The Scene is the Same

A theoretical claim I have been making since I’ve taken up the originary hypothesis is that the originary scene has never closed. In other words, if we ask, when would the originary event be over and the scene complete, we could answer by saying, once the sparagmos has been completed and the first ritual (the repetition of the gesture, this time deliberately and in unity) has been enacted. But the possibility that the scene will still break down and that the ritual will be insufficiently choreographed to “hold” remains until the closure of the scene has been “confirmed” externally, upon a new scene referencing the previous one. But the same question could be raised regarding this new scene of confirmation, which would therefore need a new confirmation within a new scene, and so on, as long as humanity endures.  Rather than infinite regression we have infinite progression. We are still, then, on the originary scene, and the subsequent and widely distributed scene created to confirm it also index its uncertainty and the ongoing tenuousness of the human. I consider this a highly productive extension of the hypothesis because it allows us to analyze each scene and each stacking of scenes in terms of the question of the demonstration and even operationalization of the continuation of the originary scene within these others—that is, we are always performing our presence on the same scene, the originary one. My insistence on the centrality of succession should be seen in this light: only by ensuring, marking, validating, authenticating, etc., succession at the center can the chain of references back to the originary scene be prolonged.

The originary event involves an exchange between center and periphery. This is an asymmetrical exchange, recognition and obedience from the periphery and existence, protection, even creation, from the center. This exchange is materialized in ritual, as a portion of the meal that the center has provided for us and enabled us to share, is returned to the center. This ritual involves a broader set of relationships and obligations between the being at the center and the community, extending throughout the world of animals, plants, celestial bodies, rivers and mountains, etc. Genealogies and modes of kinship are first of organized around these obligations, and hence around ritual. Language would be infused from the beginning with the vocabulary and syntax drawn from these relationships, as dramas enacted at the periphery enrich the scene at the center, which becomes, even prior to its usurpation by the Big Man, a council of governance. There could be no way of speaking about how and why things happen, how and why people do things, who we all are, without wrapping it up in these meta-worlds populated by meta-persons.

Keeping all this in mind is helpful in enabling us to understand the revolution enacted by that usurpation, and the human occupation of the center. It wouldn’t be too far wrong to say that all of our arguments trace back to this revolution, with all of us ranging ourselves on the pro or anti-Big Man side. The most convenient position is to protest the usurpation of the center while advocating, pressuring, manipulating, etc., some existing or potential Big Man (or woman) to displace another and thereby empower you in the name of the originary community (the “people,” the poor, the workers, the republic, etc.). Certainly, most modern political theories and arguments can be reduced to this. The other approach, barely thinkable under “modern” conditions, is to defend the Big Man revolution and assist in stabilizing the nomos and distribution it implies. The difficulty in doing this now is that the aura of sacrality that until the desecrations of the modern world had always surrounded the occupant of the center has been thoroughly demolished, and any attempt to resurrect it would probably be counter-productive as the mode of production itself (the use of PR, scapegoating, fabrication, bluffing, etc.) would be evident and easily “debunked” in real time. The only way through, then, as I’ve argued quite a few times, is to make explicit the centrality of succession as the continuity of the community as the “political” question and hence the establishment of succession rituals as the substance of the social order from top to bottom. Resentment toward the center, rather than resentment toward one or another peripheral figure, would be recognized as the greatest danger for the community—while not prohibited, since such resentments can register failings in governance that could pose even greater dangers, such resentments will be subject to special scrutiny and contained within carefully constructed and protected guardrails.

