Originary Debt, Credit, Succession

I’ve been positing what would have to be seen as fairly radical “post-economics” theory in some recent posts and it seems like a good time to see if I can focus on it directly and in a sustained way here. I’ve been working with Colin Drumm’s twin concepts: “outside spread” and “outside option.” The outside spread is the lender of last resort and the “outside option” is whoever within a monarchical order might be leveraged as a possible replacement to the king. Drumm, in his dissertation, where he develops these concepts, is interested in the ways in which problems regarding money intersected with succession questions in pre-modern English society, working this analysis through a study of Shakespeare’s plays. The crisis of the Stuart monarchy (which I am not going to analyze here), culminating in the civil war, transformed the relation between the outside spread and the outside option—it internalized both. The monarch is displaced from its central position by the central bank, so the outside spread is now directly funding the government, while the outside option is brought inside in the form of the rotation in power (a kind of simulation and deferral of civil war) between the parties, each of which tries to undermine credit when the other is in power. And no party could usurp the system because those managing the outside spread can always induce crises that make continued rule untenable. (At a certain point, I am hypothesizing but as yet have not explored, the intelligence agencies come into oscillation with the central bank.) So, rotation in rule is mediated through fluctuations in the outside spread. This schematic account led me, more recently, to propose a simplification of “cultural” and “political” analysis to the concept of credit—everyone is trying to increase and expand their own credit (the confidence others—and especially others in whom others have more confidence—have in them) and the only way to do this is by buttressing or undermining the credit of the central banker or outside spread. We could then end up with interesting questions like how Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man is meant to affect his own credibility as a publishable author, the credibility of the publishing business, and, ultimately, the credit system of American capitalism as a whole, in the short, medium and long runs. I’d like to do this at some point, but for now it’s an aside.

If I have accurately described the operating principles of the current, “Anglo” world order, and we want to replace this order with the Ve/ortexical one theorized in the previous post, the difference between the outside spread and inside optionality needs to be collapsed. It has to become a single mode of operation. This is the intuition shared by reactionaries hoping to restore absolute monarchy as well as modern “totalitarians,” fascist, Nazi or communist, who hope to establish some kind of “monistic” order, free of “bourgeois” contradictions and crisis. Clearly there are blaring red warning sides for anyone wandering into this territory, and I am cognizant of the Hayekian critique “discrediting” any such order in terms of the impossibility of information being gathered up, analyzed and used for decision making from any central location—the demon of “planning.” My way of addressing this is by having singularized succession in perpetuity swallow up in the succession problem the outside spread so that credit is conferred by the “pointman” or, to anticipate a future post, the “distributed dictator.” The more everyone in every position of any authority whatsoever is publicly choosing their successor and even ranking possible successors, and doing so publicly, on a kind of digital bulletin board (on which we would see fluctuations, like stock prices, which these nominations would replace), the more the pointman is determining credit, thereby “counter-usurping” the central bank. (Some of Trump’s recent attempts to subject the chair of the Federal Reserve to his will might be seen as a kind of faint prefiguration of that transformation.) This, then, would also solve Hayek’s information problem, insofar as relations between institutions within supply chains would exchange information through attempts to engineer usurpations in other institutions or companies, giving another form to the internalization of the outside option—institutions would directly test one another’s robustness and signal new needs, dissatisfaction with current operations, etc., in this way. And, since each institution would be competing with the others in recruiting new talent and therefore seeing to the production of the needed talent, the system would be run on “pedagogical futures,” i.e., pedagogical practices within educational institutions upon which institutions would acquire “options” by providing ever more discretely dissected models of necessary practices. So, that’s what I have laid out, here and there, so far.

