Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies

By Isaac Ariail Reed

In Power in Modernity, Isaac Ariail Reed proposes a bold new theory of power that describes overlapping networks of delegation and domination.  Chains of power and their representation, linking together groups and individuals across time and space, create a vast network of intersecting alliances, subordinations, redistributions, and violent exclusions. Reed traces the common action of “sending someone else to do something for you” as it expands outward into the hierarchies that control territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money.

He mobilizes this theory to investigate the onset of modernity in the Atlantic world, with a focus on rebellion, revolution, and state formation in colonial North America, the early American Republic, the English Civil War, and French Revolution. Modernity, Reed argues, dismantled the “King’s Two Bodies”—the monarch’s physical body and his ethereal, sacred second body that encompassed the body politic—as a schema of representation for forging power relations. Reed’s account then offers a new understanding of the democratic possibilities and violent exclusions forged in the name of “the people,” as revolutionaries sought new ways to secure delegation, build hierarchy, and attack alterity.

Reconsidering the role of myth in modern politics, Reed proposes to see the creative destruction and eternal recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies as constitutive of the modern attitude, and thus as a new starting point for critical theory. Modernity poses in a new way an eternal human question: what does it mean to be the author of one’s own actions?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226689593

Book preview

Power in Modernity

Power in Modernity

Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies

Isaac Ariail Reed

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68931-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68945-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-68959-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226689593.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reed, Isaac (Isaac Ariail), author.

Title: Power in modernity : agency relations and the creative destruction of the king’s two bodies / Isaac Ariail Reed.

Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2020.| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019034375 | ISBN 9780226689319 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226689456 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226689593(ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Power (Social sciences) | Civilization, Modern.

Classification: LCC HN49.P6 R43 2020 | DDC 303.3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034375

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Helena Freundova

Νόμος ὁ πάντων βασιλεύςθνατῶν τε καὶ ἀθανάτωνἄγει δικαιῶν τὸ βιαιότατονὑπερτάτᾳ χειρί.

Nomos, the king of all, both mortals and immortals, guides, justifying the utmost violence, with an absolutely-above-all hand.

PINDAR

And THE LORD said to Samuel: Hearken to the voice of the people, in all they say to you; for, it is not you that they have forsaken, but me: that they should not have me as a king over them.

1 SAMUEL 8:7

Contents

Introduction: Two Parables from Kafka

PART I   Power

1   Rector, Actor, Other

Rector, Actor, Other

Authorship

Alterity

Other as Enemy and Slave

Scapegoats

2   Agency Relations

Action and Agency

Projects

Projects in Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Said

The Social Theory of Agency in the Work of Julia Adams

Patriarchal Patrimonialism Retheorized

Agency Relations and the Critical Theory of Power

3   Dimensions of Delegation and Domination

The Ties That Bind

Materiality: Alfred Gell

Materiality in Chains of Power and Their Representation

On Interests and Actor Network Theory as Opposing Poles of a Spectrum

Relational Power

Discursive Power

Excursus on Chandra Mukerji’s Synthesis of Material, Relational, and Discursive Power

When Is the World Mechanical?

On Violence

Chains of Power and Their Representation: A Multidimensional Approach

4   Binding Performances

Strange Magic

Illocutionary Force and Performative Power

Binding, Sending, and Excluding via Performance

The Salem Witch Trials and the Fall of Oscar Wilde

An Analysis of Performative Power in the Salem Witch Trials and the Fall of Oscar Wilde

Excursus on the Theorization of Performance and Ritual in Sociology

Performance in Chains of Power and Their Representation

Founding Performances

PART II   Modernity

Introduction to Part II

5   Agency, Alterity, and the Two Bodies of the King

Trouble at the Edge of Empire

Chains of Power and Their Representation in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

