Nomos and Transfer Translation

I’ll begin by doubling or, maybe, by this point, tripling or more down on couple of basic idioms or hypotheses. First, and most central, singularized succession in perpetuity—recently, in the course of a brief discussion, answering a couple of questions regarding governance, I hesitated when it came to reducing governance itself, as a whole, to succession. That is, I got a little thrown off guard by having no quick answer to commonplaces regarding governance, like the “common good,” the “good of the people,” etc. I don’t know if I’ve ever emphasized sufficiently forcefully that, yes, there is nothing more to governance than singularized succession in perpetuity, and all these other criteria (along with the ones mentioned, stuff like consent, natural right, natural law, etc., etc.) are either dispensed with or subsumed within it. Singularized succession in perpetuity is the umbilical cord linking us to the originary scene—hence its indispensability. Whatever “good” or “right” that you might have in mind means nothing if the governor of today is not handing off the reins to the governor of tomorrow. These more “idealistic” or moralistic notions of governance are really apotropaic—things for a ruler to say so as to ward off incitements to rebellion—the most obvious such incitement being “he takes everything for himself and doesn’t care about you.” But if we take such notions seriously, we’d have to ask how, exactly, the sovereign knows what the common good or the rights of the people are? Only through the disciplines, starting with the priests and then extending through the philosophers, the spies, the lawyers, the nobles assembled in parliament (but how do they know what the common good is or, rather, how to frame their own demands in the idiom of “good” or “right”?) and ultimately the economists, sociologists, “area studies” scholars, etc. So, these concepts invite in the supersovereigns from the very beginning. Still, this doesn’t mean that singularized succession in perpetuity involves a mere assertion of power and an insistence on obeying whoever has it—if the occupant of the center doesn’t or, even more, can’t, name his successor, that derogates from his authority, because everyone obeying him now is simultaneously scrambling around trying to find whom they might be able to recognize as a successor. Everyone has to consider whether following some order now might put them at odds with the next occupant of the center. If you choose your successor, which would also mean changing that choice where necessary and therefore always oscillating between and shifting the value of various options, you are interfacing with various social institutions, offering a reading of their current state and directing them towards some future state and therefore shaping that institutional space even to the point of eventually replacing money with the “succession market” or market in pedagogical futures. All this serves the “common good” and elicits the kind of public feedback a ruler needs—which is really the point of granting “rights” in the first place. Every public act becomes a confirming or revising of one’s chosen successor. Even more, insofar as your choice is aimed at someone who will be able to choose his successor, who will in turn choose his, etc., you are affirming social continuity and long-term investment in “human capital” as the highest social priority—and, again, without doing that, “common good” and “right” mean nothing. There will always be a reference to and implication of traditions in singularized succession—first of all, most obviously once one can trace one’s occupancy of the center back to a series of predecessors, but even in the case of a break one would make the best case possible for having acted exigently in retrieving some line of succession dropped by a predecessor and whenever possible outlining the juridical paper trail establishing the case. And, of course, as a model for everyone else, you are encouraging the same priorities in all other institutions, installing centered ordinality as the general public protocol. This is a theory of governance that consistently adopts the stance of governance itself, proposing a kind of self-pedagogy of the prince, with everyone else converging on a “theory of the ruler’s mind” which they do their best to make more intelligent. And any theory of governance that takes its point of departure from the stance of the governed is just going to be a playbook for rebellion. (Meanwhile, all the other concerns, regarding forms of culture and morality, demographics, inequality, etc., can all be folded up into succession because, given certain initial conditions, some types of “spreads” along these axes will be more conducive to succession than others—such an order will be organized around succession rituals, which will place institutions and communities on constant display.)

