Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies 9780226689319, 9780226689456, 9780226689593, 2019034375

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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 and 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 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20

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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/./chicago/.. 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 :Mcyli Klmm vsam yta~yk vsam Kta al yk Kyla vrmay~rwa lkl Mih lvqb imw lavmw~ la hvhy rmayv 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

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pa r t i Power 1

Rector, Actor, Other Rector, Actor, Other Authorship Alterity Other as Enemy and Slave Scapegoats

9 9 12 18 21 27

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

30 30 33 35 39 43 46

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51 51 52 56 57 60 63

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

65 68 69 72 74 74 75

x

contents

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

78 79 82 86 89 92

pa r t i i 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

99 102 102 108 112 116 121 126 135

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

148 148 152 155 160 166 169

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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

171 175 179 181

187 191 196 198 201

contents

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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

204 207 210 216

pa r t i i i 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 265 Index 267

223 223 229 232 237 246 251 253 260

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.” 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.

1. “Before the Law” appears in Kafka’s novel The Trial. It is reprinted in Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes: In German and English (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 61–79; quotations are from pp. 61–65. 2. Derrida’s reading does contain some clues about performativity, but he is much more concerned with what constitutes literature as literature, and seeks also to retell the classic Freudian

2

Introduction

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. More social scientific interpretations bring the story into relationship with human geography and the sociology of the state. 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.” 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

origin story of morality and law originating in repression as, instead, a testament to the effectivity of texts in conjuring submission. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Rutledge, 1999), xiv; Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181–220. 3. Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 44–51. 4. Henk Van Houtum, “Waiting before the Law: Kafka on the Border,” Social and Legal Studies 19, no. 3 (2010): 285–97; Austin Sarat, “The Law Is All Over: Power, Resistance and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 2 no. 3 (2013): 343–79. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992, trans. David Fernbach (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 68–69.

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as true, one must only accept it as necessary.” A “melancholy conclusion,” notes K. 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.” 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 6. Kafka, “Before the Law,” in Parables and Paradoxes, 79. 7. Kafka, “An Imperial Message,” in Parables and Paradoxes, 13–15.

4

Introduction

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.” The narrator of the parable “tells us that his native province is equidistant from the Northern Tribes and from Peking.” In the story, then, the human subject is hung up between the (idealized, fantasized, dreamed-about) emperor, or rector, 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. What will he have to say, and will his 8. Walter Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 317. 9. Sokel, 317. Sokel also notes some similarities between “Before the Law” and “An Imperial Message”—both thematize the contrast between an idealized authority that promises to give life meaning, and actual relations that do not match this idealization at all; the subject’s desire for ideal authority is part of what brings the subject into the less-than-ideal relations. 10. I introduce this term in chapter 1, and explain its provenance in the first note. 11. This structure of delegation is mirrored in “Before the Law” as the doorkeeper says, “I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other.” (Kafka, “Before the Law,” in Parables and Paradoxes, 61). The iterative nature of performativity in Butler and Derrida, as an interaction of acts by a (fragmented and never secure) subject before the law, is rarely connected to the iterative aspect of hierarchy in organizations (e.g. that each boss has a boss). We need to comprehend how the iterative performativity of action under conditions of power is connected to the supposedly hoary Weberian theme according to which “technical qualifications,” appointment on the basis of examination, and alienation of the administrative power-holder from the means of administration accompany the “clearly defined hierarchy of offices” in the modern state and, more generally, in organizations that as-

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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, in its picturing of far-flung connections, and in pire to legal-rational authority. We need to think simultaneously about performance and delegation. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 220. 12. Kafka’s text seems to have a need to pose these problems in a way that renders them slightly mystical, inaccessible to critical and clear-eyed analysis, distant from the actual empires

6

Introduction

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 of Europe. One is reminded of his own set of disidentifications, from his diary of January 8, 1914: “What do I have in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” Quoted in Vivian Liska, When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 1.

pa rt 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 term, Latin for “ruler,” is introduced here because of its multiple affiliations across the supposedly differentiated spheres of “modernity”—King or rex, the Episcopal Church, and the university system. By avoiding identification with any particular source of power, I hope to open up a language for comprehending power and its representation that can trace significations of power across different institutional zones of activity—and across historical eras. Rector is helpful in doing so. It also activates a sense of agency problems and the political difficulties involved in installing new heads of already formed organizations. One can read in Max Weber a certain anticipation of the idea of linking power, action, and agency problems in the ambivalent, difficult, and somewhat funny passage in which he argues, first, that when “permanent technical officials are appointed alongside shifting heads, actual

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chapter 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. 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 knowhow). 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 power will normally tend to fall into the hands of the former, who do the real work, while the latter remain essentially dilettantes.” His example is not from the halls of Bismarck but rather “the situation of the annually elected head (Rektor) of the German university, who administers academic affairs only as a sideline, vis-à-vis the syndics, or under certain circumstances even the permanent officials in the university administration.” The state bureaucracy and the “vanity of academics,” Weber notes, disempower university presidents. Or do they? In the end, this book will attempt to develop a certain distance from the Weberian theory of modern bureaucracy. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 292–93. 2. G. W. F. Hegel writes that “the bondsman, qua self-consciousness in general, also relates himself negatively to the thing, and takes away its independence; but at the same time the thing is independent vis-à-vis the bondsman, whose negating of it, therefore cannot go the length of being altogether done with it to the point of annihilation; in other words, he only works on it. For the lord, on the other hand, the immediate relation becomes through this mediation the sheer negation of the thing, or the enjoyment of it.” Yet, as we shall see, the problem of thingness cannot be locked away in those aspects of “nature” that the bondsman works on. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 116.

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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. 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. 3. Alfred J. López recognizes the triplicate figuration that emerges in Frantz Fanon’s reading of Hegel, particularly Fanon’s theorization of the split colonial subject in terms that both inherit, but also dispute, the Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage. The possibility that the bondsman is not just subjugated but dehumanized into an object haunts the dialectic. Alfred J. López, “Occupying Reality: Fanon Reading Hegel,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 1 (2013): 71–78, 71, 77. 4. A gap in social theory obtains: between theories of power that start from the experience of alterity, and those that start with what I am here calling rector and actor, and thus with capacity, logistics, and legitimate domination. The latter start with state elites and their bureaucratic agents, or ownership and well-paid, high-skilled workers in the global core, and they are oriented to Max Weber’s questions about power. In contrast to Weber, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question is about the other: “Can the subaltern speak?” This question informs what follows, in that I ask, What are the variations in the meaning of alterity and the impact of these variations on the

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chapter 1

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 configuration of various overlapping power relations? And what are the conditions under which others to various power relations can redefine matters such that they gain access to the contest for recognition and redistribution, and the reinterpretation of projects? Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2014), 180–95; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalind D. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). In the midst of his essay “The Stranger”—which is primarily an argument about the stranger as a specific kind of actor, engaged in relationships with various actors and rectors in a complex society—Georg Simmel pauses to note the possibility of the stranger as other: On the other hand, there is a sort of ‘strangeness’ in which this very connection on the basis of a general quality embracing the parties is precluded. The relation of the Greeks to the barbarians is a typical example; so are all the cases in which the general characteristics one takes as peculiarly and merely human are disallowed to the other. But here the expression ‘the stranger’ no longer has any positive meaning. The relation with him is a non-relation; he is not what we have been discussing here: the stranger as a member of the group itself. Simmel recognized the possibility of radical alterity underlying the supposedly useful stranger. He was prescient in this regard. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 148.

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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.” 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. Given 5. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 6. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explained in these terms the different relationship that obtained, in the world of nineteenth-century English literature, between male writers and their “forefathers” and female writers and their “foremothers.” The capacity for literary creation was understood in the culture to accrue to men. Under such conditions, male writers experienced

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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

anxiety of influence, but female writers experienced anxiety of authorship. Thus for women writers of the time, there was not the fear of previous rectors greater than oneself (God, Goethe, Shakespeare) that created, for men, the anxiety of influence. Rather, they were beset by the problem of finding suitable models who had seized writerly authority from the rectors of the age: “The woman writer—and we shall see women doing this over and over again—searches for a female model not because she wants dutifully to comply with male definitions of her ‘femininity’ but because she must legitimize her own rebellious endeavors.” The connection to Judith Butler’s interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel is clear. Bonds(wo)man writes—adds her signifier to—the made object (here, the text). Yet that signifier is effaced as part of the appropriation of her labor; hence the crisis is not only one of making but of recognition of originality: “If the bondsman is to recognize the marks made on the object as his own, then that recognition must take place through an act of reading or interpretation by which the marks that the bondsman sees are somehow understood to represent the bondsman. It is not that the activity must be witnessed, but that the signs produced must be read as an effect of the effectivity that designates the bondsman, must in some way be understood to refer retroactively to the bondsman as signatory.” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 46, 50, 51. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 37–38.

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elite? The answer we develop will affect how we interpret the results of the fracturing of that elite.) 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” 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.” 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. 7. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso Books, 1994); Mark S. Mizruchi, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 8. Sherry B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 12–17. 9. The core of Max Weber’s political sociology (especially pp. 901–1110 in Weber, Economy and Society) can be considered an extended meditation on the varied and complex ways in which the discretion of rectors and the pursuit by actors of their own projects interact in relation and representation in the construction of specifically “political” organizations. See Edgar Kiser, “Comparing Varieties of Agency Theory in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology: An Illustration from State Policy Implementation,” Sociological Theory 17, no. 2 (1999): 146–70; and Julia Adams, “Culture in Rational Choice Theories of State-Formation,” in State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 98–122. 10. Charles Tilly’s narrative of transitions to modernity is often one of changed rules for ruling, resulting from the escalation of demands for war-making: “As authorities sought to draw resources and acquiescence from the subject population, state authorities, other powerholders, and groups of ordinary people bargained out (however lopsidedly) new agreements concerning the conditions under which the state could exact or control, and the kinds of claims that power holders or ordinary people could make on the state.” Modernity, as the institution of direct rule

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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. 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. 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. Furby states, is such a shift: “After 1750, in the eras of nationalization and specialization, states began moving aggressively from a nearly universal system of indirect rule to a new system of direct rule: unmediated intervention in the lives of local communities, households, and productive enterprises.” Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 101, 103. See also Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 11. Jeffrey Olick, The Politics of Regret: Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007). 12. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

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thermore, 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, 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.

13. Sigmund Freud chastised men for needing an illusion of ultimate father-rectors. But the temptation to take up another’s project as one’s own is a widespread sociological phenomenon, and we need not lean on a psychoanalytic theory of religion to recognize it. A classic example of this dilemma for actor, and of the plurality of sometimes odd ways in which it is resolved, comes from domestic service in nineteenth-century England as represented in countless novels and plays, and which is the subject of the moral anguish of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Remains of the Day. In these stories, the head butler takes up the projects of the master of the house, and his rules for ruling, with more gusto than the master himself. In this instance, actor takes up rector’s projects for the legitimacy that accrues to actor’s place in the chain, and for the pleasurable self-concept that obtains as a result. He can, furthermore, engage in the pleasures of enforcement without having to claim the ultimate prerogatives and responsibilities of mastership. Oscar Wilde’s humor sympathetically understood, yet mocked mercilessly, the subtle pleasures of precisely this resolution of the dilemma of being a “high-status” servant; Wilde plays with the iteration of identifications and disidentifications found between the gentleman and his “man.” The upper-class Englishman thinks that he is the project. In a different context, Louis XIV held a similar self-conception. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. and ed. James Strachey, standard ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 14. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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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. For to act for oneself or for a rector, actual or imagined, is Hamlet’s question. 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 humaninhuman 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, 15. See discussions in Karl Marx, Capital, Penguin Classics (New York: Penguin Group, 1993); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 16. The audacity of Shakespeare was to make this the question for many of his royals, pictured repeatedly as actors subject to extreme constraint, rather than rectors to whom much discretion and pleasure had accrued as a result of their divine heroism.

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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 within”—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 follows. Excluded and profaned, other is not, on the intersubjective terms of the relation between rector and actor, understood to be a full subject capable of reason, decision, and expression—that is, of action and authorship. But it remains the case that other is, qua human individual or group, capable of these things, though not represented as such. The wretched of the earth act rather than “behave,” attesting to their subjecthood. The very possibility of action under 17. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–20, 273–90. 18. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

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the enforced conditions of alterity haunts the minds of the rectors and actors who aspire to govern not only their own chains of power but the world at large. Other can be subject to radical dehumanization, and thus, in rector’s imagination, construed as animal or robot. But what does this mean? The representation of other as inhuman can be a source of dismissal and forgetting, but also of fear—the approach of an enemy army that appears as a “force of nature,” an unstoppable vector of violence without mercy or discretion, is also a coding of alterity. So given that other can act (even if not recognized in certain quarters, variably consequential for generalized social interpretation, as being able to do so), we come across certain questions: (1) Will other pursue entirely different projects conducted and coded as outside the power game of rector and actor, thereby rejecting the project of rector and actor entirely, and pursuing instead an objectification of rector and actor that, though perhaps not equivalent to the objectification other has suffered, nonetheless holds them at a distance? Or (2) Will other struggle to get in the serious game which is ongoing between rector and actor, and thus become a “co-worker in the kingdom of culture?” This is a question, then, not of anxiety of influence versus anxiety of authorship, not of the capacity to wield power and gain leverage in a seesaw game, but rather of access to one’s own humanity in a social situation whose most common and most public schemas of interpretation deny said humanity. Always already partially reduced by interpretation and institution to “behavior,” other must make a claim to be an actor in the existential sense, and must further have such a claim accepted (“recognized”) before other can struggle for authorship. 19. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 10. 20. In 1791 a plantation manager working for an absentee owner of sugar plantations in the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola (a quintessential example of actor and rector) expressed utter disbelief at the possibility that the black revolutionaries could be the author of their own actions: “There is a motor that powers them and that we cannot come to know. All experienced colons know that this class of men has neither the energy nor the combination of ideas necessary for the execution of this project, whose realization they nevertheless are marching toward with perseverance.” This disbelief inflected, as well, the debates over colonial policy in Paris; e.g. Victor Hughes’s letter in 1796 to a minister of Saint-Domingue claimed that “the government alone can create the happiness of the noirs . . . They are incapable of doing it themselves.” For Hughes, the “will” came from elsewhere—in this case “none other than that of those vile instruments who have constantly manipulated them.” Similarly, the journal of a royalist planter in Léogane expressed exasperation and confusion at the skill of the rebels, and complained bitterly that the formerly enslaved interpreted their violent seizure of power “as an act of justice, telling themselves that they are the cause of our wealth.” This documentation

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Other as Enemy and Slave Variation in the social life of alterity can be partly comprehended by imagining a spectrum that runs between the figure of the slave and that of the enemy. The enemy is a figure whose removal from a network of rectors and actors does not mean removal from all networks; it means instead that the enemy exists in a separate network whose projects are interpreted, by the original network, as in direct opposition to the projects of rector and actor. Enmity, then, is a relationship between relatively well-defined hierarchies of rectors and actors, whose representations of themselves rely symbolically on their other. Warfare is the paradigmatic instance of the other as enemy, and the annals of warfare are lined with two recurrent and seemingly contradictory themes. First, the culture of warfare involves the radical profanation and dehumanization of the enemy who will be killed in war, and for the killing of which the collectivity’s own actors must die or risk death. But second, in the history of war we see the recurrent theme of grudging respect articulated by generals for their counterparts on the other side, when the enemy executes a particularly brilliant set of strategies and tactics (on the ludic side of social life, this is replicated in the relationship between opposing football managers). This respect for the enemy is different from the fear of being overrun by an enemy horde, which is more a modified form of the fear of nature, which is taken to include the dehumanized other, who is interpreted and profaned as lacking coherent projects of other’s own. Rather, respect for one’s enemy involves a kind of contradictory recognition of those who are being pursued with intent to kill as themselves equally human; but it is notoriously a property of generals—that is, of the rectors who send actors into the field to die; these rectors develop the ability to see their counterparts as simultaneously rector and other. If the enemy is taken not in violent antagonism but in speech-giving agonism, the coding of alterity indicated by “enemy” shifts to “adversary,” and one arrives at a certain understanding of power politics, identified by Chantal Mouffe as the democratic paradox. “The aim of democratic politics is to conof the disbelief and confusion about the idea that black persons could be the author of their own actions, along with the documentation of the rebels’ political will to self-government and freedom, meets up with the anarchist political theorist James Martel’s concept of misinterpellation. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1878–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 110, 282; Ricarda Hammer and Alexandre White, “Towards a Sociology of Colonial Subjectivity: Political Agency in Haiti and Liberia,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 2 (2019): 215–28; James R. Martel, The Misinterpellated Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–2.

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struct the ‘them’ in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed but as an ‘adversary,’ that is, somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question.” If adversaries cease to disagree, she argues, that is because a “radical change in political identity” has occurred; “it is more a sort of conversion than a process of rational persuasion.” And so in democratic politics the goal is to “transform antagonism to agonism . . . providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary.” This revision of the concept of the enemy into the concept of the adversary retains the idea of an opposition between differentiated networks of rectors and actors, for political adversaries not only build alliances to win but in part define themselves via their opposition to the other’s alliances. If politics “indicates the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual,” and such a conflict is between “parties,” then parties are engaged in a struggle that imitates enmity but is not reducible to it. Parties live within a house of power, because they take their own rector-actor alliances as relationships that must work in the project of defeating their political others or adversaries, and thus gaining access to the state. Here again we see the grudging respect of rectors for rector-others, insofar as the adversary’s capacity for imaginative and strategic action can emerge alongside the vast apparatus of profane representation aimed at the alliance coded as “other.” What makes an enemy an adversary is the recognition of the capacity for authorship. The rector-actor alliance exists in tension with the other-asenemy, a tension generated by a radical lack of hermeneutic charity. Precisely because the capacities of the enemy to be a subject are ambiguous, these are relations of opposition that easily become negative relations of exclusion, where some are adversaries but others are enemies. Violence and various forms of economic, geographical, and political domination—as when a group of states, each with their own apparatus of rectors and actors, and each with their own economic reach, collude to “lock out” an enemy state from trade, diplomacy, and so on—are examples. However, such relations may become disputes, wherein, “if the tension has been able to be wholly absorbed into the sphere of disputes,” it is then “integrated into the sphere of norms susceptible 21. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso Books, 2000), 101–3. 22. Mouffe, 101. 23. Weber, “Class, Status, Party.”

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to general application.” At this point, others become political adversaries, which is what Mouffe intends by her transformation of antagonism into agonistic politics: the other is in some way brought “inside” the world of political culture and becomes a subject of opposition, but a subject nonetheless. Sociological analysis then turns to the representation and relational struggles required for the transformation in the interpretation of other, a profound, messy, usually incomplete process whereby other is brought into the world of actors but perhaps never completely, insofar as new actors remain caught in a cultural milieu that generates the slings and arrows of various profanations. If the enemy evokes respect amidst opposition and violence (we might say: a recognition by rector-actor that other participates in a network of human projects), then at the other end of the spectrum we find the enslaved other as dehumanized agent with no (actorly or rectorly) projects of other’s own. In Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death—and the debates that have emerged around it—we find sociological analysis of the cultural, political, and economic conditions of slave societies, and thus a theory of alterity. Slavery in Patterson is constituted by the social death of the person—“the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” In particular, social death in Patterson is precisely the removal of personhood that is normally granted by networks of alliance with other persons, by cultural traditions and collective memories with which to make meaning out of trauma, and by the legally granted capacity to make public claims on others. Enslavement places the other outside all socially constituted and publicly recognized chains of power. Masters strip from the enslaved the very possibility of entering recognized alliance in the pursuit of projects. The intersecting projects of rectors and actors within a slave society construe a social system of repeated exclusion of slaves-as-others from all projects. And so, 24. Hans Morgenthau, The Concept of the Political, trans. Maeva Vidal (London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2012), 130. 25. Jeffrey C. Alexander’s investigation of the modes of incorporation into the civil sphere represents one sociological explanation of how, in societies in which the discourses of the civil sphere are in some sense pertinent, others are transformed into actors. Instances of “internal colonialism in civil societies” are revealing in this regard because they “illustrate the ambiguities that out-group subordination generates in every society that supports a relatively autonomous civil sphere.” Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 416, 417. 26. There is a link to war, and thus to the enemy, in Patterson’s theory; he tracks the social death of slaves obtained from without through war as intrusive social death. Defeated and surrendered, they are not physically but socially dead. Crucially, however, Patterson also has the inverse category—extrusive social death of the slave as fallen insider. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 13.

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Patterson shows, the slave becomes an “element of the society” whose liminal incorporation via “institutionalized marginality . . . the loss of natality as well as honor and power” makes the enslaved person into a nonperson. In this regard, in a slave relation the master “in a godlike manner mediated between the socially dead and the socially alive.” The discussions of Patterson’s argument are multidimensional, but of particular interest are those arguments that have arisen from the grappling with agency and resistance in the histories of modern American slavery written after Patterson’s text was published. These texts affirm the interpretation of slavery as a condition “not of extreme alienation within the community, but rather of absolute exclusion from any community.” Yet they also engage the manifest evidence that no matter how vicious the metaproject of denying personhood to enslaved persons was, (fragile) social networks emerged, (sub rosa) politics of everyday life were engaged in, and thus the “captives’ will to remain fully recognizable as human subjects” was not extinguished. (Patterson recognized this in his work, but it was not the central thrust of his argument.) And so Vincent Brown argues that the concept of social death is useful, not as an ontological descriptor but as a characterization of the project of masters— 27. Patterson, 45–46. 28. Patterson, 46. 29. For example, reviews appeared in Ethnohistory, the Americas, the Journal of Economic History, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and Canadian Journal of African Studies. From the beginning, however, the reaction from the historians of American slavery was pointed in critique and productive in dialogue. Michael Craton’s review in the Journal of American History insisted on the uniqueness of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the remarkable establishment of familial units in the face of radical domination in the United States. Michael Craton, “Review of Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, by Orlando Patterson,” Journal of American History 70, no. 4 (March 1984): 862–63. 30. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 31. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 30. 32. Smallwood, 101. 33. In the preface to the new edition of Slavery and Social Death, Patterson both discusses his agreement that “social death in all its existential constraints on the slave could coexist with agency, cultural creativity, and occasional rebellion,” and delineates how this argument about the history of American slavery is entwined with a second set of arguments concerning the aftereffects of the trauma of slavery on “black life today” in the United States. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 2nd ed., with a new preface (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), xiii.

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one that proved elusive, at least insofar as masters sought total dehumanization of humans: “The farther slaveholders moved toward the goal of complete mastery, the more they found that struggles with their human property would continue, even into the most elemental realms: birth, hunger, health, fellowship, sex, death and time.” At issue here is the question of the agency of the enslaved—the question of “hidden transcripts.” Insofar as we do not use a romanticized, heroic-individualist concept of agency (as Brown notes, “the agency of the weak and the power of the strong have too often been viewed as simply opposites”), this body of work reveals how the construction of alliances and the participation in subversive chains of power—however fragile— were a key aspect of “what the enslaved actually made of their situation.” What Patterson and his critics share, then, is a judgment of slavery as an extreme form of alterity in the sense that the goal of the masters in a slave society is to ensure that the enslaved are others to all recognized projects, even though the actual reduction of action to behavior is never possible. Yet to be other to a project—to be excluded from the space of dispute over authorship—does not mean other cannot become an agent without becoming an actor. That the enslaved are agents without connection to any recognized project is confirmed in the second-to-last chapter of Slavery and Social Death, wherein Patterson takes up the difficult case of slaves elevated to high positions of political power, status, prestige, and wealth—in ancient Rome, the Islamic empires, Byzantium, and China. These enslaved persons were per34. Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1231–49; quotation is from p. 1241. 35. The links between Patterson and political theory are revealing in this regard. John Rawls uses the social construal of nonpersonhood as a foil to his own account of political liberalism— the enslaved, he argues, are the paradigmatic instance of persons who are unable to be the source of claims. Meanwhile Axel Honneth frames his concept of recognition—developed as it is from an account of degradation—partly in Patterson’s terms (recall Patterson’s use of the term dishonor). In Honneth’s terms, the enslaved were subject to consistent physical disrespect, moral disrespect, and collective disrespect. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (1985): 243; Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 131–40, especially 135. 36. Brown, “Social Death and Political Life,” 1244. 37. Brown, 1236. 38. Patterson’s theory of slavery appears to have held up relatively well vis-à-vis the ancient world, while the question of modern slavery is much more vexed. The issue of modernity, then, haunts even (the reception of) Patterson’s book, which was constructed precisely in a manner designed to avoid the narration of a transition to modernity. For slavery and social death in the ancient world, see J. E. Lendon, Empire of Honor: The Act of Government in the Roman World (Oxford: Claredon Press, 2002), and Anthony Barbieri-Low, “Becoming Almost Somebody:

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sonally influential on their masters, conducted politics and made deals on their masters’ behalf, and lived exceedingly well relative to many other persons within their respective societies. Yet, Patterson notes, these persons were found to be dishonorable and socially despised or mocked, subject to violence and removal at the whim of their master, and often recruited from the ranks of the foreign or the castrated. In all cases in which the phenomenon could be found, there was a strict contrast drawn, in the common wisdom of the society, between master-slave relations (which dishonored the slave) and patron-client relations (which honored the client who became associated with a patron of high public esteem). In other words, the conduct of power in society depended on the representation of delegation that obtained. And the representation of delegation involved a strict opposition between sacred delegation from patron to client (rector-actor) and profane delegation from patron to slave (rector-other). In the case of the high-living slave and master, delegation flows from rector to other, but no honor flows with it; in the case of client and patron, both delegation and honor flow together from rector to actor. Elevated, wealthy, and powerful slaves were always useful to their masters precisely because they could not have their own projects—they were rich nonauthors. As such, they could conduct politics on their masters’ behalf without their own humanity, recognition, and honor entering the power situation. Thus we have the slave and the enemy as codings of alterity. The spectrum runs from others who cannot be made an agent precisely because of the

Manumission and Its Complications in the Early Han Empire,” in On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death, ed. John Bodel and Walter Schneider (New York: Wiley and Sons, 2016), 122–35. 39. Carl Schmitt’s thought merged or tied together the two ends of the spectrum of otherness—the socially dead and the powerful enemy—as threats to the homogeneous body politic. This perceived threat is the context in which Schmitt argued that any symbolic violence that flows toward other is somehow connected to physical violence, especially the possibility of violent death in war. In Schmitt, the other is dangerous precisely because other lacks the enchanted connection to the land that makes one a political actor to the sovereign’s rector, and thus, in the modern era, part of a mobilizable population for a national army. In Schmitt’s writings, the defense of land in war hovers over “normal” life, and so the exception structures unexceptional “politics.” His concept of the political is grounded, then, not only in an understanding of war and international relations, but in his own investment in the enchanted relations between sovereign, people, and land. See Jens Meierhenrich, “Fearing the Disorder of Things,” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, ed. Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 171–216; Duncan Kelly, “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship,” in Meierhenrich and Simons, The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt; and Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).

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opposition constituted by their enmeshment in their own relations of rectorship and actorhood, to others that the project of social death attempts to make into nonpersons within the society. Enslaved others “represent” rector (or a rector-actor alliance) without being recognized as persons themselves. The core theoretical question around otherness now appears as the relationship between (1) the degree to which, via relation and representation, other is brought into power relations, and (2) the degree to which other is recognized as capable of action rather than mute behavior. Scapegoats There remains another possibility. The other can become a scapegoat. That is to say, other can be ascribed authorship of actions, ideas, and, in particular, 40. Haiti as “modernity disavowed” is revealing. In revolutionary Saint-Domingue, the question of the spectrum of otherness (and its potential collapse) also emerged, in the distinction between free people of color and insurgent slaves. The metropole construed both as “black,” and yet in collapsing both via a reference to skin color as signifier, Paris pulled together the “unpredictable” landholding mulattoes (other as enemy) with the abject category of slave (other as outsider within). The inhumanity inscribed on racial others calls forth a central contradiction of transitions to modernity. Those coded as inhuman are assumed by those who so code them to be incapable of accessing authorship, and thus the game of rector and actor that all humans play; yet somehow simultaneously, the racial other is feared because, qua enemy, they will work only for “their own rectors”—and be a perfect agent in so doing. Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 41. Via a conversation with Mitchell Atkinson, it has been brought to my attention that, if the enemy and the slave are opposing figures of alterity, the scapegoat may have as its opposite, or as its negative, invisibility (resulting in a diamond-like conceptual structure made out of two oppositions). In particular, the “unmarked” quality of a subject who is not in a particular project—a common occurrence implied by the very idea of a project—may have as its extreme version the radical invisibility of the subject qua person available to join projects. This is a position that, as the ironic opening lines of Ellison’s novel have it, is “sometimes advantageous,” though “it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.” Interestingly, one of the key narratives of invisibility in Ellison involves an agency problematic similar to those studied here, as the college president Bledsoe gives the narrator sealed letters of recommendation, whose contents ensure his inability to be seen as an actor who will be an effective agent by prospective employers. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 3 (quotation), 149–95; Thomas R. Whitaker, “Spokesman for Invisibility,” in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, by Kimberly W. Benston (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1987), 386–403; see especially 391–92. 42. Réné Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

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“problems” that rector and actor wish to disavow. This is mirror-world authorship. Nonetheless the possibility must be mentioned because this, too, is a kind of relationship that can be established between a rector-actor alliance and an other. As we have seen, rector and actor have a project, and they struggle over its understanding, its co-constitution, and the distribution of its rewards. They also struggle with the world, and with the other as a representative of the contingencies and frustrating flux of the world. And other, not being in the project, is generally excluded from these struggles for recognition and redistribution. In scapegoating, other is interpreted as the profane author of rector’s and actor’s worst problems. Interestingly, in the work of the theorist of scapegoating, Réné Girard, there is also a rector (“model”) and an actor (“disciple”). Actor desires an object because rector desires it; desire in persons and groups is mimetic. (One is reminded of those in low-wage work who claim to aspire to one day meet and “learn from” the CEO of their corporation; in reality television, the desire is inverted as the boss goes undercover as one of his employees.) In the modeldisciple relationship, then, the very process of bringing a subordinate along in the pursuit of something makes that subordinate a competitor—disciples are also rivals. For Girard sacrificial killing (both literal killing with a symbolic import and various symbolic substitutes for sacrifice) renders social order out of the bad feeling, chaos, and reciprocal violence that attend the (always failed) production of sameness via mimetic desire. Sacrifice, then, prevents “violence from reverting to a state of immanence.” Girard’s theory of the scapegoat is projected through a prism of discontent with all that is modern. But rather than a disaffected account of a disenchanted modernity, we can see in this work something important about the blaming of the other as a form of attributed authorship, which then also becomes a point of struggle. The scapegoat is the other to which the ills of the social body—the problems of recognized rectors and actors—have been attributed. Thus the other, symbolized 43. In Girard, human sameness and the desire to maintain it produces competition, conflict, and, eventually, violence; this makes his theory quite anti-Hegelian, as he theorizes power and violence not across difference per se but in the tensions produced by sameness. Andreas Wilmes, “Portrait of René Girard as a Post-Hegelian: Masters, Slaves, and Monstrous Doubles,” Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence 1, no. 1 (2017): 57–85. 44. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 266. 45. Later in his career, Girard proposed that the epochal importance of Christianity lies in its recognition of the innocence of the scapegoat. Réné Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 46. The fantastical attribution of perverted authorship to others is one way to track the history of anti-Semitism. But it also exists in the everyday mechanics of how modern states manage

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as scapegoat, invites the magical thinking according to which the removal of the other will result in the removal of social conflict, disease, unhappiness, rivalries, and so on. Thus in scapegoating it is precisely those who have been denied authorship of their own actual actions—that is, had action reduced to behavior—who are suddenly interpreted as authors of that which rector and actor wish to disavow. and/or direct the distribution of violence within the populations over which they rule. Consider the variable writing and application of accomplice laws in the United States. These are laws that dictate that those who aid and abet a crime are responsible for it, even if they were not its “primary actor.” This can include acts taken by accomplices that were not planned together or “premeditated”: co-conspiracy to burgle a convenience store renders one person responsible for his accomplice’s discharge of a firearm during said burglary. The laws, and contestation over them, reveal how representation of authorship is central to the distribution and execution of violence; the question addressed by the law is: Who is author here? When combined with racialized policing, the practice of scapegoating becomes quite clear. This is exemplified by the stunning case of Lakeith Smith in Alabama. One of five teens confronted by police called to investigate a burglary, Smith received a sentence of thirty years in prison for the murder of his alleged accomplice A’Donte Washington, who was shot by a police officer who arrived on the scene. The doubling of authorship and nonauthorship and the substitution of the scapegoat so as to absorb violence that is disavowed by “upstanding” and “ordered” society is thus brought into stark relief. The act of deadly force was interpreted twice by the law in Alabama. First, it was rendered as justifiable homicide by the man who fired a bullet from his gun, who was absolved of “responsibility”—that is, he was interpreted as not the author of the act (rather, the “situation” and the “dangerous criminal” were the authors of his actions). Second, the gunshot was interpreted as the murder of Washington by Smith, such that the latter absorbs authorship of the violence committed by the agent of the state. Hence Girard’s noted locution takes on a meaning he himself might not entirely intend: “The victim [of sacrificial killing] should belong both to the inside and the outside of the community.” Michael G. Heyman, “Due Process Limits on Accomplice Liability,” Minnesota Law Review 99: 131–40; Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 272.

2

Agency Relations

Action and Agency In this chapter, I will develop a concept of agency through which to study power, and thereby mobilize the vocabulary proposed in the previous chapter. I begin with a definition. Agency is the ability to send an agent into the world, and bind said agent to act on behalf of the sender. The intellectual utility of this definition for the study of power is grounded in a common human experience: getting someone else to do something for you, by persuasion, coercion, emotional connection, the performance of need . . . many are the methods of securing another actor as your agent. Yet this entails a theoretical distinction between action and agency, so that we can discuss the relationship between the two, and a critique of the notions of agency that have been dominant in Western social theory. This shift in thinking has as its goal the capacity to think “structurally” and “pragmatically” in the same frame: to theorize power as a relation between persons or groups of persons, rather than one between a person or group and a Behemoth (or . . . Leviathan); to understand, within a relational theory of agency, how nonhuman objects and systems inflect these relations; and yet still provide a means for interpreting and explaining “structures” of power in social life. If action is what all humans do as they move through the world, there is great variation in the agents (human and nonhuman) that humans are able to recruit to act for them. When one human actor or group enters an agency relation with a second human actor or group, the first accrues agency insofar as the second goes into the world to act for, and stand in for, the first. Consequently agency relations can form a chain of delegation that unfolds like an accordion, incorporating into it many actors. These chains overlap and intersect, creating networks of action and reaction given form by interpretation.

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The process of sending and binding an agent gives both order and dynamism to action in the world. Insofar as agency accrues along these chains, and settles on some of the persons occupying some of the nodes therein, then the capacities of some persons come to depend on the degree of binding control they exercise over other humans who have become their agents. We sometimes say that those whose capacity and discretion are enhanced in this way “have power.” The locution is slightly problematic, because this “having” is a result of “action at a distance,” the entrainment of certain actions with those of the “power holder”—and this is always a problem in an uncertain world subject to the contingencies of consciousness and decision. Hence flux is the rule of social life and stability must be explained, even in instances of extreme domination. Action becomes meaningful in time, like a melodic phrase. As persons take the world of social life from the past through the present to the future, they have ends-in-view, combined with interpretations of the situations they are in and the (themselves interpreted) means at their disposal. The complexity of the world, however, requires reduction though representation for such action to have direction. As a result, the navigation of the world depends on the assignment of meaning. So humans engage in a constant navigation of the world via the anticipation associated with ends-in-view; this navigation of the world is action; the understanding of world being navigated emerges from interpretation. Social life, then, can be conceptualized as action-reaction flows of variable amounts of reciprocity, variably projected across space and time via “sociotechnical means of projectively articulating actions across space and time through mediating communication, transportation, and storage.” This understanding of action places actors, both individual and collective, in an environment of needs and symbols. Actors create and tragically fall short 1. Andrew Abbott, Processual Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 2. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 3. Andrew Abbott, “Temporality and Process in Social Life,” in Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 209–39. 4. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5. Andreas Glaeser, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 30. Glaeser’s consequent processualism differs from midcentury interactionism: “It is better to talk about interlinked or interwoven action-reaction effect flows rather than interaction. The latter is merely a special case of the former where the interlinking is produced by spatiotemporal copresence and mutual attunement. In the sense that there is no action that is not also a reaction to antecedent actions that have taken place at other times in other places social phenomena are always translocal and transtemporal.” Glaeser, 30; emphasis in the original.

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of ends whose very meaning is both inspiring and, in its many layers, partially obscure to them. And so: action is universal, agency is historically and sociologically formed. Action refers to the way humans have projects and act in the world in a way dependent on both their conditions and their subjective interpretation of those conditions. In contrast, to accrue agency is to accrue, through agents, a distinct increase in the probability of achieving one’s projects (understood as the reinterpretation, through time, of the ends-in-view that were part of the ensemble of interpretations of situations at any given point in time). The reification of action-reaction flows and the habits that accompany them into networks solid enough to be traced as hierarchical in both position and interpretation is a notification to us that we are dealing with power as a peculiarly important subset of the guide rails for actions and reactions in the world. But this solidity—what sociologists debate as “power structure”—is itself subject to certain temporal rhymes and rhythms, which is to say it always carries some kind of aesthetic, and allows for the possibility of a certain degree of redirection by performance. This is because navigation of the world requires its signification, which introduces contingencies of interpretation. The recruitment of actors as allies and subordinates, as agents-in-theworld, is a process that carries with it the immanent possibility of two tragedies. The first is the misrecognition of the actor who has been turned into an agent, and thus asked to partially abrogate actor’s own projects—the result being struggles over recognition and redistribution. The second is dehumanization: within the very process of securing an actor as one’s agent-in-theworld lies the possibility of using persons and groups of persons as if they were mechanical or technological agents, and thus robbing them of personhood. This has as its endpoint one of the two poles of otherness addressed in the previous chapter, enslavement. And yet, despite the tragic possibilities always inherent in recruitment and the pursuit of projects, there is also a way in which “acting on behalf of ” need not be domination in the richly normative meaning given to that term by social and political theory. Existentially, all humans are actors in a triple sense. First, we act for rectors when we follow directions, accept authority, respond to a threat, and/or participate in the organization and reorganization 6. For the distinction between action and agency, see the heterodox reading of Aristotle on action in Isaac Ariail Reed and Michael Weinman, “Agency, Power, Modernity: A Manifesto for Social Theory,” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 6, no. 1 (2019): 6–50. 7. Michael Bacharach and Diego Gabetta, “Trust in Signs,” in Trust in Society, ed. Karen S. Cook (New York: Russell Sage, 2001), 148–84. 8. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005).

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of hierarchy. Yet second, we can also act for a project, and indeed even interpret the individuals and groups of humans who serve as our rectors as themselves allies in, and thus the “means to,” the accomplishment of a project we value highly and of which we believe we have the best interpretation. Thus third, we also have the capacity to transform, to organize, to act on and in and through the world, on the terms of something we have ourselves imagined—we can create our own projects, and articulate them over and against those projects we have inherited. The worst architect has something the best bee does not. Projects In a manner perhaps typical of the zigzagging, noncumulative progress in refinement of the human sciences, the conceptualization of human action as bound up in, and bound to, projects has been steadily making its way back onto the stage of our minds after forty years of dead authors, the end of the subject, and encoded habitus. The etymology of the term itself (from the Latin proicere—to throw forth) indicates a distinction between action-in9. In sociology, the pragmatist approach to action and the critical sociology of power are often thought of as competitors. Can we think them together? The intellectual wager of this book is that the concerns of the social theory of power (control, domination, enforced inferiority, legitimation of hierarchy, justification of violence) can be made commensurate with a theory of action that we can actually believe, which is to say a realistic account of the pragmatics of creativity and habit. The (flexible) language of rector/actor/other is designed to theorize hierarchy and power commensurate with a processual account of action, and, by so doing, render a different and more dynamic understanding of power “structures.” The emerging sociology of political engagement appears to be seeking a similar synthesis. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8; Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times, trans. Rachel Gomme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 245–57; Abbott, Processual Sociology; Eeva Luhtakallio and Laurent Thévenot, “Politics of Engagement in an Age of Differing Voices,” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 5, nos. 1–2 (2018): 1–11. 10. Mayer N. Zald, “Progress and Cumulation in the Human Sciences after the Fall,” Sociological Forum 10, no. 3 (September 1995): 455–79. 11. The meanings of this term in the Roman world anticipate the arguments that emerge in this and the next chapter about power, allies, and materiality. These were (1) to extend or stretch out into the world; (2) to abandon, throw away, or throw overboard; (3) to hold in front. The first meaning captures the agency relation as it is imagined by rector to work, if actor is properly sent and bound in action. The second meaning suggests some relationship between sending-andbinding and exclusion. The third meaning suggests how a project includes appearances and their material accoutrements—that is, a theory of performance—to which I will return in chapters 3 and 4. I thank Fiona Rose-Greenland for this insight.

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time dependent on purpose and imagination, and behavior brought forth by stimulus. In a project, a person or set of persons projects into an uncertain future an image of the world; that imagined future becomes part of their repertoire for navigating the present world; attempts to remake the world take on a relationship to the projected image via interpretation. This process requires a typification of the world as it is. And so the pursuit of a project combines models of the world and models for the world. Human action, based in the creativity and habit of persons, is organized into iterative, nested, and overlapping projects. People place minute projects within larger ones (making and drinking coffee to become more alert, becoming more alert so as to perform better in a job interview, performing well in a job interview to secure a job, securing a job so as to secure a steady paycheck, securing a steady paycheck so as to care for one’s children and send them to school . . .) as a way to manage the irrevocably complex nature of the world. Furthermore, lack of the very possibility of projects—via lostness or listlessness, overt or covert destruction of self-concept, or violence and the threat of violence—is existentially threatening to the humanity of persons. We all need a project; we are all also bound into various projects not of our own making; we attempt to exercise judgment over the projects we pursue, and this judgment becomes part of the very interpretations of the world that organize said projects. At the level of the human individual, one may propose that projects take the form of externalizing a projection by working on the world (building a boat), solving a problem (planning how to travel from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in under ten hours, and implementing said plan via a series of smaller projects), pursuing experiences (attending a concert), and developing and honing various skills over time. Conceived in this way, we can use the concept of project as a counterpoint to the strictly instrumental understanding of action; indeed we can then trace historically how certain elements of hu12. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Action and Its Environments: Towards a New Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Mustafa Emirbayer and Anne Mische, “What Is Agency?,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 5 (1998): 962–1023; Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 91–96. 13. Arendt’s philosophy of the “process character of action” articulates this well, and links it directly to the origins of the human sciences via Giambattista Vico. Arendt, The Human Condition, 232. 14. This fourfold distinction is an adaptation of William Kirkpatrick, The Project Method: The Use of the Purposeful Act in the Educative Process (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1922). I thank Daniel Huebner for bringing this text to my attention, and discussing it at length with me.

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man action situations are subject to instrumentalization (e.g. the relationship of the subject to the body, such that the cultivation of the self through the body is brought under the rubric of working more and earning more). In the development of children through education, the child comes into being as an actor via a positioning between the constraints of the world and her teacher-director, who can set up toy projects, establish artificial constraints, and imbue the process of working on the world with meaning—if education is noncoercive. (Pragmatists seek educators who will be good rectors.) But against what background, what society, what landscape of meaning, can the pragmatist ideal of encouraging children and adults to “have projects” develop? The milieus we attempt to grasp in the human sciences, and to which I propose to apply an account of action centered on projects, are never shorn of historical formation. This need for analysis and critique may be one reason that the concept of project has been abandoned by some, and perhaps can even sound a bit quaint. Yet here we must notice a series of interesting tensions that, in fact, make the use of the term project quite worthwhile. Projects in Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Said The conceptualization of human action as bound up in, or somehow bound to, projects was subject to a ritualized symbolic murder in social theory in the early pages of Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (he replaced it with the conceptualization of habitus). Despite the fact that Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism was constructed precisely to avoid the necessity of the transcendental ego as a philosophical category, Bourdieu’s move in the academic game of his time was to gouge Sartre as a pure subjectivist who then admits structure only as a crude and meaningless external materiality. Refusing to recognize anything resembling durable dispositions, Sartre makes each action a sort of unprecedented confrontation between the subject and the world . . . such a theory of action was inevitably to lead to the desperate project of a transcendental genesis of society and history (the Critique de la raison dialectique), to which Durkheim seemed to be pointing when he wrote in The Rules of Sociological Method: “it is because the imaginary offers the mind no resistance that the mind, conscious of no restraint, gives itself up

15. Joas, The Creativity of Action, 145–95. 16. This is the basis of the critique of modern American society articulated in the pragmatistdemocratic tradition. Kirkpatrick, in his discussion of the use of projects and the development of human purpose in education, notes rather quickly and incisively that “the purposeful act is not the unit of life for the serf or the slave.” Kirkpatrick, The Project Method, 6.

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to boundless ambitions and believes it possible to construct, or rather reconstruct, the world by virtue of its own strength and at the whim of its desire.”

What is at stake here intellectually, one may propose, is the double threat of, first, a social theory of the subject that dissolves into boundless possibility, and second, the tendency of the image of persons pursuing projects to bend toward a theory of the conscious pursuit of utility, a slippery slope toward instrumentalism. But this latter fear is overdrawn. For to say that energy is mobilized by individuals and groups in relationship to an image of the world is not to say that this mobilization has to be schematized as rational or irrational, strategic or altruistic; to demand such an interpretation in advance of a hermeneutics of action is precisely the problem tendency we are trying to undo here. In Simone de Beauvoir we find the direction for an answer to Bourdieu’s critique of Sartre; she pursues a commensuration of the existentialist understanding of action as projects in the world, hence distinct from behavior, with a sociological appreciation of the inculcation of durable dispositions over time. For example, she tracks the inflection of projects with power when she writes about the woman in love. She shows that for the subordinated woman in an androcentric society, the project of love consumes the self, and thus limits the possibility of other projects; such is not the case for a man. The individual who is a subject, who is himself, if he has the courageous inclination towards transcendence, endeavors to extend his grasp on the world: he is ambitious, he acts. But an inessential creature is incapable of sensing the absolute at the heart of her subjectivity; a being doomed to immanence cannot find self-realization in acts. Shut up in the sphere of the relative, destined to the male from childhood, habituated to seeing in him a superb being whom she cannot possibly equal, the woman who has not repressed her claim to humanity will dream of transcending her being towards one of these superior beings, of amalgamating herself with the sovereign subject.

Thus in de Beauvoir we arrive at the (sociological) “situation” of men being one in which the basic human vocation—of having projects, acting within projects, pursuing projects—“in no way runs counter to his destiny as a male. . . . Whereas it is required of woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as sovereign subject.” One may say, then, that the forming of subjects 17. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 73–74. 18. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Lowe and Brydone Printers, 1956), 608–9. 19. de Beauvoir, 643.

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via “situation” and “habituation” is indeed precisely the question that both Bourdieusians and existentialists wish to address. As we shall see, the advantage of the concept of project—particularly the sense of throwing forth into the world that accompanies it—is that it pairs directly with an understanding of delegation. Embedded in existentialist thought was the iterative notion of projects; Edward Said brought to the concept an appreciation of how projects emerge against a background—a landscape of meaning—which itself is a project of rule. The key third section of the long first chapter of Orientalism is titled “Projects.” The section begins with an account of the multiple projects organized underneath the project for Egypt pursued by Napoleon himself. In the course of the chapter we come to see how the four types of projects introduced above—making, problem solving, enjoying/experiencing, and the honing of skills—were, in the domination of colonies by England and France, organized by the project of empire. Hence “the East is a career” refers to how actors, called into and making a career out of a variety of projects with a variety of skills, did so underneath the umbrella of the project of comprehending and commandeering “the Orient.” The discursive formation of orientalism, then, inflected the understandings and exchanges of many rectors, actors, and others as the pursuit of projects proceeded (in science, in art, in sexual conquest, in the pursuit of capital, in the pursuit of self-development). This imperial project took its meaningful logic from a combination of fantasy and effacement—the creation of a radical alterity, the Easterner as other. The fantasy of the exotic Orient organized the meanings and constraints applied to more particular projects, thus disallowing the possibility of understanding the Eastern other, even when he, she, or they were enrolled in this or that project. For Said, such subprojects were not only tainted by the project of imperial domination but also constituted by it, due to the inner logic of the imperial project, whose ambitions for total knowledge were combined with the ambition for the absolute negation of any personal, historical, political, or cultural subjectivity of actual people in the conquered societies. That such a replacement of understanding with fantasy could not reach its goals (as Homi Bhabha showed) does not mean that the attempt was insignificant to the workings of power. In Said’s rendering, the rules for ruling were given meaningful content via the overarching discursive formation of orientalism, which, I hazard here, Said understands in part as a “project.” Part of this discursive formation was the metanarrative according to which the East was “backward,” “unmodern,” or “uncivilized.” Yet we can also see that sub20. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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projects of a specifically subversive orientation to the imperial project could enter the vast networks of empire, as traced by Leela Gandhi’s reading of the colonial archive, which unearths a series of connections between rectors and actors who had othered the empire itself as their opponent or enemy. It is unlikely that all projects are as systematic in their pursuit of domination, and in their founding of meaning on otherness, as the imperial encounters traced by Said. However, I suspect that the projects that organize how people and groups even come to have projects are always “political” in some sense—they (attempt to) organize many different human projects into a meaningful (if also unruly) whole, and thus invite elbowing and side-taking in the struggle to establish master interpretations of the big project. For these master interpretations in turn inflect and give meaning and purpose to a diverse set of more particular projects, pursued via subnetworks of rectors, actors, and others. Projects about the condition of having a project—how the basic human capacity to have a project is distributed across a population— require the pursuit of alliances (of alliances, of alliances  .  .  .) and are thus “paradigmatically about convincing others to ally with one”—they are inescapably political. I have found it useful to think of such political projects as those organizing projections of the future, collectively held and developed, that span different “zones” of activity that are (or claim to be) differentiated in complex societies. They are ways of organizing the world and its remaking that traverse the usual boundaries of institutions, spheres of justice, and economies of worth. In a certain sense, then, they cannot be “avoided,” whereas for more particular projects, in zones of activity variously defined, there may be a series of off-ramps, depending on how those zones are constructed. Consider the following contrast. A film director has as her project a film, to which she will be (variably) attributed authorship as its auteur. To accomplish such a project, power is exercised (and perhaps disputed as to whether it is legitimate), delegations are made, persons and their conflicting subprojects managed (the sound mixer wants an Oscar too, after all, and he is ruining that scene with the tugboat). But—if the material and institutional circumstances are right—the director

21. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, fin-de-siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 22. John Levi Martin, “The Human Condition and the Theory of Action,” in The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh (London: Anthem Press, 2017), 61.

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can quit (even if her actors-turned-agents are more constrained). She can remove herself from the difficulties of negotiating with the studio and gaining the support of her lead actor; she can disappear to write a novel, and reemerge later to engage the politics of literature; or she can claim, as a move within the literary field, that her novel is “not political.” Of action in service of this or that project, we may say it can be more or less “politicized.” But there is no way to give overarching, metanarrative meaning to the differentiation and complexificaton of a social order, the polarizing of politics in society, the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy, or the projection of violence into the world at large that does not itself involve a set of interpretations themselves consequential for the collective writ large. The question of how to interpret such organizing projects of projects cannot be avoided or dropped out of; it is the variably vibrating moral background for constructing projects themselves; it is the unavoidability of human life as political in the sense traced by Aristotle and Hannah Arendt. The Social Theory of Agency in the Work of Julia Adams I hope that the furniture of the universe implied by the rector-actor-other language is now coming into view. People and groups, variously positioned in intersecting, hierarchical networks, act for and against projects and projects of projects, with which a person can be complicit, which are reinterpreted and transformed by innovation. The interpretation of these projects and their interrelations is one of the reasons why agency relations are so complicated, and subject to such strange variations, sudden changes, and unexpected contingencies. We can now unpack the theoretical genealogy of agency as an approach to power. The definitive breakthrough in the social theory of agency, which followed a complex intellectual history in economics, political science, legal theory,

23. In the extensive body of principal-agent theory in economics and political science that draws from game theory, principal tasks agent with conducting principal’s business or otherwise “representing” principal. Some intriguing applications of the theory go quite far afield from the more standard studies of employer-employee relations, corporation outsourcing to corporation, and shareholder value. For example, if we imagine that the electorate is principal, and the elected official is agent, then we can explain a great deal about bureaucratic capture and why American Presidents tend not to withdraw from foreign wars, even when they are going badly. James D. Morrow, Game Theory of Political Scientists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 294–301.

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and the sociology of organizations, emerges in the work of Julia Adams. She recognizes the two quite disparate meanings of the term agency for social theorists—and traces these back to Thomas Hobbes. In the first meaning, the term agency refers to principal-agent relations, articulated for sociology in rational choice theory (and Adams’s heterodox reading of this theory). Here agency refers to delegation and the ensuing problems of working or shirking, “standing in for” another, and the monitoring and control of agents. For Adams, this is a matter not just of game theory but also of legal hermeneutics (who is liable for the action of an agent-inthe-world?), and, most important, cultural politics: who is understood to be a “natural” rector, actor, or other? Do signifiers of femininity call forth connotations of being agent rather than principal? Adams balances these questions of meaning with the formalism of agency theory, so as to grasp simultaneously subjectivity and signification with the proliferation of agency systems via technology, formal organizations, and thus bureaucracy, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The current moment in world history is for Adams one in which a morass of bureaucratic nonresponsibility introduced by agency relations has “spread like wildfire in every sphere of life.” This is represented for her by the wicked tangle of delegation one encounters when phoning 1-800-How-Am-I-Driving? 24. Gary J. Miller, “Solutions to Principal-Agent Problems in Firms,” in Handbook of New Institutional Economics, ed. Claude Menard and Mary M. Shirley (Boston: Springer, 2005), 349– 70; Susan P. Shapiro, “Agency Theory,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 263–84. See also Ann M. Carlos, “Principal-Agent Problems in Early Trading Companies: A Tale of Two Firms,” American Economic Review 82, no. 2 (1992): 140–45. 25. Julia Adams, “Trading States, Trading Places: The Role of Patrimonialism in Early Modern Dutch Development,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no. 2 (1994): 319–55; Julia Adams, “Principals and Agents, Colonialists and Company Men: The Decay of Colonial Control in the Dutch East Indies,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 1 (1996): 12–28; Julia Adams, “The Rule of the Father: Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern Europe,” in Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion, ed. Charles Camic, Philip Gorski, and D. M. Trubeck (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 237–66; Julia Adams, “1-800-How-Am-I-Driving?,” Social Science History 35, no. 1 (2011): 1–17; Julia Adams and Chris Shughrue, “Bottlenecks and East Indies Companies: Modeling the Geography of Agency in Mercantilist Enterprises,” in Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics, ed. Emily Erikson (Bingley, England: Emerald Publishing Group, 2015), 207–18. 26. James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994); Edgar Kiser, “Comparing Varieties of Agency Theory in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology: An Illustration from State Policy Implementation,” Sociological Theory 17, no. 2 (1999): 146–70; Julia Adams, “The Unknown James Coleman: Culture and History in Foundations of Social Theory,” Contemporary Sociology 39, no. 3 (2010): 253–58.

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in the United States. This first relational concept of agency—articulated in Adams’s poststructuralist counter-reading of rational choice theory—is that which has already been introduced in this chapter: “An agent is somebody to whom someone gives orders or entrusts a task.” The second meaning of agency is evident in the common reaction, by actual people, to the tangled loyalties, frustrated delegations, and abdications of responsibility represented by the bureaucratic morass. This meaning refers, often in the speech genre of the heroic epic, to “capacity, power, free will, action.” In Adams’s analysis, this second concept of agency is central to the rhetorical flourishes (and, perhaps, normative aspirations and cultural identities) of many social researchers—she notes with irony that it is a “useful intellectual bludgeon.” She is quite critical of the metaphysics implied by this second concept, especially its tendency to offer itself as “ground” from which to build social theory. Adams argues that several classics of modern Western social theory (works by Hobbes, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim, in particular) attempted in various ways to foretell the coming resolution of the tension between relational and individual-heroic concepts of agency, while Max Weber was more skeptical about the possibility. Adams is even more skeptical than Weber was, because she tracks how the “key dimensions of doing on behalf of other in service jobs have been systematically abstracted, commodified, xeroxed, and regulated, while multiplying in unforeseen ways.” Thus for Adams the relational concept of agency is primary, and the heroic formats of individual agency and world-remaking can only emerge in analysis as a counterpoint to the detailed (and sometimes playful) interpretation of the accrual of relational agency. Consequently Adams proceeds, in a series of papers, to wrest from formalist social theory and rational choice models of the world a kernel of insight, while shedding their ideological shell. She takes from the formalists an account of three recurrent problems 27. Adams, “1-800-How-Am-I-Driving?,” 1–17; quotation is from p. 6. 28. Adams, 4. 29. Adams, 3. 30. See also Gandhi’s critique of Kant in Affective Communities, 126–41. 31. Adams, “1-800-How-Am-I-Driving?,” 7. 32. Stuart R. Clegg, Frameworks of Power (London: Sage Publications, 1989); Mustafa Emirbayer, “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 2 (1997): 281–317; Jonathan Hearn, Theorizing Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Peeter Selg, “‘The Fable of the Bs’: Between Substantialism and Deep Relational Thinking about Power,” Journal of Political Power 9, no. 2 (2016): 183–205.

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for rectors who recruit actors in order to turn them into agents of one kind or another: 1. Actor’s and rector’s interests are divergent. Actors want to make more money, keep profits, and pursue other opportunities, all while doing as little work for rector as possible. 2. It is a common occurrence that actor is recruited into rector’s project because actor has skills and information—a this-worldliness, we might say— that rector does not have or wishes to avoid. As a result, agency relations are subject to a cat-and-mouse game of trust and self-presentation; actorsas-prospective-agents-for-rector can misrepresent themselves as having what rector needs, and as adhering to rector’s project. 3. Project outcomes are unpredictable. It may be that failure to complete a task, the return of a lower profit than expected, or entanglement in legal trouble is due not to actor “shirking” his job and refusing to be a “responsible agent,” but rather to unavoidable obstacles that arose in the course of actor pursuing, “in good faith,” rector’s project. Even good agents fail. But, depending on the representation and interpretation of actor’s actions, rector may not know the difference between good-faith effort and shirking.

Stated as such, these are the problems of the powerful. (It is no accident that principal-agent theory has had the most success in the disciplines of economics, political science, and law.) But in Adams’ reading, there is buried in these “agency problems” a key for understanding social process and power from a critical point of view, and thus a clue for those who wish to consider the disruption and reconstruction of agency relations as the locus of social change. In particular, Adams repeatedly considers how changes in the rep-

33. The mainstream principal-agent literature interprets problems from principal’s point of view. A counterdiscourse devotes itself to the experience of workers as agents. This literature finds that employees who are undermined by one superior but supported by another receive buffering effects from the latter, but those that are simultaneously supported and undermined by the same superior have significantly worse outcomes than those who are merely undermined. Furthermore, in this work, the information asymmetry between employee (“agent”) and employer (“principal”) is shown to sometimes result in the intentional granting of autonomy to agent by principal, which is done in the interests of both principal and agent. A certain mutual understanding of the hierarchy of the employer-employee relationship would appear to underwrite this autonomy—but also an understanding of a shared project. M. K. Duffy, D. C. Ganster, and M. Pagon, “Social Undermining in the Workplace,” Academy of Management Journal 45 (2002): 331–51; Adam Grant and Sharon K. Parker, “Redesigning Work Design Theories: The Rise of Relational and Proactive Perspectives,” Academy of Management Annals 3, no. 1 (2009): 317–75, especially 326–27; M. Freese, H. Garst, and D. Fay, “Making Things Happen: Reciprocal Relationships between Work Characteristics and Personal Initiative in a Four-Wave Longitudinal Structural Equation Model,” Journal of Applied Psychology 92, no. 4 (2007): 1084–1102.

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resentation of agency relations could change the relations themselves. The exemplar analysis in this regard is her feminist Weberian theorization of patriarchal patrimonialism and her related analysis of Queen Elizabeth I’s rule. Patriarchal Patrimonialism Retheorized In Adams’s reading, patriarchal patrimonialism in early modern Europe becomes a complex web of principals and agents, whose pragmatics of rule are made possible by the representation of fathers as “natural” rectors. The familial metaphor—with the imagined father as ruler-king, and those over which he ruled considered as of his “household”—gave shape and meaning to macropolitical arrangements that mixed actual fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters (and uncles and aunts . . .) with the broader construction in culture and society of the right to rule, and to accrue profit. This rendering of father-rulerhood mirrors, distorts, and re-forms various relations of rule that are also agency relations, insofar as, for example, sons are sent to negotiate on behalf of or “stand in for” their fathers, and, more broadly, men and women act in service of, or are coerced into acting for, the familial lineage. Thus rivalries and intermarriages between families, the control of women in the name of honor, and the long-term temporality of generations pursuing family projects of aggrandizement and prestige constituted politics “when fathers ruled.” Patriarchal patrimonialism is, in Adams, both a pragmatics of rule and a worldview. On the one hand, it can be evaluated in terms of the failure or success of logistics and enrichment—“while men made many claims on others, and on themselves, in their guise as father-rulers in early modern Europe, only a fraction of these claims won practical support, with flows of men, money, and materiel.” On the other hand, it is also cosmology that fills the minds of actors with wonder and resentment. It is this complexity—between power relations and their representation—that explains why “this pervasive masculinism” did not always manage to “reduce women to ciphers.” In particular, Adams offers an interpretive explanation of how Elizabeth I “proved able to use to her rhetorical and political advantage not simply her symbolic position as patrilineal patriarch . . . but also the signs of femininity.” She explains, “For ruling women, there was always a gap between presenta34. Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 35. Adams, “The Rule of the Father,” 245. 36. Adams, 244.

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tion of self-as-signifier and the totemic body of the absent king, prince, or other ruler for whom they were substituting, a gap widened by worries about the continuity of the patrilineage, and thus the state, itself. But I want to stress that male as well as female rulers felt the bite of this disjunction between totem and flesh; the gap was always there, albeit to varying degrees.” Adams is articulating a synthesis of Judith Butler and Max Weber here; she asks us to theorize the relationship between action and (relational) agency—even at the dizzying heights of state sovereignty—as including a cultural mismatch between action and representation. Acting out the position of rector (fatherruler) involved an actual person in the problems of performativity. Adams’s explanation of the formation of the Dutch state is an argument that interprets rule as a problem of agency. How could it be that the “creaky antiquity” of the Dutch state was “one secret of its success in the seventeenth century”? The dominance of the merchant-regents (and thus the holding at bay of the absolutist ambitions of the House of Orange) depended on the heads of elite families imagining themselves as agents of their family line. Thus the particular set of moves and countermoves that constituted the regency relied on a background set of signifiers for rendering rule legible in terms of fatherhood. Hence the lynchpin of the argument: The process of patrimonial state formation can be seen as a process of tying together nodes in a single cartel or network. But family dynamics determined who could do the tying, how successful they would be, and whether they could go on to consolidate a stable institutional center. The multiple sovereign centers in the Netherlands were each colonized by elite family heads bent on pursuing patriarchal projects that were part and parcel of their families’ survival as players in patrimonial systems . . . the stadholder’s dynastic dreams took a backseat to the merchant-regents’ during the Golden Age, and this subordination enabled the rise of the Netherlands as the hegemonic trading state.

