GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Bertrand de Jouvenel, in his historical account of the rise and metastasization of state power, On Power, finds in the origin of absolutism the very defect of unsecure power that leads to the pathological dynamic of divided power seeking more power that absolutist theory decries. The assertion of absolute power by the earliest kings (in Europe, at least, but de Jouvenel sees the model as universally applicable) resulted from their monarchical projects being stymied by the aristocrats they relied upon, who retained their land and men and therefore power (even if it was land and power nominally owned and actually distributed by the king). The king, then, elevates the subordinates of those aristocrats, makes them subject to his authority alone, and thereby marginalizes the aristocrats. This is the high-low alliance against the middle, repeated over and over again in the career of state power, because then, of course, out of the newly elevated subjects emerges a new middle, which again becomes a threat and so must be undermined by a new levy of the “people.” In the end, you get Black Lives Matter as a battering ram against the police, local governments and the white middle class.

The point, though, is that in de Jouvenel’s account there never seems to have been a time when power was “just right”—the aristocrats were, undoubtedly, short-sighted and egotistical and less capable than the king, at least on some occasions, of understanding the interests of the national community as a whole. It is ridiculous that a single aristocrat can go on strike and thereby make addressing some crisis (e.g., a rebellion or invasion) impossible. The initial appropriation of absolute power, then, was not arbitrary and was probably even justified—and probably more likely to succeed than waging war on recalcitrant aristocrats. But this certainly creates a problem for absolutist theory: where, exactly, are we taking our model of good governance from?

We could pinpoint theoretically and no doubt discover historically moments when the pre-absolutist king called upon his aristocratic loyalists, who in turn called upon their dependents—and all the calls were in fact answered. The earliest absolutisms would themselves have been modeled upon, and attempts to recreate, such events. Whatever made sovereignty reducible to the king’s will is the model for absolutism. We don’t have to assume a single miraculous moment of harmony uniting all wills and strata of society—this would have happened often, perhaps regularly. Aristocratic resistance to, say, 15% of the king’s projects might have been frustrating enough and, indeed, sometimes dangerous enough, for the king to take measures to end his dependence on the aristocrats, but that would still mean he attained 85% compliance. Even if the numbers are lower, the point would stand: unity of will was obtained, repeatedly, so we can figure out how.

It seems obvious that the king would have been most successful in mobilizing his subordinates in their hierarchical order when there was universal acknowledgement regarding the urgency of some shared threat, or potential advantage. Such acknowledgement can never be universally intense, but enthusiasm must be high enough for the skeptical to yield to that pressure rather than risking going it alone in dissent. In retrospect, it might be discovered that unanimity was attained when it was less necessary, and not attained when it was more necessary—this is what would have initiated the career of power, in de Jouvenel’s sense. In other words, if the king takes unanimity when he can get it, rather than obtaining it when he really needs it, he is not preserving the unity of sovereignty. So, we need to pinpoint our model even more precisely: what we are looking for is the king wisely “calling in his debts” when the future of his realm most depends upon it.

Absolutism, then, as political theory and method, aims at having and keeping those debts in place permanently, and acting at each moment as if the future of the realm depends upon every decision. The cost-benefit consequences of obedience or resistance must be present to all at all times—the entire social order must be permeated with signs of these consequences, which will be modulated continually: where more benefits are available, costs can be downplayed, but if benefits become limited, the costs must be highlighted. But costs and benefits must always be framed in terms of the largest cost and benefit of them all: the destruction or preservation and enhancement of the realm itself. It is easy to see why kings would have judges issuing judgments in the name of the king, merchants selling goods in the name of the king, teachers promoting students in the name of the king, and so on. Nor are these formulas any more tedious, or less given to being renewed by fresh commitments, than the clichés we live by in liberal democracies. It’s really just a way of reminding us that we must be doing what we do for the good of society, which is no vague phrase because we know where that good is located.

The idea here is less to “assert” absolute power than to simply assume the absolute power already located at the social center. There is a social center because society is founded on deferral, which assumes some central object of desire; the social center, in a civilized order premised on an upward spiral of discipline, is whatever is taken to guarantee that hierarchy of discipline. The sovereign power, then, embodies that guarantee, and the way to embody that guarantee is to issue tokens of permission and promises of protection to all the disciplines, i.e., all institutions that seek to reward discipline of whatever kind and ensure the return in kind to that form of discipline (which might be money for the merchant, recognition for the soldier, a circle of fellow inquirers and supply of students for the scholar, etc.). And then, of course, review the terms of the permission regularly and honor the promises. This is the way to govern with and through the middle, rather than against it—and this might be much easier now than it was for the original absolutist monarchs because the property and power of the disciplines are now more obviously social in character than was the land and serfs of the lord. Computer operators and doctors can’t really go it alone—they need protection and therefore permission. Of course, as de Jouvenel would also insist, all these conditions of absolute rule operate as constraints on the ruler, who, to that extent, is less than “absolute.” But no one could ever have claimed that an absolute ruler was absolute in any metaphysical sense—a massive earthquake could destroy his rule, just as much as political mistakes can. His rule is absolute in the sense that nothing in the social order is outside of that rule, and if there is something outside of it he’s not really ruling—there is a descriptive, almost axiomatic component of this formulation, but also a prescriptive one: to the sovereign, let nothing assert itself outside of your grant of permission and promise, but also grant nothing you are not prepared to guarantee; to the subject, unless you wish for disorder, assert nothing outside of that rule, but also assert and cloth yourself in the rule.