I have been reading about John Selden, the 17^th century English jurist and political philosopher, and will mention his notion of “metaphysical equity,” which would ground governance in the obligation, which ultimately requires divine sanction (grasped through the “active intellect”—for me, the result of the study of central figures who attract and defer resentment) rather than mere self-interest, to keep promises and abide by agreements, including those grounding the political order one has inherited (and therefore has not explicitly “agreed to”). The occupancy of the center would then be grounded in the reciprocal obligations between ruler and ruled, with the former obliged to judge justly amongst the latter; a certain right to resistance is allowed for here, one not grounded in natural right, but on the nature of the specific social arrangements that have extended existing agreements and promises into the present. Such resistance is first of all aimed at protesting the abrogation of such promises and their restoration, and even if that proves impossible, to the creation of an order as closely modeled on the previous set of arrangements as possible. (This is closely related to my speculations, a few posts back, about the possibility of suing the occupant of the center or putting him on trial.) This is all very coherent, and might be the political theory I’d choose if I had to, but I would incorporate this understanding within singularized succession as well, insofar as by distributing and overseeing distribution and the adjudications necessarily following from distribution and inheritance the occupant of the center is modeling practices for his successors and appointing and variously elevating and demoting those possible successors based on their performance in the juridical arena.

The other idiom, to which I have had recourse more seldomly, is that of the sample. A while back I proposed “sample” as a replacement for “utterance” in an attempt to unite various layers of the stack in a way which the linguistically certified concept “utterance” cannot: so, an utterance is, in fact, a sample of language, which one “understands” as a representation, metonymic and metaphoric, and probabilistic, of the whole, and in such a way that one contributes another sample, that adds to and alters the whole while advancing knowledge of it. This is a very simple way of thinking exchanges with the center, as mediated by exchanges with each other—we exchange sample for sample, and there will be some kind of measurement and notion of “equality” (“sameness”) involved, but only in terms of the whole, or, to stick with primes, the all, which, of course, neither of us comes anywhere near encompassing. Thinking in terms of samples is also a way of thinking in terms of data, its labeling, curation, and use in training, and therefore of reminding us that we are, however much we want to feel we are guarding our privacy, contributing systematically to the various databases. How to make your sample an improvement of the database and in such a way as to inscribe yourself and ensure your legibility in terms that enable you to keep improving your contributions, will become the most important, maybe the only, moral and ethical question. To those who consider considering oneself an issuer of samples an indignity I would say that you are yourselves samples, and not only is there no loss of dignity in being so but that being or becoming a sample is like (sometimes maybe the same) as becoming a “substitute,” which forms a cord linking us back to the sacrificial center and the elevation of humans to sacrificial value with the emergence of sacral kingship. The dignity and even divinity of each individual is synonymous with each of us being a sample. We are samples sampling samples and I would say this sampling/sampledness might also be the most durable way of naming the human in all its interactions with the animal, mineral and machinic. Samples are tokens of deferral and therefore our debt to the center and humans will always be the only beings that have taken on this debt. The idioms of sampling are the best fit for center study as, essentially, a hypothetical infrastructure or infrastructural hypothesis interlaced with all idioms. We always want to make every thing we say—every sample—a bit more hypothetical while making every hypothesis more livable and therefore testable.

All of this is really a prelude to the topic of the post announced in the title. I want to return to the nomos in order to address certain things center study is allergic to in their familiar formulations, which is to say what ordinarily goes under names like “spirituality,” “religion,”
“faith” and so on. These names refer to hypotheses I consider defunct. I have consistently proposed replacing them with language, or here we could say sampling, since maximizing the meaning of terms, constatively and performatively, or, all along the ostensive-imperative-interrogative-declarative axis, covers everything one might mean by those words, while resolving the aporias constituting them (is “faith” “had”? “Expressed”? “Manifested?” Once you’ve asserted it—against what real or imagined objection or accusation?—then what?) The language of sacred texts themselves, drawing on notions of seeing, witnessing, promising, judging, owing, etc., are far richer than the dogmas and doctrines these words end up referring to. But it also seems to me that this maximization of the sample, seeing to the iteration of the sample, can also be seen as an ongoing refounding of the nomos, which is most real point of origin any of us can participate in. The nomos assumes the conquest of some territory (even if just from “nature” and not its previous inhabitants) and the consequent distribution into lots by the conqueror to his confederates in accord with the role they have played in the conquest. All subsequent inheritances will refer back to this nomos, just as US law ultimately refers back to the grants by British monarchs of colonies to individuals and companies. To challenge the distribution is to commit to a new conquest, so anyone who imagines doing so in the name of something like “fairness” or “equality” should have that in mind. But every inheritance, division and delegation, in referring back to the nomos or originary distribution, also accesses the intention of the distributor, which can be re-experienced in every moment. The Jewish version of this is being enjoined, during the Passover Seder, to see yourself as having been present at Mount Sinai during the revelation of the Lord and the giving of the Torah. This is meant to be taken quite literarily. Christian rites also place the worshipper with Jesus on the cross and with the disciples at the Resurrection, and there is a model here of concentric circles, where those in the inner circles turn around and gesture toward those in successively outer circles so as to create an unbroken continuity from the initial revelation. Here we find very direct obligations, debts, promises, injunctions, relics of various kinds, modes of congregating and distributing and so on, all governed by some sense of ritual constraint. So, what else is necessary for a life beyond the daily exchanges with those like yourself, one in which and experience of presence through contact with the metaperson(s) guaranteeing the nomos is pervasive?