I’m not going to say that money will or must be completely eliminated (of course, I’m also not saying it won’t be), but I’m going to hypothesize the possibility so as to bring into focus the relationship between credit and succession as two sides of deferral. To bring credit and succession together, we can consider that money and delegation are two sides of the same problem. In fact, delegation is itself a kind of credit, and conferral of confidence upon someone to advance the commands of the delegator. So, singularized succession in perpetuity would have to solve both problems; or, rather, turn them into problems of data security for teams competing to occupy the center. We have to imagine what could appear to be the most static, inflexible mode of power transmission, absolute power transmitted from one power holder to the next, as even more capable of agentic initiative as even the most optimistic theoretical models of the market confers on its avatars. We are assuming that governance depends on knowledge, and that increases in power will coincide with access to well collected and curated data—even someone who, say, manages to pull together a mob to massacre the governing class and install himself in power will simply face the same problem, or his successor or his successor will. This is why intelligence agencies rise to power and essentially govern in the liberal, democratic world—it’s the only way to ensure the continuity or any governance if succession is not directed from the center. The president or prime minister relies on information to make decisions, and those with the best information will make the best decisions (leaving aside individual differences in capability—which anyway come down to ability to assess and use information), which means those providing the information are really making the decisions, Even an alert ruler well aware of the manipulations and subversions of intelligence agencies and therefore capable of pushing back and demanding precise, provable, annotated answers to his questions is merely making the intelligence agencies better rather than reducing his dependence on them. So, central intelligence does and should govern, with the director of central intelligence the pointman. Continually improving central intelligence would make this the evident and, eventually, accepted reality—central intelligence is currently disastrous precisely because it’s not allowed to make decisions that it clearly is making, and therefore has to make them in such indirect and surreptitious ways that they are ultimately bad decisions.

And the intelligence agencies are “always already” spread out through all institutions—again, necessarily so, insofar as that’s where the information is. It’s not clear that the line between gathering intelligence and creating events can be maintained—just setting up listening stations and sending out feelers involves the creation of events. Instigating criminal or insurrectionary activity may be counter-productive most of the time and probably often derives from the “metrics” used for internal assessments, but even here it’s not too hard to imagine scenarios where infiltrated institutions (i.e., any institution) might be made to demonstrate their robustness precisely by integrating and neutralizing instigations within their internal functioning and thereby integrating more seamlessly with intelligence. But by the same token, these various branchings and streamings out of intelligence involve contracting out for services, from firms with more advanced technology or interpretive sophistication. So, there is already something like a market here insofar as there is competition over who is going to be assetized or deputized by the central intelligence and if the director of central intelligence governs then whoever at the moment has tied together the most strings of clean data will be governing, i.e., will be central intelligence, regardless of titles. We’d have to assume some threshold past which a particular company becomes the location of the central intelligence simply because it has in turn provided intelligence to the juridical and disciplinary institutions responsible for producing the necessary data in the first place—that is, whoever learns and tells the truth most reliably acquires a monopoly. This doesn’t mean there won’t always be secrets, just that the secrets will be only minimally at odds with publicly available—through the courts and academies—knowledge. (If they are more than minimally at odds, then distortions of those sources of information will set in, alerting other arms of the central intelligence to usurp lapsed functions, first of all to resupply the center but eventually, perhaps, to replace it, through the available juridical and disciplinary tracks.)

We already see here the circulation of information in a way that looks like a market but is mediated by privileged access to and ability to put to use vital intelligence. But I’ve so far been discussing this as an impersonal, implicitly bureaucratic system, and the point of singularized succession in perpetuity is to put an end to that. Functional institutions working at high levels of responsibility will have clear lines of command, even if they are informal, grounded in trust between committed and honest experts. But these roles can shift—hand-offs can occur regularly. It’s in the hand-offs that we replicate the market. Each institution has a head, and this head has an appointed successor, and the successor has an appointed successor, all the way down through each institution. But the appointed successor will be assessed and replaced regularly, for any number of reasons, and these changes will ramify through the entire system. These constant fluctuations in succession replicate price change by providing information about who will be directing a particular link in the supply chain. All this information can be made available in some form through new data science disciplines who will model these fluctuations the way investors model fluctuations in the stock market. “How much does this cost” takes the form of “how resistant is this supply chain, and each of its links, to interference from faulty information coming in from juridical and disciplinary sources, which ultimately make succession less trustworthy?” Each institution, which is to say each point along the supply chain, is ready at any moment to exercise some kind of controlled usurpation at other points precisely in order to test their resiliency—this process replicates leveraging a competitor, perhaps offering a lower price or quicker delivery, against one’s main supplier.