The absolutist theory of sovereignty makes it possible to solve a problem that not only has never been solved but has never even been adequately formulated, even though it was first posed during the Enlightenment. The concept of “ideology” began, of course, as a proposed discipline focused on the study of ideas, but the problem of how to liberate people’s natural reason from faith, superstition and tradition was already a pressing problem for Enlightenment thinkers—and it is this problem that ultimately became the problem of “alienation” and finally ideology in Marxist thought. Why do the mystifications of bourgeois society mystify? The activist thinker can see through them—why can’t others be made to? Noam Chomsky has taken the concept of “manufacturing consent” from Walter Lippman’s study of public opinion, and used it to the same end—why do people accept the alien perspective of their rulers? Of course, much of this can be attributed to the imbalances of power—the Marxists and Chomskyans are all well aware of who owns the media, who runs the schools, who produces mass entertainment, etc. But it is essential to any politics aiming at radical transformation to locate in the “people” some innate resistance to such machinations, whether that be natural reason (which Chomsky seems to believe in as much as any Enlightenment liberal) or some kind of class or other “consciousness.” But if that resistance was there to be activated, why does it never seem to take shape? Somehow, ideology must be penetrating the workings of that resistant consciousness and de-activating it. But by now every group and almost every individual has its own theory of ideology—something prevents the masses from seeing corporate domination, or the war on whites, or the insidious racism oozing out of all our practices, or just from seeing how astonishingly evil Hillary or Trump is. We are way past arguments over reasonable differences regarding the fitness of candidates and the justice or effectiveness of public policies—there is no one to persuade, only enemies to destroy and potential allies to be liberated from their false consciousness. The red pill/blue pill distinction so central to alt-right and neo-reactionary thinking is the latest, and far from the most easily dismissed, of these “ideology critiques.”

We can bemoan the loss of public discourse aimed at persuading fellow citizens, but, in truth, that conception was conjoined at its birth with the theory of ideology, which is meant to diagnose those not amenable to persuasion. The confusions theories of ideology denounce are real, but they are confusions over who rules; moreover, these confusions do not bespeak confused minds but, rather, divided and unsecure power. If it is in reality unclear who rules, who occupies the center, all members of society have no choice but to do their best to identify the real ruler. Naturally they will do this differently, depending upon how they map the moral model of the originary scene onto whichever configuration of the center is most apparent to them, and which potential occupants of the center appear most threatening. A worker who fears losing his job will believe it is unjust that he lose his job because he has played by the rules and paid his dues to the center—a just central power would not allow this and since it appears likely to happen some unjust power has usurped the once just sovereign (or kept out of power the potentially just sovereign). That worker will want to know who that usurper is. Thus far, the worker is not at all mystified—he is right. The problem is that with multiplying power divisions, identifying the responsible party is a hit or miss game, and the answer that seems most plausible to that worker will depend upon who that worker, in a newly fragile world of shaken authorities, still attributes a knowing trustworthiness to. Perhaps his fellow union members; perhaps his friends at the bar, perhaps his neighbors, or his boss—or a radio talk show host.

Meanwhile, all those powers playing musical chairs are attributing responsibility to each other—the media blame the corporations, the corporations fund think tanks and media outlets that blame other corporate sectors, or the government bureaucracy, the political parties blame each other and each other’s constituencies; foreign powers, and of course, the Jews, get thrown into the mix. There may be more or less truth in any of these assessments, but no one is in any position to determine how much with any real certainty, in part because the precise power balances shift constantly. Ideology, then, is really the miasma of distributed powers all trying to ally themselves with some powers and oppose others, which means all share an interest in never allowing power to become settled, never allowing the center to be occupied. But the only substitute for secure occupation of the center is to mobilize as much unanimity as you can against some false pretender to that occupancy. This is how ideological narratives take shape, very much on the model of myth (the Enlighteners had a point there): the pretender (corporations, rogue spy agencies, foreign powers, rogue spy agencies of foreign powers, the ideologically suspect—once Communists, now neo-Nazis) threatens to possess the center, taking advantage of division, complacency and misguided generosity of those who have internalized the true center; finally, a heroic representative of the true center will awaken, enlighten and unify enough of the “centrists” (two or three, including a bratty child, may do) to restore an implicit center occupied by no one but internalized in the hearts of all. Such narratives can frame a news story or a history textbook as easily as a Hollywood blockbuster. In the end, the faith in centerlessness, with a true center in each and every one of us, is restored.