From the perspective being developed here, it must be noted that Adams does not articulate a full account of the others of early modern Europe, and her rendering of politics in The Familial State is focused on the specific question of patrimonialism. Nonetheless we can now see clearly the theoretical transformation that has taken place—from “principal” and “agent” to what I am here calling “rector” and “actor,” so as to emphasize, first, the distinction 37. Adams, 245. 38. Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 104. 39. Adams, 104.

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between action and agency, and second, the importance of signification for the forging of chains of power. In the rational choice theory of James Coleman, power is external to the agency relation itself—it is a kind of material precursor to the negotiation of authority and exchange. But in Adams, accrued agency is power, because of the simultaneity, in her account, of logistics and semiosis. State formation is shown to be the (partly unintended) consequence of the familial imagination of elite actors who imagine a specific relationship between a project (the wealth and prestige of the family carrying through the generations), a rector (the head of family), and various actors (sons and daughters who have to be married, profit from long-distance trade, loyal servants, etc.). The negotiation of alliances of rule is shown to be a product of that most elemental of actions—getting someone else (especially one’s children!) to act in one’s place, and on one’s behalf. Julia Adams uses the language of nodes and networks, because in her work agency relations—and by extension the metaphor, in this book, of chains of power—can be pictured as forming a network of ties. Agency relations in general, and patron-client relationships in particular, can be operationalized as a certain kind of directional tie. Following this line of thinking, we can hypothesize further that alterity has a correlate in the language of network theory, the “negative tie.” We see this in the network-based study of denunciation as a form of social control, drawing from the way in which witchcraft—to take one example of denunciation—can be conceptualized as “the flip side of kinship.” 40. Hannah Arendt’s reinterpretation of the distinction between ruling and acting parallels Adams’s position. Central to Arendt’s argument in The Human Condition is the distinction between the Greek verbs archein and prattein, traditionally translated in political philosophy as “to rule” and “to act.” She argues that if we take these terms in their fuller sense of “to begin” and “to pass through,” we can better understand the relationship between action and rule. Arendt’s intuition is that the ruler, understood as he who begins, is the person who has, via vision and the experience of human natality, a project (he projects a different future, and leads the way to it). He has agency because he has turned another person into his agent; the ruler “begins,” while the actor carries the project through. This turning of another into one’s agent, insofar as one’s agent is itself a person or group of persons, brings into view the fundamental contradictions of poweras-delegation in the human world. Following Aristotle, Arendt argues that this can have healthy and pathological forms. Her specific point was to salvage, in the normative interpretation of rectorship, the distinction between a good leader and a bad ruler, and thus to provide the basis for a critique, not only of tyranny in particular but of ossified authority in general. The latter includes bureaucracy as the rule of no one. Arendt, The Human Condition, 188–90 and 222–23. 41. Patrick Bergeman, “Denunciation and Social Control,” American Sociological Review 82,

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Yet, as the literature on culture and networks has shown, analyzing ties as if they exist separately from the communication that flows through them, or separately from the representation of the ties themselves that circulate between groups and individuals, has proved difficult to sustain. This suggests that some conceptual work is required, particularly insofar as the network or “netdom” has emerged, and in some quarters replaced, earlier conceptualizations of social structure (e.g. role sets, functionally interdependent systems, or class blocks and fractions). The metaphor of the network can accompany an account of chains of power and their representation, grounded in a theory of agency relations. The key is not to presuppose—indeed rather to deconstruct and reconstruct, in pursuit of interpretive explanations—what a tie is, how it is imagined by the persons and groups who are linked via said tie, and how it is maintained. Yet simultaneously, I propose that to theorize about culture and power, we should also theorize about delegation, about principal and agent. Agency Relations and the Critical Theory of Power As we have seen, Adams limns the texts of Hobbes, Marx, and Durkheim as preoccupied with the possibility of resolving the conflict between relational and heroic agency (and Weber’s texts as impressed by its seemingly irresolvable nature). Her argument is that such high modernist ambitions for ultimate synthesis are an inappropriate preparation for the politics of the twenty-first century (“these ‘why questions’ are no longer enough  .  .  . agency relations haven’t been perfected or transcended”). For Adams, what is required—and, I would say, what is required of critical social theory—is a response to relational agency’s overgrowth, in the sense of its manifestations in vast and intricate systems of delegation, outsourcing, service, and buckpassing. What is less clear from Adams’s published work is how this arguno. 2 (2017): 384–406; Peter Geshiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 25. 42. Paul McLean, Culture in Networks (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017). 43. Harrison White, Identity and Control, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 44. In this we can follow what Emily Erikson defines as the “relationalist” route for thinking about networks. We may say, perhaps, that Adams is antiformalist in her appreciation of formalism, because the constitution of ties, and of different kinds of ties, is precisely what is sociologically interesting. See Emily Erikson, “Networks and Network Theory: Possible Directions for Unification,” in Social Theory Now, ed. Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 278–304.

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ment relates to the particular arc of social theory embodied in the WeberMarx dialogue. I now propose to draw out the connections. I begin with some useful simplifications. In terms of the language being developed here, Karl Marx’s work can be understood as occupied with the specific rector-actor-other chain of capitalist-worker-lumpen, which is repeatedly and subtly placed in relationship to various circumstances, political alliances, and power formations, and elaborated into an accordion structure of class-fractions, inversions, and concomitant ideologies. Marx traced how, particularly with the rise of the social in modernity, the relationship capitalist-worker-lumpen influenced all aspects of society—from laws about property, vagrancy, and homelessness to the cultural prevalence of homo economicus as a way to imagine the human. This opened onto the question of the relative autonomy of the modern state: What variation is introduced to this capitalist-worker-lumpen chain by state organizations, given the variation in their capacities to enhance or suppress different projects via coercion? Furthermore, in volume 3 of Capital, Marx introduced the attribution, via fetishized interpretation, of authorship to commodities, who take on the religious role of ultimate rectors; their social dominance, qua effective illusion, deforms the capacity of labor to navigate the power situation. In contrast, Max Weber’s oeuvre is animated by a desire to understand the Hobbesian chain of rector-ruler, staff-actor, and excluded/ruled populaceother from a sociological and legal perspective. To be sure, Weber understands the rise of economic power, and capitalist forms of production, distribution, and consumption, to be partially constitutive of modern politics. However, his interest in the history of European feudalism and his writings on bureaucracy constitute a long and careful meditation on the relationship of rector to actor in the making of different kinds of politico-military rule. It is from this point of view that we can approach the evocatively ambiguous character of the populace, or “the people,” in Weber’s political sociology. It might be proposed that in the seemingly ad hoc character of the format of legitimate domination that he refers to as the “will of the ruled,” we can see a deep fold in 45. Robert J. Antonio and Ronald M. Glassman, eds., A Weber-Marx Dialogue (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985). 46. Two very heterodox readings of Marx suggest this view quite strongly. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Arendt, The Human Condition. 47. Ivan Szelenyi, “Weber’s Theory of Domination and Post-Communist Capitalisms,” Theory and Society 45, no. 1 (2016): 1–24; György Konrád and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York: Harcourt and Harvester Press, 1979).

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Weber’s thinking. “The people,” and the democratic imperative that references to them sometimes evoke, were in some ways the other for the men who built the Prussian state, and Weberians have been inclined to trace the process of state formation in Europe on Prussian terms. At the same time, Weber clearly recognizes that any political sociology must grapple with the way in which western European politics after the French Revolution were, in part, a question of the politics of (some of) those formerly excluded from politics. And yet “agency problems”—delegation, shirking, knowledge asymmetry—remain somewhat encoded in the language games of social theory that take Marx and Weber as their ultimate points of reference. If we bring this language out into the open, we see that the genre of analysis that is required is that which repeatedly focuses on the fraught relationship between delegation and domination. Agency, as I have reconstructed its theorization in this chapter, is something that arises from action but is not identical with it. Insofar as it accrues to the rector rather than the actor-in-the-world, agency emerges in paradoxical opposition to concrete action—agency goes to the figure who recedes subtly from action-in-the-world (though not from having a project), to the degree that actors stand in for (“represent”) rectors. In a world of multiple alliances, intersecting chains of delegation, accordion-like expansion of agency relationships, and overlapping dualities of persons and groups, one can see how this world of accrued agency also has myriad and varied others. As conceptualized by Adams, the agency relationship contains the seeds of those relationships that have been the central focus of theories of power, even if these seeds do not, in every action-reaction chain, bear the bitter fruit of domination, the “sugar-coated arsenic” of accepted hierarchy, or the “velvet glove” of paternalism. Rector sends actor as agent—as part of a division of labor, or because of actor’s expertise (including expertise at manipulating others), or to conquer and colonize a far-away land, or to make widgets where the cost of labor is lower, or to obtain better control of both rector’s and actor’s future. 48. Susan P. Shapiro, Tangled Loyalties: Conflict of Interest in Legal Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 49. Vivian Gordon, “Black Women, Feminism, and Black Liberation: Which Way?,” in Africana Studies: A Disciplinary Quest for Both Theory and Method, ed. James L. Conyers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997): 155–74; Sugarcoated Arsenic, a film directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena Harold, written by Vivian Gordon and Claudrena Harold, produced by Claudrena Harold (New York: Picture Palace Pictures, 2014), DVD video, 20 min.; Mary R. Jackman, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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In such a moment of sending, a distinct possibility of misrecognition arises, because those who are sent are human, which is to say that they have not only consciousness but also projects of their own. This does not exclude the possibility that there may in fact be mutual benefit to a project, or a fair exchange, or the reasonable expectation of shirking and malfeasance such that the initial sending-and-binding is itself a farce. It is possible that a project can be renegotiated between rector and actor, in a way that is substantively fair. But the potential for misrecognition is always there, and thus, first, to the degree that misrecognition is directed at both actor’s own projects and actor’s labor on a task, the agency relation is about struggles for redistribution and recognition. Second, taken to its extreme, the perfect agent is no longer an actor with projects but an automaton. To be absolutely sure that the agent does as directed, the rector needs not an actor but a dehumanized other who follows commands algorithmically. If said other is a human person, then the algorithmic agent is a person in a condition of natal alienation—a slave. The technologists have noted, Why hire a doorman when you can install a mechanical groom? But they have perhaps not quite taken themselves seriously enough, while the writers of science fiction know well the connection between robotics and slavery. Persons, as actors, are imperfect and messy, because they have their own projects, get entangled with other rectors, and change their minds and feelings. They are full of ambivalence, they practice mimicry. They also tire, develop hidden transcripts, band together, seek leverage, and engage in exchange. The rector always doubts the actor: is actor trustworthy, or simply producing the signs of trustworthiness? Authoritarian and violent solutions to this dilemma offer themselves: agency, taken to the extreme, finds itself at one end of the spectrum of alterity—the slave, the outsider within relied on for certain kinds of labor, and deprived of social recognition as a person, subject to violence as if valueless. Furthermore, the other end of the spectrum of alterity looms; we know from the long arc of human history that the ranks of the enslaved are often 50. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso Books, 2003); but see Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 51. Jim Johnson [Bruno Latour], “Mixing Humans and Non-humans Together: Sociology of a Door-Closer,” Social Problems 35, no. 3 (1988): 298–310. 52. Daniel Mendelsohn, “The Robots Are Winning!,” New York Review of Books, June 4, 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/articles////robots-are-winning/. 53. Bacharach and Gabetta, “Trust in Signs”; Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 54. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000).

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drawn from enemies in war. Finally, those who are made into perfect agents are, when they lose their utility, disposable. If the other’s social death is adequately enforced, if other is the perfect agent for a certain project no matter how small or large, when the utility to said project is over, other is available for violence or even death. A story in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones captures the vexed relationship between delegation by rector to actor based in a recognition of actor’s superior knowledge and skill (and perhaps the recognized link between human imperfection, creativity, and judgment), and the politics of violence and dehumanization to which other-as-perfect-agent is vulnerable. Behind the eastern front, the Nazi Bohr “found a young Jewish orphan and had adopted him as a mascot: the boy washed the cars, polished the officers’ boots, and cleaned their pistols, but above all he played the piano like a young god, light, nimble, cheerful. ‘Fingers like that excuse everything, even being Jewish,’ Bohr said.” The officers adore Yakov, and they send for new scores from Germany for him to learn. One day, when helping repair a car, the jack slips and Yakov’s hand is crushed—no longer able to play, the boy is “liquidated.” One officer taunts Bohr: “No more piano.” Bohr stabs his fellow officer, slashing his hand. The conclusion? “It’s too bad for Bohr: a good officer ruined his career.” The collective concern on display among the army men is one that despairs at the failed advancement of this high-ranking actor in the world of Nazi projects, who in a moment of anger about the death of the other hurts his own chance at public esteem (and violently attacks a member of the ingroup). This reveals in extreme form the potential, and paradoxical, link between human agency and dehumanization. The tasks that agent can be sent to do can be “highbrow,” requiring the humanity of the agent (the capacity to play Bach with virtuosity, knowledge of the subtlest aspects of the music of the great composers), yet the relation can be one of total domination. My claim is not that the example is generalizable. Rather, what one senses from the story, taken as an extreme, limited case of agency as domination, is that even here domination and delegation intertwine, and human recognition folds back on itself, defying straightforward logic. If delegation and agency are taken as the prism through which to comprehend power, the “ties that bind” need closer examination and further parsing. 55. Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones: A Novel (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 92–110.

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The Ties That Bind In a chain of power, rector makes actor into rector’s agent in the world, and other is profaned and excluded from a given project. These are the “ties that bind,” negative and positive. But the triple logic of tie, no tie, and negative tie is an abstraction from meaningful content that will not do for interpretive explanation. Instead, let us develop a conceptual language for understanding these ties that allows an understanding of how their representation acts on their formation, and that connects them to the core concerns of critical theories of power noted at the conclusion to the previous chapter—misrecognition and dehumanization. We have already seen that who and what can be represented in discourse as rector, actor, and other inflects and molds the relations between these positions. Particularly in a complex net of overlapping chains, the reduction of complexity via the assignment of meaning becomes appealing, and the repeated use of habitual interpretations as to who is likely to be rector, actor, or other across different situations is thus a recurrent feature of action-reaction chains. Yet this reduction produces an abundance of meaning, as the human imagination is brought to bear on the representation and characterization of rectors, actors, and others. Mother Earth and Jesus can be ultimate rectors; an image of the King’s head on a coin can remind an official that he is but an actor in a long chain that ends in the sovereign.

1. Isaac Ariail Reed, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 2. Andreas Glaeser, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Andreas Glaeser, “Hermeneutic Institutionalism: Towards a New Synthesis,” Qualitative Sociology 37, no. 2 (2014): 207–41.

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The difficulty that obtains for analysis is one that haunts the sociohistory of power. A question about getting someone else to do something is a question about what moves and shakes the world; when we posit rectors, actors, and others, we are making claims about causes in some sense of the term. But causality is not straightforward; it makes a Möbius strip of power theory. The modern human sciences have, in their short history, articulated myriad approaches to discussing the different ways of making a difference that attend social life. If we listen carefully to some of these speech genres for understanding causality, we can begin to parse the world of rectors, actors, and others such that we are prepared to understand better how authorship is interpreted, contested, and denied; what makes persons into scapegoats or charismatic leaders; when to expect that domination will enhance capacity; or wherefore bureaucracy can become a cultural preference. I parse the ties that bind into four dimensions—materiality, relationality, discourse, and performance—and I address the first three dimensions in this chapter. Materiality: Alfred Gell In the core theoretical chapter of his masterwork Art and Agency, Alfred Gell introduces the example of a cathedral so as to discuss the complexities of authorship that attend artifacts and the built environment. The architect of a cathedral is its rector—she directs actors to build it according to her vision, hence her building excludes the visions of her competitors and those who used the space it occupies before it was built. To build is also to violate, an act of creative destruction, and thus the architect is a power holder. But this rectorship of the architect over the cathedral is by no means straightforward. She likely attributes her vision—and thus the authorship of that which is built by those actors she has made into her agents—at least in part to the divinity or divinities who will be worshipped therein, submitting herself as merely an agent of a more transcendent rector or rectors. Furthermore, those who will later—perhaps generations later—worship in the cathedral are not without agency in this schema. As an active (future) audience they are also actors with projects, and some claims on their rectors. As Gell explains, “A religious congregation . . . is entitled to think that their piety and devotion were contributory to the causation of the cathedral in which they worship, even though 3. Isaac Ariail Reed, “Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions,” Sociological Theory 31, no. 3 (2013): 193–218. 4. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 28–48.

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this cathedral was constructed centuries earlier, because they (not unreasonably) believe that the cathedral was erected with them in mind, the future generations of worshippers therein.” So those who receive the impressions of, and are guided by the architecture of, the cathedral—actors to the rector, the architect—also grasp at rectorship, through the architect’s anticipation of their expectations. These expectations, in turn, derive their intelligibility from a shared understanding of ultimate (divine) rectors. In Gell’s anthropology of art, the agency of the artist is that of a rector that has sent an artifact into the world as rector’s agent. The artistic work “is itself seen as the outcome, and/or the instrument of, social agency.” The artist configures the physical world in such a way as to exercise agency through it, and this is, in turn, recognized via the interpretation of the art object. Materiality qua things, “with their thing-ly causal properties,” is essential to this process, because the reconfiguration of things with causal properties allows us to “recognize the presence of another.” Thus “any artifact, by virtue of it being a manufactured thing, motivates an abduction which specifies the identity of the [artist] who made or originated it.” So artists and patrons who commis-

5. Gell, 34. 6. Gell, 16; emphasis in the original. 7. Gell grounds his anthropology of art in his own interpretation of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, and in particular an understanding of the art object as an index that, when viewed, allows the viewer of the work of art to abductively infer that the artist was the cause of the work. In Gell, this abduction is an interpretation subject to great variation, as evidenced by the enormously wide range of examples that dot his book. Gell’s reading of Peirce recognizes that in Peirce’s philosophy, indexicality can have iconic and symbolic aspects. For a discussion of Peirce’s semiosis as the basis for anthropological interpretation, see Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For extended considerations of the multiple applications of Gell’s work, see Liana Chua and Mark Elliott, eds., Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell (New York: Berghahn, 2013). For the relationship of Gell’s ideas to the sociology of material culture, see Fiona Greenland, “Material Culture and the Problem of Agency,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2018): 1–9, https://doi.org/ ./s---. 8. Gell, Art and Agency, 20. 9. Gell, 23. My terminology is different from Gell’s, so I here substitute artist for his agent (roughly, my rector, though as we shall see who or what is really rector is an essential point of controversy for the interpretation of art objects). It should perhaps be mentioned that we are well into Nietzsche’s territory here as well; he, too, theorized both materiality and language in these terms—as the creations of artist-rectors. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–124; and Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense,” in On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings, trans. and ed. Taylor Carman (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

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sion and originate art have effects on recipients (those over or on whom the artifact exercises its effects, the audiences for art), in relationship to prototypes (that which the art object is taken to represent, “often by virtue of visual resemblance but not necessarily”). This gives the materiality of art its place in the moving and shaking of the world, but it does not fetishize the material or the technological. Rather, Gell sees the material as a bundling of significations in the made object, which, qua object, has certain affordances and causal capacities and effects, but is also subject to a historically situated semiotic context of interpretation vis-à-vis the relation between signs, objects, and interpretants. Thus for Gell, “the index is just the ‘disturbance’ in the causal milieu which reveals, and potentiates, agency exercised. . . . The index is at once a prosthesis, an extra limb, of the patron and/or artist, while it is also the handle, attached to the patient-recipient which is grasped and manipulated.” So: a rector-artist produces an artifact which then has certain effects on (subverts the “sense of self-possession” of) an actor, and thus the artifact is given autonomous causal power, but one embedded in the interpretation of authorship that the actor comes to via the artifact. Material artifacts, while they are not persons, can distribute personhood, thus giving their authors (and their prototypes) a certain kind of spread-out agency in the world—that is, power. For Gell, when a person is attracted to an artifact, and “submits to its power, appeal or fascination,” that person is “responding to the agency” that is contained in the artifact, an agency that “may be physical, spiritual, political, etc. as well as ‘aesthetic.’ The warrior’s shield [painted to create fear in the enemy] . . . possesses agency, having the power to demoralize the enemy warrior.” Artifacts are, then, not really primary sources of agency, because (unless the art object is the body of a person—an important exception case worth 10. Gell, Art and Agency, 27. 11. The trajectory for social theory implied by Gell shares with Actor Network Theory some of the same opponents—in particular, Gell opposes how Bourdieu concerns himself with “particular institutional characteristics of mass societies, rather than with the network of relationships surrounding particular artworks in specific interactive settings.” Yet the trajectory through a theory of materiality that Gell takes is remarkably different from that of Latour; in particular Gell seems unafraid of leaving significant room for human subjectivity and the contingencies of interpretation that attend it, in constructing a picture of the world as real-becauseconstructed. Gell, 8. 12. This is Webb Keane’s position as well. Webb Keane, “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 409–35. 13. Gell, Art and Agency, 37. 14. Gell, 31.

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further discussion) it is impossible to take the point of view of the artifact. However, “the personhood of the artist, the prototype, or the recipient can fully invest the index in artifactual form, so that to all intents and purposes it becomes a person, or at least a partial person. It is a congealed residue of performance and agency in object-form, through which access to other persons can be attained, and via which their agency can be communicated.” Thus it becomes clear that artifacts can express agency, but they cannot be actors; they do not have their own projects, which is what we would discover if we were able to take their perspective. Gell uses his theory to interpret a wide range of representational activities: for instance, the religious use of idols, the way in which ambassadors represent their countries by constructing a fictional ministate inside a foreign state, volt sorcery, drawing, painting, and sculpting. He also notes the widespread tendency for humans to interpret objects—sometimes just momentarily—as possessed of intention and capable of projects and the accrual of agency, even if, in a strict sense, such an account can only be applied to beings with intentions (he gives the example of becoming angry at his car when it will not start). The point is that the interpretation of authorship is a somewhat mobile and flexible frame, though it retains, even when mobilized outside the interpretation of human intention, the contours of the human experience of consciously creating a disturbance in the flow of material causality. But what is perhaps most promising about Gell’s theory of art is his recognition that the aura of art objects is often a result of the inequality between artist and audience that they encode. This becomes part of the interpretation of the art object itself. In a paragraph worth meditating on, he explains: Artistic agency, especially of the virtuoso character so obviously present in Trobriand carving, is socially efficacious because it establishes an inequality between the agency responsible for the production of the work of art, and the spectators; in the Trobriands this inequality is attributed to superior magic; in the West, to artistic inspiration or genius. Neither “explanation” is really explanatory, each only serves to register the disparity of powers between artists and spectators. This fundamental inequality of powers is carried over into the wider social transactions within which the art object is embedded and mobilized; the kula exchange.

15. See the discussion of feminist body art in Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 16. Gell, Art and Agency, 68. 17. Gell, 71.

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This argument can be interpreted in two ways. The first interpretation would emphasize the connection and shared project between the artist and the spectators—the artist establishes superiority, but must “bring the audience along,” which is to say establish some sort of intersubjective link about the art project at hand; in this interpretation the artist is rector and the audience is actor. Yet Gell also suggests that artistic mastery can create not only verticality but the sense of an impermeable boundary, an uncrossable divide between sacred artist and profane outsider. In this sense, the mystic incomprehensibility of the artist makes the spectators into others. Materiality in Chains of Power and Their Representation Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art is extendable to an account of materiality in chains of power and their representation. Those who take up a position as rector, actor, or other do so in the pursuit of projects; as persons, they have needs and desires, and thus “interests” in material gain, physical and food security, health, and comfort, as part of (though never all of) those projects. Material objects—artifacts and those unhewn aspects of the material world brought into human life—can be useful to the pursuit of projects by persons because they are directly needed by said persons, or because they indirectly form part of the chosen means to a given end. But the evaluation of the artifactual world in strictly utilitarian terms is already an interpretation. Indeed it is an interpretation that requires much training of the mind, and there are different utilities to be had in the case of different cultural backgrounds—for example, during the early moments of industrialization, German workers understood wage labor differently than did English workers. When the training in utilitarian reason breaks down, or fails to begin, or starts to develop cracks, what emerges is the interpretation of material objects as artifacts of the accrual of agency in chains of power, particularly objects as part of what encodes and mobilizes hierarchy in the pursuit of projects. Thus it is in their interpretation as “secondary agents” that we see the modal human mode of interpreting the material world; “materials,” “stuff,” and “technology” are interpreted as evidence of the agency of rectors and actors (variably represented), and its denial to others (variably opposed or pro18. It is worth noting that Gell’s text is effectively incomplete, given the circumstances of its production. See discussion in Greenland, “Material Culture and the Problem of Agency.” 19. Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 20. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Iconic Experience in Art and Life: Surface/Depth Beginning with Giacometti’s Standing Woman,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 5 (2008): 1–19.

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faned), in the service of projects that come in and out of existence. Artifacts that become part of chains of power can be termed expressive materials. As useful parts of the push and pull of the material world, necessary in some cases for the logistical planning of a project, expressive materials also contain the possibility that they are useful precisely because of the effect they have, via the interpretation of authorship, on the consciousness of the audiences they reach. Architecture is the paradigmatic example of this, as already indicated. In architecture, utility and pragmatism about constraints, use, and production are a constant presence, but it is equally clear that a building provides an answer to fundamental questions (moral, aesthetic, etc.) about how a certain set of people should live. Because such expressive materials are part of chains of power that are also made up of humans, their effects-via-interpretation involve tricky causal loops that sometimes feel teleological. In bundling various affordances and significations, expressive materials represent power, produce power, and exert power, especially through the normalizing function of the built environment. In particular, they can domesticate its reception. On Interests and Actor Network Theory as Opposing Poles of a Spectrum A constant accompaniment of twentieth-century theories of power is the debate about and reformulation of the concept of interests and, via such a debate, arguments about the relationship between historical materialism and a critical sociology of power. Any social science of power renders power—in part—in terms of “resources” or “material resources” or “the social organization of various resources.” G. W. F. Hegel rendered bondsman’s labor as directed toward meeting lord’s desires; in so doing, Hegel recognized the biological human as a driver of action and as the substrate within which consciousness inheres. It was just this turning toward nature, labor, and thus interests that Frantz Fanon criticized in Hegel. In Karl Marx, materialist philosophy was brought into the realm of social science—the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, and the labor of persons, were traced empirically in relationship to these needs and desires. The story from there is well known: 21. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967). 22. Virág Molnár, “The Power of Things: Material Culture as Political Resource,” Qualitative Sociology 39, no. 2 (2016): 205–10. 23. We might say that this is already found in Plato. In book 2 of The Republic, Adeimantus argues that the cities are built to meet the needs of men, e.g food and housing. 24. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 191–97.

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Max Weber’s essay “Class, Status, Party” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s lecture “Caste in America” complicated the picture by placing the materially needy and productive human—and the desirous subject of modern capitalism—into the space of culture, understood as its precondition. Hence a central dynamic of twentieth-century social theory became the oscillation between political economy and culture in the explanation of social action, and attempts, in theoretical adventures of various kinds, to synthesize the two. Against this background, a new rendering of materiality, technology, and the human practicalities that attend them has emerged—the “new materialism,” posed quite often, especially in the humanities, as a turn against, or departure from, the focus on subjectivity and representation. This intellectual constellation has multiple creative manifestations in the human sciences, but it has sometimes placed itself, or been placed, in opposition to a critical sociology of power—and this is especially the case with Actor Network Theory (ANT). But let us look closely at how much the emergence of ANT, for all its epistemological discontent, was in fact the emergence of a focus on technology as delegation. ANT takes as its focus the artifact connected to other artifacts, in assemblages (“agencements”) that can include human bodies and minds, but in which these latter are given no special place. Thus ANT, in opposition to previous social science materialisms, refuses the reduction of artifactuality to either the laboring body or the needed good-to-be-consumed—such reductions are “humanistic” and maintain a subject/object distinction that is interpreted, by Bruno Latour especially, as the bane of the Western philosophical tradition. And so the goal becomes to give an account of workedup materials as agents. Both the key term from ANT—agencement—and its accompanying concepts—boundary object, black boxing, mediators (as opposed to intermediaries)—articulate a concern with nonhuman agents and the utilities and disutilities that result from their formation. And so nature (e.g. scallops) may not cooperate with the projects that some persons have; the rendering of certain social expectations or norms into technology can set the conditions for behavior, regardless of whether persons internalize norms 25. Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2014), 180–95; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Caste in America,” typescript in The Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1803 (1877–1963), comp. and ed. H. Aptheker (1965; Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corp. of America, 1980). 26. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 27. Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” Sociological Review 32, no. 1 suppl. (1984): 196–233.

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as morality; to reach across the world to exploit another’s labor may take not only the stimulation of desire in customers but the encoding of the labor process into digital technology to measure its progress, determine its remuneration, and track the delivery of its products. The chains of power and their representation that I propose in this book embed in their networks myriad technologies of this type. To accomplish projects, rector must not only recruit actor (as a professor persuades students to write a paper) but engage the world so as to place at actor’s disposal the material to make such projects—and the discretion of rector—possible (a building to teach in, ideally temperature controlled; computers and a workable WiFi system, etc.). Shifts in the kinds of agency coded into these objects will change the power situation. Thus not only should a careful history of technology accompany a history of power but, more than this, such a history should not be separate but rather included in the account of chains of power, insofar as the power of rector over actor, and the power of the rector-actor alliance over other, is partly determined by the delegations sedimented into technologies that make certain things possible or likely, and others impossible or unlikely. What is a trial of strength but a contest of power, in the sense of the accrual of agency to some but not others? Perhaps the classic example of this—at least for historical sociology—is John Law’s paper on the agencement necessary for early modern European imperial ventures, “On the Methods of Long Distance Control.” He tracks together the building of new kinds of ships, the development of navigational techniques and mathematics, and the rendering of certain persons as agreeable and passive agents. Thus the very possibility of control of the periphery for profit became possible due to the rendering of communication between center and periphery as had not been possible before: “Mobility, durability, capacity to exert force, ability to return—these seem to be indispensable if remote control is to be attempted. Indeed they may be seen as specifications of a yet more general requirement: that there be no degeneration in communication between centre and periphery. No noise must be introduced into the circuit. Periphery must respond, as it were mechanically, to the behest of centre. Envoys must not be distorted by their passage.” One may doubt if envoys 28. Manuel De Landa, New Philosophy of Society (London: Continuum Publishers, 2006), 33; Michael Guggenheim and Jörg Potthast, “Symmetrical Twins: On the Relationship between Actor-Network Theory and the Sociology of Critical Capacities,” European Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 2 (2012): 157–78. 29. John Law, “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India,” Sociological Review 32, no. 1 suppl. (1984): 234–63. New version published 2010 at heterogeneities.net.

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were ever entirely undistorted, but the point is clear—part of command, control, and profit was the capacity to use actual technology to make social relations themselves run as if they were a machine. Only then could global empire meet the desires and needs that Lenin proposed drove them. Law called this approach “material semiotics,” and one can detect in it an acute sensitivity to the intertwining of delegation and domination. In this light, the argument of ANT that in this or that instance under study, “political stabilization relies on nonhuman actors even more than human ones” does not appear to be at odds with a supposedly more traditional or humanistic sociology. After all, installing a door closer may indeed put someone out of work (but do the bellhops have a union?), and running over, with one’s car, a plastic figure installed to direct traffic is presumably still a less violent act than running over a person so positioned. If the early and middle Latour insisted that while “for a long time social theory has been concerned with defining power relations,” and thus that its failures in the study of domination and the critique of power were due to its “exclusive concern with social relations,” the late Latour rediscovered politics as a specific and separate zone of activity. But in both cases technology is solving a problem of delegation, the solution to which is entangled with various forms of domination. Realpolitik need not be opposed to dingpolitik; indeed, as we shall see below, the critical sociology of violence may depend precisely on our ability to think them together. Relational Power The relationship between rector, actor, and other can be understood as forming part of a social structure, a network with a particular relational morphology. We can map delegation, recruitment and exclusion, patron-client ties, 30. As I interpret him, Law was signaling a continuity with the philosophical problems that occupied A. J. Greimas. Yet something happened to material semiotics in the process of position-taking in European social theory. As it became ANT, the desire to smash the social involved its participants a willful disregard for the internalities of persons and the subjective interpretation of the material. This took place despite the clear recognition, in the classic texts on material semiotics, that it is precisely the idiosyncrasies and unpredictabilities of human subjects that make mechanical door closers less expensive than human ones, Leviathans impossible to run without railroads, and certain built-in technological moralities preferable to the internalization of norms and their enforcement via human (all-too-human) actors-turned-agents-ofthe-law. A. J. Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 31. Graham Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 18. 32. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

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and structural holes. Such relational pictures of who is rector, who is actor, and who is other can be drawn because of the role of human habit in action, which allows action-reaction chains to form and repeat, and thus become institutionalized. In particular, we can examine how turning another person or group into an agent, or excluding another person or group from agency relations, becomes part of habitualized organizational structure. These habits can then be grasped in their dispersion and variation. A particularly well-known example of this is Ronald Burt’s classic finding regarding employee careers in large corporations. Men succeeded in the corporation by occupying structural holes, as was expected—they made themselves indispensable links between two or more dense networks. Yet for women, the expected correlation was inverted: likelihood of promotion increased with the density of their location in the social ties of the firm’s network. The explanatory implication is that women’s access to rectorship—and thus to the ability to send and bind their own agents, from the heights of corporate power—had a different morphological form. Advancement for women had to take the path of sponsored mobility, and as rectors-qua-patrons themselves, women developed a larger and more far-flung set of clients. We also implicitly refer to organizational habits, and thus relational power, as the basis for turning actors into agents when we draw a distinction between a coup and a revolution. The former is understood to leave the relations between rectors, actors, and others that make up the state and its relationship to the population it governs largely intact, which is to say habitualized. The latter is understood to grow out of a crisis (a “revolutionary situation”) in which the set of habits that constitute the giving-and-taking of orders up and down the chains of command is precisely what is in question, and indeed subject to conflagration. Those who lead coups plan to rely on the relations in place so as to seize the helm of the ship of state; those who lead revolutions plan on precisely the opposite. Underneath the habits that are the basis, in action, for relational morphology, we often discover something of great interest for historical sociology: stories and significations. The different morphologies of male and female corporate success tracked closely by Burt depend on gendered representations, as Cecilia Ridgeway has argued. There were, in the forms that made up Burt’s study, prevailing cultural scripts about the capacities of women as 33. Ronald S. Burt, “The Gender of Social Capital,” Rationality and Society 10, no. 1 (1998): 5–46. 34. Cecilia Ridgeway, Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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compared to men. The cultural study of revolutions has made a similar discovery, for what is disrupted in revolutions is not only the habitual relations of hierarchy within the state but also the representations of who is “naturally” rector, actor, and other. The purest account of relational power I have been able to find, in sociology at least, is John Levi Martin’s Social Structures, and in particular his pursuit of a general account of how command structures are built out of patron-client ties: “Patron-client pyramids have, throughout history, formed the skeletons on which command armies emerged.” The process he proposes is as follows: “The first layer is a core consisting of the personal retainers of the king or chief lord. These can vary from close friends and relatives . . . to professionals who are personally dependent upon the lord. These loyal followers of the leaders are given special privileges and more or less put in the position of protecting the leader should the mass of the army default.” But “few kings had personal retinues sufficient to comprise a decent army,” so any army would be formed when the king called “on his vassals to call out their vassals in turn.” Then, “most large armies supplemented this mobilization of clients and clients’ clients with other troops.” The issue, for Martin’s strictly relational account, is the transitivity of command: “Even though the armies formed on the basis of patronage pyramids look somewhat like trees, they lack the transitivity that would allow them to be used for sending threats and punishments down, and surveillance and information up.” And so transitivity of command is “a crucial component of the creation of states out of feudal relationships.” Martin’s is a micro-to-macro explanation: “First the patron35. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 36. In economic history, Avner Greif ’s study finds that eleventh-century traders in the Mahgreb formed coalitions so as to coordinate action and pursue profit; yet to do so required “action at a distance,” and thus control over agents whose opportunities for shirking and cheating were manifest, given how difficult monitoring was. And so in pursing profit, these harbingers of the modern formed coalitions, which themselves depended on “a set of cultural rules of behavior— merchant’s law—that specified how agents needed to act to be considered honest in circumstances not mentioned in the merchant’s instructions.” Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 69–70. 37. John Levi Martin, Social Structures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 262. 38. Martin, 262–63. 39. Martin, 264. 40. Martin, 265. 41. Martin, 266. 42. Martin, 266.

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age triangles were arranged into pyramids that could span vertical distances of social space, and then transitivity was introduced.” He then proceeds to examine a similar process for the formation of political parties. As with many strictly relational, and thus meaning- and context-free, explanations, the problem is posed quite clearly, while the how of the solution to the problem in different settings fades from view in Martin’s account. Nonetheless the problem statements are evocative, particularly when Martin discusses the “advantages of disorganization.” History is not linear in this regard: “For military structures, the degree of flexibility required has changed over time, increasing in the past century, so that effective modern armies often have less control over the lower layers than their less-effective opponents.” Martin does not, however, connect this to the normative question of civilian control over military power, which can also be addressed in these terms. Discursive Power Rectors, actors, and others, in other words, need to be represented somehow, if their relationships—and the variations in their relationships—are to become habituated. Such representation constitutes discursive power. The discursive dimension of power relations refers to both frames for thinking about the relationship between rectors, actors, and others, and the pragmatic give-andtake of concrete interpretation via interaction that happens when persons navigate situations (e.g. naming and accepting a certain person as leading the interaction or as running the meeting). Both of these can be iteratively multiplied—there are frames for frames, and interactional cues for interpreting interactional cues. Representation plays a role in power relations well beyond the specifically “cultural” zones of activity (e.g. religion and art); all socalled sources of power (economic, military, religious . . .) have a discursive dimension, though the importance of this dimension in any particular set of 43. Martin, 283. 44. Martin, 279–81. 45. Martin, 280. 46. Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 47. This includes the important subcategory of representations of rector and actor that suggest that rector and actor can be understood without attending to their representation, and instead merely “examined” in the universal mechanics of their interests. Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971): 83–222; Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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relations or problem-solving actions (and thus in any particular explanatory effort in the human sciences) can vary. We can see discursive power in the naturalization, via various processes of typification and invention, of a set of interpretive tendencies concerning who is a likely rector, likely actor, or likely other given a problem situation, an established process, or a series of linked interactions. Here we find sense and reference, the comprehension of the world as significant by the human subjects who engage each other and form meaningful hierarchies that are both created and justified via signification. Meanings code and communicate hierarchy and its legitimation or justification, rendering persons better or worse, moral or immoral, pleasing or mundane, sacred or profane, and thus as rector, actor, or other. Perhaps one of the most researched topics in the sociology of culture is the relationship between relational morphology (sometimes: “structure”) and discursive power (sometimes: “culture”). For example, the widespread study of institutions and institutional logics forms an arena of research on this relationship. In this view, the spaces or zones of activity that many sociologists call institutions are a key site where discourse and relation come together, and as such form the primary arena for studying the dynamic flux of the human world. However, when we consider power from the perspective of who is rector, who is actor, and who is other, we are compelled to recognize that while institutions that fuse relation and discourse are surely one site wherein agency relations are forged, contained, and reproduced, they are not the only one. Furthermore, there is a way in which the significations of rector, actor, and other travel across zones of activity, and this is precisely what needs to be investigated in a social theory of power. For even when, in putatively modern societies, various institutional logics manage to create a certain amount of space between themselves and other institutional logics with regard to the regularization of certain actions and interactions, those logics still intersect and make use of representations of rector, actor, and other, and modes of 48. Reed, “Power.” 49. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Action and Its Environments,” in Action and Its Environments: Toward a New Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988): 301–34. 50. The question, Who is represented as rector, who as actor, and who as other, and why? is a more specific question than was posed by the overall study of “discursive formations” as it emerged in the human sciences. The goal here is to parse, out of the semiotic sea of representation, the conceptualization of agency that prevails in how rectors, actors, and others are represented in a given instance. For discursive formations as a reorganizing principle for the human sciences, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).

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practice for making decisions, that are a part of the ambient background or landscapes of meaning upon which action proceeds in society at large. These more free-floating signifiers of rectorship, actorship, and alterity can be quite restrictive for persons and groups, because they become rules of thumb for the interpretation of authorship and vision in many different settings. To take an extremely mundane example, in the United States, where the ambient landscape of meaning contains an ongoing fantasy that decisions in society are and/or should be made “democratically,” many parents find themselves confronted with young children who suddenly decide that “there should be a vote” about what to do on the weekend, thus imposing the logic of the ballot box and formal democratic delegation on a zone of activity (or institution) normally governed by moral partiality, hierarchy naturalized via size, strength, and authority, and often patriarchy. Excursus on Chandra Mukerji’s Synthesis of Material, Relational, and Discursive Power Impossible Engineering, Chandra Mukerji’s study of the construction of the Canal du Midi, brings together the material dimension of power, particularly the techne of fabrication and technological delegation, with the more typical sociological duality of society and symbol, or relational and discursive power. In so doing, she clarifies what it means to consider materiality and (relationally developed, discursively represented) agency chains together. Mukerji shows how the Canal du Midi, a remarkable seventeenth-century demonstration of “the cultural power of political territoriality” (it linked the Mediterranean to the Atlantic through southwestern France), relied for its construction on certain techniques for managing water flow known to women in mountain villages who washed clothes in public laundries. The modern project to make France (and the French state) a “New Rome” used old Roman techniques. The canal’s “modern” construction, then, led by the supposed “genius” Pierre-Paul Riquet, in fact depended for its success on women from the Pyrenees who brought “indigenous variants of Roman hydraulics to the alimentation system for the Canal du Midi.” In the conclusion to her text, Mukerji places this (and other) key findings of her investigation into conversation with her core theoretical distinction between domination and dominion. This distinction, similar in focus but different in argument from that pursued here, is worth meditating on. 51. Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2. 52. Mukerji, 142.

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Mukerji’s polemical point is that the “humanist” tradition of thinking about power, centered on Max Weber and legitimate domination (and including, perhaps surprisingly, Michel Foucault, whose tendency to attribute power to semiotic or discursive formations she disavows), cannot comprehend the politics of the stewardship of nature and, more generally, logistics as tools of power. Logistics are best grasped, she argues, by taking a “posthumanist stance—taking human beings as part of nature rather than somehow made distinct from it by the power of the human mind (and language).” And yet the sociohistorical analysis that Mukerji presents reveals that the different contests and forms of power at play can be interpreted as contests over labor, delegation of tasks, and the contested representation of power relations in terms of authorship. Dominion, too, is a matter of intertwining delegation and domination, and attaching people and things to each other via chains of power and their representation. The canal project undermined noble power because it represented the lands around the canal as part of larger France, under the dominion of the King. Yet this monarchal project to change the rules for ruling, pursued as it was through the reconstruction and stewardship of nature, had unintended effects—the “plan to contain the authority of nobles with stewardship principles—designed to protect the singularity of the king—led instead to a realignment of nature and power that complicated all the lines of authority, and made singularity itself more problematic, if not immediately less potent.” At issue was the attribution of the creation of the canal to the King’s actorsas-agents: Riquet acting for Colbert, and Colbert acting for Louis XIV. According to Mukerji, “the Canal du Midi was a piece of impossible engineering that was powerful and dangerous . . . it was contingent, dynamic, and effective— impossible to erase, impossible to manage fully, and potent in its effects. It had no single author, and no ‘natural’ beneficiary. Colbert had to engage in a propaganda campaign to present it as a success of the regime—the work of the Sun King.” She points out the irony of personalizing the impersonal, and in so doing makes it clear that even the logistical formats of power in which she is most interested—and for the analysis of which she takes a “posthumanist” stance—were bound up in the politics of authorship, which is to say contestation over the representation of authorship in chains of rectors, actors, and others. Given its role in depersonalizing power in seventeenth-century France, it seems more than ironic that the Canal du Midi was hailed at its completion as a work of personal genius. There was good reason, though. The geneal53. Mukerji, 218. 54. Mukerji, 206. 55. Mukerji, 208.

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ogy of greatness nurtured to describe the canal and its “author” stabilized the canal on paper as well as in the political imagination. Colbert understood this clearly, making Riquet after his death author of the enterprise and a good servant to the monarch . . . the elevation of Riquet stripped the canal of his collaborators—the peasants, artisans, subcontractors, and supervisors who dug the ditches, built the walls, applied the specifications, and did the books.

An important and necessary inversion of Bruno Latour’s polemics occurs in this argument. For Mukerji, it is the interpretation of the canal as having a genius author that provides stability, rather than the sheer technological delegation. The claim to posthumanism, then, is a red herring. Impossible Engineering is an argument about authorship and power, and the intertwining of technical logistics with the representation of rector-actor relations. This is confirmed by the text as a whole. In Mukerji’s multidimensional analysis, the multifarious forms of material power and their interconnections—for example the connection between monarchical centralization and impersonal expert authority in engineering nature—are analyzed as a back-and-forth between contested interpretations of authorship and vision. And so the story ends up being one that is not of the autonomous power of things, but rather of the complex interplays of rectors and actors in the pursuit of projects within the material environment. Technological delegations are part of the melee of chains of power and their representation; logistical power comes into play via a transformation of the relationship between different rectors (e.g. nobles versus agents of the King) and peasant-actors. In early modern France, agency problems and agency solutions were everywhere. [In the] countryside of Languedoc, memories of classical techniques, small and locally useful, shards of ancient knowledge stayed intact where they were picked up. The wisdom nurtured this way—particularly in mountain towns—remained unnoticed by outsiders, and lost its provenance.  .  .  . Until a tax farmer who traveled through this memory palace—himself unable to “read” the truths tucked into the landscape—thought of cutting a canal across Languedoc. He hired those who knew secrets of the memory palace to do the work. They brought their traditions to the project, and reinvigorated, integrated and extended them, becoming New Romans and inventive engineers.

To understand the relationship between logistics and authorship, then, we can think of technologies, working on the world in the place of or alongside human bodies, as both signs of objects (technically, representamen) and 56. Mukerji, 223–24. 57. Mukerji, 225; emphasis added.

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objects themselves, subject to representation and interpretation. As such, technologies both engage the world of material causality and, simultaneously, activate interpretations of one kind or another. Agencement, then, involves the interpretations of technology made by those who engage with it, including interpretations that attribute various kinds of authorship to other humans, even as the technology itself embodies and distributes agency. In other words, while it may be indicative of the crisis of our times that some of our social theorists work on the science fiction fantasy of a world functioning like machine and algorithm, it is nonetheless the case that the world-in-theory proposed by such studies is neither descriptively adequate nor of much explanatory use without a theory of the relationship between artifactual materiality and human subjects. Hence the preference in this book for Gell over Latour, and for multidimensionality over reduction. When Is the World Mechanical? Expressive materials reveal to us struggles over authorship and thus over the mobilization and use of chains of power. The expressive role for materials will overlap with their logistical, needs-meeting, and labor-exploiting aspects. An artifact calls forth certain interpretations of the agency of its rector. But these interpretations are themselves subject to the discursive contest over who is rector, who is actor, and who is other. The struggle over material, then, is also a struggle over the making of persons into agents. 58. The intellectual history that articulates the relations and nonrelations between the anthropology of art, anglophone sociology of science, and the lasting effects of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre on various parts of the human sciences remains to be written. Gell does not appear in John H. Zammito’s comprehensive, excellent account of postpositivism and science studies, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). In their introduction to Distributed Objects (a volume on Gell’s work), Liana Chua and Mark Elliot remark that taken in relationship to the new materialism(s), “Gell’s theory could potentially both substantiate and challenge these approaches, depending on how it is construed and deployed.” They also note somewhat cryptically that “Gell strikes us as a fundamentally old-fashioned anthropologist, not so much because he saw social anthropology as being about the social, but because he was asking some seriously ‘big’ questions about human nature and society through comparison, extrapolation and analogy— questions which many contemporary anthropologists studiously eschew.” One can only speculate as to their views of the relationship between Gell’s “old-fashioned” style and that of We Have Never Been Modern, whose heretical tone perhaps relies more on the catechism it seeks to destroy than it wishes to admit. Liana Chua and Mark Elliot, “Adventures in the Art Nexus,” in Chua and Elliot, Distributed Objects, 1–24; 14, 15; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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We may say, then, that the insights of Actor Network Theory become available to a sociology of power when the theory is turned onto its feet again. Having spent many years disclaiming the critique of power and insisting on the agency of the nonhuman, ANT’s insights into the role that delegation to technology plays in constructing the Leviathan take on new meaning when we grasp that the struggle over technology is always part of a struggle over who will be turned from human actor (with her own needs, desires, and projects) into an agent, who becomes, to a varying degree, like a machine. Insofar as this happens to actors in the chain, chains of power can be made to act “mechanistically.” Two further questions arrive immediately: Who is it that will not be so made into an agent, retaining independence from mechanization and thus access to discretion—who is the rector? And, Who is it that will be made into a machine on a more permanent basis, who will not act like a machine so much as exist outside the struggle for recognition and redistribution—who is the other? Finally, we can propose a question to unite the insights of ANT with the Weberian aspects of comparative-historical sociology: When, where, and how does human life become mechanistic? Weber writes: “Charisma, as a creative power, recedes in the face of domination, which hardens into lasting institutions, and becomes efficacious only in short-lived mass emotions of incalculable effects, as on elections and similar occasions.” Latour writes: “A quasi-object they have all created, the object-discourse-nature-society whose new properties astound us all and whose network extends from my refrigerator to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy, and satellites. The imbroglios and networks . . . have to be represented.” Contained in these quotes is the possibility of a sociology of mechanism as a historical question for a theory of material, relational, and discursive power. On Violence Both Weberian historical sociology and the new materialism come together in and around, but do not provide a theory of, violence. Violence is a matter 59. Natalie B. Aviles and Isaac Ariail Reed, “Ratio via machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology,” Sociological Methods and Research 46, no. 4 (2017): 715–38. 60. Max Weber, “The Meaning of Discipline,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 262. 61. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 144. 62. Michel Weiviorka’s Violence: A New Approach articulates a perspective for relating violence to meaning. Two aspects of his argument seem especially noteworthy. First is his dis-

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of materiality, but not all materiality is violence; both the shield of the warrior that terrifies and the stained-glass window that induces piety via its depiction of a saint are expressive materials. When used in a certain way, certain expressive materials, as parts of chains of power and their representation, do not interpellate their audiences as actors but rather immediately render them as other in the specific sense of reducing them to their material vulnerabilities as bodies. These materials are what Hannah Arendt identified as the tools, or means, of violence. It is significant that Arendt distinguishes this category from what she calls “force”—the latter being “the energy released by physical or social movements.” Indeed in a certain sense the question of the other in social theory is the question of the relationship between two intertwined aspects of physical violence. Violence exploits the vulnerability of the body to cause debilitation and harm; yet violence also exists as part of a system of utility, which renders other into a robot-like agent of labor. tinction between violence and conflict, which, he argues, are opposites rather than correlates: “Conflict does not involve enemies . . . but adversaries who can stabilize their relationship by institutionalizing it, by establishing rules that allow them to negotiate, or by finding modalities that allow them to maintain both the links between the actors involved and the differences that divide them.” In contrast, violence is “more likely” in the absence of definable conflict—as with the decline of “the conflict between workers and bosses” in postindustrial France. We may say that in broad terms, Weiviorka is talking about the power struggle between rector and actor on the one hand (conflict), and that between other and the rector-actor alliance (violence) on the other. Importantly, Weiviorka refuses to evacuate meaning from even the most brutally violent encounters, considering carefully instead the complex possibilities that emerge to relate violence and subjectivity in the acts of violence that occur, and the contested interpretations of perpetrators and victims that emerge as a result. Similar to the perspective under development here, for Weiviorka, violence directed at those painted with the profane brush of alterity does not proceed via “senselessness.” Weiviorka also argues—and I agree—that the deep meaning of myth can be part of the cause of violence: “Myth and violence can go hand in hand. This is especially true when the actor is in a situation in which he finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile in practice elements of meaning that are not only becoming removed from reality, but also prove to be more and more contradictory and less and less easy to reconcile.” Weiviorka, however, insists on linking his evocative and useful language for comprehending the relationship between meaning and violence to a stark historicism of the onset of the postmodern age, which tracks the end of working-class politics in France. This historicism, not unwarranted as a question but often stated as accepted fact, also inflects the more recent effort of Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence. Michel Weiviorka, Violence: A New Approach, trans. David Macey (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 10, 104; Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). In parts 2 and 3 of this book, I take up the question of historical transformations in conflictual relations, via an empirical tracing of shifts in political culture; this leads to quite different conclusions. 63. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970), 45.

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The phenomenology of violence as bodily harm would suggest that it creates a power triad of “performer,” “target,” and “observer.” It is clear that this is a specific kind of othering of the target, and the accession to power of the subject who executes the violence is both potentially “total” but also risky. (The risk helps explain why powerful rulers prefer to have others commit violent acts on their behalf.) Finally, there is variation in the observance and interpretation of the somatic attack—“the formation of such an observation is open to manipulation.” Pulling these arguments together, we may say that violence is the use of material artifacts for the reduction of the target’s capacity to be a subject via bodily harm. This constitutes a meeting of materialities, whereby the artifactuality of tools and designed objects meets the biologically seated vulnerability of the body, both within the triangle of somatic harm visited by some humans on others, variably observed. There is in violence, then, a collapse of the possibilities of communication and resignification between performer and target, though not a collapse in meaning tout court; for the rendering of violence by the observer, the experience of violence by the target, and the motivation to commit violence experienced by the performer are all potential vehicles of meaning. The specific collapse of the possibility of signification between performer and target, caused by the meeting of the materiality of instruments with the materiality of the body, is the meaning of Arendt’s distinction between violence and power. But we have yet to comprehend precisely how this would change our understanding of the modern world, perhaps because we remain beholden to Max Weber’s rendering of politics in terms of the state’s command of, and legitimation of, violence. Arendt reaches for power as an acting together, but has difficulty comprehending the relationship of such acting to control and domination that proceed in spaces where violence is kept at bay, but which are hierarchical spaces nonetheless, full of rectors, actors, and others. Meanwhile Weber pulls power into the sphere of the command of 64. Teresa Koloma Beck, “The Eye of the Beholder: Violence as a Social Process,” International Journal of Conflict and Violence 5, no. 2 (2011): 345–56. Beck draws together a wideranging field of research, including several intense debates about violence and its interpretation in German anthropology and sociology. See Georg Elbert, “Markets of Violence,” in Dynamics of Violence: Processes of Escalation and De-escalation in Violent Group Conflicts, ed. Georg Elbert, Stephan Feuchtwang, and Dieter Neubert (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1999), 85–102; Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Temper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). See also Heinrich Popitz, Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence, trans. Gianfranco Poppi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 65. Beck, “The Eye of the Beholder,” 353.

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violence, and thus has difficulty comprehending alliance and side-taking as “political” in settings outside the state. But somewhere between Arendt and Weber lies something quite interesting: the grasping of power in hierarchy that is not reducible to violence but creates more resistance to itself (and perhaps precipitates the reversibility of power relations) than does pure authority. This “in-between” space is where relations that obtain between rector, actor, and other are subject to tremendous historical and cultural variation. Between Arendt and Weber we find precisely the Spielraum of agency relations as these have been characterized in chapters 1 and 2. Chains of Power and Their Representation: A Multidimensional Approach Chains of power, then, involve a series of rector-actor relationships, which confront various others. The relationship between rectors, actors, and others is repeated across many different chains, and each instance involves both relation and signification, combined with instantiation in expressive materials. Within these overlapping chains, much variation is possible. There is variation in the psychic life of power—for example in the ambivalence and melancholy, and yet also certain kinds of pleasure or self-satisfaction, that can attend taking up a project that is not one’s own (to become an actor, in the name of rector; or perhaps in the name of an ultimate rector in the sky, who is thought to be embodied in the rectors who are actually giving the orders). There are variations in the length of chains of power, and in the way they overlap to form networks of order-giving and order-taking that have very different shapes. And there is variation in what kinds of projects are pursued, with all the complexity that attends various human tasks and labors, and the ecologies of their pursuit. Finally, there is variation in the semiotics of rectitude, in the frames in which, and negotiations by which, struggles for recognition and redistribution in the pursuit of projects take place. Delegation can, in turn, be built into the nonhuman world—hence the 66. John Levi Martin explains that “Arendt’s implicit view is that politics is paradigmatically about convincing others to ally with one. Weber’s approach to politics never shook the Bismarkianism that so molded his generation; you will note that his definition agrees with Clausewitz that war is a subset of politics. In contrast, for Arendt politics is fundamentally about the existence of a public sphere, and where this has collapsed, there simply are no politics at all.” John Levi Martin, “The Human Condition and the Theory of Action,” in The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr and Philip Walsh (London: Anthem Press, 2017), 50–74; quotation is from p. 61. 67. Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

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“facticity of power” in the built environment, various electronic systems, the habituation of human beings to the technological landscape and the particular capacities granted by certain cultivated materialities, which can easily become part of domination. To grasp this facticity of power, the Actor Network theorists turned, ironically enough, to the concept of the performative— contrasting performative and ostensive definitions. This was useful precisely because it removed the “thereness” of “the social” (which was rather convenient for their ongoing attacks on those in Paris who studied the reproduction of social power through culture). Performative bringing into being captured precisely the technologists’ argument concerning that which is “real because it is constructed.” Yet in almost the same moment as this appreciation of delegations to door-closers became prevalent via the appreciation of ANT, the overreach of Latour’s attack on “the social” became rather obvious. Latour insisted that for misguided sociologists, if “a social difference is ‘expressed in’ or ‘projected upon’ a detail of fashion . . . let’s say a shine of silk instead of nylon . . . then it is in vain that an appeal has been made to the detail of the fabric.” In contrast, ANT proposed to treat “the chemical and manufacturing differences” as mediators, so as to argue that “without the many indefinite material nuances between the feel, the touch, the color, the sparkling of silk and nylon, this social difference might not exist at all.” What has been unnecessarily removed from this theorization of delegation and performativity are the layers of interpretation commonly applied to materiality as it is brought into human action and interaction. Indeed the very use of the term performativity by Latour suggests a sub rosa understanding of this hermeneutic contingency, though the need to upend the human/nonhuman distinction and the need to reinvent antihumanist skepticism as posthumanist social theory bar the technologists from explicating this understanding. In the next chapter, I venture into such an explication of performative power. 68. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. 69. Latour, 40.

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Strange Magic In a common trope of science fiction and fantasy literature, a seemingly normal and comprehensible world is presented to the reader, who is then drawn into the story as bits and pieces of something strange, weird, or uncanny creep in around the edges: magic, an unknown alien species, a scientific secret that will transform the world, a terrifying prophet, or a little-known wormhole in space-time with political consequences. Strange magic, whatever its ultimate explanation within the frame of the story’s universe, comes to stand for both opposition to the current order and the possible instantiation of a new order. The performative dimension of power can be placed in similar relationship to the material, relational, and discursive dimensions of power as agency, parsed in the previous chapter. In opposition to the inertias and affordances of the material, the settled habit of relational organization, and the naturalization of hierarchy in and through discourse, performative power appears and then fades in counterintuitive ways, achieves success in binding actors to rectors via different and sometimes quixotic processes, and retains a certain instability even when used well and repeatedly. Dependent on transformative publicity for forging relations between rector, actor, and other, the performative dimension is subject to volatility in both its direction (who sends, binds, or excludes who) and its relevance (performance can be superficial or deeply consequential, relative to the other dimensions of power). How to specify performative power? Our intellectual situation is one in which the overwhelming dispersion of different renderings of performance (the performative, performativity  .  .  .) has led to wild oscillations between views of performance that make it utterly foundational, indeed universal to human action as such, and those that grasp it as parasitic on the more organized and ordered forms of social action. These intellectual fluctuations imi-

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tate the volatility of performative power itself, but they can make it difficult to parse power: everything in human (and nonhuman!) life can be “read as a performance”; yet at the same time we are always tempted, in sociological analysis, to disavow the public act as explanatory in favor of something more stable that sits behind the act and which, we think, truly explains the matter at hand, truly turns actor into agent. When we do this, the dramaturgical metaphor—actors, mis-en-scène, frontstage/backstage, the power of the director, the fragmentation of audiences—is subsumed under a broader hermeneutics of the naturalizations taken for granted by rector and actor, the organizational habits that repeatedly exclude other, and so on; the power of drama is absorbed into materiality, relation, discourse. For we like, in the human sciences, to be able to point to some more solid, systematic, and reliably oppressive “structure” of power. All of this has the rather unfortunate effect of recurrently limning performance as one side of the agency-structure binary (a binary which, in all its horrible glory, is in the end merely a twisted appropriation of the Kantian distinction between determinate causality and free moral experience, and thus a writing of heroism onto individuals). Instead, I seek in this chapter to delimit performance as a particular feature or dimension of the world of power, neither everything nor nothing. Illocutionary Force and Performative Power The analytical idea of the performative was introduced, for certain academic audiences at least, in J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. In this text, 1. In Max Weber’s sociology, charismatic Herrschaft is both powerful in a causal sense—it can suddenly destroy and remake social order—and restricted in scope. Weber judged certain political and social situations favorable to charismatic explosion, but for him these conditions are not themselves the result of charisma. In the more existential moments of his writing, he hints that the origins of charisma might be beyond the capacity of the social scientific mindset to grasp; he tended, then, to study charismatic rule’s routinization, which is to say its return to patterns that can be comprehended in their relative stability. Weber’s ideal-typical distinctions, as a frame on which subtler and context-bound interpretive explanations can be built, provide a model of conceptual method, even if we depart from his conclusions concerning modernity and Western societies (and even if we ignore, knowingly, his implicit advice that sociology should perhaps leave to the theologians the comprehension of charisma and the inner workings of crisis). The analogy, in other words, is that the performative dimension of power shares some features with charismatic Herrschaft: ontologically unstable, potentially system disrupting, but also available to those who have the advantages of office. For further discussion of these issues, see Isaac Ariail Reed, “Chains of Power and Their Representation,” Sociological Theory 35, no. 2 (2017): 87–117; Isaac Ariail Reed, “Charismatic Performance: A Study of Bacon’s Rebellion,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (2013): 254–87.