The King’s Body as Ultimate yet Absent Referent

The King’s Two Bodies

The King’s Two Bodies in Massachusetts Bay Colony and Beyond

Bacon’s Rebellion and Race: Enter the Other

The People as Myth and Guarantor of Delegation: Herman Husband’s Sermons

6   Performing the People’s Two Bodies in the Early American Republic

The Sociology of the Spectacular State

Performing Sovereignty in 1794

Republican Government as a Problem of Meaning

Inventing the People’s Two Bodies in the Whiskey Rebellion

Parsing the People’s Two Bodies in the Whiskey Rebellion

The Northwest Territory as a Performance Space

The Battle of Fallen Timbers as a Violent Performance of the Spectacular American State

The Treaty of Greenville and the Destruction of the King’s Household as Metaphor for the State

Anthony Wayne as Agent of the Public

The People’s Two Bodies and Their Others

7   Within and without the King’s Two Bodies in London and Paris

The King’s Two Bodies and the Representation of Agency in Elizabethan England

The Crisis of the King’s Two Bodies and the Emergence of the Hobbesian Vision of the State

Killing the King as Founding Performance

Why and How Should We Kill the King?

The People, Their Representatives, and the Law

The Radical Position

Performing without the King’s Second Body

Exclusions from the Ambiguity of Being within and without the King’s Second Body

The French Revolution as a Crisis in Authorship

PART III   Power in Modernity

8   Modernity as the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies

Getting the Joke

With What Should We Replace the King’s Two Bodies?

The New Political Economy

Tensions in Cultural Theories of the Modern

Biopower as the Replacement for the King’s Two Bodies

Power in Modernity: Bodies

Power in Modernity: Politics

Power in Modernity: Authorship

Acknowledgments

Index

Footnotes

Introduction

Two Parables from Kafka

Before the Law by Franz Kafka is a frequent reference point for social theory. In it, a doorkeeper guards a door; a man from the country comes and begs for admittance to the Law. The doorkeeper is intimidating: Try to get in without my permission, he dares the man, but note that I am powerful. The man decides to wait for permission. He waits for years and keeps asking to be let in; the answer is always not yet. Near the end of his life—a life spent waiting for permission to enter—the man asks why no one else has come to seek permission, since everyone strives to attain the Law. The man is faltering and weak, so the doorkeeper shouts into his ear: No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.¹

The interpretation of the story varies—not least in the argument over its interpretation that Kafka himself stages. I would venture, however, that in social theory this parable has come to stand in for a vast amount of work—two generations’ worth, really—on the constitution of power relations through culture. Judith Butler reports that she originally took [her] clue on how to read the performativity of gender from Jacques Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law,’ but a close examination compels one to conclude that it is Butler’s reading of Kafka that articulates the parable as a paradigm of power.² Meanwhile Giorgio Agamben argues that the story (which he calls a legend) is about sovereignty, because it refers to being in force without significance—the state of exception which is outside the written rules of law.³

More social scientific interpretations bring the story into relationship with human geography and the sociology of the state.⁴ In Pierre Bourdieu’s lectures on the state at the Collège de France, he discusses The Trial. The novel, he says, reveals how the state appears as the central perspective, which is not a perspective but rather the place where perspectivism stops, and a final judgment is made: There is a moment at which you have to stop, and this place where you stop is the state. This is the coup d’état from which the state is born (even if this was an imperceptible process), which attests to an extraordinary symbolic act of force, which consisted in getting universally accepted, within the limits of a certain territorial jurisdiction that is constructed by way of the construction of this dominant point of view . . . that there is one point of view that is the measure of all points of view, one that is dominant and legitimate. This third-party agency is a limit to free agency.⁵

These theorists all ask, What is the symbolic as a vector of power? The answers to this question do not converge—and neither do the interpretations of Kafka. But they do take as their center of gravity the study of the internalization of relations of hierarchy as necessary, a process that social theorists like to term symbolic violence. Whether it is taken to be about the state, morality in culture, or identity, the parable invokes a sociological nightmare from which the subject cannot awake, because the symbolic violence is so pervasive and constitutive. The counterfactual—the person who could just walk through the door—can only be approached through the mists of melancholia. After all, the conclusion that K. and his priest interlocutor come to in their discussion of the story is that it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary. A melancholy conclusion, notes K.⁶ What could better describe the arc of social theories of culture and power from 1968 to the present?

But sociohistory generates more than this nightmare.

