Tethering and Toggling Ritual, Juridical and Disciplinary
What we speak of as ritual is distribution from the center returning to the center including the process of distributing people so as to manage the distribution and return. Needless to say, this permeates all social practices, and once the occupant of the center is no longer sacralized (leaving aside for now how secure he should be in that occupancy) we can proceed to speak of those practices previously known as ritual as central intelligence deeming the same to be returning as the same. Returns are all ultimately “in kind,” even if the kind is money or devotion, and intelligence is intelligence of the same enduring through its circulation (through ever expanding fields of likeness and against some otherness). This means ongoing checking of the channels of communication, which means continual language learning. The financial system, which I have been working on getting my vocabulary around recently, is particularly central to the central intelligence, providing intelligence regarding what is to be distributed and who is at the posts ensuring distribution. In some ways, at some times, it’s an intelligent form of intelligence, but it’s ultimately unintelligent insofar as it provides us with more information regarding arbitrage possibilities and the spread of what Edward LiPuma calls the “speculative ethos” and “monetized subjectivities” than it does regarding the state of social needs and capacities. Everything we do is an attempt to discern and follow the imperatives of the center, which we can now (while continuing to use the more accessible word “ritual”) call findings and foundings of the same.
Finding and founding the same in a field of likenesses against some other can take infinite forms (we are doing this with every utterance and sign issuance) not all of which are equally acceptable to the central intelligence. Under strictly ritual conditions, where the center is occupied solely by what Marshall Sahlins calls, in an exceptionally useful terms, “meta-persons,” the only question is whether ritual commands have been adequately complied with—this is the only “same” that is of concern. (We would have to assume that some members of the community would have greater authority than others in determining what counts as a disobeyed or flawed ritual, or contamination, but also that this might shift often and rapidly and in general be rather “situational”.) Once the authority of the meta-person-in-chief is seized by the Big Man (to be later transmitted to the chief, the sacral king, etc.), a different way of determining what can be designated as the same and under what conditions emerges. Some form of reciprocity acknowledging hierarchical relations comes into being—the tributary relation is between humans now, and what the occupant of the center distributes to the community must be returned as, all things being unequal, the same. Like all tributary systems, this is circular, serving to affirm the authority of the center. The asymmetry between center and margin, evident in the meta-personal hierarchies ruling the “egalitarian” community, is continued here insofar as nothing returned to the center could ever be enough, given that the center provides everything. Debt is built in from the beginning; the community runs a permanent deficit with the center. Sameness is always provisional.
The imperial order institutes a juridical order in order to replace this asymmetrical reciprocity with symmetry between the subjects in relation to the center, whose occupant is beyond all reciprocity. The creation of what Alan Strathern (I’m working with Sacral Kingship in History: Between Immanence and Transcendence) calls the “transcendence” invented in the Axial Age out of a (never completely eliminated) world of “immanence” comes about with the effort, scriptural, philosophical, congregational and ritual if not (yet) effectual, to include the imperial center within the justice system. I’m repeating myself here, but never exactly, as I’m aiming at patterns intersecting with patterns, in the generation of a transfer idiom. Again, the unfolding of “transcendence” into a new mode of “immanence” (moving the accountability of the imperial order from the meta-personal to new forms of institutional power) is the central problem presented to those of us interested in clarifying the channels between center and periphery.
The purpose of working through these concepts here is to center the observation that the restoration of old and the creation of new forms of reciprocity is essential to guiding traffic back and forth between center and periphery. This includes pre-juridical modes of reciprocity, which don’t need to be eliminated, simply modulated so as to prevent independent streams of violence from hindering the operations of the juridical order. To put it simply, not every instance of schoolyard bullying calls for an administrative response; nor does every border skirmish within the international order. The repair of the juridical order includes determining thresholds at which events become of interest to that order. The spread of modes of reciprocity is encompassed within the ritual order, and we will always see conflicts settled in some kind of ritual form, with a recognizable gesture, but nevertheless irreducible to it. The same is true of disciplinary knowledge, going all the way back to the use of astrological knowledge to guide decision making in the ancient imperial kingdoms—science is never untethered from the center, and is simply a way of crossing scenes so as to synthesize intelligence gathered across scenes into a new scene. An enclosed, laboratory-style scene is a meta-scene, populated by those drawing upon intelligence gathered by lurkers upon other scenes, including the hardest sciences which invariably involve abstracting elements of the scene, such as sensory and measuring equipment, from the purposes to which they are habitually put and turning them into the platform of a new scene. Preserving the “relative autonomy” (who out there remembers Louis Althusser?) of these scenes while maintaining their installation within the central intelligence is the whole problem.
