The Theseus Ship Anti-Revolution

A kind of rigor of thought and action can be derived from creating the paradox of wanting complete transformation of all social institutions but not only without revolution but without anyone particularly noticing. Put this way, such a stealth program seems antithetical to norms of good governance, popular will, democracy, public airing of disputes over social futures, etc. It seems downright immoral, a coup against the public, a conspiracy against the political order. But I will intensify the paradox by insisting that the program be carried out completely explicitly at each point along the way, relying only on a kind of linguistic drift which is always present but can be directed and exhibited as it occurs. I will take the paradox of Theseus’s Ship as a model for such a program: as is well known, this paradox involves replacing the broken or decayed parts of a ship one by one and thereby raising the question whether, once every part is replaced, it is still the same ship; if so, what makes it so, i.e., what do we consider to be “the ship”? If not, at what point did it cease to be the same ship—with the replacement of which rotten plank? Like most of these venerable old paradoxes, what gets exposed is the most fundamental paradox, that of naming which, for the originary hypothesis, lies at the origin of language. Names are conferred by the namer, but the name also “appears” as immanent in the thing itself—otherwise, what would make it a name and how would it allow for referring to the thing? We trace this back to the originary sign in which the shared designation of a central object confers meaning upon while deriving it from the object or thing. For this reason I once referred to the sovereign as the “onamastician-in-chief,” and consistently reduce meaning to a scene upon which we could say “this is the same.” The paradox of naming, which is the paradox of language more generally insofar as all words are, as Eric Gans once put it, Names-of-God, includes the “inadequacy” or even “falseness” of names, resulting from the fact that anything we name or refer to changes and therefore becomes something other than that thing and, even more, the act of naming or referring itself initiates that process of change. What counters the resentment toward the lability of some thing we have named is that it is not the thing itself that matters but the establishment and maintenance of the scene and the succession of scenes upon which it will be possible to say “this is the same.”

From a political standpoint it is better to keep the names and create, where exigent, scenes upon which the fit of those names to otherwise anomalous things and happenings can be affirmed and authenticated—to be a bit crude, it’s better to see to the adoption of an abandoned child, in which he is given a name not “really” his, than to leave him in his “raw,” bastard state—in which latter case the state or magistrate will simply have to register them in some way abstracted from any network or genealogy of names. Entire legal systems have been transformed by including new relationships under old names and this is understandably a source of great resentment but, interestingly, as I write this, the birthright citizenship case is being heard by the US Supreme Court and the problem of whether the categories used to determine which people born on US soil are “naturally born” there refer to the “same” kinds of people now as they did when the 14 th amendment was written is front and center. Even the most principled originalist seems ready to say, well, the authors of the 14 th amendment couldn’t have thought that the industrial scale production of US citizenship for Chinese nationals would be covered by this law, even if nothing explicit in it forbids such an enterprise. But, then, what if here is where the real politics takes place: in shifting designations so that they cover something they didn’t before or cease covering something they so far have? The Progressive notion of the “living constitution” is a particular way of weaponizing such a politics but ultimately focused on a rather small set of “planks” being replaced in a fairly crude manner so maybe a better cybernetics of the linguistic drift can be designed.

I understand that what I am saying could be mistaken for propaganda methods, or a kind of brute force computation whereby you flood the zone with new designations and references to match them so as to operationalize stereotypes. But if you do that you’re not interested in complete plank replacement, but rather in damaging a few especially rotten planks so as to create a rocky ride in which you might, with foreknowledge, be able to commandeer the vessel. The planks are most fundamentally juridical arrangements, cases and the iteration of the results of cases in new cases and in constructing practices so as to avoid the necessity of producing new cases in the first place because they anticipate the expected range of possible settlements. It is in the world of cases that we see the strongest linguistic drift and the linguistic drift of the nomos at large through the expansion and transformation of the nomos into new forms of distributable and divisible properties and tokenizable assets. If your focus is on the juridical as the medium of the nomos then you acknowledge the need to work one plank or case at a time while simultaneously transforming each case into a precedent for future cases and designing strategies for doing this across the board. And you work with a very definite, if rough, criteria: to create a body of case law that prevents vendettas from below from passing the threshold at which preference shifts from recourse to the courts to recourse to one’s most readily accessible avenger; and defers vendettas from above that target the very system of deferring vendettas because they interfere with short-cuts to power on the part of sections of the governing class. None of this precludes swift, decisive action, even on the boundary of legality, on the part of the sovereign but even in that case such action is, first, justified by the need for enforcement of judgements and defense of what we could call “presumptions of standing” that have been allowed to lapse; and, second, followed by the work of consolidation, which involves building the cases that confirm whatever was creative and preservative in said sovereign action while discreetly setting aside whatever was not.

