The proximal cause of the breakage and spillage of the sacral order is money and capital. For secular theory, labor, property, money, the market and capital are the real underpinnings—the “structure”—over which “cultural” and “political” institutions are superstructured. Within these secularized frames, all agents are external to each other, which means they are most fundamentally opposed to each other, making the primary theoretical question how do they ever manage to cooperate? Starting with the center, as both occupied and signifying, reverses this approach. Now we can see all these concepts as the results of delegations on the part of central authority, and of efforts to extend that authority, to overcome limits to it, and to restore authority once those attempts to overcome limits have produced competing power centers striving to influence or occupy the center. Markets do not spring up spontaneously out of an evolving division of labor, leading to the use of currency to ease the growing scale of transactions, and then to debt and capital as a result of the unequal success experienced by the various players on the market. Markets are created by states so as to provision their militaries when abroad, and money is supplied so as to enable soldiers to participate in those markets. Debt is originally used to dispossess farmers as the state or more powerful landowners encroach upon their possessions. Modern capital is the power to abstract individuals, groups and perhaps most importantly of all, entire disciplines, from the traditions and communities within which they are embedded so as to introduce them into new hierarchies. Power is ontologically prior to and causative of, markets and all the rest.
Markets are real insofar as they are what people without direct authority for maintaining the social center do with knowledge, information and skills when they are being protected and bounded but not directly supervised by such authorities. If the central authority assigns to a member of the ruling class the project of producing a certain number of vehicles in a certain time, he will not need nor want a thorough account of all the decisions made by the individual receiving the delegation. Nor will the individual receiving the delegation want such a complete
account from those to whom he delegates. Everyone has a sphere of power and command, and expects those under his authority to find ways to cooperate so as to meet the demand. Since “total” supervision is impossible, since there will always be some space between an imperative given and one obeyed, attempts at total supervision are signs of a dysfunctional power order, one riven by power struggles in which each attempts to attain the mantle of super-sovereignty. In a functional power order, no more power is given or sought than that needed to complete the assignment. The people working at the middle and lower levels of a social order, then, will be involved in various exchanges and, insofar as forms of cooperation are sustained and institutionalized, might very well end up interacting in ways suggested by liberal economic theories. The fact that corporations need to be chartered by the state, which could in principle revoke any charter once the corporation ceases to serve its declared primary function means that the primacy of the state over economic agencies is already conceded, even in liberal societies. Indeed, the prodigious technological developments of modern Western societies owes far more to its enduring corporate structure than to more recent inventions like liberalism and democracy.
The center distributes. The carcass on the originary scene distributes itself, or is distributed among the participants by the presiding and enduring being of the victim, as pieces to be consumed. The earliest forms of distribution are just such divisions of food items, no doubt matched, more or less roughly, with contributions made to the center. This is a gift economy, or what I have been calling imperative exchange, which can be widely expanded to include relations between families and clans. In the case of conquest, distribution takes the form of what Carl Schmitt called the “Nomos,” an originary division of land among the participants in the conquest, no doubt proportional to their respective contributions and the command hierarchy. Distribution can later take the form of grants of titles and rights to make use of one’s property in various ways. The establishment of towns organized around artisans, guilds and markets, with specific rights, tied to specific obligations, for all, is yet another kind of distribution. The introduction of money into these settings is yet another distribution, aimed at modifying the effects of the other ones. If we think of the center as the source of distribution and, also, as the effect of its distributions, we will never be able to imagine it makes sense to think of rights without corresponding obligations—the nexus of rights and obligation, the imperative exchange, is simply what distribution from the center entails. This would be true on local levels as well. Peasants would want more land, guilds would want tighter protections, merchants would want greater latitude in their dealings—that is, authority would be tested. But the tests and questions would be meaningful in relation to the founding nomos and the traditions it generated. Let’s say that the model of imperative exchange must have reached its limits in the feudal order in a manner similar to the conditions I hypothesized earlier regarding the ancient imperial order. It may seem obvious that this must lead to the “freeing” of all subjects from all fixed reciprocal obligations such has been effected by the modern liberal order. But if what follows imperative exchange is not merely negative freedoms, but interrogative imperativity, that is, the question of how to devote oneself completely to the signifying center, then the answer lies in new forms of the nomos, providing access to the invisible to create new and more minimal hierarchies.
