The Pointman

The Axial Age can be defined as a new mode of rationality transcending ritual or a kind of secularization in which new modes of universal understanding transcend narrow or “compact” social groupings, drawing upon the simultaneous emergence of Greek Philosophy, the Hebrew prophets and Asian phenomena like Buddhism and Confucianism. In Western terms, though (and whether Chinese and Indian cultures recognize or care about this historical transition is unknown to me), what happens here is a new form of victimization that invalidates existing ritual, in particular human sacrifice, and creates a new mode of sacrality that recognizes, more or less explicitly, the centrality of mimetic desire. It’s not just that Socrates invents a new mode of dialogic inquiry that examines the meanings of words that are ordinarily taken for granted, it’s that he is killed by the community for this questioning—this event, the execution of Socrates, is what founds “philosophy.” It’s not just that the later. Hebrew prophets refined the Judaic understanding of God, abstracting it away from sacrifice and locating it in inner intentionality, but that they were ostracized by and suffered in the name of their community, a community which in turn was made to suffer for (at least retroactively) this new conception of God. And this line of prophecy finds its culmination in the willing sacrifice of Jesus—again, Christianity is not just a a series of propositions about God, the trinity, redemption, etc., but a commemoration of this event, of a killing in which all of our (mimetic) sins are concentrated and expiated.

In Anthropomorphics and elsewhere I provided a broader speculative narrative framing for these events in terms of a kind of anti-imperial imperialism, which is to say the instantiation of a kingdom beyond and commanding all earthly kings. The new mode of sacral victimology fits within this more political framing because what the imperial order, in suppressing the vendetta and centralizing power in the divine emperor, does is to establish a justice system in which the right to revenge is disavowed on the condition that complaints will be heard and adjudicated in a “satisfactory” way—i.e., a way that approximates what would have been the result of a successful vendetta “closely enough” (we must use such approximative terms because any justice system is always poised on the verge of a “tilt” back into the vendetta but there is no way of determining in advance when one or another of the parties might initiate the decisive “tilt” through a calculation of the risks and benefits entailed in breaking with a less than satisfactory judicial regime). But the justice system can itself always be placed “on trial” in a kind of case that, analogous to the “exception” Carl Schmitt considered constitutive of sovereignty, stands both inside and outside of the system. Here we imagine—and literature provides us with ample samples for such imagining—a figure who suffers an injury that goes unremedied while possessing the ability to leverage resources that would challenge the injustice through a force illegitimate within the system but in the name of correcting that injustice (rather than overturning or escaping the system). Such an encounter creates what Jean-Francois Lyotard identified as an incommensurability of idioms (a “differend”) and is, in the first instance, necessarily tragic: the injustice can no longer be remedied without acknowledging the extra-juridical force through which it was remedied thereby undermining the justice system from which remedy was demanded in the first place. The figure initiating this singular case can only be killed or expelled and we are forced to see him as both right and wrong while nevertheless also now being forced to see a fatal flaw and vulnerability in the justice system itself.

My argument here is that the Axial Age is the ongoing testing and examination of this kind of hypothetical case which was, in fact, most closely realized in the cases of Socrates and Jesus. The problem for those committed to drawing out “centered ordinality” or the “tributary” from the current disorder driven by the oscillation between the central bank and central intelligence is that the centrality of the victim to Axial Age and successor models (modernity) has led to the extreme dysfunctions of the victimary in which, to retrieve an old formulation of Eric Gans’s, the “marked” is a priori privileged over the “unmarked.” You can say that transgenderism, Black Lives Matters, Free Palestine, etc., don’t necessarily follow from the crucifixion, or from universal morality, or reason, and you would be correct, but these movements are advanced not through testable propositions but through staged events that are “close enough” to the history or martyrdoms, including the all the secular martyrs to reason, science, liberal rights, etc., to override propositional claims. So, either the Axial Age is restored to its groundings in some way as to immunize it from such deviations, or it is rejected as a failed model, or some other new “age” is created to correct or maybe supplement (I won’t say “transcend”) it. I don’t think it is possible to reject the Axial Age revelations without breaking with the entire notion of a juridical order because it is predicated upon certain irremediable elements of that order—so, I will leave it to those who would prefer a return to the vendetta and honor system (essentially some form of “mafia”) to make a case for that approach (I have in mind here Mike Maxwell’s inquiries in his Imperium Press Substack). But I also don’t think that a mode of sacrality that relies upon the death of the singled out and centralized victim can be immunized against using that model to train attention on whoever can be presented as the most powerless and guiltless figure in any event.