There is always a sense in which sovereignty ultimately resides in whoever commands the massive bodies of armed men, but it is in the nature of liberal democratic government to pass power out of its own hands like a game we used to play as kids that I perhaps misremember being called “salugee,” where the object was to keep passing a ball or some object from teammate to teammate to prevent the opposing team from wresting physical possession of the object from the carrier (whichever team had the ball or object when lunch period was over won). So, the government attributes its actions to the will of the people, or to some overriding political or legal principle, or to the need to appease the “base” of the party in power—which really means the social groupings the government attributes “peoplehood” to in order to under-legitimize some other group, or some legal authority it wants to empower to undermine some other legal authority, or the agenda of fundraisers who want cheap labor or weapons orders or agricultural patents. The tendency is always toward power that is both more centralized and more divided—more aspects of life, more norms, more social arrangements, become the object of interference in decreasingly accountable ways. To whom do you address your grievance if some district court judge appointed by a president (elevated by a particular power configuration displacing another) enamored of some legal theorist at Harvard (himself inspired by some 60s activist and recipient of grants from various foundations) decides low income housing needs to be built down the street from you? The desire to find out who is behind all this is nearly irresistible, but also futile.

It makes a lot more sense to say that we are alienated from our proper relation to the center than from our real (or genuinely human) self or class consciousness. Our resentments speak of a center—you can’t see something as wrong, unjust, unfair or even just mistaken without imagining the possibility of remedying it (without that possibility, it’s all just things that happen). It’s a sign of maturity to realize that all things (probably most things) cannot be remedied to one’s own satisfaction, but it is, then, a sign of emergent mastery to consider which wrongs most need to be remedied, what kind of authority would have to do the remedying, what interference it would encounter, which wrongs would get neglected in the process, or might even turn out not to be wrongs at all; and, moreover, what kind of person would be able to deploy that authority, what sort of social relations and individual character would be needed to comply with and aid that authority—what you are doing, at that point, is theorizing sovereignty. In the process you will necessarily cut through the lies, the self-serving self-deceptions, the panicky confusions, because you will always want to bring the fundamental question up point blank: what hierarchy of authorities would right the most wrongs, do the most justice, lead to the greatest fairness, or, even better, prevent the most wrongs, injustice and unfairness from being committed in the first place? And not just any wrongs, injustices and unfairnesses, but the ones we see right in front of us, the ones that spark the inquiry into sovereignty in the first place. Here, there is a place for dialogue with our fellow citizens in the true spirit of openness and inquiry—indeed, we can focus the dialogue on what mode of government, what kind of occupation of the center, can best guarantee that such dialogues can be sustained? I think it must be an occupation of the center ready to be accountable for all that happens on the margins, but we can continue to discuss it.

Another dimension of absolutist theory, one that I have mostly neglected so far, can be brought into play here as well. Ultimately, for absolutism, powers that intervene in and influence events simply want their power to be more secure—they want a “decidable” sovereignty as much as anyone. Because of divided power, though, they must make an end run around other powers in order to achieve—never with complete success—such security. (It should be noted that this implies a severely divided consciousness on the part of such powers.) I will refer you to Reactionary Future’s post on the Charlotte riots, which I referenced a couple of posts back. The government, or some part of government, wants a national police force; because of divided power (federalism) that can’t be done directly; so you instigate racial and cop hatred that causes riots so that you have the “proof” of the racism and incompetence of local police forces that you need to propose nationalizing the whole shebang—in stages, of course, first by instituting “standards” whose implementation is to be overseen by the Justice Department, but which can’t really be met by the local forces without resources from the feds, etc. Of course, different powers will be doing this in different ways, often undermining each other. Still, if, as RF says in his latest post,

the best we can do is to try to deduce what actors will do in the specific position they occupy within a governmental system. We cannot dictate what they must do with a law, constitution or other such ring of Fnargl gimmicks, but must provide them with the requisite circumstances and organisation to allow them to act in accordance with their role without having to resort to such bizarre recourse as funding black rioters, anti-corn law movements or other forms of self-protesting to circumvent the republican blocks in place that stop them from acting correctly,

then we can conduct our ideology critique in a way that more directly addresses political and policy decisions. Once we have deduced what would “be in accordance with their role” without “resort to such bizarre recourse,” we can use the impossibility of fulfilling their role under current circumstances to expose the whole tangled web of “bizarre recourses” that comprise our present governmental and social order. Indeed, much of our everyday lives must be made up of such bizarre recourses, even though we often do, as must the government, get things done somehow (fulfill the roles the center as allotted us), nevertheless. (This is possible because all of us recognize at least some of the time that there is a center, and can reconstruct a version of its “instructions.”) When the center is occupied intermittently and unaccountably, everyone will busy themselves in trying to saturate the center space, and this generates the thickets of bizarre recourses (and equally bizarre explanations justifying those recourses) that we must continually cut through to bring the center—a center, I continue to insist, that we all know is there (otherwise, no rational decisions would ever make it through those bizarre recourses at all)—into view. So, the starting point of our counter-ideological dialogues can be asking what you (or anyone else) would be doing right now if a clear and secure hierarchy of authority rendered all bizarre recourse unnecessary; the question of what one should be doing will, furthermore, be of use in constructing a model of that hierarchy.