*

The theorists of symbolic violence left out logistics, underestimated the autonomy of the performative from the discursive, and failed to articulate an adequate hermeneutics of the many ways power relations could be represented in, and thus inflected and molded by, meaning. As I approached the archival materials and secondary sources used to construct part 2 of this book, I found again and again that the standard renderings of cultural power—renderings that tended to reduce the complex relationships between authority, power, and violence to a single vector—were just not sufficient to comprehend transitions to modernity, at least as they appeared at the edge of empire. In contrast to Before the Law, then, the central idea of this book comes to expression in a different parable by Kafka.

An Imperial Message begins, The Emperor, so it runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun. It turns out that on his deathbed, the emperor has urgently left this message with a messenger, and it is a message of the utmost importance. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, and indefatigable man . . . if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters. This makes it easier for him to go out to you. But multitudes block his way, the messenger cannot even get out of the palace without exhausting himself, and after that so many more persons and places would have to be encountered. Even if at last he should burst through the outermost gate of the palace, Kafka explains, the imperial capital would lie before him, the center of the world, crammed to bursting with its own refuse. The parable ends this way: Nobody could fight his way through here, least of all one with a message from a dead man.—But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.⁷

The parable is a part of a larger fragment, The Great Wall of China, in which the narrator discusses the building of the wall, and its purpose to provide protection from the people of the North. These people outside the wall are represented as evil, incomprehensible, and inhuman in the pictures of artists: these faces of damnation, with their mouths flung open, the sharp pointed teeth stuck in their jaws, their straining eyes, which seem to be squinting for someone to seize, someone their jaws will crush and rip to pieces.⁸

The narrator of the parable tells us that his native province is equidistant from the Northern Tribes and from Peking.⁹ In the story, then, the human subject is hung up between the (idealized, fantasized, dreamed-about) emperor, or rector,¹⁰ whose message will never reach him, and the (profaned, savage, dangerous) others, from whom he is protected by the wall. Thus An Imperial Message asks us to refocus our efforts in social theory, for it provides in abbreviated form a particular picture of the world, one of chains of power and their representation, cast across the globe, intersecting with one another, as persons master time, space, and each other in the service of various projects. The parable leads us to ask, What is this mysterious message? Why is it so important to dream to yourself that it will arrive? If this is a dream, what is the reality?

One rather obvious possibility is that the message is not coming at all, and that it is silly (unrealistic) to think that the Emperor—the center of power, the rector of rectors, the shining sun of divine right in domination—has something earnest to say to you. This is perhaps the most straightforward interpretation. But here is another possibility. What if the message is coming—and soon you will hear the hammering of fists on your door. Given the distance (social, geographical, cultural . . .) that has to be traversed to reach you, it will not be the original messenger—it will be the messenger’s messenger’s messenger’s . . . messenger.¹¹ What will he have to say, and will his fists be welcome? What will he command you to do? How will he translate the Emperor’s original words?

An Imperial Message suggests that power, in its communication, in its logistics, in its domination of the body, and in its hailing of some via the exclusion of others, is constructed out of long chains of persons and groups, each governing the next. So the question becomes, How could a long chain of messengers be constructed such that each is bound to the previous one, and furthermore so that each is motivated to traverse great distances to exercise power in the name of those above them? This is the problem of binding another to act on one’s behalf—the problem of agency. Power, then, emerges in the process by which some are made agents to another’s project, and some are excluded from that project altogether. As I shall show shortly, this is a matter not only of instrumental control but also of contested authorship.

In this book, I propose to imagine power as constructed out of these long hierarchical chains and their representation, grasping at the control of territories, persons, artifacts, minds, and money. How do such chains and their representation work? Whom do they bring into their purview via strength, violence, force, authority, solidarity—and whom do they exclude? How do they overlap and intersect, and how are the networks of artifacts and persons that are the result of these intersections sustained or disrupted? Finally: can we understand the arc of political modernity—its contradictions, its accomplishments, its exclusions, its violence, its potential for liberation, the possibility of its coming destruction—in terms of how these chains are represented, struggled over, justified, and, ultimately, reconstructed out of these very justifications? We know how far-flung chains of power and their representation have bound the globe together, shrinking time and space in the process. But I hazard that we have yet to grasp the way in which these chains are modern, and how their modernity conditions our existence; we do not yet understand power in modernity as a feature of political culture.

