Threading through History

Once you find yourself in a “reactionary” position, even to the extent of arguing that the latest mode of “liberation” instituted a couple of years ago can and should be reversed you start to confront certain difficulties. This latest form of “liberation” is really just the logical conclusion of the form of “liberation” instituted a decade ago, and that just follows up logically on the one universally applauded 50 years ago, and so on. So, how far back do you want the reversals to go, and who, exactly, do you think is left to operate according to the laws that were repealed a century ago? To be more specific: fine, you’re against wokeness, but what about the civil rights legislation of the 60s and early 70s? Oh, that too? How about women’s suffrage? Really? Slavery…? No matter how much you’re willing to play along, this becomes a bad game fairly quickly, because you end up doubling down on stigmatized and long gone modes of life with no chance of resurrection, or, at least, not any imaginable on the narrow terms on which such interrogations take place. But you do have to talk about history—the Russian Revolution definitely shouldn’t have happened; the French too—throw the American, and English revolutions into the pot as well (how could you not?). Well, alright, then what?—these revolutions were possible because of decisions made by European monarchs going back to the Middle Ages, decisions that would therefore have to be revisited critically, but according to what criteria? They shouldn’t have done X implies there were Ys they should have done. And having these Ys is also indispensable if we are to think forward as well—obviously we’re not simply reactionaries in the present, since there are plenty of things we want to change, and we acknowledge that things will in fact change, but that means there are good and bad changes and we can tell the difference. We can have a reading of history within history, and if we are to systematically reject liberal, democratic, progressive and deterministic narratives, we need to be able to say how.

This is the question my concept of singularized succession in perpetuity aims to solve, and I want to work it through this particular context (interpreting history within history). I haven’t pointed out for a while that the usurpation of the ritual center by the Big Man was the most consequential revolution in human history and the good news is that it’s the only one “reactionaries” can unreservedly support. So, that’s our endpoint, retrospectively: there is no human history, just unrecorded and unaccountable shifts in ritual and myth, without the human occupation of the center. We are defenders of the Big Man revolution! I would wager that not even the most reactionary reactionary wants to restore pre-Big Man conditions (anyway, you’d need a Big Man to do so, which defeats the purpose)—although some anarchists might (which might mean that, implicitly, that’s the fantasy of liberals and leftists as well, which might flip the terms of the discussion in interesting ways). One is reactionary (that is, outside of liberalism) insofar as one hypothetically narrates the occupation of the center “emically,” that is, sharing the perspective and entering the terms of decision making confronting the successive occupants of the center. We are therefore reading history through the highest responsibilities imposed upon and accepted by humans, and this is the thread that takes us from this first revolution through all the subsequent ones we would have liked to have seen avoided and can now say might have been avoided if the occupants of the center had husbanded their responsibility and authority more effectively. Within this framework there will always be plenty of room for disagreement, but we can at least know what we are disagreeing about. Furthermore, the position or stance from which we write history, including present and future history, is clarified: since the occupants of the center only very rarely write history (Julius Caesar being the obvious example) because they are too busy making it, insofar as we are writing history we are doing so as scribes and archivists of the center, hoping to gather, sort and sift through evidence and information in ways that will help the most likely inheritors of the Big Man mantle to wear and pass down that mantle in an orderly way.

I would still defend something like an “absolutist” position regarding the occupant of the center, but for the decisions or imperatives of the occupant to indeed be immediately recognizable to him (i.e., for him to have actually decided), a whole array of institutions and individuals need to be in the “right” place. Absolutist power is not so much an a priori as the result of the proper husbanding of power and authority—one has found the way of articulating the current flux of institutional linkages such that your decisions become legible across the board. Any king who had his decision implemented as intended was absolutist to that extent, not in spite of his reliance on attending to the interests of the nobility, merchants, peasantry, Church and so on, but precisely because he did attend to them. If the occupant of the center makes decisions that are less likely to become decisions in effect, he is also making decisions that lessen the likelihood that he will continue to occupy the center, and lower even more the likelihood that he will select his successor in a fully intentional way (he’s always selecting his successor, even if he doesn’t know that he’s doing so). So, attending to the full institutional array is selecting your successor by elevating and preparing the candidates for succession, which also means seeing to the institutions through which those candidates must be ranked, tested and assessed. Even if you’re a king in an order in which primogeniture is the default mode of succession and you have a healthy and perfectly capable male heir, nothing can be taken for granted. The entire order must be organized around transitioning that heir, and that also mean weighing and ranking the options in a way that is embedded ritually, juridically and through the disciplines, and this means never losing site that succession is the central problem of human social existence and must be made so explicitly. Look at how terrifying things get in a representative democracy when the mechanisms of transitions in power seem broken—I was completely with those who wanted to leverage available constitutional options for contesting the 2020 presidential election, but I also know that if the Trump campaign had successfully gotten the state legislatures of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia to withhold the electoral votes from those states in time we would have had a very interesting, which is to say, unprecedented, situation on our hands. It’s easy to understand the fear one might have of crossing that threshold.

