Reconstituting Kinship

The development of the imperial center, i.e., the state, is gradual process of demolition of kinship—monetization, the juridical and the disciplines all take kinship, where blood feuds and vendettas continually regenerate, to be the crucial obstacle to their own installation. Only in this way can the state have direct access to the application to each individual, as an individual, of regulated force. The state has been very successful in this regard, but it remains the case that wherever the state’s power does not reach, or has been withdrawn from, kinship will re-emerge, in the form of gangs, organized crime, neighborhood-based ethnic networks or otherwise, suggesting its resiliency; even more important, the honor system, in which the patriarch takes responsibility for actions of all those over whom he exercises violence, and each individual is expected to be prepared to display loyalty to the family head regardless of the cost, represents a tacit infrastructure needed to make liberalism cohere, as all the virtues felt to be lacking in liberal orders, anything that would prevent each and every one of us from selling out at each moment to the highest bidder in the market order, has its substrate in the honor system. Perhaps one could say that the honor system, or kinship, needed to be curtailed this far and no further, but who could have known how to draw the line—once kinship is marked as the enemy, uncovering new layers of resistance in it to liberalism will remain a well-subsidized specialty in the disciplines. The never-ending war against kinship constitutes a new kind of vendetta, constitutive of the left, which wages war on the juridical and the disciplinary precisely in the name of reliance of these civilizing institutions on an honor substrate. “Race” has served as a kind of right-wing retrieval of kinship, but one which relegates it to a hygienic state without distributing responsibility back to family networks, but that failure only accentuates the importance of reconstituting kinship as an indispensable part of the texture of power.

Anything can be framed in juridical terms, but as few things as possible should be—drilling the juridical all the way down to each elemental human interaction draws the disciplinary in its wake with the paradoxical result that juridical responsibility itself is evacuated and transferred to the disciplines. For the sake of the juridical itself, the threshold above which events and resentments become of juridical interest needs be raised to the point where lower levels of remediation have been exhausted. You can’t rely upon people unused to exercising a full range of responsibilities; even for the purposes of data gathering formalized sites of judgment below the juridical must be multiplied—the juridical was not designed to settle disputes between parent and child over curfew times, and parents prohibited from making such decisions will ultimately be useless as reliable witnesses and defenders of everyday norms. I can’t think of another way of filling up these sub-juridical layers other than kinship, and so any political thinking outside of the terms of liberal democracy must take up the question. Scattered elements of contemporary conservative politics point in this direction, but the insistence on preserving the nuclear family and parental rights against overweening bureaucratic intervention driven by activists who see very clearly what is at stake in breaking up the last remnants preserved in such forms already presupposes the unthinkability of kinship. Kinship means that you are held responsible, in some material way, for what your cousin does, and no one in contemporary politics could imagine thinking along those lines. (Interestingly, the closest I’ve seen any contemporary politician speak in kinship terms is the kind of remarks Trump occasionally makes about American Jews being “disloyal” in failing to support Israel.) Nor has “race realism” ever, at least that I’ve seen, indicated any interest in this direction, as its primary concern is using statistics gathered under egalitarian premises to bust egalitarian assumptions.

Kinship would need to be tokenized in some way in spaces where sovereignty is loosened or lapsed, which means where sympathetic administrative insiders provide for such loosening and the licensing of intermediate private agencies. And this in turn requires the space for a new kind of company party—in the US, at least the Republican party might be targeted as a shell within which such a company/party can grow. Something like the much reviled (supposed) Chinese “social credit” is necessary here: whether you get into a particular school, get a particular job, are considered marriageable by a particular mate, acceptable as a homeowner within a particular community, etc., must be made to depend on whether you have drug addicts, criminals, or even unemployed in your extended family. How extended? How many “points” are you penalized for what indicator of unreliability? These are the kinds of things to be worked out. There is a “spontaneous” dimension to such assessments towards the suppression of which anti-discrimination law directs considerable energy be expended. I think anyone would find it very hard to deny that they’d rather their daughter not marry a man whose brother is an addict, even if the prospective groom checks all the other boxes—from a basic “security” standpoint such an association opens up too many variables. Modern statistics and data collection can be used for this purpose—we’re really just talking about being more open about “background checks.”