So, everything that “we” say “we” want to do has to involve some advance in the interoperability of these three “modalities,” keeping their asymmetry in mind. Advancing some such interoperability is what it will mean to be a “we.” All the means of deferring violence must ultimately be compatible with each other, and the kind of condition religions will refer to as “sin” and Plato might have seen as a “disordered soul” are results of one or another incompatibility. And it has to be shown than ensuring this compatibility, or, better, commensurability, is a source of power, because every argument in favor of damaging disciplinary or juridical conditions in the name of “economic” necessities, or encroaching on basic conditions of scene-setting and commemoration in the name of “justice” (i.e., expanding inordinately the juridical order), diminishing the operations of justice in the name of psychological or sociological knowledge, etc., will be made in the name of some increment of power to be acquired thereby. The figure or “identity” of the intelligence gather across scenes, which draws upon the scholar or scribe, the priest (who acquires meta-personal intelligences for his congregants), the derivatives trader, the statesman and spy, seems to be the best way of ensuring the commensurability of the center, its sameness, across time.
What the intelligencer is doing is tethering and toggling the three modalities to each other such that transformations in one elicit a range of possible interventions in the other(s). As an aside, I don’t think the three modalities are arbitrary—I believe anything that doesn’t fit into these categories (most obviously things like morality and aesthetics) can be comprehensively accounted for as derivatives of them; nor can I see any way of reducing them further, with the most obvious target for elimination being the juridical but in thinking it through I am reminded of Durkheim’s insight that criminality can never be eliminated because the elimination of one class of recognized wrongdoing will simply lower the threshold of what counts as “crimes,” meaning that communication with the center can always be made more precise and violations will therefore always be detected; but, also, in observing complaints, critiques and resentments across and outside of the political spectrum I see virtually no way anyone has of articulating objections to anything outside of the primary juridical terms like “justice,” “rights,” “freedom,” “equality,” and so on. Even complaints about “hypocrisy” and “lying” derive from the expectations of the witness; complaints about ‘bias” rely on the figure of the judge, etc. It’s always there, even if implicitly. The alternative would be to complain that things aren’t “efficient,” which is no doubt true, but begs the question of what should be done more efficiently, and why that thing. Even talk of ‘efficiency” would break down into who should be responsible for what and accountable to whom, which are in turn matters of property and the juridical. You might want to speak in terms of something like human “flourishing” or “excellence,” but that mortgages your project to the human sciences and therapeutic discourses. The abolition of the juridical, for good or evil, and the redistribution of objects within its frame among the ritual and disciplinary, will be, if it ever happens, the result of a history that I can’t imagine and don’t think anyone else alive could either.