That leaves us, then, with the creation of a new revelatory order, one which preserves the insights into the nomos and the juridical generated throughout the Axial Age while eliminating its vulnerability to parasitism. I have already suggested the most minimal (always to be preferred!) path here—maintain the scenario constructed above while subtracting the death of the victim (who will therefore no longer be a victim). The Christian revelation already recognizes that, in some sense, Jesus didn’t have to allow himself to be killed—He was God himself, after all. The same would hold true in a weaker way for the prophets (and the Jewish people themselves) who, if they were indeed vessels of God’s word and will, could have been spared exile and universal hostility. Even Socrates rejects proposals to help him escape his sentenced execution—in each case the point is insisted upon that the sacrifice is voluntary but also, therefore, necessary for the installation of the new order of sacrality. Even well past the age of sacral kingship, in which sacrificing kings was part of the system, the possibility of the king willingly presenting himself as a sacrifice remains essential to Western legitimacy. The power of this voluntary sacrifice is that it turns the attention back on the perpetrator, who is confronted with his act of lynching an innocent victim and therefore with recognizing some degree of innocence to every victim—this is the source of the moral transformation—in Girard’s terms, one has to face the bad faith in which one carries out the ritualized killing—you can no longer believe the official story, that you are saving the community from the plague, or a drought or some other “contamination.” I certainly don’t think we can restore good faith to human sacrifice, which leaves us with the question of how an equivalent revelation can be effected without death—how do you prove you are willing to die without actually dying? Even putting yourself in an extremely dangerous situation allows for the possibility that you will try to survive it and in doing so will reveal an entirely different scenic order than by succumbing.

It must, then, be possible to commemorate, iterate and cite that other scenic order more effectively than the scenic order installing the Axial Age can now be commemorated, iterated and cited. We still have that figure, inside and outside of the system, occupying some juridical anomaly, becoming the cynosure. Here we’re thinking about a genuine candidate for power, even someone exercising power, even sovereign power, while simultaneously enacting a mode of power and sovereignty repellent to the existing mode. This candidate realizes and for others is a source of revelation that at every single point of the existing order the incommensurability or anomaly one occupies finds a source of strength. Something like a universal conversion is necessary but, simultaneously, that conversion can only find its reference points within the existing order: it only makes sense in terms of the juridical, the originary distribution, and credit. Something like maintaining the existing order by turning it inside out is called for. But this candidate wants to win, to succeed, and here is where we enact a kind of repudiation of the Axial Age’s repudiation of the merely human, social order. Redemption is within the human world—it is “social” and “political.” This is anathema to the remnants of the Axial Age, which have, under “liberal democracy,” organized themselves by attributing such a commitment to what they call “totalitarianism.” And, indeed, what I have called an “open source Messianism” is invoked here—but, at the same time, such Messianism is “reduced” to “history,” to the ordering of power. You might say that this model involves restoring the disavowed political dimension to the Axial Age model.

