Power in Modernity

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

Isaac Ariail Reed

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226689593
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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?

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 game”8 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Two Parables from Kafka
• part i   Power
• part ii   Modernity
• part iii   Power in Modernity
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Footnotes