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.”
Could you perhaps expand on how you understand the difference between a broker and a mediator? An attempt to recall same scooped this much off the top of the internet deck. "The mediator topology is commonly used when you need to orchestrate multiple steps within an event through a central mediator, whereas the broker topology is used when you want to chain events and responses together directly without the need for a mediator" (Not sure why they employ 'topology") This explanation does not "hold much water" for me when i try to apply it to an image of say, El Trumpo at large in the geopolitical field..
I'm not sure I find much use in that framing of the distinction either but, I must confess I didn't really have any distinction in mind and was using the two words synonymously.
"What doesn't fit this model is the more ritual distribution of largesse as patronage. Which is most of what contemporary governments do."
Yet the patronage networks can't work without decisions about who will and will not be included in them, or in an age of people using social media to monetize various performances, the patronage networks must involve themselves (government agents getting jobs or clients in the social media companies, telling banks to close accounts) in cancelling or green lighting.
"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 technoscientific articulation of pedagogical platforms... 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."
What I find so notable today (of course I'm not alone) is the complete lack of any official judgment on the data, alleged, denied, by (unofficial) accounts on X, etc., concerning excess mortality in the wake of the Covid "vaccines", despite an obvious interest among, i think, a not insignificant section of the public, and no doubt among those tending to be better informed and hence minimally powerful. (X keeps feeding me my local health authority’s ads to get "information" about the new vaccine whenever I visit dissident accounts, so obviously this "debate" is recognized on some level.) There are a few dozen dissidents on X presuming to present such data and related information; there seems to be some confirmation from insurance and funeral businesses, but no claims from these industries to know why. There was a very brief "debate" in the British Parliament where the junior government minister acknowledged the phenomenon of excess deaths but attributed it to causes non-vaccine. I think in Canada any governmental judgment on this can't happen anytime soon, if there is any reasonable governmental doubt about the "vaccines" because one aspect of the vaccine rollouts was that those people recognized as "indigenous" were put first in line (one doctor in rural BC, with indigenous patients, said in the early days of the vaccine that it was harming and killing some of his patients and he was suspended by the health authority and he is still being investigated by his licensing College) and it is these people, in a classic high low vs middle, who are at the symbolic apex of the present patronage system, not to mention all those whose professional positions have demanded they toe the line. Or perhaps the real apex of the patronage system are the pharma companies (the highly capitalized "healthcare" system in general) who were protected from competition with any cheap therapies (the scapegoating of drugs like ivermectin, the ignoring of humble Vitamin D) that could undo the huge investments in the new vaccine and other technologies.
Inasmuch as any patronage system necessarily includes decisions about who is what, then your model applies there as well. And yet I sense why you wanted to make this distinction between patronage and "declining" state forms: power must have more to do with deferral than consumption (or sabotage?) in the long run. But then why is this not more obvious to people generally, not least to those who sabotage endlessly in their quests to maintain positions high up the food chain at a time of "elite" overproduction? Those who desire "power" are undermining the traditional state and advancing the day when a "private" data security firm does provide those who need to know with the real data on "vaccines", etc. OK, so they only care about the short term. Is this simply the age-old way of hubris?
Anyway, I don't quite see how any "private" data security firm will avoid being captured and made into a "public" sacrifice. This may be why you talk of a "continual re-emergence" of such firms. So I still wonder if there is something to add to the model, if we can simply maintain that power is not really about consumption... The pyramid of skulls and bones wants to know!
Yes, that's true--the line between the ritual and the juridical can not be drawn so neatly here.
Regarding the emergent data security companies, I think the basic question is whether there will be those agencies who need to know what is, in fact going on--even if only to conceal and spin evidence pointing to realities adverse to their continued rule. If we were to get to the point where no one even wanted to know then we'd be in uncharted waters, but I think those who need to govern, even badly , want to know things, at least about their enemies and potential enemies. And they will need to mobilize the data collection and analysis machinery to acquire that intelligence, which means they will need diligent and passably honest personnel to do so. The whole problem is gradually and massively increasing and improving those personnel, so that they can eventually operate in a sovereign manner even with the ongoing sabotage (and if they can do that they can reduce the sabotage). I think we have to account for the isolation and impotence of people who might fit that description has to be attributed to the conditions under which competition for power takes place--we might say too much patronage has become necessary and too much patronage at cross-purposes with other distributors of patronage.
