The Problem of Obedience, Revisited

For some, the question, “why obey,” is the political question, and while that’s a liberal framing of the political, predicated upon an anarchist anthropology, the question must still be addressed. It would be easy to flip the question around, starting from the presumption of obedience to authority, rather than an eternal pre-political decision whether or not to enter the social contract made in each instant, and then ask, what do you want to disobey and why? This extracts the metaphysics from the question of obedience. I got tripped up a bit myself on this issue when I was still working through the implications of the “absolutist” argument being made by Curtis Yarvin and Chris Bond. I created a problem for myself by developing the concept of “supersovereignty,” aka, imperium within imperium, to refer to the legitimating concepts presumably grounding political order, whether it be liberty, consent, human rights, or whatever, which concepts are then appropriated by the disciplines—the human sciences that then determine what counts as “genuine” liberty, consent, humanity, etc. I’m certainly not repudiating this concept—I haven’t used it much in a while but could easily pick it up at any time—even if I would now make the juridical, and the complementarity of the disciplines to the juridical, more central to this line of thinking. But at the time it led me to a kind of impasse insofar as the concept seemed to imply that any refusal to recognize the legitimacy of sovereign command was somehow implicated in the supersovereigns, leaving one vulnerable to lines of questions like, “but what if the sovereign sends soldiers to slaughter everyone in your town—do you have to lay down and die rather than being complicit in the usurpatory implications of the supersovereignties,” etc.

Situating the question back on a linguistic terrain made it possible to discuss these kinds of scenarios more coherently and helpfully—it’s just necessary to keep in mind that any imperative contains within it the possibility of being disobeyed; even more, originary grammar allows us to continue this line of thinking by pointing out, first, that it may very well be that no act of obedience perfectly complies with the issued imperative, so very literally some disobedience is built into every response to an imperative. Furthermore, the imperative gap, which is what I’m referring to here, between the issuance of and compliance with the imperative, is, in fact the space of the disciplines and, I can now say, first of all the juridical. The law itself is an extension and segmentation of the imperative founding the nomos, as all disputes, which is to say all resentments, concern the divvying up of the original distribution of any community—the ongoing divvying up, we could say. Two people couldn’t have a dispute over property or contract if they didn’t share the assumption that their actual or potential possession of the good or service in question could be taken for granted, and that can only be the case if the original distribution is beyond challenge. So, we’re all still obeying in our own ways whichever conqueror took possession of the territory we live on and divided it among his loyal confederates, who in turn divided their shares…

Even more, though, the failure to comply with, or the prolongation of the imperative is the pathway, through the interrogative, to the declarative. The argument against the supersovereignties, then, turns into an argument against fake and self-serving rationales for disobedience in order to open up an understanding of our relation to the imperative as generative of questions and declarative sentences. This, in fact, accounts for the mediation of the juridical and the disciplines, which we might see as spaces where the imperatives of the center get drawn out into “eddies” where they can be slowed down and become generative of hypothetical modes of being—couplings of questions and answers. Once we get rid of liberalism’s arbitrary assumption that it is the occupation of the center that is anomalous and requires explanation, we can also remind ourselves that even under the most “absolute” monarchs there must have been a whole range of ways people disobeyed and a whole range of consequences for disobedience. Not every failure to snap to and shout out “yes my sire!” to the slightest command of the king led to the fate of being drawn and quartered. There is always what Colin Drumm calls the “outside option”—any king knows he can be replaced (someone must occupy the center, but not necessarily whoever occupies it now), and the responses to his imperatives always serve as tests to the integrity of his rule, and this knowledge is built into the imperatives themselves.