Thinking this way will, I propose, lead us to a further appreciation of, but also some thinking in counterpoint to, the now-classic question of theory that flows so easily out of Before the Law: How does the subject internalize the law such that he does not even try to go through the door? This is surely a necessary question. But we need also to think about An Imperial Message in its strange orientalism,¹² in its picturing of far-flung connections, and in its articulation of the relations of agency that obtain between the heights of power, those who act on behalf of the powerful, and those who are profaned and outside the city walls. And so I seek herein to develop a language with which to describe the relationship between the long arc of modern power relations and the ruptures of the present moment, so that we can find out—we must not defer any longer—whom do the fists of the messenger represent?

Charlottesville, Virginia, 2019

PART I

Power

1

Rector, Actor, Other

Rector, Actor, Other

In hierarchical relations, a figure is elevated to a superior position with enhanced capacity, and to such a figure discretion accrues. This is the person or group who rules, and to the extent that this rule extends across situations, it enables the accomplishment of projects—the bringing about of future states of the world that can be interpreted as aligned with a projected state of the world, imagined in the present. In other words, this elevation to superior position in hierarchical relations allows a certain mastery of space and time. Such mastery is dependent, however, on allies and subordinates to whom tasks are delegated, and from whom knowledge and expertise are gained, advice is taken, profits are stolen, and value is extracted. A superior, in the business of making decisions and getting things done, needs a man in the field, a fixer. This is the relation of control that enables the enhancement of capacity, and this relation comes in many ways to define the superior figure, for it is via this relation that the possibility of remaking the world that accrues to this figure emerges. Power is dependent on its dependents. To refer to this superior positioning of persons—individuals or groups—I will use the term rector.¹

The subordinate to the rector both stands in for and works on behalf of the superior. This inferior ally is recognized in various ways as having different projected futures than rector’s own. This recognition may come from many directions—from rector, from the surrounding social milieu, in public acknowledgments and private promises, from other actors working for other rectors, through the payment of a reasonable wage and the granting of time off, and so on—but it is only ever partial. To become an agent of another is to abdicate one’s own projects. Hierarchical relations are such that somehow, some of the time, the subordinate’s remaking of the world is put on hold so as to pursue that which the rector favors. Yet certain advantages obtain, at least potentially, to the inferior ally, because to be in the world on behalf of rector, thus allowing rector to be free from the world, brings knowledge of said world.² This is the paradox of becoming an agent of another—certain capacities and a great degree of discretion accrue to rector (the pleasures and possibilities of delegation and exploitation), but the possibilities for mastering the world stay behind to some degree, with those in inferior positions who follow directions rather than pursuing their own projects (they accrue know-how). To refer to this positioning of persons in inferior alliance—individuals or groups—I will use the term actor.

Actors also access capacity, leverage, and even sometimes control, turning relationships with rectors to their advantage. The utility of knowledge of the world that comes from labor on it, combined with some modicum of recognition, can enable strategy, success, and the accomplishment of projects. So emerges the question of what will happen if and when a set of actors, or a set of sets of actors, manage to make themselves and represent themselves as organized and solidaristic. In rector-actor relations, in other words, conflict mingles with complicity. Furthermore, the project that organizes and represents the reason for action by actors and rectors, and thus gives meaning to the contested, conflicted alliance between actor and rector, requires actor and rector to confront a buzzing confusion. For it is not only the conflicts inherent to the alliance (misrecognition, the shirking of promises to complete some task, the struggle over redistribution and recognition) but also the world itself that renders the rector-actor relationship, and the project pursued via that relationship, vulnerable.

