I mentioned earlier that in the earliest communities, the center is far more “dramatic,” which is also to say, far more “human,” than the actual human margin. As David Graeber points out, it is not, strictly speaking, correct to refer to these early, formally egalitarian communities as “non- hierarchical.” Quite to the contrary, they are subjected to the most asymmetrical and arbitrary hierarchies as they are ruled by the mythical occupants of the center. The very earliest occupants of the center would be the transfigured forms of the animals placed at the center for ritual purposes and consumption. These beings are the progenitors, guardians, and nemeses of the community. Until the ritual center is rendered non-figural, we can assume all worship is ancestor worship, very much including animals, because the center has generated the community. The more differentiation there is regarding proximity to the center, the more humans would be so transfigured and take their place in the pantheon of worship. Remembered ancestors founding and continuing specific family and communal lines become figures of worship. It also follows that the more humans can be elevated among those who have given themselves for the continuance and provision of the community, the more they can be ritually placed in that position. Eventually, some individual seizes the ritual and distributive center: this first adventurer or usurper is the “Big Man” widely noted in anthropological accounts. The apotheosis of this development is sacral kingship, in which the king, as mediator between the community and the cosmos, serves as both power center and ritual center. Needless to say, the configurations vary widely, but the sacral king, I am assuming, is the first object of scapegoating and human sacrifice. Failures of the community are failures to match otherworldly configurations, to do on earth as is done in heaven, and for this the king bears complete responsibility. The unity of paradoxical, signifying center and the central figure first evident on the originary scene remains intact in sacral kingship, which no doubt accounts for the pervasiveness and longevity of this social form, and even in the extension of its ramifications into modern political leadership.
A pure form of sacral kingship would entail the election of an individual who compels that election by his deferral capacities, which provide proof that sacral agencies look favorably upon him; and the killing and subsequent mythical transfiguration of that individual as soon as those agencies gave signs of withholding their favor. When whatever “credit” the king has accumulated has been exhausted would have to be determined by those close enough to the signifying center to “read” those signs. We can assume some alliance between prospective rivals
and priests in charge of the rituals, if there are such separate from the king himself. Some degree of what would look to us like cynicism would be involved in such transfers of divine favor: the failure of the king to lead a successful campaign, or some waste of resources would be “interpreted” in terms of some ritual violation of sacred injunction. But there’s no need to assume that anything like cynicism is even possible here, because that would assume there is some other vocabulary in which “rational assessments” of the performance of king could be made, and in which a “strategy” for deploying the merely “ideological” ritual and mythical language could be plotted out. Only once the center has been “unfigured” and its human occupant shorn of sacrality could such a vocabulary emerge. Decisions that would be intelligible to external perspectives would be made, because the ritual and mythical vocabulary in which thinking takes place allows them to be made—which is not to say the rationality will be quite the same as that of the retroactive observer, who would be required to reconstruct the relation to the center constitutive of events in that community.
Approximations to this “pure” form of sacral kingship could certainly endure, but the form would be a continual source of rivalry that would, at least in some cases, lead to the ritualization of the selection and transference of kingly power. This would formalize kingship and the deferral capacities of the community. The individual who most displays the power of deferral would not thereby be elevated to the center—a process of establishing and choosing from among candidates would be put in place. Nor is the king removed immediately when those deferral powers are seen to wane—scheduled transfers of power, among them perhaps the sacrifice of the king, or explicit rules or agents that must be followed or consulted are established. The increases the permanence of the occupation of the center—if the merit-based leadership that characterizes the Big Man and the model of “pure” sacral kingship I posited above is no longer the means by which power is assumed, the mechanisms and lessons of previous efforts at ruling and be collected, canonized, and provided pedagogically to the future ruler who would now have time to prepare to take his position. At this point some diremption between state ritual and more localized rituals would take place: the king is still the father of the people, who controls and distributes the resources of the community, and to whom sacrifices must therefore be brought, but his protection and therefore distance from the most active resentments and rivalries within the community make him a less effective mediator; such mediation would therefore be relocated within familial cults. This is the point of transition from sacral kingship to the divine kingship that characterized the gigantic empires of the ancient world.
Once a human has occupied the center, the possibility has opened for any human to become a center. I am going to provide an account of how that possibility has been actualized, but to do so it will help to explain what it means for anyone capable of issuing an utterance to be a center. To be a center means that attention can be made to converge upon it in such a way that it can be seen to be caused by representations coming from that center. Convergent attention is a source of rivalry and possible hostility: if your presence and self-representation becomes a source of rivalry, it can be posited as a cause of that rivalry, and your removal from the game in some way thereby a means of eliminating the danger raised by that rivalry. Your self-representations can also become a source of deferral—indeed, it is most likely that one becomes a source of deferral
through the management of rivalries generated by oneself as a desirable object. One can obviously be desirable and therefore a cause of rivalry in any number of ways, depending upon where one is positioned within the mimetic field. And there are, equally obviously, innumerable ways of converting rivalry and resentment deriving from one’s presence into deferral and love. How one operates as a self or individual depends upon how one exercises self-representation as a center so as to favor some possibilities over another; insofar as one becomes less “functional” as an individual, that would indicate that the center is not holding, perhaps because of a failure to attract sufficient convergent attention to require the means to construct oneself as a source of deferral; perhaps due to an excess of convergent attention (which can be addictive), overwhelming efforts to become a site of deferral. If we were to develop an “originary psychology,” this would be the starting point. This is the way in which what Gans calls “omnicentrism,” or what I would call the generalization of anthropomorphization,” proceeds.