So, the question becomes, what are we doing when we obey and disobey; or, if we even set aside the obedience/disobedience binary (which places us outside of liberal and monarchist traditions), we are asking what we are doing in the imperative in which we are always located. At one point in my thinking about this question I applied the concept of “originary satire,” first worked out in Anthropomorphics, to suggest that while you never have a “real” reason for disobedience (you can’t be charging the king with being a criminal, or laying claim to some pre-political essence or experience) you might simply be unable to follow some order, in which case your disobedience would take the form of a kind of self-disabling, even self-dismantling. Here, I was clearly still within the obedience/disobedience antinomy, but that there is an aesthetic dimension to one’s dwelling within the imperative gap should be maintained. Ultimately, the best reason for disobeying would be that you think the imperative will have the effect of weakening future imperatives from the center, and the reason for that will ultimately be that it is at cross purposes with other imperatives. Well, who are you to use your own judgment here is the way the response to this argument would have traditionally gone and, in truth, you are no one but a more or less necessary link in the chain conveying the imperative from one point to the next, but that’s precisely why the performative self-disabling approach, which makes explicit the scene upon which the imperative is received, is the appropriate one—I can’t do it, but I am trying to fulfill the center’s command more genuinely by demonstrating in my person why it can’t be done. If I’m wrong, well others will decide that—but that’s the case for any “principle” one might evoke in justifying disobedience.

But, again, if we set aside the obedience/disobedience paradigm and speak of operating within the imperative gap, the argument for such an aesthetic or scenic approach, one that has one presenting oneself as a “prop” on the scene, is not only strengthened but applied to instances of obedience as well as disobedience. I’m following your command, but in this way, is what one’s actions always signify. In this way you give the sovereign a reading of his imperative, or to use the preferred idiom you supply richer data to the central intelligence. You’re teaching the occupant of the center to improve his imperatives along the way, to modulate the degree to which they can be prolonged and the ways in which they can be branched out. And in doing so you’re also offering implicit reminders of the various outside options. My concept of singularized succession in perpetuity, which I think is the most “absolutist’ concept imaginable, clearly contains a strong bias in favor of continuity in command as the best sign of social continuity, with social continuity being the social problem. But the occupant of the center can lose the “mandate of heaven,” and this must happen because the imperatives he issues can no longer survive the scrutiny incurred by their prolongation into questions and conversion into declaratives. But here there is also a liberal trap to be avoided—that of establishing a dichotomy between order and chaos, or order and a “vacuum.” If the imperatives coming from the occupant of the center are waning that must be because other imperatives, maybe from further afar, maybe from closer, are waxing. Since there can be no universal criteria for determining when the source of command has moved from one site to another, the question of succession is inherently problematic. My argument for singularized succession in perpetuity aims at inscribing wisdom into the imperative order in the form of naming the successor against a background of more or less plausible candidates, or candidates of fluctuating plausibility, distributed across institutions designed precisely to provide such candidates and commemorate succession. Insofar as the entire social order is centered on succession, it will by definition proceed in an orderly way; insofar as it doesn’t proceed in an orderly way, the social order has not been so organized. This provides us with criteria for the transference of obligation and loyalty to another line, because in that case the more effective commands will come from someone operationalizing latent commands from somewhere in the stack. But now we can say that what this means is that more direct and richer lines of transition from imperatives to declaratives through interrogatives fill up the imperative gap with a different order of candidates and ceremonies hearkening back to the originary distribution. One’s operationalization of the imperative gap is not an individual matter but derivative of one’s position within the stack of scenes—you can only start with the commands it is within your power to work with, and with whatever clarity the chain of imperatives they issue from is inscribed upon those aimed at you. There is one general rule here, though, and I think it is one confirmed historically, even by revolutionaries—the shift from one line of succession to another is always minimized to the extent possible—under monarchies, this might involve constructing strained or fictitious genealogies, whereas now we might expect something like a coup to refer to data secured under the command of the prior sovereign but requiring the specific skills and location of the new one to be operationalized. Even in the event of an established reality, the approval of the exiting occupant of the center would be sought.

