Credit and Succession

Carl Wennerlind, in his Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720, observes that the emergence of journalism in the wake of the political duopoly of Whigs and Tories resulted from each party seeking to damage credit when the other party was in power. This encapsulates very neatly the core of (what was to become) “liberal democracy”: a constantly broached and deferred civil war waged indirectly by making one’s opponents casualties of the credit now determined by the central bank independently of either party. More directly, though, I think the logic of this development should be applicable to “society” and “culture” in general—and I put “society” and “culture” in scare quotes precisely because speaking in terms of a broader system of debt and credit might make it possible to dispense with such malleable terms—and maybe some others, like morality, ethics, and aesthetics, once everything is reducible to the credit conferred upon each creditor and debtor. Thinking about art in terms of the effects of a given work and its reception as raising the credit of some and lowering it of others might provide interesting ways of examining even the minutest formal features of the work (and I don’t just mean the art market here). And asking someone whose credit they are harming and whose they are propping up might cut through a lot of noise and hypocrisy of discussions of ethics and morality.

Credit is the monetization of debt and succeeds previous forms of expressing obligation like honor—it is only when the central bank (or, maybe, a more decentralized banking system outside of direct political control) replaces the general “pointman” that we have a credit order. But credit is part of the long history of debt, which is the history of humanity, beginning with our debt to the central being on the originary scene. Already in Zack Baker and mine “There is no Economy But Only the Debt to the Center” a complete reframing of human intentionality in terms of indebtedness is proposed. A debt to David Graeber is evident here, but also a kind of calling in of his anarchist “chips,” since his entire critique depends upon the assumption of an originary free community where, presumably, each exchange leaves no imprint on subsequent ones (we’d have to imagine no one remembers anything—memory, or commemoration, is itself a recording of debt). Part of the general credit system I’m advancing here retrieves the role assigned to the sovereign, or occupant of the center or, now, “pointman,” posited by follow-up discussions—that of debt enforcement and forgiveness. Now, this role, which can take on many forms (e.g., inflation might be a form of debt forgiveness), must provide feedback on each creditor and debtor’s creditability—knowing which debts are likely to be enforced or forgiven must certainly play into decisions to offer credit in the first place (something I still don’t quite understand about the ancient Jubilee year, which I have to assume involved all kinds of exceptions and end-arounds). This, then, is the form sovereign intervention in the credit system takes and provides a way of introducing the central intelligence into the central bank/central intelligence oscillation I have been hypothesizing as the logic of the modern (post-sacral kingship) world. This can hopefully sharpen the inquiry into the development of intelligence agencies and their changing role (of which I still know next to nothing) from the absolutist monarchies that certainly built them up prodigiously and the elective governments that followed and tend to be governed by them. But one thing that can be said is that intelligence agencies have many ways of wrecking credit when doing so might harm disfavored parties.

It's impossible to say anything to or about anyone without some impact upon that person’s credit, with ramifications, however miniscule, across the credit system. Wennerlind’s claim is a little bit different, though, than this observation that each encounter has an impact upon the credit of the people involved—he claims that it’s not just that Tories and Whigs tried to undermine each other’s credit (although they must have been doing that as well) but trying to weaken the credit system run by the central bank when the other party is in power. This suggests a newly created relationship between succession in power and credit: a healthy, which is to say reliable and predictable credit system is necessary for orderly succession, while, conversely, disrupting the credit system is a good way of interfering with succession. We should, then, look for the ways in which subversive activity and propaganda targets credit, i.e., lowers the willingness of people to hold and trade in the currency issued and backed by the central bank. As power is increasingly centralized in the modern world it is more tenuously held by any pointman and therefore more quickly turned over (while the stakes get higher), and this means we can directly connect the field of what Colin Drumm calls the “outside option” and capital as (per Bichler and Nitzan) “value discounted against expected future earnings.” There used to be Marxist analyses that would get very granular here by, for example, tying some shift in a politician’s rhetoric to fluctuations in real estate values; we still see such analyses, but maybe a bit more on the right. (Bichler and Nitzan, for example, correlate wars in the Middle East with oil prices. Maybe, but I want the mediations—how does an attempt by some oil producer to jack up prices translate into jihadist preaching in mosques or votes for religious nationalist parties in Israel?) In part, this is what I’m aiming at here—very direct lines drawn between credit and “subjectivity.” As always, what I’m looking for is a more direct translation of all discourse into idioms of the center. To say that someone’s critical review of a novel aims at weakening credit because the publisher responsible for that novel interferes with the creation of other publishing enterprises that would allow for the publication of novels consistent with another system of credit doesn’t diminish the “reality” of one’s literary assessment of the novel—it just translates, more directly, whatever observations one would have regarding, say the deployment of familiar or innovative narrative devices into the broader forms by which we credit each other. And this must, ultimately, be what “culture” is all about anyway.