To put this another way, to be a center is to be subject to attempts at appropriation and ostensive gestures: one can be appropriated bodily, for example, sexually; one can be appropriated as model; one can be appropriated as a proxy; and so on. Appropriation, for humans, is mediated by ostensive signs indicating deferral and the acknowledgment of other appropriative claims, including those of the one being appropriated. The relation between the appropriation and the gesture, on the one hand, and the degree of reciprocity between the one being appropriated and the one appropriating, can vary from violent appropriation with a minimal attribution of consent to the victim, on one extreme, to publicly recognized, ceremonial pledges of fidelity and respect, on the other. To be a center, further, is to give and receive imperatives—not just explicit requests, commands, demands, pleas, and so on, but the imperatives one gives off merely as a publicly recognized center: imperatives to keep a certain distance, to approach only in certain culturally acceptable ways (but also to, nevertheless, approach), and to look to yourself and your own self- construction as a center. We give off such imperatives through our speech, dress, manners, posture, choice of location, and so on, and they are constructed in dialogue with the imperatives given off by others. Finally, to be a center is to be a source of declaratives: statements and narratives representing discrepancies between the various imperatives one gives off, between the imperatives one gives off and those that one obeys, and between the imperatives one gives off and those others located “similarly” give off: the problem is always to say how can one be the same as others in being a center, given all the differences in this particular way of self-centering.
Divine kingship involves conquest and the control of vast territories and therefore makes it possible to treat populations as means—in particular, human sacrifice and slavery. The king, whether divine himself or not, is sanctioned divinely, while masses of people are treated as nameless within the system of naming. Under sacral kingship, everyone in the community shares the same ritual order—everyone is named by the center. That is no longer the case. The other notable breach in the order of sacral kingship is the emergence of populations extrinsic to the order, even if produced by that order—such as younger sons without inheritance, and hence any access to the family hearth, in systems with primogeniture. It would be the more successful, imminently if not actually imperial, sacral kingships that would generate the most “anomalies” in relation to the ritual order. In this sense, these sacral kingships converge with divine kingships
while also, most notably in the case of the ancient Greek city-states, entering into competition and conflict with them. Once there are groups, or a “people,” outside of the ritual order, kingly rule itself steps outside of that ritual order to maintain and strengthen itself. To be outside of the ritual order is to have no social existence, which is, first of all, to be merely a means, whether for productive or political purposes; it is, secondly, to be defined solely in terms of opposition to the ritual order, to specific groups within the ritual order (who are now also defined oppositionally), and to other groups outside of that order. Struggles amongst kings, aristocrats and “the people” only make sense once a breach has opened up in the inclusive ritual order. The origin of the “tyrant,” as a political concept, lies in this breach—the tyrant is simply a king who is not sanctified as the occupant of the ritual center, but defined by his rule through the manipulation of conflicts between social groups. The “tyrant” is the central problem the foundation of political thought aims to solve, and it remains the problem political thought has yet to solve. This is because “tyranny” is an unsolvable problem without the creation of a social order grounded in the imperatives issued by an originary center—and such an order cannot be grasped by political thinking derived from the problem of the tyrant.
With the breach of the order of sacral kingship we find money and markets established by kings and used by them as political instruments. David Graeber notes that markets are established, and money provided to make those markets functional, for the purpose of provisioning soldiers stationed in foreign territories. Richard Seaford points out that in Ancient Greece money was provided by the king to purchase animals for cultic sacrifices. Markets represent forms of delegation by the central authority—markets are areas of social life that are not under direct sovereign supervision. Any form of supervision generates margins where supervision lapses— markets are established when these margins need to be formalized and supervised indirectly. Money is a means of subordinating market activity to central authority—that is, money is a form taken by the delegation of power, and is therefore a form of power itself. Money is the power to command the labor of others. The pluralization of power within the polity means that power centers can align themselves with or against the king, and the king can align himself with some power centers against others. With money, markets and plural power centers comes justice systems, secular thought and at least the beginnings of technology. Justice systems because adjudication of disputes between relatively equal power centers requires rules and judges to apply and enforce those rules; secular thought, because thinking in terms of “Nature,” or some equivalent, is the only way to try and name figures and practices outside of the ritual order; and technology, because once humans are objects, levied en masse in slave gangs, as soldiers, or reduced by debt to landless laborers, it becomes possible to think of the use of tools and the analysis and articulation of objects outside of ritual constraints.