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both awkward and insightful, Austin begins with a distinction between “performative” utterances and “constative” utterances, the former doing something by saying it under the right circumstances (“I take you to be my lawfully wedded wife”), the latter stating something that is either true or false (“Oregon is south of Washington”). The text then proceeds in a long arc toward the conclusion that the distinction is unsustainable, replacing it with the distinction between locution, illocution, and perlocution. Throughout, one is impressed by Austin’s intuitive sense of how performance binds the future and invents a piece of social life “in the very act.” Furthermore, Austin repeatedly gestures away from the speech act and toward action in general, thus opening the possibility of a move away from the philosophy of language and toward social theory. He even at certain moments interprets performance as binding authority, as the law is prominent in his catalogue of illocution: judges making decisions or giving verdicts are given as key examples. Thus we get a sense that in performatives, it is not only promises that are made but also, in some cases at least, the future actions of subordinates that are secured. Finally, perhaps most well known to sociology, Austin discusses the conditions of felicity, ultimately basing them in a somewhat fuzzy notion of “convention,” which he compares to ceremony and ritual. How, then, should we read Austin’s distinction between locution (sense and reference of a statement), illocution (what one does in saying something), and perlocution (the effects in the world of making a statement, what one does by saying something)? It would appear that the purpose of Austin’s 2. John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 28–29. 3. Austin, 43, 88, 116, 153, 159. 4. Erving Goffman, “Felicity’s Condition,” American Journal of Sociology 89, no. 1 (1983): 1–53. 5. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 128. 6. Austin, 18–19. 7. The following reading of these terms (locution, illocution, perlocution) is different from that found in the work of Jürgen Habermas. This is not an accident. As Jeffrey C. Alexander has pointed out, there is a clear departure in Austin from the Habermasian rendering of communicative action: “But if the strategic or perlocutionary acts are intended by Austin to include understanding, so also are communicative, or illocutionary acts, intended to include strategizing. Whereas Habermas defines communicative understanding as completely divorced from the strategic calculation of effects, Austin defines illocution as a type of performance.” Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Habermas and Critical Theory: Beyond the Marxian Dilemma?,” in Structure and Meaning: Relinking Classical Sociology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989): 217–49; quotation is from p. 240. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 286–327.

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text is to zero in on the specifics of illocution as something that happens in the utterance. When I say to you, “I promise I will be there tomorrow at seven,” the utterance, first, makes sense in English and relies on the fact that you know I mean 7:00 p.m. as well as a variety of other taken-for-granted meanings, the interpretation of which depend on the meaningful background to interaction. This aspect of sense-making, which corresponds to the discursive dimension of power, is locution. Second, the sentence may have the effect (intended or unintended) that you will show up at 7:30 p.m., via a series of habits and counterhabits that exist in the world (you are not in the habit of being prompt given that my authority is, in your view, minimal; a Friday night traffic jam intervenes in the process of your arrival). But third, in between locution and perlocution is wedged the illocutionary force of my having made a promise, and thus having somehow committed myself to some sort of relation that has been produced in the very act of promising. By the utterance, I have invoked and invented an obligation. I have attempted—and perhaps succeeded—in binding the future via my act in the moment. This is of clear interest for a sociology of power, because it is possible that the tie that emerges between rector and actor, for example, is a result of performance and counterperformance: a compelling speech by rector pulls actor into rector’s project, on the one hand, but actor’s performance of “good worker” causes rector to choose him as the person to give the speech to, on the other. When one completes the reading of Austin’s text, one is left with an image of a world of meaning and cause chugging along via locution (sense) and perlocution (habits in the world, unintended consequences, technological facilitation), occasionally intervened upon by the illocutionary, which for Austin is where the performative really lies. When illocutionary force is summoned, statements seem to possess a surfeit of power. Instead of saying to a colleague that the concert is at seven, I emotionally and with great gusto promise my daughter I will be there at seven for her concert, and in so doing I perform into existence a vast array of emotions, obligations, and meanings. It is this notion—that the performative intervenes in the world, and, furthermore, that the degree to and manner in which it does so are highly variable—that is key to expanding the conceptual scope of sociological studies of power. Austin understands this space of variation with the term felicity. It seems particularly evocative in this regard that Austin cites the refusal of orders given as a prime case of infelicity. 8. Austin explains further, “The performative ‘I define X as Y’ (in the fiat sense say) commits me to using those terms in special ways in future discourse, and we can see how this is connected with such acts as promising.” Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 137.

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Binding, Sending, and Excluding via Performance We have seen that rector, actor, and other can be connected materially, relationally, and discursively. The performative aspect of power introduces a different epistemic profile to the study of power; in particular, we should resist the temptation to conflate performative power with discursive power, or to see the former as an extension or a subcategory of the latter. For although performance is a feature of a social theory of power precisely insofar as such a theory is hermeneutic in the sense of being a theory of action and meaning rather than of behavior, the distinction is important because of a different focus for the analysis of meaning and its relationship to hierarchy. If the power of discourse lies in how the links between signs, brought together as a fragmented but meaningful whole, render natural and taken-for-granted a certain representation of rector, actor, and other, then the power of performance lies in its splendid publicity. The latter may be provocative and “unnatural,” and may indeed accomplish power by its weirdness—by sticking out rather than fitting in. When the sending and binding of an actor-as-agent depends on the pace and emotional arc of the delivery of a speech; when the exclusion from a meeting depends on the clever combination of a minor technicality with the felicitous mobilization of manners; when negotiation hinges, not on background meanings but on bluster and interactional dominance in the moment, then we can see performative power at work. Performative power thus involves (1) an accrual of agency, (2) the dependence of this accrual for its efficacy on the dramatic felicity of the actions as interpreted by a public or audience, and therefore (3) the dependence of some kind of sending-and-binding, or exclusion from sending-and-binding, on the interpretation of frontstage drama. Understood in this way, performative power captures an aspect of both rulership and its resistance. The complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship of performative uptake and felicity to meaning as a landscape or background can be seen most clearly, perhaps, in the felicity of certain oft-repeated phrases that do not make sense (locutionally) but nonetheless “work” (are felicitous) as imperatives inspiring action: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” “to dare is to do.” However, there is an important way in which these phrases should still be grasped as meaningful; and the temptation to reduce performance to sheer contingency or sheer public visibility without meaning threatens to disable 9. See the discussion of the “rebels” in Barbara J. Risman, Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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our ability to relate discursive and performative power as distinct and, most important, variably intertwined. At this point in the theorization of performative power, I have found it useful to introduce historical episodes to think with. The Salem Witch Trials and the Fall of Oscar Wilde In the interpretations of the Salem Witch Trials that have been written by historians, literary theorists, and sociologists, it is clear that there is some10. Given this particular analytical profile, and the eventful ontology of performative power, a certain link between the social theories of Judith Butler and Max Weber comes into view. Weber traced the routinization of charismatic rule as producing an institutionalized and denuded charisma in which power relations were rendered stable precisely insofar as charisma was converted into religious tradition, incorporated into the written basis of legal order, and/ or rendered useful for meeting the day-to-day needs of economic order and trade. For Weber, then, charismatic rule becomes a shell of itself via the process of routinization, but in so doing may carry some of its “content” into the systems it helps found or is absorbed into. Meanwhile, Butler traced how public provocations, and the purposive reclaiming and resignification of linguistic terminology (e.g. “queer”) and various spaces via the assembly of bodies (workspaces, public squares where ACT UP performed, etc.), eventually shifted the discursive terrain by which sexuality and gender were habitually performed, at least in certain settings; the critique of heteronormativity carried within it a hope that the iterative failures of gender performance opened a space for its reconfiguration discursively. One might, I think, analogize this to Weber’s (substantively and politically different) analysis of the “revolutionary” potential of charismatic rule, on the one hand, and its inevitable routinization, on the other. What emerges in both Butler and Weber, then, is a sense that the strangeness and volatility of performative power contribute to the tendency for episodes or arcs of performative power to have relatively shorter timescales than do discursive formations. Furthermore, an important arena of investigation is opened by the overlap between their respective oeuvres, namely the relationship between performative and discursive formats of power. In Weber this takes the form of the question of the relationship of charisma to ideology or meaning; in Butler it takes the form of her consistent engagement with Michel Foucault, on the one hand, and Hannah Arendt, on the other. Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 17–32; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2000); Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1111–57; Philip Smith, “Culture and Charisma: Outline of a Theory,” Acta Sociologica 43, no. 2 (2000): 101–11; Isaac Ariail Reed, “Power: Relational, Discursive and Performative Dimensions,” Sociological Theory 31, no. 3 (2013): 193–218. 11. The explosion of witchcraft accusations in the environs of Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1692, which ended with the death by hanging of fourteen women and five men (and included the jailing of over two hundred), remains an oft-used reference point in American cultural production.

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thing significant about the pretrial hearings, which involved elaborate and ostentatious bodily actions and speech by those who accused their neighbors of witchcraft. In the hearings, the accusers—many of them teenage girls generally relegated, in Puritan society, to low status and likely to be interpreted as untrustworthy witnesses by magistrates and ministers—made an elaborate show of being tormented by the accused witches. This included bodily imitation of the movements of those accused (e.g. an accused witch turns her head left, and so do all her accusers). During the trials, these public bodily performances successfully (for  a time) subverted typical legal procedure for seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. As the questioning of accused witches (usually poor, usually female) by magistrates (usually rich, always male) proceeded, it did not follow the encoded habits of action and interpretation. Rather, the normal rector-actor-other relations were repeatedly disrupted, impinged on, and redirected by the accusers—despite the fact that they had little “standing” in society or authorization to speak. It is worth noting that some of the performances of the accused witches were quite consequential as well, including that of Abigail Hobbs, who at a key moment in the proceedings suddenly, openly, and defiantly declared that she was a witch. Scholars have repeatedly pointed out how some of the energy driving the trials seems to have derived from these outbursts of emotion, bodily movement, and speech by the accusers and the accused. These performances were able to sway various audiences, including the elite magistrates, who at a typical witch trial would have arrived precisely to shut down this sort of wild speaking out of turn. The irony is that in speaking out of turn, otherwise “misbehaving,” and claiming a clear vision of what was going on in the cosmos, the accusers were engaging in precisely the kinds of actions that would

12. Richard Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). For sociological reviews of the massive literature on the Salem Witch Trials, see Isaac Ariail Reed, “Deep Culture in Action: Resignification, Synecdoche, and Metanarrative in the Moral Panic of the Salem Witch Trials,” Theory and Society 44, no. 1 (2015): 65–94; and Isaac Reed, “Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft,” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 209–34. 13. Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 14. Reed, “Deep Culture in Action,” 76–77. 15. Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic and Religion; Jane Kamensky, “Words, Witches, and Woman Trouble: Witchcraft, Disorderly Speech, and Gender Boundaries in Puritan New England,” in Gender and Witchcraft: New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology, ed. Brian P. Levack (New York: Routledge, 2013), 196–217.

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normally make someone more vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. This speaks to the volatility of performative power, since in this situation, as the performative dimension came to the fore, the subject positions of accuser and accused were somehow blurred. Another instance of performative power worth meditating on is at the center of Ari Adut’s sociology of scandal (and recurs in his theoretical meditations on the public sphere). Oscar Wilde was the toast of London high society despite his homosexuality being well known; not only that, it was well known that his homosexuality was well known. In other words, among the British upper class at least, people knew that other people knew that Wilde was gay. But this was not enough to cause his exclusion from “good society,” and certainly not his imprisonment. Indeed, even as the public drama around Wilde began in 1895 (Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry, who had accused him of sodomy, for libel), it seemed quite likely that he would survive it with his esteemed social reputation relatively intact. This was not, however, the outcome—he was tried for gross indecency and sentenced to prison and two years of hard labor. Adut argues that the hammer came down on Wilde as the result of his provocation on the stand during the trial; his analysis focuses intently and convincingly on the feel, genre, and available meanings introduced into the game of power by Wilde’s testimony. This performance, which involved flippant answers to inquiries by Queensberry’s lawyers—answers that came off as someone of high status abusing his position so as to continue with an “immoral” life—was devastating to Wilde, because it was so defiant about his sexuality. According to Adut, “As Wilde appeared as public provocateur, the courtroom audience turned against him. The public gallery cheered when Queensberry was acquitted, and the public reaction was officially endorsed when the judge refrained from silencing the crowd. The press was, in turn, encouraged by this uncustomary forbearance and cudgeled Wilde without clemency.” Wilde’s rapid transition from cultural, aesthetic rector, setting and mocking the taste of the London elite—an ambiguous position of cultural delegation, one might say, where the most powerful parts of society delegated to Wilde as actor-agent the task of producing wit—to maligned, profaned, and 16. Carol Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 17. Ari Adut, On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ari Adut, Reign of Appearances: The Misery and Splendor of the Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 18. Adut, On Scandal, 63.

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imprisoned other hinged, then, on a subtle matter: to know something, and to know that “everybody knows” something, is not the same as being unable to deny it because of its emergence on the public stage. The provocative performance of Wilde, combined with its publicity, meant that no one in the London elite could possibly deny knowing Wilde was homosexual. Without deniability, the need to perform morality by attacking Wilde went from a minority cause to a normative requirement for the entire upper class. It is on this basis that Adut can write, “The public sphere is therefore primarily a dramaturgical order, and scandals are an extreme illustration of this principle.” He gestures toward a much broader category, of which scandals are themselves a subtype, and has gone on to theorize the public sphere via a theory of visibility: “Politics being inevitability about appearances, no wonder scandal is integral to it.” But it is not only visibility, in a highly general sense, that is at issue but the variable interpretation of dramatic gesture as constitutive of relations of power that we ought to examine. This is the key issue raised by Adut’s reconstruction of the Wilde case but underestimated in his theoretical explorations. The question raised is, How should we think about the intersection between dramaturgy and the violence and exclusion available to (certain forms of) domination of others? For the question of performance, in this view, extends beyond the bonds of emotional attachment that fix certain followers to certain charismatic leaders. It is, rather, the case that dramaturgy can have many lives and many deaths, as performances fail or succeed. From such failures and successes, important and volatile forces are introduced into history and society. An Analysis of Performative Power in the Salem Witch Trials and the Fall of Oscar Wilde How can we account for the sudden rectorship—indeed ability to direct ministers and magistrates—that the accusers at Salem accessed? And how could Wilde’s fall from an exalted position in polite society depend so much on not only what he said during his trial but how he said it? In the action of the Salem Witch Trials, we see rectorship accessed almost entirely via compelling dramatic performance. The accusers appropriated authority normally reserved for those with “standing,” which is to say autho19. Adut, 56. 20. Adut, Reign of Appearances, 83.

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rization to speak and decide. These appropriations were dependent on the contortion of female bodies in public space, so as to convince audiences that witchcraft was indeed afoot in Massachusetts Bay Colony. So the (previously low-status) accusers at Salem grasped at the power of the director, molding how the trials would go. However, Salem also makes clear that performative power cannot be categorically considered a weapon of the weak. For during the Trials, and more broadly during the crisis years of 1689–92, this sort of contingent, highly public ability to move and shake the social world via felicitous performance was also accessed by elites who were well positioned discursively and relationally, but nonetheless accessed further capacity and domination via performance. The Salem Witch Trials were a historical aberration in an important sense. Before the outburst of energy at Salem, witch trials in Puritan Massachusetts were contentious and adversarial but highly limited legal affairs. Thus when some girls started acting out in Salem Village, what was to be expected—if we were tracking discursive and relational power in the modal witch trial in Massachusetts Bay Colony up to that point—was that there would be some accusations and counteraccusations, usually ending with a failure to convict, but also an urging by magistrates for the accused to leave town. Especially when Rebecca Nurse was accused, the “normal” course of socially sanctioned actions would have been for the accusations to end, because the idea that she was a witch was patently absurd. A well-regarded Puritan matriarch, a lifetime churchgoer, and not poor by any means, Nurse did not fit the demographic profile of witch as widely understood in Massachusetts at the time. But that is not what happened, and the reason is the intersection of the performances of the accusers with the performances of sermons by the ministers who were on the scene. These clergymen “grasped the moment,” and 21. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Judith Butler, “Performativity’s Social Magic,” in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Schusterman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 113–28. 22. For the complexities of “directing” a performance while in it, see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 176–256. 23. The accused could present petitions from townsfolk attesting to his or her innocence; the accused could also countersue for libel. Sociologically, witch trials in Massachusetts often involved elite attempts to quiet village-based antagonisms. 24. Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic and Religion; Richard Godbeer, Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 25. Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman. 26. For an extended account of these ministers’ sermons and their timing in the course of the trials, see Reed, “Deep Culture in Action.”

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quickly convinced many people—or, perhaps, persuaded people to act as if they were convinced—that good Rebecca’s purported involvement with witchcraft was in fact evidence of just how deep and pernicious the satanic plot against Massachusetts Bay Colony really was. This was the essence of sermons given by Deodat Lawson and Samuel Parris, and it is worth noting that Nurse was eventually hanged. In his analysis of the fall of Wilde, Adut introduces the concept of transformative publicity and thereby evokes a wide range of thinking—from Erving Goffman, to Hannah Arendt, to Thomas Schelling, to Michael Chwe’s recent innovations in rational choice theory. My proposal for this term is that we use it to examine the transformation of interpretations, action and counteraction, and thus the sending, binding, and exclusion that take place between rector, actor, and other. Transformative publicity describes what takes place between actor and audience when the audience is made up of people who “realize each other as the spectators of the same thing.” This is an impor27. The circular logic that obtained here does appear to be a frequent aspect of power grasped through publicity via performance. During a crisis, a bold and convincing performance can turn common sense (such as it is) upside down. To paraphrase: “You think that it is absurd to accuse person X of crime Y because of their good standing?” the ministers railed. “You don’t know how deep this horrid conspiracy really goes.” This circularity is what allowed Arthur Miller to use a play about the Salem Witch Trials to address McCarthyism. And it is what worried Hannah Arendt about the French Revolution—“You think it is extreme to behead the King?—You don’t know how much danger our revolution is really in.” Indeed in On Revolution we receive from Arendt’s interpretation of the Jacobins an inversion of the apotheosis of political performance she ascribed to ancient Greece and held up as a model of what was lost in the triumph of totalitarian societies. Her concern in interpreting the French Revolution is with the odd circularity of certain bursts of performative power, which seem to contain within them the possibility of pathology in their conflation of motive and action. “However deeply heartfelt a motive may be,” Arendt explains, “once it is brought out and exposed for public inspection it becomes an object of suspicion . . . when the light of the public falls upon it, it appears and even shines.” But the problem with motives is that “when they appear, they become ‘mere appearances’ behind which again other, ulterior motives may lurk.” This for Arendt was the root cause of the “fateful mood of suspicion, so glaringly omnipresent through the French Revolution.” We may disagree with Arendt that such a logic contained within it the murders of the Terror—and indeed, as we shall see, a more in-depth hermeneutics of speeches around the killing of the King will be required—but we cannot ignore the difficulty to which she points, particularly insofar as we abandon a strictly rationalist concept of the public sphere. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 86, 87. 28. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Michael Suk-Young Chwe, “Culture, Circles, and Commercials: Publicity, Common Knowledge, and Social Coordination,” Rationality and Society 10, no. 1 (1998): 47–75. 29. Ari Adut, “A Theory of the Public Sphere,” Sociological Theory 30, no. 4 (2012): 238–66; quotation is from p. 244.

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tant aspect of the analysis of the felicity of performative power. If we accept that audiences can vary in size and foreknowledge, and thus that the common knowledge and asymmetry of actor-audience publicity comprise a phenomenon beyond what is normally (and normatively) debated as “the public sphere,” then what we are really talking about is performative power. Publicity as transformative for interpretation brings together the theater metaphor with the analytical notion of performativity, for it is through the transformative effects of witnessing by an audience that the alchemy of performativity takes place, and it is in these terms that we can comprehend not only Wilde’s fall but also the now-classic statements of performativity theory: “That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the ‘integrity’ of the subject.” Oscar Wilde’s open and scandalous provocation, in the context of the enlarged and focused audience created by the trial (available, via the newspapers, to the middle and lower classes as well as the upper), activated this transformative publicity. Having been so activated, no one in the London elite could possibly deny knowing Wilde was homosexual; nor could they deny that the middle and working classes saw homosexual behavior by men in the upper classes as an indication of a lack of masculine virility and a sign of corruption—that is, of illegitimate rule by rectors out of place. This explains the public proclamations of morality and the state violence toward Wilde that emerged in response to his performance—they were a collective, performative display by the upper class of themselves as the legitimate rectors of society, judging and punishing “moral degradation.” The actions and speeches of the upper class carefully and artfully traced and interpreted by Adut could be paraphrased thusly: “It might be fine for the unwashed masses to tolerate Wilde’s behavior—who knows what happens in those parts of London?—but surely we, as moral leaders, can do no such thing.” This focuses our attention on something quite important about performative power—it can instantiate a rough equality among a given audience 30. Indeed, all the felicity conditions proposed by J. L. Austin, looked at again, can be interpreted as having to do with those conditions that make a kind of transformation via publicity possible. 31. Butler, Gender Trouble, 173.

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while simultaneously drawing a starker boundary between that audience and another—a boundary between actor and other. It would appear that publics are often constructed as a we, made up of rectors and actors, over and against profaned others, excluded as foreign, alien, and/or radically inferior; and surely this fits the Wilde case precisely, given the anxieties of maintaining power that attended the upper class in late nineteenth-century Britain. There are aspects of this kind of publicity in the classic cases of charismatic leadership—wherein warrior heroes or prophets perform miracle after miracle for their attendant audiences. Charismatic rule, then, grows via a spiral of performative success dependent on cowitnessing, and thus transformative publicity, for its ongoing power. Thus we can say that performative power, tapping into the transformations wrought on sociality by publicity, binds the future, shifting reactions, judgments, interpretations, and future actions. It features a stepping out onto the stage as a claim to command and control, and thus is a making, in the act itself, of relations between rector, actor, and other. Excursus on the Theorization of Performance and Ritual in Sociology The texts that theorize transformative publicity, common knowledge, and social performance are a study in extremes. One may posit two forks in the road. The first fork is between hermeneutic and behavioral social science: between publicity as providing a kind of transformation of interpretations and publicity as a focal point for conflict and cooperation, which is to say a solution to coordination problems. Behavioral approaches study publicity as a formal property separate from meaningful content, and return us to the agency theory of James Coleman and a strictly instrumental theory of power; the hermeneutic theorization of performance breaks through the limitations, for interpretive sociology, of focusing only on discursive power. (Adut seems to oscillate between these two routes; in his second book, he moves toward a mediated version of the behavioral direction, thinking publicity apart from meaningful content.) The second fork is within the interpretive approach to performance, where there is a divide between an emphasis on ritual, on the one hand, and events and eventness, on the other.

32. Reed, “Charismatic Performance.” 33. Chwe, who writes about Clifford Geertz and Arendt from a rational choice perspective, recognizes the problem: “Publicity as well as content must be considered in understanding cultural practices such as rituals. But although this distinction is useful analytically, content and publicity are never fully separable in practice.” Chwe, “Culture, Circles, and Commercials,” 66.

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The focus on ritual, which takes as its starting point the analogy between Émile Durkheim’s belief/ritual distinction and Ferdinand de Saussure’s langue/parole distinction, is particularly prominent in the work of Bernhard Giesen, wherein “fusion” between actors and audiences results from the repetition of mystical invocations that generate an experience of the sacred. This extends the study of internalization and socialization to the “world of action” insofar as that world has ritual-like features. But what is a ritual? The debate is extensive, but one important insight to emerge from work that considers the long struggle over ritual in Christian theology (concerning liturgy and authenticity, Catholicism and Protestantism, ritual and antiritual) is that ritual is a particularly odd sort of social performance. That is to say that in ritual, the public profession of sameness of belief (regardless of what individual beliefs are) creates a terrain for the solidaristic getting-on with life; and, if audiences as participants are interpreting a set of actions as “ritual,” the dramatic requirements on the performers for felicity are reduced by this pre-interpretation. Indeed, considered from a certain angle, it begins to appear that the point of ritual as ritual is that as long as basic procedures (long since codified or habitualized) are followed, it does not matter whether the priest is charismatic or not, whether the speech that accompanies the act reaches a high point of dramatic expression or is read in a boring monotone off a sheet of paper, or whether the repetitive movements of the body are done with élan or drudgery. No matter what, if the right words are uttered by the right person to the right person, the sacrament of Communion is taken to work. So one might say that while many actions in the world are dramaturgy without power, ritual is, or least can be, a repetitive evocation of power without much drama. The temptation to oppose this kind of evocation of ritual in social theory with a poststructuralist romance of disruption and mistakes has been almost too strong to resist. In response to the ritual affirmation of a single source of the good, and in response to the Protestant insistence on authentic revelation as the opposite of ritual, social theory has—haunted by Catholicism and Protestantism—tended to render the entire world of performance into either ritual or resistance. It is in this context that we can understand the turn to the 34. Bernhard Giesen, “Performing the Sacred: A Durkheimian Perspective on the Performative Turn in the Social Sciences,” in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 325–67. 35. Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 36. It is worth noting that this is why there can be such a thing as bureaucratic ritual.

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language of “eventness,” theorized in full restlessness, as the counterpoint to the Durkheimian invocation of ritual. Thus Robin Wagner-Pacifici can write in simultaneous complicity with and radical opposition to the Durkheimian position, emphasizing that “ruptures disarticulate.” This is a Derridian inheritance: if ritual is action as if there is a transcendental signified that does sit behind all signs, then the imperative of counter-reading (for Derrida and for Wagner-Pacifici) is to disrupt this settled assumption (or illusion). This, then, involves the abandonment of the possibility that a sociological interpretation could be an explanation, since explanations, too, suffer from a ritualized firmness of purpose that must be subject to the acid bath of postmodern suspicion. Consequently, we are left with the difficult matter of articulating the elements of a “good” performance analytically. Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory takes up this task, breaking apart the elements of ritual into the components of performance as the key point of analysis. Alexander constructs this breaking apart in an analytical and a historical register simultaneously, for he sees the breaking apart as a result of the development of complexity and differentiation in all human societies that are not small bands. In his narrative, “new forms of organizational and cultural differentiation” create an “opening up of social and cultural space” which focuses “attention on the projective, performative dimension of social action, subjecting the ritualized performances of more traditional life to increased scrutiny and strain.” In Alexander’s theory, then, elements of a performance—background representations, scripts, actors, social power, means of a symbolic production, audience—having been parsed by social complexity, are re-fused via the “attribution of authenticity,” which “depends upon an actor’s ability to sew the disparate elements of performance back into a seamless and convincing whole. If authenticity marks success, then failure suggests that a performance will seem insincere and faked.” Alexander’s approach shares with the approach taken here the goal of interpretive explanation. What is different is the theorization of the problems that performance solves. Alexander emphasizes differentiation, in contrast to 37. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, What Is an Event? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 84. 38. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, “Theorizing the Restlessness of Events,” American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 5 (2010): 1351–86. 39. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–90; quotation is from p. 47. 40. Alexander, 55.

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the focus here on a constructing sociohistory of violence, power, and authority. The language of rector, actor, and other is here developed as a frame for understanding variations in the deployment, distribution, and signification of physical violence; variations in the construction, use, and abuse of chains of power; and finally, as a way to grasp how contests for power invoke and render contested authority in the sense of attributed authorship. The performative, then, can be understood not only as succeeding on the basis of fusion but also as binding. That “binding” is the site of complicities between violence, power, and authority; changes in these complicities provide an entrée to the histories of modernity. But this is an argument inside a larger argument. What is revealed by the strange twists and turns of the Salem Witch Trials discussed earlier is the limitation, for empirical analysis, of the ritual-versus-resistance opposition. The trials were neither a ritual of power automatically received and accepted, nor an irruption of resistance seeking to disrupt a norm or normative system. The ministers and magistrates found themselves navigating new symbolic territory and historical contingencies, while the ascendant accusers were, in fact, quite deeply constrained by others present in the performance, and were not “resisting” a system of power as much as they were seeking a subject position within it normally denied to them. Indeed the out-of-place female performers directed their power primarily at other girls and women, also positioned outside “authoritative speech” in Puritan New England. So what better explains the Salem Witch Trials—and many other instances of performance during crisis—is the variation in performance and its interpretation as a vector of power, wrought by transformative publicity. Performance in Chains of Power and Their Representation If we are imagining the world of power relations as intersecting chains of rectors, actors, and others, and we are imagining that the bindings and exclusions that constitute these chains are, in part, constituted by performance, we may hazard some initial hypotheses, based on recurrent themes in sociological research, concerning the emergence and causal relevance of performative 41. For a critique of the tendency to see resistance only in the disruption of norms, one whose perspective of performance and hermeneutics is commensurate with the one that’s pursued here, see Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 2011. 42. Isaac Ariail Reed, “Between Structural Breakdown and Crisis Action: Interpretation in the Whiskey Rebellion and the Salem Witch Trials,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 27–64.

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power to the unfolding of social action. I begin by positing some settings where we are likely to find performative power especially relevant to constructing sociological explanations. E x t r e m e R e c t o r s h i p a n d R a d i c a l A lt e r i t y During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the minutiae of conversational rhythms, particularly an emergent willingness to ignore the negative outcomes associated with one path of action rather than others, occurred at the very highest levels of the American state. This performative contingency helps explain the trajectory that world geopolitics took in 1962. Inversely, in her book Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders, Teresa Gowan explains that “though the [homeless] men in this book disagreed passionately about the causes and character of homelessness, all agreed on one thing. For them, just as for the rest of us, homelessness constituted a rupture in the social order, an exceptional state that required explanation. . . . Within this context, the micropolitics of selfrepresentation transmitted via different grammars of action took on weighty explanatory significance.” In this perspicacious locution, Gowan argues that although homelessness as a phenomenon surely must be understood in terms of the structures produced by various chains of power that intersect in various ways (e.g. in political economy understood in relationship to urban geography), homelessness itself is thereby constituted as a situation where, for the radically othered, much comes to hinge on performative grasping at capacity, resistance, and sometimes domination. The bricoleur aspect of survival on the street, Gowan makes clear, is not only a pecuniary strategy but often also an attempt to forge a new, emergent identity out of action itself. S pat i a l S e pa r at i o n f r o m O r g a n i z e d   P o w e r R e l at i o n s Separation from the heart of well-ordered social activity and its accompanying habits, understandings, and material constructions can set the stage for performative power, for “in the wilderness” it can become easier to upset received notions of who is rector, who is actor, and who is other. Such distances account well for the flourishing of piracy in the early modern world, as the 43. David Gibson, Talk at the Brink: Deliberation and Decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 44. Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 26.

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studies of Matthew Norton show. Dubious claims to be in the possession of letters from sovereigns, words from the King that could grant legitimacy, could be made via tremendous drama, and carry the day in so doing. For action and reaction, including violent action, in the temporally and spatially isolated Caribbean were difficult to connect to the habituated machinery centered on Whitehall. The destruction of piracy, Norton shows in detail, was contingent on the ability of the British state to develop sustained techniques for making “the maritime world more amenable to [its] political-economic worldviews and stratagems.” Primary among these were a series of “institutional and semiotic mechanisms that allowed for the retroactive judgment of isolated, violent encounters at sea.” In the early modern Atlantic, there was much sending (e.g. of Drake by Elizabeth) but little binding. Only via signs, technologies, and regimes were the wild actors and would-be rectors of the high seas turned into consistent agents of various state rectors. In particular, the creation of a legal apparatus such that these highly unstable encounters in the Atlantic—“isolate[d] interactions dominated by the powers of men, guns, and boats”—could be connected to the metropole was central to the extension of power by agents of the British government. In effect, by introducing a new draconian legal apparatus whereby maritime violence could be traced, recorded, and then tried in England at a later date, the British state overcame space by creating a series of symbols that linked together different times. This brought an end to the ambiguous categories that had allowed pirates near impunity in the seventeenth century, particularly because, as the trials of pirates were conducted and news of them traveled, the new categories interpolated the consciousness of mariners themselves. What Norton reveals via his study of semiosis is the possibility of a theory of edge performance that inherits Edward Shils’s suggestion that “those who suffer the burdens of distance from the center, who are the victims of the unequal distributions of dignity and more tangible rewards, are inevitably somewhat hostile toward those who dominate the earthly order. All charisma calls forth not only awe and deference but also a sacrilegious, ‘atheistic’ hostility.” 45. Matthew Norton, “Temporality, Isolation, and Violence in the Early Modern English Maritime World,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 37–66; Matthew Norton, “Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System,” American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 6 (2014): 1537–75. 46. Norton, “Temporality, Isolation, and Violence,” 39. 47. Norton, 39. 48. Edward Shils, “Charisma, Order, and Status,” American Sociological Review 30, no. 2 (1965): 199–213; 210.

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I n c h o at e S i t uat i o n s Finally, we may identify the inchoate situation as a likely location for the foregrounding of performative power. It is the space of uncertainty between actors that emerges in various scenes and settings, and is resolved via performance, wherein the situation is “made sense of ” precisely by its being made in the dramaturgical sense of the term. Under situations of confusion and uncertainty, actors make random choices, make themselves present and just see how things go, carry out a design they do not understand, pretend to have a design, or radically simplify their interpretations of a situation—even though it is somehow “obvious” (to whom?) that those interpretations are wrong. These are performances that attempt to bind the other persons in the situation. In inchoate situations, an actor can impose his interpretation of the situation on others by stepping out onto the public stage. He may then execute a series of actions that are moves in a game whose very rules are being defined and redefined as the situation proceeds—via performance, the actor becomes a situational rector, because the ability to command and control, and thus make certain actors into one’s agents for this or that project, depends on the felicity and uptake of the drama as presented. Founding Performances The performative dimension of power and the interest in investigating crisis that is a recurrent feature of historical sociology raise, finally, the issue of foundations. Founding performances are the reference point for Hannah Arendt’s study of revolutions as modern phenomena. Arendt was interested in the constitution of societies through founding acts whose meaning was later embodied in documents (constitutions) that came to be revered; the ensuing reverence for such documents as sacred carried through several generations. This sacralization, Arendt noted, was ambiguous, because the rever49. Iddo Tavory shows that flirting can be understood as a reversal of this use of performative power to make a sensible situation out of an inchoate one. Iddo Tavory, “The Structure of Flirtation: On the Construction of Interactional Ambiguity,” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 33 (2009): 59–74. 50. Christopher Winship, “Inchoate Situations and Extra-rational Behavior,” in Rationality in the Social Sciences, ed. H. Staubmann and V. Lidz (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2018), 223–43. 51. Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 97–113.

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ence was directed “at least as much [at] the act of constituting as it was the written document itself.” That Arendt conceptualized these acts as instances of performative power is clear because of the way she related them to causality. For her, the “beginnings” of foundational acts were “not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect immediately turns into the cause for future developments.” Rather, “it is as though [a beginning] came out of nowhere in either time or space . . . it is as though the beginner had abolished the sequences of temporality itself, or as though the actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity.” The echo of J. L. Austin on illocutionary force is quite clear, as different as his concerns, style, and philosophy were from hers. Foundations as acts in the world pull together authority, power, and violence; we see this in the history of the three revolutions that shook the Atlantic World at the close of the eighteenth century. Arendt thematizes the fraught relationship between performative power and the better-understood dimensions of power: discursive, relational and material. Certainly an implicit understanding of foundational political acts as grounded in the power of dramaturgy informs her explanation of the use, by the men at the center of the American and French Revolutions, of Roman terminology and imagery. That her explanation is thus notoriously different from that of Karl Marx is well known; and indeed it is here, in Arendt’s refusal of Marx’s interpretation of the evocation of Roman symbolics, that we find her perceptive awareness of the weakness of a social theory that reduces itself to political economy alone. For Arendt, the men of the Enlightenment who ended up at the center 52. Arendt, On Revolution, 196. 53. Arendt, 198. 54. Arendt’s interpretation of the revolutions leaves much to be desired, from the perspective of a sociohistorical investigation of power. Had she been more concerned with the social circuits of interpretation that inflected the foundational acts and foundational documents of the French and American Revolutions—had she, in other words, not only sought to understand the binding of rectors to actors, but also written more extensively about the inflection of these chains by the violent exclusions of others—she may have arrived at a quite different picture of politics in the early American republic. Nonetheless Arendt’s concept of foundation is sociologically fecund. Here I focus not on the specifics of her attribution of ultimate meaning to the Roman political experience, but rather on what it reveals about the relationship between the concepts of performance, meaning, and modernity. 55. Isaac Ariail Reed, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 29–38.

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of the American and French Revolutions were not interested in the past qua tradition. Rather, what appealed to them about the Roman republic was the “notion of a coincidence of foundation and preservation by virtue of augmentation—that the ‘revolutionary’ act of beginning something entirely new, and conservative care, which will shield this new beginning through the centuries, are interconnected.” Arendt saw this coincidence of foundation and future preservation as a matter of performative power, because she emphasized the transformative power of publicity. “The constituting act, ‘antecedent to government,’ by which a people constitutes itself into a body politic,” which is to say the “act of foundation itself,” is credited in On Revolution with creating the conditions for the achievement of a modern republic, because “the foundation . . . now, for the first time, had occurred in broad daylight to be witnessed by all who were present.” In unpacking this paradox as the route to a rendering of “modernity,” Arendt was entering a space of normative interpretation and comparison which we tend to recognize as starting with Immanuel Kant. And it is worth noting that the same specific concern—with founding performances as creative destructions of preexisting relations that somehow also bind the future—animates the short philosophical document which hovers behind so many renderings of modernity. For when Kant sought to articulate a notion of continual progress, he found himself in the same conundrum as Arendt found herself when interpreting and comparing the French and American Revolutions. First, he insisted that “one age cannot bind itself, and thus conspire, to place the succeeding age in a situation in which it becomes impossible for it to broaden its knowledge  .  .  . to cleanse itself of errors, and generally to progress in enlightenment.” But second, he also held that “a public can achieve enlightenment only gradually. . . . A revolution . . . can never bring about the true reform of a way of thinking”—thus recogniz56. Arendt, On Revolution, 194. 57. Arendt, 196, 197. 58. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 44–54. 59. One should read On Revolution alongside the vibrant debate evoked by Michel Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” since Arendt, too, is reacting to Immanuel Kant’s reaction to the French Revolution. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50. 60. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” trans. James Schmidt, in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), 58–64; quotation is from p. 61. 61. Kant, 59.

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ing, implicitly, that future ages would owe something to their revolutionary foundations in the age of enlightenment in which Kant recognized himself as living and bringing to expression. As Michel Foucault recognized, the tension here was extreme, as the modern attitude engaged in an “ironic heroization of the present.” We thus arrive at a set of questions about the modern as both a radical break and a binding of the future—an exercise in performative power which proposed to reconfigure chains of power and their representation in all their dimensions in a way that demonstrated their radical reconstructability right now, at the start of a new project, and yet also somehow made these new reconstructions have the staying power to bind future generations into the task of reinterpreting the radically reconstructed rules. It should not surprise us that it was the performative dimension of these founding acts that tended to elude the understanding of the twentieth-century sociology of power, allergic as it was to the thorny problem of sovereignty. For performative power demands, even in the soberest sociological analysis, some engagement with normative argument. As Andrew Abbott put the matter: The most common human way of relating “is” and “ought” is performativity— erecting a set of oughts which define a world that we then treat as true. In the modern world, we pretend that this is not the situation. We believe that we have contentless, formal social oughts (utility, justice, etc.), leaving the substance of those oughts to the individual, and focusing our attention on truth conceived in the narrowest, most materialist fashion. There has resulted a civilization focused on such spiritual matters as the best tasting fermented grape juice and the chemicals most useful for helping people endure an existence defined ex ante as meaningless. But in most societies and culture, the experience of a performed reality dominates. This is indeed what humans do as a species: they imagine sand castles in the air, and then live in them.

The particular, but sometimes rather grand (and eventually carried around the world and enforced as the very basis for political and social life), sand castles that emerged in the transitions to modernity in the Atlantic require further investigation. And we can see Arendt struggling with how these foundational acts of violent newness were also, somehow, the enactment of a set of layered meanings. What saves the act of beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that beginning and prin62. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 42. 63. Julia Adams and George Steinmetz, “Sovereignty and Sociology: From State Theory to Theories of Empire,” Political Power and Social Theory 28 (2015): 269–85. 64. Andrew Abbott, Processual Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 31.

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ciple, principium and principle, are not only related to each other, but are coeval. . . . The way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and to bring about its accomplishment. As such, the principle inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the action lasts.

We may, then, reasonably ask, What were the principles, the representations of projects and their attendant ways of conducting politics, that emerged to frame and render comprehensible the recruiting of actors and the exclusion of others? What did politics mean, after revolution? Arendt notes with her usual irony that no matter how much John Adams went looking for advice from the “Roman spirit,” when it came to the problem of “the constitution of some entirely new unconnected body politic, these archives must have remained strangely silent.” But the archives of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonialists in North America, the archives of the revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic confronted with constructing a “new society,” are not closed to us— though their variable reconstruction is, shall we say, precisely the issue. Nor are these archives silent in “our” moment of crisis, a crisis that, as we shall see, was foretold precisely in the articulation and institutionalization of a certain “us” in the Atlantic World. We can venture to interpret these archives—and to interpret those who have, with greater aplomb, interpreted them—and thus to mobilize our investigation of power for the purpose of grasping at modernity. The hope is that if we approach, in a register at once historical, analytic, and normative, the emergence onto the scene of history of a set of performances both creative and destructive of power, whose creations and destructions reset the imaginative possibilities of how one might glue rector to actor, and how one might identify the others who were to be excluded at all costs and from all gains, then we might gain a new vantage point from which to comprehend, and criticize, modernity. 65. Arendt, On Revolution, 205. 66. Arendt, 200.

pa rt i i

Modernity

Introduction to Part II

If I am allowed what has been said so far, in the speech genre of social theory, caught up as it is between the abstract and the general, certain aspects of the historical formation of the present come into sharper view. Archives take on a new feel, as the problems of action in concert are connected to the forging of chains of power and their representation. Thus in part 2 of this book, I pursue an account of transitions to modernity in the Atlantic World at the end of the eighteenth century. In studying these transitions, I have found exploration of the discourses and performances that emerge in and through revolt particularly illuminating. When power formations falter or run up against other ways of organizing high politics; when violence breaks out, and state violence is mobilized to quell violence with more violence; when rebel leaders must find ways to send and bind those under them, despite the uncertainty of troubled times; then we see the articulation of the underlying cognitive, moral, and aesthetic orders that render politics possible; we see the performing-into-being of new power configurations as contested solutions to problems of rule bequeathed by older configurations, which themselves some choose to defend in new terms. At such moments of revolt, the imagination of the state and the logistics of the state’s operation come together and co-illuminate each other in the urgency of circumstances. Liminality reveals regime. The rendering of the world of hierarchy that occurs in revolt has the feel of emergency thinking, and we find during such moments that the contemporaries who are living through revolt pour forth their words in search of a reason, an interpretation, a cognitive adjustment to

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the threats on display. This, then, is where we can trace the forging of relations between rector, actor, and other out of signs—a performative hermeneutics of the ties that bind which also provides an entrée to a fragmentary historiography of modernity. Layers of legitimation and justification come to light, and the tension between latent background meanings and their public performance—normally a matter of longer-term processes of adjustment and naturalization—becomes productive in a short window of actions and reactions that can be traced and reinterpreted. In conducting these interpretations, I found certain conceptual points of focus, or imperatives of interpretive method, useful to keep in mind, particularly when the evidence ran counter to the trends of historiographical and sociohistorical debates: —Examine the nexus of violence and alliance in the making of politics. How is violent exclusion and its signification a source of energy for authority and authorization, and how does it disable precisely the goals of those who engage in it? How can we relate the material command of violence to the construal of the body in regimes of signification, and both of these to the conceptualization of the “rules of engagement” between persons, on contrasting terrains of hierarchy? In other words, how does the interpretation of physical violence affect the representation of power in high politics? —Be willing to trace signs across zones of activity. It is tempting to divide the study of religion from the study of politics, to divide variation in the representation of the subaltern from variation in the language of court intrigue, to divide the institution of work from the institution of family. But the temptation should be resisted, for we must keep enough suppleness in our tracing of the representation of chains of power that we can see when signs begin to travel across zones of activity—zones which may indeed be, on many other levels, separated or differentiated—and thus constitute strange unities amidst fragmentation. —Keep in mind a recurrent finding that emerged across several vastly different settings and situations—namely that amidst revolt and the uncertainties that it induces, everyone becomes a philosopher. When crisis arrives, the relationship between the vast plurality of projects pursued by human beings (including the satisfaction of their most basic material needs) and the emic philosophies of right that form the ambi-

1. For a counterintuitive interpretation of the exigencies of emergency politics, see Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).

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ent background of social life become widely available: in private letters and public speeches, moves and countermoves to gain political or economic advantage, in recalcitrant and resentful argument and despair, in strange utopian aspiration. —This means that one must stay alert for the moments when a mundane exchange of advantage becomes a debate about the outline of a project that makes other projects possible; through a kind of shift in the level of aspiration of a speech act, the debate becomes one about metanarratives of the Kingdom or the republic. For insofar as the justification of violence and the legitimation of power interact, they would appear to do so on the terms of the projects that organize and give meaning to the more specific ventures of this or that individual or group. So to study rectoractor-other relations is, in part, to conduct comparative historical sociology of political philosophies acted out in concrete struggle. In this rendering, the philosophy of governance is subject to the contingencies and catastrophes of history, featuring actual humans with actual bodies pursuing their own projects in one way or another. —Recall that amidst all this back-and-forth, hard bargaining, and amassing of the means of violence, some of the politics of representation takes place via fantasy. If this were not so, the layer of myth in human beings’ interpretations of their own lives would simply be a summary of strategy, and the insights of game theory and material history would be sufficient for explanation. Fantasies of rectorship, of accessing the other, of becoming an actor, have never been fully surpassed by bureaucratic rationality; one needs to be sufficiently open to the possibility of following them as they appear in the archive. If these proposals have the prescriptive air of conceptual method, it is one generated by a caution born out of uncertainty—a slight fear that, despite all the advances in the study of culture and power that social theory has experienced, we have nonetheless missed something vital in the constitution of the modern. 2. See Jill Harrison, Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

5

Agency, Alterity, and the Two Bodies of the King

Trouble at the Edge of Empire On the night of September 19, 1676, Nathaniel Bacon Jr. gave an order to actors under his command to burn Jamestown, Virginia, to the ground. They proceeded to burn the colony’s capital (though some of them were reluctant—it was never a sure thing asking one’s elite allies to burn their own homes alongside those of their enemies). But Bacon, the charismatic aristocrat recently arrived from England, was adept with the flame, having recently set fire to the fort of the Occaneechee tribe after trapping many members within it. This itself was a surprise move, since he had just finished fighting with the Occaneechee as his allies—attacking a Susquehannock town nearby. The problem was that Bacon wanted all the plunder from that battle, and the Occaneechee soldiers felt differently. Violence ensued; in the summer of 1676, it followed Nathaniel Bacon Jr. wherever he went. Bacon’s Rebellion would consume the colony of Virginia in civil war, with the fighting continuing after Bacon’s death from dysentery. The war was partly a result of the fact that the campaigns Bacon led against various Indian tribes were both licit and illicit, for the authorization of violent action at the edge of empire was a difficult matter. Bacon had obtained a war commission from the House of Burgesses in Virginia, who represented the people of Virginia, and the commissions were signed by someone who signed in place of William Berkeley, the Governor of Virginia. Thus all parties enacted what had developed as the “bond between planter and King,” a feature of colonial 1. James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Isaac Ariail Reed, “Charismatic Performance: A Study of Bacon’s Rebellion,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (2013): 254–87.

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Virginia politics since its founding; but all this had occurred at gunpoint. Bacon had been publicly declared a traitor and a rebel by the Governor, but after being so declared he had been elected to represent Henrico County in the House of Burgesses. Bacon and the Governor published competing declarations against each other; these reveal the public language through which violence was justified. Berkeley insisted that Bacon’s war against the Indians was illegal, and that Bacon was a rebel for fighting it because it was done without the permission of the King. He insisted that Charles II, the ultimate rector, recognized Berkeley as the actor willing to die for the King’s “laws and subjects,” and thus that “the King’s long hands” would reward Berkeley and punish Bacon. But the King’s court was miles and months distant; everyone in the colony of Virginia knew that by “permission of the King,” Berkeley actually meant his own permission as local rector. For he was the delegate of Charles II; he had the authority to claim that an action was, or was not, authorized by the King. But Bacon would propose a counterinterpretation. Bacon claimed to be, himself, the true representative of the King’s interest—the real local rector for the actors of Virginia. He was the one, he claimed, who understood the struggles of the frontier farmers, who could see the future of Virginia, and who knew how to kill Indians. Thus it was he who could claim to be the good agent of the English people, of the King, of himself, 2. Alexander B. Haskell, For God, King and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 210–34; Thomas Matthew, “The Beginning, Progress, and Conclusion of Bacon’s Rebellion, 1675–1676” [1705], in Narratives of the Insurrections: 1675–1690, ed. Charles M. Andrews (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 15–41. 3. First, Berkeley explains the difference between instantaneous action and unapproved action: “If any Ennimies should envade England any concelor Justice of the peace or other superior Officer might rayse what forces they could to protect his majesties subjects. But I say again if after the Kings knowledge of this invasion any the greatest Peare of England should rayse forces against the Kings prohibition this would be now and was ever in al Ages and nations accounted Treason.” Then, he emphasizes how the King, qua master signifier, ends all uncertainty and ambiguity, even if uncertainty and ambiguity can honestly be said to obtain: “Though this Peere were truly sealous for the preservation of his King and subjects to doe his King and Country service Yet if the King though by false information should suspect the contrary it were treason in this Noble Peere to proceed after the Kings prohibition and for the Truth of this I appeale to al the lawes of England and the lawes and constitutions of al other nations in the World.” William Berkeley, “Declaration and Remonstrance, May 29, 1676,” in The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1700, ed. Warren Billings, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 335–36. 4. Haskell, For God, King, and People, 288–89.

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of the project of empire. This involved Bacon in some rather elaborate semiotic gymnastics. In one of the oaths his men took to Bacon during the rebellion, they swore that if the King’s men arrived from England to join the fight against them, they as Bacon’s men would continue to follow his command until Bacon could explain to the King’s men that he was actually fighting for the King. Bacon thus proclaimed that it was Governor Berkeley who had failed to act in the King’s name, interest, and consciousness. Berkeley was a bad agent.

* One hundred and three years later, Herman Husband had a vision of the New Jerusalem while walking in the woods in western Pennsylvania. Husband, too, was an agitator and a rebel; over the course of his life, he was declared a traitor by both the British Empire and the federal government of the United States of America. He was a leader of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and an articulate advocate of its underlying philosophy—broadly Jeffersonian in outlook, focused on the rights and duties of yeoman farmers and small freeholders in a supposedly virtuous republic. Like Bacon, Husband was a charismatic leader. But if Bacon understood himself as an aristocrat born to rule (and was understood by some of his opponents as an “overmighty” subject), Husband understood himself as a prophet, born to bring the truth of Jesus’ divinity to mankind. Neither Bacon nor Husband thought the men under them should follow the orders of the representatives of state who wanted their obedience, their money, and their willingness to fight in wars when so directed. Rather, they reached outside the standard, institutionally given frames for imagining when and how violence was right and good; they disputed governance. In so doing, they had logistics on their side: far from the center of power, they could articulate their charismatic visions in deep complicity with local knowledge.

5. See “Bacon’s ‘Manifesto,’” in Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 343– 46; “Bacon’s Oath of Fidelity,” in Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, 1676–1677, ed. Michael Leroy Oberg (New York: Lexington Books, 2005), 168–69. For further discussion of this and other oaths required of his men by Bacon, see Haskell, For God, King, and People, 347–49. 6. Mark H. Jones, “Herman Husband: Millenarian, Carolina Regulator, and Whiskey Rebel” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 1982); Wythe Holt, “The New Jerusalem: Herman Husband’s Egalitarian Alternative to the United States Constitution,” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 253–72. 7. Edward Shils, “Charisma, Order, and Status,” American Sociological Review 30, no. 2 (1965): 199–213.

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Bacon produced a manifesto and roused his men for war via speeches about dastardly Indians; a Virginian produced epic poems about him when he died in the midst of civil war; he leaned toward a “nonconformist Protestantism as well as Platonism,” but in the end was a follower of Thomas Hobbes. Husband produced sermons that had some of the qualities of the jeremiad—he was always railing against a tyranny coming from the east (either London or Philadelphia) and the rot of corruption that threatened good men, who in their virtue sought to build a free and fair society. In the 1750s, 1760s, and 1770s, Husband directed his ire at the British Empire for the way it had its boot heel on the neck of the small farmer at the edge of long chains of power. But by 1794, it was the US government itself, captured by wealthy merchants and cultured elites in the temporary national capital of Philadelphia, the “Eastern Snake,” that drew his opprobrium. And it was against this endless threat of tyranny that Husband tried to imagine the perfect republic.

8. Haskell, For God, King, and People, 338–39. 9. Interpretations of Husband’s visions, in this chapter and the next, rely on close readings of three sermons by Husband, whose title pages I reproduce here in their original capitalizations and italicizations: Herman Husband, “PROPOSALS to AMEND and PERFECT the Policy of the GOVERNMENT of the United States of AMERICA; or, the FULFILLING of the PROPHECIES in the latter Days, commenced by the INDEPENDENCE of AMERICA. Containing, A new Mode of Elections; with a Method of Supporting GOVERNMENT without taxing or fining the people. I beheld till the Thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of Days did sit, Daniel vii. 9.* *The Thrones of Kings thrown down by Common Sense; and ancient Men Sat in Congress by new Modes of Elections.” (Philadelphia. Printed for the Author, April, 1782). Herman Husband, “XIV SERMONS ON THE CHARACTERS OF JACOB’s FOURTEEN SONS. And Jacob called unto his sons, and said, gather yourselves together that I may tell you, that which shall befall you in the last days. GEN. chap. 49. v. I. I beheld til the thrones* were cast down, and the ancient of days† did sit. Daniel, chap. 7, v. 9. *Thrones of kings by hereditary right or claim. †Ancient men, sitting in council, such as our Congress and Senate.—Not by an hereditary claim, but by the choice of a free people.” (Philadelphia: Printed for the Author, by William Spotswood, Front-Street, 1789). Herman Husband, “A DIALOGUE BETWEEN AN ASSEMBLY-MAN AND A CONVENTION-MAN, ON THE SUBJECT OF THE STATE CONSTITUTION OF PENNSYLVANIA. To Which is added, some Observations offered to the COMMITTEE of the whole HOUSE of the said STATE, on the two first AMENDMENTS to the FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. Also, a PLAN for raising TAXES, to pay the DEBTS of the UNITED STATES in FORTY YEARS; and reprobating the FUNDING of it in POSTERITY.” (Philadelphia, Printed and Sold for the Author, by W. Spotswood, in FrontStreet, 1790).

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How to fulfill the promise of the new America, the promise of a perfect society, for which it was worth burning a thousand barns belonging to a thousand tax inspectors—those nasty agents of arrogant rectors in Philadelphia? In Husband’s apocalyptic imagination, the body of the people would have to become the measure of all things—the people would have to be the rectors who elected and sent, as agents, some among them into positions of great power. This was, according to Husband, the promise of democratic government, which he saw as the prophesy of Daniel 7:9, quoted and interpreted on the title page of two of his printed sermons. The biblical verse (“beheld till the Thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit”) is interpreted to mean “Ancient men, sitting in council, such as our Congress and Senate— Not by an hereditary claim, but by the choice of a free people” or alternately, “The Thrones of Kings thrown down by Common Sense; and ancient Men Sat in Congress by new Modes of Elections.” The problem was, as Husband repeatedly explained to his audiences, that elections—which promise to make the people the author of their own fate— are so easily subverted by the wealthy and the famous, who fool the people. He argued that the problem with the early American republic as it had come into being was that because the county units by which elections were organized were so large, the only people with a chance of winning an election were also “generally the most unsuitable,” which is to say “Tavern-keepers,” “Merchants,” “Officers,” and “Lawyers.” In contrast to this failed experiment, Husband set out his new plan. Small elections in townships, “about ten miles square, so that all residents would know each other,” would secure the body politic at the most basic level, because then each male farmer head of household would know personally those standing for election, and thus make the right choice based on his knowledge. In turn, those elected persons would elect those who would serve at a higher level. In this way, a large pyramid of power would be constructed, with each level electing the level above it. For a man to be elected to the level above the one he served on, he would first have to serve for five 10. Husband, “Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United States of America,” 4. 11. Wythe Holt, “The New Jerusalem: Herman Husband’s Egalitarian Alternative to the United States Constitution,” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 253–72; quotation is from p. 261. Holt’s excellent study of Husband informs my own interpretations of his texts. In particular, Holt discusses Husband’s problems with the “huge size of electoral districts” on p. 257 of his chapter, and his opposition to slavery, combined with his exclusion of blacks and Indians from Husband’s image of the New Jerusalem, on pp. 266–68.

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or ten years. In this way, those he served with would get to know him before electing him. Only then could the creeping nastiness of corruption and the appeal of wealth and fame be kept at bay. Husband maintained that this pyramidal structure would have the effect of enabling the “grievances of the townships” to flow “through regular Channels into the Rivers, and thence into the Seas or Power of the whole Body of the People, the General Assemblies.” If grievances could flow like this, “they would scarcely if ever overflow or rise up into Inundations of Mobs and Insurrections”—such as the “regulation” in North Carolina he had led in 1768 against agents of the empire, or the Whiskey Rebellion he led in Pennsylvania. Importantly, however, it was not the mob that troubled Husband the most. Mob violence was but a symptom, whereas the disease that always threatened virtuous republics was the corruption of the rich and the famous. The point of Husband’s fantastical pyramid of delegation was to prevent “wicked men” from “creep[ing] into all of our Offices.” Only by securing the delegation implied by election via his pyramid and its rules could the people be guaranteed to serve as rector, with the elected men of power as actors. The analogy Husband makes to explain this is that of agency relations in labor—the act of sending another in one’s employ to complete a task. For just as “Stewards and Servants” can be called to account for their “Service,” so, too, should the political delegates of the people, responsible for solving public problems and responding to grievances, never be “so far out of Reach” that they cannot be made to render an account of what they have been up to.

* We have, then, a wild set of declarations on the one hand, and a fantastical vision on the other. Both thematized authority, power, and violence. These texts, produced during crisis and rebellion, are about who authorizes action, who knows right from wrong—they are about in whose name action is taken. They are also about hierarchy and decision-making, and the various interests of various people that are and are not met in such moments of decision. And they are about when physical violence against other humans is the right thing to do. Nathaniel Bacon’s public declarations and extreme violence in pursuit of 12. Husband, “Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United States of America,” 5–6; see discussion in Holt, “The New Jerusalem,” 264. 13. Husband, “Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United States of America,” 6. 14. Husband, 7. 15. Husband, 7–8.

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the unseating of the Governor, and Herman Husband’s bizarre and impossible vision, almost comic in its strange perfection, grasp something essential about the world of power. In the world of human hierarchy—the world in which charismatic leadership and certain habits of obedience intertwine— agents are sent and bound by those who can free themselves from the troubles of the world. Delegation flows down hierarchies, and projects are thereby pursued. Yet simultaneously, in certain aspects of Bacon’s Rebellion and at the forefront of Husband’s fantastical imagination is the possibility that delegation flows from low to high, from people to prince. There is a vibrant and real sense, in Husband’s luminous vision, that those installed in positions of power—who will have servants and allies of many kinds to exercise their will; who will command armies and make laws; who will have long chains of bound agents to carry out their policies—are themselves simply agents of the people. Husband saw the agency problems that attended his vision: As we are taught in another parable, they cast out of Office the unprofitable servant, who was found not studying solely the interest of his Lord—And Now this wide Step and Vacancy, in the Building of our present Constitutions or Policy, sets our Delegates so far out of our Reach, that there is scarce a Man in ten that can have the least Satisfaction to call them to any Account; whereas by this Alteration in our forms, every Man in any Township will have an Opportunity to converse with the Representative of his own Township, and those will stand more on a Level to converse with the State of Representatives, and they with the Congress, or the Empires, and so on to the general Commander of our Forces; by which Means Satisfaction, in a sweet Harmony, will be diffused through every Limb and least Joint of our Body-politick, as the Blood is in our Bodies natural.

The idea of power-holder as agent of the people presents many dilemmas— technical, logistical, and mythological. It is important to see, however, that these were issues that Nathaniel Bacon’s great nemesis—Governor William Berkeley—faced as well, though as I shall try to show, he faced them with a different model of and for the world, a different worldview and ethos. Chains of Power and Their Representation in Seventeenth-Century Virginia Consider the colony of Virginia before it was consumed by civil war in 1676. What held together its chains of power, enabling exploitation and profit, the conquering of land, the exercise of discretion, the enactment of governance? 16. Husband, 7–8.

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What extra bit of semiotic glue would bind together a set of men, their families, and their servants and slaves, such that tobacco was made, sold, and shipped, the Dutch threat was confronted and contained, and justices of the peace were installed to maintain order? William Berkeley, before he was disgraced by Bacon’s Rebellion, was one of the most successful players of the imperial game in seventeenth-century North America. His two tenures as Governor (1642–52 and 1660–77) made him agent for both Charles I and Charles II. Near the end of his second tenure, he saw trouble coming, and so actor (Governor Berkeley) wrote back to rector-actor (High Treasurer of England), who stood in for the ultimate rector, the royal body itself. On February 1, 1675, Berkeley wrote: I hope your wil pardon this boldnesse of importuning your Lordship especially when you shal see that it is either the Kings interest or my misapprehending the Kings interest that makes me presume to write to your Lordship. My Lord thus it is the King has a great revenue from this poore place wch is twenty times as much as it was when I came to it (or els the King is wonderfully defrauded) not that I impute any greate meritt to my selfe in this improvement but to the length of time wch I have served in it. Yet perhaps the universal justice and dispatch of it as wel to the merchants as the Planters has been some cause of the increase of the colony and by consequence of his Majesties revenue for to my knowledge there is not one laborer here that does not pay the King five pounds stirling yearly and I veryly believe that in twenty yeares more our numbers and returnes to his Majestie will double.

Berkeley was imploring against the granting of a vast amount of land to Lord Culpeper, as he somewhat indirectly then proceeded to note. He insisted that although one would think it “madnesse” for him to “oppose such powerful lords that can blast me wth the least breathings of [their] anger,” because he always was duty bound to the King’s interest, he had to object. This was his mode of discourse: I am agent of the ultimate rector, I know ultimate rector’s “true interest,” and I am duty bound to pursue it. He was compelled, he said, to note that in contrast to the “great Lords,” those already in Virginia “wil by our Agents offer them more then they wil make of it.” That is, the local elites know how to make money, and some of it will flow to the King and his High Treasurer. Furthermore, Berkeley insisted, it is not the great Lords themselves that the Virginians fear (that is, they revere, but do not fear or loathe, those who stand closest to the King) but rather their officers—that is, their actors-turned-agents—who will grind them down and also defraud the Lords themselves. This is serious business, he added, because it will also “put 17. Berkeley to the High Treasurer of England, February 1, 1674/5; Letters and Documents of Sir William Berkeley, MSS 2596-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

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the country in some disorders.” He was correct about the coming disorders, though whether he had grasped their essential cause is more debatable. The semiotic center of Berkeley’s letter is the shifting play of meanings indicated by his phrase “either the Kings interest or my misapprehending the Kings interest” used as justification for his actions and requests. This locution constitutes a claim as to what motivates and justifies the letter being sent, and organizes the meaning of the letter itself—its pleading, its careful criticisms, and its deft demands. After all, as is clear from both his careful parsing as well as his expectation that something can be done to keep Lord Culpeper’s ambitions at bay, the network within which this letter was written is one that contains a tremendous amount of back-and-forth—directions are given and then completed or shirked, interests are seen through, resentments created, trust degraded. For example, Berkeley is at pains to diagnose and impress on the Treasurer an agency problem that he represents as urgent: Lords (themselves close to the King) do not directly oppress Virginians, he claims, but their agents do—and so the King must be implored not to create more resentment by going outside the structured hierarchy of the aristocracy and granting, as if it were terra nullius, a whole swath of land to Culpeper. Berkeley saw the storm coming, though through a glass darkly; but it must also be admitted that this letter is but a mundane example of the daily work of high politics in Virginia in the seventeenth century. Its idioms were not unique to Berkeley. They reappear in letters among elites throughout most of the seventeenth century. Over and over again, we see “the King’s interest” rendered and reinterpreted in the letters and documentation of the time; it is a kind of metaphysical backstop for all other signs, and a source of divine energy that flows out of Whitehall into the power and projects of 18. Berkeley writes, “By this your Lordship wil see how conducible to the Kings revenue is a moderate and a rational encouragement to this poore people that at last they may have something out of their sweat and labour to supply theire own necessities wch they can never have if this Patent of my Lord Culpepers be comanded to be put in Execution to the utmost rigor of some clauses and Powers are granted in it.” Berkeley to the High Treasurer; emphasis added. For the details on the conflict over the Arlington-Culpeper grant, and more generally the Northern Neck Proprietary, which was a point of contention as far back as 1649, see Warren M. Billings, Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 214–18. 19. Paul D. McLean, The Art of the Network: Scientific Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 20. The difficulties were multiform—not least because the argument against the grant itself put pressure on Berkeley’s skillful management of his relationship to the big planters of Virginia—especially those who did not own property in the Northern Neck. See Billings, Sir William Berkeley, 219.

