Once a human occupies the center, the most difficult political, and maybe human, problem, is how to replace that occupant when the time comes, as it must. We could assess different governmental forms as different ways of solving this problem, but none of them—not hereditary kingship, not democratic election—does so completely. Somewhere along the line a king will die without offspring; somewhere along the line some real or perceived failure into the electoral process will produce a president or prime minister widely considered illegitimate. I will conclude this book by offering a solution consistent with the originary grammar of the center I have articulated here, and along the way I will use this intrinsically anomalous element in any political order to make the various vocabularies I’ve been working through more inter-referential, answer some questions that might have arisen for some readers along the way, and even suggest the elements of what the Marxists call a “transitional program.”
The solution I propose: the current occupant of the center chooses his successor. This is, in fact, a foregone conclusion, insofar as we take power to be coherent, and all of the positions and practices in the social order to be formalized, or named. If some other body, however wide or narrow, chooses the successor, they could presumably choose the time of succession, which is to say, that body could remove the ruler at any time. In that case, that body is the sovereign, which means that power is not organized coherently. The selection of a successor could be made on any grounds the current occupant wants, and I will stipulate here that the choice of a successor could be made for very bad reasons, leading to disastrous results. That’s true of any system— democracies are obviously no more immune to the elevation of leaders destructive to the very system itself—and you wouldn’t believe me if I claimed I was offering a fool-proof system. What I can do is suggest some of the considerations that would lead at least the best rulers to put in place extended institutional processes for generating candidates for selection, and that, having been institutionalized and entrenched, would likely be accepted by lesser rulers. We can simply begin with the assumption of a ruler who wants to be succeeded by the most capable person available, and the one most willing to continue the projects the current ruler considers most essential to the long-term well-being of the order he presides over.
Such a ruler would want some way of narrowing down the vast number of candidates the society in question would generate—any society will have lots of intelligent, capable, courageous young people concerned about the good of their country. The number must be narrowed down considerably—maybe to a dozen, or so. The most obvious way of doing this is by establishing special academies to produce high level government officials, and having the top 1% or so of graduates enter more grueling training and competitions to further narrow the number down. The ruler would take an intense interest in these academies, ensuring that they inculcate the most
important political skills and traditions. Lower level schools would have special programs training especially qualified students to apply to those academies—the academies, then, would set the tone regarding moral, ethical and political education across the system. It may very well be that there are families and communities that have no wish to enter the system-wide competition—perhaps out of some moral or religious conviction, or because certain minorities will be disqualified from the highest offices, or they simply wish to prepare their students to participate in and express loyalty to the social order in other ways; indeed, this may very well constitute the majority.
If the educational system is heavily biased toward creating the conditions for strong candidates for succession, then that means all the disciplines will be oriented toward studying those conditions and strengthening them. Psychology, philosophy, sociology, history, economics, law, and so on, or, as I would prefer to think, the various regions of anthropomorphic pedagogy, would be primarily interested in questions of leadership and hierarchy—various forms, various causalities, better and worse forms (under different conditions), means of producing better leaders and hierarchies, means of sustaining them, and so on. After all, these are the kinds of things the candidates would need to know, and so would all those interested in the process of production and selection of candidates—and that would include at least most of the social order, insofar as local communities would be competing for and take honor from producing the best candidates most regularly. Since the process of producing candidates would be ongoing, it would be a central concern of the entire society, including, probably, the primary source of entertainment. Public competitions and ceremonies would be part of the process, as would the selection of marriage partners and family formation of the most promising candidates. Signs of the ruler’s preference for one or another candidate, or one or another attribute to be privileged in the selection process, would be watched and interpreted with great interest. It would have to be the case that the ruler always has an officially designated successor, but it would also be the case that he could change this designation at any time. A long reigning ruler might no longer think the 50-year old he chose as successor 20 years ago is still right for the job; or, a candidate chosen on the assumption that rapid technological development was going to be the agenda for the next several decades might be replaced if it suddenly appears that war with a rival is likely, and a more military-oriented leader seems necessary.
All this might seem likely to create all kinds of rivalries between different candidates, and therefore resentments, the establishment of factions, bureaucratic intrigue, and so on, leading to constant instability. The way to prevent this is to prohibit the top-tier candidates from occupying positions in which they exercise any real power, which also means they are to be excluded from positions in which they make consequential decisions. Second-tier candidates and below would be elevated to higher positions of power, placed in charge of the military, industry and other high power ministries; if top tier candidates would rather have such a career, they could be given the right to renounce any aspirations to occupy the center, and be placed on a career path better suited to their ambitions. The top-tier candidates would accept the likelihood of a stunted career far below what they might have achieved otherwise, for the sake of helping maintain the coherence and continuity of the ruling order. They would be familiarized with the mechanisms of
rule and, we can assume, would “intern” with the ruler—otherwise, their role would be more ceremonial, such as presiding over events, touring the country, meeting people from all walks of life. If any candidate were found to be using his role to “drum up support” or try and create a power base for himself, he would immediately be removed from consideration. Since this prohibition would be universally known, word of any attempt would get out quickly, leading to an investigation; even more, candidates would be expected to cultivate a persona that exuded, probably in an exaggerated form, disdain for flattery or offers of favors. In this way, such attitudes would also be available for emulation across the social order, raising the moral level of the people.