We can attain greater clarity here by keeping mind that the commanded can always respond to the commander, and this response takes the form of a petition, which is also an imperative. This is a kind of testing, of both sides, and is revelatory regarding the scene of command, which is always specific—imperatives are completely reliant upon the at least minimally formalized scene upon which they are uttered. A question on which I have oscillated a bit but might now take the opportunity to obtain some “closure” on is whether this petitioning might be taken further into a judicial proceeding. Here we get at one of those foundational paradoxes that recalls the paradox of the originary scene itself, and it might be best to argue that in a post-sacrificial order such paradoxes should be made explicit and made the site of elaborate performances. The king is the final judge, and how can the final judge be judged? I’m not going to take recourse in some notion of division of powers that just distributes sovereignty opportunistically, relying on some civic ethical glue that allows now the president, now the supreme court, to decide on the exception. Such equivocations become the sites of the most extreme and irreconcilable polarizations in times of crisis. For the occupant of the center to be sued, he must step away from his occupation of the center at least for the sake of the proceeding (he might still act from the center in all other matters, but, of course, the nature of the suit might make this problematic) and appoint or have appointed a judge. Such an event might be routine—perhaps the occupant of the center would be sued for all kinds of damages in ways that wouldn’t challenge his position. But if we admit this possibility, we also admit the possibility of a case that would utterly compromise him and make his continual occupation of the center untenable. In the model I’m proposing, this is the clearest portrait of a crisis of the entire order: it is his prerogative to appoint his successor, but the more deeply he is compromised the more “tainted” the successor. Needless to say I’m not going to propose some constitutional deus ex machina here--procedures can never be the point.

Let’s examine the kind of case we’re hypothesizing here more closely. If the occupant of the center can be sued, he can counter-sue—we’re not imagining an impeachment, modeled on a deposition, or the sacrifice of the central figure. In this counter-suit the occupant of the center would have considerable resources and advantages. Perhaps he will initiate the suit—he would have good reasons for caution, but those suing the occupant of the center would have equally urgent reasons. If you are to sue the king over a small thing, do it in such a way as to portray his loss as ultimately to his advantage—the suit is in that case more the best way you could think of to get his attention; given a well-ordered state, the king might understand and even appreciate this. Such suits might become a kind of socially beneficial ritual. If you’re aiming for something bigger, especially a suit designed to remove him from power, you would have to be in and/or have support from circles close to the ruler himself. The lawsuit is then a means of deferring or accelerating a civil confrontation. I will assume that the occupant of the center cannot be obliged to enter the lawsuit—who could oblige him? This means the lawsuit wouldn’t be likely to work as an accelerant, because the ruler would simply douse it before it could set the place on fire. If it’s an attempt at deferral, then it is part of a process of negotiation—of petitioning, which could then be downgraded to some ritual form short of a decisive lawsuit. The outcome of the respective political, legal and maybe military strategies depends on the character of the occupant of the center and how he has filled out the field of candidates. Determining how to treat the suit places the occupant of the center even more squarely there. He calls in his debts, contracts new debts by making new promises, and penalizes those who are defaulting on their debts to the center. He opens the ledger and writes. If he goes bankrupt, he petitions for an orderly disposition of his assets, which is to say, their conversion into data. Whoever headed the lawsuit is best positioned to succeed him, and the occupant of the center exits the scene gracefully by appointing the victor as his successor, thereby maintaining the line of succession. This, at any rate, is a model to be approximated and broken down into articulable idioms.

I have written of a fundamental demand-command dialectic constituting the imperative order, in which the demand is always (in quasi-Lacanian terms) as demand for the command that would abolish it, whether it be through satisfying it or refusing it. The demand itself emerges from the inappropriate ostensive, which indicates some kind of disorder—the demand is to set it right. We could continue this mapping of the imperative order by bringing in the petition, as a prolongation of the demand, stopping short of the interrogative—we might also speak of prayers and pleas in this space. We are getting close to the performative self-disabling I discussed above. One is never outside of the space of the imperative—there is no way of pretending to revert to some pre-social space in which we are all speaking in declaratives, deciding whether to sign the social contract. The demand (or petition, or plea…) most consistent with the prolongation of the originary imperative, then, is one to add a layer of formality to the “felt” chain of command, which must be at least somewhat at odds with the present formalization of that chain for inappropriate ostensives (referring to things that are not there for others on the scene) to have been detectable. “Lend authority to the one I seem to be obeying in fact, if not in principle”—even if mistaken, such a petition seems to me overwhelmingly likely to be issued in good faith, and hence to be appreciated by a commander even in the event of refusing it; it is the kind of petition in response to which the occupant of the center might wish to establish a juridical or trial space, to formalize the plea into contending parties, even implicating sovereignty itself, in a precautionary, pre-emptive way. It is almost certainly going to be a source of valuable data.