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the periphery. In other words, “the King’s interest” is both an anchor and a shifty signifier—it anchors the frame in which arguments can be made, allies recruited or dismissed, and thus order forged or disrupted. But it is also flexible, attaching itself to various projects in the world. It was a world arranged around communication with the royal body. For example, the “thrusting out” of Sir John Harvey in 1635 centered not only on the relationship Harvey had established between Virginia and (Catholic) Maryland but intently on his refusal to allow letters of complaint to the King to go back to England. The mutineers complained of this extensively, and for them it was perhaps the central evidence of Harvey’s tyrannical nature: “The consideration of the wrong done by the Governor to the whole colony in detayning the foresaid Letters to his Majesty did exceedingly perplex them, whereby they were made sensible of the miserable condition of the present Governor, wherein the Governor usurped the whole power, in all causes without an respect to the votes of the councell, whereby justice was now done but soe farr as suited with his will to the great losse of Many Mens estates and a generall feare in all.” And “the next meeting in a most sterne manner he demanded the reason that wee conceived of the countreye’s Petition against him. Mr. Menefee made answer, the chiefest cause was the detayning of the Letters to his Majestie and the Lords.” Moreover, when we look to exactly why Harvey was accused of being such a bad Governor, we find that he was accused of having ignored the King’s letters, so as to set out his own policies instead. Harvey gave his own account in a letter to the King’s Commissioners for Foreign Plantations. In it, he admitted that the central accusation against him was not forwarding the letters of complaint. We know well the disruption of rectorship that took place in the midseventeenth century in England—the “revolution of the saints,” which 21. “The Mutineers’ Complaints Against Harvey: Samuel Mathews to Sir John Wolstenholme,” in Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 310–14; quotation is from p. 310. 22. “The Mutineers’ Complaints against Harvey,” 312; emphasis added. 23. Furthermore, the mutineers complained that their own meeting had been misinterpreted in another letter by “Captain Purfrey.” “The Mutineers’ Complaints against Harvey,” 311. 24. In particular, Harvey writes: “The maine occasion, which they pretend to proceed upon, is that which is mentioned in the councellors letter or petition to themselves, but made in the name of the countrey, and that is, for my not sending a letter, which was by them written in answere to his Majesties letter touching the Tobacco contract; a true copy whereof Mr. Kemp sent to Mr. Secretary Windebank, but the originall I thought fitt to keepe, both for their owne good and his Majesties service.” “Harvey’s Account of His Troubles,” in Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 314–18; quotation is from p. 316. 25. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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sought to replace the great chain of being with something more arbitrary and divine—whereupon Thomas Hobbes would offer his theory of sovereignty. But told from the difficult and contingent social order of frontier Virginia, the negotiation of sovereign politics reveals a different piece of the puzzle. For even outside the interregnum, when there was public clarity and agreement in Anglican Virginia that the King is the ultimate rector, there remained the rather difficult problem of reaching him. If you are an aristocrat in the colony of Virginia, are you authorized to write directly to the men on the King’s Council, who will, if they are so inclined, appropriately present your communication to the King? Or do you have to go through the appointed Governor and his council? This conflict—a struggle over agency and its representation—was always simmering. Indeed, in the wake of the Lawne’s Creek Uprising in 1673, the Council of State defended Governor Berkeley in exactly these terms. Berkeley was, the council insisted, an essential link in the chain of signification that leads to Whitehall, and ultimately to the King’s person—the whole problem was that some bad apples in Virginia had attempted to communicate directly with the King. And so it was this problem of reaching the royal body, so as to felicitously reinterpret the relationship between the frontier and “the King’s interest,” that formed the landscape of meaning on which politics proceeded. In the wilds of Virginia, “the King’s interest” allowed for a good deal of (though not unlimited) creative interpretation, as persons used it to comprehend, justify, and condemn their own actions and the actions of others. The politics of alliance and counteralliance took expressive form through royal hermeneutics. The King’s Body as Ultimate yet Absent Referent The signs of the King, then, were a central part of elite political life, but the King was not in Virginia—neither he nor his closest agents could observe di26. Revealing for the argument pursued here is Berkeley’s continued arrangement of himself qua political subject in relation to the royal body during the interregnum. His letter to Charles II relating the surrender of Virginia to Cromwell’s Parliament runs in part as follows: “This added to the uncertainty of where or in what condition your Majesties Person was which then we had not the least knowledge of, thoughe since to our inexpressable joy we heare god has miraculously preserved from the hands of your Ennimies and undoubtedly reserv’d your Majestie for most glorious fortunes.” “Sir William Berkeley Explains to Charles II the Surrender of Virginia, May 1652,” in Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 318. 27. “Dissatisfaction with Sir William Berkeley’s Leadership: The Council of State Defends the Governor against Complaints of Mismanagement, October, 1673,” in Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 324–25.

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rectly which hierarchies were being mobilized for which tasks, who was lording it over whom, who was doing violence to whom. This distance from the ultimate signified caused a lot of back-and-forth; we may say that high politics in the periphery took its idiom from the center, but was only loosely coupled with it in any organizational sense. This indeed was the basis of thinking of Virginia as itself a little commonwealth, connected to the King and to England but also a project unto itself. Virginia was in a complex agency relation, multiply represented and interpreted, in the pursuit of wealth and glory “For God, King, and People.” The historian Alexander Haskell grasps the early manifestations of, and representations of, this relationship as the Christian humanist, or “renaissance,” version of Virginia’s colonization. It was because of tension regarding these agency relations that in the wake of the Lawne’s Creek Uprising, assurances had to be sent about Governor Berkeley: “Wee have thought it our Duty to your Majestie and Justice to your Governor for here, To give your Majestie and your most Honorable Council This true Character and Accompant of him and his actions. . . . some of us who living near him are most Conversant with him, Doe assure your Majestie and most Honorable Concell That he Spends most of his time and Thoughts in the Contemplation of your Majesties Interests and in Contriveving which way (on all Occasions offered) he may be most Serviceable to your Majestie.” The King in Virginia was, then, a present absence. He was the center of the understandings that construed the world into a coherent registry of 28. Haskell, For God, King, and People. 29. “Dissatisfaction with Sir William Berkeley’s Leadership” 324–25; emphasis added. 30. Jacques Derrida notes that the reassuring evidence within which Western tradition had to organize itself and must continue to live would therefore be as follows: the order of the signified is never contemporary, is at best the subtly discrepant inverse or parallel—discrepant by the time of a breath—from the order of the signifier. And the sign must be a unity of a heterogeneity, since the signified (sense or thing, noeme or reality) is not itself a signifier, a trace: in any case is not constituted in its sense by its relationship with a possible trace. The formal essence of the signified is presence, and the privilege of its proximity to the logos as phonè is the privilege of presence. One is inclined to agree for the case of royal hermeneutics; perhaps Derrida anticipated the complexities wrought by its creative destruction when he engaged the semiotics of C. S. Peirce, coming to the following conclusion: Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified . . .

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protagonists and antagonists, opponents and allies, issues and debates. The whole structure of talk and countertalk, petitions and accusations of treason, referenced the royal body. With the King as ultimate but absent rector, persons could be sure that their political struggles had, across the Atlantic, an ultimate referent; but that referent could neither act nor observe. His council and advisors were absent as well. As was almost all of England. Peripherality made the problem of the King as absent observer particularly acute. After all, persons, news, and tobacco had to travel across the Atlantic to find the touch of the sacred that authorized action and made profits legitimate (and thus a route to status). That such a touch would be secure was, to be sure, an illusion for everyone—if persons, news, and tobacco did find their way to Whitehall, they did not find there an end to the ambiguities and flexibilities of royal signification, and certainly not an end to politics and violence. But perhaps the context was more ritualized in the environs of London, and slightly less freewheeling; for the nodes in the chains of power were more densely connected with each other, even when those who occupied them were at each other’s throats. The evidence from the Lawne’s Creek Uprising makes clear that there was supposed to be a simple rector-actor relationship between monarch and governor—the Governor of Virginia was actor for the King, bringing to the world his own projects (what aristocratic man did not have his own projects?) but ultimately serving as agent. This normative relation granted Governors authority over various other actors, and the ability to turn them into agents; hence Governors were rectors on the American side of the Atlantic, the bottleneck in this picture of the world. In the cleanest picture of this relationship, the King’s projects and the projects of the Governor of Virginia coincide. This is, we might say, the constitutive fantasy of governorship in early North American colonization. It is interesting, however, that the affirmation of the existence of this proper rector-actor relationship requires “eyewitness” testimony, which the King himself cannot provide. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 18, 49; emphasis in original. 31. Julia Adams, “Principals and Agents, Colonialists and Company Men: The Decay of Colonial Control in the Dutch East Indies,” American Sociological Review 61, no.1 (February 1996): 12–28. 32. Haskell notes the frustration of some early Virginia colonists—including Sir Walter Raleigh—with what they perceived to be the weakness of the English monarchy. Haskell, For God, King, and People, 1–24.

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And so, given the space for creative interpretation opened by these ambiguities and absences, there were repeated attempts to complicate this agency relation and its representation. New actors repeatedly emerged, and claimed that their interests, ideas, and projects were those that aligned with His Majesty’s. That they could do so was surely in part because they acted at the very end of a long chain of power, with an ocean that put months between them and any new battery of King’s men. The importance of distance, and the agency problems induced by it, are clear enough. Concerning Governor John Harvey, who was “thrust out,” we have the following conclusion to the tale: Once in London, Harvey obtained a hearing before the Privy Council. Proving that the allegations against him were groundless and that his enemies had personal reasons for wanting him removed, Sir John won the king’s renewed support. Armed with a new commission and orders to arrest the rebellious councillors for trial in England, he returned to Virginia in 1637. The apprehension of Mathews, Utie, West and William Peirce soon followed, but sending them to England finally undid Harvey. Instead of being tried, the four were able to lobby against the governor through their connections at court. Three thousand miles away in Virginia, Harvey could not defend himself against their machinations. In January the Privy Council replaced him with Sir Francis Wyatt. . . . Sir William Berkeley never forgot the lesson of Harvey’s fate. He made common cause with the great planters and became one of them.

The chain of power and its representation, then, began with God, traveled through King Charles II, and then on to the King’s Privy Council. The council mediated the contact of humans with the King’s body, and the King gave his stamp to the appointed Governor of Virginia. This actor for the King was thus tasked, as agent, with maintaining order in the colony itself. In so doing, he drew from the advice of the Council of State to a great degree (a kind of surrogate privy council), as well as the “little Parliament” of the colony of Virginia, elected by freeholders (and, in 1676, by freemen). This hierarchy was simultaneously a real elite political network along which commands flowed and through which favors were exchanged, and a fantastical imaginary, maintained by signifiers of the King, which bequeathed legitimacy to the smallest declaration and most inconsequential project in the swamps of Virginia. 33. Billings notes, vis-à-vis the troubles surrounding Governor Harvey, that “settlers whose claim to power lay only in their success at wresting a living from a new place increasingly provided the talent pool out of which sprang councillors, burgesses, and local magistrates. Lacking the usual carriage of English ruling classes, these men did not always command respect, and they were ever sensitive to any slights to their authority, imagined or real.” Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 296. 34. Billings, 299.

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Insofar as such signifiers made reference, in their oblique and subtle way, to the divine right of Kings, they brought Whitehall to Virginia and Virginia to Whitehall. It is a strange accomplishment, but, in the grand arc of human history, a frequent one. The King’s Two Bodies There is a name for this fantastical imaginary that organized elite politics in the colony of Virginia: the King’s Two Bodies. Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic study, which takes that name as its title, begins with the jurists whose calling it is to interpret the state and the law. They wrote of the King that “to [his] natural body is conjoined his Body politic, which contains his royal Estate and Dignity; and the Body politic includes the Body natural, but the Body natural is the lesser, and with this the Body politic is consolidated . . . these two Bodies are incorporated in one Person, and make one Body and not divers, that is the Body corporate in the Body natural, et e contra the Body natural in the Body corporate.” Before Shakespeare appears in The King’s Two Bodies, then, the book makes clear that it is about lawyers and the command of physical space. The opening pages of the text involve lawyers trying to solve a pressing practical matter concerning land—namely, a dispute over lands that had been in Edward IV’s family before he was King, and which he had leased out before he came of age but while he was the monarch. It is an issue whose idiom we recognize from William Berkeley’s letter to the High Treasurer concerning the grant being made to Lord Culpeper. When the King moved to give Culpeper a vast tract of land in Virginia, Berkeley objected that it was not, in fact, in the King’s interest to do so. Berkeley could write this way, because “the King’s interest” was a matter of concern for all Englishmen (especially those of noble birth), and because the king, qua mortal man, was doubled by the King, qua political entity. The latter could dif35. For an extensive description of elite politics in Virginia, with a focus in particular on the council, which shows quite precisely the complexity of the agency problems that obtained given (1) the council’s proximity and responsibility to the Governor, and (2) the sworn requirement that the council serve the “king’s majesty” see Ira Brown, “The Governor’s Council in Colonial Virginia, 1607–1689” (master’s thesis, University of Virginia, 1942); and Haskell, For God, King, and People. 36. Edmund Plowden, Commentaries or Reports (London, 1816), cited in Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 9. See also the discussion in F. W. Maitland, “The Crown as Corporation,” in Maitland, State, Trust and Corporation, ed. David Runciman and Magnus Ryan, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 32–51.

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fer from the former in “interest,” and sometimes override or even somehow convince its mere mortal twin. Similar to Berkeley’s letter of 1675, in Kantorowicz’s book the jurists argue that the leases were legitimate because of the genius of the King’s second body; even if the king’s natural body was too young and immature to make the leases, his political body had made them, and thus they were the clear will and word of the King. The idiom, then, is this: the King’s Two Bodies and its cognates—“for King and Crown,” “the King’s interest”—are mobilized to attach certain tracts of land to certain people, make property legal, take sides, and render the world subject to the mastery of those men who are interpreted to be the agents of the ultimate rector. What, then, is the King’s Two Bodies, as not only a legal fiction but a form of culture, a frame for politics? Its best-known usage is as a guarantor of dynastic continuity—the king is dead, long live the King—and it encodes a ritualized superiority, a charisma of office. But these straightforward examples vastly underestimate the King’s Two Bodies as a frame for action and problem solving, and for moral dispute. Consider again the English justices arguing over semantics: This [second] Body is not subject to the Passions as the other is, nor to Death, for as to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law (as Harper said), the Death of the King, but the Demise of the King, not signifying by the Word (Demise) that the Body politic of the King is dead, but that there is a Separation of the Two Bodies, and that the Body politic is transferred and conveyed over from the Body natural now dead, or now removed from the Dignity royal, to another Body natural.

This elaboration of meaning was of import because, as I shall attempt to show, the King’s Two Bodies framed a pragmatics of power, an entire way of building a network. It was not only a matter of belief in monarchy as a political system, and not simply the language dusted off for coronation ceremonies. Rather, as political culture, the King’s Two Bodies can secure rectorship in the face of uncertainty, and thereby make order out of chaos. In social theory, the unfortunate tendency to locate Kantorowicz’s study in some long-forgotten medieval past means that we have not investigated thoroughly how this “mystic” fiction of the King’s Two Bodies relates directly 37. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1139–40; Shils, “Charisma, Order and Status.” 38. Plowden’s Reports, cited in Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 13. 39. See Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in 19th Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

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to the theoretical problems of the sociology of power in the twentieth century, including problems which bedeviled German social theory in the generation after Max Weber. For example, in the Two Bodies of the King we find a route to the institutionalization of charismatic domination that resists disenchantment, a kind of maintenance of rulership via authoritative mana. In this understanding, heredity and selection as succession options for enchanted power relations are subtypes of a process by which the arrangements of signs and their interpretation are designed to move the aura of rectorship from one physical human body to another. The publicity of Kingly mourning rituals suggests this. For what is at stake is not just the ritual experience of the coronation but a vast set of habits of interpretation spread across the population, according to which a certain person just “is” rector-ness. In a transition of power, these must be disrupted in their object of attribution but not in their meaning; and for such a tricky choreography of power, the mutual focus of public ritual is (almost) indispensable. From the vantage point of seventeenth-century Virginia, the relevance of Kantorowicz’s theory of the state becomes clear. In the dirty world of the vicious, starving Scotch-Irish frontier farmer and his Indian enemies and allies, the second body of the King provides an excess interpretation of the world, one that goes beyond the immediate accounting for action and reaction in the moment to moment of survival and attack. This interpretation grounds action in a notion of right by way of a vanishing whiff of nobility, royalty, and morality. This is the social basis of its magical power, or perhaps we should say the magical basis of its social power. For in so doing, the second body of the King links not only persons and things in chains of power but different scenes of action that would not otherwise be linked. As a language that transverses scenes, it becomes a kind of frame for working through “what we are doing here” in any one instance. It is a language simultaneously for and about the exercise of power, and a flexible one at that. In it, various persons can take up the position of actor for the ultimate rector, and thereby represent their passions and their interests as legitimate and their violence as justified. Kantorowicz made clear in his own text that the King’s Two Bodies helped legitimate the practice of annual taxation. The tax collector at one’s door was an agent of the King’s second and superior body—a body that never dies!

40. Kantorowicz writes that “public taxation, at least in many parts of the Continent, became synonymous with annual taxation. In other words, taxation, formerly linked to an unrepeatable event, could now be linked to the calendar, to the infinitely rolling wheel of Time. The state had become permanent, and permanent were its emergencies and needs, its necessitas.” Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 286.

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So one might be forgiven for imagining that more certain than death itself for the mortal person were the fists of the messenger banging on one’s door, requesting payment of taxes. This is the essence of Kantorowicz’s genealogy of the early modern state. Actions “for the King” or “for King and Crown” were taken by agents of the state in the name of this mystical second body—a body neither mortal in the sense of bound to the time and space occupied by a person over the course of his or her life, nor eternal in the sense of being outside time. It was, rather, sempiternal. Action understood as connected to the second body of the King takes on the authorizations and accoutrements of a raison d’état both personal (and therefore with the feel of reality and immediacy) and abstract (and therefore serious, for the actions taken in this name are not only for now but also inherit the past and point toward an infinite future). This linking of the personal to the abstract, and the immediate action to the absent, ultimate, signified, was particularly useful for linking a given household at the edge of empire—in a tidewater, or on a farm in a contested area west of the colony—to the ultimate household that contained the most sacred of bodies. Kantorowicz’s book is ironic about its own hermeneutics; the author recognizes simultaneously the glorious ambition and the fundamental mysticism and confusion of the King’s Two Bodies as a figuration of state. But perhaps we can see, from the standpoint of the struggles on the imperial frontier, something more. For in the supposedly savage and supposedly howling wilderness of “America,” the extraordinary utility of the King’s body as double symbol comes into remarkable profile. The body of the monarch served there as a signifier that referred to a terrible justice awaiting all Englishmen, and yet was also almost impossibly far away. It was useful because its meanings were both precise and vague. They were precise in that, at any given moment, insofar as there is a King (or perhaps a Lord Protector?), then there is a rector, whose decisions are final, and whose existence guarantees the rightness of any action, anywhere, if it can be felicitously shown that the action aligns with the interest of the King (one also has to do interpretive work to know what the interest is). According to this schema, if one follows the thread of signification far enough along any chain of communication having to do with law, violence, and social order, one eventually arrives at a true match between referent and signified, a concretization of the deepest meanings of state—a single person, whose word is the origin of law. 41. Jürgen Habermas implicitly recognizes the recurrent appeal of this kind of authorization for the conduct of human politics, even though the entirety of Between Facts and Norms is written so as to replace it with the fairness of procedure as itself the basic, and to him universal,

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On the other hand, the vagueness of the King’s second body—its essential mysticism—allowed dons at Oxford, tax collectors, agents of the empire across the ocean, and the King’s own close ministers all to construct an understanding of what they were doing: they were carrying a sign of royalty as a guarantor of their authorization to act on the King’s behalf. And it thus allowed argument, alliance and counteralliance, and consequently politics. In particular, we may ask, Who was to say what it meant to pass along the sign of the King, far up the James River, so far from surveillance? At the least, we certainly can better understand on these terms the (to us) bizarre march of Nathaniel Bacon Jr. and his men to obtain a war commission at gunpoint. It was not absurd to obtain authority with coercion at that moment, for what Bacon’s Rebellion did was precisely what everyone in high politics was doing all the time: aligning one’s projects with public evidence of the interest of the King—which is to say a public performance of how one’s own interests were sacred because they were aligned with the wants of the King’s second body. The episode reveals power and its representation. Having been elected to the House of Burgesses, Bacon traveled to Jamestown, where he was arrested for waging war outside the authorization of the King. Governor Berkeley, performing the magnanimous sovereign, pardoned Bacon and promised him the war commission. But Berkeley procrastinated; he was not forthcoming with the sacred seal from the King that would make the war an authorized action. Bacon left, and returned to Jamestown with his army, surrounding the House of Burgesses. The evidence we have about the drafting of the commission reveals just how much was at stake. The merchant-planter Thomas Mathew was nervous when forced to write out the commission, which included blank spaces where Bacon could write in the names of his lieutenants. Mathew recounted the drafting thusly: This Surprizing Accostment Shockt me into a Melancholy Consternation, dreading upon one hand, that Stafford County [the author’s home county] woud feel the smart of his Resentment, if I shoud refuse him whose favour I had so lately sought and been generously promis’d on their behalf; and on th’ other hand fearing the Governours Displeasure who I knew woud soon hear normative basis for decision-making in concert. Habermas writes that “the ruler’s will is channeled through statutes . . . in this construction, the facticity of a quasi-natural power to command comes into direct contact with the rule structure of laws that grant subjects their freedom of action. One can still find traces of this antagonism even in Kant and Rousseau, although with them the rule structure of law (and democratic procedure) is conceived as the core of a new kind of autonomy.” Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Love and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 138.

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of it; What Seem’d most Prudent at this Hazadous Dilemma, was to Obviate the present impending Peril; So Mr. Bacon made me Sit the Whole Night by him filling up those Papers.

This is the logic of the King’s Two Bodies in action: Berkeley’s signature stands in for the signature of Charles II, Rex. So the sign of the King is being passed from Whitehall, to William Berkeley in Jamestown, through Thomas Mathew, to Nathaniel Bacon Jr., to the men he will command. One can say of Bacon’s coercion that it was a case of cherchez le roi. The King’s Two Bodies in Massachusetts Bay Colony and Beyond The two bodies of the King had a life beyond the seventeenth-century royalists of colonial Virginia. They were to be found as well in the conflagrations of the Congregationalist Massachusetts Bay Colony—though in a different chronology with different manifestations. The ousting of Edmund Andros, Governor of the Dominion of New England, in 1689, as news of the Glorious Revolution in England arrived in Boston, inaugurated an era of apotheosizing the Protestant monarchy. William and Mary were supposed to guarantee—so thought the New Englanders—a calmer (eighteenth) century, in which the troubles of the previous one—popery, the French, and the Indians—would be left behind. English subjects, protected by the mystic power of an English king, would have liberty and prosperity guaranteed. This is to say that in a worldview and ethos construed in the space of play between Robert Filmer, John Locke, and John Calvin, the King’s second, sacred body retained its meaning and utility as semiotic glue and constitutive fantasy; it would help persons and groups frame and complete projects. That second body, in fact, reached into all sorts of projects having to do with everyday experience, and networks of social power broadly understood. No less than the poet Anne Bradstreet, in her elegy for Queen Elizabeth I, used the two bodies as a degendering strategy vis-à-vis religious authority in everyday life. For Bradstreet, Elizabeth had succeeded because of her partaking of the second body that never dies, and thus her own authorship of the body politic, while she was monarch. According to Bradstreet, this brilliant authorship was the result, not of something specific the queen offered to the nation as a mortal woman instead of a mortal man, but rather of her partaking of the corpus mysticum, which was never wrong. Bradstreet used Elizabeth I’s 42. Thomas Mathew, “The Beginning, Progress, and Conclusion of Bacon’s Rebellion, 1675– 1676,” in Narratives of the Insurrections, ed. Charles M. Andrews (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 33.

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second body to undermine the argument that gender justifiably differentiates the positions and agency allotted to men and women. And so “Bradstreet . . . suggest[ed] that all those who would insist that distinctions based on the natural body are important are at best traitors and at worst heretics. After all, as she insists, the monarchy itself requires, in compliance with Protestant theology, that the natural body is relatively insignificant . . . any challenge to the superiority of the spiritual body represents an act of heresy as well as an act of treason.” Bradstreet did not win the argument with regard to gendered authority in Congregationalist Massachusetts. But the frame of her challenge was shared by the patriarchs who detested her. It was the sacred second body that, in its various significations, could link together situations, solve problems as to what constituted right action, and thus authorize experience. During the Glorious Revolution, the tracts written in New England both for and against Governor Andros reveal the second body at work as well. Andros had myriad agency problems in the Dominion of New England during his tenure as its Governor. When he was jailed before being sent back to England for trial, the language with which authority, power, and violence were construed came to the fore—and this language, too, manifested the chains of power that were held together by the representation of the King’s Two Bodies. His opponents claimed they had been treated as others, rather than as actors with their rightful place in the long chain of power that ran from Whitehall to Boston and Salem. They claimed to have been treated as slaves rather than subjects, insisted that the Magna Carta had been breached under Andros’s tenure, and argued passionately that Andros had forced people to swear on the Bible in court (taboo for Congregationalists). Andros’s defenders, on the other hand, insisted that New England was not Scotland, for it was initially 43. Nancy E. Wright, “Epitaphic Conventions and the Reception of Anne Bradstreet’s Public Voice,” Early American Literature 31 (1996): 243–63; quotation is from p. 258. Cited in Jim Egan, Authorizing Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 84. 44. Egan, Authorizing Experience, 85. 45. Jim Egan attacked the founding truism of American studies that “America begins . . . when its first European colonists were unable to successfully map their ‘Old World’ ideologies onto the experiences of a New World, Virgin Land, Unknown Coast, or Frontier.” His argument is that if Englishmen “on both sides of the Atlantic understood experiential knowledge to be inferior to the knowledge obtained from the ancients or various holy books, then experience itself would not have transformed anyone’s cultural practices. . . . Are we to believe that people had been able to denigrate the category throughout human history until America was colonized by English men and women?” This leads him to an extended investigation of how a notion of “experience” could come to be authorized. Egan, 6, 3. 46. David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the

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“inhabited by infidels.” Thus “Right and Dominion” fell only to the Prince— the King’s second body, of which Andros was the rightful agent. For them, to rebel against the Governor was indeed to make oneself a most abject other in the sacralized world of authority: “Is not Rebellion, as the Sin of Witchcraft?” Andros was agent of the King—everyone agreed on that—but what did that really mean? For the elites of Massachusetts Bay Colony, their land was not at Andros’s discretion as that agent, because they, too, were rightful actors for the King; they, too, could claim a tie, a stake in the game of representing the sacred second body. Thus were landgrabs in North America mixed with claims to dignitas, claims that the body of Massachusetts clergyman Increase Mather was itself a part of the corpus mysticum—indeed for some, much more so than was the body of Edmund Andros. Such were the conflicts of interpretation in the political culture of New England.

* We already know that the conflagrations of seventeenth-century England were a trauma of royal authority and its potential replacement with an authority supposedly more divine. What becomes clear from the periphery of the first British Empire, however, is the specific utility of the King’s second body as a frame for conflict, and indeed as a pragmatic salve for the violence and war of the seventeenth century. The king’s second body could bring order to life in the “wilderness.” The historians who have traced the Anglicization of the colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century have made clear the royalism that sewed together the Chesapeake with the Mid-Atlantic with New England; the controversy concerns the significance, for the 1770s, of those last-ditch attempts by the colonies’ elites to appeal to the King to save them from the tyranny of

Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). 47. John Palmer, “An Impartial Account of the State of England, or the Late Government there, Vindicated. In Answer to the Declaration which the Faction set forth, when they Overturned the Government. With a Relation of the Horrible Usage they treated the Governor with, and his Council; and all that had His Majesty’s Commission,” in The Andros Tracts, ed. William Henry Whitmore (Boston: Prince Society, 1868–74), 56–57. 48. See Richard Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 49. John Murrin, Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); Steven Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995).

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Parliament. It may be, however, that in this debate about how republican or how royalist the lead-up to the American Revolution “really” was, there is an opportunity missed, an opportunity to see that qua political culture, the King’s Two Bodies and its cognates provided the frame for a system of power with multiple dimensions. Its rendering of the world had flexibility and thus could be used to render order from chaos on multiple levels, in multiple spheres, across time and space. It was not, in other words, just a matter of belief in royalism; nor was it even a matter of the multiplicity of arguments made about the three potential reasons why monarchy was legitimate (divine appointment, hereditary right, election). It was, rather, a matter of attaching persons to persons, persons to land, persons to objects to be consumed; it was the interpretive-pragmatic basis for the ontology of power in social life. A moral background grounded in the sacredness of Kings was no mere apotheosis. It was a way to talk about one’s plans for action. Not only the first half of the eighteenth century but also the lead-up to crisis in eighteenth-century British North America can be understood in these terms—though they are surely partial, and I make no claim that those framings of action in terms of the second body of the King constituted the only cultural logic of power that stalked the continent. Rather, my hypothesis is that the disorder, into which a certain kind of republicanism could insert itself—a republicanism I will trace in chapter 6—was in part generated by the emergent tensions between the different dimensions (material, relational, discursive, performative) of the chains of power and their representation constructed via reference to the second body of the King. As the British population of the colonies expanded, and royalism in political culture prevailed, a widespread understanding of patriarchy in the family as essential to the lifeblood of empire—trade, war, security, high politics, kingship—took hold. This rendered subjects in certain ways; they were interpellated by the sign of the King. For economically and socially high-status men, a patriarchal desire for recognition as “of standing” within the empire obtained. As it coursed through the men of the population (and, in a different way, through the women who married them), this desire exceeded what the organizational structure of the empire had to offer. “In the colonies . . . royal ceremonies and print culture spread the cult of monarchical patriarchy everywhere. But . . . freeholders abounded, while new colonies, counties, towns, and even churches came into being only fitfully and totally out of sync with the yeomen freeholder population’s growth.” And so “desires for place and au50. Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).

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thority . . . threatened the established order.” The growth of population and economy was such that the recognition of authority via installation within positions of political power could not keep up; men of wealth and status could not access (what they felt to be) their rightful place. It was a “slow burning crisis” of “patronage, population and patriarchy” for a vast set of people who “knew they lived in an empire where the most important tie was to the king.” The authorization of action, the legitimation of power, and the justification of violence in the terms of the King’s second body extended further. We also find it in the conspiratorial attempts of certain persons who had been rendered nonpersons to become persons in society—violently excluded others who pursued violence to become rectors and actors. A common element of slave conspiracies in the eighteenth century was the trope of a benevolent George II or George III who wanted to (but for his evil ministers and the lying masters) or planned to (having seen the light of true religion) free the enslaved. This was one way in which enslaved persons engaged in a rhetorical construal of sacred freedom, articulating, in the language of the two bodies of various Kings, the freeing of those whose nonpersonhood was connected to their attachment as property to actors who took the sign of the King to justify their violence. The Antigua Slave Conspiracy of 1736 was timed to the King’s Birthday, and it was enslaved Virginians who approached the Earl of Dunmore with the idea that became his proclamation of 1775, offering freedom to enslaved Virginians who fought for the British. Via acts of creative subversion, the royal system under which enslaved Africans and their descendants were punished fused African and British understandings into a justification of rebellion and freedom that partook of the King’s second body.

* If the King’s Two Bodies, as a way of knowing who was rector, who was actor, and who was other, ran aground on the institutional failures of the British Empire, it also had other renderings of chains of power as challengers. These, too, used the language of the body—though not, as we shall see, the body of the King. The Lockean argument in America, as it effloresced as a counter51. Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688– 1776 (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 152. 52. McConville, 158. 53. McConville, 158–59. 54. Orlando Patterson, “Freedom, Slavery, and the Modern Construction of Rights,” in The Cultural Values of Europe, edited by Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegant (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 115–511.

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point to Robert Filmer’s worldview, also used the body as metaphor for order. However, if the second body of the King had come into the cultural life of England (and Europe more broadly) qua figuration as the “classical” body— closed, upright, contained, perfected, stone-still in the face of the raucous crowd, imposing in its authority—then the Lockeans were up to something different. If the classical body, as we know from Mikhail Bakhtin, was opposed, in the arc of medieval Europe’s history, to the grotesqueries of carnival and the sensualities of the overflowing, messy, “common” body, then something strange happened as this metaphor was carried to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century. The Lockean counterargument to Filmer posed the common body as individuated and self-regulating, and, once men were of age and free from their fathers’ authority, the basis of a civil political order. Simultaneously, the savage Indian body provided the model for the new grotesque—the body of the other that had to be excluded for order to prevail among the English: “The English body remained English by virtue of its difference from the Indian body. Native bodies were unruly, out-ofcontrol—in short, much like the grotesque body in need of regulation.” Bacon’s Rebellion and Race: Enter the Other Governor William Berkeley of the Colony of Virginia shared with other imperial governors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a tendency to be derided by certain English persons over whom they ruled. These were English whose localism extended to a resentment of Berkeley’s and Andros’s skillful handling of complex alliances with various Indian tribes. In other words, the Governors’ cosmopolitanism was a specific source of vexed politics in English and British North America; complaining about George III’s affection for “savages” made a well-known appearance in the Declaration of Independence. In colonial North America, this resentment was constantly mixed with other renderings of powers, interests, and right action. For Congregational55. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). 56. Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 57. Egan, Authorizing Experience, 24–25. For further theorization of this issue, see Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 58. For an understanding of Andros from the perspective of principal-agent theory in economics, see Dror Goldberg and Igal Milchtaich, “Property Rights under AdministratorDictators: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Bank,” Journal of Economic History 73, no. 4 (December 2013): 1105–31.

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ists in Massachusetts Bay Colony, the religious politics of resentment toward an Anglican governor such as Edmund Andros quickly combined with the feeling that Andros had negotiated too respectfully with their violent opponents from King Philip’s War. This resentment had some basis in truth, as it was indeed a mark of the men of power in the networks of the first British Empire to engage in war and diplomacy simultaneously. Berkeley’s long, distinguished career as Governor of Virginia was in part premised on exactly this capacity to make Indian others into trusted allies (actors) when the time was right. Virginia’s survival and success were partly traceable to his executive directives for timely warfare, but also to his careful negotiations and extended peace treaties with the Doeg, Potomack, Accomack, and Appamatock tribes. Berkeley’s strategies had, in fact, secured a space for tobacco production, and his military alliances were useful in wars with the Dutch. In contrast, newcomer Nathaniel Bacon Jr. joined the tense world of the farmer at the far western edge of the colony, and gave the anger and resentment felt toward Berkeley and the tidewater merchant-planters a voice—and a Hobbesian feel, in which guaranteeing the security of “the people” via the sword created the right to rule. Bacon offered himself as aristocratic rector to a set of actors just barely scraping by economically, actors who regularly participated in the back-and-forth of theft and deadly violence that obtained on the contested frontier. In thematizing this experience into an account of who was and who was not deserving of recognition as a person, Bacon gained a clear and distinct rhetorical advantage over Berkeley, particularly when it came to non-elite Virginians—the formerly indentured and enslaved. For Bacon was, in his frontier charisma, a far more effective racist vis-à-vis the “savage” Indian other than was the esteemed (and older) Governor Berkeley. In his speeches Bacon synthesized ambition for land with spitefulness toward all Indians. He sarcastically noted that given the way they were acting, it appeared that the Governor and his council were inclined to

59. Louise Breen, Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “Gaining the Diplomatic Edge,” in Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World, ed. Wayne E. Lee (New York: NYU Press, 2011); Matthew Kruer, “Bloody Minds and Peoples Undone: Emotion, Family, and Political Order in the Susquehannock-Virginia War,” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 3 (July 2017): 401–36. See also Ian K. Steele, “Governors or Generals?: A Note on Martial Law and the Revolution of 1689 in English America,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 2 (April 1989): 304–14. 60. Haskell, For God, King and People, 338–44.

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defend the Queen of the Appomatocks “with their blood.” In his manifesto Bacon declared, Our manifest aversion of all, not onely Foreign but the protected and Darling Indians . . . we doe declare and can prove that they have bin for these many years enemies to the King and Country, Robbers and Theeves and Invaders of his Majesties’ Right and our Interest and Estates, but yet have by persons in Authority bin defended and protected even against His Majesties loyall Subjects and that in soe high a Nature that even the Complaints and oaths of his Majesties Most loyall Subjects in a law full Manner proffered by them against those barborous Outlawes have bin by the right honorable Governor rejected and the Delinquents from his presence dismissed not only with pardon and indemnitye but with all incouragement and favour,

According to Bacon and his followers, Berkeley was a bad agent, a traitor to the second body of the King, because he honored treaties conducted with an Indian queen. This was a highly incongruous position, indeed in a certain sense it was absurd: the treaties to which Bacon was referring were made precisely in the language of the King’s Two Bodies, with Berkeley as agent for a distant sovereign. Bacon was playing the same game. He wanted to carry out his own actions, and bring his own projects under the sign of the King. However, he had even more to say about these “barborous Outlawes”—namely, that English persons could not be expected to tell one Indian from another. To Bacon they were nonpersons, at least in the legal sense: “Indians cannot according to the tenure and forme of any law to us known be prosecuted, Seised or Complained against, Their Persons being difficulty distinguished or known.” Bacon’s conclusion? “They have bin unjustly defended and protected these many years.” For Bacon, Indians were enemies and only enemies; they could not be brought into an ordered world of power and conflict as rector and actor; they were a priori outside the chains of power and their representation through which projects were pursued. This approach surely went against the grain of the King’s Two Bodies as a rendering of power, at least as it had been habitu61. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, the edge of the first British Empire in North America had moved inland. This created a distinction between an imperial frontier and relatively settled coastal regions of the empire, run by wealthy planters. The tidewater counties were made up of plantations of an average size of about four thousand acres, and were, by 1660, relatively free from violent interaction with Indian tribes. In contrast, the inland frontier was a space of tremendous anxiety and physical danger. Into this difference stepped an emotional argument, between Bacon and Berkeley, about the tribes to the immediate west of the English settlements. 62. “Bacon’s ‘Manifesto,’” 345. 63. “Bacon’s ‘Manifesto,’” 345.

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ally interpreted. Throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, we find ample evidence that the sovereign game, with the Kingly double at its center, allowed Indian others to be turned into actors when it was practical to do so. This was the politics of the middle ground that often emerged between various imperial formations. Some treaties involved Indian leaders pledging allegiance to the English king, and the legibility that was involved in such a move supported the pragmatics of negotiation. Life on the frontier was of course nasty, brutish, and short; but the long chain of power that ran from Whitehall to the frontier was fuzzy and flexible at its edges even in its fantastical representations. More broadly, a set of reasonably working mis/ understandings obtained, in which various local rectors and actors engaged in combat and conflict.

* Bacon and his rebels have eluded straightforward interpretation in terms of modern identities and identifiers: historians have searched in vain for a clear parsing of the rebellion along lines of class, race, or national origin. The rebels comprised the well-off and the penniless, persons of African and European descent (including both English and Scotch-Irish); and, though radical in their aims and willing to die for their cause, the aftermath of the rebellion featured a firm reassertion of imperial rule. Yet simultaneously, Bacon’s 64. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 65. Haskell, For God, King, and People, especially 188–89. Haskell places interpretive emphasis on the generational differences between Berkeley as a representative of renaissance Virginia and its Christian-humanist concept of rule, and Bacon’s Hobbesian position on sovereignty, according to which Virginia could only ever be either completely under the English king or its own polity. That is, for Haskell Berkeley represents a vision of colonization with a greater tolerance for ambiguity. I am inclined to agree. Here, though, I emphasize Berkeley and Bacon’s shared language—that their disagreement operated within the problem space of the King’s Two Bodies. See the discussion of Hobbes in chapter 7. See also the account of English governors in Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion; 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially 159–79. 66. H. G. Koenigsberger, “Composite States, Representative Institutions and the American Revolution,” Historical Research 62, no. 148 (June 1989): 135–53. 67. This has left local politics—of alliance and misalliance, the cost of lobbying the King, contestation over new defense measures instituted after the Third Anglo-Dutch War, different elite visions for the future colony of Virginia, and the difficulties of maintaining order through delegated authority to Justices of the Peace—as likely causes of the rebellion itself. See in particular Billings, Sir William Berkeley, 210–47; and Warren M. Billings, “‘Virginia’s Deploured Condition,’ 1660–1676: The Coming of Bacon’s Rebellion” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 1968). 68. Webb, 1676.

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words about the Indians ring as significant because of their elective affinity with the cultural, economic, and political trajectory that the colony of Virginia took between 1660 and 1710, a trajectory toward a “populism” defined via the strict separation of “white” from “black” and “red,” and the guarantee, via law and violence, of the superior positioning of the former. For in the course of those fifty years, Virginia was transformed from a society structured by indentured servitude—effectively a tobacco boomtown 69. Edmund Morgan’s classic argument is that as the small man’s economic position improved, he was also enjoying the benefits of a shift in social and political attitudes that coincided with the rise of slavery. The shift seems to have begun with the efforts of the crown, after Bacon’s Rebellion, to restrain the covetousness of Virginia’s provincial magnates . . . the 1690s saw a radical change in the character of the conflict. . . . While the assembly was generating measures to align white men of every rank against colored men of every tint, and while magnates were tilting with governors, it became imperative for everyone who aimed at power to court the good will of the small freemen who made up the bulk of the voting population. The end result was to bring the small man, not into political office, but into a position that allowed him to affect politics as never before. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 345–46. 70. Anthony Parent focuses on three historical developments to explain the rise of slavery in the social formation of colonial Virginia: (1) the expropriation of Indian lands, (2) the move away from indentured servitude as a source of labor, and (3) the growth in profits from tobacco. Parent situates Bacon’s Rebellion—as I do here—as a watershed in conflicts between the English settlers and Indian tribes; Parent, as I do, treats the rebellion in the context of white settler resentment and anxiety. Importantly, he shows that the rebellion had a certain set of paradoxical or contradictory implications in its interpretation, then and now. On the one hand, its panracial coalition aimed at economic issues remains a touchstone of possibility; on the other hand, the conflagration solidified the planters’ understanding of themselves as a discrete group—as both status group and class, I would argue—and contributed to their felt need to coordinate action if they wished to remain at the top of Virginia’s social order. Since the publication of Parent’s seminal text, historical dispute has emerged about the timing of the most elite planters’ turn to enslaved labor, and the varied geographies of investment in slavery as a labor system. Parent also shows how the Chesapeake Rebellion involved a rumor that the King had issued an edict freeing enslaved persons who converted to Christianity. Finally, Thomas Murphy asks whether the turn of certain Virginia elites to Enlightenment deism should be read in the context of the threat posed to a system of dehumanization by certain forms of Christianity. Anthony S. Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Lorena S. Walsh, “Review of Anthony Parent, Foul Means,” Journal of Southern History 71, no. 1 (February 2005): 138–40; John C. Coombs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 332–60; Thomas Murphy, “Review of Anthony Parent, Foul Means,” American Historical Review 110, no. 3 (June 2005): 782–83.

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with a feudal social structure—to one structured by chattel slavery and the divisions of race as the fundamental representative scheme for comprehending rector, actor, and other. Demographically, the number of African-born slaves purchased and owned by landowners increased dramatically, from approximately two thousand in 1670 to approximately fifteen thousand in 1710. At the same time, the laws depriving “negroes” of various English rights became harsher and more specific; and “white” replaced “Christian” as the default category for those endowed with English liberties (particularly in an extensive statute enacted in 1691). And certainly in the years immediately after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, the lawmakers of Virginia busied themselves not only with generous gifts to those plantation owners who had lost horses and farmland in the rebellion, but also with the enhancement of the legal apparatus for the control of the non-European portions of Virginia’s population. In particular, “whites, although wrong, could refuse to submit to the authority of blacks, even when blacks were performing as agents of the common master.” Thus the rebellion as object of historiographical interpretation repeatedly refuses to be jammed into one era or another; it is a hinge point for inter-

71. I use the term feudal in a broad way, to signify the importance of “lordship” and a certain connection between landed estates and status. For debates about the social structure in early Virginia, see Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith ([orig. pub. 1959] Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 90–115; Virginia Bernhard, “Poverty and the Social Order in SeventeenthCentury Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 85, no. 2 (April 1977): 141–55; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; W. M. Billings, “The Growth of Political Institutions in Virginia, 1634 to 1676,” William and Mary Quarterly 31, no. 2 (April 1974): 225–42; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 72. Lorena S. Walsh, “The African American Population of the Colonial United States,” in A Population History of North America, ed. Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 191–204; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 295–315 and 395–432. 73. A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., In the Matter of Color: Trace and the American Legal Process; The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 44. 74. Higginbotham, 30. Higginbotham finds that “from 1619 to approximately 1660 there appears to have been no systematic effort in Virginia to define broadly the rights or non-rights of blacks.” It was a key case in 1669 that evidences a trend or shift—a white woman, whose overseer was black, escaped punishment due to the race of her overseer. “Even though Warwick indicates that as late as 1669 racial roles had not been so defined as to preclude a black person from exercising some control over any white person, the case signals the end of that era.” Higginbotham, 19, 30.

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pretation. Bacon was an English aristocrat, and he had black slaves in his rebellion; the category of white, as opposed to black, would have to be made central to legal and social order in the years after 1676. And, as we have seen, throughout the remainder of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, the high politics of the first British Empire were politics of sovereignty, which frequently invoked the idiom of the King’s Two Bodies and its variations. No matter how hard it was to control the British, French, or Spanish settler at the far end of a given imperial chain, the King’s Two Bodies could make sense of how to think about politics when the latest battle was concluded. This idiom, as discussed earlier, was the primary framework used by both Nathaniel Bacon and William Berkeley for understanding power. Yet if one cannot locate in Bacon’s Rebellion a specific causal sequence that brought about a turn in Virginia politics toward race, it is equally undeniable that the rebellion captures for interpretation a shift in the representation of power worthy of the historiographical obsession to which it has been subject. Indeed the call to interpretation is unavoidable, given that in the middle of this most consequential of transitions sits a rebellion that burned Jamestown to the ground, led by an aristocrat whose racist declarations about Indians surely adumbrated the world to come. Thus the interpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion opens onto the vast arena of debates that have concerned themselves with the invention of whiteness (and the wages of whiteness) in North America, the nexus of slavery and racism, and the relationship of both

75. Specific causal claims with regard to the effect of Bacon’s Rebellion on the behavior of Virginia’s power elite can be sustained for the following events and trends: Berkeley’s recall, the continuation of intra-elite conflict over Indian policy, and the pursuit of “a more centralized and efficient system of colonial administration” (Billings, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 306). In contrast, tracing the “invention of whiteness” to the fear induced by this particular rebellion remains tendentious in its specifically Marxist gloss. Theodore Allen projects onto the rebellion, erroneously in my view, the transformation of a class in itself into a class for itself: “In their solidarity with the African-American bond-laborers in Bacon’s Rebellion, the laboringclass European-American bond-laborers had demonstrated their understanding of their interests, and bond-laborers had had the sympathy of the laboring poor and the propertyless free population.” Thus in his text he imagines race as the strategic invention of a unitary subject, the “plantation bourgeoisie.” It is worth noting that although surely a major event, the rebellion of 1676 was not the only deadly war affecting Bacon’s generation of English colonists, Indian allies and enemies, and enslaved Africans. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 271–92, 349–51; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 2, The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso Books, 1997), 248. 76. Greene, Peripheries and Center; Koenigsberger, “Composite States, Representative Institutions and the American Revolution.”

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of these to the populist political imagination as it emerged in the colonies. The significance of Bacon’s Rebellion, then, is its ambivalent existence at the intersection—perhaps even the collision—of two different constructions of authority, power, and violence. One of these constructions focused on the King’s interest and the meaning of treason. The liberties (read: discretion) of actors to assert, develop, and pursue their own projects were, in this rendering, directly connected to their participation in the sovereign game of the ultimate, Christ-like rector, the King. This was the treason politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein crimes against public order, even far from the sovereign center, were “treason” because betrayal of the King’s second body was the language of politics. The give-and-take of elite alliance and conflict, the legitimation of exclusion from chains of command, and the justification of destruction were understood on these terms. Burning houses to the ground was a matter of who was in and who was out of the chains of power connecting the imperial frontier to the body-with-two-bodies that could authorize right action. In this first logic of power, why not include, when practical, the rectors of those “savage” others—for example the Queen of the Appamatocks—as actors in the agency chains that ran from Whitehall to the frontier, if doing so was valuable for this or that project? Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and British war and diplomacy are full of such treaties and maneu77. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso Books, 1999); Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905; Audrey Smedley and Brian Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), chaps. 4 and 5; Vilna Bashi Trifler, The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 140–41; Owen Stanwood, “Captives and Slaves: Indian Labor, Cultural Conversion, and the Plantation Revolution in Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 114, no. 4 (2006): 434–63; A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Anne F. Jacobs, “The ‘Law Only as an Enemy’: The Legitimization of Racial Powerlessness through the Colonial and Antebellum Criminal Laws of Virginia,” North Carolina Law Review 70 (1992): 969–1070; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015): 113–14. 78. In seventeenth-century Virginia, the charge of treason came into “increasingly supple use . . . for political purposes.” Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 61. 79. The settlement of Virginia was initially highly dependent on the Powhatan empire; over the course of the seventeenth century, the enhancement of the English population of Virginia allowed an increasingly aggressive stance to be taken by British militias vis-à-vis their local neighbors, though not without difficulty. Thus the story of the seventeenth century in Virginia is to some extent a story of how “two new and expanding empires, Powhatan and English, collided in the hardwood and pine forests and in the vital cornfields west of Chesapeake Bay.” Ian K.

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vers, as myriad distinctions were made: between Indians living within the colonies, who were clearly subject to the monarch, and those living outside; between those who were Christianized and those who were not; between those groups who were subordinate to the English and those who were allies on equal terms. Under the aegis of this worldview and ethos, conversion to Christianity and claims to be subject to, and thus actor for, the King were a route to the accrual of agency relationally understood: “Indians . . . insisting that they were loyal subjects of the English sovereign with a direct relationship to the crown” could hope to “bypass colonial authorities.” This way of representing rector, actor, and other made a good deal of sense in its practicality, especially in a place so removed from the sacred center. And yet Lauren Benton has asked provocatively whether “the upper reaches of distant rivers might be places for men to think of replacing the king’s two bodies with one of their own.” This emphasis on the body, and a different way of interpreting what it means to share a body with another actor, was the precarious link between the competing logics of power I am investigating here. Different ways of referencing the body, using it as signifier, fantasizing about it, and using it as a metaphor, provided different ways to link rector, actor, and other. The second rendering was only partially visible in Bacon’s Rebellion, and then only fitfully, here and there. It certainly was not taken for granted as the way to shore up agency problems. But we can see it in the rebellion itself, and even more in the reactions of elites to the rebellion. In this second construal of power, certain others were cursed categorically to exclusion, while the relationship of actors to rectors was somehow more ambiguous, or even circular. And in this rendering, hierarchy was less obvious and natural—or at least, the hierarchy articulated and underwritten by the sacred second body of the King was less hegemonic. Instead, masses of bodies—either huddled together or distinguishing themselves via small amounts of ownership—claimed authorship of themselves, their worlds, and their histories. A strange possibility came into view: a few of the rectors who ran Virginia were thought to draw their authority not only from Whitehall but from their election by “the people,” from their installation into power via mechanisms of representation, and even, at odd moments, from the exceedingly odd idea of their individual competencies as authors. This second construal of power often involved a different rendering of Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 37–58; quotation is from p. 37. 80. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 91. 81. Benton, 41.

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verticality, wherein a broad multiplicity of mini-rectors delegated authority to their representative, who then in turn ruled them. To be sure, this was present in Bacon’s Rebellion primarily as a negative, underdeveloped space, not as a positive ideology. Nathaniel Bacon Jr. was not John Locke or Thomas Jefferson, and there were no “liberals,” and very few republicans, in colonial Virginia in 1676. But the enchanted populism of democratic rule, the legitimation of power as the will of the ruled, shadows the rebellion and its aftermath as the barely visible other side of a coin that has as its more discernible face the violent, racialized exclusion of the Indian other. Bacon, after all, had his charisma attributed to him because of his capacity to act out the resentments of certain Virginians, resentments of actors whose bitterness toward the elite of plantation society (rector) was mirrored by their viciousness toward the Indians only a few miles away (other). That these resentments were still spoken in the language of the name of the King should not blind us to their reality, for the rebellion was itself a Janus-faced signifier of the transition to modernity. Thus in this second format of power, not just the two bodies of the King or the Queen but all kinds of bodies—“black,” “white,” and “red”; rich and poor; male and female—are considered for interpretation in their specifically political valence. These bodies are obsessed about endlessly, and the obsession focuses on their suitability for alliance, and on which significations can be interpreted as indexing this suitability. The body of a person, variously positioned in various chains of power, or the bodies of masses of persons, grouped by force and categorization, become signifiers themselves in remarkably new ways—signifiers of race and civilization, of democracy, of modernity. The People as Myth and Guarantor of Delegation: Herman Husband’s Sermons We are now prepared for a deeper reading of Herman Husband’s sermons as the counterpoint, from more than one hundred years later, to Bacon’s pugnacious declarations that he was the true agent of the ultimate rector. When he imagined a New Jerusalem positioned between the Alleghenies and the Rockies, Husband was trying to solve a problem, and that problem was how to ensure trust in rule, thereby providing a landscape of meaning in which to 82. Ivan Szelenyi, “Weber’s Theory of Domination and Post-Communist Capitalisms,” Theory and Society 45, no. 1 (2016): 1–24. 83. Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America; Society and the Sexes in the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

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conduct politics, given the destruction of the King’s Two Bodies. He sought a frame for understanding, forging, and practicing governance. And his texts reflect the destruction of the second body of the King, because in them, the metaphor of the body is a continual presence, darting in and through his policy proposals, suffusing his language, and pointing in many directions at once. Husband’s sermons are texts of crisis; they exude the intensity that only comes with deep political confusion. And the crisis was how to construct a space of political action without the second body of the King. In this, Husband was not alone. How to do politics without a King was a central practical, intellectual, and mythological problem for the citizens of the new republic; it touched not only the writing of the Constitution and the grandiloquent articulation of national narratives but also questions such as whose advice an individual should heed in everyday life, and what kind of career a freeman could hope to pursue after the American Revolution. We know about public debates concerning the merits of a strong executive, protestations for and against the idea that the American President was like a King, and the fraught relationship to the Roman republic evidenced by early American elites. But my claim does not concern only the specific definition of monarchy versus the checks and balances of a constitutional republic; rather, I mean to look not only at Madisonian machinery but also at the vibrant, ambient background against which it was articulated. What interests me is the landscapes of meaning in which one would find allies, take sides, push and pull on the laws, and so on. We find one manifestation of this ambient background in Husband’s sermons. When we open them, we step into a different world of signification—the world of biblical republicanism, which was widespread in the United States of America of the 1790s. The obsessions here concerned not the imitation of ancient Rome but the sacred commitments necessary as a backdrop for politics in a world where the sacred second body of the King was no longer available to glue rectors to actors, turn others into actors and vice versa, and motivate and justify violence. 84. Jeffrey Pasley’s account of the rise of printers as new men of power is but one excellent example of the chaos and confusion vis-à-vis the status order that attended the 1780s and 1790s in the United States of America. He shows that while the Federalists expected the newspaper system to continue the agency relationship they were used to from before the American Revolution—with gentlemen, qua rectors, publishing anonymously, and printers, qua actors, doing their business as artisan agents—this is not what happened. Rather, a field of journalism emerged, in which printers challenged for rectorship in the specific sense of seizing the power to narrate political events outside not only government influence but also elite opinion. Jeffrey Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002).

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For the most cited text in the printed works of political relevance from 1760 through 1805 was the book of Deuteronomy; even excluding sermons, biblical citations were as common as those from common-law and classical sources. Millenarian strands of Christianity provided the popular framework for comprehending the violence of the American Revolution. Husband’s sermons represent well this “enthusiasm”—the ascending spiritual project of the end of days, prophesied in the book of Revelation. But the sermons also represent the world of Protestant Hebraic republicanism, a discourse with both popular and elite variants, and an impeccable prestige via its link to the culture of Calvinist New England. This discourse could overlap with, but was not coextensive with, millenarian energies. It concerned itself with the God-ordained virtuous American republic, understood as a covenant with God via analogy to ancient Israel. Via intertextuality, metaphor, and mood, this way of rendering power became the meaningful background for countless arguments and actions in the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s. The standard feature of the Protestant Hebraic genre was for the author to

85. Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 12. 86. Millenarianism found its home in the Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Baptist congregations, and thus half the colonies’ white population was exposed to it; its ideational effects eventually moved further into the public at large, to the chagrin of the leaders of Anglican congregations in the South and elite merchants and traders in the mid-Atlantic and New England. Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), xiv. See further discussions in Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 87. The trend was for the phrases that had been used during the Great Awakening of the 1740s to be transferred to the American rebels, as loyalists and Tories in the 1770s labeled those who favored independence enthusiasts to signify that they were blinded by religion. This was not a very effective discursive strategy. The “enthusiasm” carried into the politics of the 1790s. David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 215–22; Jon Mee, “Anxieties of Enthusiasm: Coleridge, Prophecy, and Popular Politics in the 1790s,” Huntington Library Quarterly 60, no. 1/2 (1997): 179–81. 88. Bloch discusses Husband specifically as a millenarian, and traces his work and voice from the justification of the North Carolina regulation against the first British Empire, to his agitation as a patriot in the lead-up to the American Revolution, through to his anti-Federalist positions in the 1780s and 1790s. She dates his loss of faith in the actually existing republic to 1789: “Whereas in 1788 Husband envisioned this New Jerusalem as a confederation of four empires including all the new American states, after the passage of the Constitution in 1789 he lost faith in the rest of the nation and confined its boundaries to the region west of the Alleghenies.” Bloch, Visionary Republic, 114.

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inquire into ancient Israel as a republic, looking to the Old Testament for clear indications of how a virtuous republic should function (and how it could be corrupted and lose its virtue). As a way to represent state-society relations during a moment of great uncertainty, this speech genre had a few distinct advantages. First, it had popular legibility in a society wherein those who learned to read without an elite education did so overwhelmingly by reading the Bible. But second, it had certain advantages of meaningful content. The Twelve Tribes of Israel (often miscounted as thirteen so as to make the analogy with the thirteen states even better) could be thought of as “federated.” The pastoral world of Moses could be connected to the Jeffersonian ideal of the small, freeholding farmer. And finally, as multiple social forces began to generate the messy, raucous, racist democracy of the early United States, the disinterested elitism of Roman republicanism felt less and less like a workable model of and for the world. Into its place, then, one could put tracts with titles like Nicholas Street’s The American States Acting over the Part of the Children of Israel in the Wilderness, and thereby Impeding Their Entrance into Canaan’s Rest (1777) or Joseph Huntington’s On the Health and Happiness, or Misery and Ruin, of the Body Politic, in Similitude to that of the Natural Body (1781), which was centered on the ancient Israel–United States analogy. It is not quite right to understand this space of discourse as an instance of religion as a tool of politics, or even of politics imitating religion. Rather, these texts and countless others like them participated in the emergence of a landscape of meaning in which certain sorts of actions became not only possible but likely to be judged legitimate. Biblical republicanism “legitimized political novelties” and also united “a growing number of dynamic political entities—the American states—around well-known and revered scriptural narratives, structures, and models.” Husband’s vision, then, would have been immediately comprehensible to his listeners as yet another attempt to draw out, from the (biblical) wisdom of the ages, how a political life together could be construed so as to avoid corruption and tyranny. What it reveals to us is the degree to which the problem of power was—for Husband and his allies in the Whiskey Rebellion and their Federalist opponents—the problem of the intertwining of delegation and domination, which threatened to go awry without the King’s Two Bodies.

