Sovereignty as the Occupation and Temporalization of the Center
In Center Study, sovereignty is not primarily a legal or political concept in the modern sense — it is the human occupation of the sacred center made permanent and successive. As Katz writes in The Anthropoetics of Power, "the basic assumption of absolutist thought is that sovereignty is absolute and sovereignty is conserved. This means that everything done within a social order is the responsibility of the sovereign"1. The anthropological support for this is that "the center is never absent. Everything we do or think is in deference to the center, including our deferences to one another." Sovereignty, then, is not merely the power to command but the human instantiation of the center's organizing force on the social scene.
The historical emergence of sovereignty is traced through a specific sequence. As Katz explains in The Transdisciplinarity of the Hypothesis, "the occupation of the sacred center by a human being, first of all the individual referred to be anthropologists as the “Big Man." initiates "a line leading from the Big Man, through ancient sacral and divine kingship, through the modern day presidents and prime ministers"2. What distinguishes sovereignty as a specifically temporal problem is captured in Hyperstitching the Soliciting of the Center and the Prolonging of the Imperative: "Succession has served as the center of thinking about sovereignty, uniting what Anthropomorphics calls the “signifying center” (the sacred) and the occupied center (the imperial) in the temporality of singularized succession in perpetuity: the occupant of the center selecting not just the next occupant, but the next occupant to select the next occupant, who is to select the next occupant and so on."3. Sovereignty is thus inherently about continuity — the problem of how the center persists through time.
This temporal structure generates what Power and Paradox calls "the paradox of power." A sovereign who fully grasps his own power in the act of exercising it cannot simultaneously occupy the reflexive position needed to secure succession. The disciplines — intellectual, juridical, religious — arise to hold this paradox in institutional form. As Katz writes, "any command can be obeyed in different ways, and the more open-ended the command the more the servant is confronted with the distinction between its 'letter' and 'spirit.' The disciplines display their loyalty to the sovereign by presenting their obedience to the particularly open-ended charges they are given as in the 'highest' spirit of the sovereign"4. Yet this same structure is inherently unstable: the disciplines have "pledged themselves to a center older and higher than the sovereign center, and must judge the sovereign center to be lacking in comparison"4.
The problem of sovereignty in the present is characterized by a liberal dissolution of this structure. In Muffled Transmission from the Center, Bouvard observes that "when the occupation of the center is defined precisely in terms of its contestability, then that unanimity around the originary distribution and the imperatives enforcing it becomes impossible to" Liberalism installs "values" like "rule of law" and "pluralism" in place of that unanimity, but these are "all ways of conferring power upon the disciplines who will govern in tandem with elements of the state capable of protecting themselves from public scrutiny so as to maintain some continuity in governance"5. Sovereignty, properly understood, is thus precisely what liberalism cannot name — the irreducible singular occupancy of the center, with the full weight of responsibility for the order it sustains.
The crystallizing formulation comes from Originary Hypothesis as Mobius Strip, where Katz draws the threads together: "all that matters is preserving clear lines of communication with and continuity of the center—this means calling upon the center, imploring the occupant of any center, to take upon himself the responsibility to see to his successor, selecting as his successor the one best suited to in turn select a successor and so on in perpetuity; and, meanwhile, to model the kind of activity that such a singularized succession in perpetuity would need to rely upon"6.
Excerpts
"The basic assumption of absolutist thought is that sovereignty is absolute and sovereignty is conserved. This means that everything done within a social order is the responsibility of the sovereign. It's impossible to imagine any economic, cultural or individual activity that is not framed by the will of sovereign. The equivalent and anthropological support for these assumptions in originary thinking is that the center is never absent."
The Anthropoetics of Power · PDF Read →
"Making this distinction between commands from and obligations to the sovereign, on the one hand, and participating in the process of initiation of potential sovereigns, on the other hand, is, then, the most fundamental tribute to the center paid in a 'rightless' system. This distinction will run through all institutions, practices and discourses, in various ways, explicit and implicit. Degeneration in governance and disloyalty will be effects of and contribute to the treating of potential sovereigns as present or imminent sovereigns."
Power and Paradox · PDF Read →
"The recognition that a leak in sovereignty in one place is a leak elsewhere, and perhaps ultimately everywhere, would spread. Insisting that other states exercise sovereignty (as long as one is not simultaneously undermining their sovereignty) has a moral justification that insisting they become democracies or expand human rights doesn't."
Distilling Sovereignty · GABlog Read →
"In identifying the paradoxical nature of power in a way that the sovereign can never completely grasp in the act of exercising power, the disciplines potentially set themselves against the sovereign. After all, they have pledged themselves to a center older and higher than the sovereign center, and must judge the sovereign center to be lacking in comparison. We can already see the implications of this construct in the relations between the prophets and kings in the Hebrew Bible, but the potential becomes full-blown reality in the European Christian Middle Ages. From a strictly theoretical point of view, all of modern political thinking, most especially the “rights talk” I began this essay by discussing, emerges out of this ultimately unsolvable"
Power and Paradox · PDF Read →
"So, to speak for sovereignty is to be more sovereign—to treat all powers as sovereign, to treat their formal and real powers as identical (they allow for and therefore endorse everything done in their sphere), and initiate disciplinary spaces that would inform more fully sovereign powers."
What is to be Undone?, 1 · GABlog Read →
"Sovereignty, tech and finance are to be articulated into a single scenic articulation, which on the terms of center study means the articulation of succession, the soliciting of the center and the prolonging of the imperative."
Hyperstitching the Soliciting of the Center and the Prolonging of the Imperative · Substack Read →
"Turning that control into delegation means working to make power and responsibility commensurate, to the extent that this can be done within the existing institutional and legal framework but with an eye toward transforming that framework. This is different from the anti-capitalism of the left, which seeks simultaneously, and maniacally, to disempower while adding on responsibilities. It is better to make all delegations of authority models of the mode of sovereignty capable of establishing such"
The Bearer of Sovereignty · Substack Read →