Sovereignty, tech and finance are to be articulated into a single scenic articulation, which on the terms of center study means the articulation of succession, the soliciting of the center and the prolonging of the imperative. Succession has served as the center of thinking about sovereignty, uniting what Anthropomorphics calls the “signifying center” (the sacred) and the occupied center (the imperial) in the temporality of singularized succession in perpetuity: the occupant of the center selecting not just the next occupant, but the next occupant to select the next occupant, who is to select the next occupant and so on. This understanding of what is still “sovereignty” on center study’s public interface serves as a measure of what is always already the operative telos of any sovereign, which is succession and perpetuation, however roundabout and contra-indicative the means. Once we further consider that the selection of the successor can be revoked and transferred at any time it becomes clear that assigning successor status, and a more or less explicit hierarchy of likely candidates, serves as a means of establishing values in a way parallel to and eventually replacing the market system. And this in turn further assumes that the “toxins” have been extracted out of succession and the various candidates, indeed the dictator or pointman himself, has other things worth doing and which can be safely pursued so that taking the highest responsibility is not a matter of survival or life’s highest ambition. This assumption depends on the creation of a more robust juridical order than we have seen previously, allowing for peaceful, explicit and easily disposed of challenges to decisions made at all levels. One could issue a charge of “utopianism” here, but there’s no need to answer such a charge from anyone who will use the word “should” in the course of projecting any social or political possibilities until someone can show which variety of “shouldness,” or normative mapping of human action, would not be open to such a charge. The goal of center study is to stay as close to boundary between diagnosis and prescription as possible on the longest timeline imaginable: to always be able to say, this is what everyone is already doing and here’s how they might, given certain shifts in visible trajectories, do it more explicitly and accountably.
The “solicitation of the center,” meanwhile, is a very recent coinage for the “patriation” of discourses of debt, money and financialization within center study. Credit and ledger involve the diversion of the resources on the scene toward certain parties and the registering of such diversions. Any credit is drawn on the center, a practice that is transparent enough under either archaic gift economies or monarchical regimes where the monarch is responsible for coining and authenticating money. No doubt over an extended period of time we would find kings increasingly reliant on external sources of money from international moneylenders and banks and external sources of accounting from middlemen minorities: such episodes get resolved through war and conquest, or the eventual loss of sovereignty. Our interest intensifies with the situating of the central bank at the center in England in 1694, and transformation associated with, most directly, the creation of the two party system and its attachments, such as journalism, whereby each party tries to undermine credit when the other party is in power; also, though, the emergence of official science (the Royal Society) and related changes in the English language (I don’t know whether other languages saw similar linguistic shifts). Now we have a kind of split and oscillation between sovereign and debt center, one which gradually gets “communicated” across the world through Anglo imperialism. In seeking a conceptual formulation for this epochal transformation that doesn’t confer upon it the privilege of inevitability and eternity, i.e., to make it possible to think outside of the terms of “liberal democracy” without reverting to one or another stereotyped archaism, I’ve designed the phrase “soliciting the center,” which involves an ongoing request, petition, even disturbing of the center for the purpose of channeling resources toward specific agents and projects—soliciting the center would happen under any regime, making it possible to think in terms of transitions from the oscillations between succession and the interference in succession by credit issuing agencies in the dialectic between debt enforcement and forgiveness toward the programming of futures that would ledger the field of succession itself.
The prolonging of the imperative is another way of speaking of succession, as one aims at reaching back to the originary proto-imperative issued on the originary scene itself to the furtherest future obedience to that imperative through accredited pedagogical institutions; but speaking in terms of prolonging the imperative allows for a closer integration with the perfecting of the imperative, center study’s (so far) primary way of speaking about technology. Any governance is to some extent “technocracy” and any technology is governance, and the more explicit we get about this the better, because then conflicts over techno and cracy can be given proper juridical form and removed from the purview of any demos. Soliciting the center, succession, prolonging and perfecting the imperative should all be one thing and that is the object of any politics seeking to abolish itself, which is what politics is for. “Modernity” is their splitting apart, dispersion, and reciprocal sabotage. The way you solicit the center under capitalism is by presenting yourself as more creditworthy than other credit seekers; or, as presenting your potential bankruptcy as prohibitively draining upon the center. This certainly involves soliciting credit on behalf of perfections of the imperative, especially those that contribute to governance (succession) by automating (stacking scenes) some part of it. But it also includes the sabotaging of perfections of the imperative outside of one’s control, which might in turn mean sabotaging that which is under one’s control as well, and the creation of various kinds of artificial scarcity so that the debasement of currency can be evaded and hedged, and interfering with succession so as to guarantee continued lines of credit by enabling lines of succession whose mode of governance coincides with the particular mode of sabotage in which one specializes. But it must also be added that modernity is also the series of spastic attempts to break with the central bank backed imperial order without finding any way to recreate the oscillations within governing and between governing (succession) and finance (soliciting the center) and technology (perfecting the imperative. Suppressing such oscillations becomes the misguided goal of anti-liberal politics, introducing some kind of ritualized vendetta run through the secret police, to fill in the gaps between the oscillating poles. In this way, the present form of oscillation appears, simply, as “freedom” against “tyranny,” rather than as the creation of juridical and disciplinary scenes that create new scenes to send data back to the center.
