Trails of Liminal Succession

There’s nothing that can’t be automated but there will always be a residue to any automation, and a new, surplus capability to train the new forms of automation. It is this residue and surplus that keeps humanism solvent, because you can always abstract away from the automated infrastructure and isolate something that “presents” as purely human, whether it be intuition, some quality of feeling, the capacity to “really” think or reason as opposed to mechanical pattern recognition, etc. But the residue and surplus are of the automation and inseparable from it, and defending humanism requires constant negation of increasingly subtle ways of ensuring repetition and modification of motions beyond human intention. The reason why I always emphasize pedagogy as a kind of fundamental human modality is that it builds sociality and techne directly into the human itself: if we understand or practice ourselves as always teaching and learning then we would always be imagining ourselves on a scene and as participating in scenic design—the originary event is the original pattern recognition. Pedagogy is the residue and surplus—there will always be a need to show others how to do things.

The words “teach” and “learn” are ultimately rooted in following trails by identifying (pointing to) marks that “mean” because they have previously drawn attention, and attention that is at least potentially joint attention—if you notice something and remember it it’s because you might point it out to another. I’ve hypothesized before that following and creating trails (assuming we can distinguish between following and creating) was itself the pathway by which the sign traveled from the originary scene to other scenes outside of the pull of the ritual one. It would also be the way in which human signs rooted themselves in the natural environment and developed forms of kinship with animals, who also follow and leave trails—insofar as they are signs, it would be easy to think that one’s prey was leaving the trail for you. These earliest trails are the ancestors of todays thoroughly stacked environment, with the globe crisscrossed by cables, wires, trading routes, highways, and so on, with everything, including our bodies, increasingly thoroughly mapped. We’re always creating search terms, leaving data trails behind us while following others, like leaving bread crumbs for others to find us and for us to find our way back… well, where? not necessarily home.

The problem of succession is easily seen as a problem of pedagogy. The “education of princes” is an ancient genre, and it has not become less relevant over the millennia. That controlling succession within a single family that claims ownership over a territory is increasingly unlikely to be a way of making the problem of succession intelligible and treatable marks our own distance from a sacred order. We cannot turn back from the desecration that founds not only our politics but our science and technology, but the problem of succession indicates that we cannot settle with desecration, permanent hostility to the center, as our default mode. Any attempt to sanctify today will appear to too many, and too many of the highly capable, to be sanctimonious. The Big Man revolution must be continued otherwise. Pedagogy is not necessarily sacred, but it also need not be sanctimonious, while creating tacit and haptic relations between individuals, relations which can in turn be scaled up. There’s something irreducible and beyond any critique in simply showing someone how to do something, which means apprenticing them to a scene. Whatever you can show someone how to do you can think of how to automate, but that automation will produce new practices that we will have to show each other how to do.

We find ourselves in the middle now, requiring continual mapping, mapping which transforms the territory, with partial, precarious succession and pedagogical practices confronted with ferocious efforts to keep the desecration going. To use Colin Drumm’s terms, we are governed by the oscillation between the outside spread and the outside option: between those with the funds, however tokenized, to back up any shortfall in liquidity, and those who can control the current occupant of the center by holding in reserve a “bullpen” of potential replacements. If the occupant of the center seeks to ensure liquidity or liquidate the need for liquidity by building originary debt into succession practices themselves, those in control of the outside spread can liquefy him simply, for example, by calling in all debts. If the occupant of the center seeks to establish succession practices outside of the purview of the intelligence agencies, cutting the threads that bind political parties, large media corporations (including, of course, social media), NGOs and so on to those agencies, any number of coup opportunities, more or less credibly legitimated by one or another democratic procedure, can be leveraged. This is a forest with many trails, because of lines of succession must be forged here and there, if even to maintain the outside spread and outside option themselves, but none of which lead anyone anywhere other than into some unmapped entanglement.

This, then, is the territory to be mapped and navigated. Our Big Men today will have to be cartographers, and being cartographers today means organizing the cleanest and most comprehensive data and submitting it to algorithmic training dedicated to the expansion of the nomos and the settling of cases within it. This also means overtly and systematically foregrounding pedagogical practices all the way down. Expanding the nomos involves creating what Zack Baker calls “namespaces,” which allow for new levels of the stack, new territories, real and virtual, to be distributed, divided, transmitted and inherited. If we are to have “faith,” that faith should be in our inexhaustible capacity to name things, as onomastic beings. Naming something is an originary, generative gesture, but it’s never just you doing the naming—the object draws you toward and you in turn are drawing others toward it and those others who might be drawn to it are part of the object drawing you to it. And we could teach others how to do it—we could have institutes for naming instruction. Likewise, we could teach people and ourselves learn how to judge better—this is really one of the highest human abilities, involving occupying a center in front of disputants while claiming nothing for oneself and dedicating oneself only to “justice” which, anthropomorphically, we can translate into maintaining the threshold below which the vendetta re-territorializes social life and above which the antinomic vendetta against the center is triggered. Technological innovation is then the construction of platforms upon which pedagogies of naming and judging can be invented.