Rapidly increasing knowledge of genetics and heritability can be pressed into use here. Many people are clearly interested in obtaining very precise knowledge of their genetic inheritance, and we can assume greater accuracy in this regard will be increasingly possible—instead of simply 76% British maybe further breakdowns into clans and families. Degrees of closeness (there may be many ways of measuring it) to a range of individuals will be calculable. No doubt people already take an interest in and sometimes contact people who unexpectedly turn out to be cousins, or from the same place; the next step would be to formalize reciprocal obligations along these lines. Begin with "affinity groups"—geneticists could develop criteria for degrees of genetic proximity and corporate entities could be established to create modes of exchange (reciprocal obligations) for different degrees of proximity. Within the inner circle of affinity you oblige yourself to engage in, say, crowdfunding for members of the group in demonstrated conditions of need—in exchange, of course, others are obliged to crowdfund for you when you need it. Dating/mating sites would be set up within affinity groups, shared business enterprises, etc. The boundaries of groups would be continually revised and refined in accord with scientific developments and changing demographics (there would be formal and informal rules regarding how far out of the group a new member can be accepted through marriage, or adoption for that matter). People might join just because it's a group, or because they're a bit "racist," i.e., prefer members of their own group and care for group continuity, or because the affinity groups become successful modes of cooperation. There would be a degree of anonymity to it, as people from the same affinity group could live across the world, but at the same time we'd probably find ourselves with more actual cousins to get to know. And DNA as a kind of language might become meaningful, even aesthetically, in new ways. This model of social order would co-exist and compete with, perhaps infiltrate, existing civil orders predicated on stamping out kinship as a meaningful marker of belonging, with encounters taking place through the law and otherwise.

There will remain individuals who prefer to remain unaffiliated, whether because they are individualist and/or idiosyncratic, or are “self-hating” in some way, i.e., are alienated from their family or group, or do not identify with what will surely be both resurgent and new “stereotypes” with which they are tagged. They will protest against being associated with their ascriptive groups, and there can be ample room and generosity to credit those protestations in many cases—you can be asked to prove yourself worthy of individual assessment. What matters is that whatever case they make be confined to the individual case and that attempts to generalize them as arguments against “prejudice” or whatever be seen through with ease. And the affiliations will matter less for some purposes, like technoscientific work.

I’ve already pointed to ways in which interests in kinship manifest already, and we can further add increasingly mediated forms of mating which necessarily take into account, even if in disguised ways, issues of lineage and reputation, and this will likely increase. Why wouldn’t we expect people to request full DNA profiles and family histories, perhaps going back several generations. It may become suspicious if one has not had the interest, diligence and foresight to be ready to provide such information—respect for one’s heritage will become more than an empty assertion. If such becomes the demand, supply will come to match it, as we could all already probably learn more about our family histories than we currently know, and new means of gathering this information will arise. With pride in heritage will come shame—no one can expect to have a background made up entirely of honorable, accomplished, moral and respectable ancestors. But shameful elements of one’s past are debts to be repaid and redemption to be gained. There will be idioms to be revivified. All this mediation or tokenization (the involvement of the disciplines in establishing kinship) should ensure that kinship not revive ancient vendettas and thereby override the juridical. Appeals courts will concern themselves with that threshold at which resentments require juridical treatment, and if the threshold is lowered we would have evidence of either vendettas starting to infiltrate the juridical or lapses in kinship maintenance. There will be all kinds of differences along kinship lines, including differences in accomplishment and approximation to the power center and subsequent resentments will fluctuate around the juridical threshold but will also provide a basis for all kinds of more peaceful competition. There are all kinds of ways of “participating in mutual being,” to take Marshall Sahlins’s definition of kinship, and kinship systems have always been inventive in the use of mechanisms such as “adoption” to fill in gaps and continue lines. Arguments over how to assess lineage will be productive and can be open sourced and determined on the market—one could put forth matrilineal and patrilineal versions, for example, and let potential partners or team leaders emphasize whichever they like. We will know that kinship has been genuinely restored when we see a return to kin alliances being arranged through marriage—which would also, incidentally, signal the end of the influence of Romanticism in Western culture.