Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center

Center Study has no political theology, because what would be political theology is retracted into anthropology and anthropology is retracted into anthropomorphics, the constitution of the human through signs. Political theology is taken to be some kind of ultimate back-stop, kind of like a lender of last resort, or the outside spread, guaranteeing your more mundane positions of nation, race, constitution, the people, friends and enemies, and so on. And it’s true that supposedly secular political theories and commitments hold in reserve such a theology, in the West usually traceable back to some variant of Catholicism or Protestantism, and it’s also true that exposing the political theology of political tendencies that most vociferously deny can be an illuminating demystification. But this is because secular theory has foreclosed the question of the sacred and God, rather than solving it. The originary hypothesis not only solves it but does so in a way that can support more historically specific revelations, while accounting for the “substrate” of those revelations, which is to say, why (and what it means to say) one “believes” in them. Historic faiths are discovery procedures whose results can be assessed while being maintained as ongoing inquiries, and any inquiry needs fervent advocates who feel something irretrievable might be lost without adherence to the founding event. But any political arrangement dictated by any historic faith will be transparently arbitrary to anyone not of that faith and, increasingly, to those within it as details of governance find ever more tenuous reference points in theological particulars. At the very least, then, the originary hypothesis provides a kind of meta-faith, and if you want to see that as a far more minimal “political theology” I would see no reason to object but the ground of a hypothetical event with no trace of philosophy also seems to me to make the demand that the originary hypothesis be slotted as a political theology a futile one.

An originary event provides a theory of “justice,” since that answers a persistent question, while also recognizing that “justice” is an anachronistic term, a de- and re-ritualization of the distribution created on the originary scene. The central object is shared in accord with the dictates of the center, which is the central object giving itself up to be shared but under very specific conditions. Those conditions are established through the originary event itself, as the sign of deferral that stemmed the contagion of violence imminent on the scene is iterated throughout the act of appropriation, marking the point at which taking too large a share would threaten to restart the catastrophe—the shares are equal enough, as determined through the jostling and pushing back that would register some differences in strength, speed and risk-tolerance while measuring the limits at which such differences might engulf the community. The results get formalized through the iteration of the event as ritual, which is a preliminary preparation for consumption—the formalized ritual evens things out further as all must be equal before the center while leaving the differences untouched as long as they don’t interfere with ritual proprieties. What would be “wrong” or “bad” would be to appropriate against the will of the center, codified in ritual and presided over by the “community” or, more precisely, whoever stands ready to mobilize enough of the community against a perceived transgression, with those guardians of ritual eventually getting separated out and formalized as priests. There will always be a rule of thumb character to this along with various a posteriori adjustments as sometimes transgressions go unprevented or unpenalized and therefore need to be forgotten or written into the ritual in some way.

All of the laws, rules, tacit understandings, gestures, postures, etc., that mediate human interactions on any scene are, then, preliminaries to some kind of distribution and consumption, and are continued through to the completion of consumption. All that changes are the commands of the center, and that matters quite a bit—the history of the human is the history of the center and its commands. Private property is one, very long and durable, set of relationships pursuant to commands of an occupied center, which is to say, a distribution by a Big Man and subsequently various forms of monarchy and states, ultimately, as our “liberal democracies,” organized around the reciprocal struggle to oust whoever has been grudgingly placed at the center. The heyday of private property is under a monarch whose realm is also understood as private property, the protection of which is bound up with the distribution which he sits at the head of. This is to say that property has always been a kind of permission slip to operate certain territories and assets but as the occupation of the center becomes more tentative so does the issuance of permission slips, which first of all become devalued by being more widely issued, which for a while produces a kind of renaissance of ownership but in the end is hemmed in by so many provisos laid down by a state that increases its power by accelerating the subversion of the present occupant and thereby exercises such asymmetric power as to make the balance between armed lord and king in the heyday a distant memory. To accept that there are no natural or divinely granted rights to property or anything else that anyone is required to acknowledge outside of the power (perhaps just as natural or divinely granted if sought out and cultivated) to resist encroachments upon them is to see property as derivative of one’s position on a team that needs to allocate responsibility and therefore power in certain ways. As always, property, or one’s share, operates through petitions to the center.