One central source of uncertainty that affects the attempt, by rector and actor, to bring a project to fruition is constituted by those groups and individuals who are not allies; who tend other projects in other valleys. This unpredictability is reified by rector and actor into an understanding of nonunderstanding—a coding of alterity. Those who are so coded are excluded from (or appear from outside) the projects that rector and actor are working on. But this exclusion, this disinvitation from the game of (partial) recognition, is itself subject to tremendous variation. The radically excluded can be loaded down with the dread of the world that rector and actor wish to be rid of; they can, by virtue of their coded alterity, be used and worked as if they are incapable of their own projects at all. In enforcing such an interpretation, rector and actor deny those outside a project the usual leverage that conflict or misrecognition implies. Thus the radically excluded are also candidates for desubjectification and thus elimination.³ To be interpreted (publicly, or in one’s own subjectivity, or in the intersubjective space that emerges between rector and actor) as outside a project, and thus as outside the rector-actor relations that are forged in its pursuit, is to occupy, even if only partially, for this or that relation, a position of nonrecognition. To refer to this position of persons—individuals and groups—I will use the term other.⁴

Authorship

Rector and actor engage in an unequal relation of sending-and-binding to complete a project. Actor abdicates actor’s own projects to take up those of rector. When this happens, a contest emerges—a struggle for power. This is a contest over authorship, vision, and division. If humans, via social organization mediated through language, enhance their capacity to act in the world and transform it, then these organizations and the transformations they make possible must be interpreted as related to the humans who act in some way. And so relations of organization are comprehended in terms of authorship; accomplishments, profits, public approbation, and honor accrue to those who are interpreted as the rectors of the project, because the rectors are understood to be its authors. Via relation and representation, rector is taken to be the true author of the actions that have done the transforming. Such an interpretation (which is always, in some way, a misinterpretation) of authorship is the basis of the continuity of rector’s position. In this way, relations of power—of making and remaking the world, of giving and taking orders—get intertwined with the interpretation—itself contested, socially variable, subject to change—of the origins of said making and remaking. This can then become the basis of more power, insofar as rector’s reputation exceeds the initial relations to specific actors and their legitimation, and takes on a public life of its own, ascribing to rector the esteem of that category of persons who embody something valuable beyond themselves. As I shall show, this is one meaning of the idea that the King has two bodies.⁵

As a way to understand struggles over power, conflict over authorship can refer to a variety of social situations. It can refer to the extraction of surplus value—the product of labor, made on the factory floor, belongs as property to the owner qua (supposed) author of production. It can also refer to more public, widespread misrecognition of human potential. The director of a film, made via countless hours of collective labor by many people, becomes the film’s auteur. It can refer to matters of tactics and strategy—the rector of a battle plan orders and arranges the actions of several actors, trampling their originality in the name of logistics and urgency, making them into agents of himself, while also recognizing their specific intelligence, all in the attempt to make good on the promise to win. What obtains in all these instances, and many more, is an unequal relation in which rector comes to be understood as author not only of rector’s own actions but of actor’s as well.

Resistance to and rebellion against the hierarchical relationship that obtains between rector and actor are about claiming the responsibilities, capacities, and prerogatives of authorship. A rector might experience anxiety of influence, wondering whether the credit, profit, and recognition that accrues are deserved. This is the anxiety of looking over one’s shoulder for other rectors, fearing that in truth, the actions that have given rector so much applause, salary, and prestige, the glorious recognition of rector’s originality as the author of a project, were actually unoriginal. The anxiety of influence is a question of whether rector was only another actor for some other originator, the true author. The bitter irony of power relations is that rector tends not to see those laboring, working, and thus creating on rector’s behalf, under his direction, as the originators to be anxious about; rector looks over his shoulder rather than in front of his face. To remove yourself from the world in order to be free of it is to disable your ability to see what is right in front of you.

In contrast, actor might experience anxiety of authorship, which derives from the contradiction between the work done or the labor performed and the representation of authorship that is laid over it like a thick cloth.⁶ Given the partial recognition from rector, there is always the possibility that someday in the future, actor will arrive into full rectorship. Yet underneath there is still the problem of the work at hand, done in another’s name. The sheer pragmatics of needing allies to bring projects to fruition means that authorship is always at stake.

