Notes on Governance and Center Study Politics

This will be a short post. I think I have a simple way of addressing the issue of obedience and disobedience to the center more minimally than I have done so far. Both my recent incorporation of “credit” idiomatically and the consequent articulation of Colin Drumm’s concepts of the “outside spread” and the “outside option” allows for an elegant formulation: the degree and quality of your fulfillment of imperatives coming from the center (the “pointman”) constitutes a bet on the likelihood of the replacement of the pointman by an outside option. Complete and devoted obedience would indicate no possibility (whether it be desire for or fear of) an outside option; complete disobedience, meanwhile, indicates reliance upon and proactive obedience toward, some outside option. In between these poles there will be some hedging of bets. Now, this is not a solely utilitarian decision—in general, obedience to the sovereign will decrease as that sovereign’s hold on power slips and his replacement seems increasingly likely; indeed, one could easily reverse the formulation—but there are questions of “sunk capital” here as well and how thoroughly identified with the existing regime you would be for a successor regime—in cases where one would almost certainly be treated as a traitor by the new regime, intensifying loyalty to the existing sovereign might be the only way of maintaining one’s dignity or honor, with “dignity” and “honor” here being a kind of credit that cannot be cashed in either under the present or successor regime, but only in the eyes of God or History, however one understands these forms of judgment. And something like “credibility” irreducible to the likelihood of predicting one’s next action will be more important the higher up the hierarchy one goes—of course, paid soldiers can be allowed to switch sides without suspicion being shed on them, but for those in the higher ranks not to be seen as “irredeemable,” credibility would have to lie in something like professionalism, demonstrated concern for the country regardless of who rules it, or a type of loyalty to something like the “office” that seems transferable. And all of this enters into the quality of one’s obedience even when one has placed all of one’s chips on the extremely low likelihood of any outside option. An important implication is that, by the same token, the degree and quality of obedience of the pointman’s subordinates provides an ongoing measure of the viability of one or another outside option. The “modern” world system, i.e., the oscillation between the central bank and the central intelligence, is predicated on the assumption (or bet, or faith) that there will always be an outside spread and that the outside option has been securely internalized through the rotation in power of the competing parties. Concerns about radicalism are less about the emergence of a revolutionary outside option (which the “First World” has never experienced) than damage to the credit of intermediate actors sufficient wreck credit beyond foreseeable repair. Still, there’s a “spectre”—the chances of the evacuation of the outside spread and the emergence of the outside option can never be zero. Center study implies what I think is a unique politics: placing all the bets on a center or prospective or type of pointman so inside as to turn the central bank and central intelligence into a single entity, thereby abolishing both, along with the outside spread and outside option. Everything is to circulate through succession practices. I would also add that, if degree and quality of obedience constitute a bet on the continuance of the pointman, we can say all bets, i.e., investments, are themselves ultimately bets on the degree of oscillation within succession, which is to say how much credit-wrecking each side in the rotation of power is likely to do, with zero being the point at which we have the center study bet. This assumption would be consistent, I think, with Capital as Power’s definition of capital—the oscillation within succession (and the way it plays out in specific sectors) determines the expected future earnings against which current value is discounted. In this way we bring “politics” and ‘economics” within a single category: confidence in the pointman. It’s obviously, even trivially, true that any investment is ultimately a bet on the regime being able to protect that investment.

The kind of politics that aims at channeling all obligations into succession practices is one, to idiomize another recent formulation, that sees governance as follows: everything everyone does can be traced back to an adjudicable command issued by the center. This is a holistic or totalizing formulation: whatever each of us does, even in our most private or intimate moments or associations, is pursuant to a command by the center, even if it’s one that allocated property in such a way that I have a space to pursue intimacy and privacy (with said allocation therefore at least partially or potentially dependent upon how it is pursued). But every command from the center must be adjudicable, because every command creates a “spread” or nomos or centered ordinality that will lead to disputes and uncertainty. (Even a military government will need military courts.) This cognizance then enters into the design of commands and of the architecture (“technology,” or scenic design) constructed so as to “platform” commands. The juridical and the disciplines are in this way brought into oscillatory alignment with the pointman, as the disciplines are dedicated to gathering, labeling, curating and analyzing data so as to settle cases that arise from adjudicable commands—which become more adjudicable the more the disciplines have studied the conditions of their articulation. Betting on succession then become betting, or exhibiting some degree of confidence, in the settlement of possible cases. So, the politics proposed by center study involves perfecting the juridical (ultimately, bringing cases) toward the horizon of its abolition by enhancing deferral to the point of fending off the potential conflicts that might develop into “cases.” Assets, which we might call tokens or credits, are converted into data suitable for the juridical in ways studied and refined by the disciplines. Using our credits to join cases then becomes data we contribute to the center as part of the data exchange by which we solicit more data, of increasingly precisely determined kinds, from the center—for the sake of helping to decide cases. The ethics, or morality, or politics of this mode of activity then lies in presenting oneself as increasingly rich and intricately demarcated data which also involves training the machine learning processing data. This is a politics that can be and in fact always is being conducted even on an individual level but it’s meant to be scaled up, enormously. In a way this resonates with much more ancient understandings of morality which involve asking oneself how you would behave if God could (as was the assumption) see everything you do. Maybe part of the insistence on privacy in modern life is to discount our transparency to God—a transparency which has now returned, recorded in the Domesday machine being currently built.