The selection of a successor would be the most important decision the ruler could make, and, for reasons I suggested above, it would be woven into the texture of all his other decisions: every major problem or turning point would lead to a reconsideration of the chosen successor and the arrangement of the major candidates. The ruler might want to bring them in for regular interviews to get a better sense of their fitness. Designating a new successor would be a cultural a political event, both to the ruler’s subjects and other governments. Everything that a ruler should be, all the threads connecting the ruler to all other institutions, the shaping of those institutions to ensure they produce the best ruler and enable that ruler to rule—all this would be the basic substance of the culture. If this sounds strange and “cult of personality”-like, I would suggest seeing it as a social order in which the most fundamental questions of any social order—its stability, coherence and continuity—are systematically placed front and center. No one could think or speak for long without coming across questions regarding what makes this society what it is, how it could be improved, how could we do our jobs, raise our families, cultivate or intellects, develop our friendships, participate in our communities, and so on, in such a way to contribute to that. To go back to the problem raised above, regarding the dangers of leaving so much power in one man’s hands, I would say that, with the model I’m presenting here, we could say that such deeply rooted habits in the people would be very hard to repudiate, and a weak leader is more likely to rely upon them (or to have his weaknesses recuperated by them). (I also think this is a system less likely to produce weak leaders, but weakness can come in many forms and anyone could make a mistake.) In the event, the possibility of which could not be completely excluded, that a genuinely dangerous leader needed to removed (preferably quietly, in such a way to solicit his perhaps grudging consent, with as much consensus among the elite leadership as possible), this system would provide a set of buffers lessening the shock to the system.
Now, if you are with me so far, you will acknowledge that we would be waiting for a time when the highest authority of the country we reside in will actually name his own successor. (Assuming, of course, we live, like the vast majority of the planet, in a social order not governed by a monarch.) At that point we will know that something has happened; but up until that point, what is happening is that we are waiting for that to happen. We could think of this as a kind of inverted messianism. Inverted, because everything that is shrouded in mystery in messianic expectation is made a site of pedagogy here. What would it take for whoever is formally in power right now to name his successor? What are the institutional blockages making that impossible? In our own speech and actions, we evince a readiness to commence constructing the
institutional architecture (described above) in case those blockages are removed; at the same time, we act in accord with the implicit command coming from he who would have to name his successor that those blockages be respected. Whenever we deal with these institutional restraints, we represent as best we can the contrary imperatives intersecting therein, while trying to ensure the commands we transmit to others are as consistent as possible with those transmitted to us, and act so as to intimate at least the possibility of such consistency up and down the line.
This takes away from us the right, or at least the pleasure, of opposing those in power, including those we see to be most inimical to any possibility of establishing coherent forms of power. But this also doesn’t mean we are obliged to become cheerleaders for whomever happens to be the president. In an insecure, incoherent system, the imperatives issuing from the center are wildly inconsistent with each other—simple, strict obedience is impossible. A hierarchy of imperatives must be constructed: there are those explicitly issued recently; older, more established ones; those inherited from previous rulers, even previous regimes, neither explicitly confirmed nor superseded; those presumed to have lapsed but capable of reactivation; and so on. The most immediate imperatives, when they cannot be complied with perfectly, must be refined in terms of more mediated ones. If you can’t provide ostensive proof of compliance with the most direct imperatives, you probably won’t be in a position to receive them much longer, but what will count as compliance will be determined after the fact and it’s possible to comply in ways that will affect that judgment. What can always be done, though, is requesting further instructions and clarifications, and such requests can invoke the originary events of the institution and the social order. This is an instigation to archival work and the construction of alternate histories, with a search for more reliable forms of governance that were perhaps discarded or allowed to lapse but might be re-invented. There is always a mode of deferral that makes a particular imperatival space possible, and questions refer to that mode of deferral. Anyone’s questions regarding the imperative chain involve an offer to donate oneself unconditionally to the center, and this donation depends upon a clarification of the centered ordinality rendering the imperative consistent. In this way, one’s actions make the present anomalies transparent while seeking to resolve them. Even the most difficult cases can only be dealt with on these terms—let’s say you are ordered to commit immoral acts, like atrocities, or to turn yourself over to a rigged process despite your innocence. The more your attempts at mitigation or deferral can be presented as obedience within a more expanded present, rather than the rebellion of your internal space of representation against tyranny, the more likely even your short-term prospects will improve.