* Husband’s vision for the new America is what Eric Voegelin would call gnostic. It is deeply suspicious of the world as constructed before him; this world, 89. Shalev, American Zion, 12. 90. Eric Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint: “The Political Religions,” “The New Science

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he attests to the reader, is primarily one of elites “who will use both art and eloquence to deceive us.” Those “outwardly learned” who display their learning as a matter of distinction are, according to Husband, prone to tremendous error and are likely wicked. Only those who are “learned of the spirit” can be trusted to be good. Yet Husband is optimistic, for he claims that outward and spirit learning will merge in “these last days”: with the printing press, becoming outwardly learned will be less expensive, and thus open to the common man. For Husband, the American Revolution was a precipitating event of the “last days.” In his texts he imagines the perfected society becoming real on earth through his labor and that of other men. To achieve this perfection he constructs, in his sermons, the pyramid structure that would be peopled via his electoral rules. He then explains that in his pyramid-like plan, “satisfaction, in a sweet Harmony, will be diffused through every limb and least Joint of our Body-politick, as the Blood is in our Bodies natural.” Inversely, Husband’s account of tyranny is also given in terms of bodies. “The Spirit of an arbitrary Government” is that which divides “the Body of the Governors from the Body of the Governed, that the one Body may combine while the other is cut off from the Benefit of the Circulation of Life and Knowledge, and so become dead and ignorant.” According to Husband, the “lawyers” are always pursuing this sort of tyrannical plan. But if it can only find the design to manifest itself, the “Body of the People” will be divine and infallible, he assures his audience; the men chosen “cannot fail” to pursue that “which will be always best and right in the Policy of our own Affairs, even if in Reason and Philosophy there may be better.” Following the analogy through—and Husband was nothing if not thorof Politics,” and “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism,” vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. with an introduction by Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). 91. Husband, “XIV Sermons on the Characters of Jacob’s Fourteen Sons,” vi. 92. In this Husband was correct. The rise of widely accessible periodicals was essential to the prevalence of millenarian ideas in the Atlantic World in the late eighteenth century. Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 93. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the location of the coming utopia changes over time. In 1782 Husband hopes the soon-to-be US government will channel this sacred labor, but by 1789 he is no longer willing to regard the United States of America as currently constituted as conducive to his eschatology, since in the intervening years it had been corrupted by the wicked. 94. Husband, “Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United States of America,” 8. 95. Husband, “Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United

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ough—he is compelled to conclude that a body must have a head. This after all was the whole basis of Christ-like kingship, as the body of the church, with Jesus as its head, was analogized to the body politic, with the King as its head. In both cases, Jesus or the King took into his “second body” the bodies of all those who partook of the religious or political community so defined. The analogy is furthered in Husband when he retains the terms Prince and Privy Council for the executive in his New Jerusalem, and he proposes that the “four Parliaments of England, Ireland, Scotland, and the American Assemblies” were a historical forerunner of his plan, though they stayed within the orbit of monarchy, taking “the King and Ministry as the Head and Heart.” Next, Husband takes his reader into the “heart” of the matter: how to replace the second body of the King? Herein enters the Protestant philosophy of history. The tradition of dissent, Husband explains, which had begun with Luther, eventually had to supersede monarchy via revolution and the founding of a democratic republic. This philosophizing, however, returns Husband to a question that repeatedly troubled him and others, one of the great questions of the age for both high- and low-born: How to determine the proper “head” of the “body politic” in a democratic republic? Husband hews closely to dictates of the metaphor that is clearly, for him, more than mere metaphor: the American body politic “when it comes to its full Stature of Growth . . . is to have all the Parts and Proportions of the Body natural.” And he argues that if the steps between electoral levels are not too large, and the time between elections is adjusted correctly—otherwise those wicked men will creep in—then the “right balance of power” will be achieved. States of America,” 9. Later in the text, Husband sets out the analogy of the body of the church to the body politic in this way: Our Duty to God, and to our Neighbor, is nearly connected: If a Man love God truly, he must love his Body the Church, and long for her Prosperity, and Growth, and Happiness in the World, as well as that which is to come: And as the Happiness of our Souls depends on the tight Knowledge of those Parts of Scripture which relate to our Conversion . . . so the Happiness of ourselves, and our Posterity, in this present World, and in the future Times of this World, depends on the right understanding of those parts of the Scriptures which relate to the right Government of Mankind in this World. Husband, 31. 96. For a larger discussion of thematics such as these throughout American history, see Philip S. Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 97. Husband, “Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United States of America,” 10. 98. Husband, “XIV Sermons on the Characters of Jacob’s Fourteen Sons,” vi.

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The pyramidal republic he imagined, staffed by election, also had bodily form. There would be four councils at the top of the pyramid, with each acting as a finger in the “hand” of the republic (see figure 1), since hands are also “bodies”; these councils would “unite and elect a prince, to be over the whole, and also fix elderly men . . . to be as privy council to this prince.” Thus, this elected prince is the thumb of the hand, and the head of the body politic. So created, the “supreme power” would be “the life and cement of the union, as the members of the body natural are united to the head and heart.” Husband incorporated a plan for the separation of powers in his vision, and he proposed that positions of public leadership would not have salaries but simply basic living expenses supplied by the state. Even paying for these involved him in significant conceptual gymnastics, because he compared tax collectors to the teeth of a lion, and blamed oppressive taxes for the perversion of the relationship of people to government in the actually existing United States of America. All of this—the pyramid structure, the unsalaried administrators, the balance of power—was proposed as a way to make government the responsible agent of “laboring, industrious people, the militia of freemen.” These “freemen” are the new location of the sacred in the body politic; they are consistently opposed by Husband to the “standing armies of kings and tyrants, that only rob them, and live upon their labor, in idleness and luxury.” In direct analogy to the King’s Two Bodies, Husband locates the political version of the sacred second body not in the eternal (outside time) but rather in a sempiternal reality—extending in time to infinity. He references “posterity” rather than the otherworldly as the reason why revolutionary labors are taken up (as did many eighteenth-century revolutionaries). Through this analogy, the many bodies natural of the citizens of the republic (and specifically, “mechanicks” and “farmers”) come together to make up the body politic (see figure 2). They become the collective author of their lives together, taking up an authorship that is, in the end, divine rather than belonging to any one mortal. For the new America, prophesied all those years ago in Daniel 7:9, was coming to be through the hand of God, such that “though 99. Husband, viii. 100. Husband, vi. 101. Husband, 13. 102. Husband, 16. 103. Husband, 21. 104. Husband, “Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United States of America,” 7–8. 105. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

F i g u r e 1 . Plate from Herman Husband, “A Dialogue between an Assembly-man and a Conventionman” (1790), depicting the state as a working hand, as “shewed to Israel by Ezekiel.”

F i g u r e 2 . Plate from Husband, “A Dialogue between an Assembly-man and a Convention-man,” showing the “Lords house” or “Confederation of States” becoming one “Federal Government” via analogy to the body natural.

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the honest Men throughout all America are divided into separate religious Societies; yet they are all united in this greater Wheel of the State; for it is to govern the Whole in true Justice and Righteousness.” Husband was a philosopher of the people’s two bodies as a replacement for the two bodies of the King. But there is also a third body in Husband’s account. This “stinking carcass” allows him to use the body-as-sign to differentiate the righteous from the wicked. This dead body of “filthy lucre” is what must be excluded at all costs. For Husband, Luke 17:37 (“Wherever the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together”) refers to the vultures who feed on the stinking body of monetary greed. In Jesus’ time, this body had infected the Jewish council and blinded the people, who otherwise would have elected “our Lord” to lead them. Hence, insofar as there have been rulers whose object is “getting money,” this explains the fallen condition of man, the “principal cause of all wars and desolation of kingdoms.” Thus the righteous republic will be an ascetic one, for if luxury is not pursued, no one will have to live by exploiting the labors of others. Such a republic will “unite us all into one body; that so every member might have the same care for all the members as for himself; for if one member of the body politic perish, it will affect all the members the same as happens in the body natural.”

* Herman Husband’s inversion of the King’s Two Bodies, such that the chain for the authorization of action runs from the people to the prince, creates a conceptual dilemma. In what way can “the people” be an author? Husband tries to solve this problem in two ways. First, he delineates certain actions that can be ascribed to “the body of the people”—articulating grievances, rebelling violently, judging whether a solution to a problem does in fact meet their needs. And second, he posits a natural solidarity between male heads of farm and household that constitutes the body politic as capable of communication 106. Husband, “Proposals to Amend and Perfect the Policy of the Government of the United States of America,” 32. 107. Husband, “XIV Sermons on the Characters of Jacob’s Fourteen Sons,” 33–34. 108. Husband, “A Dialogue between an Assembly-Man and a Convention-Man, on the Subject of the State Constitution of Pennsylvania,” 7. 109. Husband, 2–3. 110. Michael Walzer raises the same issue in his discussion of the trial of Louis XVI in France: “However one pictures God, he does not look like a council or a crowd.” Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 15.

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and judgment; this solidarity is based in part on similarities in how such men rule over their own domain, thus allowing them a certain unity in choosing those who will choose those who will choose . . . the prince. In his gnostic construction of a perfect republic, then, Husband pursues a Jeffersonian answer to a Hobbesian problem, via the myth of the “the people”: “Without government, the strong and robust in body tyrannise; and property is not secured. With government, we have to guard against the crafty, designing and lazy.” But it is Husband’s struggle with the “mysteries” of rulership as authorship that perhaps deserves our special attention. His texts are obsessed with the lack induced in the body politic by the death of the King; his mood is not that of calm confidence in Enlightenment progress, whereby history will be made the agent of the men who have finally found philosophy, but rather that of the benighted anxieties and dazzled hopes of revolution and revelation. We have perhaps not been sufficiently attentive to this gnostic construction, which for all its wild speculation became quite compelling to large swaths of the American electorate—and in some way or another, still is. It is a construction whose lineage reaches back to before the early modern era, and forward to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Husband’s sermons are one small piece of a long arc of rendering the body politic as a whole infallible, because divine. Ernst Kantorowicz, in his essay on mysteries of state, places the starting point of this arc at the beginning of the thirteenth century, whereby the rendering of rulership as sacred “expanded from individual dignitaries to compact communities. Therewith sociological problems began to shape ecclesiological problems and, vice versa, ecclesiology, sociology.” Husband wrote after the American Revolution, but within this 111. Pateman, The Sexual Contract; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Honor Sachs, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Liveright, 2017). 112. Husband, “XIV Sermons on the Characters of Jacob’s Fourteen Sons,” 21. 113. Ernst Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins,” in Selected Studies (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1965), 381–98. 114. For a study of Husband that focuses on his Jeffersonian politics, see Holt, “The New Jerusalem.” 115. Kantorowicz explains that by the early thirteenth century, the spiritual-secular hybridism whereby “ruling individuals” enhanced their personae with the accoutrements of sacrality reached “a state of saturation . . . when both the spiritual and secular dignitaries were rigged with all the essential attributes of their offices.” But the dynamism of sacred rule did not stop; rather,

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arc, as he reckoned with how to maintain the mysteries of the perfect, infallible state—maintaining, as it were, the myth of the state—while excluding from its operation the “henchmen” of the King and their postrevolutionary equivalents: the wicked men of luxury or leisure. But this is not easy, for the delegation is not from King to officer but from people to elected official; and what or who is “the people”? Confronted with these difficulties, Husband must introduce a third body into his metaphorical apparatus. He can separate the good body of the people from the bad by identifying the latter with the stinking carcass of leisure and greed. Via this rhetorical maneuver, he shores up, with asceticism and a certain version of the labor theory of value, the difficulty of creating a sacred center out of a dispersed population. For any and all disruptions of his perfect pyramid of governance, and indeed any and all human imperfections— pettiness, greed, competition, violence—can, in Husband’s logic, be displaced onto a single scapegoat: lucre. “Lucre” would not be the only scapegoat of political modernity; the profanity of “filth” would be extended to various groups of people, in various ways. Husband, whose adoration of the Old Testament is clear, writes that this love of lucre dogged the Jews “throughout their whole history,” thus affirming his narrative that liberation begins only with Luther. For Husband, “if we only remove this abomination of desolation, this stinking carcass of filthy lucre, or yearly salaries and stipends out of our supreme councils of the state . . . all the eagles and birds of prey will disperse, who now stand in the it expanded to different zones as power and its representation changed. The sacralization moved from the symbolization of powerful people—that is, actual persons-made-rectors in some relatively small space of projects and counterprojects—to communities of people conceived as a whole. Representations of the King as ultimate rector rendered the sacredness of the leader in terms that included how said leader encompassed—in his concerns, his might, his worldview— the body politic as a whole. Thus the infallibility of the leader came from their responsibility in some sense. The result was a new kind of statism, in which “the Prince himself had stepped into the pontifical shoes of Pope and Bishop.” (He locates the “Pontificalism” of Princes in Louis XIV and, even more so, in James I.) This is where “mysteries of state” come from: “The royal ‘Pontificalism,’ then, seems to be resting in the legally settled belief that government is a mysterium administered alone by the king-highpriest and his indisputable officers, and that all actions committed in the name of those ‘Mysteries of State’ are valid ipso facto or ex opere operato [recalling ex opere operato Chisti ], regardless even of the personal worthiness of the king and his henchmen.” Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State,” 381–82, 381, 385; F. W. Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality,” in Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 236. Cited in Kantorowicz, 382. 116. Husband, “XIV Sermons on the Characters of Jacob’s Fourteen Sons,” 34.

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way and crowd about the doors of our sanctuaries in such flocks.” Yet the question of who was in and who was out of the “body politic” rendered as the “body of the people” via the metaphor of the “body natural” would not be resolved by this particular profanation alone. 117. Husband, 34.

6

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

The Sociology of the Spectacular State To the supposedly disenchanted reader of a preemptively disenchanted sociology, the texts of Herman Husband read as a message in a bottle, a strange artifact authored by a strange man. But contextualized properly, they help reveal the landscape in which certain actions and reactions took place— especially in the 1780s and 1790s, when the American republic lurched from emergency to emergency. These crises combined rampant publicity with violence and near violence, and in their acting out helped instantiate a new figuration of power. Husband’s sermons were, then, a kind of advance notice of a coming set of political performances. One of these performances—the Whiskey Rebellion, examined here in detail—featured Husband himself as one of its leaders. These instances of performative power helped bring into being the federal government of the United States of America. In this chapter, I interpret two of these performances, so as to illuminate further the shift in how chains of power and their representation were built and maintained as the King’s Two Bodies was creatively destroyed. These sovereign performances helped create the early American state. But to understand what constitutes a sovereign performance, we must note a recurrent conceptual opposition in the history of Western social thought— between the spectacular and the mundane state. In studies and treatises that emphasize the spectacular state, one finds an emphasis on the splendor of power and the capacity to create overawed subjects. Analysis concerns the myth-making surrounding “great” leaders and leadership; feats of violence and generosity attributed to the state (by those who engage it or are ruled by it, or by the analyst herself) are traced in their historical trajectories and traumatic memories. In contrast, the study of the

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mundane state draws a picture of an organization made up of persons applying rules and attending fussily to detail, and the essence of domination is then found in paper pushing (or tablet pushing), interpersonal officiousness, and the quasi absurdities that obtain when those who, in the end, have the means of violence at their disposal can let a condemned man off on a technicality. In the mundane state, the difference between staff and populace is a question of role; in the spectacular state, it is a question of magnificence. There is a relationship between these two poles of thought that takes various forms in various concrete studies. One can ask how and when the ability of an organization to amass information and informants, and to streamline functionality, makes its reputation as a spectacularly terrifying force (in other words, one can ask when its lawyers are even more dreadful than its guns). Inversely, one can point out that the ostentatious use of money, not only for the construction of army and infrastructure but also as itself a spectacular act, is a manifest act of states throughout history (think of the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in the modern era). In this chapter, I will be concerned with certain spectacular displays by actors-turned-agents-of-state, displays that helped perform into being the agency relations we normally associate with the mundane state’s attempt to grow its organizational capacity. My point will be not only that public performance was necessary to create the federal government in the early American

1. Often, the study of the spectacular state veers toward the study of the theater of rectors; the study of the mundane state becomes the study of the organization of actors made into state agents at all levels, including the lowest. But this is a bit of a false dichotomy, since whether the upper reaches of an administration manage to organize themselves in the generation of effective theater surely affects capacity (Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy notes the disorganization of the Clinton administration), while the performances of certain lowly actors can make a bad speech by a state leader into a compelling message, depending on the configuration of the media environment. Furthermore, a certain sort of sociological disenchantment encourages us to take as received truth that when combined with the pursuit of capital, it is the mundane state qua organization that underwrites (literally and metaphorically) the spectacular state. I am not so sure. The use of money is by no means limited to the mundanity of bureaucratic officialdom, or even to the grubby incentives that obtain when it is time to build an army. Spending can itself be a spectacle, and elaborate ceremonies perform into existence an impression of organizational capacity. Cultural theories of states and state formation, with their emphasis on the naturalization of categories and their inflection by theories of cultural cognition, have yet to grasp the fear, ambivalence, and resentment provoked by the performance of domination that is the essence of the spectacular state. Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013); Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970).

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republic, but also that the performances that did this work provide a hermeneutic entry point for our revised understanding of power in modernity. State power features a relationship of recruitment, and then sending-andbinding, between rectors and actors who act for and on behalf of the state. This relationship exists in four dimensions simultaneously: relational, discursive, material, and performative. I focus here on the performative in productive tension with logistics, capacity for physical destruction, and the naturalization of categories. Examining performances of sovereignty allows us to understand how the American transition to modernity brought into existence a specific configuration of sign and regime—it allows us to sociologize Herman Husband. For in these performances we will see understandings of “bodies of the people”—the political body, individual bodies, and grotesque, “stinking” bodies that are to be excluded at any cost—emerge as concrete and pragmatic solutions to the problem of replacing the King’s Two Bodies as the semiotic glue that helps to hold the state together, the set of signs that enables the productive entwining of delegation and domination. These solutions try to answer the question, as Husband did: How can the people be an author? The people-as-author, with its multiple bodies, came into being in part through the dramatic give-and-take of sometimes violent interaction, publicized widely—that is, through performative power. And so, to approach state formation in transitions to modernity in this way, we will need to step outside the standard models of state formation, whose emphases on, and arguments about, material, relational, and discursive power are well known to historical sociologists and historians. These 2. Isaac Ariail Reed, “Performative State-Formation in the Early American Republic,” American Sociological Review 84, no.2 (2019): 334–67. 3. Julia Adams and Tasleem Padamsee, “Signs and Regimes: Rereading Feminist Work on Welfare States,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 8, no. 1 (2001): 1–23. 4. Extant models provide different answers to two questions: (1) How do the would-be rectors of a would-be sovereign organization recruit various actors and turn them into state agents? (2) How are ties between rectors and actors inside the state-in-formation inflected by their relationship to a series of others? Bellicist models focus on physical violence, how to pay for it, and the varying consequences of varying struggles to become the most effective protection racket. Cultural models emphasize symbolic violence, its internalization, and how to naturalize it. Both articulate an understanding of relational power as simultaneously domination and capacity. There is great variation in the others of the state. To name just a few: the actors for enemy states and their rectors; scapegoats pulled out of the general population so as to shore up legitimacy with other portions of said population; persons who, situated in poorly understood places, constitute borderlands. Nicholas Hoover Wilson, “The Fixation of (Moral) Belief: Making Imperial Administration Modern,” European Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (2018): 13–38; Kimberly J.

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models do not do well with emergency politics, short-term state-making (e.g. less than a generation), the importance of publicity, and the improvisational performance of new meanings. As such, they struggle to fully comprehend the Age of Revolutions in its contingencies and creativity, and more specifically the coming-into-being of the federal government in the early American republic, which cannot be explained by standard models alone. Examining the performative dimension of state power points us toward a different terrain of interpretation, and a different set of documents. Instead of seeking out rituals of identification, we allow ourselves to see moments of negotiation and invention as creating hierarchy and its acceptance—and new ways to tie rectors to actors, and exclude others. We can also see acts of violence that are spectacular and grotesque precisely because they are so desperate and desperately underfunded, yet successful in their gratuitous destruction Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990); George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Patrick Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 5. The size and funding of the army, the complex agency problems posed by local militias and the dual army tradition, the economic effects of depression of the 1780s, and the complexity of the American revolutions as a source of disorder and discord that repeatedly challenged federal attempts at the creation and maintenance of sovereign order during the 1780s and 1790s all make explanations focused on material and relational power alone insufficient. Explanations that seek to fold performative into discursive power are also insufficient. Reed, “Performative State-Formation in the Early American Republic”; John Murrin, “A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard Beemen, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 333–48; Johann N. Neem, “Civil Society and American Nationalism, 1776–1865,” in Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present, ed. Elisabeth S. Clemens and Doug Guthrie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 29–53; Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf, and Brian Schoen, eds., Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

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because they evoked, in the moment, certain emotions in certain parts of the populace. There is no shortage, especially amidst the nostalgia for a republic of hope and dreams, of thinking—some of it extraordinary and insightful, some of it mundane, some it inane—that looks to the qualities of certain individuals to understand the contingent moves and countermoves of the birth of American modernity out of the maelstrom of revolutionary violence and postrevolutionary uncertainty. The Founding Fathers, whose nickname evokes the felt necessity of replacing the second body of the King, are discovered anew for each generation of Americans, in part so they can exchange books as Christmas gifts. This custom leads to the wild dichotomies with which the American reader will be overly familiar: these men were, it is argued, brilliant in foresight (or remarkably naive about politics), deeply moral in their understanding of republican governance (or viciously immoral in their embrace of slavery), gifted students of human nature (or self-important men of no significant maturity). A performative approach helps with these dilemmas, for it enables us to grasp the contingency and fragility of the early moments of the republic—and thus learn something relevant for the broader question of transitions to modernity—while avoiding these wild accusations. For the theory of performance reveals that the early American republic was, to be sure, a “leap in the dark”—but a leap taken by many individuals, who played different roles in different chains of power, and who walked on stage, not as latter-day Olympian gods out of whose heads sprang the republic, but rather as characters in search of an author. Performing Sovereignty in 1794 Between the Treaty of Paris and Thomas Jefferson’s occupation of the White House, a series of rebellions and battles became points of focus for both the would-be rectors of the new United States of America and the American electorate at large, qua public-in-formation. Shays’ Rebellion (1786) haunted the debates about federal power at the Constitutional Convention; the crushing of Fries’s Rebellion (1799) became a cause célèbre for newspaper editors intent on decrying Federalist tyranny, and helped John Adams lose the presi-

6. Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown, 2017). 7. John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 8. Luigi Pirandello, “Six Characters in Search of an Author” and Other Plays, trans. and with an introduction by Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).

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dential election to Jefferson; Gabriel’s Rebellion (1801), though effectively aborted and crushed by a combination of weather and white violence, terrified American slaveholders, especially those who had followed the news from the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola. Congress, and elites invested (literally and metaphorically) in Alexander Hamilton’s plan for a central bank, were devastated by the lost battles in the Northwest Territory in 1790 and 1791; the Ohio Indian alliance was ascendant; and the US government’s solvency, dependent on land speculation in the Northwest Territory, was at risk. Performances in times of emergency—acts of performative power on behalf of a state that as yet did not quite exist—met the chaos of crisis with a frame for comprehending order, criticizing power, and accepting authority, a frame for reading the world’s practicalities, and attaching to them various moral imperatives, emotional reactions, and intentions both brotherly and violent. This was an attempt to replace the King’s Two Bodies as a way to think and enact power; having destroyed that rather useful trope as an unsustainable “tyranny,” access to rectorship was suddenly in play as something that could be distributed to some of the population living in the former thirteen colonies. This rendering of the “mysteries” of state as somehow contained in the demos was combined with a radically reorganized concept of authority, and with a narrative of the spread of this empire of liberty around the world, particularly in a westward direction across the North American continent. But this frame for both criticizing and creating power—the “true objective of the American Constitution was not to limit power but to create more power, actually to establish and duly constitute an entirely new power centre”—was brought into being only with great difficulty and much iteration; only slowly would certain actors come to know what “the people’s two bodies,” as the sort of thing from which one could build hierarchy and in the name of which one could accomplish projects, meant for the practicalities of everyday action. We can see these understandings coming onto the stage in a particularly clear manner during two crises that took place in 1794. Therein we find sovereign performances that helped secure, in the minds and bodies 9. John Murrin, “The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 1 (2000): 1–25. 10. Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010); Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 11. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 153–54; Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the US Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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of electorate and elite, the beginnings of an understanding of how the relationship between state and society would be managed. The Whiskey Rebellion involved the greatest movement of troops on American soil between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It was a public performance of the first order—the talk of the town throughout the republic, the subject of newspaper reports, and a repeated point of contestation over the meaning of “the people.” Speculation and debate about the rebellion ran into taverns and among the well-heeled who would never enter such taverns. The rebellion was a focused gathering publicized to the entire electorate, a thematization of the most fraught lines of political conflict in the new republic. The farmers and their leaders who became the rebels had several grievances. They demanded greater state presence (to fight “savage Indians”) and greater state absence (less tax collection) at the same time. They wanted a strong state to negotiate the opening of the Mississippi River from the Spanish Empire; they wanted protection from debt collection and foreclosure, and indeed debt relief. Furthermore, they viewed Hamilton’s new tax plan—an internal excise on whiskey—as a bailout of the wealthy elite, the new state rectors’ best friends. Which, in fact, the plan was. Meanwhile the control of the Northwest Territory was also at stake in 1794. George Washington commissioned General Anthony Wayne to refashion the American military into the Legion of the United States, and Wayne headed down the Ohio River and then into the territory, under immense pressure from Congress to secure it. Secure was code for two ends-in-view: a severe reduction in the capacity of “savage Indians” to attack white citizens of the United States, and the removal of the British from the forts they occupied therein. The financial problems of bond and securities payment faced by the treasury of the American government—problems that had in part caused the adoption of the whiskey tax—could be resolved with much less focus on taxa12. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2013); Johann N. Neem, “Freedom of Association in the Early Republic: The Republican Party, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Philadelphia and New York Cordwainers’ Cases,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 127, no. 3 (2003): 259–90. 13. William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); William Hogeland, Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012); Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008). 14. Leonard J. Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

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tion and debtor courts if the land in the Northwest Territory could be auctioned off to wealthy individuals and collective investment ventures. Hence a vicious circle of agency problems appeared: to make the state solvent, the rectors of the US government needed to secure the territory; but to do this, they needed a big-enough army, which meant money, which meant taxes. The US government tried at first to negotiate with the Iroquois empire, former political patrons of the tribes that made up the Ohio alliance, in an effort to have the Iroquois reel in the violence of the Ohio Indians, and bring them to the negotiating table. This negotiation by proxy failed. Meanwhile the British offered themselves as patrons of the Ohio Indians, promising aid and arms. So the American state failed to extend its power, because the appropriate chains of power could not be constructed via negotiation. The discursive unity of the Ohio Indians was in part predicated on EuroAmerican racial codings; as an aggressor, negotiator, and loser of battles, the representatives of the United States interpreted the “Indians” in Ohio as sharing an essential commonality. This was taken up in part by the tribes themselves, particularly since the Iroquois covenant chain could no longer tie patron to client. This, then, was the power situation in 1794: the Ohio Indians militarily ascendant, with American settlers continuing to venture into the Northwest Territory, only to complain about the lack of protection from their own federal government and to rail against its whiskey tax. Republican Government as a Problem of Meaning The Whiskey Rebellion began with a breakdown in a chain of power and its representation; violence ensued when authority and power could not hold. Alexander Hamilton had obtained orders from Congress to arrest those who had tarred and feathered tax agents in western Pennsylvania; on the basis of

15. It was an issue of material and “environmental” power: the land of the Ohio Valley held tremendous productive potential, but it was difficult to access from the coast and the site of years of chaotic violence. See David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson, eds., The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012). 16. Although the racial interpretation of various tribes is traceable to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century encounters between Europeans and Americans, its full implementation in the self-understandings of all actors involved in the conflict, particularly the idea that military and political incentives and alignments would always sort out along racial lines, emerged during, and immediately after, the American Revolution. Indeed, as we will see, one brick in this wall fell into place in 1794. 17. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).

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these orders, the tax inspector for the environs of Pittsburgh, John Neville, solicited the deputy marshal, John Fox, to arrest those responsible. But the delegations went still further: on Neville’s advice, Fox delegated the task of delivering the news of the arrests to a local cattle herder, described in one account as “a poor simple man . . . ignorant of what he was doing.” This delegate for the would-be state was then “seized, whipped, tarred and feathered” by those he had been tasked with arresting. William Findley’s sarcastic rendering of the episode from his text published in 1796 communicates precisely the mixing of (lack of) authority, power, and violence in the crisis. If the inspector [Neville] could have contrived a surer method to degrade the government in the esteem of the rioters, and invite insults, it is beyond my comprehension . . . what better could the inspector expect. If the people were well disposed where the process was to be served, why discourage the deputy marshall from going forward? If they were not well disposed, why send a poor creature who, not knowing what he delivered, could not give testimony of his having served the process? . . . The authority of a commission from government, and the respectability attached thereby to the person that bears it, generally procures a degree of reverance to an office of justice. The sherrif or constable will be respected when the officious bum will probably be well flogged.

Soon the country was aflame with resistance, as a firefight at the tax inspector’s property ended with his house getting burned to the ground. Findley’s text reveals the intertwined agency problems of state formation that gave the Whiskey Rebellion its significance. Cutting through these problems was the performance staged by the rectors in Philadelphia and their agents (negotiators, generals, soldiers) who went out to meet the rebels, achieving state by demonstration. The archives also reveal how the rebels’ grievances came to expression. Underneath the tarring and feathering of this “officious bum” was a landscape of meaning recognizable from Herman Husband’s sermons; the motivations for violence and coercion coming from the rebels were framed by a demand for recognition of the citizen in the house of power. The citizenship of the voting population, earned via military service in the Revolutionary War, was supposed to come with a relationship of delegation between that population and elected officials, installed in positions of authority and entrusted to be agents of the second body of the people. Yet the 18. William Findley, History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania: In the Year M.DCC.XCIV, with a recital of the circumstances specially connected therewith; and an historical review of the previous situation of country (Philadelphia: Samuel Harrison Smith, 1796), 68–69. 19. Findley, 68–69.

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Federalists who were building the state from Philadelphia were not viewed as representative by the population of veterans and their families eking out their living on the western frontier. It was from this context that violence emerged. The contentious actions taken on the frontier by the rebels were derived partly from the repertoire of the peasantry in early modern England: humiliating with “rough music,” tarring and feathering of persons of authority, burning of barns, and barricading of roads to prevent foreclosures—this was the stuff of rural resistance. These actions, not surprisingly given their origins, could in no obvious way articulate a public, democratic demand on the leaders of the federal government; they were ambiguous representations of “the people,” and they could not really or fully grasp at Husband’s utopian dreams. Instead, they became points of interpretive contention amidst a maelstrom of violence. Locally, such actions as the tarring and feathering of would-be tax collectors and the burning of Inspector Neville’s house were understood as justified violence in pursuit of legitimate power, a rejection of the “tyranny” of the whiskey tax, and expected responses to precarity on the periphery of empire—they were, that is, of a piece with the Glorious Cause itself. But in Philadelphia the violence was interpreted as a rejection of the very idea of republican authority, which is to say the authority of laws made by the representatives of the people. This is the problem with destroying the King’s Two Bodies—everyone becomes a political philosopher, and different philosophies of right contend in the street, justifying or undercutting the rightness of this or that instance of violence. In reaction to the tax trouble, the new American rectors—Washington, Hamilton, and the rest of the cabinet, along with the Governors of Pennsylvania and Jersey and various military and economic elites—drew together in their minds a cornucopia of concerns that to them were connected as profane threats to the mystical second body of the people. Their letters articulate

20. Terry Bouton, “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-independence Pennsylvania,” Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (2000): 855–87. 21. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 22. Isaac Ariail Reed, “Between Structural Breakdown and Crisis Action: Interpretation in the Whiskey Rebellion and the Salem Witch Trials,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 27– 64. See also William H. Sewell Jr., “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (1996): 841–81. 23. See in particular letters contained in Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, vol. 4, ed. John B. Lynn and William H. Egle, MD (Published under direction of Matthew S. Quay, Secretary of the Commonwealth; Harrisburg, PA: B. F. Meyers, State Printer, 1876); available at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19107.

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(1) fear that the new democratic-republican debating societies popping up around the country were but the front for a violent destruction of the new republic; (2) recognition of Francophilia in the United States, widespread by 1794 and to them distasteful; (3) readings of intercepted mail from British agents suggesting an alliance between London and the rebels; and (4) concern about the charismatic authority of Thomas Jefferson as rector of the West and the South, ready, in their view, to tear apart the new American state in the name of total revolution imported from France. This was a countercircuit of signification, “the Philadelphia interpretation” of the Whiskey Rebellion out west. In this rendering, high global politics were seen as of a piece with the intentions of the Washington County Militia in western Pennsylvania (Mingo Creek Society, or, more colloquially, the Mingo Creek Boys)—both were opposed to the federated republic. As a result, violent trouble from below would be met by a proto-state apparatus both paranoid in style and eager to prove its mettle on the world stage. The links drawn by Washington and others between Jacobinism, Jefferson, and the Mingo Creek Boys were, if taken to be network ties, a fantasy. But the fragility of the republic was real; the paranoid style originated in a moment of chaos and charisma. The nonperformative dimensions of power, especially the relational organization of violence, suggested imminent failure. The militias of western Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and various regions of Jersey were well organized but locally oriented. Out west, they became explicitly antifederal, and this was why the rebellion thematized sovereignty. When the militia of Washington County (the westernmost county of Pennsylvania) declared it would hear all court cases before actual courts did, claims to collect debts in the area dropped off precipitously. When a wealthy creditor cannot go to court to collect his debt, but instead has to petition the antigovernment, antifinancier militia made up of debtors, the creditor, no matter how well connected and prone to believe in the project of the state-at-large, will tend to conclude that (1) seeking payment is not in his interest if he values his physical well-being, and (2) the sovereignty of the federal government in Philadelphia is something of a sham. Hamilton in particular recognized the problem. But what was the solution? Proposed military solutions created more agency problems: while the ability to raise men to fight locally was not in doubt in Jersey or really anywhere else on the Atlantic coast, the necessity of marching them three hun24. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, with a new foreword by Sean Wilentz (New York: Vintage, 2008); Carol Berkin, A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

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dred miles over the mountains to fight for a federal cause was a more complicated proposition, especially since these sorts of military maneuvers took any given militia out of local hands. Thus as the crisis arose, it remained unclear to many involved if anything or anyone could be made to move and shake western Pennsylvania. But rousing speeches were made, letters exchanged, and the accrual of agency pursued. One Judge Peters, a link in the chains of power that authorized the calling up of various militias, could not help himself and articulated in his letter the political philosophy of republicanism so as to name the rebels the new tyrants “There is an end of all government under a republican form,” he wrote, “if the minority undertake, by violence, to control the general will when constitutionally promulgated. If any measures are thought unequal & to press severely on any particular description of district of citizens, let them decently, yet firmly remonstrate, write and speak against them. . . . But let none of our citizens, by warring against the laws, endeavor to extinguish our most important rights, which they lose sight of while blinded and bewildered by local, and perhaps, mistaken interests or prejudices.” At the same time that Judge Peters was sending that letter, Herman Husband was persuading residents of Pittsburgh to speak against the likes of Peters as themselves the tyrannical minority—the “Eastern Snake,” the origins of all tyranny. Such considerations of republicanism amidst the logistical dilemma of controlling the western United States were by no means rare. Suddenly, among the literate elite, nearly everyone had a view on how it really worked to make the people sovereign. However, these views were not all the same: some emphasized the rule of law, others the rights of property, others the exchange between government and citizen. The stage was set, then, for an eventful performance—a making of meaning. George Washington assembled an army comprising militias from Jersey and Philadelphia, named it federal, met it in the field at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and delegated Henry Lee to head it. As this army was being raised, and then as it began to march west, Washington sent negotiators ahead of the troops to meet with the elite representatives of the tax-resistant “whiskey rebels.” These negotiators were in two groups, one representing the state of Pennsylvania and one the federal government. The back-and-forth that took place between these two groups and the “committee of conference” representing the rebels was an enactment of exchange between sovereign and citizen. By looking closely at this negotiation, we can see the fantasy of citizen-rector and the actuality of elite patron25. “Charge of Judge Peters of the U.S. Courts” [n.d., likely August 20, 1794], in Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, 4:174–80; 176–77. 26. Reed, “Between Structural Breakdown and Crisis Action.”

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age politics collide; we can see the idea of the people as author come into being via a rendering of exchange and delegation. Inventing the People’s Two Bodies in the Whiskey Rebellion The theater of negotiation and (mis)recognition took place between August 20 and September 2, 1794, and involved three collective actors: 1. The US Commissioners (hereafter USAC) served as agent/representative of the federal government (reporting, then, to George Washington). 2. The Pennsylvania Commissioners (hereafter PennC) represented the state government of Pennsylvania (reporting, then, to Thomas Mifflin). 3. The “committee of conference” (hereafter RebelC) represented the counties of Westmoreland, Washington, Fayette, and Allegheny (also known as the fourth survey of Pennsylvania), and reported back to the larger group of sixty men that represented those four counties (each township having elected a representative). 27. What follows can be considered a counterpoint to, but also a broadening and development of, Roger Gould’s work on the Whiskey Rebellion. In his two published pieces on the rebellion, Gould focused on patron-client ties, the likelihood of elites to join the rebellion, and group formation, with attention to the local/national distinction. However, in his thesis at Harvard University, he focused much more intensively on the agency problems presented by the militia, a concern that is much less present in the published work. In particular, he posited that “the other important offices in the western counties consisted primarily of positions in the militia. Since every ablebodied male between the ages of eighteen and fifty-three was required to serve in the militia, the official responsible for coordinating the regiments in his region had a direct control relationship with several hundred people  .  .  . the militia structure afforded substantial means of control to the officials in its ranks.” And so, he argues, it was in this context that “the excise law affected the pattern of control most clearly through its addition of officers to the regions where whiskey was produced,” which in turn “constituted a rather subtle menace to some of the local elite.” The significance of this argument for the thesis pursued here is that the organization of violence as an agency problem points toward the need to legitimize, via sovereign performance, the new state; as Gould notes in the opening pages of his thesis, interests alone cannot explain collective action. Roger Gould, “Patron-Client Ties, State Centralization, and the Whiskey Rebellion,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 2 (1996): 400–429; Roger Gould, “Political Networks and the Local/National Boundary in the Whiskey Rebellion,” in Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics, ed. Michael P. Hanagan, Leslie Page Moch, and Wayne Te Brake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 36–53; Roger Gould, “Organization and Control in the Whiskey Rebellion: A Study in Collective Action” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1984), 33, 36, 37, 19. 28. This reconstruction is based on the inspection of Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, vol. 4. 29. There was also a fourth party partially involved, representing Ohio County, Virginia, whose participation in the negotiations was ambiguous, and, in terms of volume of letters, muted.

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There were face-to-face meetings for which minutes were recorded, and for which some eyewitness narratives exist as well, as along with a wealth of private exchanges between the parties involved. What follows is an interpretation of the drama in its give-and-take. The Overarching Problem of D e l e g at i o n a s R e p r e s e n tat i o n Throughout the negotiations, the three actors struggle with the meaning and limits of delegation. USAC is not always clear about what they can promise on behalf of President Washington—what does it mean to “speak for” the President (and related to this, who or what does the President himself stand for)? USAC is actor, Washington is rector; USAC stands in for him, speaking for him on certain matters and not others. And on those matters they can only go so far, promise so much, without checking with the President (and his cabinet). In a related issue of representation, PennC attempts to articulate the complex relationship between the laws of Pennsylvania and the laws of the United States of America (two different bodies politic). Finally, RebelC has its own problems of representation—with what it can reasonably say yes to on behalf of, first, the larger committee of sixty men it represents, and second, the population of citizens that those sixty represent in turn. These representational problems came to expression through the language of “the people” as sovereign author—the new ultimate rector. Can RebelC really and truly ensure that those who elected it and sent it to negotiation will, if RebelC so promises, avoid further violence? If RebelC accepts a deal, what is to stop “the people” in western Pennsylvania from rejecting it? This dilemma of rebel leadership has been repeatedly recognized in the histories of the Whiskey Rebellion, though perhaps not always as the crisis in political mythology that it really was—the very parameters of democratic myth were being written. RebelC’s accession to authorship was itself fraught and ambiguous. The twelve who represented the sixty who represented the white male population of western Pennsylvania kept trying earnestly and honestly to speak out of both sides of their mouths. They would try to convince USAC and PennC that intensely violent repression was unnecessary, because “the people” were peaceful; at the same time, they tried to convince those whom they represented that violent resistance was not advisable! The rebel charac30. In contemporary political science models where representatives are agents of a constituency (which is principal), the “punishment” is not being reelected. Here the problem is more fundamental—the setting up of an agreement wherein such agency relationships can take place.

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ters in this drama, then, were always searching for their author; if freedom is an endless meeting, democracy involves ambiguous authorship and a lot of confused muddling through. The Opening Act The negotiations begin with the expression by USAC of a Hobbesian concern. They express the “extreme pain it had given to the Executive to have heard . . . of the deviations from the constitutional line . . . to those means of violence and outrage which would lead to having no laws at all,” and thus that it was, in fact, the constitutional duty of the Executive to use force to suppress the rebellion. However, USAC insists on “the great reluctance of the Executive to have recourse to force,” and thus explains their purpose as agent of the President: “They had been commissioned with certain powers . . . in order that, if possible, short of bloodshed, submission to the laws might be obtained and peace restored.” USAC follows this by noting that the militia for the use of force by the federal government had already been drafted—a threat, as it were, though one itself dependent on successful state logistics that might be in doubt. PennC first lists the series of “violations” that gave them, too, great pain. The most grievous, they insist, was the robbing of the mail by the rebels. This is interpreted by PennC in terms of republican philosophy, which makes the mail a public servant to the citizenry—after all, how could the people be an author if they could not exchange letters? Thus, according to PennC, the rebels were profane for “invading the cabinet of government by intercepting the public mail, and violating the right of the citizen which ought to have been considered as sacred as in his secretaire.” Next, PennC asserts that federal laws are part of the laws of Pennsylvania, but that the “outrages” in western Pennsylvania were breaches of municipal law too. Consequently, the Governor of Pennsylvania is aiding the President by also raising a militia (from eastern Pennsylvania) to help suppress the rebellion. Regrettable as this is, PennC insists, it is necessary unless peace is obtained. To that end, PennC states that “they [PennC] were authorized on an accommodation with commissioners of the United States [USAC], and an assurance of a disposition to

31. Francesca Poletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 32. “Proceedings of the First Conference,” Pittsburgh, August 20, 1794, in Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, 4:183. 33. “Proceedings of the First Conference,” 184.

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preserve peace, to stipulate and engage a free and full indemnity for what was past, so far as regarded the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” To these opening remarks RebelC responds by explaining the many grievances of the four counties, which, they claim, “have grown up at great length to that popular fury which has shown itself in the late transactions.” The Government and “the People” Next, an exchange between the magnanimous and understanding sovereign state and the rebels is proposed. The new US government, USAC and PennC explain, can give amnesty, but only if RebelC can ensure peaceful following of the tax law (and the law more generally). To this RebelC demurs, claiming only the power to report back to “the people”: “It was answered by the committee [RebelC] that it was their duty to hear and report, for to this purpose were they appointed, but no power lay with them to stipulate for the people.” Again we see the problem with representation. What does it mean to “speak for” the (rebellious part of) “the people” of western Pennsylvania? This move by RebelC frustrated USAC and PennC greatly. They demanded that RebelC “at least . . . recommend what opinion they themselves should form” on the subject of the proposals made by USAC and PennC. “This was thought reasonable,” and RebelC agreed. Note the tremendous ambiguity of decision-making that obtains here. All parties involved—the agents of the federal government, the agents of the Pennsylvania government, and the agents of those in the West who had, among other things, dressed up as Indians and burned barns to avoid oppressive taxes—all want to use “the people” as the signifier of sovereign right. But precisely because of its ubiquity and ambiguity, “the people” cannot resolve the differences between the actors in this drama, all of whom claim said “people” as their ultimate author. But something had to be done, some pragmatic way to go forward had to be found. T o wa r d a R e s o l u t i o n The resolution would come via public demonstration, in which a certain amount of background meaning could be left ambiguous and contested, but a kind of exchange of recognition performed. On August 21, PennC wrote out 34. “Proceedings of the First Conference,” 184. 35. “Proceedings of the First Conference,” 185. 36. “Proceedings of the First Conference,” 185.

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their proposals, including a requirement that all twelve individuals of RebelC immediately sign an oath to submit to the laws of the US government and the state of Pennsylvania, and furthermore that those twelve secure from the committee of sixty assurances of peace. If this was done, PennC insisted, the rebels would be offered amnesty—if peace and “good behavior” were to last until June 1, 1795. USAC also wrote out their proposals from the conference the day before and sent them. The proposals’ language, here designed for wide public consumption, is remarkable: “The president, who feels a paternal solicitude for their welfare, wishes to prevent the calamities that are impending over them—to state to them clearly, the inevitable consequences of further resistance; to recall them to their duty, and to prove to the whole world, that if military coercion must be employed, it is their choice and not his.” This communiqué manages to both make Washington King-like in his management of the body politic (“paternal solicitude”) and interpret the forthcoming state violence as truly and only authored by the persons said state violence would be directed against. In its circular logic, the second body of the people is never wrong. And Washington is faithfully representing (and perhaps acceding to?) that second body; thus any and all violence, even that committed at Washington’s command, is in fact authored by those who are not on the side of “the people.” After locating authorship of state violence in this way, USAC then assures said rebels of what they all have in common, saying that the federal government, as agent of the people’s sacred second body, will listen to those to whom it is responsible: “We are ready to enter with you into the detail necessary for the exercise of our powers; to learn what local accommodations are yet wanting; to render the execution of the laws convenient to the people; to concur with your measures for restoring harmony and order, and for burying the past in oblivion, and to unite our endeavors with yours, to secure the peace and happiness of our common country.” USAC then gives a deadline of September 1, 1794 (at which point, presumably, the past will be buried in oblivion), and suggests that RebelC should not “temporize and procrastinate.” RebelC does not do so—it responds the next day, restating its position that it cannot speak for its constituents, but willingly taking up the task of “composing the disturbance.” RebelC also 37. “The U.S. Commissioners to the Committee of Conference,” Pittsburgh, August 21, 1794, in Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, 4:188. 38. “The U.S. Commissioners to the Committee of Conference,” 189. 39. “The U.S. Commissioners to the Committee of Conference,” 189. 40. “The Committee of Conference to the United States Commissioners,” Pittsburgh, August 22, 1794, in Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, 4:190.

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states that it intends to continue to pursue every available constitutional means for obtaining the repeal of the law. In reply, USAC outlines an eightpoint proposal for what was to happen next. In this proposal, we see the exchange between sovereign and citizen appear as the performance of the people’s two bodies. The Government Speaks The first four points of the USAC proposal are direct requests, bordering on orders. 1. RebelC will get the committee of sixty to declare before September 1 that it will submit to the laws of the United States. 2. RebelC must “explicitly recommend to the people” a “perfect and entire acquiescence” to the excise law. 3. RebelC must also recommend that no more harm come to the persons or property of the officers of the federal government, and pledge to support the protection of said officers. 4. RebelC must take measures “to ascertain, by meetings in election districts or otherwise, the determination of the people to submit to the said laws, or resist them.” This knowledge must be obtained before September 14.

The next four points are promises made by the USAC as to what will happen if RebelC meets points 1 through 4. 5. The US government will not prosecute for treason. 6. If there is a “general and sincere” submission to the law until 10 July, 1795, offenses from before August 22, 1794, will be pardoned by the US government; 7. Future offenses against the excise tax will be tried locally, if the President, by his own judgment, assesses the local court system as unbiased in the pursuit of justice. 8. The US government will make adjustments to the administration of the law. 41. “Propositions Submitted by the U.S. Commissioners,” Pittsburgh, August 22, 1794, in Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, 4:191. 42. “Propositions Submitted by the U.S. Commissioners,” 192. 43. “Propositions Submitted by the U.S. Commissioners,” 192. 44. “Propositions Submitted by the U.S. Commissioners,” 192. 45. On the issue of the President’s judgment, the specific wording was, “But it is to be understood, that of this he must be the Judge, & that he has no authority to part with any power vested in the Executive of the United States.” “Propositions Submitted by the U.S. Commissioners,” 193.

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T h e C l o s i n g O f f o f F u rt h e r I n t e r p r e tat i o n RebelC wants to take this eight-point proposal from the representatives of the US government back to the committee of sixty. But both PennC and USAC immediately make clear that this will not do. As PennC explains in response to RebelC’s expressed desire to further consider the offer from USAC, the rebels need to sign now, to create an agreement and give the deliberations “weight.” (This “weight” refers, as far as I can tell, to both to the authority of the men that made up RebelC and to the unanimity that would be signaled if they all signed.) Thus, in its last letter of August 23, RebelC writes to both USAC and PennC to express its understanding of why signatures are desired by USAC and PennC, and to express a willingness to pursue peace on these terms. There would be no further disputes, simply a signing on to the laws. The closure of interpretation—achieved by signature, and a commitment to have all the citizens in the area commit a public act of signature—is a key aspect of performative power. The negotiation was an interpretive struggle and a drama—characters in search of an author. But the felicity, the ability to move and shake the world and indeed to exit the interaction with a resolution, is in part contained in the making of a felicitous interpretation that there can be no more interpretations. Herein signature becomes a mark of authorship, signifying in particular that intent and commitment accrue at that moment and are genuine and legitimate. Parsing the People’s Two Bodies in the Whiskey Rebellion The historiography of the Whiskey Rebellion reads as a refracted and insightful set of interpretations of the concerns of the “founding era,” on the one hand, and the fractures of our own troubled end of the arc of American modernity, on the other. After all, both the 1780s and 1790s and the 2000s and 2010s in the United States involved financial chicanery of variable intelligence, the food politics attendant to global markets, the folly of imperial ambition, and a crisis in the project of economic democracy; these meanings sit behind the burned barns and property disputes of the Whiskey Rebellion and its latter-day interpretation in the historiography of the era. Patronage, state46. “The Pennsylvania Commissioners to the Committee of Conference,” Pittsburgh, August 22, 1794, in Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, 200. 47. “The Committee of Conference to the Commissioners of Pennsylvania,” Pittsburgh, August 23, 1794, in Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, 204.

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making, and states’ rights were present as well, and the very possibility of property in land—much of it possessed by George Washington himself—was at stake when seven thousand men marched on Pittsburgh in defiance of the whiskey excise. But perhaps more than anything else, the Whiskey Rebellion thematized what Johann Neem adroitly identifies as “modernity’s wager.” I hazard that it did so in a way that remains to be clarified and grasped. The neoprogressive historian Terry Bouton finds in the rebellion’s conclusion a crushing defeat for the very possibility of American democracy and the betrayal of the promise of what he terms, in defiance of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, “the Pennsylvania Regulation of 1794.” Neem, a neo-Tocquevillian, emphasizes that the exit from the rebellion’s violence bequeathed at least the possibility of peaceful, voluntary associations in a pluralist democracy. But within and through these arguments, we can glimpse an implicit recognition that the rebellion evidenced a shift in the sinews of power. What was this shift? My hypothesis is that it was a shift in the representation of the authorship of right action and a recrafting of how chains of power were constructed and maintained. The shift entailed both creation and destruction. On the one hand, the King’s second body was destroyed, and the President, installed as supreme executive, was endowed with a second body, but of ambiguous and difficult status and meaning, subject to a new set of disputes about its figuration. Did Washington have a second body? Yes—and his separation from “the people” was, in many ways, how he sought to establish and maintain it; the eight-day procession for his installation as President would find itself at home in the pages of Ernst Kantorowicz’s book, and we know well the importance of elites’ love of Washington’s rectitude in their acceptance of a strong executive in the Constitution. But the investment of the second body in Washington was only partly successful—the Whiskey rebels made fun of him in their meetings (even though many of them had fought for him in the Revolutionary War), mocking his doddering old age and wooden teeth, and noting with bitter sarcasm his (supposed) affection for Indian “savages.” The plantation owner Thomas Jefferson found the ambitions of Washington and John Adams for the symbolization of the presidency abhorrent, unmodern, and absurd; he often greeted visitors to the White House in his 48. Johann N. Neem, “Taking Modernity’s Wager: Tocqueville, Social Capital, and the American Civil War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 4 (2011): 591–618. 49. Stanley Elkins and Eric MacKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 45. 50. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania, in the Year 1794 (Philadelphia: John McCulloch, 1795).

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sleeping clothes to prove that he was just a man. But in so doing, he was participating, not in the kind of disenchantment that we associate with the Enlightenment, but in an enchantment of the executive itself in a new way—as one disgruntled Federalist wrote, he “often sees company in an undress, sometimes with his slippers on—always accessible to, and very familiar with, the sovereign people.” Jefferson’s performances indicated that not only the first body of the executive—the physical body of the person who becomes President—but also the second body of the President, the sovereign body that makes the first body the “decider,” is a “representative,” a standing-in-for, the sacred “people.” The very capacity of this second body of the President to grow into existence, to take on the mythological stature necessary to subsume within it the body politic, was dependent on its ability to channel the people. But what, then, were the people? It is a vexed question, and we know many answers—that the figuration of the people came into being in the rituals of nation and the emergence of nationalism; that the people, qua political entity, require not just voting but party before their “voice” could be heard; that the people’s inner meaning is reducible to a racial project. I do not doubt these answers, but I wish also to advance the possibility that, if we think of the problem of the people as the problem of attaching various rectors and actors together, and excluding various others—that is, if we think of “the people’s two bodies” as something that emerged, in part, to solve a problem of politics, alliance, and hierarchy that the King’s Two Bodies could no longer solve—then we can see in the end of the Whiskey Rebellion a figuration of “the people and the people.” That figuration is a script for an exchange between two highly typified characters who are both separate (actor and rector) but also one (partaking in the second body of the people): the upright citizen and the agent of the dread sovereign. In the script, the two characters approach the cliff of violent destruction but avoid it, and transition to exchange and alliance instead—to “politics.” Crisis is escaped with minimal violence. Such performances in the founding era brought into being the sovereignty of the executive as the representative of “the people” who then sends his agent to negotiate with “the people.” It is a circular picture, to be sure: because he carried a second body, infused with the people, George Washington’s singular judgment grounded the turn to a judge, whose own judgment was that the judiciary in western Pennsylvania could no longer function—and thus that the use of the militia act to repress tax resistance with an army was necessary. But all-out war was 51. Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), 366.

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avoided, via the agents sent as negotiators—the actors for the rector who is himself but an actor for the people. By obtaining obedience in return for amnesty, the actors acting on behalf of the US and Pennsylvania governments helped perform into existence a state whose spectacle induced interpretations of it as generous but powerful, dreadful but fair. This gave state-society relations a certain meaning: the state was a house of rectors and their loyal actors who were willing to recognize the white men of Pittsburgh as actors in their own right, with their own projects, on their own land. The well-timed performance of the response to the Whiskey Rebellion gave life to the dynamic that Hannah Arendt tended to ascribe to the American Revolution and the Constitution: the use of power to create more, and a new form of, power. In particular, the fact that negotiations took place while news arrived of troops on the move meant that generosity and coercion were performed simultaneously; the arrival of the troops after the oath of obedience had been signed indicated a capacity for violence; the highly public “dreadful night” where a few rebel leaders were hauled off to be put on trial in Philadelphia (including Herman Husband), but the great majority of farmers left alone, amplified the meaningful contrast between the two hands of the state—the capacity to arrest with the willingness to grant amnesty. And so the federal government managed to make itself both rector over, and agent of, the people simultaneously. This script formed one version of “the people’s two bodies,” wherein the rebel-citizen is one representative of the corpus mysticum, and the agent of the executive the other. But a second figuration was also in process, in the summer of 1794. The Northwest Territory as a Performance Space The Indian wars of the 1790s form another series of performances in the making of American sovereignty, culminating in Anthony Wayne’s victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. These wars reveal, in concrete and excruciating detail, the extensive physical violence on nonwhite bodies conducted by the agents of the United States, and the extensive popularity of that violence with the electorate—including those rebels in western Pennsylvania who otherwise hated the state enough to violently attack its agents. The Northwest Territory, in other words, was a staging ground for American racial democracy; and on this staging ground violence against racialized others became violence against scapegoats, shoring up rector-actor relations and underwriting, in its performance of exclusion, the two bodies of the people as a way to give order to politics.

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The Great Lakes region had long been a space of war and imperial competition, so in a certain sense when Wayne took his Legion of the United States there in 1794—in his attempt to secure in actuality what was on paper a territory of the new United States of America—it was an action in step with the logic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The area was a prized possession for any empire because of its rich farmland, and had been sought after by the Iroquois, the French, and the British (e.g. the Iroquois tried to make the region theirs by asserting their suzerainty over the Algonquin tribe). The early 1790s was marked by a struggle between the British, the United States, and the alliance known as the Ohio Indians focused on the land north of the Ohio River. Control of the territory was of concern for the British, who imagined that an Indian buffer state would be a useful tool for containing the Americans. It was a central concern for the alliance of Ohio Indians who inhabited and lived on the land, and had built an extensive trading network in the area. (Some of these tribes, such as the Delaware, had been pushed west by two hundred years of European migration to eastern North America.) Finally, it was of intense interest to the nascent federal government of the United States, as it was the one possession that promised to shore up the state’s most pressing financial difficulties; a central occupation of those wealthy Americans who had engaged in extended land speculation in the area; and a constant source of fear and violence for American settlers who lived in or near the territory and who engaged in repeated, if small-scale, violent exchanges with their neighbors. At the moment the battle occurred in 1794, the following chains of power and their representation were thereby tested: •

•

•

Actors for the British Empire encouraged, armed, and made promises to the Ohio Indians in order to convince them to oppose the Americans; the British officers acted as rector to the Ohio Indian Chiefs as actors; the Chiefs (as actors tend to do) had their own projects. This was a contested agency relationship. American settlers ventured into the Northwest Territory, complained about the lack of protection from their own federal government, and railed against its whiskey tax; in so doing, they continued a practice from before the Revolutionary War (when settlers disobeyed the British Empire’s attempt to have them respect the terms of the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War), but they hailed their government in different terms— demanding an American Leviathan that they loved to hate. Anthony Wayne created an extensive chain of command via new recruitment strategies and a reorganization of the military arm of the federal gov-

52. Skaggs and Nelson, Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes. 53. Griffin, American Leviathan.

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ernment. His Legion of the United States promised to do what the armies of 1790 and 1791 had utterly failed to do: carry out projects emanating from Philadelphia. Federalist elites had delegated to Wayne his generalship in a moment of desperation; Wayne’s correspondence with Secretary of War Henry Knox reveals that Wayne spent most of 1792 and 1793 trying to overcome various agency problems—including sabotage and political intrigue to have him removed—within his own army. Finally, the military leaders of the Ohio Indians, including Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, rejected the overtures of the Iroquois to accept American settlement peacefully, made an alliance with the British, and prepared to continue defending their territory, as they had done in 1790 and 1791.

The Battle of Fallen Timbers as a Violent Performance of the Spectacular American State The performance itself was staged at a tornado-torn area called Fallen Timbers. Several strategic maneuvers by Wayne positioned his army for a key advance and an American victory that resulted in a full retreat of the Indian forces. In strict military terms, the battle was minor; but Wayne wrote proudly to Knox that “this horde of savages, with their allies, abandoned themselves to flight, and dispersed with terror and dismay, leaving our victorious army in full and quiet possession of the field of battle.” This letter was published widely in American newspapers. But the performance was not over. Wayne and his Generals razed and burned Indian fields, British storehouses, and everything in the area. Meanwhile the British locked the Indian troops out of Fort Miami in an act of betrayal that would echo through politics for the next ten years. Despairing at the prospects for the future, the Delaware leaders sent the following message to the British: Look at the graves on the Miami, look farther on, where the bones of the young folk lie, on who the beasts have fed. Thou art the cause of their death.

54. This was, itself, partially accomplished by exemplary punishment of deserters and those who ran from Indian attack when ordered to stand their ground: they were to be branded with the word coward on their foreheads. Alan D. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 61. 55. Richard C. Knopf, ed., Anthony Wayne: A Name in Arms (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960). 56. Wayne to Knox, in Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 312. 57. Mary Stockwell, Unlikely General: “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

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Thou has always preached to us and said: “Behold, the States are taking away your land. Be brave, act like men. Let not your land be taken from you. Fight for your land.” But now we have got at the truth. The States have struck thee to the ground and overcome thee. Therefore hast thou given them our land in order to have peace from them, but thou tellest us to fight for it, so that we may all be blotted out. See, this is the truth.

It was the truth, and the quotation reveals an Indian understanding of the tactics of erasure—emanating from Philadelphia and from Wayne. The British, for their part, expressed disappointment in the military performance of the Ohio Indians (their actors-turned-agents). Wayne, meanwhile, stopped short of where the British planned to make their own stand. Soon after, he and his troops returned to Fort Defiance, “boasting of the devastation they had visited upon the Indian country,” and gloating in letters that the Indians would have a tough winter ahead with all their crops burned. The gloating correctly anticipated the reception of the American army by the electorate; this response turned a minor military victory into a major moment of collective effervescence—which took as its totemic gods Anthony Wayne and his army. “Frantic with joy,” rich and poor alike received the General and his men in such a way that “every portion of the army, and every individual who had belonged to it, was cheered in the most enthusiastic manner by the citizens, and to have belonged to Wayne’s army was enough to elevate any individual (in the estimation of the field) almost to the pinnacle of fame.” Certainly Wayne himself became a charismatic warrior hero in Max Weber’s sense. Rufus Putnam, who would be appointed Surveyor-General of the United States in 1796, made clear in 1794 not only his joy at Wayne’s victory but also his view that had it happened earlier, the Whiskey Rebellion would not have occurred, because the people of western Pennsylvania would not have had such “a contemptable opinion of the strength of our Government.” 58. From the diary of David Zeisberger, published as Diary of David Zeisberger: A Moravian Missionary among the Indians of Ohio, trans. and ed. Eugene F. Bliss (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1885), 2:378–79. Cited in Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 325–26. 59. I am indebted to Heidi Nicholls for discussing the interpretation of this quotation with me. 60. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 332. One estimate suggested that three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand bushels of grain had been destroyed. Gaff compares the destruction of crops to the Civil War: “The total ruin inflicted upon residents of the Auglaize and Maumee River basins would not again be duplicated on American soil until William Tecumseh Sherman marched through the Confederacy in 1864–1865.” Gaff, 332–33. 61. Ezra Ferris, The Early Settlement of the Miami Country (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1897), 350–53. Cited in Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 363–64. 62. Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986), 48. Cayton also discusses the com-

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How did a small skirmish become such a turning point, an event that “cross[ed] thresholds—of time, of space, of political authority”? How did it procure a certain amount of stability in American interpretation, as a kind of starting point for the repeated reconstitution and iteration of the vast imperial machine of the nineteenth century? The Battle of Fallen Timbers became a part of the glue that held together the new American state, because it linked sovereign ambition to land and to race. It bound together into a new and violent coherence the chaotic realities of the era that preceded it. Before the performance that was the battle and its reception, the relationship between rectors and actors on the American side—the relationship between officers and privates in the army, and that between the federal army and the electorate it claimed to fight for—were uncertain, and full of resistance and resentment. Those on the British and Indian side were more certain and more confident, especially because of the victories of 1790 and 1791. After Fallen Timbers, the reverse was true. From the American side, the losses of 1790 and 1791 had deeply wounded the post-Constitution government’s reputation in the eyes of voters, and a sense of chaos and impermanence prevailed. But Wayne was excellent at playing the rector, in the sense that his ordered violence was disciplined, remorseless, and strategic, and his rhetoric efflorescent. The reaction, by American newspapers and their readers, to the news of the Battle of Fallen Timbers articulated the popularity of the image of the Indians as radically other and as subhuman. Wayne’s behavior suggested that the Americans had two quite distinct categories of enemies in wartime—foreign actors representing foreign rectors (e.g. the agents of the British Empire), and others, below the bar of (mis)recognition—rectorless inhabitants of terra nullius. Wayne’s inhumane approach to the battle revealed the deep popularity of this basic split, which would inform everyone from Henry Knox to Thomas Jefferson in the development of the early American state. It also underwrote the increasing political relevance of arguments about Indian land as “unimproved” and thus subject to capture by settlers whose definitions of self and work separated them, in their own view, from the “savages.” The othering of the Indians was a process with several notable features. The representation of the land on which various tribes lived as terra nullius

plexity of Putnam’s actor-rector relationship with the federal government, and Washington in particular, pp. 48–50. 63. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, What Is an Event? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 49. 64. Cayton, The Frontier Republic.

