preparedness which grasps the broader reality but has failed catastrophically in some particular. Think of this thinking process as a maxim generating machine—the problem with generally true maxims, in politics and morals, is that without other maxims telling you how to apply them here and now, they’re really worthless. Originary programming is a kind of maxim assembly kit, making maxims adjustable for the occasion.

The absolutist assumption is that we all obey the same imperative, if we trace it back far enough. We don’t all clarify this imperative in the same way because the mining process involves extracting it from the vast mass of subsequent imperatives which have both made it more absolute (defer the most compelling imperative exchange) and thoroughly obscure it. The work of interpretation is ordering all imperatives in accord with the absolute one. This means we do assume that the king who had his main opponent arrested 3,000 years ago, the chronicler who recorded it 2,000 years ago, the scholars mulling over this chronicle for hundreds of years and those of us contemplating it today are all bound by the same chain of imperatives—to “understand” what that king did is locate ourselves within that imperative chain, and then to defer it, however slightly—to understand how it was is to imagine it might have been different. The way to do this is to generate forward that modified imperative chain. So, actual sentence A defers imperative X somewhat more agilely than possible sentence A1 and somewhat more pointedly than possible sentence A2; imperative X is now modified as the question we construct a given sentence as answering, and it takes the form of a “tell me…” command. That “tell me” command can in turn be converted to a command to make present or make available, which in turn brings us to a sacred or significant name of something to be made present or available in whatever way it makes itself present or available. Someone, at some point, wanted the intentions of that “main opponent,” and even his will, made present, in the name of central power. Those who read such a sentence today also want central power made present, even if now we obey the command to take into account and assimilate in advance the kinds of opposition that bedeviled previous rulers. We can convert the opponent’s aims and the king’s decision into “information” contained in our “stock” insofar as we ultimately obey the same command as both of them, and use that information to carry that command forward.

In principle, this practice could be a source of algorithms: an algorithm has fed into it selected features of an object or situation, along with the weight to be given to those features, separately or in combination, so as to set in motion a response: so, a male of race A, appearing (according to another algorithm for assessing likely age) to be age B, dressed as a member of social class C, with a posture indicating D level of potential aggressiveness, etc. (however complex we need it to be), is not to be allowed onto the premises, or is to be subject to a stricter degree of scrutiny (with “strictness” also being a term of art to be established algorithmically). We could eventually use computers to game out possible “auditioning” outcomes. But the qualitative dimension of assessment and decision is irreducible and always grounded in language—the more complex and targeted we make an algorithm the more its dependence upon humanly set values is evident. (The desire for a non-violent environment is a human value.) And political discourse is more interested in exposing presuppositions about power and sovereignty than in making supposedly rational decisions—the most rational decisions will be those that render those assumptions the most transparent. (The best argument for absolutist rule is that the distance between formal and actual power should be brought as close as possible to zero.) Since we can’t work with all of the sentences in the constitutive field of the sample, or nodal, sentence, we have to choose a few; these will be the few we feel we can best use as levers to make a link in the imperative chain visible that previously was not. This makes trolling, rather than logic, the model for the most powerful political discourse: trolling aims at eliciting responses from various actors that reveal things those actors would rather not reveal. It’s a way of issuing imperatives, to enemies and allies alike—the imperative is to show us which commands you really obey. Then all you have to do is reiterate, in perfectly declarative terms, the name and character of the god she obeys, the imperative exchange upon which she hangs her hopes—and present the clearer form of the same imperative, the one you obey.

Of course, the implication of this discussion is that the more absolute power becomes, and the lower the threshold of significance, and the more named and incorporated all elements of society, and therefore the clearer the imperative structure, the less uncertainty, and therefore the less need for algorithmic approaches to social order. The argument for absolutism is distilled from the acting out of the anarchist ontologists, by selecting amongst the imperatives they obey those that can be lined up with the imperatives we obey in making sense of them.

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.