The introduction of money to empower those more directly dependent upon the ruler indicates some lack of security of central authority—it means indirect forms of power, rather than formalized, direct ones, have become necessary. There might be measures that can be taken by the central authority to control the supply of money in such a way as to recoup that power deficiency, but the more social interaction is mediated monetarily the more likely it is that the state itself becomes monetized. The problem here is that the state needs masses of people mobilized for various projects, and to mobilize them they must be abstracted from their embedments. For the state to directly initiate such abstractions is to risk generating opposition from various power centers—only by recruiting those power centers themselves could the central authority reduce the risk sufficiently. It’s easier to recruit power centers that are themselves already abstracted and thrive on abstraction—risk takers, who can be integrated or dispensed with as necessary. In that case, those abstracters must be permitted to make demands on the central authority, which is to say abstract its own modes of performance. The other approach to abstraction, and the only one consistent with central authority, is the assignation of teams, directly accountable to the central authority, with the authority to take whatever measures are necessary to improve the functioning of the institution. In other words, the form of institutional innovation proper to secure central authority is “skunkworks,” or teams empowered to work outside of established protocols in order to accomplish specific tasks. This is a fractal form of centered ordinality, and provides the basis for permanent forms of rule, insofar as the central authority can always “seed” skunkworking teams, announced or unannounced, within institutions so as to keep attention centered on the primary institutional function. In this way, the originary social form is retrieved in a way that counters the tendency of formal delegation to create inscrutable forms of power that resist further formalization.
The traditionalist opposes abstraction in the name of full embedment, but the possibility of rejecting abstraction disappeared with the rise of divine kingship a few millennia ago. By now, the forms of embedment defended against abstraction are the results of previous abstractions that have been re-embedded. The question is, in what form will abstraction proceed? Or, what kinds of mobilizations are necessary? If the market operates within the capillaries of the system of supervision, then abstractions should contribute to that system. The paradox of power is that the more central the authority, the more authority depends upon the widest distribution of the means to recognize authority; to put it in grammatical terms, the paradox of power is the paradox of the most unequivocal imperative leaving the largest scope of implementation of that imperative. As Andrew Bartlett explains very thoroughly in his “Originary Science, Originary Memory: Frankenstein and the Problem of Modern Science,” abstraction always involves some desacralization or, to put it more provocatively, some sacrilege. Sacrilege can be justified on the grounds that the innovation it introduced will enable new forms of observance of the founding imperatives of the social order. So, the sacrilege should be, as Bartlett argues, “minimal,” while the new forms of observance (I depart from Bartlett’s formulation here) should be maximal. Abstraction creates new “elements,” and therefore new relations between elements. Monetary and capitalist abstractions are pulverizing, creating new elements that are identical to each other, and therefore most easily mobilized for any purpose. This is the process of “de-skilling,” with its ultimate telos being automation, that labor theorists have known of for a very long time. Any
mode of abstraction consistent with secure central authority, or auto-cracy, meanwhile, would make ever finer distinctions between skills, competencies and forms of authority within disciplinary spaces. In this way, abstraction carries with it its own form of re-embedment.
The market economy, then, becomes a measure of fluctuations around the threshold at which the paradox of power is made explicit. Let’s imagine a king turning himself into the largest property owner in the realm, and formalizing, as disposable private property, all that is possessed at different levels of authority within the kingdom. The king converts much of the army into his private security force, and the rest are distributed to the various lords, barons, merchants, and so on. Let’s further assume some external market every producer within the kingdom can sell to, which would in turn create internal markets. Let’s also accept the libertarian assumption of a consensual legal system, which settles contractual disputes and violations of property rights. The community would be converted into a mass of competitive enterprises. Some would do better in the competition, and would put the less successful out of business, buy up the pieces and equipment of failed companies, hire the former owners, and so on. The trend would be toward a hierarchy of monopolies, in which case supply chains could be agreed upon by the companies themselves. The real purpose of establishing a market is to break up one system of distribution and create another. The market would essentially cancel itself, and we would end up with what is essentially a single company supplying all of the society’s needs, unless the more powerful monopolies undertook to introduce competition at the lower levels in order to provide themselves with a wider range of available products and workers. But once this process is initiated, the different leading monopolies would end up in competition with each other, as the new companies they form or break off out of existing smaller ones would serve one monopolistic concern better than others. The more competition, the more instability and insecurity, the more collusion and counter-collusion, the more fully marketized and monetized the social order: it is only at this point that prices are again needed in order to determine which producers are creating more value for the community. Now, that point at which the leading monopolies would intervene in the smaller ones is the point at which a central authority could behave in exactly the same way, and undermine itself in order to have more direct access to its materials; or, the central authority would act directly on the emergent mismatch between formal designations and actual functioning by inserting teams into the relevant companies on the model I suggested above. In this latter case, the paradox of power is made fully explicit: all members of the social order are following the imperative to richly implement the imperatives issued by the center; in the former case, the paradox of power is obscured: explicit power is a mask for hidden and unaccountable forms of power.