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was bound up with the interpretation of the Indians as “without politics”— living in and off the land. We have seen this representation before in this book—in the contrast between Nathaniel Bacon Jr., on the one hand, and William Berkeley, on the other. To be a successful Governor in seventeenthcentury English North America generally involved having a subtle knowledge of Indian politics and history—one was constantly parsing rector from actor, patron from client, the basis for one alliance from the basis for another. This was also a politics of memory—a Governor had to think about how to represent and recall the relations established or broken with various tribes after each war with the Dutch. A more subhuman coding removed this complication to some degree; in so doing, it accessed popular appeal among the US electorate, though it also involved a loss of knowledge and Machiavellian capacity. It was this rendering of the Indian other that Wayne tapped into, elaborated, and helped make into federal government policy and practice. Discursively, the racist coding of Indians was readily available long before Anthony Wayne was put in charge of the American military. But his particular performance was one that acted, from a position of prestige and the command of violence, as if these ideas were obviously and unalterably true and widely accepted (but in the intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World broadly considered, they certainly were not—not least by the powerful Iroquois empire). Wayne accomplished this not through the normalization of categories, not through texts qua texts, but via spectacular display and its re-presentation in various media. For what Wayne and his comrades in arms conducted—in their violent attacks and then at the Treaty of Greenville—was a performing-into-existence, not of a pernicious idea of race (that already existed, in the space of contested discursive power), and not of technical military superiority (the military capacity of the United States was quite precarious), but rather of a representation of how sovereignty should be organized, honor distributed, and agency construed. 65. Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018); Colin G. Galloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Colin G. Galloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 66. Andrew R. L. Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’ upon ‘the Theatre of Honour’: Power and Civility in the Treaty of Greenville,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi 1750–1830, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 235–69.

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The Treaty of Greenville and the Destruction of the King’s Household as Metaphor for the State Having had their crops destroyed by Wayne’s men and having been betrayed by the British, the Ohio Indians entered the treaty negotiations of 1795 from a position of weakness. In particular, Little Turtle, the general whose war methods had helped defeat the Americans in 1790 and 1791, had been demoted before the Battle of Fallen Timbers, in deference to Blue Jacket. Wayne, entering the negotiations as conqueror, was obsessed with how his role as host of these negotiations would be viewed by the American electorate and Federalist elites, who had, in their moment of crisis, relied on his military prowess. This was Wayne’s chance to enter the world of “civilized” government—to overcome his bad reputation (he had been thrown out of Congress when it was revealed that he had fixed his election to the House of Representatives in Georgia). Robin Wagner-Pacifici has examined surrender and treaty-making as the kind of moment wherein the multiple possibilities for signification are narrowed via high drama, and thus political power is codified (but never quite secured). In the terms being developed in the present text, we can see surrenders as a process heavy with performative power, whereby treaties as documents, produced at a certain time and place and with certain material accoutrements as their “props,” help the persons engaged in their signing perform into existences certain power relations as (variably) binding on future action. That is, treaty negotiations produce the configuration of misrecognition that attends power. They are an interactive drama of respect and disrespect in which role and representation are acted out, rendering emergent understandings of who is rector, who is actor, and who is other, and what those positions mean. What the Treaty of Greenville in particular reveals is, in highly concrete form, something that in fact characterizes transitions to modernity in the Atlantic World more generally. It is an instance of something usually referred to indirectly in social theory, wherein the rendering of the state as the household of the King (occupied by his two bodies) was replaced with something else. For most of the eighteenth century, treaties that made peace after war were treaties between rectors (the winners) and actors (the losers) who sub67. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 68. Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992, trans. David Fernbach (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014).

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mitted to them. The landscape of meaning that informed these treaties was the familial state understood as the King’s household. Those who negotiated at the edge of empire, close to the field of battle, carried with them the sign of the King or his equivalent (the Emperor, the Chief of Chiefs, the Queen, etc.). Out of these signs of the various sovereigns were forged unequal exchange relationships. Little Turtle and Blue Jacket were well versed in this mode for ending conflicts, as were generations of Indian Chiefs and British Generals; in particular, the Iroquois Covenant Chain and its imitations had been a central organizing principle of much of the politics that occupied those who sought to control the Great Lakes region. It was the Iroquois, after all, whose chain of power had kept the balance of power in the region stable before the Seven Years’ War. For these men in this era, then, treaty negotiation was a question of the skillful application of a long-honed set of habits, modified as they were passed down through generations. As habitually conducted, Europeans and Indians alike were happy to be called father when on the winning side, and references to distant sovereigns as Great Fathers were common. Men of war who met to make peace considered themselves patriarchs in this double sense—men of command over their families (and servants and/or slaves), but also men positioned in a long chain of sovereignty. They imagined these long chains of authority as descending from various gods, through various Kings, Emperors, and Chiefs, and through various political structures, all the way to the persons negotiating on one frontier or another. Indeed the Ohio Indians understood “a father as an essentially benevolent figure, whose influence flowed from sympathy rather than coercion.” Thus the history of war during the eighteenth century: people became “fathers” when it was time to end war and make peace; winners would be obeyed only insofar as they acted the part and, in particular, supplied protection in return for tribute; winners failing to do so would cause a given defeated group of natives or settlers to turn from the French to the British, or from the British to the Iroquois, for protection. But the Americans, and Wayne in particular, were playing a different game in 1795. At Greenville, after a month of ritualized gift giving, the formal negotia69. Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984); Daniel K. Richter and James H. Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010). 70. Fred Anderson and Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). 71. Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’ upon ‘the Theatre of Honour,’” 253.

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tions began on July 15, 1795. Wayne pressed for the Indians to officially cede to the Americans all the land north of the Ohio River. Citing the Treaty of Fort Harmar—long hated and disputed by the allied tribes of Ohio—and reading out loud the Jay Treaty, which explicitly referred to the British abandonment of their forts in the region, Wayne took an extraordinarily firm and oppressive line while maintaining absolute calm and civility, and offering excessive gifts. In response, the Indians began to argue extensively among themselves. Most of their Chiefs understood what was happening to be an iteration of treaty rituals from the eighteenth century. On this account, Wayne, and by proxy George Washington, were rectors-as-fathers, bringing inferior actors into the household of the state. But Little Turtle, acutely aware of the overwhelming wave of American settlement taking place regardless of any promises made by the new US government, warned his compatriots repeatedly against the treaty, insisting that the Americans were not fathers in the double sense of the term bequeathed by the figuration of the King’s Two Bodies, which had dominated eighteenth-century treaty negotiations. Little Turtle was coming to the tragic realization that there was no longer any middle ground in the signification of the world being pursued by Wayne as agent of the US government. He saw that Wayne “understood his new title of father in the Revolutionary language of popular sovereignty.” The mass of Americans spilling over the border “increasingly insisted that white men were all brothers, or, at best, friends.” Thus Wayne, when called father by the Indians he had defeated, “failed to understand the invocation of the word father as a sign that he had participated in the mutual creation of the kind of reciprocal social obligations with which the Indians were familiar.” Little Turtle was ultimately isolated by his Indian allies, and after a long wait also signed the treaty. But he was right. The Americans were not at Greenville for the interplay of rector and actor. They were there to dominate a scapegoat. During the negotiations, a question was repeatedly posed to Wayne: What did the Great Father George Washington think? At a certain point, Little Turtle manifested written promises from Washington that his people would have hunting and fishing rights north of the Ohio. It was a recognizable move—for this was the sign of the ultimate rector, was it not? A little piece of Washington’s second body. But Wayne did not care about letters from Washington, whom he regarded as his superior in office but certainly not in divinity. Why? The sociohistorical significance of General Anthony Wayne is that he represented a new figure on the scene: the edge warrior as himself sovereign, 72. Cayton, 267. 73. Cayton, 267.

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which is to say the agent at the end of a long chain of power and its representation who acts as if he carries the “central zone” within himself. Wayne was impressive, violent, pragmatic, populist, and racist; an avatar of the new band of brothers. He effectively wrote the Treaty of Greenville himself—and he did so as the figuration of the people’s second body. As such, we can see the treaty as in a small way a partial cause, and in a larger way a symptom, of the great transformation of power that occurred, in myriad combinations and manifestations, in the Atlantic World at the end of the eighteenth century. More specifically, in the Great Lakes region “widespread economic and environmental change,” the leading agents of which were American settlers, meant that the region was transformed more in the years 1795–1805 than it had been for more than a century. The Ohio Indians were destroyed as “independent political agents.” The commercial autonomy of the Indians had depended on a politics of alliance and counteralliance, and it was precisely this possibility that was extinguished in the new logic of power performed into existence. This was, in part, because violence against Indian others was, in the emergent American imagination, violence against a rectorless people with whom “treaties” were made without sacred covenant. The making of Indians into an unsalvageable savage enemy, profaned and excluded, was the link in American political culture that came to hold together the disparate interests of “western settlers and national leaders”—in our terms, the settler-actors and state rectors of the new United States of America: the “Ohio Indians . . . offer[ed] the United States government and western squatters a common enemy and common focus of concern.” This was a matter of political economy, to be sure, as the army’s very presence in the region created a market for the squatters’ goods (and the army could, famously, pay in cash). But underneath this was the fantastic rendering of the American experience that was taking place—of emerging from a chaotic frontier into supposed self-sufficiency that in fact was underwritten by the “people’s” army. Thus the Ohio Valley saw a proliferation of Christian denominations, all focused on rendering the sequence of “danger, grace, 74. Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macro-sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 75. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 476. 76. White, 483. White takes the phrasing from Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 77. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 244. 78. Hinderaker, 244.

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deliverance.” The first American naturalization clause further solidified the racialization of the citizen. In the Indian policy of the US government—and in the figures of sovereign edge warriors such as Wayne—we can see that the “stinking body” that in Herman Husband’s sermons was “filthy lucre” has become something else: the grotesque, savage body of the nonwhite other who must be eliminated, made dependent, kept in chains, or otherwise subordinated. To be sure, the rendering of the body and its relation to whiteness was complex and allowed for tremendous variation; the differences in its application to “red” and “black” were particularly stark. But the semiosis is nonetheless apparent—a grotesque third body has been excluded from the world of political authorship, and at the same time, through the same state-in-formation, “ordinary farmers and mechanics . . . experienced for the first time the power that accrued to humble people through broadly based voting rights, exercised in a context that was neither deferential nor coercive.” Anthony Wayne as Agent of the Public In the correspondence between Wayne and Secretary of War Henry Knox, we witness the intertwining of the version of the people’s two bodies on display in the Whiskey Rebellion with that on display in the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville; together they constitute a new way to bind together rector and actor. Shortly before the Battle of Fallen Timbers, Wayne wrote to Knox concerning his Legion of the United States. Wayne was strident: there had to be a “more effectual & certain” way to supply his army than the one he was forced to rely on—“private Contract.” To make his argument, Wayne articulated the public/private split as a fundamental way to organize action: “Avaricious individuals, will always consult their own private

79. Hinderaker, 259. 80. The statute of March 26, 1790, reads in part: Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof, on application to any common law court of record, in any one of the states wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least, and making proof to the satisfaction of such court, that he is a person of good character. Statutes at Large, 1st Congress, 2nd Session (1790), 103. 81. Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 255.

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interest—in preference to that of the public—they will not part with so great a sum of money at any one time as will be necessary to purchase a large quantity of provision in Advance . . . but content themselves if they only supply the troops from hand to mouth, whilst the principal part of the money advanced by the treasury, may possibly be otherwise employed.” Wayne complained that such private contractors did not run the risk of loss from defeat, with the result that “the public service always suffer[s] & the troops be constantly exposed to famine.” For Wayne, he and his men were the people, and the bodies of the people were starving. In his reply to Wayne, Knox communicated the “anxious desire” of President Washington to win the Northwest Territory from the Indians, and he explained that given the importance of this matter, Wayne was to do everything that he could to increase the size of his force, if he thought it necessary. Knox then revealed the logic at work, which gave substance and meaning to this delegation of discretion to a General in the field: “You are therefore to understand in the present as has been expressed in former cases, that the public interests North West of the Ohio in a military sense being entrusted to your discretion that you are to proportion your force so as to effect the end intended with as little risque as circumstances will admit. . . . You are the Agent upon the spot to correct any errors and for the accuracy of your judgments your reputation is pledged to the public.” Knox, acting on behalf of the President, faced the problem of controlling far-flung actors at the end of long chains of power along with their representation. He was, in a way, beset with the same agency problems as had beset Governor William Berkeley of the colony of Virginia more than one hundred years before. Both men sought to pursue the projects of their (respective) ultimate rectors. In addition, some balance between directive and interpretation had to be achieved with their agents, all so that land could be grasped and managed, men could be mobilized and taxed, and the growth of the empire pursued. But the representations of the sacred that they reached for in their moments of anxiety and distress were remarkably different. Wayne is rendered by Knox as the agent of the public, while Berkeley asserted himself as the agent of the King. These are different renderings of different bodies politic, with different mythologies of second and third bodies as frames for managing alliance, delegation, and thus the accrual of agency—they consti82. Richard Knopf, ed., “Wayne’s Western Campaign: The Wayne-Knox Correspondence 1793–1794, II,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 78, no. 4 (1954): 424–455; quotations are from p. 427. 83. Knopf, 438; emphasis added.

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tute differences in the chains of power and their representation, and they had consequences for authority, economy, and violence. Wayne is the servant of George Washington, but only insofar as Washington is the chief servant of the public, and Knox can construe Wayne as actor and the public as rector. In this way, Wayne and Washington begin to appear closer in status. Knox also implies that “the public” will be the judge of Wayne’s reputation. The second body of the people, which had judged the agents of Washington as scary but fair in their dealings with the whiskey rebels, will also judge Wayne, assessing how much it finds him a suitable Indian killer. In this new representation of power, a large mass of actors—the American electorate—designate to some among its members the right to play rector for a while. But outside this rector-actor game were others—both foreign rectors and, in the new schema, those interpreted as lacking the full faculty of reason, and thus lacking in humanity. The American audience interpreted the Treaty of Greenville as Indian acquiescence to expansion; Indian recognition of the moral superiority of Americans and the justifiability of the Legion’s violence; and Indian consent to give up right to the land. A grievous misinterpretation, to be sure—but one eventually made into an actuality, not least of which because it was a highly felicitous vision for any American who wanted to win an election, enlarge the army, or move west. My proposal is to interpret the model of and for the world evident in Knox’s letter, and prevalent across the letters that made up communications between rectors and actors in the American republic in the hinge year of 1794, as a grafting together of these “scenes” of the people’s two bodies—one in which exchange between sovereign and citizen affirmed the rendering of the state as the agent of the people, and another in which winning the battle against the other meant that the edge warrior carried more authority than the President who sent him. The People’s Two Bodies and Their Others Throughout the crises of the early American republic, then, a set of patterns for performing the people’s two bodies—and excluding a “filthy” third—came into view. These were patterns in which the relationship between citizen-actor and state-rector was to be resolved in the heated world of vicious newspaper debate and passive resistance, but not through violence or the disruption of 84. In another letter from before the battle, Knox warned Wayne of the “treachery” that awaited him if he met the Indians “in council,” for it was, he assured, the “maxims of the Indians to obtain by fraud what they cannot by force.” Knopf, 317.

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property as written into law, while the repression of others verged on being total, at least within the possibility of the means of violence of the later eighteenth century. In this way, a temporary, fragile, but nonetheless comprehensible resolution of the inherent instability of “the people” as the location of sovereignty was arrived at. Its contradictions would emerge in the great American conflagration of the nineteenth century. At its heart, this format of modern American power—with its distribution of violence and nonviolence to differently interpreted bodies, and its labyrinthine authorization system to account legally for when and how violence was in the right; with its political understanding of delegation, obligation, and freedom intertwined with a fantasy of frontier capitalism; with its rough destruction of European norms of status and politesse; with its simultaneous brutality and openness (what Arjun Appadurai once called the “harsher, sexier, more addictive New World of Humphrey Bogart reruns”)—was one solution to the myriad agency problems that attended a revolutionary situation. A conception of the bodies of persons as connected to each other, not through the second body of the King but through a different set of bodily metaphors, was forged. It becomes possible, then, to posit the transition to modernity in British North America as a transformation of political culture in which the King’s Two Bodies as a frame for the construction of power relations in general, and a frame for the pragmatic action of statecraft in particular, was violently destroyed. The delegation problems left open by this destruction were then creatively reoccupied by a series of renderings of “the people.” Simultaneously, the King’s Two Bodies did not disappear but recurred in hidden ways as a trope of rule throughout culture and society. Stripped of its status as grounding legal fiction, it reappeared in partial configurations, in new renderings of ultimate rectorship that drew meaning and energy from the old myths, even while proclaiming a new logic of power and being. One pathway of recurrence, as Michael Rogin makes clear, was the cult of Presidents. Another way, as Robert Bellah indicated, was through the endowment of the language of the people with religious significance and structures of feeling. (One suspects, in fact, that Rogin and Bellah were to some degree studying the same phenomenon from different angles and with different critical aims.) 85. Johann N. Neem, “Taking Modernity’s Wager: Tocqueville, Social Capital, and the American Civil War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 4 (2011): 591–618. 86. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 2. 87. Michael Rogin, “Ronald Reagan,” the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 88. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.2 (Winter 1967): 1–21.

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That the meaning of the American Revolution was bound up with the destruction of sacred sovereignty centered on the bodies of the King is available from the republic’s founding documents; from its pamphlets and newspaper articles; from its creation of a strong executive after much hand-wringing; from its Jeffersonian reversal in the election of 1800. That destruction was surely included in the making and spreading of the fiction of American exceptionalism, which often took the metaphor of the body quite seriously: “But so opposite are the habits of the Americans, that an attempt to erect a monarch or an aristocracy over the United States would expose the authors to the loss of their heads.” That a subset of revolutionaries was, in the early 1770s, inclined to favor the King’s will over the corruption of Parliament as a route to representation only furthers the significance of the iconoclasm of revolution, for what was once a back-and-forth concerning the unsustainability of a certain format of rule across the ocean—the Kingin-Parliament—became amidst the chaos of war a search for a new way to glue rectors to actors. We know that the turn to classical models of republican virtue and the spread of biblical republicanism were forming causes in the construction of the republic; we can debate productively the relative importance of this or that writer, the thematics of republicanism and liberalism. We know also that these configurations of political culture gave meaningful content to the confusing sign of “the public” or “the people.” But what I wish to emphasize here is the degree to which the transformation in political culture was essential to the construction of new chains of power, given the evaporation of the frame—the King’s Two Bodies—that bound patron to client so effectively for so many years in British North America. This provides a new vantage point from which to understand the mythology according to which the Glorious Cause created a more virtuous world, a supposed actual enhancement of the morality of all involved. Consider a classic rendering of this myth that captured the imagination of the men who fought the American Revolution. 89. Noah Webster, writing as Giles Hickory III, “Liberty Is Never Secure by Paper Declarations,” in The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters during the Struggle over Ratification, Part Two: January to August 1788, ed. Bernard Baylin (New York: Library of America, 1993), 304–15; quotation is from p. 310. 90. Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 91. Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a discussion of “forming causes,” see Isaac Ariail Reed, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies each man’s desire to what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by fear or force, by patronage or honor. In republics, however, each man must somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his personal desires, his luxuries, for the sake of the public good . . . republics could never resort to such force. In their purest form they had no adhesives, no bonds holding themselves together, except their citizens’ voluntary patriotism and willingness to obey public authority. Without virtue and self-sacrifice republics would fall apart.

Gordon Wood means this as a description of a radical shift in political imagination; his critics see it as pure fantasy, a hermeneutic indulgence. But I propose that it is a description of a problem situation: after the murder of the King’s second body, how does one do politics? This is the problem that was thematized when the federal government crushed the Whiskey Rebellion with the threat of tremendous force, and when Anthony Wayne salvaged the republic’s finances and excited its electorate by burning cornfields so as to starve “savages.” In other words, it may indeed be absurd to expect that the entire electorate of a new republic would become more virtuous overnight. But this quotation from Wood, and the many more like it that thickly describe the political culture of the early American republic, should be read as imaginative leaps prompted by the anxieties attending the problems of trust and rule. How to glue together the chains of power that would authorize action and justify violence? This question gnawed away at both the revolutionary movement intellectuals whose pamphlets constituted late eighteenthcentury ideology, and the sheriffs, teachers, and soldiers whose lives make up a part of the picture drawn by social and cultural history. What, these men were prone to wonder, glued the pieces of the government together, if not the mystery of state that enables the King to take into his body the entire body politic, and in whose name sacred honor could be distributed? Protestantism certainly offered one way to reimagine the management of state and the reason to do as one was delegated to do. Racial hierarchy of92. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 105. 93. Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 94. Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters during the Struggle over Ratification; Part I: September 1787–February 1788 (New York: Library of America, 1993); Johann N. Neem, Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2017); Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

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fered another frame, which could accommodate the pursuit of profit and the pursuit of “honor” via the phantasmagoria of whiteness, and could be mixed, in ways both obvious and hidden, with other frames. So, too, did the idea of a new military elite, to be found in the patriotic organization the Society of the Cincinnati on the basis of excellence in war. But surely the most vexed of these proposals for gluing together rectors and actors in the new world was the Jeffersonian one, embodied in the growth of the state after 1801 as a “Government Out of Sight,” headed by the man who had run against such ambitions for the federal government. Jeffersonian politics, we may hazard, were glued together by a fantasy about smallholders as simultaneously radically free and yet somehow similar to each other, and as able to govern themselves as well as to lead and govern others. Thomas Jefferson sought to replace the King’s Two Bodies with a different way to form rector-actor-other relations, grounded in “the people” as rector. His position is well known; he embraced “the good of preserving inviolate the fundamental principle that the people are not to be taxed but by representatives chosen immediately by themselves.” This represented a transformation of power relations; the popularity of this view helped create a world of too many rectors for any mechanism to accommodate. There was, however, a symbolic economy to the Jeffersonian myth: if every actor in the game of power was to be a small rector, access to actorship would have to be policed closely. In the long arc of American modernity, it has been. In the letter from which this quotation is drawn, Jefferson worries about executive power; one can feel the weight of the King between the lines. He worries at length about the possibility of a perpetual President unrestrained by “rotation in office.” Jefferson feared that the “first magistrate will always be re-elected,” and thus that foreign powers “will interfere” in American affairs “with money & arms,” such that “the election of a President of America some years hence will be much more interesting to certain nations of Europe than ever the election of a king of Poland was.” Jefferson feared the recurrence of the King’s Two Bodies; one can infer that he understood its appeal, its utility, its time-tested analogy of the body politic to the body and household of one person. Jefferson proposed a world in which every citizen was a rector, and this 95. Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 96. “The Will of the Majority Should Always Prevail,” Thomas Jefferson replies to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in Bailyn, The Debate on the Constitution, 209–13; quotation is from p. 210. 97. “The Will of the Majority Should Always Prevail,” 211.

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constituted the very basis of patronage, leverage, alliance, and, eventually, “faction.” Furthermore, it was the Jeffersonian picture of thousands upon thousands of rectors, demanding protection from a state while they demanded less taxes, that organized cognitively and morally the push west. For “if the Revolution transferred imperial sovereignty from the Crown to ‘the people,’ then it also entailed the transfer of territorial sovereignty and thus title to western land to ‘the people.’” This, then, provided the frame for the incorporation of territories as states, for it provided a “model of colonization by which colonial entities would be integrated into empire without subordination to the metropolitan center.” Amidst her own utopian interpretation of the promise of the American Revolution, Hannah Arendt had to admit that the subordination of nonwhite others into the abyss of nonpersonhood is what granted the very possibility of the politics brought into being in the American founding: “The absence of the social question from the American scene was, after all, quite deceptive . . . abject and degrading misery was present everywhere in the form of slavery and Negro labor . . . from this we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty; the slave, not the poor man, was wholly overlooked.” But what she missed about the experiment was its gnostic tendencies; the yearnings, shared across elite and electorate, for a luminous replacement, in the here and now, for the Two Bodies of the King. 98. Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 36–37. 99. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 60.

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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 Ernst Kantorowicz argued that Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard II—the “tragedy of the King’s Two Bodies”—was understood in explicitly political terms throughout the seventeenth century in England. The evening before an unsuccessful rebellion against the Queen in 1601 featured a “special performance” of the play; the royal judges for the trial of these rebels discussed that performance. Charles II forbade its performance the 1680s. For, Kantorowicz notes, the play is about a man who becomes “deputy elected by the Lord,” and then in his fall is violently separated from the second body that he had gained. Over the course of the play, as the “bad news trickles in” for Richard, the “Universal called ‘Kingship’ begins to disintegrate; its transcendental ‘Reality,’ its objective truth and god-like existence, so brilliant shortly before, pales into a note, a nomen.” It is perhaps not a surprise that the King’s Two Bodies provides the language for Shakespeare to dramatize the fall of the sovereign. But it is worth noting that Shakespeare was well aware that this was a matter of delegation: “And shall the figure of God’s majesty / His captain, steward, deputy-elect / Anointed, crowned, planted many years / Be judged by subject and inferior breath.” 1. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 29. 2. William Shakespeare, Richard II, act 4, scene 1. The Bishop of Carlisle continues: “Be judged by subject and inferior breath / And he himself not present? O, forfend it, God, / That in a Christian Climate souls refined / Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed!” Quoted in Kantorowicz, 34. Kantorowicz’s reading of Richard II became the subject of some controversy within new historicism. David Norbrook argued that the play is not as much about Richard as Kantorowicz makes it out to be, and emphasizes instead the garden scene (act 3, scene 4) as suggesting commoners’ participation in political discourse. But Norbrook’s objections rest

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Kantorowicz also makes clear that it was not simply the genius of the poet at work. In Elizabethan England, “the legal jargon of the ‘two Bodies’ scarcely belonged to the arcane of the legal guild alone.” It was a commonplace found in dictionaries, and was the figuration whereby the population at large understood the union of England and Scotland. It was ubiquitous because it was a figuration of power, a theory of representation, and a way to understand the sacred, all at once. Religious writers and orators explained that political rule should be based on an analogy to the corpus mysticum. The Puritans discussed Christ “as a ‘common person’ representative of us all,” and disputes erupted concerning whether Saint Peter was a “mere delegate” of the church, subject to its rule, or rather was the personation of the church, and therefore its clear “head”—as a magistrate ruled a city. And so Kantorowicz emerges as a theorist of the contestation over authorship as the rendering of the power of the state. The continuity of the King’s second body, passed down hereditarily from monarch to monarch, was conceptualized via dignitas non moritur. The “Dignity” of the King “referred chiefly to the singularity of the royal office, to the sovereignty vested in the king by the people, and resting individually in the king alone. . . . Since the king’s Dignity, together with his prerogative rights, had to be maintained and

on a misreading of Kantorowicz. Commensurate with a tendency common in the 1990s, Norbrook insists that Kantorowicz’s reading of Shakespeare is “strongly marked by the conservative German tradition,” and places The King’s Two Bodies in line with, rather than as a reaction to, Kantorowicz’s heroic, popular history of Frederick II, published in 1927 when Kantorowicz was a member of the poet and Shakespeare translator Stefan George’s circle. But the ironies and playful misdirections throughout The King’s Two Bodies, and especially the long final chapter on Dante, which Kantorowicz refused to remove from the text when his publisher suggested doing so, undermine Norbrook’s dismissal of the politics of The King’s Two Bodies as of a piece with Frederick the Second. Instead, we should see the text not as itself nostalgic for the (supposed) unity of the medieval order, but rather as laying out a theory and interpretation of the action problems that would produce, among varied reactions, the kind of conservative nostalgia and romanticism that Kantorowicz himself participated in as a young man. Viewed in this way, the text as a whole becomes quite commensurate with Norbrook’s own historicization of Richard II. David Norbrook, “‘A Liberal Tongue’: Language and Rebellion in Richard II,” in Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions; Essays in Honour of W. R. Elton, ed. William R. Elton, John M. Mucciolo, Stephen Doloff, and Edward A. Rauchut (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 37–51; Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 344–57. 3. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 24. 4. Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 192–94.

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respected for the sake of the whole realm, the Dignity too was of a public, and not merely private, nature.” (We shall see that in France too, before the emergence of “public opinion” in the lead-up to the revolution, that the King was the only public person.) In tracing the origins of this idea in the papacy, Kantorowicz found, at the heart of this mystery of state, the problem of delegation. For the idea that “the Dignity never perishes, although individuals die every day” was articulated when the Pope had made the Abbots of Leicester and Winchester delegate judges; when the Abbot of Winchester died, “Leister waited for the election of a new abbot and then resumed his work together with the successor,” an action judged in the right since the Pope (not the pope) had delegated the work to the Abbot of Winchester qua position. Importantly, the same principle applied to the rector as to his agents. The Pope/pope “could make the delegation likewise in two ways: he could let it originate either from his person, in which case the delegation would terminate on the pope’s death; or from the Dignity of the Holy See, in which case the delegation of power would be binding to the succeeding pope as well.” The common recurrence of this format for fusing power and authority, rendering politics, and constructing a legitimate hierarchy can, perhaps—for a certain history of the Europeanoid world, anyway—be traced to the ease with which those who use the frame can channel religion into politics and vice versa. For the second body of the ruler provides an answer to vexing human problems of authorship, problems that obtain in multiple zones of activity. When such an answer obtains widely, hierarchies may not need to be ideologically defended so much as felt and sensed. The King’s Two Bodies, 5. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 384. 6. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 7. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 385. 8. Kantorowicz, 385. 9. See discussion of the origins of “office” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially 138–44. 10. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 386. 11. Ahmed Al-Rahim makes a similar point in arguing that “ideology” is a modern way to render both power and the relationship between public and private. See also Michael Walzer’s discussion of the great chain of being as a felt or intuited order, before its disruption by Puritan

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then, can explain why certain parts of an aristocratic house are quasi-public spaces (though not popular spaces), while other parts of the house are tucked away (they are spaces for the natural body to “be itself ” in its untidiness). It can provide a raison d’état when there is not one by combining references to the mood of the actual sovereign’s body natural to a policy choice suddenly enshrined in sacred legality. It can provide a map for attaining political influence via sexual seduction, for the first body of the desirous monarch can provide access to the second body, and thereby the state. And it can provide reason to write poetry and to stage a comedy or a tragedy for public consumption or private advantage; for to mock the dignitas on stage is, in some way, to mock it on the stage of real life. In other words, the King’s Two Bodies as a frame for action and reaction provides a language for inferring motivation, judging right from wrong, and authorizing projects. Viewed from this perspective, in fact, Kantorowicz’s ambivalent announcement, in the preface to the King’s Two Bodies, that he aims to make a contribution to the “greater problem” of “The Myth of the State” as posed by Ernst Cassirer starts to make sense. It is an odd sentence, given the text’s own stubborn refusal to ever move forward in time beyond the seventeenth century. And yet, sub rosa, all the “modern” themes of state power appear in The King’s Two Bodies: the governing of how human beings perceive and understand time, nationalism and the body of “the people,” patriarchy and the politics of marriage, annual taxation, war, and of course the invention of the corporation. For each of these markers of Western modernity, Kantorowicz has something to say about their medieval origins. divines. Ahmed Al-Rahim, “Whither Political Islam and the ‘Arab Spring’?,” Hedgehog Review 13, no. 3 (2011): 8–22; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 12. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, xxxv. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946). 13. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 275–84. 14. Kantorowicz, 302–13. 15. Kantorowicz, 217–23. 16. Carly R. Knight, “Creatures of the State: Metaphor and Personhood in Legitimating the American Corporation” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2018); David Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 1 (2013): 139–58. 17. See further discussions in Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Jennifer Rust, Graham Hammill, and Julia Reinhard Lupton, eds., Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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The Crisis of the King’s Two Bodies and the Emergence of the Hobbesian Vision of the State Kantorowicz’s efforts at in-depth empirical analysis stop, with rather astounding precision, at the point that the King’s Two Bodies became, rather than the moral background to politics and social life, the essence of their ongoing crisis. We know from Michael Walzer that in England, the “revolution of the saints” in the seventeenth century involved, as part of its Calvinist politics, an attack on the investment of Anglicans and royalists in a vision of the “great chain of being.” Such a rendering of the world naturalized all sorts of unequal stations, and brought to this naturalization a plethora of metaphors, including those of the body—the body natural, the body astronomical, the body economical, the body celestial—on and on it went. In contrast, for the Calvinists “the antidote to wickedness and disorder was arbitrary power,” for the whole problem with all these chain-of-being renderings, according to the new divines, was that they could not adequately distinguish illegitimate from legitimate domination. It was the ingenious invention of a problem to which the problem-inventors promised a solution—they understood the relationship between captain and soldier, because they understood the covenant between “God and predestined man.” Walzer details the extreme ends of an opposition in English renderings of power in the seventeenth century, distinguishing in stark terms between the Calvinist divine and the true believer in traditional authority, for whom divine right and heredity were obvious beyond mention, because in medieval naturalism all macrocosms and microcosms were mirrors of each other and the “great chain of being.” More recent research by Quentin Skinner enhances our understanding of the complexity of the situation, while focusing it clearly on how the revolutionary crisis was a crisis of the King’s Two Bodies. Skinner reveals the way in which the maelstrom of dispute, the cultural world from which Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan emerged, was one in which a series of attempts were made to set out clearly and explicitly solutions to the problems to which the King’s Two Bodies had, implicitly and somewhat mystically, provided a solution. This representational tumult of words and wit—a tumult that included fierce political denunciations over fine differences in the philosophy of artistic representation—mirrored the actual violence of swords and guns in the English Civil War. Those English writers who held up republican city-states as ideals of governance insisted that in a commonwealth that allowed freedom, discretion 18. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, 159, 169.

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could not be allowed to a monarch on whom the people were dependent. They noted that even Jean Bodin—no friend of republicanism—had studied “popular estates,” in which “every citizen is in a manner partaken of the maiestie of the state.” They took this and ran with it, insisting that “sovereign power could never lie with kings as heads of state.” Sovereign power rested with the “body of the people,” which was then delegated, in some instances, to Kings. They thus approached an important and radical possibility—that the metaphor of a body politic to a natural body did not always work, or at least was not as extensive as had been previously thought. In their view, while a natural body dies if you cut off its head, this is not the case with the body politic. It was, as we say today, a motivated argument. The English republicans tended to favor a philosophy of representation as likeness or verisimilitude; they thus insisted that a republic was the best form of government because in it a Parliament resembles the people it represents. And so, “when Parliament acts, it is as if the whole people act  .  .  . it is due to being an image or representation of the people that Parliament has the power to pursue policies in their name.” This “populist theory of the state” was subject to a variety of outraged attacks. Antirepublicans wheeled out the ancient argument of divine right (though those writers did not use the word state so much; they liked kingdom), and they insisted that the King, qua ultimate rector with two bodies, was the source of all law, because in the King was found the unity of church and state. Interestingly, however, other arguments for monarchy agreed with the republicans that sovereignty had originally rested with the people, but insisted that the English had irrevocably delegated this sovereignty to their Kings. It was not an unreasonable stance in the cultural milieus in which sacred kingship had so recently been taken for granted—after all, the King never dies. But the sheer proliferation of arguments, the coming into discourse of the felt need to articulate the basis for sovereign claims, reveals the profound uncertainty and crisis of rule in the seventeenth century. And this was the crisis within which Hobbes made his move, a move that Skinner’s analysis reveals as profoundly Kantorowiczian. Hobbes mocked the “democraticall gentlemen,” with their populist theory of the state, endlessly. He could not stand the absolutists either. Why? None of these writers, Hobbes claimed, had a correct understanding of representation, and they misunderstood the essential nature of authorship. 19. Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 348. 20. Skinner, 348, 351. 21. Skinner, 351, 197, 353, 354.

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Hobbes found absurd the populist idea that a body of the people preexists the moment of covenant. For “the people,” individuated and alienated from each other, carry a multitude of conflicting interests, desires, and ideas—they have, we might say, their own projects. Simultaneously, he found profoundly wrongheaded the idea that the people live in subjection to and dependence on a “God-given head of state.” From this frustration emerged his account of authorship, and of the state as a fictional person. Skinner shows that the Hobbesian construction works as follows. The construction of “the people” as sovereign is performative. It is in the moment of covenant that “the people” come into being as a collective author—that is, it is only in the act of delegation to the sovereign as the person responsible for the safety and prosperity of the people that “the people” is performed into being. What this means is that they remain the author of the actions of the sovereign, by attribution. There is a further complication to the construction. When the covenant is made, what is brought into being by this delegation is a fictional person, the “state” or “common-wealth.” And any single person who occupies the position of sovereign King or Governor of the people is in fact only an actor for this fictional person, “the state,” who was brought into being in the covenant. So there are two acts of delegation—the first, which creates the state as that thing which comes into being when the people come together to end the war of all against all, and second, the delegation of the tasks and reasons of state to a natural person or council of persons who then act on behalf of the fictional person of the state, who is authored by the people. From the people, to the state as fictional person, to the living actor for the state. The debates in political theory that derive from this construction are myriad and well known. In the register of cultural histories of power, however, we can note that Hobbes’s construct is a working through, at the level of concepts, of a solution to the problem created by the crisis of the King’s Two 22. Skinner, 355. 23. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), especially chapters 16, 17, and 18. 24. Skinner is interested in how this Hobbesian construct enables a distinction between state (a set of purposes, including security, prosperity, health, and well-being of those who are part of the covenant) and government (a specific, concrete organizational apparatus made up of natural persons, who make and enforce laws), because the former then provides a normative basis from which to judge the latter. See also Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan,’” Historical Journal 7, no. 2 (1964): 321–33; Quentin Skinner, “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” Historical Journal 9, no. 3 (1966): 286–317. See also Don Herzog, Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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Bodies. As a hinge in transitions to modernity, it is representative of the issue of how to bind actors to rectors, in long chains that sometimes ambivalently run in two directions at once, and which confusingly appear to have “the people” at the very bottom and at the very top of the chain. The problem is the space left open by the no longer taken for granted corpus mysticum of the King. Fifty years before Leviathan, the second body of the ruler was part of the moral background against which chains of power and their representation were constructed, a frame for politics which was also a tool, wielded with particular skill by Elizabeth I; by the time of Hobbes, it is in the foreground, because it is in crisis. And we can now see the profound connection between the construct traced by Ernst Kantorowicz and the discourse that emanated from the thinker for whom power and causality were the same thing. First: the state as fictional person is designed specifically to be the sort of person that can have life eternal, as opposed to the mortal sovereigns, governors, or councils (“governments”) that act on its behalf. The state is an intangible, sempiternal rector, to which actual rectors are actors. Second: the theory of representation that underwrites the Hobbesian construct is taken from the dramatic, rather than visual, arts. It is one in which to act as the agent for another, to become actor for a rector, means that one’s own actions—speeches, decrees, bodily actions, violence against other bodies—are attributed to rector as author, even if that rector is a fictional person. Hobbes drew an analogy between the way in which an audience, watching an actor on stage, attributes the actor’s speech and movements to the fictional person he is playing (e.g. Hamlet) and the way in which a king or governing council has its actions attributed to the fictional person that is the state. Reading Hobbes’s texts in the light of both the English Civil War and the 25. Julia Adams, “1-800-How-Am-I-Driving?,” Social Science History 35, no. 1 (2011): 1–17; Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992, trans. David Fernbach (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014). 26. Julia Adams, “The Rule of the Father: Patriarchy and Patrimonialism in Early Modern Europe,” in Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion, ed. Charles Camic, Philip Gorski, and D. M. Trubeck (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 237–66; Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society,1977). 27. Hobbes wrote, “The power of the agent, and the efficient cause are the same thing.” Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London: J. Bohn, 1845), 127. In his theorization of power as an “essentially contested concept,” Steven Lukes took a similar position, tracing the differences between the three faces of power as simultaneously an issue of political philosophy and of social science methodology. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005).

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predecessor theorists of the Elizabethan age leads us to an ambivalence according to which Leviathan becomes both reason and myth. In one sense, the text is an attempt to work out, through precision of argument, precisely how one might construct a legitimate state in the light of the knowledge bequeathed by true human science of power; in another it is itself the construal of the myth of state, a kind of enchantment that participated in the making of the spectacular state. Perhaps we can say that the difficulty that myths present to the analyst in the human sciences is that their persistence seems to be linked, in political life at least, to their profound utility, to actual persons, for making sense of “what we are doing here,” especially during a crisis. For even in the specifically theological parts of Leviathan, Hobbes displays a consistent concern with (fraught) agency relations and (variations in) signs of trust. Hobbes and his various interlocutors, then, were all, in the chaos of civil war, concerned with the problem of how to restore, recur, or replace the King’s Two Bodies as the frame for representing and constructing power relations in society. What myth could secure, as a practical tool of political action, the sempiternal state, the authorization of action secured by representing action

28. That these texts can be read as a kind of foundational myth—a story about exit from the state of nature through a covenant—was the premise also of Carol Pateman’s reading of the early modern intellectual moment in the Anglophone tradition generally. Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 29. Cassirer writes, “From the first beginning of his philosophy it was his great ambition to create a theory of the body politic equal to the Galilean theory of physical bodies—equal in clarity, in scientific method, and in certainty.” Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 165. 30. Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 31. In addressing “How God speaketh to men,” for example, Hobbes notes, “How God speaketh to a man immediately, may be understood by those well enough, to whom he hath so spoken; but how the same should be understood by another, is hard, if not impossible to know. For a man may pretend to me, that God hath spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce, to oblige me to believe it.” (Here the verb pretend means to claim in a way that may or may not be deceitful). Furthermore, in his chapter on miracles, which discusses at some length how uneducated men who do not understand science are easily fooled into thinking something is a miracle or “magik,” Hobbes nonetheless is primarily concerned with a precise definition of actual miracles. And this definition concerns agency relations in relationship to God as ultimate rector. His argument is that the purpose of genuine miracles is always to secure knowledge among the people that a prophet is a genuine messenger or lieutenant (read: agent) of the Lord. He makes this argument about both Moses and Jesus, and offers the following definition: “A MIRACLE, is a work of God, (besides his operation by the way of Nature, ordained in the Creation,) done, for the making manifest to his elect, the mission of an extraordinary Minister for their salvation.” Hobbes, Leviathan, 190, 202.

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as in line with “King and Crown”? What cultural construct could provide the flexible yet powerful semiotic surplus, by which far-flung chains could be constructed, and order secured? How could we be sure, in Franz Kafka’s terms, that the messenger arrives, and truly represents the Emperor? Killing the King as Founding Performance The problem for sociohistorical analysis, then, is that Kings are deposed or are murdered, and sometimes, those who remove them attempt to destroy the cultural system that positioned them at the top of the social and political order in the first place; in so doing, they are compelled to come up with new metaphors for rule, new rules for authorship, new ways to construct the ties that bind, new authorizations. That was the basis, at least, for Michael Walzer’s return to the justification and legitimation of regicide during the French Revolution. 32. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 67–118; Kevin Olson, Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 33. If the King’s Two Bodies, as the “mystery of state,” attached people to people and groups to groups in the long chains of authorization that made up states and empires, Margaret Somers has shown that something similar obtained in the “misteries of property.” This, we may say, is the Polanyian inheritance of the problem of the King’s Two Bodies. If property attaches things to people, and even perhaps land to people, then this, too, Somers shows, was a matter of political belonging, of participation in the body of the people: During the Chartist era English working people . . . [claimed to have] . . . inviolable rights to a particular political and legal relationship between the people and the law. . . . This conception of rights defined independence and autonomy as inexorably linked to the property rights of working people, but only minimally to the fruits of individual labor. The rights rested primarily on membership in the political community. . . . But just who were “the people”? Like the concept of law, the idea of the people had three dimensions: (1) the “people” were freeborn and independent; (2) the “people” were a democratically conceived group of equal participants; and (3) the “people” were a solidaristic self-regulated community. Margaret R. Somers, “The ‘Misteries’ of Property: Relationality, Rural-Industrialization, and Community in Chartist Narratives of Political Rights,” in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1996), 61–92. 34. Franz Kafka, “An Imperial Message,” in Parables and Paradoxes: In German and English (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 13–15. 35. Rebecca Ali Ploof, “The Automaton, the Actor and the Sea Serpent: Leviathan and the Politics of Metaphor,” History of Political Thought 39, no. 4 (2018): 634–61. 36. The first edition of Walzer’s text Regicide and Revolution came out during the Watergate crisis in the United States and “received greater attention than academic books usually do be-

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The French-Revolution-as-iconoclasm has been much commented on, and the cultural history of 1789 exhibits, in the long arc between the eras of Louis XIV and Louis XVI, a vast combinatorics of desacralization—in science fiction, in pornography, in political philosophy. Revolution as iconoclasm was evident in the visual arts themselves. Throughout the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, the most important subject for French painters had been the monarch himself; after him, it was les grands hommes— the French aristocracy as magnificent rectors of time, space, and peasantry were the favorite subjects of visual representation. These men of standing added to their already significant agency the figurational agency of being both patrons of, and prototypes for, the great artists of the age. But during the “dramatic democratic repopulation of portraiture during the French Revolution,” the King became one among many actors, another representative agent acting for the nation. In the portraits for the National Assembly, Louis XVI’s engraving was the same size and coloration as every other representative’s. It was a far cry from the “agglomeration of the citizen multitude in the body of the Sovereign King on the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.” The breach represented by this shift in agency opened onto a time in which performative power would be of paramount importance, and “in the French Revolution, such perlocutionary uptake occurred most pointedly on certain occasions—festivals, funeral processes, installations of elected officials, consecrations, as well as the moments of oath taking and declarations.” At the very heart of this performance-into-existence of a new order of social relations we find the amalgam of speech and violence: “the storming of the Bastille prison; the executions of political figures, aristocrats, and monarchs; the mass executions during the period known as the Terror; peasant attacks on feudal properties; the war in the Vendée region. Each episode of cause of this apparent timeliness”; but Walzer, in the preface to the 1992 edition, claims that the second edition was well timed, since the “revolutionary transformations in Central and Eastern Europe” raised the question, “How are today’s revolutionaries to deal with the leaders of the old regime?” Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), ix. 37. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 38. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, What Is an Event? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 92. For more on portraiture and the French Revolution, see Tony Halliday, Facing the Public: Portraiture in the Aftermath of the French Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 39. Wagner-Pacifici, What Is an Event?, 93. 40. Wagner-Pacifici, 94.

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violence was (and in some cases still is) a subject of political semiotic contestation about how to name and assess it.” Consequently, we can return to the public speeches concerning the trial and beheading of King Louis XVI to further our study of the crisis of power in transitions to modernity as the crisis of the King’s Two Bodies. For if the long, shifting arc of desacralization of the monarchy prepared the ground for Paris of 1789, we can read this crisis as a performative iteration of the crises of 1649, 1688, and 1776. As with all performative iterations, something a bit new was performed into being in the iterative failure to meet the moment and the status quo simultaneously. Here, too, I will argue, we see destruction of the King’s Two Bodies as a frame for the practicalities of political action, and attempts to replace it with something else. Why and How Should We Kill the King? The drama surrounding King Louis’s trial is subject to some of the same interpretive disputes as is the period of the Terror more generally, and these debates contain an interesting contradiction. The Jacobins, or more broadly, the “radical voices” (including, for example, Marat as well as Saint-Just and Robespierre) who articulated the fiercest version of the argument that the King must die, are found by historiographical reflection to be simultaneously pragmatic and ultra-principled. This is particularly the case for Maxi-

41. Wagner-Pacifici, 87. 42. Did trying the King in front of the National Convention amount to an early slip into the revolutionary justice of the Terror? Or was it a moment, rather, when the Jacobins were kept (temporarily, it would turn out) at bay—in the name of the rule of law in a republic, as offered by the Gironde? Ferenc Fehér, The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Michael Walzer, “The King’s Trial and the Political Culture of Revolution,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Lucas Colin, François Furet, and Mona Ozouf (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), 183–92; François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Rebecca Spang, “Review of Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 89, no. 3 (2017): 699–701; Guillaume Mazeau, “Scripting the French Revolution, Inventing the Terror: Marat’s Assassination and Its Interpretations,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 131–47; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Macmillan, 1890); Keith Michael Baker, “Enlightenment Idioms, Old Regime Discourses and Revolutionary Improvisation,” in From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution, ed. Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. Van Kaley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 165–89.

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milien Robespierre, for whom interpretive disputes spill over from history to the historical novel. The basis for Robespierre’s appeal as he advocated for removing the king’s head from his body has been found to be a result of both his pragmatic realism and his idealistic republican virtue. The lawyer was “wonderfully businesslike” because he was willing to “tell the (ugly) truth,” and yet also compelling because he was never willing to compromise his principles so as to be politic. (Walzer reminds us of the comment of the comte de Mirabeau: “He will go far, because he believes everything he says.”) This contradiction should alert us to the possibility that the National Convention in 1792 and 1793 was a stage for performances that called into being several different layers of meaning and politics. These performances constituted a kind of three-dimensional chess game of claim and counterclaim  amidst a crisis in state legitimacy; this crisis was also a crisis on the level of myth. Amidst this complexity, a red thread runs. The speeches given during the trial of the King constitute an extended public meditation on when and how power is in the right, and when and how action (especially violent action) can be understood as authorized by “the people.” The dividing lines that manifest in the concern with the rule of law and the criminality of kingship—for example, from the Jacobin leader Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just: “no man can reign innocently,” which we now judge with bitter irony—have their roots in the representational problem of how to perform “the people” into existence as rector. The trial of the King, then, was a social drama in which the main characters sought, if not an author, at least a frame for thinking about authorship—a way to think of politics as in and of the state despite the destruction of the King’s second body. And it is within this context that we will 43. Marge Piercy, City of Darkness, City of Light: A Novel (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2016); Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2006). 44. Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 245, 130. 45. Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, November 13, 1792, in Walzer, 124. 46. The trial and execution of the Queen raise an avenue of research related to that pursued here, and in many ways influential on it; but this avenue recognizes that in the case of Marie Antoinette at least, the Queen did not have two bodies so much as stand for a corruption of the political body through her influence on the King’s first (and thereby second) body. In other words, the Queen’s body, too, was a dense semiotic node for the transfer and transformation of meanings concerning the body politic, but in a different way that requires its own investigation. Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of the Queen, ed. Dena Goodman (New York: Routledge, 2003), 117–38.

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be able to better understand the “strong gnostic components” of the “Jacobin tendencies” in modernity. The issue of delegation was raised immediately. The politician JeanBaptiste Maihle’s opening report on the possibility of a trial for the King has the following in its first paragraph: “Will you delegate the right to judge [Louis XVI] to a tribunal formed by the electoral assemblies of the eightythree departments? Is it not more natural that this convention itself should judge him?” At issue was the fact that the Constitution of 1791 had described the King as “inviolable and sacred.” But the opening report identifies inviolability as itself a problem of delegation between rectors and actors: [The King] will say that his person could not be separated from the functions of king; since as king, he was inviolable for administrative acts, as an individual he was equally so for personal acts. . . . We will reply that . . . his inviolability had as its only basis a fiction which transferred the crime and the punishment from the king to his agents. But did not he himself renounce this fiction if it is true that he hatched his plots without the aid of his ordinary ministers, or other apparent agents, or if he put them out of reach of effective surveillance?

In other words, what does it mean to be a King’s minister, acting on behalf of a monarch both inviolable and criminal? From a certain, royalist perspective—a perspective paid ample textual tribute in the compromise Constitution of 1791—the idea that the King could be treasonous to the nation is an absurdity, because to do so would be to betray his own “body politic.” It is this problem—of the legal fiction at the foundation of the state—that must be squared with the idea of “law” as the trial of Louis XVI, referred to as Citizen Louis Capet, proceeds. For as Maihle notes qua dutiful lawyer, “It is contrary to the basis of the Constitution . . . that there be an infraction of the law without a responsible agent.” The opening report settles on “the nation”—which is to say the “body politic,” now separated from the king—as the ultimate rector, which means, first, that the nation delegates to the Constitution-aswritten, and to its legislature, the capacity to make laws. Under these conditions, “public officials” may be tried for treason—and so, the report concludes, the King should be tried for treason. But is the King a “public official”? Maihle concluded that he was, but in 47. S. N. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40, 105. 48. Jean-Baptiste Maihle, November 7, 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 93. 49. Maihle, November 7, 1792, in Walzer, 96. 50. Maihle, November 7, 1792, in Walzer, 96.

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doing so raised the difficulty that would haunt the entire process of preparing to kill the King. The difficulty was that the delegations of the people (e.g. delegation of power to the members of the National Convention) can be made in error—people being people—while the delegation that was being rejected in killing the King was divine, a delegation from God to the King, to whom no error can be attributed. Maihle saw the problem: what was the basis for the system of power was also the very basis for royal treachery and abuse of power. “All the kings of Europe, relying upon the credulity of nations, claim they hold their crowns from heaven,” he chided. “They have schooled the people to regard them as agents of the deity who governs men, to believe that their person is inviolable and sacred and beyond the reach of any law.” Only “the nation” has a right to rule, however. And then, Maihle rewrites the history of kingship in the course of his report to the Convention. The rewriting makes the history of kingship the history of delegations by various peoples, who always had the right to recall their agent—but were fooled by mischievous royals into forgoing their “natural” right. And so the King’s second body, at least, must clearly die, or be replaced, or be reinterpreted, or be reoccupied by the people, for it is the second body that is responsible for tyranny in the world: “Is a monarch a god, whose very blows must be cherished or, if a man, must we bless his crimes?” The People, Their Representatives, and the Law This was the cultural frame within which the legal problems of trying the King would be considered. In the ensuing debate, those problems were addressed, again and again, as a set of questions about who is rector, who is actor, and who is other, and how they should relate. As the debate developed, certain truisms emerged as the shared language within which the political animosity occurred. These include (1) “the people” is an entity that is always right, and always sovereign (but who represents it?); (2) popular sovereignty is what “nature” dictates; (3) “the law” is expected to serve, or somehow embody, “the people”; and (4) both the “world’s peoples” and “posterity” are judging France at this special moment. Even a defender of the King, Charles-François-Gabriel Morrison, spoke in these terms; he insisted that to truly represent the eternal goodness that was the rector of “the people,” the National Convention had to restrain itself, and not seek bloody revenge. He played the same game of delegation: “I know 51. Maihle, November 7, 1792, in Walzer, 100. 52. Maihle, November 7, 1792, in Walzer, 104.

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well that kings, as they were first conceived, were no more than delegates of the people; that their function, their duty, was to execute the general will . . . yet this right . . . may nevertheless receive modifications in the manner of its exercise.” For Morrison, the people were represented by the Constitution, and the Constitution carried “an express exception in [the King’s] favor.” Furthermore, Morrison insisted, when it came to anything bad the King did, “his agents were in fact the ones responsible.” The Gironde disagreed with both Morrison and their Jacobin opponents. For them, the King could not be an inviolable rector with a delegated right to rule from the spirit in the sky. For Girondins knew—and had evidence for—all he had done, qua conniving, fallen, vicious person. The Marquis de Condorcet attacked the individual person himself—Louis Capet—in all his venality and traitorous scheming, and mocked those who held on to any “superstition in favor of monarchy.” Condorcet, in other words, both foreshadowed precisely those moments in The King’s Two Bodies where Ernst Kantorowicz throws up his hands in despair at the utter mysticism of certain jurists, and echoed Thomas Hobbes’s impatience with the theorists of divine right. But it is tough to be a liberal defender of a compromise Constitution amidst a violent crisis. Condorcet proceeded to lay out, in incredibly dense terms, a circuitous legal route around the inviolability of the King as stated in the Constitution of 1791. Rather than being saved by his exceptionality, the King was to be tried on a technicality. The inviolability of the Constitution was not true inviolability with its “normal” meaning but something else— that which applied, in fact, merely to agents of the King (his deputies). And so the King was to be judged as any actor would be judged—“like any other citizen.” In so doing, furthermore, the people of France would show this would-be rector—and all of his ilk through Europe—what’s what: “It is time to teach kings that the silence of the laws about their crimes is the ill consequence of their power, and not the will of reason or equity.” Condorcet’s argument set out the basis for the position taken by members of the National Convention who insisted that the “sovereignty of the people” is expressed in “the power to make laws, rules, in a word, all the acts concerning the happiness of society,” as Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud put it. 53. Charles-François-Gabriel Morrison, November 13, 1793, in Walzer, 112. 54. Morrison, November 13, 1793, in Walzer, 113. 55. Morrison, November 13, 1793, in Walzer, 115. 56. Condorcet, December 3, 1792, in Walzer, 139. 57. Condorcet, December 3, 1792, in Walzer, 143. 58. Condorcet, December 3, 1792, in Walzer, 146. 59. Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud, December 31, 1792, in Walzer, 195.

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Through their representatives, who make a decision, laws are implemented. This was also the frame for allowing the King to have lawyers and to mount a defense in front of the convention, and finally, for the late call to put the decision of the convention up for ratification by a popular vote across France. This insistence on the performance of legality during a time of revolution, which is to say the performance of procedure under manifestly nonprocedural conditions, is the focus of Michael Walzer’s own interpretation. The defenders of the King responded to Condorcet and the Gironde that the King should pay for his crimes via abdication; their position was that qua top public official, the King as head of state was inviolable, but his crimes as a person were enough to disqualify him from that office; thus the Constitution of 1791 had within it precisely the meaningful picture of the world required to make sense of the situation of 1792–93. For those who sought abdication but not execution, the King had acted in such a way that the implicit delegation of the right to rule by “the people” to the King should be abrogated; the King should be returned to private life—perhaps one where he had to work, perhaps one in exile. The Gironde disagreed; for they wished to argue that just as they themselves were actors within the body of the nation that was “France,” so, too, was Louis Capet—he had always been a mere actor, not a rector, and as such he should be punished as any traitor should be punished: made, via trial, into the kind of criminalized other who should be executed. For the Gironde, the Constitution that made Louis inviolable was an unfortunate compromise, but one whose awkwardness had to be endured. It was necessary to demonstrate to the people in France, and more broadly in Europe, what living in a republic really meant. That is to say that to try the King, find him guilty of treason, and execute him would show that any single person could be brought before the people’s law and tried as an actor among actors. For the Gironde, the people and the law were co-constitutive. The legislature was the representative of the sovereign people, not only because it had been elected, but also because it made laws that applied to all actors equally, Louis included. This, then, was the performativity of liberal republicanism during revolutionary crisis—calling the world of the law into being by pretending it had always already been there. In the public speeches of the 60. Walzer’s argument is that the performance of “adversary proceedings” made sure that “the king [was] subjected not merely to the power but to the sovereignty of the people, and treated, so far as possible, as the equal he never was . . . for such a court, legality is no doubt only a form of self-restraint, but it is important nonetheless because that restraint suggests as nothing else can do that the principles being established are at least potentially principles of justice. Revolutionary justice is defensible whenever it points the way to everyday justice.” Walzer, 78–79.

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Gironde, the sovereignty of the people was not being violently established in the killing of the King right then and there. Rather, the National Convention was acting in line with the authorizations of the people’s law, because the sovereignty of the people had been there all along (all evidence to the contrary). The Radical Position The radical speeches whose presenters sought the death of the King were not all of a piece; the performances were not always coordinated—at one point, Jean-Paul Marat interrupted Maximilien Robespierre to call him a charlatan. Perhaps for this reason, they have been subject to multiple interpretations. They have been interpreted as expediency brought to its violent limits; as based in the strategic realization that to keep Louis locked up would risk making him a martyr, and thus gifting Christ-like kingship to a pathetic man who had done everything to lose it; as a position of radical egalitarian principle, unintimidated by the recondite theorizing of the legalists; and as the very moment when the vanguard party, rather than the supposed “people itself,” stepped onto the world stage. The speeches may be all this and more, but what they surely are is an extended grappling with the problem of what comes after the King’s Two Bodies as a frame for representing power. In the words the radicals spoke, the wound of monarchy forgone was given meaning and shape as a wound that modernity would be called on to heal; and the ambiguity of the revolutionary moment was kept symbolically at bay by the “moral agonism” of “performing the binaries.” For Saint-Just, the King was, first and foremost, radically other, and, in particular, an enemy. Hence “we must not so much judge him as combat him . . . he had no part in the contract that united the French People.” According to Saint-Just, it is impossible to justly punish Louis and to found the republic at the same time, for Louis is not in or of the republic, as rector or as actor—he is radically other. To even bring Louis onto the public stage would be to profane the revolution itself. Hence the melodrama: “We seek liberty, and we are becoming each other’s slaves. We seek nature, and live armed like 61. Walzer, 192n1. 62. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution; François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 63. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological Theory 22, no. 4 (2004): 527–73; quotations are from pp. 552–53. See also Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

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wild savages.” For Saint-Just, the sacred dignitas of the people can never be allowed to come into contact with the profanity that is Louis: “that dignity, being for the profit of the people, has no warrant against them . . . the citizen is bound by the contract; the sovereign is not.” Citizens have no obligations to Louis; he is radically other—“a rebel,” who must either “reign or die.” Saint-Just saw the problem in its starkest terms. Louis, qua King, contained the body politic because of his second body. If he does not contain the body politic in his own second body, he cannot be within the body politic at all. Saint-Just thus advocates violent exclusion without a trial, to avoid profanation: “Citizens, the tribunal which ought to judge Louis is not a judiciary tribunal: it is a council, it is the people; it is you . . . a formal trial would be unjust,” for “Louis is an alien among us, he was not a citizen before his crime.” What Saint-Just saw and wished to resist—and it was precisely this that the Gironde was advocating for—was that to bring Louis to trial would be to bring him into the political life of the republic. This was for the radicals intolerable, because the republic as animated body politic could only flourish without the threat of tyranny represented by a living King. He was not the mundane version of the profane but rather a sacred evil. Having “waged war against the people,” the King was “a barbarian, an alien, a prisoner of war . . . king of a band of conspirators.” Robespierre also thematized the King as enemy other. In addition, he hammered away on the revolutionary nature of the situation (precisely the point of contention the Gironde, perhaps, wanted to avoid in performing as if the law had always already existed), distinguishing between “the condition of a people in the midst of a revolution” versus “a people whose government is firmly established.” But it is also in Robespierre that we see the eerie way in which the avid member of the Jacobin club mirrors the staunch royalist, for in his speeches the magnificent sacred inviolability of “the people” effloresces in rhetoric that meets and exceeds that traced by Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies. The loquacious Jacobin vanguard, in its praise of the people, outdoes the baroque mysticism of the King’s Two Bodies. 64. Saint-Just, November 13, 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 121–23. 65. Saint-Just, November 13, 1792, in Walzer, 125. 66. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995). See also Alexander T. Riley, “Renegade Durkheimianism and the Transgressive Left Sacred,” in The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, ed. Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 274–301; Elisa Heinamaki, “Durkheim, Bataille, and Girard on the Ambiguity of the Sacred: Reconsidering Saints and Demoniacs,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83, no. 2 (2015): 513–36. 67. Saint-Just, November 13, 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 126. 68. Robespierre, December 3, 1792, in Walzer, 132.