John Barth’s Giles, Goat-Boy, which I almost finished many years ago, analogizes the world to a university in a fairly comprehensive allegorical manner (salvation as matriculation, etc.). Gaston Bachelard recommended turning society into a school, rather than containing school within the society. Such a recommendation is not to expand our existing educational institutions throughout society but to abolish them in what would be a new order of apprenticeships, tied into new kinship networks. There’s nothing schoolmarmish about it—but, there’s a place for schoolmarms as well. Pedagogical relations and networks would be trailblazing, marking all institutions with succession practices. What that would look like today would be a pedagogical company which could begin modestly by providing a pathway for gifted young people to skip college and be prepared to work for, first of all, the most forward looking (pathfinding) data security companies, those who must be grooming themselves to assert sovereignty. Scientific and engineering education would, of course, be central, but the holism of the medieval university would be recalled as well and center study would provide the all-encompassing and open-ended (ever hypothetical) curriculum embracing the human and social sciences, and the physical sciences within them. Once college has been eliminated for enough people, middle school and elementary school can as well—as broadly as possible, but without waiting for the all the regulatory hoops to be jumped through so it can be universal. Different communities, which really means different kinship networks, since under such pressure and given such incentives, communities would fork off into extended families capable of advancing, protecting and sheltering their young, would compete for entry into the apprenticeship programs.

The results of different pedagogical institutions would be made public and blockchained not through standardized tests but through open competition, which would become the source of betting markets, initiating new forms of currency. Athletic contests, infrastructure building contests, moot court contests, city building contests, all judged by those with the most vested interest in maintaining the school’s credibility and attractiveness to prospective applicants would be the substance of the education. Fitness is all. Once such institutions attain lift-off, they could publicize themselves by challenging Chinese and Russian teams (I’m obviously Americo-centric here) to competitions, perhaps thereby usuring in a more humane and productive model of international political competition. We could even organize espionage contests, with each side agreeing to place certain mid-level secrets on the boundary between within reach and just out of reach, with further disclosures given to the winner. Studying and remixing the records of the contests would provide new pedagogical but also artistic materials: these competitions would be the basis of succession rituals I have written about many times before, and which would in turn become the main source of literature, film, and music. Everyone comes to see themselves as a possible candidate for occupying the center but as, for almost everyone, those chances will obviously diminish through life, as possible nurturers and models for those who might have better chances. And we would work toward the point where it would be possible to make claims on generations of graduates across these institutions, as if professional sports teams could draft the future starting play of a particular high school with an especially strong sports program, several generations down the road on the expectation that that program would remain strong. This would then abolish currency in any conventional sense, because originary debt would be directly realized in succession practices.

What I would like to do is derive from this enlarged scenic thinking, this stacked presencing, a way of thinking in the here and now. We’re cutting paths toward these practices of stacked presencing, and whatever we do either gets us more entangled in desecration or generates new pedagogical pathways. Whether we’re talking about inflation, wokeness, AI, elections, TV shows, romantic relationships, or whatever, we’re always at a certain inflection point toward moving originary debt enforcement up the pedagogical ladder. You take more of the debt on yourself by making your practices more explicitly pedagogical and making your pedagogical practices samples of sampling, distinctive and timely enough to be iterated across the stack. Directionally, we’re thinking of a kind of diagonal movement here as we are pulling in one direction guided by the Big Man revolution while being pushed in another direction by those furiously trying to maintain maximum randomness around all succession other than what ensures the continuity of that very effort. (I’m borrowing here from an analysis of a very short Kafka story, “He,” by Hannah Arendt, in her Thinking.) There’s a deferralesque, demand-command dynamic here, as we’re always not quite going in the direction we’re going. We’re looking for trails of liminal succession, drawing nearer to them, pointing them out, marking and commemorating them, treating even their erasure as signs. (There’s some of the old post-structuralist idiom in this description.) It’s a matter of lowering the threshold of detection and significance, the next to oldest linguistic practice according to Gans’s The Origin of Language, and this is in turn a practice of naming and namespacing. As a genre, it’s a proposal for a novel and universal pedagogical system, present everywhere but never completely institutionalizable, presented to whomever wants to take the originary debt fully upon himself, to transfer it generationally rather than liquidate it. Of course, we’d accept a small grant to get a few classes up and running, even from someone who will not know he has contracted the debt until he himself has gone to school.

Following the trail of liminal succession means transferring debt enforcement and forgiveness from its current, monetary, form, to credit and debt bearing idioms. The credit and debt bearing idioms are promises, oaths, prayers, testimony, hypotheses, bets, bids, moves in games, and so on. All of these are marginalized by desecrating modernity, i.e., the replacement of orderly succession by rotating succession and the consequent introduction of the oscillation between the outside spread (the central bank) and the outside option (the intelligence agencies) as the mode of governance. The value of everything under capitalism is the expected future earnings tied to possession of any thing as an asset, and this mode of valuation is a mode of power (I’m just restating Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power thesis) that has everyone relying on those determining the outside spread (liquidity) with the intelligence agencies no doubt exercising at least a veto. Even within this space, credit and debt bearing idioms must have their function—sheer reward and punishment is never enough to ensure that those you need to do X tomorrow will in fact do X tomorrow, if for no other reason that if reward and punishment are the only mechanisms of control there’s not even any way of knowing what will count as X. Someone must be able to say, “sure, I’ll get this done by next week,” be believed, and indeed get it done by next week. Any company to be built must occupy that space and enlarge it, and the only way I can think of enlarging it is by creating such spaces for others, which is to say by building a pedagogical space, which would also be a technological space, a modification of the stack of scenes such that the expectation of future actions and outcomes can be brought into closer correspondence with those actions and outcomes idiomatically than monetarily. Showing someone how to do something is the ultimate act of faith—faith in that increment of deferral represented by the practice can be sustained and further stacked. It is also the origin and essence of debt—if someone shows you how to do something, it is inscribed in your practices and you are obliged to maintain and transmit it. And this will be the case at any scale and for any duration.