Debits and Credits

Returning to Zack Baker’s and my “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center” is a way not only of continuing to explore the notion of originary debt but the implications of that concept for others, which might receive amplification as a result. For example, I have been positing, as the ultimate replacement for money, something like what would be “tokens” representing future pedagogical practices that would most effectively supply one’s team with the best members, increasingly projected into the future. This notion in turn suggests amplification of something I’ve said quite a few times in the context of my thinking of technology as scenic design, which is that what technology produces is, ultimately, pedagogical platforms for the further breaking down and reassembling of practices. This is perhaps convergent with Heidegger’s notion of the technological as disclosure, and perhaps also with Simondon’s and Stiegler’s understandings of technics as eliciting features of the human that had previously been merely potential or, more radically, didn’t exist. But, even further, this suggests that the ultimate project or program of the human as such is pedagogical, the ongoing “explicitation” of the tacit, the creation of scenes upon which we might show up in different ways. In this more ambitious formulation, we would have to see how all the idioms deriving from all the world’s traditions would be rendered pedagogically, since it is in the nature of pedagogy that one never clears the decks but always works with the materials provided by the “habitat,” and all the histories trailed along in them.

I wrote a fairly forceful critique of GA a little while back and I want to add something to that on the way to some concept production. It seems to me that the earliest decision, and in my view mistake, that Gans made in turning the originary hypothesis into Generative Anthropology is already there in the original The Origin of Language: the separation between “institutional” and “linguistic” representation. This creates the path to the “freedom” of liberal democracy and the autonomy of the aesthetic as the model of social exchange. The institutional, i.e., ritual, is heavy and filled with various investments, while the linguistic is light as air, travels freely and therefore has an autonomy and duration no institution can have. But if there is never any linguistic representation, i.e., no use of language, outside of institutions, then the entire separation collapses. To imagine this separation, we’d have to imagine completely unhoused individuals with nothing between them but their words—where, exactly, would we imagine them to be? Talking about what? We’d also have to imagine something like a Chomskyan reduction of language to the endless possible permutations of grammatical forms—but how would such a language have originated? By tapping into the rhetorical tradition and, in particular, the notion of “commonplaces,” which modern linguistics recoups in the form of “chunks” and “constructions,” we can remember that there is no language without circulation in institutions. Language is always pedagogical, and pedagogy always implies an institution, some scene to be preserved, extended and restaffed. Pedagogy is language learning, and language learning is the creation of idioms out of commonplaces—what we might call “idiom mining.”

Social life is the recording, enforcement and payment of debts to the center. The first debt is to the object on the scene that has constituted by saving the human community. It does this over and over again, every time the community is provided with nourishing food, protection from predators and enemies, etc. Of course, the community does this itself when observed in the cold light of day, but the cold light of day provides a partial view, missing the miracle of everyone collaborating intelligently in the course of making provisions—that is the work of the center, realized in the fact that all goods are ultimately brought back to the same place, and the center being given its share. How else would you name the how of everyone doing things together without some word that would be, functionally, “God”? Everything about every member of the community, then, has been lent to that member, for the purposes of making the provisions that will be brought back to the center. When the Big Man seizes the center, he takes on the debt; there is, though, I think, never a perfect identity between the Big Man and the center, even in the case of sacral kings and divine emperors. The occupant of the center is more like a manager than a holder of the debt, insofar as his own life is marked up with prescriptions regarding his own debt to, say, his ancestors and their ways.