Before we leave off the question of succession, it’s worth nothing that contemporary liberal democracy, and the US far more than any other country, has been explicitly foregrounding this question of late on its own terms. In the end, liberal democracy, whatever the textbooks say it entails (“robust media criticism of government,” “independent judiciary,” etc.), really comes down to peaceful transfer of power following an election. But, as we are seeing, this is an extremely complicated matter. What ensures the legitimacy of an election result? Well, obviously if the votes were miscounted, whether due to incompetence or corruption, the election is illegitimate. But who determines that, other than those who are in some way in office due to their dependence on those who have been selected by that very process? At lot of faith must be
conferred here. Anyway, we’re just getting started. We have further learned that the results of elections might be illegitimate if the election district has been drawn (“gerrymandered”) in such a way as to favor one party over another. This is especially the case if the district has been drawn in such a way so that plausible (to whom?) claims that a protected minority group has been disadvantaged. The legitimacy of elections can be diminished if the rules for determining the eligible electorate (or, for that matter, candidate) discriminate against such a group, or favor one party over another: should felons be deprived of the vote? Or for that matter, how about the placement of voting booths, or the lines upon which voters must way in one as opposed to another venue? Why can 18 year olds vote, but not especially mature 17 year olds? What about a corrupt media that deliberately misinforms people with no other access to information? How about foreigners, who are surely impacted by the decisions made by elected officials? Once we embark on that line of thinking, why not, for an extremely influential country such as the US, enfranchise the entire world? (At this point, have we all been chastened enough by various unbelievable proposals come true to refrain from laughing?) All these questions become more contentious the more each and every element of the electoral process can be deemed to favor one side over another—and this process of politicizing presumably neutral determinations of who should be counted as a citizen and what counts as a fair process obviously feeds on itself. Now, of course, all this means nothing until one side in an election simply refuses to accept the result of that election, and mobilizes its institutional resources to contest it—we could say that the constant delegitimizing of election results in the US over the last few years (maybe decades) is a way of softening people up for this eventuality. One plausible account of the origins of elections is the concession of one side in an imminent war to another upon seeing the numbers on the other side—eventually, it becomes customary and convenient to count heads without all the trouble of actually preparing for war. Once one side refuses to accept the result of an election, we will have reverted back to the testing of all societal resources on both (all?) sides.
So, we can say, first, on a practical level, that when the existing social order starts “problematizing” succession itself, such problematization can then take on a variety of forms. And this is the case, because, second, what is put into play under such conditions is the very existence of the “people” in the name of whom representative government governs. What counts as the “people,” in an operationalizable sense, is arbitrary, which is to say, depends upon histories of all kinds of power relations that cannot themselves be attributed to any decision of the people, as such decisions can only be made in previously formalized ways. A conversation over who decides what counts as “the people” is bound to be a productive one, because it makes explicit the paradoxes regarding the various ways the people supposedly chooses itself. We can parcel out all the different formal and informal elements of “the people” to different institutions, different disciplines, different starting points, and trace its construction. We will no doubt find very specific people, acting in very specific forms of concert, involved in each and every construct of the people. The people is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, or a robot, or an android, or an army of zombies (why not draw upon the full array of popular genres for our stock of metaphors), and it has its origin story like all of those creatures. The ongoing process of calling into question more and more of the formalized features of the electoral process, invariably in the name of some super-sovereign (a truer democracy based on a more rightly constructed “people”)
can be transformed into a process of modeling a process of formalization that would make questions of succession, selection and delegation everyday topics of political discourse. After all, the most likely crisis point of liberal democracy is such an outright refusal on the part of the loser in an election to accept the results, in which case these issues of political responsibility (who can secure power) would displace all the evocations of the various contending super-sovereigns.
If our focus is on the consistency and coherence of power relations, what we see in any commander-in-chief is a certain degree of interest and competence in maintaining the same. Those showing a lack of interest and competence or, even more, showing determination to further undermine the coherence of power, are the kinds of commanders we would be inclined to “oppose.” Well, you could oppose them—vote against them, organize support for their opponent, write articles criticizing them, and so on. The question is whether you want a different commander-in-chief who will play the leaky power system in a way that provides you with a modicum of real or imagined power; or, whether you want to plug the leaks. If the latter, you want to develop practices, relations and institutions that would present themselves to the kinds of leaders who might name their successors as plausible replacements for the kind of officer class that thrives on leakiness. This involves minimizing reactiveness and seizing opportunities to display deferral—self-defense and tit-for-tat responses should always be framed as instituting a more coherent chain of command from the center. All the secular demands—calls for more freedom, more democracy, rights, equality, etc.—are intrinsically disordering and it will always be possible to show how more granularly constructed pedagogical relations, aimed at modeling a form of centered ordinality, would repair the situation. The truth of resentment, insofar as there is truth in it, is that power is used without responsibility, or responsibility conferred without the power needed to fulfill it generates insecurity, a leaking of meaning, and therefore resentment— any analysis of conflict, then, looks for a way in which power might be matched more perfectly with responsibility.