All social conflicts can’t be reduced to this fluctuation, but all social conflicts are “processed” through it. This is most obviously the case for everything grouped under the concept of globalization, most especially movements of capital (at the “high” end), especially financial, and migration (at the “low” end). Globalization represents a raising of the threshold at which the paradox of power is made explicit: global corporations have been released from obligations to any central authority and construct their own command chains, which include governments as subordinate partners; advocates of increased migration exercise power across borders that
national states find it difficult to counter. In both cases, states are set up so that they must respond to the same “market” incentives as the corporations and migrants themselves. This is the case even if globalization is an imperialist strategy advanced by one or more leading powers—in that case, the new powers ceded to subordinates end up compromising and colonizing the home government itself. That government (or those governments) might even become more powerful in terms the effects they can have globally, while still becoming less powerful in terms of their ability to control or even predict those effects. We could imagine a point at which the paradox of power would take on an inverted form, in which it becomes explicit that central authorities would not be issuing “operational” commands at all—commands would just be one more incentive (or disincentive) agents further down in the chain of command would have to take into account by assessing the likelihood of any penalty for disobedience. Of course, this is already regularly the case, as corporations weigh the costs and benefits of possibly paying a fine for breaking some law or regulation as opposed to losing whatever advantage on the market the transgression provides them.
Within a market order, then, any action, event or relationship is characterized by a fundamental duality. On one side, however thinly, the paradox of power is in play: all actors recognize that their sphere of activity is protected by some more powerful agency and constrain and direct their activity accordingly. On the other side, to some extent, imperatives are converted into market signals—that is, a site of exchange where one person’s power to punish or reward you must be balanced against lots of other peoples’ power to do so. In both cases we find an interaction between center and periphery—in the first case, one acts in a way that redounds to the authority of the center, thereby creating space for the further replacement of external by auto-supervision; in the second case, one tries to subject the central authority to incentives and disincentives similar to the ones we are all subject to—this ranges from simple bribery and other forms of corruption to the vast avenues of influences made legal and even encouraged within a liberal social order, like lobbying, forming interest groups, political donations, think tanks, media propaganda and so on. We could locate anything anyone does, thinks or says somewhere along this continuum and study social dysfunctions accordingly.
Probably the most intuitively obvious argument in favor of the “free market” is the Hayekian claim that all the knowledge required to carry out production and cooperation at all the different social levels is far too distributed and complex to be centralized and subordinated to a single agent. This is of course true, but also a non-sequitur and a distraction. A general must provide some leeway to his subordinates, and they to theirs, and so on, and for the same reason—the general can’t know exactly what this specific platoon might have to do under unexpected circumstances, and he can’t even know all that one would need to in order to prepare them for those circumstances. There will therefore be “markets” all along the line, as people instructed to work together to address some exigency organize “exchanges” of knowledge, skills and actions amongst themselves in order to do so. The general doesn’t need to know 1/1,000 of all the specifics of these interactions to still be the general—that is, to issue commands that can be obeyed, and to place himself in a position to ensure that they will be. The same is true for those institutions charged with providing communications, health care, education, transportation,
housing and so on. In each case, capillaries along the margins of these institutions can be adjusted in accord with the level of responsibility to be allowed consistent with meeting the purpose of the institution. The argument for markets is really saying no more than that you can’t do a very good job if you’re being micromanaged at every point along the way. It’s equally true that you can’t do a very good job if the terms of each move you make have to be “negotiated” with a constantly changing range of agents.
Liberalism has generated the illusion that what appears below the threshold of direct supervision is what, in fact, determines the form of supervision; even more, that the supervision is a servant of those actors which have merely been provided some leeway. This situation produces destructive delusions, because the presumably free agents are nevertheless aware of their utter dependence upon their “servants.” Is there any businessman who thinks he would be able to protect himself against violence, fraud, robbery and extortion by those readier than him to use violence and break laws without the force of the state? No businessman believes this, but in a way they all believe it, because their political theory leads them to assume that, first, there were a bunch of individuals engaged in peaceful exchange with each other and then, only when criminals and invaders, presumably attracted by the wealth thereby created, tried to take it using force, was the state “hired” as a kind of Pinkertons to maintain order. This makes it impossible to think coherently about the simplest things, such as how a policy everyone would recognize to be beneficial might be conceived and implemented in the best way.