We can work under the assumption that the institutions we inhabit have served to defer violence and that they have always done so imperfectly precisely because things shift around underneath their names. Every naming is a renaming and that is a kind of linguistic drift that can be subjected to constraints. We are always naming scenes and roles and enactments on those scenes and it’s impossible to do that without figuring some further perfection of the scene, whether by imagining it better than it is or leveraging some minimized element of the scene as a kind of controlled usurpation. Of course the discussion can always be raised to the level of alternative versions of sovereignty, even to the point of naming the possibility of a refounding of the nomos, but even such indications would be laid out plank by plank. Someone who doesn’t follow politics closely should just at some point notice that there are venues where one can file complaints and also that if those complaints are not well-formed you end up vulnerable to the complaint of whomever you complained about and so that it might be better to examine your latent space, run your programming through some rounds in your internal GANSian space, take counsel and consider you path forward more carefully, thereby becoming the kind of person who considers paths forward more carefully. That same person should also find, as a condition of the existence of more transparent venues for filing complaints, that what he owns, what he can offer as collateral, what makes him more or less creditworthy, has also become less mysterious and better defined. Maybe laws and institutional structures will have changed considerably by that point or maybe not—constitutions, laws and institutions can be leveraged in a range of ways. But we can imagine that laws that function as grants of resources to bureaucratic agencies that in turn outsource their responsibilities to various non-governmental agencies who, along with their clientele, thereby become the ultimate beneficiaries and leveragers of those resources will have been abolished or somehow rendered purely nominal. Such laws can be repealed the same way they were passed, but it might be better to be more patient and probably more effective by developing legal strategies that neutralize them.

If there is anything to which this Theseus Ship, plank by plank strategy might seem unsuited, it would be in bringing the intelligence agencies to heel or, more precisely, making them either properly adjunct to authorized decision makers (who, in turn, would need much longer terms with much more secure succession practices—many planks to replace here) or, more radically, be transformed openly into sovereigns themselves. How do you act, from the outside, on agencies who control the information and access to sources of information you would need in order to act on them? They seem sometimes vulnerable to the juridical order, but only minimally so—they control the determination of whether the information required in any case could be presented in court. Presumably you could just dismantle the agencies and fire everyone working in them, but someone would have to move in and assess all the information held there and enter the exact some roles. I think we would find that the real problem, the real reason these agencies have usurped power, is that those whseo power is assessed publicly don’t want to take responsibility that can be delegated to the intelligence agencies. And the agencies themselves, understandably, don’t want to be publicly accountable for their actions any more than the politicians do. Bringing the central bank into the juridical order seems simple and painless by comparison.

Here I’m going to return to a major “plank” in my own platform to suggest the kinds of planks that might, indirectly, corral the intelligence agencies back into a proper cybernetic (maybe GANSian) relation to decision makers, towards creating genuine central intelligence. A major part of the power of the intelligence agencies to interfere with the adjudications of the nomos and cripple the sovereign comes from its access to media outlets through which it can spread lies, rumors, and decontextualized and massaged truths. Without such conveyer belts, the intelligence agencies would be able to mislead their “customers,” but would have no defense against rigorous cross-examination and the sovereign’s ability to set one team against another and set up adjudicating teams to help decide between them. And without those outlets, the incentive to mislead would diminish because there would be no way to coordinate such deception with broader campaigns that would amplify it. So, this brings us back to essentially shutting down the media through a revivification of the laws that have always governed speech: libel, slander, fraud and obscenity. Smear campaigns could be made extremely risky, and so media outlets would be reduced to notifying the public regarding the outcomes of court cases (and they could make that very interesting and valuable) and forwarding messages from the sovereign which they could check for consistency and conformity with information derived from court cases. A full, and mostly truthful, representation of public affairs would be the norm, enabling “datazens” to understand the terms of their data exchanges with the center. The intelligence agencies could no longer join the media in trying to damage credit when one or the other party is in power. These are very specific planks, discrediting and disempowering one habitual liar after another.

The study and imitation of various linguistic drifts can then become a leading theme of the arts and object of the disciplines. The discrepancy between what is promised and what is delivered, what impressions we give and which we give off, the expectations we create and invest in and actual results, have always been the stuff of artistic representation and the key to the study of institutions. The arts and disciplines track cases very closely and the better that cases are framed the more precise and robust the arts and disciplines will be. Writing scripts that make more visible the slippages between names and named become part of the directed linguistic drift, one plank after another. And each plank is a prefiguration of a comprehensive replanking, as a single sample includes the all. And the sovereign companies, which tokenize arbitration, I’ve proposed repeatedly could serve as patrons of the arts and sciences as they would in turn help provide the data those companies need to grow themselves, one plank at a time, into the central intelligence, and central intelligence would entail routing the linguistic drift of names into data distributions that help settle cases.