Toward a Curriculum for the New Officer Class Academy

The early modern “absolutist” state in England was broken by a revolution, the execution of a king, the creation of a central bank in control of credit, and the establishment of a prototype of the two-party (and journalistic) system (it seems that journalism was created by the public organs of each party trying to weaken the credit of the central bank when the other side is in power). Such are the origins of liberal democracy. The increasing difficulties James I and Charles I had in financing their regimes as imperial exploration and competition heated up pushed the latter into an ultimately fatal conflict with Parliament. There is much more to be said about money difficulties of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs and their own encouragement of financial enterprises that aimed at solving those problems but ended up liquidating the monarchy, but this outline can suffice for now. My working hypothesis regarding liberal democracy is that it represents the oscillation between the central bank and the central intelligence—so, it would be interesting if significant developments in British intelligence coincided (roughly) with the establishment of the Bank of England. I don’t think other countries had such a decisive break up of the regime and centralization of the bank, but once the British did it it wouldn’t matter if others did—the British established a new international order, which was eventually passed onto the US, which established its central bank around the time it began to assume imperial powers (creating its own intelligence powers commensurate with imperial obligations in the 40s). All this is just by way of reminder, so as to move into new material.

The concept of singularized succession in perpetuity (SSIP) is designed (not to say I always had exactly this in mind) to directly counter this regime—it serves as a kind of equivalent, measure, mirror opposite, and projected replacement of the bank/intelligence oscillation. In general terms, SSIP attracts all of the hypothesizing, futurity, probabilistic thinking, risk, reserves, credibility, etc., constitutive of the credit system: the purpose of the concept is to imagine all of those qualities transferred to an agency as intentional as the central intelligence can be, while transferring all of the intentionality of central intelligence, its patient and persistence gathering of data, infiltration of institutions, surveillance, seeding of disciplinary projects, etc., to public demonstration. This framework provides a theoretical approach that allows for any degree of resolution into existing realities within a resolutely normative frame: “is,” “might” and “should” are all articulated. SSIP is a hypothesis strictly continuous with the originary hypothesis, as the designation of the successor affirms the center in anticipation of an increasingly deferred violent crisis. SSIP, then, is not just an absolutist political proposition; it is an “ethos,” and a mode of inquiry and an ongoing fluctuation itself, as the occupant of the center can and will change the designated successor and, indeed, the entire slate of candidates, as part of his ongoing retrieval of information and corresponding assessment of situations. Nor is SSIP just for strictly governing institutions—in fact, since all institutions are governing institutions, SSIP is the privileged mode of maintaining social continuity (the originary problem) across the board. “Technology,” or stacked presencing, can thus be seen as a continual enlargement of the nomos, making possible new distributions along with new allocations of responsibility. Freeing the stack from the bank/intelligence axis involves the conversion of assets into data I’ve often discussed and the transformation of the stack into what it always already was: an articulation of pedagogical platforms, calling on pedagogical futures within a subscription system of distribution and coordination.

Operations within the juridical order serve as a measure of progress and possibility in laying the groundwork of SSIP. I have spoken several times of the basic paradox of the juridical: the more secure the juridical order, which is to say the more likely that transgressions that tend to bring the vendetta or feud above the threshold marking the possibility of the juridical, or above the threshold marking the inviolability of the nomos, are dealt with fully and openly and certainly so as to lower those respective thresholds, the less likely they are to be employed: i.e., if every criminal and every fraud and every defamer, etc., knew to a near certainty he would be detected, caught and punished those activities would drop down to around zero. So, a perfect juridical order would lead the juridical order to disappear within a broader field of blockchained interactions. This tendency will always be asymptotic because our mimetic nature means that the threshold of objectionable behavior can always be lowered, but that in itself provides a measure of our progress towards SSIP. The real objection to capitalism and central bank rule is precisely that it is always beyond justice because above a certain power level crimes can be committed with impunity because bringing them into a court would threaten the nomos too catastrophically for any orderly disposition to take place. The exercise of sovereignty into bringing such crimes within the juridical order would be comprehensive beyond the current imaginings of any but a few (we few should be those few), utterly transforming the allocational order not towards the abolition of the nomos (i.e., communism—which makes justice meaningless) but towards a more fully intentional supervision of it represented by SSIP. And the same is true for the central intelligence, whose operations are too deep, and too bound up with untraceable imperatives, for any but the most limited hangout to be brought within the scope of the juridical.