I am idiomizing the now commonly used word “hyperstition” as “hyperstitch” because I’m not speaking about conjuring or meme-ing something into existence but stitching together the world of debt and money and the world of technology and technocracy. The stitch is succession, and the stitching extends and holds to the extent that succession is singularized in perpetuity. It may now be possible to explore this grammatically, since the imperative exchange that effects the transition from the ostensive-imperative world to the declarative world through the sequence of petitions issuing in the plea to the center to let us know its command through the creation of disciplinary spaces allows for the controlled generation of idioms. We stitch our petitions into the fabric of reality by leveraging existing institutions of deferral so as to produce more objects that can become the target of ostensives and shared in more diverse ways, as subsistence and as data and as subsistence that enables us to become carriers of fresh data. Most directly to the question of succession, it can be proposed as a rule to lend support, to donate your resentment, to whoever most proximal to central power seems mostly to, even tacitly or tendentially, nominate and invest like successors because they in turn will be most likely to do the same. A range of actors might fit this description in a floating manner, with it being possible to assign fluctuating probabilities to each of them, and to articulate possible convergences between them. Someone close enough to power to be worth rating in this way is going to be embedded in some financial or technological enterprise able to collaborate on the level of sovereignty—or, some crossover between fin and tech. What we are looking for is where technology might become ledger, perhaps through electronic currency but more importantly through the collection of data that is juridically and disciplinarily relevant and becoming more so. We can hypothesize some boundary where fin becomes tech and tech becomes fin, with succession running through that boundary by bringing fin, the outside margin, within the juridical and aligning tech with high level pedagogy. The first part is the hardest, as it overturns several hundred years of entrenchment and would arouse the ideological suspicions of the entire debt-ordered world (forming companies that could bring capitalism increasingly within the law, in particular as we approach its outer limits in the outside spread, are of the highest priority, as these would also be very innovative tech companies). Right now, the US is defending the debt-ordered world organized around the dollar and Treasury bonds and this requires escalating military supremacy (but for that reason not necessarily escalating military action). This is only sustainable if it translates into accelerating industrialization within the US core, first of all the US itself, of course, but also transnationally through what we might see as a kind of internalization of multipolarity. Simply ending the Fed or nationalizing the banks falls back into the anti-Anglo reactiveness I alluded to earlier. Eliminating fiat currency might not be the point either. Rather, we might think more in terms of converting US debts into formalized security arrangements that would pay them down, and this might mean encroaching on the sovereignty of debtors by carving out sovereign entities within their borders and paying off the debt to them, as protectorates, specifically, There’s something of the state as protection racket in this approach, but that has always been part of what any state is, and some protection rackets are preferable to others, in particular those that extend new powers to favored clients. This is a risky approach, but it’s hard to imagine any approach free of risk (indeed, risk is better thought of as something to be optionalized rather than avoided)—in particular, we’d be thinking here of breaking of up China, obviously something to be undertaken with great caution and only after some practice redrawing borders in other regions so as to align assets with governments best able to protect and cultivate them. As long as I’m working this through in a very practical manner, I’ll add that this extremely interventionist approach becomes possible only through a reindustrialization of the US homeland with the prosperity and sense of a national project that would bring along with an expansion of the national security apparatuses to train a new officer class, one that would include all kinds of overseas appointments and adventures, along with letters of marque and other private adjuncts to the state. This would also include the creation of something like honorary Americans amongst the governing classes of other nations. In a way, this would be the neoconservative strategy for global power projection set right-side up, to speak a little Hegelianese, insofar as the point would not be to spread “liberal democracy” but compatible or interoperable modes of succession across the world. I’m not doing much more here than drawing out some threads I think I see implicit in the “Trumpian” approach to the world.
In such an ordering, credit would increasingly be directed in advance, called upon, for longer term state aligned projects and grounded in what would ultimately be data security companies whose exchanges of data would eventually supplant currency. The coordination problem money was originally invented to solve would be solved in such a way as to phase out money while making it possible for many in the credit-offering section of the governing class to transition into other managerial and planning positions. Oscillations are thereby recouped within fields of succession around which cluster juridical and disciplinary scenes answering questions that come from what will increasingly be stage-managed, not in the sense of fake “psyops” but of induced collisions between different paths that might be taken from wherever we are now, disputes at various levels of the expectant scene. The great arguments can then become over pedagogy, or language learning, with vast research institutes reconstructing paths through the various languages and idioms and hypothesizing ways of upclining forward to increased sensitivity toward nuance of expression, gesture and posture all of which are forms of compression—compressions into (governing and being governed) styles.