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Robespierre spoke of the people with awe, and indeed suggested that their sacred authority might be hard for the mere mortals of the convention to comprehend: “the majestic movements of a great people, the sublime force of virtue often seem to our eyes like the eruptions of a volcano or the end of civilized society.” Those who wished to try the King had failed to align themselves with the “sublime force,” and they risked profaning all that was sacred: “we revere the shadow of a king because we do not know how to respect the people; we are kind to oppressors because we lack feeling for the oppressed.” And so he concluded that the King should be killed without trial, for “a people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences, it hurls down thunderbolts; it does not condemn kings, it plunges them into the abyss.” For Robespierre, “public vengeance” is precisely the necessary performance so that the “contemptible person of him who was the last king” can be eliminated. Robespierre’s speeches, then—which have echoed through one modern revolution after another—concern the difficulty invoked when “the people” are granted the second body that has been taken away from the King. This was the basis, furthermore, for his gnostic suspicion (shared with JeanJacques Rousseau) that the actual people might not know much about their second body. Robespierre insists that “the people” might indeed have “prejudices which despotism fostered within us.” And so to try the King would be fatal for the republic, hence the King should be killed without trial. Interestingly, Marat favored a trial for the same reasons Robespierre opposed one. He thought a trial would be just the thing to perform, to show the people what they really thought. That thought was one of delegation to the other, in that the nation was rector and the King was the perfect agent, with no “contract” to be party to: “a nation which delegates its powers to agents does not contract with them; it assigns them some function in the general interest.” It is on these terms that Marat could profane the Constitution as an “odious” and “iniquitous” contract—for, he argues, the King is but “the first agent of the people,” and as such does not have a citizen’s rights. Only the “sham representatives of the sovereign people” could have written such nonsense, and thus “substituted for his title of first public official, that of born representative of the nation,” thereby “invest[ing] in him the highest authority, plac[ing] all power once again in his hands.”

69. Robespierre, December 3, 1792, in Walzer, 132–33. 70. Robespierre, December 3, 1792, in Walzer, 132–33. 71. Marat, December 3, 1792; not spoken at convention but published in the official record of the Convention and in his paper, Journal de la Républic Francais. Walzer, 159. 72. Marat, December 3, 1792, in Walzer, 160–61.

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The radical position was, then, the following. Power could only be represented in a workable way in a republic if the state institutionalized popular sovereignty and kingship as incommensurate—“if [the King] is innocent, the nation is guilty.” And so the king must simply be killed without trial, for the courage to do so is what was required of any representatives who claimed to be authentic representatives of the people. Performing without the King’s Second Body Thus it is here that we begin to see the connection between the lawyer from Arras and the radical preacher from western Pennsylvania, Herman Husband, though their contexts, particular paranoias, and proposed solutions to agency problems were so very different. They are both obsessed with corruption as an infection of the body of the people, and this inclines them to a paranoid style. In Robespierre’s speeches, the image comes with clarity: in a nation where the people rule, the population at large must somehow delegate to some to rule, and in so doing introduce the possibility of corruption and deception. “Are the plots of the nobility feared? No, it is the ambition of I know not which deputies of the people who stand ready to take the place of the aristocrats.” This rendering of plots and deceptions would come to define the Terror. But before it did, the Jacobins had already revealed their eschatological project. Michael Walzer notes that references to the book of Exodus, a common part of the repertoire of Oliver Cromwell in 1642 and Benjamin Franklin in 1776, had been exorcised from the speech of the secularists in the French Revolution—but not their spirit. For the Jacobins, their heavenly city was never far away, and their imagination of a progressive, forwardlooking break with any notion of cyclical power makes the spirit of exodus plain enough in their words—not to mention the repeated reformulations of “the last shall be first” in their ambitions to uplift the oppressed. Hence Robespierre as prophet. When those who hoped to save the King’s life made a last-ditch effort to subject his sentence to a popular referendum, the Jacobins objected. We must kill him now, because in this moment, we are the people, and 73. Saint-Just, December 27, 1792, in Walzer, 175. 74. Richard J. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 75. Robespierre, December 28, 1792, in Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, 191. 76. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 77. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

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we must decide. There would be no delay of the decision—that would allow corruption and the way in which the actual people were fooled by royalty to creep in. This sense of the need to decide, when no respected rules were in place according to which to make a decision, is perhaps what makes revolutionary moments so performative, and troubled times so amenable to charismatic leaders. It is not inconsequential to these performances that in the world of the high politics of the West at that time, what the government leaders of the United States of America and France were doing in 1794 was speaking a new language—a language of governance without the language of kingship. Maximilien Robespierre and George Washington both struggled with this, for they had in common a representational difficulty when they called out armies and started action-reaction chains of violence. Their enunciations were made in the name of the people. Thus they acted as sovereign, and insisted on their judgment as being “for the people.” This meant that they simultaneously claimed and did not claim authorship of their own actions. This issue was—as the Gironde would point out—further complicated by the fact that the decisional action of the King, and the King’s household as the metaphor for the state, had been replaced by the notion of the law as the representation of the people within the state. The result, then, was that to suspend the law in the name of the people’s sovereignty is complicated indeed, for the body politic does not rest easily in the person of Robespierre. Robespierre, to be sure, was both clever and compelling. But the difficulty was that the body politic was no longer embodied in a person who could utter “this is how it is”—or if it was, it was in practice and not in theory. Rather, in the construal of power, it was now admitted that “how it is” was to be found out, via law, via knowledge, via the people. In other words, there would have to occur a conflict of interpretations. Would a trial for the King really lead to a counterrevolution? If we murder him, will he become a martyr? And so it goes . . . Kings had to perform as well; their actual power depended on the acceptance of a narrative of their sovereignty, but the denotations and connotations within which the Kings of France for the century and a half before the revolution performed were a well-elaborated terrain. They were a space of discursive power that granted Kings and their agents tremendous performative advantages, via the vast metaphysics of the King’s Two Bodies and 78. Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Routledge, 1960), 302–10. 79. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (London: Continuum International, 2011).

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its associated significations. It was a representational system well known to overpower its opponents. For what was the French court but a magnificent set of expressive materials, rendered to produce awe—an aesthetic apparatus for the performance of royal power? Robespierre, then, struggled with the problem of emergency powers as possessed by an executive in a republic, and the relationship of these powers to the people as the ultimate source of the right to rule. And within and through the Committee of Public Safety we can see a recurrent form of the anxiety of influence haunting all these new revolutionary rectors, an anxiety, moreover, which they unleash on each other repeatedly. Amidst the terror, the revolutionaries are always looking over their own and each other’s shoulders in metaphor before sending each other to the guillotine in real life. Was an action truly and authentically for the people? Did a leader’s motivations match his actions, was he virtuous through and through? When decisions were made to execute those judged enemies of the people, was such a decision itself really and truly for the people? What we have perhaps not recognized is the degree to which precisely the same ambiguities and fears motivated the anti-Federalist Jeffersonian Herman Husband to design the New Jerusalem, when he gave up on the early American republic and its corrupt rectors. This fear is, perhaps, always available to the project of popular sovereignty. And what is populist authoritarianism but an escape from this anxiety? As Albert Camus wrote, when we read Saint-Just’s argument, “we are not dealing with law, we are dealing with theology.” Thus in the political events of 1793 we see “two different conceptions of transcendence meet in mortal combat.” We may still be able to say, then, that “by its consequences, the condemnation of the King is at the crux of our contemporary history.” Yet if the fear of the corruption of political representation haunts all popular sovereignty, the crises represented by revolution and war not only raise that fear to a fever pitch but also create fundamental problems of logistics in chains of power. How to give orders and have them followed when old habits of interpretation no longer work, when the state does not hail its people as it used to, when the background texture of everyday life is subject to disorienting shifts? Who, under these conditions, decides to kill the King, to order the army into the field, to promulgate the law, to send the police to arrest his

80. Chandra Mukerji, “Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles,” Public Culture 24, no. 3 68 (2012): 509–34. 81. Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 1994). 82. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, a revised and complete translation of L’homme Révolté by Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 118–20.

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colleagues? The entity of the people’s two bodies as the solution to agency problems was developed under extreme conditions at the center of one of the world’s largest empires. Exclusions from the Ambiguity of Being within and without the King’s Second Body France before 1789 was an empire of the King, in which alterity had already become radical, as the very possibility of being a person with a project—being publicly recognized as able to author action, including but not limited to violent action—was robbed daily from tens of thousands, and by the time of the revolution hundreds of thousands, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. This robbery was written into law via the Code Noir, which denied slaves the possibility of ever gaining access to the chains of power and their representation that ran from Versailles to Cap Français. The enslaved black persons of the Caribbean were, in the terms of Paris, neither inside nor outside the body politic in its standard definition; nor could they be criminals in the typical sense, because they could not be subjects of law. This involved, in the ambitions of the empire (broadly) and the projects of the planter class (specifically, both absentee owners who resided in Paris and their agents in the Caribbean), not just being other to this or that project but other to all legitimate projects actual and imagined. Such systematic othering, in symbol and in social relation, required an elaborate apparatus of highly patterned speech and violent action in extremis. During the radical years of the French Revolution, many of the disenfranchised of Paris forced themselves onto the political scene repeatedly; insofar as they succeeded in grasping at some modicum of political power, even in the crude sense of mob demands on revolutionary leaders, they transformed themselves from others into actors on the stage of politics. This is the essence of the revolution’s volatile and radical politics—new subjects repeatedly found themselves on the scene, only to find themselves banished or subject to violence; simultaneously the very scene of performance was changing, as men of power in the revolution grasped for a replacement for the King’s Two Bodies. As Joan Landes and Lynn Hunt have made clear, this replacement was in the end strictly male in terms of the actors these men imagined on the stage of history—while “France,” the second body of the people, was imagined as 83. Robin Blackburn notes: “With some 465,000 slaves St. Domingue was the largest and the most productive slave colony in the Caribbean in 1789.” Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso Books, 1988), 163.

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female—mother of, and protected by, the revolutionaries. We know the effects of this. The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, which supported the ejection of the Girondins and was briefly a highly effective Jacobin force during the crisis, was able to “apply enormous pressure to sections, popular societies, Jacobin clubs, and Convention deputies to support a full program of protective and repressive measures for the safety of the people . . . it took to policing the markets to root out hoarders and to insure the passage of grain supplies to the cites.” Yet the society was defeated by the masculinist commitments of the Jacobins, for “after a report from the Committee of General Security, the Convention decreed the prohibition of all clubs and popular societies of women. . . . Subsequently the Convention outlawed all political association by women.” In Landes’s estimation, this latter moment was key in the centralization of power that would lead to both the worst of the Terror and the Thermidorian reaction. But the ultimate removal from personhood and from politics was among the enslaved of the French colonies, and it is here that we see the fiercest repression of authorship and its most intense contradictions. White plantation owners initially engaged in a variety of politics in Paris in 1789, while attempting to limit the distribution of news of the revolution back home in the colonies. In particular, the grands blancs took the early moments of the revolution as an opportunity to seek power and thus autonomy from French oversight. (The goal was unfettered access to international markets.) Though true republicans were hard to find among the white plantation class, there had been much complaining about the proposed reforms to slavery promulgated by the King in 1784 and 1785 (the second body, it appeared, might be extended to the bodies and minds of the enslaved). Thus the revolution provided—as it did for so many—the possibility of a renewed pursuit of selfinterest, for the possibility that Saint-Domingue might send representatives to Paris on equal terms with other parts of France loomed appealingly as a source of power. Meanwhile the ascendant planter class, the free people of color, engaged in the republican project at a deeper level, seeking to become 84. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 142–43. 85. Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–14. 86. For details about this conflict, centered on the Exclusif, originally formulated by Colbert, see Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 87. The Code Noir was thus subtly symbolically threatening, even though, qua document of practice, it did not disrupt but rather gave “logic” to the trade in enslaved persons. I thank Alida Goffinski for discussing this issue with me.

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part of the political body of the people, by which they hoped to transcend their racial categorization. But the project’s initial adaptations and work-arounds designed in Paris kept Saint-Domingue from achieving political autonomy, and kept slavery in place. This was the repression of authorship at work, through the repetitive performance of certain spaces as simultaneously of, and not of, French law. Successive governments in Paris insisted on ruling Saint-Domingue by the appointment of commissioners who were granted broad powers, effectively making, several times over, the island colony subject to a minisovereign, a delegated ultimate rector that the persons therein had not elected. Thus the King’s Two Bodies continued, in a certain way, in the Caribbean. Freedom in France was separated from slavery on the island, and liberal, constitutional, and rights-oriented law silenced itself for the sword and the whip in Saint-Domingue. The people’s two bodies stopped at the Atlantic shore. This apportioning of space became part of the replacement for the King’s Two Bodies in Paris, as the colonies were pictured as simultaneously inside and outside French law. The commissioners arrived in full tricouleur to govern Saint-Domingue in June 1792, with powers granted to them that “exceeded those of the legislature and the king.” However, they arrived to a scene of successful slave revolt that had led to civil and inter-imperial war. And so Commissioner Sonthonax was forced to abolish slavery in order to gain an army with which to fight the British and Spanish armies. Much to the surprise of French revolutionaries and French royalists alike, a set of people who had spent their entire lives under conditions expressly designed to remove the very possibility of authorship of a project—via violence, exploitation, and public humiliation—had authored a revolution, in defiance of the law which also granted masters “exceptions” from the law in their inhuman treatment of the enslaved. The following question then arrived at the metropolitan doorstep. When replacing the politics of kingship with those of citizenship—and thus initiating “the people,” “the nation,” and the “dispossessed” as the ultimate rectors of the world—what was to become of those persons who were not even subjects? The Code Noir excluded slaves from being subjects of the King—and thus from legal status. A rewritten version in 1793 recognized that the sign of the King was no longer valid—and insisted on replacing the Fleur-de-Lis 88. Miranda Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 2 (2009): 365–408, especially 374, 379, 381. 89. Spieler, 387.

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branding of slaves with one of two letters—V (voleur, thief) or M (marron, escaped slave). It is for these and other reasons that Louis Sala-Molins is able to theorize that the “men” referred to in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen are only those men understood to be part of the social body. Consequently the enslaved, understood as property and not as social beings, were not included. Black persons, Sala-Molins argues, appear only in article 2 when property is mentioned. And so, he concludes, “the Negro sits enthroned in property. He does not possess it. . . . Ontologically, legally, specifically, exclusively, he is property.” The possibility of the expansion of the “body politic” (or for Sala-Molins the “social body”) was at stake in the French Revolution. From the moment that Abbe Sieyes penned What Is the Third Estate?, the question of the relationship of otherness to power was central to the activities in Paris. It is from here that the idea of a “part that has no part” as the sacred center of “the nation” begins to influence events. In Robespierre’s speeches, the signifier became not the “third estate” but “the people.” Indeed the rhetoric of his speeches repeatedly draws its energy and melodrama from the great inversion represented by the revolution. It is precisely insofar as “the people” had been othered, which is to say left out of the political game of influence of rectors and actors in chains of power at the French court, that they are judged by Robespierre free of the corruption and rot of the ancien régime, and thus capable of taking the sacred destiny of “the nation” into their hands. Previous exclusion from the two bodies of the King meant that the oppressed could found a new sacred second body of the people. There is an undeniable universalist feel to these invectives, as Robespierre picks out the royalist as the enemy of all humanity—“mercy for the innocent, mercy for the weak, mercy for the unfortunate, mercy for humanity!” This chain of signification is the core of his rhetoric of compassion: the last shall be first, other shall rule actor, and both will make a scapegoat of former 90. Spieler, 388. 91. Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, trans. J. Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 62. 92. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). 93. Maximilien Robespierre, “Report upon the Principles of Political Morality That Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic,” speech given to the National Convention on February 5, 1794, amidst the executions that constituted the Reign of Terror. In Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2007), 115.

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rectors. “The people,” the poor of Paris, are thus the persons-who-were-notpersons, profaned and excluded in the extreme, that have now been elevated to the position of ultimate rector, with posterity in their hands and the grand future the product of their judgment. Indeed the language of “slavery” and “being enslaved” was used to articulate these misfortunes of political exclusion for American and French revolutionaries who were not, in fact, enslaved. But the enslaved of the empire were left out of revolutionary republican authorship—or were they? That is the subject of the tumultuous historiography of the abolition of slavery in the empire in 1794. By that year, the revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue had violently forced the issue of what, exactly, the restrictions were for the application of the supposedly universal declaration. In 1790, the constitutional monarchists had been deliberately vague about the relationship of color to enfranchisement; in between 1790 and 1794, the National Assembly regularly and knowingly waffled on the issue when free men of color demanded an answer regarding the extension of active citizenship and the boundaries of law—the boundaries of the people as body politic— beyond the hexagon. In Paris uncertainty about Saint-Domingue—and unwillingness to extend access to political authorship to nonwhites—helped create conditions wherein uncertainty became the law in Saint-Domingue. I seek here not to take a position in these debates or offer an interpretation of the Haitian Revolution so much as to draw from this work to understand its importance for the problem of replacing the King’s Two Bodies as it emerged in the French Revolution. There were blacks in Paris who demanded abolition for the enslaved in the colonies. They were not well received by the Jacobin Club, and their demands were suppressed by the Journal de Montaigne; but Citizen Belley traveled from Saint-Domingue to speak to the National Convention. The question was abolition and implicitly the role of the color of a person’s actual body in granting or denying access to the body of the

94. Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” 391. 95. Three deputies from Saint-Domingue addressed the convention: Belley (identified as black), Mills (identified as mûlatre), and Dufay (identified as white). Dufay gave the official address; when the convention passed the bill, Belley gave concluding remarks about his happiness at the bill’s having been passed. Dufay was chosen to deliver the speech because he was white; the presence of Belley’s and Mills’s physical bodies at the convention was itself a scandal. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 169–70. One is reminded here of Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008),168–73. 96. Alida Goffinski, “Reception Study of Girodet’s ‘Citoyen Belley’: Ontological Metalepsis and the Paradox of Blackness from 1798 to 2016” (unpublished manuscript, consulted January 2019, MS Word).

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people: were the formerly enslaved of Saint-Domingue part of the “body of the people” that had experienced the “French” Revolution? Those who opposed abolition in the French colonies rendered the enslaved as the other others of modernity, in whose name French rectorship could not be seized. Even the success of abolition in Paris was Janus-faced. The National Convention announced a decree ending slavery in the colonies, but in doing so it inserted language that simultaneously referred to the previous year’s Constitution and to the sovereignty of the Committee of Public Safety— but the Constitution referenced therein had been suspended. Furthermore, as the Terror proceeded, the Committee of Public Safety continued its accusations against the commissioners in Saint-Domingue who had abolished slavery—accusations that made them enemies of the people. (Those commissioners had been sent to the colony with a royal license—one of the last acts of Louis XVI—but when the Girondins were in power, making them an uncertain hybrid of royal rule and rule by the people.) And so “the circumstances that enabled the abolition of slavery reveal the paradox of emergency power as a lever of transformation, which expanded liberty as well as destroying it, sometimes at the same time, during the French Revolution.” As the Terror, Thermidor, and royalist counterrevolutionary efforts proceeded, the colonies were repeatedly left as blank spaces on the French imperial map. When Napoleon was forced to concede Haiti’s independence, the containment of the liberated black bodies on that island swung into full force. These efforts spanned the different empires of the Atlantic—“private official correspondence reveals that Anglo-American policy toward Saint-Domingue aimed specifically at controlling black communication networks . . . if Toussaint won the war against the British in 1798, he clearly lost the peace.” The influence of the revolution in Saint-Domingue on the transformations studied in this book are clear enough—many moderns in England, France, and the United States moved to place strict limits on their supposedly universal ambitions for citizen-rectorship in the world. In 1792 Virginia passed a law 97. “The National convention declares the slavery of the negres to be abolished in all the colonies. In consequence, it decrees that all men without distinction of color, who are domiciled in the colonies, are French Citizens, and will enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. This decree is referred to the Committee of Public Safety, which will report immediately on measures for its execution.” Archives Parlémentaires de 1787 à 1860, Première Série (Paris, 1897), 84:284, quoted in Spieler, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” 393. 98. Spieler, 392. 99. Julius S. Scott, A Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Verso Books, 2018), 206.

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to punish the spreading of news among the enslaved; “the slaveholding powers in the Americas, in an effort to contain the spread of black unrest in the hemisphere, moved decisively to limit Saint-Domingue’s contacts with the rest of the Americans by the black rebels’ access to the sea.” The more difficult question concerns if and how Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of an independent Haiti, was understood to have two bodies. The denial of the authorship of action—a denial even in the giving of freedom—meant that the enslaved were rendered outside the reconstruction of the ties that bound rectors and actors in the politics of London and Paris. If Thomas Hobbes and Maximilien Robespierre remained in the orbit of the King’s Two Bodies, mirroring it as they sought to escape it, the formerly enslaved rebels of Saint-Domingue drew together a symbolics of authorship that merged themes from the Kongo, the royalism of the King of France as counterweight to the power of the grand blancs, and republican citizenship. Laurent Dubois has argued that the latter included an attempt to think difference without hierarchy, and as such represented a profound synthesis of different ideas circulated through the Atlantic: “insurgents in Saint-Domingue made use of, and profoundly transformed, the very meaning of republicanism.” And thus, though the Spanish tried to make the revolutionaries of Haiti their agents, they never could quite control their supposed “auxiliaries.” The French Revolution as a Crisis in Authorship Michael Walzer’s argument about the regicide suggests that the guillotine was intended not only to kill the “natural” body of Louis Capet, individual person in France, but also to destroy his second body once and for all. The result was—as Ernst Kantorowicz surely would have predicted, and Immanuel Kant saw quite clearly—a crisis in the representation of authorship as a way to construe chains of power. How the people should be represented in speech and argument as a way to perform state power into being became a pressure point of tremendous creativity. The struggle over this representation became acute during the Terror, and upon delving into that maelstrom we find a constant struggle over who is to 100. Scott, 142, 202. See also Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 101. Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment,” 6. 102. Dubois, 12. 103. David Geggus, “The Arming of Slaves in the Haitian Revolution,” in The Arming of Slaves in World History: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Philip Morgan and Christopher Brown (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2006), 209–32.

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be rector, who is to be actor, and who is to be other. Explanations of the Terror run toward two poles: one (usually “progressive”) that argues it was result of circumstances, and thus should be understood as a derailing of what was an assertion of the rights of the people, and one (usually “conservative”) that argues that it was always already contained in the logic of the violent overthrow of the ancien régime. Most recently, the question of emotionality has injected new energy into these debates. However, if the destruction of the King’s Two Bodies is conceptualized as an affordance—an opening of possibilities and problems—then we can surely see that this destruction did not, in and of itself, necessitate its Jacobin replacement. Rather, what occurred was a tremendous contest of interpretation, centered on performance, as the route to the legitimation of power and the justification of violence during the French Revolution. Considered in this way, the revolution reveals the strange political alchemy that results from intense social drama being staged during moments of radical political uncertainty. The outpouring of discourse during 1793 and 1794 in Paris—what François Furet identifies as the ideological moment in the revolution—was not an accident. It was a product of how uncertainty privileges performative power and its paradoxical causality. Progressive historians of the Terror look for an efficient cause of that period in circumstances. Conservative historians of the Terror interpret it as the Aristotelean “final cause” of the revolution of 1789. Both interpretations underestimate the performative. From the perspective of the argument I am developing here, the French Revolution was a series of events in which a crisis of rule opened onto representational struggles for inclusion in, and definition of, “politics.” The ancien régime had a single rector, a very restricted world of actors (centered on the “influence” of aristocrats at the French court and the surrounding salons), and a vast world of others who were not in the game of political power. These others differed tremendously in their access to networks of economic and cultural power. The irruption of (some of) these others into this order, brought on by the war in North America, the financial crisis it created, the calling of the Estates General, and the long cultural arc whereby kingship became something to be argued for and against rather than taken for granted, created a situation in which the ties that bound hierarchy together became 104. Carla Hesse, “Revolutionary Historiography after the Cold War: Arno Mayer’s ‘Furies’ in the French Context,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 4 (2001): 897–907; Timothy Tackett, “Interpreting the Terror,” French Historical Studies 24, no. 4 (2001): 569–78; Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution; Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 105. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution.

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uncertain and unclear. Into this uncertainty stepped certain persons highly influenced by Enlightenment discourse, and as such they became performers of the crisis. These public performers of the French Revolution became rulers confronted with an extraordinary set of circumstances—war with the rest of Europe, counterrevolution in the countryside, and eventually revolution and war in Saint-Domingue, as well as in Martinique and Guadeloupe. The leaders who had “invented revolution” in their interpretation of the Bastille  confronted these circumstances via a hermeneutics inclined to republican understandings of right rule and racist understandings of personhood. These schemas also had lacunae and unexpected difficulties. In particular, as Robespierre quickly discovered, even the most “routine” emergency for the government would require justification in terms that would point, not to his own judgment, but to an interpretation of the needs of “the people” that he would have to perform for an audience—the Jacobin Club, the National Assembly, or the National Convention. He used this ambiguity very much to his own advantage, until it was used against him in his arrest. Yet in the very ambiguity we associate with the emotionality of the Terror, we also find the possibility of democratic pluralism, a possibility denied when the Committee of Public Safety pursued a sovereignty as unified as that which it sought to replace—or as unified as it thought the world of the King had been. For what the revolutionaries struggled and ultimately failed to comprehend was how to use politics—politics in the sense of appearance before one’s fellow citizens and the ability to act together that emerges from the speech that occurs in this situation—to create a social order in which power accrued, in a partial way, to a larger mass of rectors. The struggle of the French Revolution was indeed the struggle to create a society of individuals who, qua human persons (rather than as holders of this or that status or office), had access to sovereign decision-making. It was a struggle to find that humanism which Kantorowicz found in Dante in the final chapter of The King’s Two Bodies. Yet the Jacobin dimension of modernity that effloresced on the stage of world politics in 1794 linked equality to sameness—sameness of opinion via consensus; sameness of Frenchness and whiteness; sameness in the received 106. William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 107. Laurent Dubois, “The Price of Liberty: Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794–1798,” in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies, ed. Gary Kates (New York: Routledge, 2002), 254–82. 108. William H. Sewell Jr., “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society 25, no.6 (1996): 841–81.

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understanding of eschatological Christianity that informed Robespierre’s radical secularism. Hannah Arendt traced the disaster of the Terror to the compassion felt by Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the sufferings and (biological) needs of the masses. But it is possible that the correct Arendtian diagnosis of the Jacobin dimension of modernity was not the one she arrived at in On Revolution but rather that which becomes available via inference when we read The Human Condition. Therein Arendt noted that “human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them. If men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is, was, or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood.” Robespierre’s philosophical distance from this position is perhaps especially revealing, for it hints at the tragic complicity of the Jacobins with the rector they were intent on destroying. For Robespierre, “the people” somehow had to be as inviolable—as unimpeachable—as the King with his two bodies. Perhaps, then, it is not a surprise that wherever they appear to destroy sovereigns—in Paris, in Moscow, in Beijing, in Tehran—the Jacobins of modernity throw up sovereigns of their own, complete with an irritatingly modern second body—magnificently sovereign but strangely temporary, having traded the sempiternity of the King’s Two Bodies for the terrific capacity of the modern state. 109. Jean-Jacques Dessalines can be interpreted in this way as well. He declared all Haitians “black” and all foreigners “white,” and demanded, upon his rise to power, the execution of all remaining French persons on the island, thus eliminating otherness in the pursuit of a politics without ambiguity. 110. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution. 111. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 175.

pa rt i i i

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Modernity as the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies When I ask, What did it mean to kill the king?, I want to know what it meant then, to the men who made the political judgment and ordered the killing, but I also want to know what it might mean to us, how we should place the regicide in our own understanding of terrorism, revolution, justice, and responsibility. M i c h a e l Wa l z e r

He believed in Brutus and did not cast one speck of suspicion on this type of virtue. . . . The height at which he places Caesar is the finest honor that he could bestow on Brutus: that is how he raises beyond measure Brutus’s inner problem as well as the spiritual strength that was able to cut this knot. Could it really have been political freedom that led this poet to sympathize with Brutus—and turned him into Brutus’s accomplice? Or was political freedom only a symbol for something inexpressible? Could it be that we confront some unknown dark event and adventure in the poet’s own soul of which he wants to speak only in signs? What is all of Hamlet’s melancholy compared to that of Brutus? F r i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e , “In Praise of Shakespeare”

Getting the Joke Circulated through American newspapers in 1794 was a deeply sarcastic script for a (supposed) play, which provided a gloss on the politics and violence of the Whiskey Rebellion and, by implication, of a variety of crises in the early American republic. The play, which ironically undermines both rebels and the federal government, reveals the transformation of power constitutive of

1. The play appears as an appendix in Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, vol. 4, ed. John B. Lynn and William H. Egle, MD (Published under direction of Matthew S. Quay, Secretary of the Commonwealth; Harrisburg, PA: B. F. Meyers, State Printer, 1876), 545–49; available at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19107. The editors introduce the play by writing, “the following papers appearing at the beginning of the Insurrection in the newspapers of the day, having been filed away by the authorities, it has been decided to reprint them. They give the humorous side of the transaction.” This suggests that the humor contained in the texts was still relevant after the Civil War, and was indeed understood to be about the nature and purpose of “authority.”

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transitions to modernity that I am positing here. It features a fictional dialogue between “Six United Nations of White Indians” (meaning the rebels in the four counties of western Pennsylvania and two northernmost counties of Virginia), “Commissioners Sent from Philadelphia” (the negotiating teams sent by the federal and Pennsylvania governments), and “Jersey Blue” (the army that was raised to crush the rebels). Over the course of the play, the rebels are rendered as men possessed of reasonable grievances and as drunken louts risking the essence of the republic in the name of confused self-assertion. If the latter, they are a new tyranny; if the former, the new federal government is a failure. The satire functions, furthermore, through the simplistic racial epithet of rendering the rebels “white savages” and their leaders “chiefs,” though this is mediated by the use of the word captain in the mocking titles given to the rebel leaders. These leaders are four: “Captain Blanket,” “Captain Whiskey,” “Captain Alliance,” and “Captain Pacifus.” Not surprisingly, Captain Whiskey gets some of the best lines. He says to the Commissioners Sent from Philadelphia: I am told that the people of your great council call us a parcel of drunken ragamuffins, because we indulge ourselves with a little of our homespun whiskey, and that we ought to pay well for this extraordinary luxury. What would they think if the same was said of them for drinking beer and cyder? Surely the saying will apply with equal force in both cases. We say that our whiskey shall not be saddled with an unequal tax. You say it shall; and to enforce the collection of three or four thousand dollars per ann. of nett proceeds, you will send an army of 12,950 men or double that number. This is a newfashioned kind of oeconomy indeed. It is a pitty this army had not been employed long ago in assisting your old warrior, Gen. Wayne; or chastising the British about lakes.

This voiced opinion is indeed an accurate representation of the sentiments of the smallholders in the American West at the time—as detailed in chapter 6 of this book, the rebels wanted Indian “defense” and access to waterways for their crops, but not to pay taxes on whiskey. What could seem more reasonable, in the idiom of the time more civil, than such a complaint from Revolu2. Robert Darnton wrote about the massacre of the mistress of the house’s cats by journeymen in 1730s France—and its later narration by one of those involved—that “it strikes the modern reader as unfunny, if not downright repulsive. Where is the humor in a group of grown men bleating like goats and banging with their tools while an adolescent reenacts the ritual slaughter of a defenseless animal? . . . By getting the joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to ‘get’ a basic ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old Regime.” Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 77–78. 3. Lynn and Egle, Pennsylvania Archives, Second Series, 4:546.

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tionary War veterans—that taxes are unequal, and that all this taxation does not appear to help fight off the Indian “savages” or push the British out of the Northwest Territory? The narrative appears at first to side with the rebels. Yet “Captain Whiskey” soon slides into talking about whiskey itself as sovereign. After a barb directed at Philadelphia for respecting the British and thus betraying the spirit of the American Revolution, he continues: I presume it is the present policy [of the United States] to guard against offending a nation with a King at their head [e.g. Britain]. But remember, brothers, if we have not a king at our head, we have that powerful monarch, Capt. Whiskey, to command us. By the power of his influence, and a love to his person [italics in original] we are compelled to every great and heroic act. . . . Capt. Whiskey has been a great warrior in all nations and in all armies. He is a descendent of that nation called Ireland; and to use his own phrase, he has peopled three-fourths of this western world with his own hand. We, the Six United Nations of White Indians, are principally his legitimate offspring, and those who are not, have all imbibed his principles and passions—that is a love of whiskey; and will, therefore, fight for our bottle till the last gasp.

Here we have several layers of sarcasm: the newspapers are poking fun at the crazy drunken rebels, who may have grievances, but who take their orders from the bottle. Yet within the text, the rebels are poking fun at the Federalists in the state, who after winning the revolution at the cost of much blood and treasure, cannot but supplicate themselves to the British, and do not understand liberty. Furthermore—and this is perhaps more obscure to the contemporary reader, but would have been common sense at the time—the very project of the state is being mocked via these references to whiskey. The passage plays on a widely known and unavoidable truth: one needed barrels of whiskey to run an army. Without whiskey (or some other strong liquor) for pain relief and motivation, desertion would be such that any army on the North American continent in the eighteenth century would melt away; it was as necessary as winter coats and bullets. It was the material that would hold together the chains of command, the carrot that accompanied the stick of military discipline. Meanwhile the oxymoron of “white Indians” not only reveals the racialized understanding of the new republic as violently excluding “savages,” but also references a common aspect of (white) rural resistance in the early republic. Raids conducted by citizens on tax inspectors and other representatives of the federal government often featured white men dressing up as Indians and women (as had, of course, the protest of 1773, which opened onto the revolu4. Lynn and Egle, 4:546.

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tion itself). This was a highly stylized gesture of political meaning. Likely to be ineffective in concealing the individual identities of men in a local context (the sheriff still could find out who did what), it nonetheless provided a kind of symbolic cover in the stories that made the national press. It was a persona for the conduct of midnight violence, displacing the authorship of violence onto those who were not citizens. In the play, then, “Indians” are present in the discourse of the republic only as a signifier; they are not actors but a way of profaning the rebels as savage, and a way for the rebels to disavow their own violence. The signification of alterity, in other words, is unambiguous about the exclusion of the Indian other from politics, but ambiguous in its usage as an epithet. It signifies, on the one hand, the denigration of certain (white, male) citizens as unsuitable for politics, but also, on the other hand, a way for citizens with political claims to disavow the disruptive violence that was (in their view) necessary to have those claims heard. Finally, we have the habitual reference to (and yet also mockery of) patriarchal generation as the basis of the right to rule. Whiskey, himself a descendant of Ireland, has “peopled three-fourths of this western world with his own hand.” The implicit references here are multiple. On the one hand, it refers to the contrast between Scotch-Irish national extraction and English, which tracked (to a greater or lesser degree) class and regional distinction in the early American republic. The proper rectitude of the Philadelphia Cavalry was encoded into an understanding of the Englishness of the early American elite, and was frequently contrasted, in the Philadelphia imagination, with the supposed poverty and feared overpopulation of America by the Scots and the Irish. The rebels are thus associated with those nationalities which, in certain renderings of the world, were understood to be less qualified for gentlemanly concerns (“politics”), especially given the possibility that their ancestors had come to North America as indentured servants. And “Irish” encodes “popish”—a deviation from the true gospel of Protestant American biblical republicanism. But note that all of these are rendered in terms of the old 5. For discussions of the phenomenon, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). For the eighteenth-century transition in terms of Indian-settler relations, see Edward Countryman, “Indians, the Colonial Order, and the Social Significance of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1996): 342–62; Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 6. This interpretation is confirmed by the speech of Captain Alliance, who suggests that “some evil spirit might prompt us to a separation from the union,” and complains that “it appears as if the Kentuckians were disposed to bow knee to the Spanish monarch or to kiss the Pope’s . . . and wear a crucifix, rather than be longer deprived of their Mississippi.” Lynn and Egle, Pennsyl-

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assumption—the assumption that underwrote Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha— that the generation of persons qua fatherhood was the ultimate basis of legitimacy in rule. This is of course another joke about booze and, in this case, booze and sex. It would be all too easy to assume that this world of racism, cynicism, and sarcasm indicated the death of the sacred in the early American republic; a kind of bequeathing of immanent modernity untethered to anything imagined as transcendental; a sign of the disenchantment attested to a dozen decades later by Max Weber. But this would be a misreading; for if the world is imagined as disenchanted, the text is not funny (and it does not contain any new information). To get the joke of this document, we must recognize that the tension that produces its humor can only come from a world in which the renderings of what makes action right, what makes violence justified, and what provides the ultimate legitimation for power—renderings of sovereignty—have lost none of their sacred qualities but much of their certainty. The play was funny because it captured the heart of the matter for those on either side of the crisis, and especially for those watching it unfold from within the electorate, but outside either the Federalists determined to crush the rebels or the rebels who had tarred and feather the tax inspectors. There was for this audience confusion and ambiguity about how right rule was to be understood; confusion and ambiguity about who is in and who is out of politics; and confusion and ambiguity about how those who are “in” are to conduct themselves (is “rough music” a legitimate political technique?). For there was no clarity about the ultimate basis of right action, no ultimate rector to authorize action. In other words, what marks these paragraphs from Captain Whiskey as part of a transition to modernity is not the subtraction of magic from the world but rather the nervousness that besets a plethora of actors-becomerectors in a world of state-society relations in which the naturalness of the metaphor whereby the state is a corpus mysticum demands to be rewritten. The joke of the document is that no one is sure who the sovereign is when the sovereign is the people—it could be whiskey itself. This is not disenchantment vania Archives, Second Series, 4:547. The profanity of the reference to the Pope further confirms the intertwining of sacred/profane distinctions with politics. I thank Courtney Bender for suggesting that I pursue further the Irish-Catholic aspect of the interpretation of the text. 7. Johann Neem shows that the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion involved the evacuation of certain (violent) parts of the rural repertoire of resistance from the aura of legitimacy. See Johann Neem, “Freedom of Association in the Early Republic: The Republican Party, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Philadelphia and New York Cordwainers’ Cases,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 127, no. 3 (2003): 259–90.

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but the proliferation of a plurality of different enchantments, and uncertainty about what organizes them. Another way of saying this is that modernity is the problem of too many arrogant actors in a world of no ultimate rector. Who, after all, is “the public” that judged Anthony Wayne glorious after he burned the crops of the Ohio Indians? And who are these whiskey rebels? Are they the avatar of the people, holding out against the new big men of the day in Philadelphia, saying to Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, as they did to King George III before them, “Don’t tread on me”? Or are they tyrants—holding the dear young republic hostage to the preferences of just a few, subverting the legitimately elected government, to whom has been delegated the power of “the people” to make laws, including the legitimately legislated whiskey excise? Both interpretations were common in 1794; iterations of them appear again and again in the arc of American modernity. This uncertainty, and the conflicts of interpretation that came with it, concern elections and other mechanisms for setting up a republican government; but they extend beyond these, to organization and hierarchy throughout society—to order-giving and order-taking up and down hierarchies of state and corporation, town and business venture, army and militia. The question that emerges in the wake of the King’s Two Bodies is, What do the war secretary and his captain in the field share—what binds them together? This concern is also satirized by Captain Whiskey when he notes in virtually the same breath that (1) what the federal government really needs is discipline and power in fighting the British and the Indians, and (2) it is really the bottle that is bossing around the fighting men of the new America (and thus they will always be rather ineffectual). The joke in 1794 is but more evidence of the nervousness I have been tracking in the previous three chapters of this book, an anxiety about how to solve agency problems, to bind rector to actor, and to exclude other, without the semiotic glue of the sign of the King. The sarcastic newspaper snippet from 1794 has an echo in a well-known— and far more tragic—scene from the novel The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck frames the scene by writing, “The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men.” In the scene, the son of a local man arrives on a tractor to bulldoze the house of a tenant farmer, to make way for commercial agriculture. The tenant farmer threatens to shoot the driver of the tractor; the driver responds that if he does there will just be another guy on the tractor long before the tenant is hanged for his crime. The

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tenant asks who gave the orders to bulldoze his house, only to find that the man who directed the tractor driver got his orders from the bank, whose directors got orders “from the East.” “Where does it stop?” asks the tenant. The reply: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot.” There may be someone to shoot, and there may indeed be power in the modern world that can be redirected; but this passage from Steinbeck suggests that the experience of being unsure of whether there is or is not someone to shoot is part of the modern. If we spiral out from the experiences of the tenant and the tractor driver in this novel—and from the contradictory grievances of the men in the Whiskey Rebellion—we begin to arrive at a definition of modernity, a definition that, moreover, is not limited to the break in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World constituted by its three great revolutions. With What Should We Replace the King’s Two Bodies? Let us try a thought experiment, and designate as modern any attempt—at any time and any place—to destroy the King’s Two Bodies or any of its cognates as the frame for conducting politics, and replace it with something else as a language for binding rector to actor, and excluding other. If the construction and extension of chains of power and their representation involve making alliances so that projects can be pursued, and making exclusions and attacks on those outside a given project or projects, then modernity is the attempt to fill the negative space left when, for various reasons and via various methods, the frame for solving agency problems signified by statements such as the following are vacated. He [the King] beareth and systeyneth the person of the whole Realme. The person of the King is inviolable and sacred; his only title is “King of the French.” Rome is where the emperor is to be found. 8. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 38. I thank Steven Lukes for pointing me to this passage. 9. Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 195. 10. Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 253. 11. Lellia Cracco Ruggini, “Rome in Late Antiquity: Clientship, Urban Topography, and Prosopography,” Classical Philology 98, no. 4 (2003): 366–82; quotation is from p. 370; Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 B.C.–A.D. 337) (London: Duckworth, 1977).

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The harm to the ruler does not come from outside, but often comes from within the ruler’s own body. The emperor is sacred and inviolable. . . . The Emperor is the head of the Empire, combining in Himself the rights of sovereignty.

These sorts of statements—which dot world history, and remain a part of the cultural background in and through all sorts of different regions and historical eras, each with its own, much more particular hermeneutic—are usually understood as the language with which rulers are apotheosized. Alternatively, they are analyzed from a legal perspective concerned with what powers are granted (in a constitution, say) to the executive. I am, based on the arguments of chapters 5, 6, and 7, advancing a different hypothesis. In addition to apotheosis and law, such statements encode a flexible tool of political action that operates within a generalized sociocultural configuration of the sacred. Such statements are one small piece of evidence pointing toward a broader landscape of meaning—variably present in variable configurations, to be sure—as the setting in which politics take place. The landscape to which I refer is one where the sovereign has a sort of second body that is also accessed, in part and in various ways, by other members of the body politic. For by imagining and by institutionalizing in various ways (as a legal fiction, as an understanding of nation, as a recurrent trope in popular plays or movies) the second body of the sovereign, a sign is generated. That sign can be multiplied and carried far from the natural body of the sovereign, and can, over time and through various machinations, be loaded down with a highly effective set of meanings. These meanings are not all there is to chains of power, but what they do is help bind together rectors and actors. They do this because the second body of the King—the whiff of royalty, the feel of sacrality—makes it possible to slightly shift the preferences of a subject of the realm who has opposed interests to the agent of state who is hailing him; or makes it a bit more likely that a soldier will risk his life in securing territory for the state and follow the orders of his general amidst chaos and blood; or seduces a Justice of the Peace into a decision that attempts fairness because it aims to imitate an ideal King. In other words, the second body of the sovereign helps people and groups participate in projects because it 12. Jack Wei Chen, The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 76. 13. From the Meiji Constitution of 1889; “The Constitution of the Empire of Japan,” trans. Ito Miyoji, National Diet Library, accessed June 27, 2019, https://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/ c.html. See also Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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generates a certain degree of faith in the continuity of those projects, which then need stewards, servants, agents. For to have a monopoly on the importation of wine granted by the Emperor is to have a small piece of the Emperor’s second body to pass on to one’s child; and if in so doing an analogy is created between the Emperor as father of all the people and the importer as father to his children, this further shores up the authority, extends the power, and justifies the violence of the latter as of a piece with the actions of the former. All of this, when done against a landscape of meaning infused with the two bodies of the sovereign, works not because of “status” per se but rather through the aura of sacrality that travels with the signifiers of the second body of the King. This second body, then, is a kind of code by which the distribution of sovereignty is accomplished, for its imagination lends legitimacy to interest and to coercion, provides a language for the transmutation of might into right. A piece of the King’s second body, distributed via signs of the King on coins and flags and via the experience, direct or indirect, of the adoration of his glory by his subjects, has the effect of creating an extra bit of semiotic glue so as to enable the construction of chains of power, and the endowment of actions with sacred morality. This means that enchantment is not the opposite of utility; the second body of the King is a metaphor for binding together superiors and inferiors through an experience that every human has: of the body, of sharing via proximity in the bodies of others. What is a more compelling basis for the construction of trust relations than to suggest that a general and a lieutenant share in the same body? And so, when the multiple meanings of the second body of the King collapse or are violently vacated, a problem situation for action in a political register emerges. This problem is not a loss of power or a loss of project so much as a loss of frame for the attainment of felicity in the pursuit of projects via power. It is a widely felt irruption in normal alliance-building and projectpursuing because the existence of a sacred point, from which one can imagine that if action can link itself to that point, it is always already authorized or can claim to be always already authorized, is now in doubt. What can be put in its place, and can be likewise used to construct far-flung chains of power and their representation, so as to control time and space and make practical political action within and through them conceivable? 14. Erving Goffman, “Felicity’s Condition,” American Journal of Sociology 89, no. 1 (1983): 1–53; Thomas J. Scheff, “The Structure of Context: Deciphering Frame Analysis,” Sociological Theory 23, no. 4 (2005): 368–85; Isaac Ariail Reed, “Performative State-Formation in the Early American Republic,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1 (2019): 334–67.

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Many theories of culture and power in modernity approach some part of what is implied by this hypothesis, though they do not quite fully articulate it. To put the hypothesis pursued here in relationship to other accounts of culture in transitions to modernity, it will be useful first to discuss this book’s clear counterpoint in political economy. The New Political Economy The narration of the modern as capitalism is not new, but the sociohistorical study of the dynamics of capitalism has a new techne from which to launch critique. The classic renderings of the transition to modernity as political economy—the great transformation, the great divergence, the construction of the world system, “all that is solid melts into air”—can be grounded in the study of networks, and the comparative study of commodity production can parse the intertwining of hierarchy and market. For if the “standard explanation” of globalization “attributes it to variations in the factors of land, labor and capital that make business opportunity more or less desirable in different regions of the world,” and if heterodox economists and sociologists have pointed to institutional contexts (and most frequently the state) in accounting for such transitions, then the images of networked trade and chains of commodities have bequeathed a revision of these explanations that operates in a different register. Transitions to modernity, in this approach, involve the intertwining of formal organizational structures and informal social ties as the dynamic basis for the rationalization of trade and exploitation in the pursuit of profit. Emily Erikson explains the economic success of the English/British East India Company in terms commensurable with those deployed in this book; she provides an account of rectors, actors, and others in transitions to moder15. For scholarship, this represents a shift akin to the relational shift in the conceptualization of agency noted in chapter 2. For the implications of commodity chain analysis for the theorization of capitalism, see Marion Werner and Jennifer Bair, “Losing Our Chains: Rethinking Commodities through Disarticulations,” Environment and Planning A 43, no. 5 (2011): 998–1015. 16. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, with a foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz and an introduction by Fred Block, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso Books, 1983); Jennifer Bair, “Analysing Global Economic Organization: Embedded Networks and Global Chains Compared,” Economy and Society 37, no. 3 (2008): 339–64. 17. Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 178.

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nity. “Free-riding” was a term “originally coined to refer to a specific type of principal-agent problem: how to keep employees from taking advantage of their employers.” In other words, within a profit-oriented organization, rectors provide certain resources necessary for their agents to pursue projects, but these agents are actually actors—they try to act out their own projects while using said resources. And in the East India Company, the free-riding of the actors benefited the rectors in the long run. This was due to the way in which the “shirking” actors were “actually helping the Company collect information from and distribute information between the factories and presidencies of the East.” The information acquired was advantageous, in part, because of the light it shed on certain highly consequential “others”: different ports in Asia provided quite different environments for trade. Finally, the East India Company is metonymic for the takeoff of British capitalism, and the restructuring of the globe along the lines dictated by “British hegemony and free-trade imperialism.” For “a key component of the Company’s ability to successfully expand its operations for nearly two centuries depended upon the local knowledge and adaptive capacity introduced into firm operations through the entrepreneurialism and communication networks of the private traders.” The transition I am proposing here—modernity as the creative destruction of the King’s Two Bodies—can be thought of as a counterpoint to these kinds of transition stories. For the account of power in modernity available in network and commodity chain theories of capitalism is one that tends toward the instrumental. In contrast, one might inquire into the difference made for transitions to modernity by the myths and meanings which framed claims to authority, helped construct the chains of power that accompanied the expansion of trade, and provided a source of variation in the solutions to principalagent problems in production, problems which were also opportunities for profit introduced by offshoring and outsourcing. 18. Erikson, 109. 19. Erikson, 109. 20. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso Books, 1994), 47. 21. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade, 173. 22. Jennifer Bair, ed., “Global Commodity Chains: Genealogy and Review,” in Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1–34; Jennifer Bair and Miriam Werner, “Commodity Chains and the Uneven Geographies of Global Capitalism: A Disarticulations Perspective,” Environment and Planning A 43, no. 5 (2011): 988–97; Mark Anner, Jennifer Bair, and Jeremy Blasi, “Toward Joint Liability in Global Supply Chains: Addressing the Root Causes of Labor Violations in International Subcontracting Networks,” Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 35, no. 1 (2014): 1–44.

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Consider (again) whiskey. Whiskey was—given its utility to armies mentioned above—a valuable commodity in the early American republic. This was, no doubt, in part due to its bodily effects—needed by soldiers after a long march, farmers after the sun went down, and patients during treatment by surgeons, among others. The farmers of the western United States converted their harvests into whiskey for easier transport by horses and donkeys to markets in the East; strapping four large containers to a pack animal was a significantly more promising economic prospect (and required significantly less wealth) than trying to get a wagon full of wheat through the narrow, muddy, and tree-laden road that led over the Allegheny Mountains. As Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton conceded, after the Whiskey Rebellion was over, to collect only one year’s back taxes on whiskey (the rebels owed three years’ worth). Furthermore, since “this part of the Country could not without oppression pay the duty in cash,” he allowed payment “in cash or in Whiskey.” His reasons for doing this were quite clear: “The supply of the Western Army enables us to accommodate in this. . . . The Whiskey received in payment is to be delivered to the said Presley Neville whose receipt of it will be accepted at the Treasury as a remittance for the amount . . . Mr. Neville will provide for its transportation to where it is wanted.” Thus the whiskey rebels paid their taxes on whiskey in whiskey to fund the Indian war of the federal government that had just crushed them. At every moment along the way in this construction of the networks of capital and state, chains of power carried a dispute over the meaning of whiskey, including—as we have seen from the newspapers—drinking whiskey as metaphor for “not knowing who is in charge.” Hamilton won the discursive battle in the Philadelphia public sphere and in the cabinet, in part because of skillful rhetoric dismissing the men of the West as drunk and inflamed with riotous passion—whiskey as the opposite of rectitude and self-control, the demos as wild and irrational, needing to be checked by the clearsighted elite. To the farmers of the West, their use of whiskey as commodity and as currency signified the frustrating weaknesses of the new federal government; for them, whiskey was a matter of freedom from tyranny, but in inverted form to the interpretation emanating from the metropole—Philadelphia. In the West whiskey stood for the good of “the people” in the sense of the 23. Alexander Hamilton, “For Pittsburgh (copy), November 17th 1794,” RFP S1, box 5, folder 5A F5, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia 19107. 24. Isaac Ariail Reed, “Between Structural Breakdown and Crisis Action: Interpretation in the Whiskey Rebellion and the Salem Witch Trials,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 27–64.

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smallholder. Whiskey (and rye) encoded then, as they encode now, American fantasy. Thus, the theoretical interpretation of the Whiskey Rebellion cannot end with the instrumental interest in the trans-Appalachian West. Rather, the meanings of whiskey take us into the world of subjectivity, imagination, fantasy, and myth—whiskey is not merely (though it surely was also) a technology. Thus, taking the networked chains of commodity capitalism as background, I propose to ask, in the foreground of the analysis, the following: If the King’s Two Bodies attached person to person, and person to thing, in the making of chains of power and their representation—if the King’s Two Bodies was a frame for making alliances and opponents (indeed, even for guaranteeing property in land)—then what could replace it? Surely not whiskey alone . . . no matter how meaningful. There is another way of putting the matter. We know that a notable aspect of the efflorescence of capitalism in the nineteenth century is the personation of the corporation. If to some degree we understand the world of the mod25. Wilma A. Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 26. John Law, “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India,” Sociological Review 32, no. 1 suppl. (1984): 234–63. New version published 2010 at heterogeneities.net. 27. In a recent dissertation on the legitimation of the American corporation, Carly Knight writes: The foundational sociological critique of Western capitalism asserts that capitalist industrialization involves processes of rationalization and individualization that replace emotion, mysticism, and tradition with reason and calculation. The “disenchantment of the world” that for Weber characterized modernity involved not simply secularization or the loss of religion, but crucially comprised the loss of a belief system in which values, agency, and motive were located in the world, outside of individual human experience. . . . Personifying corporations—ascribing them with intentions and personality, locating their moral agency at the collective level—is not a religious belief. Nor could the anthropomorphism of corporate conglomerates be considered a characteristic of traditional societies. Yet the legal metaphor of the “natural” corporate person and the moralization of “good” and “bad” trusts explored in this dissertation has more resemblance to an “enchanted” economy than it does to a highly rationalized, individualized, and atomized economic ethos. Corporate capitalism required, and continues to require, the ascription of agency outside of the individual: the treatment of collective organizations as themselves members of and agents in society. Carly R. Knight, “Creatures of the State: Metaphor and Personhood in Legitimating the American Corporation” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2018), 16–17. See also the oeuvre of F. W. Maitland, whose work Ernst Kantorowicz drew from but also wrote in tension with, as well as more recent studies by David Ciepley, Jason Kaufman, and Elizabeth Anderson. F. W. Maitland, State, Trust,

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ern as one in which the triumph of property is linked to the triumph of the bureaucratic organization, and we see that such a world featured the personhood and even the rights of entities who were not in fact persons, would it not make sense to ask about the transition to modernity as the transformation of, eternal recurrence of, or creative destruction of the cultural schema whereby certain actual persons had been endowed with more than one body, persons whose persona was thereby taken to incorporate, and bring into relationship with their actual body, other persons taken to be members of the body politic? To pursue such an investigation requires the acceptance of one presupposition of sociohistorical analysis in the pursuit of doubt about a second. (Both were originally constructed in response to the arguments of political economy.) We begin from the premise that relations of power mix coercion, interest, and legitimacy—that submission to order derives not only from “fear or from motives of expediency,” and not only from a “variety of interests,” but also from “a belief in the legitimate authority [Herrschaftsgewalt] of the source imposing it.” But we question the premise that transitions to modernity in such impositions of order are inflected, in a patterned way that overrides other tendencies and other possibilities with merciless consistency, by a widespread knowledge and acceptance that “no mysterious forces come into play,” and thus that “the world is disenchanted.” and Corporation, ed. David Runciman and Magnus Ryan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David Ciepley, “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 1 (2013): 139–58; Jason Kaufman, “Corporate Law and the Sovereignty of States,” American Sociological Review 73 (2008): 403–25; Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), with an introduction by Stephen Macedo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 28. It is perhaps not widely acknowledged that Joseph Schumpeter’s concept was taken from Werner Sombart’s Die Drei Nationalökonomien, which acknowledges an explicit debt to Friedrich Nietzsche. Here I draw the concept back into a theory of political culture, aesthetics, and artistic creativity. If Schumpeter used the concept to refer to an ongoing economic process, I use it here to refer to a highly creative moment of destruction—a break in history—with the understanding that the process that emerges from the break is simultaneously subject to the eternal recurrence of that which was destroyed. The two concepts were twinned in Nietzsche’s thought, and might be further elaborated as a way to think about continuity and crisis. Hugo Reinert and Erik S. Reinert, “Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter,” in Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) (Boston: Springer, 2006), 55–85; Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 29. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 37. 30. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2014), 129–59. There is an extensive and impor-

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Tensions in Cultural Theories of the Modern As this double citation of one of the central pillars of sociohistorical analysis perhaps foreshadows, I have found that the theories of culture, communication, and power in transitions to modernity that flow through the human sciences tend to lean toward, and then away from, the argument pursued here. With significant and unfortunate simplification, we may propose that there are three axes of thought whose complicities and contrasts with the argument of this book can be brought out. In social theory that emphasizes culture, modernity has been theorized in three ways: as deliberation, as disenchantment, and as itself a mere signifier in projects of domination. D e l i b e r at i o n a n d I t s D i s c o n t e n t s One approach evokes a set of normative commitments of “modernity” and their discontents. Say out loud, in the world of social theory, “the public,” “democracy,” “civility,” or “rationality”—or just utter the proper noun “Habermas”—and the myriad insights of an extended debate pour forth. These arguments concern the emergence of the public sphere and deliberation, on the one hand, and counterpublics and subaltern discourses, on the other. They discuss in reverent tones the rise of access to the vote and constitutionalism (and coffee shops), or they note the violence inherent in the racial contract as the core of modernity. And so a central contradiction in our understanding of modern societies and the revolutions that led to them comes into view: the egalitarian norms of “this violent empire.” The contradiction repeats itself through myriad studies and debates concerning past, present, and future, all in the name of “modern” ideas of rationality, equality, and autonomy, and the distinction between private and public. The historiography of the American Revolution is itself an example of this symbiotic tant theoretical literature on the specific question of enchantment among the moderns. Most recently, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm examines the absence of myth as itself a myth structuring certain aspects of cultural life in western Europe. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he locates the disenchantment thesis with James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Hans Joas confronts Weber more directly, insisting on the continuing power of sacralization. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Hans Joas, Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte von der Entzauberung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017). 31. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2012).

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bifurcation, with that event being interpreted as “either distinctively freeing or hypocritical.” These arguments about deliberation and its discontents share with the hypothesis pursued here an interest in the co-constitution of modernity’s actors and modernity’s others—the debate, interpreted as a whole, attends to how the coffeehouses and salons of the eighteenth century, in which certain ideals about universal humanity became popular, were also places of not only exclusion but also the formation of the codes of alterity. Such codes were surely useful to a general like Anthony Wayne when he went to burn the cornfields of those he took to be subhuman savages. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these codes proved themselves repeatedly capable of being made commensurate with slavery, colonial domination, and racialized science. However, it may be that our understanding of this core contradiction of modernity—between universalism in its ambitions for human equality and domination in its restrictive institutionalization of who gets to be human—is in fact distorted by a dichotomous view of communication and power. For this debate is framed in terms of the normative ideal of horizontal reciprocity and hyperrational deliberation, justified in terms of certain philosophical understandings of democratic norms. It is not about principal and agent, rector and actor, ruler and staff, pragmatic exigency and political myth. Rather, it is a kind of dedication to rationality as a variably accurate descriptor of the modern world that contains within it the possibility of a normative advance in human thinking. If we theorize the birth of the modern as a special kind of value-rationality concerned with equality and the fair compromise between persons equally capable of self-determination, and somehow grasp at the kernel of that rationality as the generative seed of the critical 32. Patrick Griffin, introduction to Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era, ed. Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onus, and Brian Schoen (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 1–18; quotation is from p. 2. 33. Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during US Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). For discussions of the relationship of Immanuel Kant’s modern philosophy to his views on race, and their implications for (broadly Habermasian) critical theory, see Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); for critical theory after the postcolonial critique, see Amy Allen, The End of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 34. Isaac Ariail Reed and Abigail Moore, “Rationality/Rationalization,” in The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, ed. A. Allen and E. Mendieta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 379–86.

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desire to upend domination, we invite the manifest historical record of violence and exclusion as clear counterevidence to our thesis of what makes the modern. But we also fail to understand how “the people” and “the public” provide a new way to organize and justify hierarchy—a new way to run the state, and imagine a fictional person as in fact the author of our actions as actual people. For those who focus on the public sphere, its discontents, and its violently excluded, in other words, “power” is often understood as outside deliberation; this leads to a tendency to understand power as political and economic capacity with ideological accoutrements. It is worthwhile to recall, in the context of this sort of debate, that in 1794 Secretary of War Henry Knox cited “the public” when giving General Anthony Wayne an order, a command passed down through a chain of power in the coming war with the Ohio Indians. Knox expected his order to be followed, and I hazard that it is that expectation which is really interesting for theorizing modernity—by what jerry-rigged assemblage, we should ask, could one expect orders to be followed at such a distance, especially via reference to the ill-defined and still vague “public”? I m m a n e n c e i n D i s e n c h a n t m e n t, D i f f e r e n t i at e d o r F u s e d A second approach concerns itself less with the ideal of a reasoned society and its variable corruption, misuse, and betrayal, and more with the triumph of the instrumental, the mundane, the bureaucratic, and the immanent. This is a story that stretches from the hermeneutics of the earliest Protestants, to the laying of telegraph cables, to twentieth-century state-sponsored hygiene initiatives. Such studies revise, extend, and sometimes renovate entirely an older intellectual history of modernity which takes natural science, particu-

35. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 88–91. See my discussions of authorship in chapter 1 and of Hobbes in chapter 7. 36. Jürgen Habermas’s own appropriation of the multiple modernities paradigm is evidence of this tendency: “Based on the same globalized social infrastructure (whose primary feature is the stubborn orientation to the scientific-technological control of nature and the world, the bureaucratic exercise of power, and the capitalist production of wealth), ‘modernity’ today represents something like a shared arena in which different civilizations encounter one another as they modify this infrastructure in more or less culture-specific ways.” Jürgen Habermas, “Essay on Faith and Knowledge: Postmetaphysical Thinking and the Secular Self-Interpretation of Modernity,” unpublished manuscript on file with author, 25. Cited and discussed in Allen, The End of Progress, 70.

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larly the early modern European intellectual break with scholasticism, as its focal point—“there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution and this is a book about it.” The arguments found in this genre of cultural theory tend toward an understanding of the modern as the birth of poesis, in the specific sense of an understanding of the world as subject to a remaking on terms derived from humans themselves as makers. Such a shift is—implicitly or explicitly, depending on the text—understood as a history of the departure from the transcendental (and, in a different register, from magic, animism, and superstition). Accounts of modernity written in this vein—whether Marxist, Weberian, early Durkheimian, or some combination of the three—tend to take their character from how bureaucrats are out of touch in their abstraction yet worldly and cynical in their political effectiveness, in their ability to force their abstractions into the world, to make “real abstractions.” The disenchantment hypothesis has two renderings that are mirror images of each other: differentiated and fused. In the fused version of disenchantment, the modern transition brings with it a vast immanence of reference, and a capillary network of signs and practices (“techniques,” “tactics”) for securing the obedience of both body and mind—the soul as the cage for the body. In the differentiated version, zones of activity separate, becoming their own arenas of power, defined symbolically and socially, and a metazone of power emerges to manage the relationships between these zones. For example, in field theory, the “metafield” of power regulates exchange rates between different capitals and is often, though not always, occupied by the state. Fused or differentiated, the twinned histori37. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1. 38. Victoria Kahn reads the interest of Weimar intellectuals in early modern texts in this way, and thus constructs her argument that Kantorowicz, in The King’s Two Bodies, “intended to provide an antidote to the misuse of Kantorowicz’s Frederick II . . . the two bodies could morph into the distinction between person and office,” which she links to liberal constitutionalism, which replaces myth with fiction as something made by humans. Eric Santner dissents from this view, insisting that “political theology of every kind involves not only what Kahn refers to as enabling fictions but also, and perhaps more importantly, their more ambivalent and recalcitrant underside of fantasy . . . there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought, though it is surely much more difficult to identify in the absence of the body of a royal personage where it could be focused and dramaturgically elaborated.” Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 58; Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 46–47. 39. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).