None of this is exactly what I want to address here, though, even if it’s essential as background. I want to follow up on my recent arguments regarding the relation between debt, money and the center, especially in Zack Baker’s and my “There is No Economy But Only the Debt to the Center.” The consequence of the occupation of the center by a human introduces further layering within the human community as, even prior to such forms as sacral kingship (much less divine emperors), that is, even with more “primitive” Big Men and chiefdoms, the occupant of the center would have his supporters and cohorts, who would be considered in an earlier stage of distribution and would, in fact, be responsible for those later stages of distribution. There is no longer a single event of distribution in which the community as a whole participates, and therefore no direct, shared ritual event in which the exchange with the sacred center is unmediated. It is here that we can locate the origin of money and debt, which serve as extensions of the scene and prolongation of the event. The earliest loans, I would assume, would be made to those who needed money to be the animal to be sacrificed at the temple, for those who had to travel and couldn’t bring their own, or hadn’t any to sacrifice, and could only afford one bought on site. But loans made to set up markets and facilitate long-range exchanges of goods would of course also be part of this scenario—but these are just more indirect ways of donating to the center.

Anyone who gives a loan presumably expects to be paid back, and therefore wants assurances, guarantees, collateral, etc. These would first of all take the form of family and community members sharing responsibility for loans, along with the back-up possibility, no doubt often invoked, of enslaving the debtor for non-payment. Systems of slavery and feudalism no doubt often had their origins in such arrangements, which have the effect of eliminating tributary mediations between center and periphery. And, of course, there was the jubilee, mass debt-forgiveness, which must have also entered into calculations regarding lending and restored some mediations. But with the attenuation of such arrangements, with the circulation of money beyond the limits of any one sovereign and, even more so, with tying of monetary circulation to the rotation of occupancy of the center, lenders would need other assurances of the future of the money they set in circulation. Risk calculation comes to the center—you need to know not only whether you will be paid back but whether, when you are paid back in the agreed-upon terms, what you receive will equal in value to what you originally loaned or invested. You need, that is, information regarding the conditions under which you are initiating a particular circulation, and this information will itself have value calling for assessment. I want to follow up on a suggestion made by Joseph Vogl in his Capital and Resentment to the effect that the earliest modern print media emerged to provide precisely such information to investors to argue that herein lies a broader theory of the functioning of the media in the broadest sense, that is, to include the various sources of the media, which reach into all governing and disciplinary institutions.

So, let’s say that ritual, our debt to the center, is now articulated through indebtedness, which is to say everyone positioning themselves in relation to the financial institutions as indebted, actually or potentially, as a good or bad risk, and as someone whose riskiness is monitored and recorded via all the data one produces over the course of a lifetime. The state, meanwhile, serves as debt enforcer, on behalf of those same financial institutions which, in fact, deem the state to be more or less of credit risk depending upon how effectively it performs this function. All debts can’t be equally enforced at all times with equal determination and ferocity, so political questions can be reduced to that of where the energies of debt enforcement are to be directed. This doesn’t apply only, or even primarily to individuals—all institutions, public and private, rely upon their credit rating and therefore must comply with the industry-approved standards for determining credit-worthiness. This process operates globally, and we’d have to distinguish between, right now, the US as the primary currency generating state with the power of debt enforcement globally, and other states more or less outside of the nomos or orbit of US debt enforcement (operated, of course, through layers of vassal states and transnational institutions). I have spoken before of a kind of oscillation between, or thread upon which other institutions hang reaching from the central banks to the state, which is to say, the permanent state, which is to say, those layers of the bureaucracy with surveillance, investigatory, and prosecutorial powers; despite appearances, I continue to assert that the state always has primacy and I can now say that this is exercised through the chokehold the agencies would always have over financial institutions through their ability to determine what manner of debt enforcement will be pursued. The agencies can’t do away with the central banks or financial institutions, but they can subject those institutions to any degree of turbulence needed to align their priorities with those of the agencies. Finance, meanwhile, has no corresponding power over the agencies.