These groundings will have to provide us with our way, or ways, of speaking about money and markets. Money is distributed as a way of providing people with means of repaying their debt. This might be money generated by the temple or emperor, or locally, within the community. But the money is used for individual transactions—a farmer goes to the local market and gives a merchant a certain amount of money for some seed—where is the repayment of debt there? As Gans says in the passage we quote in “There is No Economy,” the debt is simply paid immediately. The merchant will then use that money and all the other money he receives from similar exchanges to go buy more seed; he needs a buffer, enough money to keep himself stocked with seed when, say, seed is harder to come by or goes up in price. And there will be someone, the outside spread, whom he will go to for money if he falls short, after a particularly long period in which he has difficulty finding or keeping or transporting or selling seed. And that outside spread must rely upon the occupant of the center, who will enable, for example, the expropriations that might be necessary to maintain the holder of the outside spread when things get rough for him. And, finally, the holder of the outside spread is always hedging by looking towards possible outside options that might reroute succession towards someone better able to protect the spread, and in the meantime “discipline” the occupant of the center. The expropriations carried out by the occupant of the center may or may not fall upon our farmer, but they shadow him, and create the conditions ensuring that the farmer will buy his seed within the acceptable ritual parameters, as a donation to the middleman’s cut to the outside spread—the farmer cannot be allowed to do his shopping outside of these parameters. Local market exchanges in the capillaries are always held by the availability of credit which have “always already” indebted those on the periphery to the terms of expropriation determined closer to the center. You have been given a certain starting point, within a particular community, neighborhood and family; a certain set of abilities, to some extent “natural” and yet shaped and formed educationally in conformity with and therefore mortgaged to the center; and the way you depart from that starting point and cultivate and employ those abilities is channeled so as to make you useful to, i.e., enable you to repay your debt to, the center.

On the linguistic or semiotic level, this means that nothing in a given order can be left without meaning, even if tacit or undeveloped. Nobody’s ever just “doing what they feel like,” even if that phrase is a viable idiom describing someone’s withholding of debt repayment on the chance (making the bet) that other forms of credit will materialize, in the form of nurturing associations or some productivity resulting from “doing what you want” that you will find a market for. And the meaning of anything is idiomized. It’s impossible to speak outside of some version or higher-order articulation of the Natural Semantic Primes, and in thinking, doing, wanting, knowing, seeing, etc., one is positioning oneself within a particular eddy or vortex within which the means of redeeming those claims is more or less available within broader circulations of debt and credit. You are always referencing, as best you can, the present intersection or conjuncture of the outside option and the outside spread: at every moment, the outside option conditions a regime of debt enforcement that will ensure people have to work, manage their households, save, spend, invest, borrow, repay, etc., in certain proportions, and that means those controlling the outside spread are always weighing the current occupant of the center against some possible replacement who might enforce debts more according to the desired proportions. And it’s possible, perhaps in some historical periods even the default, for the occupant of the center to ensure his own succession in such a way as to impose a “haircut” on those managing the outside spread—the extreme difficulty of even imagining that today is an indication of its centrality to any serious political project. The power of current states comes from the necessity of debt enforcement, currently undertaken in the form of the authorized currency, and they, or at least the largest ones, would have to find some other source of power.

At a particular turn in my thinking I asserted that with the collapse of sacral kingship, the problem of the relationship between the signifying and the occupied center opened up and became the central, still unsolved problem of social order. This thinking here is a development of that line of inquiry, in the new frame that compresses the signifying and occupied center in the problem of singularized succession in perpetuity. In a recent Chronicle, Eric Gans trots out the by now formulaic distinction between “submission to faith” and the open-ended and paradoxical process of self-constitution presumably embodied in the form of liberal democracy. We can take up that distinction, or speak in that idiom, if need be, and pose our problem in terms consistent with it: we need to “oscillate” between immersion in the team, including devotion to its current leadership, on the one hand, and the submersion of that team in a stack of scenes that leverages all the data that ultimately constitutes and renders barely meaningful any team. This oscillation can in turn be framed as one between debt enforcement and debt forgiveness: we are each and every one of us repo men. Punishing a criminal is debt enforcement: the criminal has used his abilities and energies in ways that extract from the community in a way that includes refraining from any repayment; so, the loss of freedom for a certain amount of time and imposed in a certain manner aims at approximating the debt. Thinking in these terms, incidentally, would enable use to become more inventive in thinking in terms of punishment, which in many cases might be imposed more along the much despised “social credit” terms (which just submits to algorithmic data collection and analysis time honored forms of reputation maintenance), and involve exclusions and removal of access to certain places and provisions. It would be easy to show that just about everyone critical of such approaches (Deleuze’s “society of control,” etc.) resorts to them immediately and reflexively as soon as they find themselves confronted with others and enemies that normal methods of combating can’t easily be applied to. And with good reason. But we could push this analysis past the contemporary “carceral” culture of punishment, and imagine technologically enhanced means of isolating, restricting and exposing transgressors without traditional forms of punishment and confinement and in ways, moreover, that might turn offenders into suppliers of data regarding training in new modes of self-reflexivity that apply to further refinement of the disciplinary order and thereby represent a kind of debt repayment (and rehabilitation). A kind of high-tech, data gathering cities of refuge, perhaps situated within existing cities.

