What is a command?

Or, slave morality and university discourse in the age of planetary annihilation

In Creation and Anarchy, Agamben observes that ‘a power does not fall when it is no longer, or no longer fully, obeyed, but when it stops giving orders’ (CA, 54). With this, Agamben could be read as deemphasising the classic political problematic of the mass psychology of fascism — the contortions in psychic life that bind us to power, that drive us to obey and love it. Agamben is, instead, articulating the problem of ‘the command’ for our politics — that the decay of a power is only complete when there is no master left to order a wafting plume of tear gas, tanks rumbling down streets, bodies slumped against a wall (CA, 55). In his investigation of this problem, Agamben proposes that the command constitutes its own region of ontology (CA, 57). He initially recalls that the ancient Greek term arkhḗ was imbued with a fateful polysemy: its semantic data includes both ‘origin, principle’ and ‘command, order’ (CA, 51). This reveals the conspiracy of the origin and the command in Western metaphysics and culture: ‘the origin’ — as the beginning or birth of something — ‘is always already the command’ (CA, 52). The coincidence of the origin and the command represents the most primal substrate of the Indo-European languages, even the — per researches of the linguists Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste — archaic core of the verb as such (CA, 60). For Agamben, this establishes that the ontological status of the command is that it ‘enjoins’, as opposed to merely asserts, a particular relation of language and world: as a ‘pure imperative’, the command institutes being, an order of things (CA, 58-59). Agamben posits that magic, religion and law — as the primordial discourses of the command, of the master — actually dominate in our so-called secular, democratic societies. Here, Agamben refers to the directives and ‘warnings’ of security bureaus, advertising as spectacle and phantasmagoria, the algorithmic technological apparatuses whose buttons and icons are, indeed, labelled as ‘commands’ (CA, 61).

Having discussed the mass psychology of fascism several times on this publication, I am inspired by Agamben’s articulation of the command as a decisive political problem — especially his allusion to the command’s ‘underhandedness’ in modern democracies (CA, 61). In this post, I would like to elaborate the underhanded command by, in a move away from Agamben’s wider archaeological reflections, returning to the genealogy of modern power developed in Nietzsche (and Lacan). To start with: the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil derides the ‘moral hypocrisy of the commander’ (BGE, 86-87). In this, I take him to be critiquing a metamorphosis in the modality of the command that is structurally homologous with the great historical shift from master to slave morality. In Nietzsche’s universe, the archaic master — the Genealogy’s infamous ‘blonde beast’ — rampaged with glee, indulging unabashedly in carnivals of mass murder (GM, 23, 58). I would risk seeing these shameless atrocities as, to speak with the Lacan, the ‘murderous effects’ indexing the obscene power of a ‘master-signifier’ (SXVII, 178). Which is to say, the discourse of the old Nietzschean master is readable as a ‘law’ or ‘commandment’ totally isolated from any external reasons or legitimacy — a whole social order unburdened from any compulsion to justify itself. The massacres Nietzsche describes are rewritten through Lacan’s declaration that the archaic master simply ‘gives a sign […] and everybody jumps’ (SXVII, 43, 104, 174).

But eventually, this figure was drenched in the cold beams of slave morality — the passion of revenge, the sinfulness of flesh, the freedom of will, the equality of souls, the celebration of weakness, the slander of reality. On Nietzsche’s account, these morals contaminated the psychic functioning of the old master with shame and guilt, thereby estranging him from his cruelty and the active forces of joy, affirmation, diversity and spontaneity which circulated through it. This is slave morality as the ‘vindictive cunning of powerlessness’: the liquidation of the master by the slave, the downfall of the master-signifier and the corresponding social bond of naked, rapturous domination (GM, 28). However, Nietzsche is absolutely clear that the slave’s historical victory does not instate a power that is any less violent and brutal. As he establishes in Twilight of the Idols, slave morality was always parasitical upon an obscure will to its ‘opposite’: the ‘thoroughly immoral’ mutilation of body and deformation of mind to freeze, to torture, slave morals into the substance of humanity (TI, 39-41). The slave commands this excruciating ‘taming of the beast man’, the bloody training of weakness and servility in a new society of discipline and punishment, of total administration (TI, 37). But, even as the screams of this torture fill the air, the slave disavows the fact he is now the master — he scorns any symbolic investiture in this title, name, mandate, rank, post, honour. Instead, the slave sacralises himself — and this is the moral hypocrisy attacked in Beyond Good and Evil — as the faithful servant of ‘higher and older’ slave morals, as humbly representing the signifiers of the Good, the People, the State, the Divine (BGE, 86; EH, 100). As Deleuze and Guattari remark in Anti-Oedipus with Nietzschean fire, ‘‘I too am a slave’ — these are the new words spoken by the master’ (AO, 254).

