The Sufficiency of Singularized Succession in Perpetuity

I came by the concept of singularized succession in perpetuity in trying to think through the furthest implications of the absolutist politics I wanted to give some finished shape to in completing Anthropomorphics. The logic of concentrating actual power in nominal power, in acknowledgment of the fact that every social order in which the center has been occupied has found it necessary to designate some power as central and “ultimate,” seemed to come to rest in the question of selecting your successor: if you are not choosing your successor you are not actually in power, because everyone around you can hedge on various degrees of obedience and support by transferring promises of obedience and support to the more likely successors—which also means the successors they are helping to make more likely. In hereditary monarchies, the problem is solved, but in such a way as to generate other problems, and since it's a mistake to invest one’s thought in a single, rigidly defined form of order, I considered it best to abstract away from the (one must admit) remote possibility of establishing hereditary monarchies across the world. Meanwhile, if you are choosing your successor, then it would follow that choosing your successor is all you are doing, which means that all decisions, all allocations, all considerations held in reserve are directed toward the “fluency” of that succession, thus placing social continuity explicitly at the forefront of public concerns and organizing all attention on commemorative events surrounding that succession and its prerequisites. And, like all concepts I prefer, this one has a direct purchase on the reality we see before us, because viewing everyone, in every field of endeavor, as concentrating their efforts of selecting their successor, is the most powerful way of reading human practices in terms of the desire for immortality constitutive of the sign user. The most devastating critique, then, of the contemporary order, is how heedlessly, sloppily and maliciously this is done, with the upshot of that critique being to take the requisite care in building your own organizations, companies and communities to ensure succession.

So, it’s not surprising to me that this concept has stuck by me and that I constantly find myself reaching for it, often to solve fundamental problems—such as the difference between the occupied and signifying center manifested in the imperative gap. Now, I can say that the imperative gap is closed to the extent that each of us contributes to singularized succession in perpetuity. The reference to “perpetuity” is to sharpen the focus—it’s not just a question of choosing the best person for this job right now, but the best person who will also be best in choosing a successor, seeing to all the conditions enabling that successor, who will best choose his successor, and so on. We open up onto infinity here, as one must imagine oneself selecting your nth successor somewhere down the line while realizing one can’t really do that but can only promote the intelligence infrastructures that make consistency and continuity more likely and understood in terms of confronting specific modes of discontinuity.  Here, in fact, as this infinity is embodied by open source Messianism, we have our answer to capital’s discounting against expected future earnings. The entirety of culture is therefore organized around producing candidates for succession, creating spaces of performance for them to test and prove themselves publicly and exploring the various conditions that seem most fertile for their future generation. Such a mode of central intelligence further imposes upon one the need to see oneself as a successor, and to identify one’s true predecessors, those who have implicitly selected you and would have done so more explicitly if not for the distracting noise interfering with such singleminded vision. This brings us back to the originary scene itself, continually regenerating it as a source of possible ways of holding to and being held by the center.  

Well, what about bad leaders choosing their own successors—you don’t want them doing that, do you? Do you want Biden to be allowed to choose his successor, and then that successor to choose hers, ad infinitum? Doesn’t that mean heading further into leftism, incompetence, and mindless egalitarianism forever? First, they are already do so, insofar they have any power at all; but they can only do so very partially precisely because they don’t exercise real power. If the president of the US were actually the chief executive and commander-in-chief it wouldn’t be Joe Biden. Challenging such a selected occupant of the center to choose his own successor would be very illuminating, because it would be impossible for him—for any of them—to do so without upsetting the delicate balance of rivalries between the various agencies, interest groups, formal and informal organizations that currently count on being able to sell themselves based on their input to the process. The successor such an occupant selects would not, in fact, succeed. Only someone who has the necessary threads tied up in his hands would dare to do so, and it would always, even once it became an established practice, require audacity. The selection would not be made once and for all, in the form of a permanent vice-president; rather, in the course of the occupancy at the center conditions will change, requiring reconsiderations of the qualifications for succession, new candidates will emerge, existing candidates will reveal themselves in new ways, the occupant will himself revise his expectations and sense of future directions, and so on. The current nominee would be a marker of the occupant’s purposes and assessment of the scene—there would also be nothing preventing the occupant from stepping down or retiring, which also be a way of signifying purposes and assessments. The role that should be played by the leading contenders would be a perpetual subject of discussion—perhaps they should be gaining valuable experience at the highest levels of governance but, then again, perhaps they should not be allowed to hold levers too close to the central power. (It’s interesting that the “totalitarian” leaders never publicly—and, probably, privately, for that matter—choose a successor [except insofar as they come to approximate hereditary monarchies.] Either they want to maintain the fiction that they are not really in charge or understand that they in an order where it is too dangerous to have someone with a comparable level of legitimacy. In a genuinely coherent order, neither condition would hold.)

Such a political formula is, of course, “formal,” and not, it seems, as rich in content as proposed modes of government based on some kind of “substantial” identity, like creed, nation, or race. But not only does it not exclude any particular basis for social order, it provides a powerful principle of selection of one over another. What you would be looking for, trying to excavate and revivify, is the most unbroken chain of transmissions of power from the origin of the social until now. As you work to make the order more of an order, the more “vested” the leading candidates for figuring out some way internal to the existing order to create a new mode of succession are with the heft of the political traditions of the country, the better. This imperative would inspire new studies of history, as the genealogies that can be traced back and then forward to the most compelling candidates and to the mechanisms, perhaps obscure as well as regularly used, might turn out to be complex and surprising. We could therefore imagine a spectrum from ethnic orders, on one side, to more associative orders on the other; from authoritarian and traditionalist orders on one side, to innovative and experimental ones on the other. (And those two spectra don’t necessarily line up with each other in any obvious way.) Singularized succession in perpetuity should provide powerful ways of arguing within any political tendency. A failed occupant of the center would naturally pose a challenge to any order, but valorization of occupancy as such would enable leading actors to rally around even a malevolent occupier and mitigate while overtly disobeying as minimally as possible destructive decisions.

