Insofar as a social crisis is transcended or resolved, it is done so through a retrieval of the originary scene. The retrieval of the originary scene means an assembling by deferred desire for some central object—the central object that is the most dangerous in the given social setting. Scripture and metaphysics are such retrievals of the originary scene within the crisis of the ancient imperial orders. The organization of communities around intellectual practices resistant to sacrificial mobilization, around saints, around wise men, around dialogue focused on conceptual paradoxes, around sacred texts and revelatory events: these are the disciplinary orders of late antiquity which retrieve the practices of deferral and revise and neutralize decadent sacrificial practices. The study of these disciplinary orders is itself productive of disciplinary orders. While these disciplinary orders of the Axial Age exposed the decrepitude of divine kingship, they operated exclusively through a withdrawal from questions of power. Only this way could they sustain their practices of deferral, but this limits their usefulness as models for solving the problem of restoring a kind of working amity between the signifying center and the occupied, governing center. The need to solve that problem is imposed upon all of us, because if there would be one thing we could come close to unanimous agreement on, it would probably be that there is no space of withdrawal from power struggles. We are all of us implicated in various forms of direct and indirect violent centralization, and all of our language is unmistakably marked by this violence. Just try and speak about any but the most trivial (and even, increasingly, what we might have considered trivial) matters in a “nonpartisan” way that doesn’t divide the world up into friends and enemies, that doesn’t isolate those against whom the power of the state should be deployed. Try not to speak in terms of inviolable rights perpetually under threat by one tyrant or another—and see what you are left able to say.
It’s therefore not surprising that modern liberal thought is allergic to discussions of power: power is either held or used “legitimately,” that is, according to some “super-sovereign” concept to which the actual ruler is beholden, or it is used “tyrannically.” How it is actually used seems beside the point. In order to make it the point, we can begin by pointing out that power comes from the center, and the center comes from deferral. Insofar as someone occupies the center of a scene, that person wields power. We could use these concepts to carry out very micro-level power analyses: if one person, however otherwise irrelevant and ignored, becomes the center of attention in however small a group, however briefly, to that extent that person exercises power. The exercise of power involves, first, exhibiting deferral: when others give in to some mimetic contagion, like panic, whoever is able to resist that contagion and model another way of responding to the situation is exercising power. In so resisting, the agent turns himself into a center of attention—he has done something others couldn’t or didn’t think to, and so everyone will now look to see what he does next. It is also the case that in making himself the center of attention, whoever exercises power makes himself liable to convergent attention and violent centralization. He has made an implicit promise to provide an alternate response to panic, or surrender, and his next moves will reveal whether he can keep those promises. His fellows may judge wrongly: what they take to be a failure to redeem a promise might in fact be more acts of deferral, laying the groundwork for some plan, that they are less capable of seeing than he is—
that is, their panic can overtake them once again. This is why the second component of power is representing the desires and resentments that emerge within the group—that have in fact been generated by the exercise of power. One member of the group wants to drop out, another sabotages it out of spite, yet another engages in petty criticism of decisions that have not yet been given a chance to bear fruit, another gives off the sense, more or less unmistakably, that he would really have a better way of seeing us through this new difficulty. Exercising power involves not only blocking these moves but using them to continue renewing the group’s relation to the center: whatever project has led to the articulation of the team.
Only one person can occupy the center at a time, just like only one person can speak at a time in a conversation. Part of occupying the center is delegating roles to one’s confederates; by the same logic as single occupancy of the center, each other member of the team, at any one time, can only occupy one position in the hierarchy. So, if there is the one that goes first, there is then one that goes second, one that goes third, fourth, and so on. If the hierarchy branches off in different ways, this sequence is reproduced in each “branch.” We can call this structure “centered ordinality”: each gesture toward the center, or each assertion of centrality, initiates the ordering mentioned above. Insofar as it doesn’t, it turns out not to have been an assertion of centrality. Leadership can therefore be reduced to the maintenance of centered ordinality: leadership is successful to the extent that everyone knows their place in the order at a given point in the process, and that there is no gap between actual order and nominal order. This is what power is— having theorized that, I can address the fairly obvious fact that the exercises of power we see on a daily basis often don’t correspond closely to this model. If an institution deviates too much from this model, it will cease to function—even highly corrupt institutions must have at least an inner circle, or enough mid-level groups, where shared goals and a clear chain of command is sustained. The question, though, is how to diagnose such deviations, which seem far more common than the “norm.” We can reduce the question to, “what disrupts centered ordinality?” On the most immediate analytical level, we would look to some discrepancy between nominal and actual order.
But such discrepancies and imperfections are inevitable, and as long as they are marginal they can be addressed within the process itself. These disruptions become pervasive and chronic disruptions of centered ordinality because of some discrepancy between the occupied center and the signifying center. Let’s imagine a team formed improvisationally in some emergency—say, escaping from a burning building. One individual seems to know the way out, so others follow and listen to him. On the fly, he delegates tasks—you look to see if anyone is left upstairs, you check to see if there’s something we can use as a ladder, you find a way to help the injured, etc.; the scene has a clear center—to sustain the cooperation necessary to get as many people to safety as possible. Let’s say they succeed—then what? Obviously the group can dissolve, as everyone goes back to their own lives. But let’s say they have reasons to sustain themselves as a group— maybe this building was their home, and now they want to rebuild it, and to do so in a way that makes it less vulnerable to fire. The person who got them out of the building may not be the best person to take charge of this new, radically different, task. They may elect someone to oversee the rebuilding—in that case, the one in charge is formally subordinate to the group, or the
majority. This can easily be the case without a formal election, because informal cooperation will still be necessary, and could be withheld in ways that would be difficult to account for. Now, to the extent that the one in charge confers upon the assembly the power to confer power upon him, we have a discrepancy: the task of the new leader is not to build the building, but to maintain a majority among those he is serving. Every decision he makes now has a double meaning: on the one hand, it needs to contribute to the rebuilding; on the other hand, it has to help him to keep majority support.