Imagine a group of ten people. Nine of them, when food is presented, rush straight towards it and grab it greedily, shoving big chunks into their mouth as fast as they can. The tenth waits a minute or so, until the furor and squabbling dies down, and calmly goes to the food that has not yet been touched and eats it at a normal pace. How impressed the nine would be with the tenth! He would be a veritable god to them—his self-control would seem magical or divinely inspired. This is charisma, in its original sense, according t Philip Rieff: divine grace perceived in a person who has transcended desires that are compulsive to others. Such an individual, through force of example, would be able to lay down the law to the nine, restructuring their eating habits so that at least a modicum of his discipline is reflected in them. Or, of course, the nine might kill him, especially if instigated by one of their number who was to point out, for example, the possibility that the new eating arrangements might not benefit all equally, might, in fact, redound in particular to the benefit of the tenth and, anyway, how was he able to restrain himself—does he possess some power he might now use on the rest of us? This instigator would recommend transgressing the better order proposed or even just implicitly embodied by the tenth, and in doing so would end up transgressing even the old order, where at least, however squalid the proceedings, everyone knew they’d get their piece. He must end up transgressing this established order because in it lie the seeds of the new, more disciplined one, and he will do so by reversing the scale of values and empowering the most piggish of the bunch. This is the modern, post-Weberian meaning of charisma: the transgression of the established, the secure, and the accepted.

The two modes of charisma are not, though, as easy to distinguish in real life as they are in this simple example. Those who transgress and flout traditional sexual norms do so in the name of restraining our desire to lash out at those who are “different”; while many of those who defend tradition against the corrosive dictates of political correctness can no doubt feel a transgressive thrill in breaking the rules of current discourse on race, sex and other topics. This complexity is multiplied by the diversity of virtues, each requiring its own form of discipline and capable of being manifested with either form of charisma. To be courageous is to discipline oneself to restrain feelings of fear, the most natural and powerful of all feelings, but it is also fear that keeps us in line and in accord with established values, and it might be courageous to break completely reasonable norms. To think carefully and systematically requires years of training, involving the suppression of the natural desire to make every new idea fit the ideas you already have mastered, but careful and systematic thinking can devise monstrous theories, monstrous theories that might put the author’s brilliance more on display than the intellectual output of a more traditionally minded and therefore seeming conventional but no less powerful thinker.

Indeed, if we return to our original example, the transgressive instigator of the other nine must have been at least slightly more disciplined than his brethren—otherwise, there is no way he could have extricated his mind from the sheer expanse separating the nine’s gluttony from the tenth’s restraint to resent the power the latter now deployed. Perhaps the tenth is “more” disciplined than (let’s call him) the “ninth,” but not only is “quantity” a very limited category to apply to the wide range of disciplines, but it may often turn out that the ninth is more disciplined than the tenth (which would be why they sometimes win). The difference we are looking for must be qualitative.

How do the nine of ten indulge their voraciousness while managing not to kill each other? We’re not dealing with animals, so there must be some minimal hesitation and mutual adjustment even in what would look to mannered onlookers as a disgusting food orgy. They remember enough of the originary scene to let each other know that they won’t interfere, at least not too much, with the others’ satisfaction. The tenth just has a memory of the originary scene that is both more abstract and more present. How is that possible? Compared to the tenth, the nine all seem out of control; compared to each other, though, there are definitely differences—some are, sometimes, more attuned to the danger posed to the group by the aggressiveness of others, and take measures to both limit that aggressiveness and model a more sustainable mode of sharing. It may be that these differences never settle upon specific members but, rather, emerge contingently, depending upon which of the ten (first of all) has the sharpest insight into the danger at the time. The tenth emerges when these differences settle upon an individual who is now capable of applying them a priori to any scene.

The ninth couldn’t emerge before the tenth because in that case he would just be a somewhat cleverer aggressor amongst the horde. So he comes after the tenth. The tenth separates himself from the rest by remembering the originary scene in its difference from the present scene. The memory of the originary scene induces an obligation to preserve the present scene, but to preserve it in distinction from some imminent danger, which also means to modify it—in as understated a way as possible. This involves both the addition of an increment of deferral and thwarting the most present danger. The stronger the memory of the originary scene, the more visible and imitable the deferral and the more accurately perceived the danger. The ninth exploits the hesitation induced by the tenth’s modeling of deferral, while seeking to destroy that model, which would eliminate his advantage as the only one who can choose to hesitate or not. The ninth denounces the commemoration of the originary scene as a delusion that benefits only the tenth.

