Ve/ortexicality: Post-Axial Age Morality

I’m going to begin by doubling down on something I don’t recall mentioning for a while: the principle, or imperative, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” I won’t spend too much time defending the phrase against its communist “taint”—of course, I first came across it in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, but have done enough looking into it (I wouldn’t want to call it “research”—i.e., the Wikipedia page) to see that Marx did not invent the expression and a bit of reflection dissipates its communist “vibe”—unlike the principle emblazoned on the Communist Manifesto, “the free development of each is a precondition for the free development of all” (which is also not necessarily all that “communist”), “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” is expressly inegalitarian—indeed, Marx explicitly presents it as a critique and transcendence of “equality” (which we might recall Marx saw as a “bourgeois” concept). The objection from “hierarcharians” to the principle might be that it sounds extractive and exploitative regarding the more able, but this can be dissipated by keeping in mind that the able also have needs, which might require a far greater allocation of resources than that to be distributed to the needy. Think of the needs of, say, a nuclear engineer, or the leader of a team of nuclear engineers.

Unlike more explicitly reciprocal moralities like “do unto others..,” the outflow of abilities and the inflow to meet needs can scale up as much as necessary: how, exactly, does “do unto others…” enter into a discussion of war, or budgetary decisions, or the deployment of police forces, or family policy, etc., etc.—it will instantly turn into a propagandistic talking point, with each side shaping it to its own political “needs.” “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” meanwhile, can be thought of in terms of mobilization, allocation, planning and pedagogy. What I’d like to do here is think through the principle as a post-Axial Age morality—even though, as you can see by checking out the Wikipedia page, it may have its origin at the highwater mark of “Axiality,” i.e., early Christianity. I’m assuming that post-Axial Age morality will be explicitly inegalitarian, starting off by making explicit the tacit inegalitarianism of any post-Big Man order, including, of course, our own “liberal democracy.” I’m also not going to stick with the word “morality” for long, as that word, along with other elements of ethics and culture, can be transferred over to credit and confidence, which is to say materialized, tokenized forms of shared deferral. The main test of “from each… to each…,” or what we might call (to avoid having to keep repeating the phrase or some acronym if for no other reason) “stacked reciprocity,” will be whether it can serve as the connecting tissue, or credit system, of a juridical order. Juridical orders are presently based, of course, on the presumed equality of all individuals (first of all property holders) before the law, a principle clearly vulnerable to witticisms like “the law, in its majesty, forbids both the man living in a mansion and the man without a home from sleeping under a bridge”—such clever criticisms can imply the need for some kind of mercy or grace exceeding the merely legal or to abolish law altogether, but I’d like to see if stacked reciprocity can strengthen the law itself, on its own terms.

We’d have to begin by understanding property in a way that might outrage libertarians but that I would say simply corresponds to reality: property is an advance, from the center, of a particular amount and form of credit, which can include the use of territory and various apparatuses. This is nothing more than a charter, the terms of which are laid out in advance and which are revocable, or justiciable in court. Suing someone, then, comes to focus on violations of the charter (which would then be written so as to anticipate such eventualities) more than upon the injuries to the plaintiff which are, however, accounted for in terms of interference with the plaintiff’s ability to make use of the credit advanced to him. The center is protecting its interest in ensuring a return on the credit it has issued on both sides. The amount of credit issued to any agent is a measure of the “needs consequent upon ability” “accredited” to that agent and the terms of repayment established accordingly. So far, this is essentially what a central bank does, issuing credit (“creating money”) in terms of how likely any recipient is to pay back (maybe not exactly, but let it go for now), which is in turn determined by how much credit that recipient himself issues, his history of repayment, and his access to those willing to extend credit to varying degrees. Now, think in terms of the pointman (“sovereign,” if you like), whose priority is to establish succession and a pool of eligible and loyal successors, aiming to roll back and eventually eliminate the central bank’s (and its clients’) ability to issue credit to “outside options” (the pool of successors are all inside options). Here, we have a fundamental and irreducible judgment: the ability of those gathering resources should be channeled toward the inside rather than the outside options. This can be formalized by having the pointman explicitly nominate and rank candidates so that he or they can sue the token issuing institution for aiding outside options that interfere with the candidate’s ability to exercise his options. The token issuing institution might then be signing onto the charters issued by the center, committing to issuing a certain line of credit. All the time we are pushing towards the subscription and token issuing system I have referred to many times, going back to the GABlog, in which networks of suppliers maintain the chains tying them altogether with each company or team holding the “right” (really, the ability) to exercise outside options with their suppliers or recipients—“usurpation” is internalized as part of the transfer translation of “free market” operations to the subscription and monopolistic order. Conflicts are possible at each point along the supply chain and in each act of interference in the other’s charter and the juridical order will be shaped to settle those disputes. Again, the focus is on each party’s use and repayment of the credit issued in terms of the charter, which represents a particular configuration of “needs” and “abilities.”