Suppose rector asks actor to become agent for rector; actor agrees, and this agreement is, in part, due to the sincere belief in the value of the project shared by rector and actor. Rector then becomes anxious—does rector’s ability to envision and divide the world, and project a certain remade future, justify the attribution of authorship that comes with a superior position? Meanwhile actor is compelled by the relation to wonder whether accession to authorship would reveal a lack of vision (or discretion, or ability to delegate)—that is, a mismatch between ambition and vision that identifies an imposter. It is the relation itself and its representation in social life that produce these anxieties; the question of authorship cannot be disentangled from the social struggle for its attribution.

Rector and actor, then, struggle in a double sense—they struggle to complete a project, and they struggle over the representation of the authorship of a project. This is a difficult matter, particularly when rector and actor are large collectivities engaged in projects-as-long-run-processes that span large swaths of time and space. (For example: In what sense does the project of twentieth-century managerial capitalism belong to the American corporate elite? The answer we develop will affect how we interpret the results of the fracturing of that elite.)⁷ This struggle over attribution is conducted via, and communicated through, symbols that mirror, distort, and form the relation between rector and actor. For insofar as actor takes on the project of rector, and to do so must (partially) understand that project, then actor and rector are complicit—they are in a serious game⁸ of claim and counterclaim, alliance and enrollment, motivation and subtle resentment. As rector-actor chains develop—unfolding, like an accordion, from a mere dyad into extended hierarchies—they create situations wherein almost every person or group in the chain is both a rector to an actor and an actor to a rector.

If rector is recognized as author, and thereby escapes certain demands to serve, a certain discretion obtains—though this discretion may open onto further and different action, work, or labor. When this happens, the bewildering plurality of human purpose comes into the world, as well as the socially granted capacity to change projects midstream. The limitations on rector’s discretion constitute an important space of sociological variation in power situation.⁹ There are many sources of this variation in discretion—competing rectors (with their own actors-turned-agents), limitations in capacity and talent of rector’s own actors, and so on. But these limits, too, are subject to reinterpretation and reconfiguration, and the breaking of them can become part of rector’s own project, as rector seeks to change the rules for ruling.¹⁰

Rector’s experiences, however, are not only given structure and meaning via the limits to discretion. For the rules for ruling also require maintenance. This is its own tension. It is hard enough for an individual or group to remember and reinterpret what was originally intended by them when they took up the pursuit of a project, for such remembering itself involves the representation and interpretation of authorship, and thus collective struggles over memory.¹¹ But the matter is even more complicated: the relationship between what is to be done through rule (the project) and maintaining rule over the allies recruited into the project (the relations of power that allow the project to be pursued) itself changes over time and can, in any given moment, be subject to new contingencies. Rectors are constantly at work retooling the rules for ruling, reconsidering the mixture of coercion, interest, and legitimacy that structures various relations with various actors—even if all they want to do is keep things the same. Rectors want to know which rules for ruling will last, and what they will allow qua project completion, but this itself creates problems. For how can rector find this out, except by tasking a set of actors to search the archives of the world for history, metaphors, analogies, and examples—in a word, stories—of successful rectors? But this is now itself a relation of rule, and official or consecrated historians may end up finding the means with which to speak back to power.¹² The maintenance of the rules for ruling consistently threatens to subsume, overwhelm, or supplant the original project.

For rector, that the world is constituted as a multitude of different overlapping projects is a source of uncertainty, a problem to be solved—it admits the fantasy of removing or minimizing, once and for all, resistance and inconsistency. For actor, uncertainty about how conflicting projects will work themselves out is experienced as an existential condition. Actor can be rector for other projects, or actor for other projects, or in the process of being othered by a different set of rectors and actors—even the theoretically reduced world presented here, with three subject positions, is in the end a human mess. Furthermore, for actor, even within a given project and a given relation to rector, there is a tension between fighting uphill for actor’s own projects and taking the path of least resistance—namely, accepting rector’s projects as actor’s own (particularly if the remuneration or recognition is adequate to some other need). This is an intrapsychic as well as an intersubjective struggle, and many are the novels that display a contrast between the external dialogue between rector and actor, and the internal dialogue of actor. To give up authorship is usually to give up some decision-making responsibility, though not the stress of fulfilling rector’s vision or of executing a decision. There are perhaps, in some cases, subtle pleasures in taking up another’s project; one can avoid the existential angst that besets those who propose to navigate the world alone,¹³ and actor may have access to a public disavowal of authorship if the project, when brought to fruition, is judged a disaster. From rector’s perspective, actor’s temptations to not decide and to disavow authorship are themselves a justification for rector’s superior position—rectors are prone to irritation with inferior allies who, having followed them into the desert of freedom, complain about having done so. Rector and actor are thus in tension as they enact a series of meaningful exchanges whose ultimate meanings are never quite clear in the moment. When rector delegates a task to actor as part of a project, actor delegates to rector the responsibilities of decision and direction, the pleasures and anxieties of discretion. In so doing, actor may make a virtue of necessity.¹⁴