In a way this is a getting back to basics post, so I’ll conclude with a revival of the concept of “transfer translation,” which I took over from Marcel Jousse, and which is ultimately a more historically specific way of speaking about “mistakenness.” I’ll frame this is terms of an observation which I’ve been aware of for a long time but never ceases to startle me when I confront it in a new context—that all of our “ideas,” “principles,” ‘convictions,” “fundamental beliefs,” etc., all, without exception, originated in some polemical exchange where reasons had to be given for something one was already doing, or was compelled to do, in the course of following certain imperatives and engaging certain challenges or enemies. None of them originated with someone sitting down and thinking, “what’s the real meaning of X?” In the process of connecting one declarative to another through expressions like “because,” “either/or,” “in order to,” etc., an optical illusion (which is really what modern critics of “metaphysics” meant by the term) arises whereby the ideas seem to be generating each other. The notion of the transfer translation gives us a more specifiable way of examining this kind of process, one which I find preferable to psychological concepts like “cognition.” Jouse was interested in what happens when a sacred text is translated and the terms that are treated as equivalent for the sake of the translation have different meanings or webs of connotation in the respective languages. New commentaries on and narratives “explaining” rituals or sacred events emerge from the translation and even find their way back into the original language, since in these cases of translation (Hebrew-Aramaic-Greek-Latin in the case of Scripture) many in the scribal class are familiar with several of the languages; indeed, since these kinds of transferences might have been going on well before the texts were gathered together and canonized, the transfer translations might already be “contaminating” the “original” text. Now, as plausible and interesting as I find this as a way of understanding scribal, ritual, liturgical and theological cultures, I’m more interested in it as a model for our every day exchanges of samples, where metaphors getting taken more literally, slippages from a localized to a general application, names turning into words, along with many other semiotic processes generate new understandings of our transactions with, or, rather, indebtedness to, the center. One could certainly say that the entire financial, ritual, monarchical, technological and juridical vocabularies I’ve been taking over and remixing (sampling) for years now are just so many transfer translations—more deliberately formed, but never with complete foreknowledge of further permutations and combinations. It’s all a way of pressing samples into service to the center precisely by transgressing their respective specializations (the source of disciplinary power) and putting them in “orbit.” It’s a kind of controlled (but never completely) mistakenness, creating a store of idioms to be sampled in ever new ways. It’s a kind of cult of the idiom, but one open to anyone willing to have their commonplaces displaced.

Our learning processes today are continuous with those deriving from the originary scene: we carry out rituals that have made the center present to us, which is to say, added an increment of deferral to the field of mimetic practices; those rituals are felt to be uneven in their effectivity, leading us to comment narratively on the failure of the ritual, in turn adding to or revising the ritual to fit the commentary. We’re trying to draw out imperatives from the center—what should we do, how should we contribute to the center so as to be worthy of and receive its bounty—whether this is done by more rehearsal of a chant and dance or by revising a prompt or search term eliciting information from the center is the aim. And this is all iteration and commemoration of the originary event, the one that first “worked” and therefore provides a model for all subsequent ones. One implication is to be skeptical of ideas, which is to say declaratives; or, to use the language from my previous post, just treat every declarative as a citation, citing other citations (a form of sampling), which brings its history and grammatical embeddedness to the fore. This will return to you at least a hypothesis regarding the argument (the sampling of a mimetic convergence) over some failed imperative that issued this restraint before a conjured reality and attempted repair of the imperative.