Ultimately, maintaining regular, if flexible and unpredictable in the details, succession practices requires “investing” in pedagogical futures. If you’re going to guarantee a steady source of successors, that means you would be rather obsessed with the prospects of future generations, who will give meaning to your present efforts. Institutions would be contracting with pedagogical institutions, which will in turn bolster and draw upon renewed kinship networks. This replicates the defining feature of capitalism—discounting against expected future earnings. Every question concerning price or credit (and price is ultimately derivative of credit) becomes a question of some node in the broader intelligence network. In a sense we could think of this as scientific, maximized, nepotism and patronage, with the proviso that familial networks are not self-sustaining and must be shaped by the rigors of scenic design, which creates intelligence networks that provide the information that make extended interlocking kinship networks possible in the first place. So, it’s not like you would just hire your son; you would start in proximity to your own position in the kinship network but be ready to seek out relatives at some distance—and, even this, just to provide nominees for a particular position. There’s a whole new way of thinking here: how can I ensure that my “line”—familial but even more, occupational, institutional and governance—can be extended X number of generations into the future? How can I continually discretize my practices so that they can be distributed across the stacked scene and automated and packaged so as to become elements of a new practice in such a way as to maximize future discretization through pedagogy—the pedagogical institution that best promises such a transmission will be extended the most credit and will be “invested.” What replicates “cost” is the skewing of whatever it is you’re doing so as to get in on the ground floor of pedagogical innovations with the most promising succession practices. The more the entire scene is named, with each node continually updated in its relation to the other nodes, the more questions of money and delegation come down to identifying particular nodes within the system as suturing points that for particular purposes of intelligence gathering (intelligence basically means “gathering”) “grasp” the entire system. It comes down to a question of who the most importantly situated people are most drawn to as the one most to rely upon in a particular case. Culture has always been pedagogy, or the practice of welcoming new generations into the idioms of the community, and this becomes the ultimate source of value, the paying down of originary debt and it will now be elevated to the central source of prestige with its rewards.

No hypothesis is complete until we bring it to bear on what we are doing now. I would say that center study has a critique of capitalism, which is that it has never been shown that capitalism can be contained within a juridical and sovereign order—indeed, for its more radical and honest proponents, that’s a selling point. If it comes down to protecting the outside spread, even if it means dismissing all kinds of crimes—ultimately various kinds of fraud—it’s clear what the decision will always be. And this really means that the outside spread is inherently fraudulent, allowing for more fraud the closer we get to the top. In fact, the outside spread is itself always a kind of bluff and hostage-taking, depending upon the enforcement agency (the state) coming through when the chips are down. And the exception is the rule—the credit system is always governed by the threat of the collapse or withholding of the outside spread. At the same time, center study repudiates other critiques of capitalism, whether communist, fascist or nationalist, which rely upon some collective agency that remains essentially the same over time. And it certainly rejects critiques of capitalism based on “exploitation,” or “equality” (which was not really Marx’s idea anyway). Capitalism can only be transcended by forming companies which discount against expected future earnings foundationally, by charter, beyond the life span of anyone running the company. The problem is forming what would be permanent companies which can pay dividends, of course (people have to live), but, kind of like the endowments of universities serve more as collateral for taking loans to maintain operations. Only various kinds of data security companies, based on one or another mode of the preservation of knowledge, capacities, information, technological, archeological, philological, biological, and so on, could fit the bill. Companies that require extended terms of deferral so that knowledge only adumbrated by current research provides the goal of the company. And ultimately what makes it possible for such companies to survive is providing valuable services to the central intelligence, which provides services to all the other institutions. In the end, central intelligence will be a kind of rotation or “head of the joint chiefs of staff” of these companies. To put it bluntly, the state very much needs all those kinds of knowledge I listed above, along with many others, and once the knowledge gets organized and imperative-issuing to the point of algorithmic governance you have something other than the state. If you are not in a position to found and maintain such a company, then you can act as if you might one day be employed by or contribute to one, and donate your resentments to the central intelligence in the forms of the continuing unfolding data of your existence.