I have come to treat concepts in a way that I think is rare—they must be descriptive and constitutive at the same time, much like ritual, capturing the paradox of the originary event. In this case, singularized succession in perpetuity is both normative and diagnostic: a flawed society is one in which succession is not attended to and accounted for and a pathological society is one in which succession is actually subverted; meanwhile, the cure is to identify, protect and articulate those forms of succession that nevertheless survive, as they must, as no order can destroy it altogether. This has enabled me to construct a dialectic between the treatment of the center as either designated object of the endless simulation of regicide or designated scapegoat-free zone, on the one hand, and scenic design (technology) and the future perfect (finance, capital), on the other. All have their roots in desacralization, and in the severing of narrative and pedagogical ties between the signifying and occupied center, which is to say, in the defense of the imperative gap itself, as such (this is modern freedom). It is the unhousing or “untenting” of people from a sacramental order that makes it possible to eye them as dispersed, mobile parts of yet to be imagined wholes. Humans then become components of the scene, while circulating within it, requiring the erection of various scenes at various levels, scenes for training participants to enter, for their recreation when they exit, for their mobilization for contingencies. And it is the elimination of the center as the site of a distribution that is explicitly ritual in the complete sense (that is, including the “economic”) that makes contenders for the occupancy of the center tokens and guarantors of the extension and riskiness of circulation, committed to defending whichever section of capital can most forcefully order the whole by ensuring the return of its own investments. To create a new mode of distribution, a tributarianism, would also be to create a mode of scenic design devoted to making each scene a pedagogical translation of the infrastructures.

It seems impossible to even get started on such a project (if it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism it’s because you can imagine getting financing for the end of the world but financing just reproduces capital), but that’s not the case, once we jettison the desiderata the main antagonists to capital thus far have attached to it. The perfect, endless, self-reproducing arbitrage would entail identifying two adjacent markets with the same asset sold at a different price on each of them, respectively, and with yourself as the only one with access to both, and with your participation in the total market system composed out of perfectly balanced hedges on all other assets in the world. You perpetually rebalance all the hedges while investing the same amount on the asset at that moment differentially priced across the two markets. But no firm could approximate such a condition, if for no other reason than the existence of all the other firms. The market resists such control because the knowledge needed to approximate it would require the very stable succession at the center the market has been invented to disrupt. All of the supply chains, though, are priced, and therefore knowable, as their prices tell us how secure the future earning expected from ownership of it is but also, I think, the scenic and pedagogical conditions of the continued maintenance of those chains. That is, price only secondarily reflects the power of the owners of capital as opposed to the counter-power of other claims on the social product; primarily, price reflects the resilience and robustness of the entire infrastructure with all of the humans posted at each station along the way. Prices go up when the strongest section of capital can sabotage that infrastructure so as to lessen the flow of income from it to other social entities. They go down when such sabotage is interfered with, always temporarily as long as we have capital, when other capitalists can pry open new sources of earning themselves from it. But while they can’t go up infinitely without destroying the capacity to extract even exclusive sources of income, they could conceivably go down to nothing if we get to a threshold of companies and governments able to protect them that can engage amongst each other in the equivalent of intra-company exchanges. This would not be so much a question of calculating the number of widgets needed for each department as the formation of teams engaged in skunkworks that operate on the logic of Big Men and at least some company founders in taking less for themselves so as to model the kind of teamwork required to sustain circuits of production and distribution.

The functionality of such companies in advanced industries as yet beyond the reach of the finance industry, along with the functionality of teams within companies that have been subordinated, and even teams within the finance industry itself, is where the work of converting assets into data would take place. One way or another, this would have to be seen as a kind of holy work, as “tenting” or “tabernacling” humanity, and it would take place in the face of furious resistance and intensified sabotage by the financiers, the conglomerates most tied up with them, and those states (no doubt including the leading imperial one) that has most aggressively and completely tokenized itself as a marker of the health of the market. Only a mode of thinking and practice that can see the whole, without fraudulent divisions into public and private, economic, political and cultural, etc., and that can envision humanity from its origins into the distant future, could provide the ballast for such a project. As I’ve argued many times already, these companies and organizations would be fundamentally interested in data security and, I can say now, “search wisdom.” The gathering, classification, sorting, analysis, preservation, dissemination, etc., of data is constitutive of anything else you’ll ever want to do—in a way this was always true, even before there was anything that could be called “data.” The interest in data is what tells us how to donate our resentments to the center, which means converting our resentments in indications that data is being corrupted back into assets. We could reduce it to control over increasingly massive and targeted search engines, keeping in mind that the search engine itself will never be able to design your search terms if they don’t already exist in. the system. Adventurous, scholarly scribes will have to man these stations, and some of them can be manned now. With such searchers, all the forms of institutional intelligence can be infiltrated—the secret police and surveillance agencies are more dependent on data security that they can’t entirely provide for themselves than anyone is. This is naturally a global project—why in the world wouldn’t curators of the crisis from China, the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Germany, and so on not find common ground here? Data security is bound up with succession across the board. This means some form of global governance, but not a global government formalized as such—it would mean that the system of teams most effectively ensuring its pool of candidates for succession would effectively be a kind of global directorate. Their power would flow from them being completely open about their data management because they know that others’ use of it will just produce more candidates for them. All of this follows from frontloading the responsibility of singularized succession in perpetuity to the social order.