So, our intelligencers are simultaneously minding tributary chains and continuity at the center, the boundary between the asymmetrical reciprocity of the honor system and the juridical, and the conversion of elements of the scenic infrastructure into new scenes. Assets into data, vendetta into justice, prop into scene. The most immediate data provided by the valuation of assets regards continuity of occupancy of the center in reproducing tributary systems. Here the problem posed is the irreducibility of capitalism to juridical categories and the consequent need for an account of chains of command over supply chains brought to a head in data security. That is, where economic agents cannot be tried or sued for breach of promise, fraud, intellectual theft, or other violations of contract because of issues of size, location, legal anomalies, technological complexity making discovery difficult, etc., they will be subject to audit by data security companies interested primarily in bringing them within the scope of the juridical which will also mean separating out and protecting operations whose technical requirements resist reduction to the juridical. The juridical is reduced to points of contact, but everything lying behind those points of contact is legible at those interfaces or are to made so. Obviously, the point is not to say “we” should do this but for intelligencers to commence and continue building such companies to eventually become the best last resort for all (or a critical mass of “all”) concerned. There is always the danger of familial, kin, ethnicity, or locality becoming a source of the resurgence of the vendetta, but the most immediate danger now is the rerouting of juridical capacities for the sake of conducting vendettas—i.e., “lawfare.” Here, it is the signs of such rerouting that must be addressed through data security, by translating the banners of lawfare—“racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “hate,” etc.—into legally actionable and legally irrelevant forms. Maybe class action lawsuits against people “slandering” entire groups are conceivable, in which case bodies of law could develop regarding the terms and limits of such suits; far more often it is the accusation itself that will prove libelous, and made costly within a well-run legal order. Here, simply demanding definitions of these terms, challenging those definitions or their applications in specific cases, and defending the victims of what remain damaging defamations will take the sting out of them, thereby rendering the underlying anti-discrimination legal order supporting it weakened and irrelevant and/or vulnerable to dismantling. Meanwhile, all this provides a large part of the agenda of an improved disciplinary order, completed by an ongoing drawing of the boundary between a particular sensing or measuring apparatus as part of the total infrastructure, on the one hand, and its conversion into a new scene centered on gathering data on the effects it produces and detects, on the other—which data is then reconverted back into infrastructural transformations. Both science and the arts are conjoined in the props to scenes pipeline, as, for example taking particular genres of writing (legal, psychiatric, journalistic, encyclopediac, etc.) and seeing “what can be done with it” is a major generator of modern literature and doing the same for new infrastructures is the engine of much modern art.
So, the acquisition of authority to tilt practices of discounting against future earnings within the scope of the juridical; identifying and controlling for attempts to weaponize the juridical against the juridical; and cultivating habits of singling out unnoticed infrastructural elements that might become scenes in their own right—doing one of these things should “trigger” the initiation of action to do the other across the networks of intelligencers. The work is to make it so if you’re focused on one you’re doing the others as a side effect. Keep uncovering layers of commensurability across these practices. The kind of knowledge needed to bring supply chains within the scope of authority that can deliver evidence to courts and follow the execution of judgments, requiring lots of people trained in ways few if any have ever been trained; this is technical, organizational, legal and therefore anthropological knowledge all at once; knowledge, therefore, requiring the habits of singling out various parts of the entire order and testing, probing, playing, imagining rearrangements, substitutions, modifications of both materials and their human handlers. The ability to disassemble and reassemble oneself as needed is implicit in this new kind of human being. We would then be bringing closure to the remnants and residues and ruins of the Axial Age by serving a central intelligence driven entirely by chains of authentication, attestation, archivization, confirmation, transmission, authorization, and so on—that is, explicit ostensivity.
To figure out how particular classes of derivatives might be brought sufficiently within the frame of lawsuits concerning fraud is a question of knowledge and technology—how can sales and movements of money and assets be measured and recorded so that the behavior of legally defined agents can be made reliable enough as to make a system-threatening withdrawal of “faith” extremely unlikely is a problem to be solved through algorithms and increasing computing power. Perhaps a new technological development, or even the scientific development presaging such a technological one will generate new forms of juridical agency. Changing legal behavior, then, might start at the other end, in the problems set within the disciplines of computing and data science. Meanwhile, the data made available by the infrastructures for such inquiries derives from institutionally sanctioned forms of data gathering dependent on juridically defined modes of authority. And those juridically defined institutions in turn bear responsibility for the distribution of production and pedagogical capacities, with the failure to meet such responsibilities to others within the supply chains also a juridical matter—what is legally imposed on one end can’t make what is legally imposed on the other end impossible. I’m not making an argument here so much for “policymakers” (“protect the rule of law but without hindering the creation of wealth,” etc.) as for allied intelligencers infiltrating the various institution and sharing data across them—think in terms of fulcra that would generate effects across fields that advantage “meta-dataticians” who know how the same piece of data becomes a difference piece on each scene, real or imagined, with the imagined scenes working on the real ones.