Could you perhaps expand on how you understand the difference between a broker and a mediator? An attempt to recall same scooped this much off the top of the internet deck. "The mediator topology is commonly used when you need to orchestrate multiple steps within an event through a central mediator, whereas the broker topology is used when you want to chain events and responses together directly without the need for a mediator" (Not sure why they employ 'topology") This explanation does not "hold much water" for me when i try to apply it to an image of say, El Trumpo at large in the geopolitical field..
"
I'm not sure I find much use in that framing of the distinction either but, I must confess I didn't really have any distinction in mind and was using the two words synonymously.
"What doesn't fit this model is the more ritual distribution of largesse as patronage. Which is most of what contemporary governments do."
Yet the patronage networks can't work without decisions about who will and will not be included in them, or in an age of people using social media to monetize various performances, the patronage networks must involve themselves (government agents getting jobs or clients in the social media companies, telling banks to close accounts) in cancelling or green lighting.
"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 technoscientific articulation of pedagogical platforms... 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."
What I find so notable today (of course I'm not alone) is the complete lack of any official judgment on the data, alleged, denied, by (unofficial) accounts on X, etc., concerning excess mortality in the wake of the Covid "vaccines", despite an obvious interest among, i think, a not insignificant section of the public, and no doubt among those tending to be better informed and hence minimally powerful. (X keeps feeding me my local health authority’s ads to get "information" about the new vaccine whenever I visit dissident accounts, so obviously this "debate" is recognized on some level.) There are a few dozen dissidents on X presuming to present such data and related information; there seems to be some confirmation from insurance and funeral businesses, but no claims from these industries to know why. There was a very brief "debate" in the British Parliament where the junior government minister acknowledged the phenomenon of excess deaths but attributed it to causes non-vaccine. I think in Canada any governmental judgment on this can't happen anytime soon, if there is any reasonable governmental doubt about the "vaccines" because one aspect of the vaccine rollouts was that those people recognized as "indigenous" were put first in line (one doctor in rural BC, with indigenous patients, said in the early days of the vaccine that it was harming and killing some of his patients and he was suspended by the health authority and he is still being investigated by his licensing College) and it is these people, in a classic high low vs middle, who are at the symbolic apex of the present patronage system, not to mention all those whose professional positions have demanded they toe the line. Or perhaps the real apex of the patronage system are the pharma companies (the highly capitalized "healthcare" system in general) who were protected from competition with any cheap therapies (the scapegoating of drugs like ivermectin, the ignoring of humble Vitamin D) that could undo the huge investments in the new vaccine and other technologies.
Inasmuch as any patronage system necessarily includes decisions about who is what, then your model applies there as well. And yet I sense why you wanted to make this distinction between patronage and "declining" state forms: power must have more to do with deferral than consumption (or sabotage?) in the long run. But then why is this not more obvious to people generally, not least to those who sabotage endlessly in their quests to maintain positions high up the food chain at a time of "elite" overproduction? Those who desire "power" are undermining the traditional state and advancing the day when a "private" data security firm does provide those who need to know with the real data on "vaccines", etc. OK, so they only care about the short term. Is this simply the age-old way of hubris?
Anyway, I don't quite see how any "private" data security firm will avoid being captured and made into a "public" sacrifice. This may be why you talk of a "continual re-emergence" of such firms. So I still wonder if there is something to add to the model, if we can simply maintain that power is not really about consumption... The pyramid of skulls and bones wants to know!
Yes, that's true--the line between the ritual and the juridical can not be drawn so neatly here.
Regarding the emergent data security companies, I think the basic question is whether there will be those agencies who need to know what is, in fact going on--even if only to conceal and spin evidence pointing to realities adverse to their continued rule. If we were to get to the point where no one even wanted to know then we'd be in uncharted waters, but I think those who need to govern, even badly , want to know things, at least about their enemies and potential enemies. And they will need to mobilize the data collection and analysis machinery to acquire that intelligence, which means they will need diligent and passably honest personnel to do so. The whole problem is gradually and massively increasing and improving those personnel, so that they can eventually operate in a sovereign manner even with the ongoing sabotage (and if they can do that they can reduce the sabotage). I think we have to account for the isolation and impotence of people who might fit that description has to be attributed to the conditions under which competition for power takes place--we might say too much patronage has become necessary and too much patronage at cross-purposes with other distributors of patronage.