A New Model of Power

My thinking about the centrality and fragility of the juridical causes me to revise my understanding of power as “centered ordinality.” Power is ordered through imperatives, command and obedience within a team organized around some shared purpose, but that observation always leaves open the question of the form of the imperative (the crafting of imperatives, we could say) as well as the imperative gap, or the difference between the imperative issued and the imperative obeyed. The imperative must be deemed to be the same across this distance, but through some ritual of succession, which itself then defines power. Liberalism fills the imperative gap with what I have called “supersovereignties,” drawn ultimately from the disciplines, centered in law but reaching across all the media, social scientific and even physical scientific disciplines needed to determine the application of law. The gathering of these concepts into a new model of power confronts the supersovereignties even more directly by sharing its centering of the law. For liberalism, power derives from the leveraging of rights claims presumably constitutive of the legitimacy of the state itself—that makes it a kind of succession ritual itself, insofar as it’s a way for power to be transferred from one agency of debt enforcement/forgiveness to another. As is always the case with liberalism, it’s a succession ritual that must disavow itself. Nevertheless, liberal transfers of power must take place through judgments, in claims against itself and often other parties that the state empowers. This, I would now say, is because all power is exercised through judgments: you have power insofar as, and to the degree that, contending parties bring their grievances, counter-grievances and defenses to you rather than resort or revert to the vendetta. To govern is to enmesh all of the order that answers to you in your judgments to the point where the very anticipation of those judgments becomes the ordering “grammar.” This is the conversion of resentment into donations to the center, or originary “debt servicing.”

It's easy to counter this claim with the contention that power flows from conquest, and I have and would continue to contend that but would introduce the following question: is conquest ever “naked”? Is there ever a conquest, however brutal and, from external standpoints, unwarranted, that is not presented as a bringing of justice to the conquered territory and people—as recompense for some previous offense or aggression, as an intervention to settle some dispute and thereby establish one’s authority, as the assumption of a grant of territory or authority by an originary distributor, or in some other way? We’d have to go back to very minimal levels of juridical order, I think, to find “naked” conquest. I doubt whether empire can be conceived of without this assumption of occupying or being authorized by the highest seat of justice. What has helped me arrive at this conclusion is witnessing the stupid, vicious and counter-productive policies the US has come to pursue towards both Russia and China. It occurred to me early on in the Russia-Ukraine war that America’s power would have best been used, and thereby vastly increased, by offering its services as an honest broker (an approach it seems to me likely a President Trump would have pursued). Instead, the US took the path of mindless sabotage, in an attempt to “weaken” Russia and, of course, wreck who knows how many millions of lives. The US seems to know no other way at this point than to mimic the sabotage Veblen and, more recently, Bichler and Nitzan attribute to capitalism. Meanwhile, China has seized the opening left by this pathological behavior and inserted itself into the Middle East as a potential mediator, a role it is far less fit to play than the US, which contributed considerably to creating the current configuration of the region, but being able to behave normally might compensate for its alienness to the various actors. What anti-colonialist critics have often taken to be imperial meddling in and manipulation of native disputes is probably a result of such exercises in setting oneself up in judgment—if the conflicts themselves are often stirred up or inflamed by the would-be imperial power that merely proves how indispensable this move is in asserting power.