Clearly, then, Nietzsche’s revaluation of slave morality is irreducible to some pathological, symptomatic contempt for the clamouring mass of the downtrodden and the oppressed. It is a serious, radical critique of the phony moralism of modern, ‘democratic’ power — the self-deception, the dissimulating emblems and halos, by which the order of liberal democracy evades its own violence and terror. To slide back to Lacanian terms, the hegemony of Nietzsche’s slave correlates directly with the discourse of the university: this ‘new tyranny of knowledge’ reinscribes a social bond of domination, represents the secret ‘persistence of a master’s discourse’ (SXVII, 31, 33, 182). Crucially, the insignia of the ‘modernised’ master is not the toppled master-signifier (SXVII, 35). Rather, it is the signifying chain of a knowledge which has become universal in a bureaucratic, technological, ‘consumer society’ — having once merely been the mathematical-geometric knowledge of anonymous ‘craftsmen’ and slaves, those previously ravaged by the violent whims of the master-signifier (SXVII, 22, 81, 148). Today, the fake objectivity of ‘facts’, ‘expertise’ and ‘qualifications’, or even the sham consensuses of ‘opinion polls’ and ‘democratic mandates’, occult the command and lyingly divide power from its arbitrary, violent performativity. Thus, emerging from Nietzsche — and Lacan — is a genealogy of the underhanded set of symbolic forms or rites organising the politics and ontology of the command in our societies. The master does not, and cannot, admit what is doing — he compulsively disavows and dissimulates that his word institutes planetary terror.

As Alenka Zupančič remarks in her own inspiring essay on Lacan and Nietzsche, a ‘mastery which comes to perpetuate itself without masters’ remains ‘a very powerful one at that’ (TSS, 45). I think that the bloody tyranny of this ‘topography’ of mastery — the seeming imperishability of this power — demands further elaboration with reference to Foucault’s aesthetic, even dramaturgical, category of the grotesque (TSS, 44). As he describes it in Abnormal, the grotesque sticks to power which should be ‘disqualified’, dissolved, because the individual or discourse that produces it has obviously laughable, pathetic or vile attributes (A, 11-12, 35). To illustrate, Foucault refers to Roman emperors with deranged gestures, sexualities and costumes, the doomed kings and princes of Shakespearean tragedies, and a trembling Führer demanding chocolate cakes as, above his crowding bunker, the Soviet Union’s army was storming Berlin and tens of millions were lying massacred. Appearing, too, in Foucault’s text is the ‘mediocre, useless, imbecilic, superficial, ridiculous, worn-out, poor and powerless’ bureaucrat of the modern liberal and fascist states — perhaps even like the former SS lieutenant-colonel who, as he sat behind bullet-proof glass in Jerusalem, on trial for deporting millions to death camps with a ‘murderous zeal’, occasionally coughed and sneezed (A, 11-13; EJ, 137).

For me, the grotesque of power today is inextricable from the hegemony of a feeble slave morality and the homologous university discourse, precisely as the laughable symptomatology of the modernised master, the pathetic afterlife of this function. Think of factory and estate owners, stock exchange speculators, and other capitalists with philanthropic foundations, glitzy charities; presidents and prime ministers diligently serving ‘voters’ and ‘constituents’; thinktank and TV experts chattering about the cold logics of ‘growth’ and ‘security’; advocates of ‘fair-trade’ and ‘cruelty-free’ shopping, buying ‘local’ and ‘organic’; the faces of an (allegedly philosophical) movement for assigning income to the hungry and the sick; police and military majors imploring openness about ‘mental health challenges’; academic administrators and HR directors vaunting ‘action plans’ to redress the historical and contemporary injuries of oppressed social groups. The ‘humane values’ and ‘objective knowledge’ of this ruling class articulate a vast symbolic disinvestiture from the title of master — even as our rulers thirstily plunder the planet’s wealth, as their missiles arc across a bleeding sky, as they command ‘one single catastrophe’ (Benjamin) (TPH, 268). This is the comedy, indeed the utter farce, of the order: disavowals and dissimulations absurdly, grotesquely inadequate to the violence and destruction commanded by the ruling class. What is a corporate ‘wellness’ seminar or sustainably-sourced coffee beans — smiles, apologies and TED Talks — compared to a concentration camp or mass grave?

There is no question of some stupid nostalgia for the pre-modern, obscene master, who ‘at least’ affirmed his cruelty and domination. In my view, this is an irrationalist and pre-fascist distortion from which Nietzsche’s most piercing insights should be rescued. The political point, rather, is to grasp that the theatre of the grotesque is ‘absolutely inherent’ to the contemporary master function — that the lame, pathetic farce is not a glitch in the command, but a ‘functional feature’ of it (A, 12-13). Modern, ‘democratic’ power incites mockery of the structure of a ridiculous, weeping, sentimental, therapeutic, castrated master. But, despite all the farcical symbolic disinvestiture, this function retains its murderous effects — its comic disavowals and dissimulations simply attract an affective surplus of derision and disbelief from the dominated, who now laugh as they obey. To remix both Lacan and Nietzsche, this is truly the worse — ou pire — of the old master, the blonde beast scouring the world for his next festival of atrocity.

Thank you to all supporters of Critical Rory Theory, especially George, Josh and CRAM.