None of this, nevertheless, is in the title of this post, which is where the more fully developed post-Axial Age language is to be found. Here, I want to articulate “vertex,” being the top point of two lines meeting and, of course, cognate with “vertical,” on the one hand, with “vortex,” most basically in the sense of a whirlpool, as a representation of the churning of mimetic crisis, so that vortex/vertex is where the mimetic whirling and escalation is converted regularly into the vertex. A brief etymological search shows that the two words are originally one, even though (as happens often) they seem to be opposites. (Think, for example, of “cleave.”) (There was an artistic movement in England called “vorticism,” with Wyndham Lewis among its founders, and I do have this in mind even though it never seems to have been clearly defined and may not have represented much more than the desire to stir things up.) Vertex originates in a root word meaning “to turn,” and we can see how that might split up into, on the one hand, a single, defining, culminating “turning point” and, on the other hand, a turning that never stops. I’m proposing some iconography to work with here--maybe even a retrieval or vorticism on firmer anthropomorphic terms. There’s a lot to do with this imagery—a vortex forms a center, and when it goes fast enough can appear to be still around the center. Also, one might pronounce either the “e” or the “o” depending on the context.

There is continuity from the Axial to the Ve/ortexical Age. I have always seen the “equality” established by Judaism, Christianity and Greek philosophy as the equality created within a discipline, rather than social equality: the early Christian communities organized as disciples of Christ, the peripatetic Socratic dialogue among free questioners, the Rabbinic pedagogical institutions, and so on. There is a similar equality or symmetry, which we can see as a retrieval of the originary scene from its burial underneath sacrificial divine empires, in the modern scientific enterprise governed by the experiment, or any form of inquiry or discussion, including Habermas’s coffee shops of early modern Europe. Such forms can be maintained, and their maintenance is really the best way to understand “freedom,” but they don’t scale up, and for scaling up the Axial Age came to rely on the extra-juridical “differend” (to refer to Jean-Francois Lyotard), with an injustice incommensurate with existing ways of doing justice. “Freedom” becomes associated with martyrdom by the tyrant (always hovering the background of those Axial Age disciplinary spaces) and it becomes easy to reverse the terms and define freedom as participation in such martyrdom, yielding the victimary, which may have especially blossomed in the post-Nuremberg world but has roots laid much deeper. It is this in particular that Ve/ortexicism wishes to replace. A disciplinary space, constituted by continual usurpation to option the implications and extensions of that space, determines which needs it has depending on its evident abilities. What I have in mind here is the promotion and churning of skunkworks as the leading social edge. Every member of society has some credit issued to them, though, and there will also be disciplinary spaces dedicated to commensurating, publicly, within the juridical order, the needs and abilities of those least able to do so for themselves. Skunkworks are aways delegations, an issuance of credit from some institution, with leading figures in those institutions gambling that the results will redound to their further credit.

Stacked reciprocity gives us a way of recognizing the obligations of the strong to the weak (the “widows and orphans” in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible) without the eruption of masses around some victim of extraordinary injustice, of a kind that calls the system into question, in which faith in another world is ultimately convertible into faith in the revolutionary transformation of this one. Stacked reciprocity within the credit system opens up new possibilities for adjudication and the exploration of these possibilities involves the organization of disciplinary spaces. A sturdier juridical order could accommodate something like the “Innocence Project,” which is actually a good idea—a kind of rolling paraclete testing the judgments of the existing order. Here, though, it’s worth pointing out another implication of stacked reciprocity for the juridical: a shift from process to truth, i.e., a rejection of some Anglo legal traditions, like the adversarial process (which differs significantly from Continental systems that emphasize the search for truth). Within the adversarial system, something like the “Innocence Project” inevitably incentivizes the search for “technicalities,” which is to say, not so much “innocence” as insufficiently proven guilt, with “sufficiency” an ever rising bar—if for no other reason than the maintenance of the project, which can thusly continue even if not a single innocent defendant is ever convicted. Stacked reciprocity would zero in on the relationship between victim and perpetrator, plaintiff and defendant, ascertaining the truth of the matter in terms of the credit extended to both sides and now to be retracted or extended on one side or the other (in a civil case, maybe both). It is the bar for deferring the vendetta that gets lowered, and in doing so various forms of data supplied from all environments are solicited, including data providing information regarding levels of resentment and desire for revenge, all of which can be discussed and examined openly. Whether a criminal is poor, deprived, a victim himself of mistreatment, etc., is very much worth knowing, without leading to any particular conclusion. We could say that everything is narratively accounted for, with the implications for judgment and severity of punishment to be thereby determined but not according to the calculation that more understanding equals lesser severity. The opposite might very well be the case. But what matters is that nothing is left outside of juridical treatment and therefore outside of the nomos, or originary distribution—everyone’s needs and everyone’s abilities are given a full reckoning and accreditation.