I am now adding a few words written in early November, to take into account the Hamas massacres of October 7, and the subsequent Israeli war on Hamas. This provides an interesting and difficult case, both for the exercise of power by the Israelis in their little empire and by the US in its global one. Israel has framed its military goal as the elimination of Hamas, which we’d also have to assume means establishing conditions wherein a similar successor organization cannot emerge. So, it’s not a question of judgment in the sense of punishing the criminal but, rather, of eliminating a threat. In that case there is maybe something technical but also something ritual in the war: a restoring of a previous distribution, or nomos. Perhaps we could think of this as the military and political equivalent of the death penalty; if it’s framed more as self-defense, including the long-term sense of anticipatory self-defense, then Israel would be presenting itself as a party in the dispute claiming rights implicitly meant to be judged by others, with the only imaginable judgment and enforcement institution being larger imperial entities, with extremely unpredictable and diffuse agencies. Should the US, then, here as well, find some way to offer itself as the honest broker? It would be impossible not to pre-judge the October 7 massacre as an especially egregious crime, one which radically calls into the question the standing of its perpetrators. But that would just mean that the “brokerage” shifts in determining the standing of the respective actors, with the framing of the event reduced to the how of the elimination of Hamas, in which various actors, including those supporting Hamas in various ways, are stood in some form of judgment. Acting as an advocate for non-combatants is a legitimate role for such an arbiter, which would entail setting terms and conditions for determining who they are and what kind of room for advocacy the imperative to eliminate Hamas allows or demands (and before which implicit or explicit forum, etc.). Such advocacy, conducted within the terms set by Hamas delenda est would, I think considerably advance the imperial power of the US. The model is, then, equally effective and comprehensive here, and we can start to see some of the complexities it might entail. (The problems of evidence gathering, assessing and measuring in real time, in ways incommensurable with an actual court case, will have to be considered as well—this is also a question of the generation of norms.)

Judgment must be enforced, but it’s also the case that issuing widely accepted judgments might be a way of acquiring that enforcement capacity. It’s not hard to imagine that the initial Big Man was simply a respected figure others came to in order to settle disputes, who eventually had to seize the center with the aid of those who wanted disputes settled against those who didn’t. All just interventions in the social order (“politics”) follows this model. (What doesn’t fit this model is the more ritual distribution of largesse as patronage. Which is most of what contemporary governments do.) The model, further, can be applied to more individualized cases, with regard to the pedagogical dimension of everyday life, in which I include the pastoral practices of clergy and the managerial responsibility of bosses. In other words, there’s a hypothesis regarding leadership here, which proposes that you exercise pedagogical power by making explicit the disputes “within” an individual, or between successive iterations or selvings of that individual and institute habits to settle them. There is also a model of reciprocity implicit here, insofar as the capacity to exercise judgment involves not only the ability to listen to others (take in testimony) but to entertain appeals and submit to the judgment of others, even humbly, when they come without enforcement capacity from those one is accustomed to judge. You want to take all these models of judgment in so as to refine your own practices and quell your own resentments.

It follows that it is best to think about succession rituals as exercises in judgment, but also in displaying that which stands behind any judgment, which is the founding nomos of the order (originary distribution). To embody power is to select your successor—if you’re not selecting your successor, your power is conditioned on the approval of those who will. Once hereditary succession is ruled out as the default option (while remaining as an option), the process of selecting a successor entails and, really, constitutes and defines, the entire social order. All institutions are organized so as to produce candidates. One who is publicly selected as the successor now might be replaced by another, for reasons, themselves ritually embodied, that would also be public. (I’m briefly recalling arguments I’ve made one many other occasions.) It’s easiest to think of this on the model of kingship, but we can’t rule out very different forms of governance. Perhaps there won’t always be a single state—but, we could say that however power is distributed, there will be disputes within and across institutions, and with the decline in contemporary state forms (which will decline or be dramatically transformed) venues for receiving “wise” judgment regarding those disputes will be in demand—the juridical will be found to be irreducible, again and again, with each new technoscenic articulation of pedagogical platforms. There might be many firms offering judgments, perhaps specialized across separate fields, but I would hypothesize the emergence and perhaps continual re-emergence of a centralized data security firm that attains a temporary monopoly on treating data for purposes of judgment. That firm will exercise the closest thing to what we currently call “sovereignty.”