So, can we apply this rather abstract model to contemporary politics, and distinguish in real time between the two charismas? The “graceful” charisma wants to bring power and accountability into ever closer identity. If someone is expected to do something, he must have the means to do it; if someone has the means to do something, he must be expected to deploy those means in a way that serves the end for which the means were provided. This extends all the way up to the sovereign, who is accountable to no one in particular but must use the means at his disposal to maintain sovereignty, because no one else will do it for him. Accountability involves retrieving the model of the originary scene: showing yourself refraining from the act most likely to break the existing truce and restart mimetic rivalry. Power means thwarting the ambitions of whoever would break ranks and rush to center. We can tell when someone wants to bring power and accountability closer together: they evince recognition, at least, of the fact that doing one thing means not doing something else. Transgressive charisma, meanwhile, wants to separate power and accountability—to have power is to be unaccountable, and to be accountable is to be accountable to power. Transgressive charisma promises power without accountability, exercises power without accountability, and seeks to strip the power of those it holds accountable. (It does take some discipline to maintain this focus and steady oneself to violate norms and normality.) I don’t think we’ll find any unmistakable examples of graceful charisma in today’s political world, but we can certainly distinguish between those at least aware of the possibility and those who want to extinguish it.

Remembering the originary scene is the ultimate tradition. It is manifested not in the construction of pacific utopian fantasies, but in a kind of attention management: noticing where some refrain from violating the perimeter surrounding the center, where some of those who refrain also stand prepared to restrain those (the other locus of attention) who exploit the hesitation of others. To be a traditionalist is to look for where discipline has been stored in existing institutions, and to add to the stock. You do this by preserving and restoring the sovereignty of the institutions by bringing power and accountability into alignment—by adhering to the original function of the institution. Well, what about bad institutions, whose original purpose was to do evil—let’s go straight to the reduction ad Hitlerum and Stalinum and say death camps and Gulags (are they not institutions?)—but it’s not clear what it would mean to add new increments of deferral to institutions explicitly and solely devoted to torment and extermination, is it? Such institutions are the end point of transgressive charisma, loading on more accountability in proportion to the stripping of all power.

Reactionary Future’s explanation for the Black Lives Matter riots brings out the strengths and distinction of absolutism as a theory of social order. I would here like to bring that explanation into convergence with what I think is originary thinkings most important contribution to theorizing social order: the relation between resentment and the center.

RF first distinguishes the absolutist explanation from the others (from Nazis to liberals), all of which share a reliance upon some pre-social being that accounts for social relations, whether they be genetics or natural “free and equal” individuals. Absolutism goes right to the question of how an unsecure sovereign acts to implement policy or, we might say, secure itself (what other point would policy have for the sovereign, especially an insecure one?):

This is simply the way in which a sovereign governance structure which is subject to checks and balances will act to implement policy. It is clear the central governance structure wishes to re-organise the police force, and has ingrained electoral and institutional enemies which it cannot directly confront. It also labors under the delusion of private society which it cannot merely expose as fraud (it is also manned by people who believe the fraud.)

The result is that the governing institutions use “private” institutions (foundations) to create agitation and trouble which creates an environment, and/ or results in legal action which allows for the planned policy to be enacted. That this process also attacks the institutional enemies (electoral enemies, republican checks) is also of value.

The black lives matter seems to have two broad goals, one is to create the required “demand” for a re-organisation of the US police force on a national basis, which is a reasonable goal for a government. The other is to create racial tension for electoral means.

One important virtue of this approach is to extract all of the resentment from the situation, and reduce it to a question of governance, even management. I will be bringing resentment back in, but not as a pre-social feeling of resistance—rather, resentment is an index of the degree of security or certainty of the central power. It is above all resentment that needs to be governed and managed by the sovereign. Let’s recall the form resentment takes on the originary scene: the central object, intensely desired and therefore all the more intensely prohibited, has both saved (and even created) the community (and each individual in it) and stands guard over the fulfillment of desire. Resentment is directed toward this second function of the object (or, to be a bit Lacanian, Object)—it bars the realization of desire. This goes beyond simply preventing the hungry man from having a decent meal—it also ensures that satisfaction will never match desire. What is barred is possession of the center itself.

When we say that the center bars possession of itself, of its own power to create the community and, indeed, the world, we really mean that the collected “sign-ature” of the group prevents each and every member from advancing to the center. Objects (small “o”) can now only be possessed under the aegis of some sign, a sign that guarantees the protection and permission of the Object. We can devour the downed buffalo, which quickly becomes a collection of flesh and bones, with the permission of our buffalo ancestor (who insists we devour it together, in an orderly manner). The members of the group stand in surety for the buffalo ancestor, which means each individual resents that buffalo ancestor for restraining our desire while also resenting any other member of the group that might throw off such restraint. The power of the buffalo ancestor is secure insofar as the latter resentment outweighs the former. We can call this a donation of resentment to the center, which cancels the resentment toward the center.