So, a president who encourages leaking, who undermines his own formal authority by encouraging activist groups and cabals within the intelligence agencies to use the media to “force” him to do what he would prefer not to initiate on his own, who multiplies factions within the bureaucracy that he can play off against each other, etc., can be distinguished from one aiming at increasing the coherence of power. The differences will show up ostensively, imperatively, interrogatively, and declaratively, and we can learn to see it. When we have a president exploiting incoherencies within the system, we are as loyal to him as to any other, we are equally awaiting the possibility that he will arrest the entropic drift of the power system by effectively passing power to a successor (or even indicating the necessity to do so), but our way of helping him see the way towards to that entails pointing out how all his actions contraindicate this clearly desired result. This is different from opposition because we wouldn’t be looking for little “levers” that could be used to gain some discernable advantage on the time scale set up the electoral process, like trying to incriminate him or bombard him with bad publicity a few months before the election. It would be better to expose such maneuvering pedagogically, to explain how the system reproduces itself through apparent opposition. It is also the case that the political exploitation of systemic incoherencies will overlap significantly with “issues” as they are
represented within the liberal order. Most obviously, such exploitation will almost invariably coincide with the subversion of the government’s responsibility to minimize criminal activity against powerless civilians. Policies that encourage criminal activity, or raise the threshold of what is to count as criminal activity, are the calling cards of those who thrive on instability. At the same time, multiplying bureaucratically defined crimes, to be prosecuted at the discretion of officials at various levels of the system, likewise coincides with the kind of parasitism upon disorder I am discussing. We will also find that these indicators of a more uncertain political and legal setting overlap significantly with a whole range of other issues considered “cultural” and “economic”—a careful examination of policies favored across the spectrum of liberalism would yield interesting results if undertaken from the standpoint of how much tolerance and promotion of illegal activity they would require if implemented. Meanwhile, most insidious corporate activity can be eliminated in two simple ways (simple, at least if we assume a coherent regime): first, abolish anti-discrimination laws, which is what, through a predictable, even inexorable, process has led most major corporations to adopt the cultural left’s agenda unconditionally; and, second, combine few, clear safety rules with a robust legal regime that can identify cause and effect and responsibility when it comes to harmful impact alleged to corporate activity—this is something we already know how to do quite well. At any rate, I am not suggesting that the current lines of political antagonism are completely unconnected with the pedagogical “expectancy” my discussion envisages.
None of this changes the fact that the goal of an onomastic pedagogy is not to address the issues but to produce the dispositions required for when some occupant of the center decides that only by passing power to a successor can the attempts he has undertaken to provide coherence to the system be sustained and continued. Naming always places the named object under the authority of the broader system of signs, or cultural authority—to name an object is to place its disposition at the disposal of the central authority. But naming is itself only effective under properly lent authority—I can call the president a traitor, or illegitimate, but those are really nothing more than desperate “suggestions” I hope some replacement will adopt—but through what chain of mediations, exactly? Better to name what the system authorizes me to name: what I am expected to do, but find it difficult to do according to expectations. I will be excluded from access to certain institutions and practices if I say something “racist,” and I could protest this on “free speech” grounds, but more pertinent is the absence of anything like an acceptable definition of what counts as “racist” speech (or “sexist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and so on). Here is where a real marker of political reliability will be one’s ability to resist the temptation to turn these accusations back on one’s accusers, which continues the transformation of politics into attempts to be licensed as an arbiter of unacceptable speech. It will really be essential to find and create spaces where it will be possible to ask, patiently, for explanations of what, exactly, these heresies involve—how do we identify them? Who has authority to rule on violations? What does the history of precedents look like here—how would it be possible to know in advance what would count as a violation? To be blunt, it is to be demonstrated that, as I mentioned earlier, all these words mean no more and no less than the term, central to the pseudo-legal systems of all revolutionary social orders, of “counter-revolutionary.” It would be impossible to overstate how transformative a patient, civil, stoic demonstration of the meaninglessness of all these words
would be. You could say that without replacing those in power with different leaders, none of this would matter, as power would simply find replacements for all of them. But dissolving these words in the acid bath of their incoherence would itself do a great deal to release other power centers from externally and self-imposed limitations. To put it in originary grammatical terms: evaporating all the terms superstructured on anti-discrimination law would upset the entire ostensive order, leaving us, literally, with little to point at in a shared manner—and these are fruitful conditions for an onomastic pedagogy naming the transitions from a society of usurpers to an order saturated by pedagogical demonstrations of how to be and how to do in such a way that your practices and your life are pedagogical demonstrations.