This approach, then, provides us with a way of threading our way through history by entering sympathetically into the frame of those making decisions, even those we might consider enemies because if those enemies sought to institute new modes of authority it must be that they noticed weaknesses, in some cases fatal ones, of the mode of authority in place. We can introduce what we know now, but that those occupants of the center couldn’t have known, because the purpose is not to indict those figures of authority but to learn from them and with them. We can say “this shouldn’t have happened” because we will be able to point to ways in which those occupying seats of power might have held the threads of power better than, in the event, it turns out they did. We could be wrong now, just as they were wrong then, but we nevertheless institute the habit of training our focus on the immense and never once and for all solved problem of succession; we learn to probe, to test, to bring to bear all the theoretical and technological means for ensuring or subverting successful successions. Maybe sometimes the kinds of changes we might oppose can be hypothesized to have been enacted in very different ways, ways that reinforced rather than accelerated subversion of succession. (Defenders of the Confederacy’s right to secede have generally had an argument regarding a more peaceful, if gradual, way of abolishing slavery.)

The obvious question now is, well, what about “bad” guys of history and of the present? Would we like to have seen Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, et al achieve an orderly succession? First of all, it’s interesting that none of them did, in fact, publicly name and appoint a successor, which tells us quite a bit about those regimes. (The partial exception to the refusal of ‘totalitarian” regimes to nominate candidates for succession would, I suppose, be the North Korean regime, which seems to have devolved into something like a hereditary monarchy, but who knows what is really going on in there.) The same for Biden—do we want him choosing his successor, who will choose his successor, etc.? Again, I would say that the interesting point here is that he couldn’t, because he obviously doesn’t exercise power. So, only in certain kinds of regimes is “absolutism” possible. There is no reason, though, not to imagine the possible development of regimes if they had instituted orderly, intentional succession practices, along with using the principle of singular succession as a diagnostic concept for analyzing such regimes. If Stalin or Hitler (the two most “interesting” examples, I think) deliberately named the positions they occupied in such a way that, rather than being, nominally at least, a mere instrument of the party, class or race, they were to adopt the responsibility to see, publicly and explicitly, to the preparation and selection of named successors, they would have in fact been, or would have become, different regimes. Better regimes, even if not ideal ones. A regime that can allow for the public and, indeed, spectacular ranking and display of successors of the current ruler without the nagging fear that one of them will contend as a rival to that ruler at any moment will be a strong regime indeed. Such a regime would have articulated very powerful institutions of deferral with an unhesitating willingness to defend those institutions against subversion.

It might be best to treat resentment toward authority as memory of and desire for the ritual scene preceding the revolution. I use the term “resentment toward authority” rather than resistance to or repudiation of authority because “resentment” assumes some adjudicable lapse in meeting obligations and insofar as authority is authority, there is no space for adjudication. Resistance to authority can be carried out in the name of that authority, in the interest of revealing it to itself and improving it, while repudiation of authority is merely futile. Resentment toward authority creates a double bind in which you can’t stop engaging it while never really being able to acknowledge it. You just keep rubbing up against it, so to speak. This recalls the position on the yet to be usurped ritual scene, anticipating its usurpation and mourning it all at once. Perhaps we all have such a recall. I want to distinguish this from what Eric Gans calls the “moral model” of equality on the originary scene, which abstracts from everything that makes ritual ritual in the name of liberal apologetics. Insofar as we recall the ritual scene, we recall being held along with others on a scene before a spectacle placed at its center; we recall performing, carrying out movements that come from us and not from us, movements that transfigure us. This is why demonstrations and riots are ends in themselves, not just demands for a fair shake or a piece of the pie. Our resentment to authority, to the occupied center, can only be met by a re-enactment, with heavily ritualized overtones, of that originary usurpation, in what must be a fundamentally pedagogical gesture. This pedagogical gesture gives us the basic “cultural” form of the order centered on succession, and around which are ordered all the forms of work, play and learning taking place across the order.