Judgment can be rooted in the ritual order or originary distribution by being conceptualized as the realm of debt enforcement and forgiveness. Even in the most mundane cases, whether or how much to, say, punish a shoplifter, can be illuminated in this light: the transgression incurs a debt to the social order and the best way to measure, extract payment for, or forgive that debt is among the most serious kinds of conversations we can have. How do we weigh what the criminal has done with what has happened to him—clearly, this can’t be reduced to a numerical weight; rather, it’s a question of “measuring” the damage done to the originary distribution and the threshold below which the vendetta is triggered. Right now, the relation between debt issuance (the central bank) and debt enforcement (ultimately, the security and intelligence agencies) results in the outside spread provided by the bank imposing strict limitations on the options available with the governing institutions—no outside option is allowed, of course, but what is going to count as an outside option is precisely the ongoing decision-making process the security and intelligence agencies are always making. The official rotations in power, where decisions about succession, while still relying heavily upon the input of the most capable and ensconced of the office holders, are strictly constrained, function to calibrate movements along the continuum between enforcement and forgiveness.

Under these conditions certain exchanges are beyond the reach of judgment, and, therefore, so are all exchanges downstream of those. To put it crudely, neither the central banks nor the security/intelligence agencies can be put in the dock even if, very rarely, a member of either group might be singled out for public opprobrium and even penalties (it seems to me you could count the number of such instances on one hand). But, even on the model I’m offering here, would that not always be the case? After all, the originary distribution can’t be undone or restarted, and any attempt to do so will simply set in motion generations of vendettas. But there’s no reason any member of the highest governing bodies, even the head of the data security firm selecting his successor as hypothesized above, cannot be brought within the scope of judgment. I think it must be a willing submission, in which, for the period of judgment, the governor delegates to another the right to set succession, and such judgment must be taken to be somewhat extraordinary, establishing very precisely who might have claims and standing in this case. This might be something like a current prime minister calling for new elections, precisely in order to confirm his mandate. Perhaps pre-emptive rituals of judgment are incorporated into succession rituals, like the festivals of medieval Europe when power relations are temporarily reversed: an orderly process of advancing claims before a highly skeptical tribunal might be instituted. This might take the form of the kind of “futures” market I’ve been examining in some recent posts, in which bets are made on a final judgment, even if no immediate consequences follow from it. The only way of jumping into (usurping) the line of succession would be through better sampling, and such trials and contests would provide data that the current leader could use to determine whether to keep or change course as well as to initiate potential fork-offs.

It's good to think through such problems now in part because they help us think through the more immediate problem of producing an outside option that can subject the outside spread to judgment. Here, I don’t have much new to say right now. The only moves that can be made here is to reform and/or replace the existing security/intelligence agencies by infiltrating the disciplines they must ultimately depend on—even the rogue-est political police has to know a bit about what’s going on, and that’s becoming increasingly difficult to follow—more and more of such work will be contracted out, and the contracting out process incentivizes and even subsidizes freelance data gathering among candidates to proceed closer to central intelligence. This would in turn redirect significant flows of capital towards investments in institutional maintenance, as these proto-sovereign organizations would need to make inroads in educational and related institutions (this redirection would require and stimulate inroads within finance). This means all the disciplines, however they might be re-organized—a translation of Homer might be as pertinent as the development of advanced AI-controlled surveillance. No one needs to tell me how difficult this would be, but I also don’t think anyone can propose a plausible alternative in taking on systematic capitalist-liberal sabotage. But the prospects of advance are improved by training our attention on sites of judgment within the reformations of the originary distribution, to the point of finding reassemblings of the originary distribution in judgments. If a designated owner of a piece of the originary distribution (most simply, a member of the leadership team conquering some territory allocated a piece of it) must in turn rely upon the services of others he must extend them some kind of credit, which they can then extend, opening a space of exchange, distribution and judgment. (There’s a way of thinking about the High-Low vs. the Middle mechanism here: the High keeps transferring sites of judgment from the middle to its own authority.) This is the study of history, including all its usurpations, which appear as usurpations against the field of an originary distribution interrupted, but as a doing justice upon some other field of distribution. The best studies of history will be those that frame and propose possible settlements of those differends, which it is the vocation of the literary arts in particular to reveal.