This is not accomplished once and for all, nor would it be to the betterment of humankind if it were. Individual resentment toward the center is the source of innovation in human affairs. The appropriation by the Big Man of the center derives from such resentment, and so does the “framing” of the Biggest Man (the god emperor) by a cultural space that retrieves the originary configuration. The monotheistic and metaphysical innovations, whereby the asymmetry of the emperor cult is reconstructed as a form of reciprocity, certainly manifest powerful resentment toward the center. Such innovations, though, must also be seen as attempts to restore and resecure the center—presumably, the Big Man emerges when the primitive community is under some kind internal and external pressure (the terms of exchange with the buffalo ancestor become obscured), and the emergence of the absolute (monotheistic or metaphysical) imperative responds to the instability of the emperor cult with the emergence of competing centers and powers that cult was ill-equipped to handle. These innovations (all civilized cultural innovations) will be successful to the extent that they redirect the resentment they generate from the center toward the margins in the name of the center—that is, to the extent that they become conduits for the donation of resentment.

I think we can identify three modes of resentment toward the center (and, therefore, three corresponding modes of donation): the resentment of those who believe they should occupy the center; the resentment of those whose lot in life has been inadequately adjudicated by the center; the resentment of those who object to the existence of the center itself. In the first case, we have rival elites, for whom the fact that central power is in the hands of another is arbitrary (no real difference in ability or desert can be established); in the second case, the acceptance of subjection to the center takes the form of assumption that the center will do justice to the subject (in his relations with other subjects) in a manner proportionate to that subject’s supplication; in the final case, we have those who push the civilizational innovations framing the sovereign to a conclusion that calls for a direct restoration of the primitive equality of the originary scene. All three modes of resentment presuppose the center—you can’t envy the possessor of a power you don’t assume to be permanent and valuable; you can’t complain that justice is not being done without taking for granted that it could be done; and you can’t indulge nihilistic fantasies without an omnipotent very big O Object to rebel against. The center, then, is secure to the extent that rivalrous elites compete with other elites over their respective closeness and loyalty to the sovereign; the “middle class” demand for justice can accept the difference between the perfection of divine justice and the imperfection of the worldly kind; and the nihilistic fantasy is contained within ritual and esthetic forms. The center, meanwhile, will be insecure to the extent that these three modes of resentment inspire, incite and collaborate with each other.

To return to RF and the riots: in the terms I have laid out, it is clearly, for RF, the resentment of the elites that is the starting point. This reverses virtually all modern sociological explanations that locate disruptions in eruptions from “below,” due to some “natural” resentment of economic inequality or political injustice. Which is to say, it clears away a lot of liberal clutter and chatter. So, in the case of BLM, the sovereign power wants to increase its own security by having a police force directly subordinate to itself—a “reasonable goal,” as RF says, which is not necessarily to say that it is likely in this case to enhance the security of the sovereign (federal) power. The sovereign power is the sovereign power for the moment (the very meaning of unsecure power is that sovereignty is passed off and seized by one group of elites from another continually), and in this case it is contending with a rival for that sovereign power—RF doesn’t explicate this, but we can simply see this as a status quo power base, which would prefer to see the division of power between municipalities, states and the federal government maintained. It seems to me this is a good place to introduce the absolutist Jouvenelian concept of the high-low alliance against the middle: a secure power could be constructed out of a hierarchy of relatively autonomous police forces in the last instance answering to the federal power—that last instance never has to arrive in reality, and won’t if everything is well managed at its own level, but everyone can know it will arrive if necessary. So, the present, Soros-funded sovereign is both sovereign and rival at the same time (again, that must be the meaning of unsecure power), which it seems to me is alluded to in RF’s reference to the “attack on institutional enemies,” and it tries to ensure its sovereignty by mobilizing the low against the middle. On one level, it’s a perfectly intelligible power play, and even a reasonable attempt to preserve and enhance order (which must be pursued in an indirect and admittedly grotesque way); on another level, we can see the resentment of progressive and by definition better qualified elites towards more “traditionalist,” static and to that extent more firmly grounded elites, a resentment that instigates resentment of the second kind (the police no longer act in accord with the norms of justice, whites don’t care, etc.) to paralyze the middle, and uses the third resentment (a chiliastic belief in a world where all the subjugated, from Charlotte to Gaza, will move from the margins to the center, but also a carnivalesque suspension of law and order) to mobilize the mob.