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cal figures of this interpretation of the modern are the Prussian bureaucracy and the French civil service, which are seen as bringing cognitive order (and thus organizational capacity, or “power to”) into the world in new, distinctive ways. This capacity for organization, discipline, and audit, however, comes with the steep price of disenchantment, variously understood. As the evaporation of magical explanations from public life proceeds, the modern comes into view; if “nature outfitted with anthropomorphic features” recedes, the human, qua instrumental rationality and value-rationality, can replace it. The degree to which the last two hundred years have been characterized by a certain amount of differentiation of institutional or symbolic logics seems, descriptively speaking, undeniable—whatever “relative autonomy” really means, there is no denying that, for example, the emergence of socalled modern literature in France occurred via the autonomization of art, and so on. Simultaneously as part of the modern, there are also techniques that cross different zones of activity, making it so that some of the time, schools, hospitals, and prisons look alike. But the more tendentious aspect of these theoretical interpretations of modernity is their commitment to the disenchantment thesis, and this causes writers working in and through this interpretation to miss something essential. In this approach to modernity, “culture” is central to the development of “power to” and “power over” in the modern era; but culture as a myth, or as an enchanted tool for action, or as a background that people not only take for granted but also believe in a way that consumes them, is both acknowledged and ignored—it is disavowed. To be sure, we can show, in various ways with various details, how bureaucratic rules create bureaucratic subjects. But does such a showing necessitate a theoretical commitment to the idea that the enhancement of human capacity in “modernity,” the wrapping of the globe in chains of power that shrink time and space, is ultimately traceable to a shift in social cognition toward the scientific understanding of the world, and in particular the opposition between science and magic? To the contrary, it may be possible to more effectively shake and move the human world, not because of one’s superior physics, but because of one’s more appealing fantasies. 40. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 47. 41. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Claudio E. Benzecry, “Curtain Rising, Baton Falling: The Politics of Musical Conducting in Contemporary Argentina,” Theory and Society 35, no. 4 (2006): 445–79. 42. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology 61, Suppl. 1 (1992): 173–205.

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What theories relying on disenchantment cannot fully grasp is not only myth but also its value in shoring up authority in highly contingent imperial ventures, providing an imagined background for the performativity of laws and statutes (especially those acted out far from the reach of the apparatus of the functioning state, or during a time of crisis and reciprocal uncertainty). And so I wish to ask, What do enchanted actions, at the edge of empire, have to tell us about the construction of the modern world? We have seen in chapter 6 how Anthony Wayne played a large part in forging the idea of “the people” as the location of sovereignty as he fought (and wrote treaties) on the American frontier. He and his superiors in the federal chain of power confronted—and violently overcame—the problems of running an empire: enforcing contracts, controlling the behavior of soldiers on and off the field, and so on. In so doing, Wayne and Henry Knox were motivated and studious (they made precise logs of all supplies), but not disenchanted. Rather, they reached for all kinds of myths precisely because getting anyone to do anything amidst the chaos of the edge was extraordinarily difficult. To bind rectors to actors, myth turned out to be quite useful indeed, particularly insofar as myth suffused the world of acting “in the name of the people.” But this is to say that these myths were not so much treated as a tool but rather experienced as the frame within which alliances could be built and projects pursued. Contramodernity A third approach doubts the very utility of modernity and modern as terms of art for the human sciences. Rather than grasping at the essence of modernity, the task of the analyst becomes, then, to investigate “modernity” as a series of claims, sans an analysis of transitions to modernity from something that came before to something that structures the now. It is an antinarrative goal, much abetted by the postcolonial critique of classical social theory; the project then becomes one of removing modernity from the analytic and normative ambitions of social theory, but retaining it as an important point of empirical cultural analysis. For this approach suspects that on the one hand, social scientists themselves must be interpreted as rendering, partially through their own attractions to one myth or another, a self-reflection about their own eras (and this is the source of modernity as a fetishized term), and on the other, modernity is, qua social phenomenon, little more than a particularly effective ruse performed for the dominated by the dominator. Jeffery C. Alexander argues that out of a sense of “instability, of the immi-

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nent transitoriness of the world,” scholars are induced to introduce “myth into social theory. Even though we have no idea what our historical possibilities will be, every theory of social change must theorize not only the past but the present and future as well. We can do so only in a nonrational way, in relation not only to what we know but what we believe, hope, and fear.” On the basis of this position, Alexander analyzes the modern (and “modernization”) in terms of “code, narrative and explanation,” the point being that theories of the modern are claims in a space of intellectual combat, parallel to claims to modernity made by artists and politicians. “Modernity” is, for Alexander, social theory’s own version of code and narrative, a rendering of a reality in terms at once ideological and speculative. In a different discipline, as part of a different argument, Homi Bhabha comes to a similar conclusion: “It is to establish a sign of the present, of modernity, that is not that ‘now’ of transparent immediacy, and to found a form of social individuation where communality is not predicated on a transcendent becoming, that I want to pose my questions of contra-modernity: what is modernity in those colonial conditions where its imposition is itself the denial of historical freedom, civic autonomy and the ‘ethical’ choice of refashioning?” In this focus on the sign, Bhabha, too, invites a reflection on “modernity” as a signifier of power in certain settings. Along with this signifier, we might say, comes an entire semiotic toolbox, and the question then becomes the degree to which this set of signs/tools is, as it were, an elaborate system to convince the world that some must wait to accrue freedom, and in the meantime be 43. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Fin de siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London: Verso Books, 1995), 9–10. When the essay “Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo” appears in The Meanings of Social Life, published more than ten years later, Alexander modulates the sentence in an interesting way: “We can do so only in normative expressive ways, in relation not only to what we know but to what we believe, hope, and fear.” Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2006), 196. 44. Alexander, Fin de siècle Social Theory, 10. 45. Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture was published the same year as Alexander’s “Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo,” which first appeared in the Zeitschrift für Soziologie 23, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 165–98, before being included in Fin de siècle Social Theory. Bruno Latour’s Nous n’avons jamais été moderne appeared in French in 1991. Alexander was a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études in Paris in 1993–94. Each of these texts constitutes a reaction to the broadly Marxist-historicist framing of “postmodernity” as a separate era in history, and in the history of capitalism in particular. In contrast, these texts analyze claims to modernity as a space of empirical study requiring a different sort of theorization. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 46. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 241; emphasis in the original.

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exploited by those “with more modernity.” Modernity is the ideology of a waiting room. Finally, Bruno Latour proposes an anthropology of the moderns as enchanted by their own claims to separate natural from human, and both from the divine. In so doing, he argues, they created the overabundance of hybrids that give some sort of structure to the era that claims modernity. In other words, the only thing modern about the modern world is that its bizarre codings of modern and antimodern produce more and more of what a strict modernist philosophy cannot comprehend, but which all human groupings in fact have—nature-society hybrids. If we join Alexander’s historical-cultural sociology of intellectuals with Bhabha’s postcolonial intervention and Latour’s tracing of unintended consequences, we arrive at an account wherein modernity just is some people (intellectual-sounding people, administrators, bureaucrats, knowledge workers, well-meaning psychologists and anthropologists who take expensive flights from the metropole to the colony) insisting to some other people (the previous generation’s intellectuals, the administrated, the dominated, the colonized, those who are classed and categorized as unable to be torn away from their supposed “nature”) that the former are modern and the latter are not. And the implications follow from there. This perspective has a great deal to offer us as we try, again, to unpack and comprehend transitions to modernity. Nonetheless I shall try to hold full nominalism about modernity at bay—precisely because of the hermeneutic complicity between social theory and those it interprets. For while there may be a way in which, within the modern age, the human sciences operate with an overarching tendency to study humans as “a strange empiricotranscendental doublet,” it is nonetheless possible that the social basis for this doublet can be studied as a set of economic, political, and cultural transformations and transitions, with the understanding that the very contestation of the terms economic, political, and cultural will be included in their studies. This, presumably, was the reason Michel Foucault did historical research on the emergence of the conditions for the “attitude of modernity.” 47. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, new ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 48. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. 49. See discussions of this issue in Allen, The End of Progress. 50. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, a translation of Les Mots et les choses (New York: Vintage, 1994), 318. 51. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 32–50.

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Furthermore, one can study transformation and transition without presuming progress. The central objection of contramodernity theory—an objection I find compelling, and which has recently appeared in sociological theories of race—concerns how the concept of modernity has tended to conflate the understandings of break, crisis, and progress. This is what Dipesh Chakrabarty cannot abide—“that was what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonized to wait.” In a similar move, Alexander rejected Parsonian modernization theory for a transhistorical—and therefore unburdened with telos—concept of civil society. But it is not necessary to understand the breach in politics constituted by the three great Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century—or other breaches in other places, breaches that may or may not cite 1776, 1789, or 1791—as bequeathing anything like progress to the world. Rather, one might examine whether, in such breaks and crises, affordances are created, certain dynamic conditions for world-making are introduced, certain possibilities are opened up and others closed down. And it might be worth noting these dynamics in their myriad histories, particularly if they, in some small way, set the contours of our own attempts in the twenty-first century to grasp at the possibility of freedom by writing a history of domination. It is worth mentioning in this regard that the letters that tried, in their philosophy and in their orders for violence, to bring into being the federal government of the United States of America in the 1790s did not engage in a masquerade; public reason was not offered as a cover for white supremacy and the pursuit of capital. Rather, the latter two phenomena were quite publicly on display. The discourses of the era were not a veil being pulled over other, more secret projects (as books that venerate the American Founding Fathers do today). Rather, what the letters reveal is attempt after attempt to marshal certain signs as the enchanted replacement for the King’s seal, the King’s interest; they 52. Louise Seamster and Victor Ray, “Against Teleology in the Study of Race: Toward the Abolition of the Progress Paradigm,” Sociological Theory 36, no. 4 (2018): 315–42. 53. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8. 54. Robert Antonio still finds in The Civil Sphere “traces” of “Hegelian historicist presuppositions”; Alexander responds that “I am committed to the idea of progress ideologically, but in reality it happens less frequently than the cheerleaders for modernity would have us believe, cheers that have only sometimes succeeded in drowning out the cries of those who have suffered modernity’s progress . . . modern, seemingly democratic societies are filled with barbaric contradictions [which] become lodged inside the sphere of solidarity itself.” Robert J. Antonio, “Locating the Civil Sphere,” Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2007): 601–13, quotation is from p. 602; Jeffrey C. Alexander, “On the Interpretation of the Civil Sphere: Understanding and Contention in Contemporary Social Science,” Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2007): 641–59, quotation is from p. 643.

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tried to render a worldview that somehow departed from Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha but nonetheless kept certain fathers (literal and metaphorical, usually white) in charge. They applied these signs to the highly practical problems of securing agents and projects; they used these signs in rule, violence, alliance, and extraction. My hypothesis is that such letters—and, I think, others like them, in other times and other places far removed from the late eighteenthcentury Atlantic—were engaged in repeated attempts to create a metaphysics of rule to replace that of the King’s (or Queen’s, or Emperor’s) Two Bodies. That which humans have come up with in this creative destruction has been extraordinarily varied. This variation is not distinguished by a strong tendency toward rationality or a trend toward disenchantment, but it is also not just another code among many. The new capacities and dominations of modernity, rather, derive from the new vistas of practicality opened by the creation of landscapes of meaning in which to comprehend rule—vistas which, as I have tried to show, address in varied and new ways the relationship between authority, authorization, and authorship to solve practical problems of delegation via creative signification. Biopower as the Replacement for the King’s Two Bodies These tensions in cultural theories of the modern—tensions bequeathed by a tendency to comprehend the modern in terms of its imminent rationalities— are the context in which a certain thesis has emerged: that the biopolitical is the replacement for the King’s Two Bodies, and thus that the second body of the King becomes, in transitions to modernity, the cultivated obsession with the health of the individual bodies, on the one hand, and the governance of the population, on the other. This thesis is symptomatic of the problematic addressed here; it articulates a felt need to consider transitions to modernity as the creative destruction of the King’s Two Bodies, but it is also in some deep way contrary to what the investigations I have pursued have revealed. Because this thesis—as developed in the work of Eric Santner in dialogue with Victoria Kahn—is so similar in focus, but so distinct in argument, from what I argue, it is worth quoting Santner at length and without ellipses. My hypothesis is that the complex symbolic structures and dynamics of sovereignty described by Kantorowicz in the context of medieval and early modern European monarchies do not simply disappear from the space of politics once the body of the king is no longer available as the primary incarnation of the principle of sovereignty; rather these structures and dynamics—along 55. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

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with their attendant impasses—“migrate” into a new location that thereby assumes a turbulent and disorienting semiotic density previously concentrated in the “strange material and physical presence” of the king. A central problem for secular modernity is how to account for the flesh once it no longer functions as that which, so to speak, “fattens” the one who occupies the place of power and authority, elevating the body that thereby comes to figure as its naturally—because supernaturally—appointed caretaker, the one charged with guaranteeing the health of this element for all the others (who thereby become his subjects). As I have been arguing, the discourses and practices that we now group under the heading of “biopolitics” come to be charged with these duties, with the care taking of the sublime (but also potentially abject) flesh of the new bearer of the principle of sovereignty, the People. The dimension of the flesh comes, in a word, to be assimilated to the plane of the health, fitness, and wellness of bodies and populations that must, in turn, be obsessively measured and tested. But if my hunch is right, that would mean that before biopolitics emerged as such, it was, in some sense, already on the scene as the political theology of kingship.

Santner’s study contains a careful and intellectually powerful reading of Ernst Kantorowicz that emphasizes the concept of the body of Christ in the texts of St. Paul, and the slow transfer, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth century, of the connotations and denotations of this multiform concept to the realm of politics in the West. Santner then argues that the King was thereby endowed with surplus flesh—the stuff, simultaneously, of Freudian fantasy and political obsession with health. The “degradation” of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard II is, then, about “bare life,” and the closeness of the sovereign to the “creature,” the monster, the beast—or to homo sacer. And so the two bodies of the people that replace the King’s Two Bodies are first, the managed and immunized population, and second, the excluded and stateless person. It is an extraordinary reading, one that emerges from the branch of heterodox Foucauldian theory that refuses Foucault’s advice to cut off the head of the King in social and political theory. Several aspects of the long passage quoted above are worthy of note. There is a move away from the image of

56. Santner, The Royal Remains, 33–34; emphasis in original. 57. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). 58. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 1:81–89.

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kingship and toward a notion of flesh that proposes to be about materiality— though always materiality as subject to fantasy. The effect of this, over the course of Santner’s book, is to undermine the autonomy of the metaphor of the body, and replace it with the flesh of the body as somehow itself “interpretation” (or a replacement for interpretation). There is also in this passage an invocation of “secular modernity,” and thus the disenchantment hypothesis. And there is at the core of this argument a historical telos, that the social changes that shook the Atlantic World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had as their clear and distinct endpoint the emergence and eventual dominance of biopolitics. And so what was once the reverence of the King was, it turns out, merely a stage on the road to biosovereignty in its hypermodern form. Santner’s magnificent argument inherits the flaws of the speech genre in which it operates. It accepts biopower as the obvious description of modern power—as the minimal interpretation of the modern world that needs to be considered and explained via theoretical interpretation. It also accepts the claims of certain politicians, policy makers, and writers that the modern really is a world of immanence, without referent to anything sacred or transcendental; this immanence is read back into various transitions to modernity, and used to account for the emergence of, and social theory’s need for, Freudian formats of interpretation, in a world where the illusion of religion

59. Later in the text, Santner claims that what was the enchanted second body of the king gets “under the skin” of people in modernity. He disavows disenchantment, but only via reference to “the flesh.” It is an interesting inflection point in the theory, which I think recurs in other work that takes Foucault as a founder of discursivity—the disavowal of hermeneutics, which Foucault attacked even during his archaeological phase: “To speak about the thought of others, to try to say what they have said has, by tradition, been to analyse the signified. But must the things said, elsewhere and by others, be treated exclusively in accordance with the play of signifier and signified, as a series of themes present more or less implicitly to one another? Is it not possible to make a structural analysis of discourses that would evade the fate of commentary by supposing no remainder, nothing in excess of what has been said, but only the fact of its historical appearance?” Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2001), xvii; emphasis added. 60. It may be an especially long road. Andreas Kalvyas’s criticisms of Giorgio Agamben are relevant here. He notes that Agamben’s “biopolitical body, which cannot be escaped since it cannot be negated or even transformed, seems literally to hover outside time.” Even if one does not take Agamben’s position, it is nonetheless remarkable to note how many texts written with or against Michel Foucault take for granted as true the emergence of biopolitics as the central fact of “modernity.” Andreas Kalvyas, “The Sovereign Weaver,” in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 113.

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is decimated. Furthermore, the obsession with the bodies of Kings and Queens and their children that marked the early modern era becomes a preview to the obsession with the population as a whole, rather than evidence for the way in which the familial state worked as a metaphor to solve agency problems. It would be more in line with the historical evidence to forgo the teleology of biopower, and trace instead the destruction of the King’s Two Bodies as something that affords the emergence of certain forms of biologization, among other possibilities, but not only and necessarily that. For to read the politics of technique as replacing a politics of alliance, to read biopower as the inheritor of the King’s Two Bodies, is to reduce the modern to stateless persons and the rise of homo laborans; it is to exclude social movements, worldbuilding as a collective activity, and civil disobedience as also afforded by the creative destruction of the King’s Two Bodies. That is my concern: the world in which “civil disobedients are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association” and thus in which civil disobedience that disobeys the law could nonetheless be interpreted as embodying its spirit is also a world afforded us by this remaking of sovereignty. Nonetheless Santner bursts the boundaries set by taking Foucault as a founder of discursivity. He grasps that the metaphor of the body politic— whether St. Paul talking about the church or Shakespeare rendering the politics of royals—cannot be reduced to its physical messiness. Certainly Foucault, too, saw this as an urgent matter. In his opening lecture of 1975 at the Collège de France, he engaged in a significant excursus on the “grotesque” or “Ubu-esque” as a “precise category of historico-political analysis.” The essence of his argument is that the figuration of the leader as “odious, despicable or ridiculous”—a “vile sovereignty”—“has a long history in the structures and political functioning of our societies.” If bureaucratic rule, in Western societies since the nineteenth century, has an aspect of the “administrative grotesque,” then this is a re-rendering of “a functional feature of Roman imperial power.” And, Foucault continues, it is evident in certain twentieth-century leaders as well. 61. See discussions of this “need” in Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 62. Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics, and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 49–102; quotation is from p. 96. See also Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

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The grotesque character of someone like Mussolini was absolutely inherent to the mechanism of power. . . . I do not think that explicitly showing power to be abject, despicable, Ubu-esque or simply ridiculous is a way of limiting its effects and of magically dethroning the person to whom one gives the crown. Rather, it seems to me to be a way of giving a striking form of expression to the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function its full rigor and at the extreme point of its rationality even when in the hands of someone who is effectively discredited. This problem of the infamy of sovereignty, of the discredited sovereign, is after all Shakespeare’s problem . . . in our society, from Nero, perhaps the founding figure of the despicable sovereign, down to the little man with trembling hands crowned with forty million deaths who, from deep in his bunker, asks only for two things, that everything else above him be destroyed and that he be given chocolate cakes until he bursts, you have the whole outrageous functioning of the despicable sovereign.

This vein of argument in Foucault contrasts starkly with the immanent world of biopolitics and population management he presents elsewhere. It is a break, furthermore, from any easy explanation of modern power in terms of disenchantment, since Foucault proposes not only that the grotesque contains a kind of magic in itself but also that this magic iterates itself through the entire history of the West, from ancient Rome to the present. There is, furthermore, a focus here on the image of the leader as grotesque—the reference to Hitler’s final days makes this clear—and on the binding effectiveness of such imagery for the “mechanism” of power. This is to say that bureaucratic agents can be bound to a project via their reception of the image of the leader. Foucault is proposing, with his usual combination of counterintuition and sly appropriation, that the birth of the bureaucrat be placed in a series of enchanted figurations of power, from which power itself could be forged. The passage, in other words, suggests that rather than a sheer plane of immanence, the modern contains within it a proliferation of second and third bodies attached to functionaries, soldiers, elected presidents, and dictators, rendered profane and sacred in their figurations of disgust and glory, and compelling (even charismatic) in being so rendered. And it is these images that help forge the “mechanism” of power—what I would call chains of power and their representation. If we think of modernity as the creative destruction and eternal recur63. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Picador, 2003) 2:11–13; emphasis added. The discussion of Hitler’s bunker references Fest’s classic biography: Joachim Fest, Hitler (Orlando: Harcourt, 2002).

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rence of the King’s Two Bodies, then what we are drawn to is an analysis of variations in the significations from which hierarchical chains of power can be constructed. This provides a viewpoint from which certain phenomena, previously puzzling, begin to make sense. Power in Modernity: Bodies We know that in the arc of modern Western philosophy, the constitutive fantasy that the mind is principal and the body agent recurs and recurs. And we know also that in certain transitions to modernity, specific bodily differences or similarities were rendered not only the focus of obsessive knowledge but also the basis for the redistribution of authority, power, and violence in society. We may now hazard a connection between these two phenomena— namely, that behind them both sits the appealing idea that individuals and groups may be sent and bound to work on one’s behalf based on the sharing, or not sharing, of a body. The rendering of the individual into mind and body and the parsing of individuals in terms of bodily features—features that might be sculpted or remade in certain instances, or doom humans to subordinate status in other instances—both stand as imitations of this rendering of connection. My hypothesis is that these renderings of the world were constructed in part as replacements for the links established by King and Crown in intertwining agency and sovereignty. If building a racial state requires the establishment of certain white solidarities across class; if controlling reproduction and population requires the signification of women’s bodies as irruptively emotional and possessed of the desire to destroy deliberation; if the destructions of the laboring body, as it is enchained to profit and the speed of the machine, produce a longing for order and an escape from freedom; then in some way these modern dominations emerge into an open space left by the creative destruction of a cultural system for intertwining domination and delegation. They are, that is, linked, not positively but negatively in the affordances provided by the end of a great chain of being. But this argument takes as its background, and requires for its further pursuit, an elevation of an understanding of the metaphor of the body alongside the two understandings familiar to us from social theory. The first understanding constitutes the history of modernity as the history of the productive body, the body as producer of value, if also the body as hungry consumer and source of desire for consumption. Such a history 64. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy, trans. Richard Langston et al. (New York: Zone Books, 2014).

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understands the coming of modernity as the class struggle over the wealth produced by the newly productive body; renders the feudal world and the ancien régime in terms of the recalcitrance of the peasantry and the pressing demands of the nobility for even more surplus; and finds early industrialization in the plantations of Saint-Domingue. The second understanding constitutes the history of modernity as the history of violence against bodies and, inversely, creations by them—including of course the creation of more bodies. (Feminist science fiction offers future solutions to—or dystopias based on modernity’s enhancement of—the control of women’s bodies pursued in the name of “protecting unborn children.”) This concern intersects with the study of the use of bodies in striving for productivity and profit; but the focus is on the social tracks of embodied domination, on the one hand, and embodiment as a continual source of human creativity, on the other. We would find herein the story of biopolitics, but other stories as well. In counterpoint to these two tropes, we should place a third—a social theory of the body as a metaphor and image useful for alliance building, persuasion, and order-giving and order-taking between individuals and groups of humans. This understanding has less of a material home in actual human bodies, though it surely intersects those understandings that do. Instead, it proposes a sociohistory of the use of the body as a sign in the communication about, and collective arrival at solutions to, problems of acting together. This history of the body might appear, from the perspective of the first two understandings, as not a history of actual bodies at all. It would instead be a history of the “body of law,” the “body politic,” “bodies of thought”—to the point that the whole venture might begin to look like the pursuit of one dead metaphor after another, across time and space. But my hunch is that engaging and investigating these metaphors will reveal, from a certain distance, a useful interpretation of the first two histories. In particular, it will show us how the changes in the metaphorical use of the body entailed certain changes in the pursuit of projects, and the building up of projects of projects, with immense consequences for actual bodies.

65. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). 66. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Lowe and Brydone Printers, 1956); Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the ‘Genius of the Species’” and “The Origin of Our Concept of ‘Knowledge,’” in The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 297–302.

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Power in Modernity: Politics A central story of this book has been the transformation of politics in the eastern part of the North American continent, interpreted from the perspective of the mixing of authority, power, and violence at the edge of empire. Those mixings, I sought to show, were the stage for a reconfiguration of delegation and domination. A set of disruptive performances sought to install the people’s two bodies as the orienting frame for political action in the early American republic. This frame had two figurations. The first was a rendering of popular sovereignty, evident in Herman Husband’s millenarian sermons. In those sermons, the body politic was to be protected from corruption by a pyramidal system of elections, designed to ensure that no citizen would ever have to vote for anyone but another small farmer that the citizen knew face to face (he—and it was a he, for Husband—could see his neighbor’s body and face). This localism posited the individual citizen as sacred in his first body, and rendered the second body of the people as the emergent effect of this sacred trust of smallholder democracy. The New Jerusalem of America would be constructed, in Husband’s and other biblical republicanisms, out of the popular self-taught knowledge of those who eschewed fame and fortune. This combination of millenarianism and Jeffersonianism was manifest in the social drama of the Whiskey Rebellion. The second figuration of “the people’s two bodies” in the early American republic involved a fierce and violent policing of the edge of who was in, and who was out, of the relation of delegation implied by elections. This policing was manifest in the newspaper interpretations of the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville, whose violence was publicly directed at the “Indian savage” to be removed, and twinned with the violent coercion and exploitation of the enslaved enemy within. In this vision, each American solider on the frontier was, in some small way, possessed of the second body of the people—carrying the justified violence of a state “for the people.” And we know well that the same constitution that enshrined “the people” as the replacement for the King as the origin point for right action also restricted quite explicitly who was construed a full person in American society, able to pursue projects via participation in chains of power and their representation. This interpretation of the historical record finds resonance in other instances of sociohistorical analysis of the trajectories of American modernity, particularly in Aziz Rana’s rendering of the political arc of the United States as the “two faces of American freedom.” Rana’s argument is that “what distinguishes the [American] national experience . . . is the way in which a robust ideal of republican freedom emerged through practices of external coercion

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and control,” something he seeks to bring to bear on “the difficulties and possibilities implicit in the contemporary moment.” In his analysis “Revolutionary Politics and the Populist Alternative,” he concludes that while populism offered a dramatic reconstruction of republican freedom, drawing from localist and Rousseauian traditions, one should still underscore how wedded this account remained to the imperial status quo . . . these arguments worked to entrench both settler supremacy and the rigid divide between Anglo citizens and marginalized groups, justifying a particularly intense commitment to Indian expropriation . . . the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, which ended indigenous control in the Ohio country and thus opened it to Anglo settlement, was perhaps the single largest factor in dissipating the intensity of frontier antipathy to coastal power.

Similar arguments appear in the studies of Alex Gourevitch and Anthony Bogues.

* But there are further and varied replacements for the King’s Two Bodies. In the early American republic, Jeffersonians like Herman Husband were enamored with the French Revolution; some millenarians in the United States even saw the rise of Napoleon as a sign of the times. This was, to be sure, seeing through a glass darkly; Jacobin politics were never fully present in the United States. But the Jacobin dimension of modernity is itself an attempt to replace the King’s Two Bodies with a different myth as a frame for making delegations and judging domination. In the twentieth century, both fundamentalist and communist regimes (e.g. the USSR after 1917, Iran after 1979) 67. Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 129–30. 68. Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010). 69. In particular, his march into the Vatican confirmed the Protestant meaning of the American and French Revolutions. Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 170; for Great Britain, see Stuart Semmel, “British Uses for Napoleon,” MLN 120, no. 4 (September 2005): 737–41. 70. S. N. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

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are interpretable as the result of “distinctive Jacobin movements”—as having inherited Maximilien Robespierre’s eschatology. For each of the movements had “a very strong salvationist vision or gospel,” which combined an impetus to protest with “the construction of a new ontological definition of reality, with a total world view rooted in the respective salvationist vision.” This salvation was to take place “in this world, in the present.” Jacobinism aims for a total transformation of “the symbols of collective—and personal—identity, of the institutional structure of the society, and . . . the establishment of a new social order, rooted in the revolutionary universalistic ideological tenets, in principle transcending any primordial, national, or ethnic units . . . even if in fact many of them developed as part of national reactions to Western imperialism and expansion in its different forms.” Whether the new society is viewed as the completion of the project of Enlightenment or the upending of its very premises, the Jacobin dimension evidences a “very low threshold of tolerance for ambiguity on both personal and collective levels.” In place of the sovereign’s two bodies, Jacobins propose to create a perfect social order on earth, and in so doing are often drawn to the concept of “the people”—for via the revolution, the last shall be first. The meticulous and total rebuilding of society can, in Jacobinism, only be known and grasped by certain initiates who are not fooled by the corruption of the old world, and these initiates form the advance guard of the revolution. (This rendering of sacred understanding is an old one: if Moses can hear God, the actual people are kept at bay, away from the mountain.) Jacobinism retains from the sovereigns it replaces (and often murders) the certainty of the word from on high—mystical, difficult to follow, but always right. Members of the advance guard are the persons in whom, in theory and in practice, the first body of the people meets the second, the new corpus mysticum—or they are such as long as they are interpreted by enough of their followers as acting with rectitude. The leader of the people who also is the people, who contains the people’s second body, must be upright, irreproachable, l’incorruptible. Jacobinism as a replacement for the King’s Two Bodies has certain notable features that emerge as patterns through its long and varied history in the modern era. It can create very strong ties between rectors and actors, insofar as the cause itself becomes a kind of shared spirit for the bodies of revolutionaries, and especially when the concrete bodies of revolutionaries are subject to violence. Strength of ties in times of stress allows chains of command to 71. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution, 106, 107, 109. 72. Michel Foucault’s controversial writings on the Iranian Revolution are interesting in this regard. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender

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flow with extraordinary efficiency, and soldiers to give their lives willingly— who could doubt the effectiveness of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in comparison with the Shah’s army? But the Jacobin dimension also suffers from the difficulties that come with the paranoid style, due to the gnosticism of its vision. The emphasis on certainty and intolerance for ambiguity—the attempt, we may say, to mimic the sovereign as singular agent of the fictional person of the state—means that movements and regimes that operate within the Jacobin dimension are vulnerable to sectarianism and the phenomenon of “near pollution,” with its attendant purges. Finally, the tendency of certain revolutionary movements in modernity to endow certain leaders with extraordinary charismatic authority, based on their virtuous representation of the people—and despite their constant insistence that it is the revolutionary masses who are the ultimate rector—also exemplifies this sovereign mimesis. Who needs a sovereign (or a bible) if one has a little red book?

* If the Jacobin dimension of modernity pursues a mimesis of the (fantasy of) the unified sovereign, the Girondin dimension of modernity seeks to allow ambiguity, compromise, and negotiation, albeit within an internal space of civility guaranteed by certain solidarities—solidarities that are themselves exclusive. That is to say that one can also interpret liberal political modernity— and in particular its anxieties and exclusions—as taking its dynamics from the creative destruction of the King’s Two Bodies; liberal republicanism also engages in “the struggle for authorship which ensue[s] once the king [is] dead.” and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Corey McCall, “Ambivalent Modernities: Foucault’s Iranian Writings Reconsidered,” Foucault Studies 15 (2013): 27–51; Wisam Alshaibi, “The Intellectual Destroyer: Michel Foucault and The Iranian Revolution” (Undergraduate Honors Thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2015). 73. In the Iranian Revolution, the Shah’s army, seen as the bad agents of a rector who was himself but the agent of an even worse rector (the United States), was overwhelmed by rebel troops and eventually was forced to declare its neutrality. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was established via decree by Ayatollah Khomeini on May 5, 1979. 74. Eric Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint: “The Political Religions,” “The New Science of Politics,” and “Science, Politics, and Gnosticism,” vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. with an introduction by Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). 75. Philip Smith, “Of ‘Near Pollution’ and Non-linear Cultural Effects: Reflections on Masahiro Mori and the Uncanny Valley,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2, no. 3 (2014): 329–47. 76. Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 77. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 12.

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In political theory, it is Carole Pateman’s rendering of the social contract as the sexual contract that makes this argument; it becomes clear as well in the feminist historiography of the French Revolution. Liberal political modernity was sown in the space left open by the loss of the King’s Two Bodies, along with the anxieties and opportunities for men created by that loss. For, a central response to John Locke’s treatises was fear of sexual chaos. Writers who attacked Locke emphasized their certainty that, if Locke’s attack on Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha prevailed, society would break down into a wild and uncontrolled series of acts of sex and violence—a sexual state of nature. The solution of the liberals to this unbearable and unfounded anxiety was to imagine government as a contract between men who were old enough to no longer be under the control of their fathers, but who shared a body with their wives and children—the body of the family, which men represented in public. The sexual contract, then, was founded on the public-private divide being drawn in such a way that (1) women were relegated to the private side, domesticated; and (2) men were citizen-actors in the street, but kingly-rectors in their own homes. In this figuration of modern power, the band of brothers is secured by the second body of homophily, such that a citizen can, by grant of his male body, have two bodies. The first, “natural,” individual body has a series of specifications that render it individual: not only a class location but an occupation, a network of friends and family, a set of consumption preferences, and so on. The second body of the liberal individual links him to all other male citizens. This link constitutes a recognition of the first body of the citizen as sacred (rights civil, political, and social), a recognition of reciprocal equality in political voice for men across class locations, and a recognition of the contract to not intervene on each other’s domestic rule. This legitimation of power in politics and society requires certain cultural prerequisites to take on the feeling of “naturalness.” It is premised on the rendering of women as actors in the moment that they make a marriage contract—when they participate in the choice of a particular man to marry— but not before or after: “Women, their bodies and bodily passions, represent the ‘nature’ that must be controlled and transcended if social order is to be created and sustained . . . women’s relations to the social world must always 78. Pateman, The Sexual Contract; Lynn Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 2013); Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 79. T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays, with an introduction by Seymour Martin Lipset (New York: Praeger, 1973); Margaret R. Somers, “Rights, Relationality, and Membership: Rethinking the Making and Meaning of Citizenship,” Law and Social Inquiry 19, no. 1 (1994): 63–112.

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be mediated through men’s reason; women’s bodies must always be subject to men’s reason and judgements if order is not to be threatened.” Rendered as dangerous to social order by cultural interpretation, the female body then requires removal from the space of reasoned deliberation and compromise; in the fantasies of the liberal republic, there are no female Girondins, even though in actual politics there always are. The work of Pateman and her interlocutors reveals not only the flaws in the normative ideal of society-by-contract but the myths and morality that make up the noncontractual elements of contract in transitions to modernity. The degree to which “sharing a body” (or not) occurs as a basis for the ties that bind and the authorization of action is, then, a matter not only of law but of cultural imagery, part of the moral background of action.

* Fascism, known for its obsessions with bodies and their uses, pursues radical homogeneity in the body politic via the violent exclusion of persons with bodies that do not fit. Its adoration of hierarchy and its cult of authoritarian leadership can also be interpreted as emerging from the felt problem of lacking the King’s Two Bodies—the problem of securing delegation and legitimating certain forms of domination while profaning others. Fascist intellectuals develop a worldview according to which mass society and capitalist “civilization” (or “liberal democracy”) have destroyed the link between authorship and authority; they propose that the sudden action of a true, new elite, hidden until now, will author a new world. And such intellectuals fantasize that liberals and leftists, as avatars of modernity, have somehow ruined their lives and made them other. Amidst an ambient background of malaise 80. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 100–101. 81. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 2014). 82. Gabriel Abend, The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 83. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936). 84. Not only before the Nazi era, but during and after, did Carl Schmitt interpret himself as other: “Schmitt viewed himself as a victim, first of the Nazis (though it was never exactly clear in what way he was their victim, other than that they failed to triumph), and subsequently of the Allies, particularly in the form of his interrogator, Robert Kempner, a Prussian-Jewish émigré who returned to Germany as a prosecutor at Nuremberg.” Jeffrey K. Olick, “In the Ashes of Disgrace: Guilt versus Shame Revisited,” in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Gino, and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 68–90; quotation is from pp. 84–85. For a reading of Schmitt’s journals,

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and despair, they emerge to claim a radically conservative solution to the lack of the King’s Two Bodies and the dearth of rule by fathers. It is against this landscape of meaning that Carl Schmitt wrote of the importance of the discretion that accrued to judges; of the need for a sovereign to use his own judgment to decide both that there is an emergency and what to do about it; and of the grounding of all political concepts in the theological—a triptych of concerns that suggests rather strongly a particular kind of replacement for the King’s Two Bodies. In his book on Hobbes, published in 1938, Schmitt gave intellectual expression to the resentments that drove the Nazi revolution and regime. He first linked the emergence of modern, Weberian bureaucracy to the death of divine kingship as an ordered format of rule. He then preached about the inevitable collapse of liberal democracy, which he called a “fool’s paradise” with no real legitimacy. Into this breach, placed in the larger context of German intellectuals’ (variable) complicities with the Nazi regime and the question of German guilt, see Jeffrey K. Olick, In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 85. The intellectual world from which radical conservatives emerged was swimming in “antimodernist, antipositivist, antiscientific, antidemocratic, etc., statements promulgated by German professors in response to the crisis, not of culture, as they argued, but of their own cultural capital.” This was a world in which certain university professors and graduate students began to see themselves as “other” to scientific and liberal civilization, and to see capitalism as a foreign import—or imposition—from Britain and France. Ernst Kantorowicz participated in a particular romanticist version of this world as a young man, as part of the circle of the mystical poet Stefan George, for whom he authored Frederick the Second as a search for “the secret Germany.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194–1250 (New York: F. Ungar, 1957). 86. Carl Schmitt, Gesetz und Urteil: Eine Untersuchung sum Problem der Rechtspraxis (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009 [1912]); Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity Press, distributed by John Wiley and Sons, 2013 [1921]); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. and with an introduction by Georg Schwab, with a new foreword by Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [1922]). On Schmitt’s interest in the early modern moment of sovereignty, see Kahn, The Future of Illusion. 87. Schmitt writes that “in the eighteenth century the leviathan as magnus homo, as the godlike sovereign person of the state, was destroyed from within. . . . But his work, the state, survived him in the form of a well-organized executive, army, and police as well as administrative and judicial apparatuses and well-working, professionally trained bureaucracy. To an increasing extent the state was perceived as a mechanism and a machine . . . law, too, changed and became . . . a technical instrument that was intended to make calculable the administration of state power.” Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. Georg Schwab and Erna Hilfstein, with an introduction by Georg Schwab and a new foreword by Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [1938]), 65. 88. Schmitt, 65.

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he could only imagine one solution: an entirely homogeneous demos could delegate to a single sovereign, who, because he was of the body of the people, would be trusted and endowed with absolute power. In this way would the dictator’s second body be born of the body of the people. It is a figuration that is still with us. Power in Modernity: Authorship The epigraph from Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of this chapter cites Brutus’s pain at the murder of his friend in the pursuit of a republican Rome. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a performance of the performance of founding violence—the destruction of intimate ties so as to destroy Caesarism and to put in its place a (version of) the body of the people. Caesar’s question is one of authorship—are you, too, author of this violent act? But we may now see that this opens onto a question which includes Hamlet as well. The political cultures that emerge from transitions to modernity are iterated and varying attempts to replace the sign of the King with the sign of something else whose mark, appropriately distributed through chains of power, will enable the organization of action in concert. This enables a certain view on “modern” political culture, which I have tried to develop here. However, the human natality and plurality called forth by attempts to replace the sign of the King also invite a less obviously political set of meditations on modernity, one more focused on social life as a whole. For the dislocations and transformations of transitions to modernity pose, in new and eerie ways, a very old human question: What does it mean to be the author of our own actions? The iconoclasm of Protestant cultures, traced by Max Weber in the texts of Richard Baxter and Benjamin Franklin, has a notably individualist solution to this problem of whether one’s actions are one’s own in a fallen world structured by chains of delegation and domination. The authorship of everything by a transcendent god, in the Calvinist imagination, leads to a worldview and ethos in which each individual person (or, at least, each individual who is among the saved) has only one true relationship of delegation to worry about—that between God and believer. The energy to act on and in the world

89. Jeffrey Alexander, “Raging against the Enlightenment: The Ideology of Steven Bannon,” Section Culture (Spring/Summer 2017): 24–28. 90. Paul Kottman, A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Peter Baehr, Caesarism, Charisma and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max Weber (London: Routledge, 2017).

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that animates this-worldly asceticism, then, has its motivation in the lonely experience of knowing that one has no worldly rectors, only oneself as agent of sovereign grace. This is not a mentality well suited to the maintenance of status quo economic and political structures, though myriad accommodations and compromises can be found, and some persons tend to be publicly acclaimed as more equal at reading the word of God than others, hence rectors in their own right. Émile Durkheim also struggled with the problem of how an individual’s actions could be attributed to that individual alone. He developed his argument about individualism in modern societies amidst the Dreyfus affair— another one of those crises that dot the modern arc, and are linked together by the anxieties and fantasies regarding who is and/or ought to be in, and who out, of the body of the people. In this context, Durkheim took up the question of how a society could be constructed such that the interpretation of an individual as good or bad, dangerous or constructive, vis-à-vis other members of the society could be based on the evidence of what that individual had actually done. What acts had the individual actually authored? The Dreyfusards, of which Durkheim was a founding member, specifically protested the mystery of state that covered over the investigation of the Jewish captain. Durkheim struggled with the problem in a broader way, however, because he argued that the individual could only be sacred if he was granted sacrality by society. He thus held that an industrial society “required the functional equivalent of a religion to cohere, and he conceived this as an ideology sanctifying the values of liberalism and pointing towards socialism.” In particular, individualism was a “social institution like all known religions.” Hence Durkheim saw the integrity of the individual in modern society as the result of individuals being treated with the dignitas that used to accompany the King: “the human person . . . is considered as sacred . . . conceived as being invested with that mysterious property which creates an empty space around 91. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, new translation and introduction by Stephen Kalberg (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012). 92. Their petition read: “We the undersigned protest against the violation of judicial procedure and against the mystery surrounding the Esterhazy affair and persist in demanding Revision.” Steven Lukes, “Durkheim’s ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals,’” Political Studies 17, no. 1 (1969): 14–30; quotation is from p. 17. See discussion in Chad Alan Goldberg, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 93. Lukes, “Durkheim’s ‘Individualism,” 18. 94. Lukes, 19.

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holy objects, which keeps them away from profane contacts and which draws them away from ordinary life.” For Durkheim, in the good society every individual has two bodies, the first natural, the second ritually affirmed as the sacred human; and it is on this basis that the integrity of the first body, and the fair judgment of the individual as author, can be secured. That such efforts at modern individualism had as their accompaniment a vast and violent series of exclusions of entire categories of persons from the dignitas of having a second body has been a recurrent theme of this book. Indeed one way to think of what Frantz Fanon calls epidermalization is that in the colonial situation, the manifestation of authority, power, and violence in the enforcement of racial classification denies dignitas to all involved; even if it accrues further power to the colonizer, both colonizer and colonized are dehumanized. The social theories of contramodernity, then, also linked the critique of power to the question of authorship, both individual and collective. Fanon’s poetic conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks makes clear that his revolutionary consciousness is, in part, derived from the impossibility of authoring one’s own actions in the colonial situation; from having actions attributed instead to “behavioral” tendencies of supposedly inferior races; from being repeatedly told that certain persons have a need for dependence in action and authorship (and after being told, being beaten). Fanon’s language of revolution is avowedly existential, and his proposal is that freedom is, in part, the possibility to think, and then to act: “To induce man to be actional, by maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, that is the task of utmost urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act.” Fanon agreed with Nietzsche that a life lived in mere reaction creates resentment; and he mocked the idea that the anticolonial revolutions took as their central motivation the reinstallation of a precolonial past. Durkheim, Weber, and Fanon, then, all worked on and with the desire to be the recognized author of one’s own actions as a central experience of being human. Yet, as we have seen in this text, this desire has a recurrent cost—a cost both “symbolic” and “social”—and thereby creates a dilemma. For the desire for freedom, as the antinomy to domination, does not easily square with the need, in the projects that humans pursue together, for 95. Émile Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” trans. S. Lukes and J. Lukes, Political Studies 17, no. 1 (1969): 14–30; quotation is from p. 21, emphasis added. 96. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 97. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 197.

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delegation—it does not accommodate easily the complexities of authorship as a social phenomenon. Thus in transitions to modernity and their dynamic aftermaths, we see again and again the accession to power and authority of nonpersons—corporations, most notably, but also states, the images of the leaders of movements whose charismatic communities bequeath to them second bodies and, in a different register, fetishized commodities. These fictional persons are legitimated through various means—taken for granted habits, fussily written out rules, emotional attachment—but they are, in an era of supposed individualism, given the sacred halo of humanity via the attribution of personhood in some form or another, because they are imagined as authors. They are granted, by actual persons, the sacred effectivity of being the author behind the author. We are never as far as we think we are from the ascription of authorship to God or to whiskey. In the final pages of The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz wished for a version of sacred authority that took the measure of humans on terms also human, rather than the impossible divine—to make “humanitas . . . the sovereign of homo.” But in doing so, he leaned heavily on the authority of Dante, whose access to wisdom he would never doubt; referring to Dante simply as “the poet,” Kantorowicz attributed to him the genius to “visualize the very tension of the ‘Two Bodies’” as applying to humankind. In so doing, Kantorowicz affirmed the authority of the European intellectual tradition, and he cited its most prestigious originator as the ultimate author of his own ideas. Yet Europe was a continent from which he had fled, and where his mother had died, in Theresienstadt. Othered, he nonetheless found himself an actor, searching for a rector. It is an all-too-human dilemma.

98. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 495.

Acknowledgments

Jennifer Lynn Bair for love, dialogue, articulation, and understanding, making it all possible. *** Michael Weinman for reading every draft and making clear to me the stakes of the argument. *** Peter Simonson for discussing the project’s ontology and significance with me when it barely existed. *** Eli Weiner, Abigail Moore, and Vasfiye Toprak for research assistance. *** Jacqueline Ariail, Hannah Katarina Bair, Hannah Barco, Jessica Bair, Rosemarie Bair, Scott Bair, Irit Dekel, Jacob Reed, and Michael Reed for letting me be myself. *** Julia Adams, Pertti Alasuutari, Ahmed al-Rahim, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Wisam Alshaibi, American Council of Learned Societies, Fred Anderson, Elvira Basevich, Courtney Bender, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, Karida Brown, Sarah Corse, Joseph Davis, Claire Decoteau, Matthieu Desan, Emily Erikson, Jennifer Geddes, Andreas Glaeser, Alida Goffinski, Fiona Greenland, John R. Hall, Richard Handler, Risto Heiskala, Daniel Hirschman, James Hunter, Carly Knight, Monika Krause, Paul Lichterman. Aliza Luft, Eeva Luhtakallio, Steven Lukes, James (Jake) Lundberg, Douglas Mitchell, Johann Neem, Heidi Nicholls, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Alexandre White, Kyle Wagner, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Xiaohong Xu, Mayer Zald

Index

Abbott, Andrew, 31, 33, 95 action: versus agency, 25, 30–33; process character of, 34n13; versus projects, 33–35 actor, the, 32, 45n40, 48, 49, 54, 92, 103 Actor Network Theory, 57–60, 69, 73; agencement, 58, 59, 68 Adams, John, 96, 152, 169 Adams, Julia: theory of agency, 39–48 Adut, Ari: sociology of scandal, 81–86 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 248n60 agency: as heroic, 25, 41, 46; rational choice theory and, 18, 40, 41, 45; as relational, 41, 44, 46; representation and, 31, 42–44, 46; in the work of Julia Adams (see Adams, Julia) Alexander, Jeffrey: civil sphere, 23n25, 245n54; cultural pragmatics, 88; modernity, 242–43, 245 alliance: between rector and actor, 10–11, 15, 18–19, 22–23, 27–28 alterity, 11, 11n4, 18–27, 27n41, 45, 49, 65, 69n62, 102, 210, 226, 238 American Revolution, 124, 135–47, 169, 183, 186, 225 Andros, Governor Edmund, 121, 123, 127, Antigua Slave Conspiracy, 125 anti-Semitism, 28n46 Arendt, Hannah: founding acts, 92–96; On Revolution, 84n27, 94, 94n59; power, 71–72, 93–94; ruling and acting, 45n40; violence and force, 70 Aristotle, 39, 45n40 Austin, J. L.: How to Do Things with Words, 75– 77; locution, illocution, perlocution, 76–77, 76n7 authority: as binding, 76–77; performance and, 82, 89, 153

authorship: as contested, 5, 89; representation of, 13, 28n46, 66, 216; as sending and binding, 31, 49, 78 Bacon, Nathaniel, 102–5, 120–21, 127–29, 132, 135, 174 Bacon’s Rebellion, 102–9, 120, 126–35 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 126 Battle of Fallen Timbers, 171–75, 179, 253–54 Bellah, Robert, 182 Benton, Lauren, 134 Berkeley, William, 102, 108–21, 126–32, 174, 180 Bhabha, Homi, 37, 243, 243n45 binding the future, 76, 77, 86, 94, 95 biopower, 246–49 body, social theory of the, 252 body politic, 94, 96, 106, 116–17, 121, 138–41, 144– 47, 164, 168, 184, 185, 192, 200, 205, 208, 210, 213, 214, 230, 249, 252, 253 Bourdieu, Pierre, 54n11 Bouton, Terry, 167 Bradstreet, Anne, 121 bureaucracy, 9n1, 40, 45n40, 47, 52, 259 Burt, Ronald, 61 Butler, Judith, 1, 4n11, 44, 79n10 capitalism, 58, 182, 232n15, 233, 235, 235n27 Cassirer, Ernst, 190, 195n29 chains of power, 4, 20, 23, 25, 45, 59, 89, 95, 125, 209, 213, 216, 230–31, 233, 234; representation of, 4, 5, 19, 46, 56–57, 66–73, 99–100, 105, 108, 114, 122, 124, 128, 133, 135, 148, 152, 155, 170, 180– 85, 194, 210, 229, 235, 250–53, 260 charismatic rule, 79n10, 86 Code Noir, 210, 211n87, 212

268 Coleman, James: theory of power, 45, 86 Condorcet, Marquis de, 202–3 corpus mysticum, 121, 123, 169, 188, 194, 227, 255 creative destruction, 52, 113n30, 223, 233, 236, 236n28, 246, 249–51, 256 Darnton, Robert, 224n2 de Beavuoir, Simone, 35, 36 Declaration of Independence, 126 dehumanization, 20, 21, 25, 32, 50, 51 delegation: Actor Network Theory and, 58, 60, 67, 69, 72; agency and, 40, 46, 48, 50; chain(s) of, 30, 48, 260; performance and, 73, 81, 150, 193, 200, 246; representation of, 26 democracy, 135, 162, 166, 167, 169, 237, 253, 258, 259 Derrida, Jacques, 4n11, 88, 113n30 Deuteronomy, Book of, 137 discursive, the, 3, 68, 77, 79n10 disenchantment, 118, 149n1, 168, 227, 235n27, 236n30, 237, 240–42, 246, 248, 248n59, 250 domination: as legitimate, 11n4, 47, 66, 191 dramaturgy, 82, 87, 93 Dreyfus affair, 261 Du Bois, W. E. B.: “Caste in America,” 58 Durkheim, Émile, 35, 41, 46, 261–62 early American republic, 93n54, 106, 148–86, 209, 223, 226–27, 234, 253–54 East India Company, 232–33 Eisenstadt, S. N.: Jacobin dimension of modernity, 219, 254–55 Elizabeth I, Queen, 43, 121, 194 Enlightenment, 93, 95, 145, 168, 218, 255

Index Gowan, Teresa, 90 Great Awakening, 137n87 Greif, Avner, 62n36 Gubar, Susan, 13n6 Habermas, Jürgen, 76n7, 119n41 Haitian Revolution, 214–16 Hamilton, Alexander, 155, 157–58, 167, 228, 234 Harvey, Sir John, 111, 115 Hegel, G. W. F., 10n2, 11n3, 13n6, 57 hegemony, 233 hermeneutics, 3, 36, 40, 75, 89n41, 100, 112, 119, 218, 239, 248n59 Hobbes, Thomas, 40, 41, 46, 105, 112, 191–95, 216 Hunt, Lynn, 199n46, 210 Husband, Herman, 104–8, 135–47, 148, 150, 156, 159, 169, 179, 207, 209, 253, 254 iconoclasm, 183, 197, 260 Indians (Native Americans), 103, 105, 121, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134, 135, 154, 155, 163, 170–78, 180, 224, 225, 228, 239; Indian wars of the 1790s, 169, 234 instrumental control, 5 Iranian Revolution, 255n72, 256, 256n73 Jacobins, 84n27, 198, 198n42, 207, 211, 219, 255 Jefferson, Thomas, 152, 153, 158, 167, 168, 173, 185

Fanon, Frantz, 214n95, 262; critique of Hegel, 57 felicity, 76–78, 85n30, 87, 92, 166, 231 Filmer, Robert, 121, 126, 227, 246, 257 Findley, William, 156 Foucault, Michel, 66, 79n10, 94n59, 95, 244, 248n59, 248n60, 249–50 founding fathers, 152, 245 French Revolution, 48, 84n27, 196–219, 254, 257 Freud, Sigmund, 17n13 Fries’s Rebellion, 152

Kafka, Franz: Before the Law, 1–3; An Imperial Message, 3, 196 Kahn, Victoria, 240n38, 246 Kant, Immanuel, 94–95, 119n41, 216, 238n33 Kantorowicz, Ernst: idea of delegation in, 187, 189, 194, 202, 263; The King’s Two Bodies, 116–47, 148, 150, 153, 157, 168, 177, 182–83, 185, 187–219, 228, 229, 233, 235, 246, 247, 249, 254–59; Weber and, 117, 118, 259 King Philip’s War, 127 King’s Two Bodies, the: second body of the King, 117–26, 128, 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 152, 167, 182, 184, 187, 188, 199, 201, 206, 207, 210, 211, 230, 231, 246 Knox, Henry, 171, 173, 179, 180, 181, 239, 242

Gabriel’s Rebellion, 153 Gandhi, Leela, 38 Gell, Alfred, 52 George III, King, 125, 228 Gilbert, Sandra M., 13n6 Girard, Réné: theory of the scapegoat, 28, 28n43, 28n45 Gironde, 202–5, 208 Glaeser, Andreas, 31n5 Glorious Revolution, 121–22 Gould, Roger, 160n27

Landes, Joan, 210–11 landscape of meaning, 35, 37, 65, 112, 135, 138, 156, 176, 230, 231, 259 Latour, Bruno, 54n11, 58, 60, 67, 68, 69, 73, 243, 244 Law, John: material semiotics, 60, 60n30 Lawne’s Creek Uprising, 112, 113, 114 Littell, Jonathan, 50 Little Turtle, 171, 175, 176, 177 Locke, John, 121, 135, 257 Lord Culpeper, 109, 110, 116

Index Louis Capet (King Louis XVI), 197, 198, 200, 202, 203–5, 215, 216 Lukes, Steven, 194n27 Martin, John Levi, 62, 63, 72n66 Marx, Karl, 41, 46, 47, 48, 57, 93 materialism: historical materialism, 57; new materialism, 58, 68n58, 69 materiality: in chains of power and their representation, 56–57; as distributed personhood, 54, 55; as expressive, 57; in Gell, 52–57 Mathew, Thomas, 120, 121 misrecognition, 11, 18, 32, 49, 51, 175 modernity: contradictions of, 5, 27n40, 238; contramodernity, 242, 245, 262; the Girondin dimension of, 256; the Jacobin dimension of, 218, 219, 254, 256; political, 5, 146, 256, 257; transitions to, 95, 99, 135, 152, 175, 194, 198, 224, 232, 233, 236, 237, 242, 244, 246, 248, 251, 258, 260, 263 Morgan, Edmund, 130n69 Mouffe, Chantal, 21; agonistic politics, 23 Mukerji, Chandra: domination and dominion, 66; Impossible Engineering, 65–68; posthumanism, 67 National Convention, 198n42, 199, 201, 202, 204, 214, 215, 215n97, 218 Neem, Johann, 167, 227n7 network of ties, 45 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53n9, 236n28, 260, 262 Northwest Territory, 153–55, 170, 180, 225 Norton, Matthew, 91 Ohio Indians, 153, 154, 155, 170, 171, 172, 175–87, 228, 239 other, the. See alterity Parent, Anthony S., 130n70 Pateman, Carole, 195n28, 257–58 patrimonialism: patriarchal, 43, 44; as state formation, 43–46 Patterson, Orlando: Slavery and Social Death, 23, 23n26, 24, 24n33, 25, 25n35, 26 Peirce, C. S., 53n7, 113n30 people, the: agent(s) of, 108, 181, 201; as author, 150, 160, 161, 162, 193, 199; bodies of, 106, 139, 144, 146, 150, 169, 180, 207, 210, 212, 247, 253, 260; as body politic, 147, 214; myth of, 145, 168; second body of, 156, 157, 164, 168, 181, 210, 213, 253; sovereignty of, 161, 193, 202, 203n60, 204; in Weber, 47 performance: as binding, 52, 74, 76, 77, 78, 95, 175; as binding authority, 76; as founding, 92–94, 95, 196 performativity, 1, 4n11, 44, 73, 74, 85, 95, 203, 242

269 personation of the corporation, 235 political economy, 58, 90, 93, 178, 232, 236 political theology, 240n38, 247 power: as accrued agency, 45, 48; as binding another to act on one’s behalf, 5; as binding control, 31; as binding the future, 86; chains of, 4, 5, 19, 20, 23, 25, 45, 46, 56–57, 59, 66, 67–70, 72, 89, 90, 95, 99, 100, 105, 108, 114, 118, 122, 124, 125, 128, 133, 135, 148, 152, 155, 159, 167, 170, 180–84, 194, 209, 210, 213, 216, 229, 230–35, 250–53, 260; critical sociology of, 33n9, 57, 58; cultural, 3, 65, 150, 217; as discursive, 63–65, 69, 78, 86, 151n5, 174, 208; exercise of, 118, 239n36; paradigm of, 1; as performative, 73, 74–75, 78–79, 79n10, 81, 82–86, 90, 92–95, 148, 150, 153, 166, 175, 197, 217; as relational 60–63, 69, 83, 150n4, 151n5; and resources, 57; power to and power over, 241 power relations, 6, 11n4, 13, 27, 43, 60, 63, 66, 72, 89, 118, 175, 185; constitution/construction of, 1, 182, 195 projects, 9–29, 32–39, 49, 55–59, 100–101, 110–11, 114, 120, 121, 229–33, 252 publicity, 78, 82, 84n27, 85–86, 86n33, 94, 118, 148, 151; as transformative, 74, 84, 85, 86, 89 public sphere, the, 72n66, 81, 82, 84n27, 85, 234, 237, 239; counterpublics, 237; deliberation, 237–39, 251, 258; the public, 75, 81, 180, 181, 183, 228, 237, 239 race: and alterity, 21–27; and Marxism, 132n75; modernity as racialization, 179; relations of, 21–27; and slavery in Virginia, 126–34 Rana, Aziz, 253 rector: agent of, 109, 135, 256n73 (see also actor, the); rectorship, 14, 27, 45n40, 52, 53, 61, 65, 82, 101, 111, 117, 118, 153, 182, 215; situational rector, 92; ultimate rector, 72, 103, 109, 112, 117, 118, 135, 145n115, 161, 177, 192, 195n31, 200, 212, 214, 227, 228, 256 rector-actor-other, 9, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 33n9, 39–40, 47, 51, 56, 59–60, 62, 64, 67, 69n62, 72, 74, 78, 84, 86, 89, 100, 101, 109, 114, 131, 134, 169, 181, 185 relational sociology, 41 relative autonomy, 47, 241 republicanism: as biblical, 136, 138, 183, 226, 253; as disruption of the King’s Two Bodies, 138, 203–4, 256; as part of transitions to modernity, 183, 256; Roman, 94, 96, 136, 138 ritual: as action, 88; as different from performance, 76, 86–87; versus resistance, 88–89 Robespierre, Maximilien, 198–99, 204–9, 213, 216, 218–19 Rogin, Michael, 182 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 119n41, 206, 219

270 Said, Edward, 37 Saint-Domingue, 20n20, 27n40, 153, 210–12, 214, 214n95, 215–16, 218, 252 Sala-Molins, Louis, 213 Salem Witch Trials, 79–81, 82–84, 84n27; Hobbs, Abigail, 80; Nurse, Rebecca, 83, 84 Santner, Eric, 240n38, 246, 247, 248n59, 249 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 35, 36 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 87 scapegoat, 19, 27n41, 27–29, 28nn45–46 Schmitt, Carl, 26n39, 258n84, 259, 259n87 semiotics, 53n7, 72, 113n30 Shakespeare, William, 18n16, 116, 187, 187n2, 249 Shays’ Rebellion, 152 Simmel, Georg, 11n4 Skinner, Quentin, 191, 193 slavery, 24, 24n29, 25, 49, 130n69, 131, 132, 186, 211–15, 238 solidarity, 5, 19, 144, 145, 245n54 Somers, Margaret, 196n33 sovereignty, 2, 44, 95, 112, 132, 150, 152, 158, 168–69, 174, 176, 177, 182–83, 186, 188, 192, 201–4, 208–9, 227, 231, 242, 246–51, 253 state, the: capacity of, 219; as the central perspective, 2; as familial, 44, 176, 249; as Hobbesian, 191–94; as performative, 149–51; as spectacular, 148, 149, 149n1, 151, 171, 195 state formation, 15n9, 44, 45, 48, 149n1, 150, 151n5, 156; bellicist models, 150n4; cultural models, 150n4, 151 state of exception, 2 Steinbeck, John, 228, 229

Index storming of the Bastille, 197, 218 symbolic, the, 2 technology, 40, 56, 58–60, 68–69, 235 Terror, the, 197, 198, 198n42, 207, 211, 215–19 ties that bind, 50–52, 100, 196, 258 Tilly, Charles, 15n10 Treaty of Greenville, 169, 174, 175, 178, 179, 181, 253 violence: and performance, 71, 82; and the state, 85, 99, 164; symbolic, 2, 3, 19, 26n39, 150n4; theory of 69, 70 Virginia: colony of, 108–12; slavery in, 126–35, 130n70; treason politics in, 133, 133n78 Voegelin, Eric, 138 Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, 88, 175; eventness, 88 Walzer, Michael, 144n110, 191, 196, 196n36, 199, 203, 203n60, 207 Wayne, Anthony, 154, 169–75, 177, 179–81, 184, 224, 228, 238, 239, 242 Weber, Max: charisma, 69, 75n1, 79n10, 91, 117, 127, 135, 158, 172; “Class, Status, and Party,” 11n4, 58; Economy and Society, 9n1, 11n4, 15n9, 47–48, 71; Herrschaft, 75n1 Weber-Marx dialogue, 47 Weiviorka, Michel: violence and meaning, 69n62 Whiskey Rebellion, 104, 107, 138, 148, 154–58, 160, 160n27, 161, 166–69, 172, 179, 184, 223, 227n7, 229, 234–35, 253 Wilde, Oscar, 79–83, 84–86 Wood, Gordon, 184