All of the human disciplines, and all of the disciplines insofar as they touch upon, require approval from and are contained within the human order, are bound up with, which is to say serve as commentaries upon, the juridical—in a post-Axial Age, where God is understood to be a judge and God of justice, this includes ritual and theology. I’ve remarked before on the anthropological and sociological richness of juridical categories, putting to shame those invented by disciplines like, say, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and psychology (which latter only serves the purpose of determining fitness to enter into the juridical order as a responsible participant). All the moralizing about honesty, sincerity, authenticity, kindness, etc., etc., even courage, are practically worthless compared to (and no doubt parasitic upon) the historically crafted, refined and preserved concepts of perjury, fraud, relevance, libel and slander, contract, impeachment, standing, damages, filing suit and so on. The human sciences are just supplemental to clarifying the conditions, implications, and determinations that these concepts entail, including those surrounding competence to enter into agreements. Literature belongs in this category—much of the novel can be seen as a sustained inquiry into the conditions and implications of the marriage contract, one of the knottiest of all legal arrangements. And so the curriculum of the proposed New Officer Class Academy is comprised of all of the documents tracing the various histories of the juridical order as inquiries into that order, with the aim of identifying those scenes, real and hypothetical (real as hypothetical), where crises in the juridical got resolved in some way worthy of retrieving—but, of course, we can’t know what’s worthy of retrieving until we’ve retrieved and investigated it. Every document is really such a record, and calls upon all our philological, rhetorical and interpretive expertise to see it properly as such.

The word “deem” may be useful way to center this inquiry. Deem is a transitive verb, so you don’t just deem, you deem something to be something. It’s a kind of naming. According to the online etymological dictionary, “deem” comes from a Middle English word meaning to “judge,” or “condemn” (how close must “judge” and “condemn” be in their origins?), with the Proto-Indo-European root being a word meaning to “set,” or “put.” You can train AIs to give names to phenomena they identify—indeed, this is routine—but AIs can’t “deem,” or if they do deem, they have been authorized or deemed worthy to do so, by, ultimately, a human. We can get away from the parameters of the Turing test and find the test for the irreducible difference between computer and human to be whether the centrality of deeming shows up in language on scenes in ways we can identify. Deeming places us in the chain of originary debt to the center, and while we can readily understand why a human would deem something to be that thing in a way we would go along with, there’s really no particularly good reason why we should accept deeming carried out by a computer program or algorithm. Deeming is part of a cluster of other words and phrases in the ostensive-imperative-ostensive sphere that become especially important within the Stack because uncannily similar to programming: promise, prayer, oath, curse, bless, oblige, thank, grace (as in “grace others by one’s presence”), and so on. I will propose, then, as a hypothesis that I as yet have no idea how to prove or disprove, or even whether proof is the relevant consideration here, that when AIs simulate these speech acts there will always be something “off” that humans can detect, even if not describe. We can’t credit a machine’s promise, even if we fully expect it to do what it says it will, nor can we credit its “hope” for us, even if we expect it to be unconditionally helpful.