Actor, then, frequently arrives at an action situation constrained by consequences, in which the possibility of acting for oneself is, somehow, both one’s ultimate desire and yet also easy to avoid. The experience by actors of the need to make a decision to either struggle against or go along with the prevailing arrangement of tasks is what ties together two opposing poles of materialist social theory—rational choice theory and Marxism. In both theoretical languages, the actors of the modern world are beset by dilemmas with regard to their own interests (individual in the first instance, collective in the latter): to quit and try the job market, to work for reform or revolution, to engage in a wildcat strike or a slowdown. All of these are dilemmas about how and when actor’s own projects are brought into the world and might take precedence over the tasks delegated to actor by rector. But though the rise of the social in the modern world surely brought the material side of these questions to the fore, actor’s dilemma—to act for oneself or for rector—runs much deeper and much broader than its specifically economic manifestations, no matter how urgent and dominant these become in societies structured by the fetish of the commodity and la pensée bourgeoise.¹⁵ For to act for oneself or for a rector, actual or imagined, is Hamlet’s question.¹⁶

Alterity

If actor is an ally to rector, other stands outside the project, profaned. The relationship of other to the rector-actor alliance has a paradoxical nature—it is a relationship defined to a certain degree by nonauthorship, for other is outside the contested misrecognition of authorship discussed above, though not outside certain highly degraded forms of the attribution of authorship, as we shall see.

Alterity as a subject position is given shape by the instability of the human-inhuman binary within the relations and representations of power. The relationship of other to rector and actor teeters between a triadic relationship between subjects, on the one hand, and a double dyad between two subjects and then between those two subjects and an object, on the other. Insofar as it tips toward the latter, a shift takes place—from other as a subject not inside (and possibly in the way of) a given project to other as tool, object of desire, or scapegoat. The radical uncertainty that other represents, in the intersubjective space of rector and actor, can become a synecdoche for the uncertainty of the world itself. Given this, it becomes possible that physical or symbolic violence directed at other by rector and actor is not merely solidarity generating—a drawing of boundaries between in-group and out-group—but also an assertion of the autonomy of rector and actor over and above the world, a demonstration of the capacity (fantasized or actualized) of the alliance to remake the world in the image they have projected for the future.

The way in which others are reduced to objects or quasi objects in social relations varies immensely. This is because of the vast complexity of overlapping chains of power and their representation as well as the manifest plurality of projects contained therein, but also because alterity itself, even in a highly stylized situation, allows for much variation in relation and representation. I begin by looking at extremes.

Other can be an all-powerful-enemy rector, with better mathematicians on her payroll; other can be a terrifying savage horde outside the gates of the city; other can also be an outsider within¹⁷—used, abused, and profaned as an intimately known means to certain ends. There may be many things that rector and/or actor want from other in the pursuit of their project—information, labor, deferential behavior, pleasure, appreciation from afar, a trade deal, an exchange of land for cash, and so on.

All of this, however, is subject to the tension surrounding other’s relationship to the rector-actor alliance. Within that alliance, rector and actor struggle over the attribution of authorship, and thus over recognition and redistribution. Outside the complicity of hierarchical alliance, the struggle is different: other struggles to have what is attributed as behavior recognized as action. From whom, where, and when such recognition might be forthcoming, and whether it is even desired, is itself a space of tremendous variation. But we may hypothesize that the core of the tension is as