Partitioning and Parceling the Imperative

As I work to integrate debt and money into center study I get to the point where these concepts need to be articulated more fundamentally, in terms of originary grammar. For Brett Scott, the issuance of currency involves making a promise to be redeemed—insofar as the promise is formalized and recorded, it can be distributed, and therefore become currency. The question then posed itself regarding the articulation of this way of originating money with the creation of money through the issuance of debt, which seems the opposite of promising (promising seems to be indebting oneself). Of course, both accounts might be true at different times—for that matter, there are probably several other ways in which money might be created—and I should eventually get to all of them. But they should be synthesized or at least made to overlap as much as possible, even if for no other reason as that such a procedure uncovers less obvious connections. And in this case it seems to me that Christine Desan’s account of money creation in medieval England might help out here, as Desan sees money as beginning with the issuance by the king of tokens certifying that the recipient has donated goods or services to the king before they were required to, to meet some exigency. In that case, the promise involved in the issuance of money acknowledges a prior payment of an ongoing debt to the center by one who has become in effect a privileged subject. Scott probably has more horizontal relations in mind, but even here I would say that promises always issue from an “always already” state of indebtedness constituting each member of the community’s possession of whatever they are able to promise. We always start with a debt to the center but it is also the case that the debt to the center always takes the form of an imperative issued by the center and, in fact, the broadest of imperatives, the imperative to respect and protect the originary distribution. But, then, it follows that the imperative from the center is necessarily divisible, and that currency marks obedience to a particular part of the imperative, with debt in that case extending the circle of the imperative’s “radiation” by including others less on the basis of loyalty and more bordering on coercion and the threat of expropriation.

An imperative has to work its way through a series of subsidiary imperatives, with debts and exchanges at each point along the way. Power is “confidence in obedience,” as Nitzan and Bichler put it in Capital as Power, and this confidence is confidence in one’s debtors continuing to pay. What accounts for the degree of confidence? Whatever auxiliaries of power we were to point to, such as loyal subordinates, would just raise the same question at a different level. I think that line of succession provides the best way of accounting for this confidence—the more one’s rule follows most “consistently” from predecessors and seems likely to be transmitted to successors the more that confidence is justified. There is a circularity to such a definition as there will always be in such discussions, but the way one deploys institutional markers to distinguish oneself from “pretenders” and clears the way for successors requires cooperative preconditions, real personal capacities and leaves visible trails. This is how one can measure and register the strength of any imperative issuing from the center, and the mode and degree of obedience at any point in the chain of imperatives is a kind of speculation on the security of the officeholder versus any of the outside options. Insofar as that speculation can be monetized we have debt. This way of measuring the imperative points to one man rule, but is applicable even under conditions of controlled rotation at the center: imperatives issued by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele with an approval rating upward of 90% deserve a far higher rating than those issued by the crowd jostling to get in line behind whoever the emergent competition between political insiders, “civil society organizations” and donors ends up pushing to the front behind Biden. There’s no reason why more coherent succession practices can’t emerge under electoral conditions, as an executive getting 60% of the vote performs well and hands off to one who receives 70% and so on until elections become uninteresting and ultimately vestigial and finally dropped or converted into a new kind of succession ritual.

The clarification of the imperative by unclogging the chain of command presupposes the reduction to the point of elimination of the central bank and its equivalents and co-conspirators inside and outside of government. The debt to the center is then directly invested in succession rituals, which comprise the entire social order. All the disciplines are to be organized around unfolding and maximizing the imperative constituting and renewing the originary distribution—including the “hard” sciences which, even allowing for the necessary scope for experimentation and speculation, ultimately feed back into scenic design, the creation of pedagogical platforms which are, in turn, concerned with the creation and learning of idioms. This all sounds utopian but you can see that it can be articulated in a compact and easily packaged way that can be adapted or idiomized for any occasion and become a way of thinking through any issue, including thinking through what needs to be thought through. That’s why I’m re-centering the imperative from the center here—as a site of translation which reveals the intersection of the outside spread and the outside option in any event and in turn points to some way of contracting both, ultimately in some form where the juridical channels disciplinary inquiries. I’m not interested in a political “movement” that takes a stand on the “issues,” but in creating a new idiom, let’s even say a new language, that will be learned in direct proportion to one’s ability to, wherever one is found, identify the juridical questions that reinforce the originary distribution and generate new questions for the disciplines. Something like a secret society and intelligence agency within the institutions, with the difference that nothing is hidden—if you can’t learn the language because you’re invested in trying to play one outside option off against the other and trying to open the sluice gates of the outside spread and channel it towards your own little watering hole than you just can’t learn it. You are holding on to too many names for things that would need to be renamed.