The credit order that comes after the Axial Age must confront the legacy of the Big Man up front: inequalities and asymmetries are part of any order, all the justifications or mythologies we create to naturalize them (“merit,” “inheritance,” etc.) will never completely do so and, nevertheless, the resentments these “misfits” generate must not be framed as violations of some imagined but illusory equality; rather, they must be framed as derived from some violation of the imperative of the center and remediable through the donation of one’s resentment to the center. Anything less means failure, and the continuation of centralization initiatives carried out in the name of some further horizon of equality. Whoever occupies the center is obliged to more fully occupy it by transferring debt/credit from institutions that fund outside options to the ever more precise tokenization of a ranked field of successors: whatever knowledge the market system distributes through the tacit and non-totalizable practices of all the producers and consumers, large and small, and which is measured through prices, is to be translated into a formalized ranking and corresponding allocation of credit (materials and a sphere of activity) within and across all institutions. Your “price” is exactly the responsibility someone who has been given responsibility by another who has been… has given to you, and the tacit and explicit assessments and accreditations further formalizing your “price” or credit; and this further means your expected future credit, which depends upon the pedagogical futures laid upon all the educational or “successionary” social institutions. This conversion of money into learncoin transforms the juridical order by bringing the institutional backing (credit) advanced to individuals into the dock along with the individual in any dispute—something like the ancient distribution of responsibility for acts committed by a member of the group is retrieved here, with stacked reciprocity subtracting the recourse to the vendetta. And disciplinary spaces, retrieving most directly the “equality” discovered by the Axial Age communities of inquiry, conduct unrestrained inquiries into the entire tokenization and adjudication process while establishing mobile units to consult with regard to cases. And this includes inquiries into the physical world, with the barriers separating humanistic from scientific and technological knowledge relativized to the research in question, as levels within the human, credit, and technological stacks (and boundaries between these types of stacks) are continually probed and reconstructed. Certainly microbial, viral and conceptual transformations are connected in ways we haven’t yet explored, to take just one example. This new ordering, toward which concrete action within the existing order can always be taken, in the form of companies aimed at prolonging the extension of credit, is what I would like to call “Ve/ortexticality.”

Maybe things can be pushed a bit further. At the heart of the Axial Age are the antinomies of the juridical, which take the form of the possibility of an injustice beyond remedy within the justice system. This “meta-injustice” can take on either otherworldly or revolutionary implications, and the oscillation between the two characterizes much of Axial Age Western history. Maybe the horizon, then, is the abolition of the juridical, its recollection back into ritual, or distribution from the center. I have played with this possibility in some previous posts, pointing out that the further we move approaches to transgression away from explicit penalties and towards various forms of prevention and containment, the more evade the traditional state vs. individual or individual vs. individual model of accusation and judgment. I’ve been arguing for a while that the juridical is the most fundamental post-tribal institution (rivaled only by money—but could you have money without courts of law?), and is central to the anti-imperial imperialism of the Axial Age, both in reality and in the imaginary—so, we are touching on the roots here (getting radical). Try to think of any complaint that isn’t formulated in juridical terms. No more juridical, no more justice (all those who clamor for justice don’t seem to realize that justice would be meaningless without injustice). Abolishing the juridical would mean moving so far beyond the vendetta that it no longer need even be gestured to as a reference point. Also, despite the centrality of the juridical, it has never been more than a carve-out within the ritual, as a way of regulating distribution and hence preserving the nomos. We can’t, though, consider the abolition of resentment, which would therefore require some other mode of expression and settlement. We would have to think about judgment being completely brought into existing institutions within the subscription system, and the subscription system being made to cover all territory and all activity (as is already really the case, albeit in haphazard ways). So, street crime is not some public issue but a problem for whichever security firm runs the city, or a particular part of it, subscribed to be the various businesses and residents. If there’s still street crime, though, then there will need to be some accepted way of arresting, judging and punishing criminals—transcending the juridical would mean a deferral of crime—that, then, is the responsibility of the security firm. So, for example, some past behavior provides for someone, through facial recognition, DNA samples, etc., to be deprived of access to various facilities, maybe culminating in something like house arrest. Such deprivation might have a very low threshold, if banishment is to kick in before crime as such has been committed. We’re speaking of very high standards of civilization here. (And, of course, we all know the sci-fi dystopian versions of this kind of order.) Such a person might feel aggrieved at his exclusion, which might seem arbitrary, based on a misreading of merely idiosyncratic behavior, and so on. In a post-juridical order, his appeal would have to be toward the security firm and the subscribers, not to some third party adjudicating between them. And here he could draw on the disciplines, in the same way someone operating within the juridical would, in this case requesting “data-driven” reassessments of his banishment or sequestration, perhaps negotiating over possible behavioral adjustments. If everyone had an expectation that such an appeal would be treated “fairly,” i.e., with a decision that leaves that person’s access to institutions within the agreed upon or “optimal” range of probability for interrupting their operations, and all such resentments, civil as well as criminal, were to be treated similarly, then we will have abolished the juridical and would no longer be speaking in terms of justice and injustice. We would, in fact, be speaking, directly, in the idiom of deferral. So, post-Axial Age, Ve/ortexicality, means the systematic naming and tokenizing of modes of deferral. (I shouldn’t need to emphasize that the only way past the juridical is through it by converting all the tokens an increasingly rigorous juridical arena would produce into markers of deferral—a paradigm shift through the tokenizing of exceptions, rather than a mere declarative abolition.) This returns us to Measuring Deferral and Tokenizing Deferrality. And, of course, credit and debt are also modes of deferral. Eventually, I will want all these terms translated into deferrality, and maybe eventually will come soon.