This also redirects all questions about art, culture, thought, etc., to questions of which credit system is to be preferred over others. We can work at various levels of specificity here but the ultimate level of analysis can’t be something like “this poem makes it more likely Jerome Powell will continue to head the Fed” (which is not at all to exclude the satiric uses of such a intermediate, deliberately “crude,” level of analysis). Colin Drumm, as I’ve pointed out many times, provides us with a broader frame for addressing the articulation of succession and credit in his “dialectic” (I’m not sure he’d call it that—I’m not sure I will continue to do so) between the “outside spread” (the lender of last resort—who could always decide not to lend, precisely when credit is most needed) and the “outside option” (some possible replacement of the present monarch, there to serve as a focal point for mobilization of opposition and therefore as a kind of background check on the monarch’s power). Drumm was discussing pre-modern (i.e., pre-central bank, pre-generalized credit) England, but the modern credit system and the alternating parties trying to wreck and restore it, respectively, is what has replaced it. The new system is an attempt to exchange the elimination of the outside option (by internalizing it within the system) with placing the central bank in charge of the precipice over which economic life will now dangle. But if we get too close to the precipice, let alone go over it, the outside option will simply be deployed against the entire internal oscillation between the central bank and central intelligence, mediated through the political parties (this is what the talk of “controlled opposition” is all about). But we’ve never actually gone over the precipice, even if large accumulations of assets have periodically been tossed in the abyss, and it may be that we can’t without the creation of a new order. This is the implication of Bichler and Nitzan’s “capital as power”: there is no endemic crisis, there is no “internal contradiction,” there is no transcendence internal to the dialectic of capital—individual firms can keep discounting against expected future earnings even if that’s done primarily through sabotaging productive activity rather than stimulating it. (In that case, the outside spread will always be made available to some borrowers, even if only after a vast culling of less credit-worthy ones.) This makes it all the more ironic, even if it adds to the credit of their own system, that Bichler and Nitzan offer exactly nothing by way of a possible replacement of capitalism. To the extent that we accept their theory, though, we are cautioned against choosing one saboteur against another—which would be another way of describing the two-party system, with each party set upon undermining credit when the other is in power.

To think in terms of a better system of credit we must go back further beyond pre-modern England, beyond the ancient empires and the Greek “tyrannies” that succeeded the sacral kings and introduced the generalized monetary order which, according to Richard Seaford philosophy represented (without exactly realizing it was doing so, and therefore itself being, I suppose, merely controlled opposition)—back to originary debt, on the originary scene. Here there is a unity of succession and obligation, since the community’s shared obligation is to sustain the ritual center, which means ensuring that the ritual scene we all exited last time is the same one that we all enter this time. Center study’s “telos” is to restore this on the vastly expanded scale of the stack of scenes, and this involves the tokenization of deferral and exchange in what I have been calling “pedagogical futures.” At some point, this must involve something like a political party issuing currency, i.e., credit, and establishing institutions that would enhance that credit by organizing people in such a way that they would be better able to maintain it. Since organizing such enterprises around existing political parties—certainly in the US but probably anywhere—could not be properly done and would in fact likely be illegal in various ways, they must first be located in companies adjunct to the government (central intelligence) which are in the business of converting assets into data, i.e., mapping out the existing credit system for the sake of simulation and prediction (“assets” really are issuances of credit, which can be drawn upon in accord with the legal provisions ensuring a reliable interplay of debt enforcement and forgiveness—and let me mention here that if we wish to turn assets into data we might first need to generate a range of novel assets). There’s nothing more important, and really nothing else than, imagining and building such companies. Such companies will seek to monopolize and thereby guarantee sources of credit, i.e., step further in from the precipice—they will make their debt the bank’s problem, so to speak. A lot of sabotage might be necessary along the way (we could think of sabotage as eliciting especially punitive debt enforcement on others) in order to get to the point where expected future earnings are projected well beyond the possibility of any sabotage, which also means beyond the cashing in of anyone alive or even their known descendants. Such expected future earnings, now beyond any present-day “discounting,” could have once been invested in land, but now could only have a home in the ongoing learning of the accredited. This means assuming future descendants who will have mastered credit and scenic systems well beyond any we could imagine now, but who will also have recovered and preserved all the lost human capabilities of human history. Such recovery will be an important use of artificial intelligence, which will be able to offer reconstructions of, e.g., engineering and architectural knowledge, and even physical knowledge of builders, based upon monuments and artifacts discovered archeologically. In this way alternative paths of human development can also be constructed and enacted and made to converge with those paths that won out.

In a sense, then, center study takes sides in contemporary politics—it tries to impact credit, i.e., engage in sabotage, in accord with whether its preferred party is in power—but the real issue is ensuring credit flows to promising companies and keeping those companies promising by relying on data collection from institutions within juridically intact spaces and keeping those spaces juridically intact so as to feed their hunger for nutritious data. The simplest way in here (not to suggest here aren’t already promising companies) that I can think of is data collection and curation for the sake of large scale lawsuits for defamation and fraud, with the goal of making lying very costly (on this point I agree with Curt Doolittle, but this agreement may end—I genuinely don’t know—once I point out that not all human utterances can be classified as true or false because not all human utterances are solely declarative). But we can also counter and include new forms of assetization (Bitcoin is not credit so it’s not really money) by proposing tokens issued by the United States backed by the blockchained obligation to maintain the scientific, technological, and educational capacity to go to war in a timely manner against any state upon which some of such capacity still depends—i.e., an obligation to be able to convert to total autonomy virtually instantly. (Establishing and maintaining this obligations would require exactly the kind of data security “subcontractors” I referred to earlier.) This should be the case anyway, and points to the inclusion of credit and tokenization, or the outside spread, within the order of succession. The outside spread is already the most crucial depository of data in its vast recordings of claims to assets and credit and the strengthening of succession involves retokenizing those tokens as teams who can be counted upon to assess, verify and accredit those records. This involves the creation of what we can call a Domesday Machine, after the survey ordered by William the Conqueror recording all the property claims in England after the Norman Conquest, as an attempt to approximate the Last Judgment. Now, such a survey would be ongoing, constantly updated, including mappings, simulations and predictions guided by machine learning AIs—but such work would still be meticulous labeling, at all scales, requiring equally highly levels of integrity, innovativeness and precision—“precision in matters of the soul,” as the novelist Robert Musil put it. And it could start at any scale right now, with various inventories of creditability.