I’m continuing to draw upon Colin Drumm’s work here, and I look forward to continuing to do so as his inquiries remain quite open. He points out, although here with less originality than with the concepts I worked with above (“outside spread” and “outside option”), that markets are made, and while I don’t think he systematically relates the making of markets, which requires some kind of currency, to the intersection of the outside spread and outside option, there’s no reason for us not to do so. What makes it possible to exchange a particular amount in a particular denomination for a particular good or service within a particular market? It’s a question continuous with the ritual one of what makes a particular offering acceptable, or performatively efficacious. The occupant of the center, always fending off at whatever distance or degree of threat, a possible outside option, supervises, through layers of delegation, that market in the name of protecting the continued viability (the eternity, we might say) of the outside spread. So, the denomination will work as it does as a measure of the demands of the masters of the outside spread upon the occupant of the center and the latter’s ability to comply with those demands through a series of commands he issues (an important consideration here is that the demands of the outside spread can compromise the occupant’s ability to enforce them). Politics, then, involves enforcing some debts and forgiving others.

How, then, to create self-enforcing idioms for the oscillation between forgiveness and enforcement? I’ve done some work on this: you forgive what has happened and enforce what one has done. The line between the two is redrawn, on the one hand as more data comes and on the other hand as creditors become either more insistent or more prepared to write it off—which is also really a question of data. There must be judgment in here, that is, the juridical, which I am increasingly leaning toward seeing in terms of data exchange, which may be seen as implementable on the civil law level (where data can function as currency) but even criminal law translates into data exchange: that someone must be executed as the only way of ensuring the oscillation between forgiveness and enforcement fits the originary distribution entails that data of the specifics of that crime and the way it registered as damage or disruption to that oscillation is extracted by way of the execution (in which case consideration of punishment as an event that elicits the positioning of participants, observers and broader “registrants” of its effects becomes imperative). The deliberate generation of ordered data takes place on futures markets organized around events curated by judgment agencies, so we can say that debts are to be forgiven to the extent that currency in which they were to be paid back and the likelihood of receiving that repayment would lead participants in a futures market to decline placing a bet on it; and they are to be enforced to the extent that the assumption of the debt shows forth as having been done and set down a stake so as to thereby attract bettors. Of course, enforcement of debt might involve something like enlistment, deputization as a repo man, which means that forgiveness is for people you don’t want on your team or that about them you don’t want them bringing to the team while enforcement is for those who will be on your team or a competing one. We close in on someone whose idiom is to be redeemed, who due to our intervention might turn out to have done what he did; but, then, it’s a question of what to enforce and what to forgive in each case—for one who must be almost completely forgiven because things have been deemed to have happened to him, redemption is only possible insofar as there is something enforceable in the whole mess. Debts below the threshold of current forms of enforcement that thereby trigger new possibilities of repayment become sites of inquiry and pedagogy.

It's interesting that what happens here is that forgiveness is failure and enforcement is recruitment into higher tasks, which is the way originary indebtedness should be taken on. This does not correspond to existing realities, in which formulating terms for forgiveness is often a precondition for taking on more debt. Every bit of our lives is mortgaged to financial institutions—even if we have paid off our actual mortgages and car loans and pay off our credit card bill in full every month, etc., everything we own can be ruined as collateral and our savings rendered worthless by a series of deliberate articulations of the outside spread and the outside option, making us nevertheless indebted to the behavioral demands, which may be impossible to meet, of those articulating the spread and the option. What role blockchains and bitcoin will have I am still thinking about, but the intelligent decisions by those of us unable to affect the spread/option will be a version of converting assets into data which here means transferring monetary debits to originary credits through the creation of justice markets and edging justice markets towards data exchanges. Forgive all crimes against data extraction insofar as those crimes can be turned into data curation.