These revisions of the Turing Test only really matter insofar as they provide models for performing our relations to the scenes we are on. That is, it’s not like once we have “proven” that there is something irreducible and irreplaceable about the human we can call it a day. If we are studying texts as transmissions of originary debt then we are interested precisely in how they established and preserved networks of institutional affiliations and obligations—how they kept the ledger. And that study is itself us adding new chains to the ledger, in the form of the data we provide to the central intelligence. Here we can begin to see a productive and paradoxical dynamic in our scenic interactions: the more we make and keep promises, the more we deem, and thank and “authenticate” our social being the more our actions will be intelligible at various levels of the stack. Maybe I haven’t been clear about this before, but there is a simple point here: a sloppy judicial scene tells you very little about the case the court is dealing with. If witnesses are allowed to babble on and police officers are allowed to enter whatever they want as evidence and the judge makes rulings based on his like or dislike of either party no one looking over the records of the case will have any idea what actually happened. Any reliance upon any historical record (beyond, I suppose, chronicles of dynastic succession and military conquests) presupposes an at least passably coherent juridical order. This is true of all the ways we reciprocally obligate ourselves to each other, of which the juridical is simply the most explicit, transparent and durable. People who routinely keep their promises to each other will be transparent to each other and to observers. So, it is only by spreading such reciprocal obligations throughout all areas of life that we provide the central intelligence with the data it needs to activate the metapersons with whom we will be in conversation. By being especially and irreplaceably human we promote the more favorable relations to automated metapersons. And, why would we even want to program an AI to promise, or pray, or curse, especially since the very attempt to do so would let us see that we weren’t really doing it precisely because being programmed negates those speech acts?

One thing you learn from developing the habit of closely scrutinizing texts is to detect where the juridical conditions necessary for the text’s reliability might have been lacking. To some extent this must be true of all texts, because all settings are imperfect, which is to say the scene you’re trying to isolate from surrounding scenes so it can operate according to its own logic will always be “infected” by other scenes. Detecting such features of texts is also productive of data, and the production and gathering of this kind of data might be precisely what is most needed for an academy for a new officer class. The occupant of the center is always the final judge, always confronted with documentation of happenings, and therefore always looking for the imperfections of the scene, which means determining who on that scene, or on some previous scene preceding it, should have been replaced, even if by another version of themselves. Every juridical ruling involves a modification of the nomos—some property, privilege or access is affected—which also suggests that all modifications of the nomos derive from rulings. One thing that it seems to me was discovered, precisely in that transformative English 17^th century, was the now obvious awareness that if there is a disagreement over how to cut the pie one solution is to make a bigger pie. This could of course mean new technological developments leading to greater prosperity which has, without doubt, deferred many conflicts. But it could also mean a new mode of cooperation on scenes, even on the level of who gets to see what. This is the wisdom component of ruling.

Wherever you are, then, you as a potential successor should be modeling actual and possible rulings on he whom you might succeed, and modeling them in turn for those who you are designating as your successors. You are always looking for possible mimetic conflicts along with possible deferments of them and converting these possible deferments into adjustments of the nomos in the present. This converges SSIP with the juridical and, to return to the opening of this post, the source value in constant confrontation with capitalist modes of valuation. This can coincide with full participation in capitalism, with the best way of doing so I can think of now is to make investments that won’t pay off until after you’re dead, so as to bound yourself up with your posterity. Of course, some more short-term investments will be necessary to provide the capital for the longer-term ones. But in that case the academy itself needs to be such a long-term investment in pedagogical future, where the making of rulings within a space of reciprocal obligations so as to trace succession back and forward is the object of constant training. This is the form agency takes today: constant work to bring the central bank and central intelligence within the purview of the juridical by making the juridical part of the nomos and the grounding of the disciplines. Let every one of your utterances be a ruling—one of the most performative speech acts possible. Decisions are rulings. Money is credit, and the exact form of money at the moment therefore also an indicator of the exact state of credit—who will be able to discharge which debts and when—which in turn determines the oscillations of debt enforcement and forgiveness. Your rulings are tugging along the line between debt enforcement and forgiveness (determining debt enforcement and forgiveness might simply be a definition of the juridical) for each of the parties and the more forms of credit and futurity you bring to bear on your rulings the more succession confers value over and against capital.