From the standpoint of the group, the need to have someone in charge still seems to be the default assumption; however, the more any particular leader seems dispensable at the whim of the group, the more this default assumption slides into scapegoating, and the generations of fantasies, themselves subject to debates and power struggles, of other arrangements. Perhaps a majority can be created for ruling by committee, or for taking turns, or even for a kind of anarchy in which each individual simply picks up the slack wherever it seems necessary to do so. Indeed, any of these alternatives might work as long as a certain threshold of resentment is not reached, but once that threshold is approached, the default assumption will be restored, only in a less explicit way, because it is now “controversial.” Decisions will now increasingly be made by whoever is best able to mobilize a majority, according to whatever process of determining majorities the group uses; at a certain point decisions will be made more by those who are able to leverage the process of determining majorities. No doubt very skillful leaders can find ways to represent and redirect even the manifold resentments generated by this process, but it become less likely that such leaders will emerge and survive. Now, some reasoning must be providing for a particular way of selecting and replacing leaders. Why a “majority”? A majority of whom? There may be many ways of slicing up the potential electorate. Some new agency must be constructed so as to make some sense out of the process (think of all the situations where it would be patently absurd to let the majority decide something)—say, the “people.” The “people” must be anthropomorphized, provided with thought and agency. It has conflicts; it changes its mind; it gets fooled and manipulated—a wide range of narratives regarding this new fictional entity will be created. Deliberations regarding selecting a leader no longer concern the best way to rebuild, but determining what the “people” want—what they really want, not what some demagogue or slick operator manages to make them think they want. Of course, all along there was another option: let the guy who got everyone out of the building choose his successor. He can do it in consultation with whomever might be able to help him decide; he can establish a process for providing the group with veto power. He might not be the best person to decide; he might get it wrong—but, at least, there would be a clear decision, made by someone who has demonstrated some competence in one crucial area, along with a willingness to take risks for the group. We can at least assume he’ll want to do the best he can, and he’s likely to be willing to rely on the help of the community to supplement his own shortcomings. If he gets it wrong, it may be in choosing the second, third or fourth best, rather than the twentieth best—so, the building might go up in the end, with those who could have done a better job gracefully taking on their allotted roles and maybe over-producing a bit. So, secure power places a premium on continuity in leadership; if having the actual leader serve some metaphysically “realer” entity is the highest priority, power cannot be secured, and we have all the institutional pathologies we are
familiar with. The problem here results from what might seem a small slippage: any leader does depend upon those he leads, who must therefore in some sense willingly participate; but this willing participation, or donation, can only be meaningfully performed when addressed to the competencies of each, not to ontologically prior identity of them all. In the first case each tries to align with the center, while in the latter all try, in what is an inevitably circular manner, to define the center. This still leaves us with the question, which we are still some way from answering (or from showing how an answer is solicited from the signifying center), of whether I should obey this man; but it shifts the focus of the question from “this man” to the specific command.
Now, the foundation of the community, which is the origin of leadership successions, is different than the assembling of a team—in the latter case, the existence of the community is already taken for granted. So, I could leave the question of sacrality, or the signifying center in it most compelling form, mostly aside. This must be addressed so as to reconcile is the signifying center and the occupied center. Gans identifies “significant” and “sacred” on the originary scene, and I follow him here—even with the decline of the sacred, there can never be any decline in “significance.” Once the center has been humanly occupied, the problem becomes determining, or knowing, that the center as occupied is the same center as the center as signifying. The originary center “tells” the group to defer appropriation; as exchanges with the center multiply, as the imperatives from the center are extended beyond the ritual space, the center becomes richer with activity: beings at the center appear and disappear, make demands, distribute rewards, and deliberate and fight amongst themselves regarding how to do so. Once a human occupies the center, he becomes part of these ritual exchanges and mythical narratives: he ascends to power, acts, and distributes in prescribed ways, with the collaboration of central beings. Systems of signs are elaborated that have to be “read” in order to order these prescribed activities in the right ways. A priestly class of specialists devotes itself to reading these signs, which is to say to conveying the meanings of the signifying center to the occupied one. The continuity of power is still presupposed—even if the priests are, on rare occasions, actually choosing the occupant of the center, they are certainly not determining the form of that occupancy. The reading of signs is as ritualized as the ruling, even if the need to interpret opens up some space to deal with “exceptional” circumstances. Anyone might be able to imagine that the man who happened to be king now might not prove to be the most “qualified” if a kingdom-wide “job search” were to be held, but he has ascended and now rules through a complex, time-tested process that draws upon the talent and accumulated means of the entire community in a way that would not be replicable if there were a constant search for someone who might be “better” in the abstract.