All this so far is probably obvious enough for those familiar with center study and intelligible enough to those familiar with the originary hypothesis, but what I’d like to add now is a scenic dimension that I don’t recall being particularly explicit about yet. I’d like to draw (“liberally”) on Eric Gans representation of the history of aesthetics in Originary Thinking as a series of scenic transformations: first of all, from ancient Greek tragedy, where the central figure is simply placed on the scene with the audience on the periphery to Renaissance or more specifically Shakespearean tragedy where the central figure places himself on the scene, represents himself on the scene, defends his right to occupy the center, and so on. In other words, the scene has to be explicitly staged. The Romantic aesthetic then shifts the scene to the periphery itself, making the individual’s relation to the center more explicitly problematic, and then the Modernist aesthetic in which the figure on the periphery becomes overtly resentful towards the encroachment of the bourgeois center on available sites for scenes, with the postmodern aesthetic becoming a promiscuous eagerness to inhabit any scene and any articulation of scenes. What interests me here is the assumption that the succession of aesthetic forms involves a rendering explicit of previously tacitly enacted scenes along with the penetration of scenicity into previously unaestheticized scenes. Moving the analysis outside of the realm of the aesthetic, we can design a model whereby scenes get stacked through the “platforming” of scenes and elements and preconditions of scenes in a way that is technological. Once the scene upon which the king sits gets made explicit, becomes increasingly elaborate, adorned with intricate justifications and arrayed with intelligence of actual and potential enemies we have the creation of an entire set of new scenes, of administration, law, intelligence, the military, sources of funding, etc., all of which in turn get broken down into scenes and so on. This makes occupation of the center more buttressed but ultimately more fragile, as those supplemental scenes can fail, deteriorate, become infiltrated by enemies, create new enemies, and so on. One of the scenes, or one set of scenes, is that of science, which both flourishes and is corruptible as it works over the materials provided to it by scenic design and construction elsewhere. When the king is deposed and the center left empty, all the supplemental scenes take on the responsibility of “continuity of government” while also dedicating themselves to ensuring that any temporary occupant of the center (the scandal of modern political thought is the need to come up with some reason why someone has to be there in the first place) remains cognizant of his contingent hold on the place.

We will keep turning parts and pieces of scenes we never noticed before into the centers of new scenes as they are brought to our attention, generally due to some misfit with other features of the scene, and these new scenes will have interfaces with other scenes, supply other scenes and be supplied by them, and open new areas of inquiry and new modes of performance. This is not fragmentation because no scene is an island and there are strict hierarchies of scenes governed by protocols regulating exchanges between them. Furthermore, what unifies all these scenes is that they all rely on and generate data, and data across scenes will become increasingly commensurate, not because everything will be reduced to biology or chemistry or physics but because everything will get reduced to scenes of teams doing biology, chemistry, physics and everything else and new ways of counting and recording things will be designed so as to make data transferable, so that new knowledge about human bodies can be articulated with new agricultural knowledge and new pedagogies training the people developing the agricultural knowledge. Not only is this not fragmentation but it makes the emptiness at the center, the carnivalesque replacement and behind the scenes arranged succession at the center, increasingly untenable because agencies will need to be able to range freely across all the disciplinary spaces and the meta-disciplinary spaces and protect and ascertain data security. And this will break up the existing forms of sovereignty, except insofar as some of them can transition into data security companies competitive with other data security companies on the field of providing vital assurances to other companies and institutions that their own data will stand the strictest juridical scrutiny. The winners of this competition, those companies that supply the most reliable data security services will end up exercising new modes of authority with the fee for their services resembling the tributes paid by subjects to monarchs as sovereignty relinquishes all of the bureaucratic trappings that made it appear an indispensable and immovable machine, returning them to what sovereignty has always been—the largest property owner, establishing and presiding over the nomos. And there will always be competition, since data can never be completely monopolized once and for all (your own work at securing data produces more data), but there is reason to believe this competition will remain “meritocratic” since trying warfare would assume you already had a decisive data advantage but if you had that why would you need war? Distribution now takes the form of assignment to teams, issuing credit to specific initiatives, securing of supply chains, the creation of smart contracts, the drafting or recruitment of future members and, therefore, the pedagogical futures supervised without any guarantee of calculable return. And the originary question of the human as a derivative of the center will inform distribution in a way that some might still want to call “theological” or “philosophical.”