The second and third resentments are always there, but the absolutist analysis is right to contend that they only become effective when “catalyzed” by the first resentment, that of the rivalrous elites. But that may be, in part, because the rivalrous elites already incorporate those other resentments: Bolingbroke, in Richard II, has been unjustly treated by Richard in the latter’s adjudication of a dispute between Bolingbroke and a rival aristocrat—it is Richard’s arbitrary judgment that has “debunked” the intrinsic connection between power and the dispensation of justice that let’s Bolingbroke see he could be just as good a king as Richard. Moreover, are not the “unjustly” sidelined elites the most extravagant fantasists—are not the dreams of George Soros (or Shimon Peres) in a borderless world of unhindered exchange and movements among peoples who are somehow both more themselves than ever and interchangeable as sincere as those of the most wild-eyed Occupy Wall Street demonstrator? If you want to be a realist about power, you must take into account the anthropomorphics of our dance around the center. To imagine replacing the center is not imagine moving into a somewhat swankier residence with a larger armed detail; it is to imagine a new world, with oneself at the center. This is all the more the case when one strives to occupy a secret center, a real sovereignty behind the apparent one—or when we imagine others doing so (which in turn makes it more likely to consider doing so ourselves). (We can, in fact, see indications of all three resentments in the passage from the Soros memorandum RF quotes from: for example, “even under a Progressive Attorney General, the Department has failed to take steps” [first resentment]; “the opportunity to promote meaningful and lasting change,” along with the list of “grassroots and youth-oriented groups,” with its gesture towards open-ended and continually growing resistance and change embodies the third resentment; while “enhance procedural justice, reduce implicit bias, and support racial reconciliation” points to the second.)

The space of sovereignty is a disciplinary space; a disciplinary space of disciplinary spaces. A disciplinary space installs what Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm,” in which certain questions are presumed already answered, or unanswerable, and therefore disallowed or simply ignored within the disciplinary space; other questions, meanwhile, open up new lines of inquiry, making the disciplinary space, like language itself, inexhaustible. For originary thinking, for example, questions regarding ways of making sense of particular practices or institutions as forms of deferral and deference to a sign-mediated center are open and generative in this way—meanwhile, questions regarding the relation between “the forces and relations of production,” grounded in the concept of “labor,” are unintelligible within the discipline—those questions belong in Marxism. (Of course, we could account for Marxism and its concepts as forms of deferral.) For the sovereign, the disciplinary “paradigm” is the recirculation of all authorized power back to the author, the sovereign, without remainder. “I did this because I wanted to” doesn’t make sense in terms of sovereignty—this doesn’t mean that in an absolutist order no one would ever do what they wanted; rather it means “because I wanted to” would really mean, and would readily be translated into, something like “because it redounds to the glory of the sovereign.” This doesn’t mean we’d always be saying things we didn’t think to flatter the sovereign—it means we’d be trying to eliminate any distance between our own desires and the will of the sovereign to preserve a good order in the realm (the glory of the sovereign is what makes it possible for me to peacefully and productively do what I want). Absolute sovereignty is a virtuous circle. Anything that couldn’t be thus “translated” would be remainder. And any remainder would be evidence of one or more of the three resentments. Evidence of the three resentments is then an index of the unsecurity of central power. The defining work of the sovereign as disciplinary power is to establish the terms on which those resentments can be, not so much repressed (though it may sometimes come to that, of course) but converted into donations to the center.

The notion of secure vs. unsecure sovereignty has been the most difficult absolutist concept for me to grasp. If sovereignty is conserved, isn’t it by definition secure—if the Supreme Court is sovereign is deciding that same sex marriage will be the law of the land, isn’t that an exercise (again, by definition) of “secure” sovereignty? If, on another occasion, the President decides he is not going to order the deportation of illegal aliens even (let’s say) in the face of a contrary Supreme Court decision, then the President’s sovereignty is secure in that case as well. Insofar as sovereignty is always exercised rather than held, it is always secure—and what would it mean to “hold” sovereignty other than to exercise it repeatedly and explicitly? How repeatedly? One month? Ten years? A hundred? Always when it comes to, say, immigration? There’s really no answer to these questions.

Let’s say a group of five friends decides to go on a hike. They all agree that someone has to be in charge, since they will be going through difficult and sometimes dangerous terrain, and there will be occasions where the leader needs to be obeyed by everyone immediately and unconditionally. Someone always has to be sovereign, in other words. Since they are all equally skilled and experienced hikers, and all trust each other, they decide to rotate in the leadership position. One day for each; or, maybe, one person is in charge of determining the route, another when it comes to deciding where to camp, etc. Such an arrangement might work out perfectly fine, if our assumed conditions hold—of course, if it turns out that one of the five is not quite as good as the others, or does not have the temperament to lead, or becomes mistrustful, it can work out very badly. That person is likely to exercise his sovereignty ineffectively, but he will still be exercising it. If his poor leadership endangers the hike, the others may remove him—he might accept their assertion of sovereignty over him gracefully, or he may leave the community. Is that what unsecure sovereignty entails—the sovereign simply failing to perform his sovereign duties, so the survival of the community comes to depend on him being replaced, without there being any clear method of doing so? One could, then, contest sovereignty on the grounds of incapacity at any time, because a subjective judgment is involved; still, sovereigns will sometimes actually fail.