So, we have someone who is indeed ready to lose, resistant to compromise that would in fact be failure, but making every effort to win, clarifying what that would mean at each point along the way—this is what we want to “sacralize” or, again, to be more precise, identify, name, commemorate, iterate, and cite. I’ll get more specific: during Trump’s first term, when the “Qanon” posters and others (like Thomas Wictor) were attributing to Trump far-reaching plans, strategies and powers that they claimed refuted the appearance of lost opportunities, poor appointments, lack of control over relevant agencies, etc., my attitude was always that I don’t know how true any of this might be but there’s no reason it (or at least much of it) couldn’t have been true. It seemed to me at least as plausible as Trump being a screw-up or just being defeated. And I didn’t see any reason not, as an interested observer unable to influence these events, to maintain a kind of oscillation between the possibilities, assigning various likelihoods as things go. This still seems to me the right approach, resisting the arrogance of claiming to have some behind the scene knowledge (that others are too stupid or weak to grasp), and in the process contributing to the construction of an iconic sign of governance that might become real. Even “cognitively,” this position seems to me the best one, as it embodies a humble stance of constant inquiry, employing the simple heuristic that, on some level, Trump means what he says—and meaning what you say also means that what you say has the kind of bearing on reality you say it does—and then “measuring” events accordingly, as either opening some distance between saying and doing or introducing new layers and temporalities of meaning—leaving open, as a last resort, the possibility (which can never be completely abandoned) that it was all false, a lie, a fraud, an utter failure, etc.—but even in that case we would emerge with a sense of what would have been the truth, what would have counted as success, what would have involved maintaining the identity of saying and doing.

I am going to call this figure whom we should be seeking out and in seeking out hypothesizing regarding the conditions of emergence and features of, the “pointman.” He is at the point, taking the initiative, gathering all initiatives under his banner, and at the same time the one everyone points to, out of wonder, curiosity or outrage, with the finger of accusation. Like the Axial Age sacrificial figure, the pointman must draw all attention to himself, and must compel everyone to choose whether to join or deny him. Everyone will marked by the degree to which they keep “faith” with him. We are speaking of the latest iteration of the Big Man, which also means that what is now commemorated is the pointman’s reception, seizure and eventual transfer of power. The word for “center,” if the Online Etymological Dictionary is to be trusted, derives from the word for “point,” which itself derives from the word to “prick,” i.e., to wound, to cause to bleed. So, I can now replace the clumsy “occupant of the center” with “pointman,” as a more resonant and less technical-sounding synonym. Nor is seeking out the pointman a merely passive stance—it’s not waiting for Godot, because there are a lot of candidates out there and you’re looking for them, testing them when they emerge, drawing conclusions from events they create, contributing to the conditions of their platforming and, indeed, in the process, someone so engaged in the process of pointing out the pointman might end up having been the pointman all along. You might turn out to have been the outside option insofar as you have been contributing to the monopolization of the outside spread.

What I am describing is marked by all the paradoxes and perils of Messianism, and even more, a worldly Messianism. Liberalism has good reasons for being wary here. It’s easy to imagine things going terribly wrong and, after all, would we ever know, would there ever be anything approaching unanimity, on the arrival of such a figure? I’ll answer these likely objections by referring to my concept of the succession ritual, in which this high tension between being “pinned” to the center, so to speak, on the one hand, and entering and occupying it, on the other hand, can be enacted and the scenic structure attributed to and conferred upon the pointman. This conception draws upon archaic rituals of initiation and sacral kingship, but in place of the sacrifice of the central figure we have the high stakes lawsuit against him, which might be brought by any subject and might end in the ruin of the pointman (or the subject). Anyone daring to take on the pointman in this mediated, spectacular, presumably non-violent (but the possibility of violence is always part of the background of the scene) contest would have to be ready to claim the title himself, ultimately, given a victorious suit, through a gracious transfer from the present pointman himself. Note that the trial of Socrates and the trial of Jesus are critical to the Platonic constitution of philosophy and to the Gospels, respectively. Echoes of trial by combat can be heard here as well, but now through the marshalling of data more than through individual valor and skill (but, again, once a confrontation is initiated, however closely it’s controlled by conventions and careful monitoring, the outcome is never certain). What is at stake here is both the character of the governor and the maintenance of governing traditions placing social continuity, i.e., succession, at the center. And, in the end, the maintenance of such traditions will do more to protect the weaker members of society from violence, injustice and indignity than all the martyrologies we’ve inherited through the Axial Age.