So, what are all those cultural, mediating, disciplinary institutions (universities, media companies and platforms, NGOs, etc.) doing within this framework? They are, most immediately and formally, providing knowledge and information pertinent to risk-assessment by financial institutions. Everything considered worthy of reporting on or studying, and the way in which it is reported on or studied, can be clarified in these terms—as identifying possible areas of risk that the central banks can draw upon in making decisions. This may sound cynical, but it’s actually the best-case scenario, and one in which all individuals could acquire information that might help them in their own risk assessments. There is no firm boundary, though, between scouting out events (keeping in touch with major players within various institutions, watching for signs of disturbance, etc.) and actively intervening in events and generating risk—and “news” organizations must have figured this out simultaneously with the discovery of the usefulness of their information to financiers, that is, along with the creation of such organizations. In accord with the logic of capital as power, new agencies directly, but the workers in the human sciences more indirectly, disable, defame, blackmail, inform on, threaten, etc., one set of actors in the interests of others. This is a way of distributing risk along with providing information on it so that those sectors of capital with the greatest leverage over the media can be told “you can proceed more or less safely in this manner because we are sabotaging those who might proceed in some way you are less prepared to exploit.” This approach provides, I think, a powerful way of reading all of the major “event” of recent years, which are with increasing obviousness, media-generated with the operations of the media increasingly seen as those of the intelligence agencies. This way of thinking fits rather well with the higher levels of scrutiny and awareness regarding the media we see across the spectrum. You can get things wrong by asking, when presented with any media product, “who wants us to know this, why in this way, and what do they not want us to know by letting us know—or believe—this?,” but you’ve got a much better chance of getting it right than if you allow yourself to be “activated” by the story to express outrage against the villain it presents you with. In the latter case, you have no chance of getting it right, even if the story happens to be true and happens to reinforce one’s political preferences.

Now, these are all intelligence operations, and we are all intelligence operators. We want orderly exchanges with the center, and we therefore need the information and knowledge required to allow us to engage in such exchanges, across the various tributary layers and circuits. Such transactions are always enabled technologically and mediated juridically. We can therefore assess any story in terms of the way it sets up a juridical case, with specific laws broken (or not) by specific people, within a certain chain of precedents and legal tradition (referring to tributary channels), coherently assembled and presented evidence, a coherent, narrativizable event giving rise to the case, and so on. A story that doesn’t provide all that or doesn’t indicate that some of these details are still missing, is likely to be fraudulent. Likewise, a chain of custody of the information, if not fully presented, should be evident—out of what institutional and technological capacities is the story composed? If we are provided with such knowledge, the imperatives issued by the center are being made intelligible to us, along with the actions that would indicate obedience to those imperatives. If, on the other hand, we see people accused by “many people” of vague pseudo-crimes, with accusations supported by “sources,” and framed so as to induce conformity with some ongoing public vendetta (“a growing appreciation of the importance of…”—or something along those lines)—then we know we are being put as risk for the sake of someone’s risk assessment and information extraction operation. And this also tells us a lot about the kinds of institutions we should try to build.

It follows that no one can see further into the future than furthest derivative one might buy. I have no idea how far away that is—can you buy a derivative allowing you to purchase a stock 10 years into the future? 20? 50? What’s the world record? At any rate, if you remain with the system of capital, that’s the furthest along any social change can be imagined in a way that could be discussed meaningfully—otherwise, it’s just imagining new technologies aligned to ideological positions of the present. The only way to peer beyond those confines is to start making markets, and being explicit about making markets aimed at serving specific needs of specific communities and answerable to specific authorities. This is the way things work now, but implicitly and incoherently. But if you make it explicit, you can make markets until markets no longer need to be made because we will have transitioned into team-to-team subscription system in which each team (producing something, protecting something, teaching someone, etc.) subscribes to the products , services and personnel it needs from other teams, in turn providing its goods, services or personnel to other teams that can be or already are articulated in the network. At that point our debt to the center is paid forward into the institutions of pedagogy, which the various teams would competitively cooperate (or compete cooperatively) so as to request from those institutions the preparation of new team members who will be able to identify and do what we don’t yet quite realize we’re going to need. The continual deferral of the furtherest future operator of the network then replaces currency. The outside option and the outside spread will have been brought inside, replacing risk assessment qua risk distribution with total data exchange with the center.