Of course, those five friends can divide sovereignty up because they are themselves included within a broader sovereign realm. Someone owns the land they are hiking in, whether it be a private individual or corporation, or the state; that owner has laid down various rules for hikers, which it enforces through a private security force or public police forces; the land itself is part of a country with an established order, with courts that will try and punish any of the five who might, say, attempt a “coup” by killing one or more of his fellow hikers—the hikers themselves will have to go back to civilization and explain why one of them didn’t return, or came back seriously injured, or refused to ever talk to the other four again. That broader sovereignty, upon which they rely, allows for the more local delegation of sovereignty—and, in fact, a breakdown of the “sovereignty” of the hiking group would indicate a weakening of the broader sovereignty over that group. That is, the more hikers forget or reject the norms of the civilization they belong to (e.g., because unexpected conditions return them to something like a “state of nature”), the more likely their consensually agreed upon distribution of sovereignty will fall apart. If the group is to then remain together, some kind of struggle, possibly violent, over the sovereign power, will be waged. During that struggle, sovereignty will certainly be unsecure; but it won’t really be conserved, either—but that just means there is no longer an order to exercise sovereignty over.

Ultimately all Western social orders derive their sovereignty from some medieval monarch who claimed ownership over the whole of the land over which he ruled (what Reactionary Future calls “primary property”). Perhaps, though, that was itself a distribution of sovereignty exercised by the Roman Empire, until it could no longer. Perhaps the successive divisions of sovereignty that followed over the centuries were akin to our group of hikers, who take for granted that they can causally rotate sovereignty because they are all subjects of a civilized order—perhaps there was an assumption that the original distribution of secondary property (what Carl Schmitt called the “nomos”) was sufficiently guaranteed so that primary property no longer needed to be preserved. Those charged with preserving private property preferred a more collegial relation with the largest secondary landowners, or couldn’t summon the energy to resist the push by some conspiracy of those landowners to formalize their title to their land beyond their obligation to the monarch. This laxity didn’t seem like much of a problem, precisely because the order established seemed so permanent. There’s a tendency to forget primary property, a tendency that is stronger when primary property has been especially securely established.

Sovereignty is always passed off—to be sovereign is to decide upon one’s successor. In principle, there is no difference between a king passing sovereignty off to his son, and the American president passing off sovereignty when it comes to the question of same sex marriage to the Supreme Court, and then having it passed back to him when it comes to enforcing immigration laws. The difference, then, is in fidelity to the original title, which is to say to the line of succession. Neither the president nor the Supreme Court claims sovereignty in their own right—they only claim to exercise it in the name of “the people,” according to the document (ratified by “the people”) known as the Constitution. But popular sovereignty is meaningless—some one always exercises sovereignty, i.e., makes (or declines to make) the final decision. Moreover, from where do “the people” derive their title? Claims to popular sovereignty assert the naturalness of that sovereignty, not its origin in some act of possession. Popular sovereignty is really, then, just anti-sovereignty, an excuse for attacking all the necessary elements of sovereignty, in particular the self-referential claim to act in the name of the sovereignty one exercises. Unsecure sovereignty, then, is sovereignty without any reference to the original claim to primary property. The President and Supreme Court don’t really pass power back and forth, because neither claims the right to delegate, having no claim to act in defense and enhancement of primary property—each just seizes the opportunity to exercise sovereignty that comes their way, and the other will either fear the consequences of challenging their rival, or wait patiently for the opportunity to do so (or rest satisfied, since both entities have allowed sovereignty to be seized for the occasion by an ally of both). The division of powers between courts, legislature and executive could work (i.e., didn’t lead to complete social breakdown) as long as all involved believed, however tacitly or vaguely, they were defending the “rights of Englishmen,” i.e., regardless of the break from Great Britain, ultimately saw themselves as tending to property inherited from the original realm. But, then, any specific, breakaway power gains an advantage over the others by throwing off that inheritance, and insisting that this property here and now is ripe for the taking in the name of those who have been denied it (“the people”).

Absolutism as secure sovereignty must, then, be aimed at restoring the original realm, and deriving all property and powers from the unity of that primary property. Someone will have to claim ownership of it before they control it; the control of some portion of it will have to be seen as a prelude to complete acquisition. Any portion of the original realm that can be recovered must be used to exemplify the form of fully restored sovereignty by distributing secondary property in accord with a detailed hierarchy of obligations and in payment for contributions to effecting the restoration. Any current politician or, for that matter, property holder, has had his “piece” of sovereignty delivered to him under false pretenses, but that’s not the problem, as we have no way of actually tracing a line of sovereignty back to the original realm—what matters is that they are not using that sovereignty to secure the original realm by asserting the primacy of primary property. They are not, that is, resisting and discrediting claims made based on the distribution of secondary property, which are inherently incoherent and illegitimate. It is the claims to sovereignty that rely upon the secondary distribution that spiral endlessly into demands for further distribution, to remedy some presumed injustice in that secondary distribution (the belief in the injustice of that distribution is an unintended acknowledge of primary property). In that case, all the social realities hidden by liberalism (except to present them as injustices) and now being surfaced by the alt-right (race realism, the sexual economy, i.e., hierarchies and differences) can all be assessed in terms of the contribution such hierarchies and differences can make to the restoration of the realm. Different groups, and groups preserving different hierarchies, will make different contributions to the restoration of primary property—this will be noticed in the process of restoration, and repaid in kind afterwards.