Anyone can learn to think along the lines I’m suggesting. You are presented with a question, problem or issue—the very fact that is presented means it is, at least potentially, a case, so let’s begin by sorting out who might have claims and counter-claims against whom and before which effective arbiter. This might get complex very quickly, as layers of power hierarchy get implicated since whoever trespasses against another has had some implicit (at least) permission to do so. But dealing with complexity is really just a matter of reducing the complexity to an articulation of simple cases. Someone destroyed another’s property, someone violated a contract, someone committed a violent crime, etc. Someone is authorized to adjudicate. “Agency” means bringing the case where it can be brought—if the adjudicator is himself part of the case at a higher level, someone situated at that level will have to bring it. The more thoroughly institutions have been infiltrated and, therefore, the more likely that adjudicator will, if it’s called for, be brought before another court, the less likely that it will be necessary. In any case, inquiry into the facts, law and history underpinning is necessary—by now, this involves everything from the low-tech approach of gathering eyewitness testimony to the most advanced scientific and technological techniques for turning the world into a collection of material witnesses. Whether the information gathered can be trusted, or has been presented carelessly, fraudulently or malevolently, opens up other possible “cases.” The world is everything that can be made into a case, but we say that so as to work towards making the cases as informally, expeditiously, transparently and mutually satisfactorily handled as possible. Any case can be framed in such a way as to include repair of the institutional breach enabling the complaint, which puts us on the path toward data exchange. The indebtedness of the institution or community in each case is either a constraint allowing for a tighter framing or a corrupting influence compromising the adjudication at some point along the way. Sometimes one loses, the case cannot be kept clean, and so one creates a record of it. And sometimes, very rarely, the originary distribution itself is upended, and those partitioning and parceling out the imperative respond by rushing to the new occupant of the center and his representatives down the line with cases offering the opportunity to start creating lasting precedents. All “literature,” that is, all the modern descendants of scripture, epic and prayer, is nothing other than experimentation with ways of framing cases.

We “speculate” on the imperative from the center in the sense of working to prolong it into the future—the creation of “derivatives.” There can’t be anything more important than de-monetizing debt and converting it into pedagogical platforms for performing succession rituals. I would be very happy to see the bitcoin maximalists turn out to be right and having El Salvador serve as a test case for both that and the prioritizing of public order is extremely important. It is good that it will be very difficult for US imperial agencies to come up with a rationale for intervention, and Bukele is presumably aware of the various “civil society” vehicles used for subversion. I keep mentioning Bukele because it’s good to highlight models for clarifying the imperative, and he seems to be innovative in a way that other often touted models, like Viktor Orban, however preferable to alternatives, really isn’t. El Salvador will not be the vanguard transforming the world, but it’s excellent as a test case. It’s interesting that I’ve seen very little written about Bukele—where he came from, the sources of his thinking about governance, what he had to leverage to be able to clean up his gang infested society, where his support originally came from, international connections if any, etc.

Partitioning and parceling out the imperative now becomes an idiom “backing” originary indebtedness and draws upon the more “diagrammatic” idiom of “the part of the all is the same.” Originary debt can be located in the imperative gap, where one must extend and particularize the imperative while prolonging it through its interrogativizations into declaratives that will enable others to do the same. Within the existing, finite, property system, where everything is already apportioned, one facilitates transitions to new subdivisions and consolidations and provides for the entry of new learners to the system by proposing and enacting new spaces of exchange and judgment, which now means new forms of data exchange. A new form of data exchange, one with the potential for to contribute to the machine learning that will generate more precise and articulate forms of correlation, pays off the interest, if not the principle of the originary debt. Maybe the goal is to get to the point where correlation is indeed causation because the correlations are so systematic and precise (in other words, enough “likes” can become a “because”) that data could be with increasing directness converted into a series of rated (on various scales) options for succession. Imperatives can always be disobeyed (disobedience is built into the imperative just as much as obedience) which means they always include the potential for resentment and new micro-spaces of judgment (of thirdness) are the way of completing the imperative, preparing it for its declarative mark-ups.

Currency, then, is the creation of inflection points extending the imperative from the center in one or another direction, towards one of another future. It’s a share in the continuity of the current order, in which current it will flow. In that case, movement toward singularized succession in perpetuity means turning everything we can into currency and making everything turned into currency capable of replacing debt money. All the promises you make and all those promises that have been made to you and to others on your behalf (e.g., a degree granted by an educational institution) can be forwarded to others and serve as collateral. Separating good currency from bad in that case involves the further extension of data collection and the treatment of collected data so as to make it suitable for potential adjudications. The politics of this movement involves the creation and defense of institutional strongholds where data that is good for indispensable governing purposes is protected from the pincer assaults where the outside spread mobilizes the sabotage of the outside options. This can’t be nationalist or libertarian, both of which desire to evade the demands of global governance. It would require chains of command willing to protect supply chains like air to breathe, idioms that circulate entirely within the stack, algorithmically mediated with the highest human responsibility, and pedagogical institutions directly targeting new modes of literacy preparatory to these new modes of governance. Thirdness should be part of this, but I remain on the lookout for other “inside options,” i.e., those assuming command as if they are merely resuming it.