Codes and Overcodes

Post-Human Politics: Part One

I have wanted to return to writing some longer theory-focused pieces. This is the first in a series of essays where I will be exploring the idea of post-human politics and how they are influencing the world around us. I hope you enjoy.

The family expands into a clan, clans band together to create a tribe. The most basic civilizations develop customs, folkways, traditions, and rituals based on the day to day need for survival. The rhythms of life center on the patterns of the land the tribe occupies. Hunting, sowing, fishing, reaping. The tide comes in, the herd migrates, the crops are gathered before the first snow. Religion honors these moments, festivals celebrate them, a shared language communicates their importance. It is a language that only they speak and only they understand, because only the tribe lives in this particular pattern. Members of the tribe must learn the patterns of life or perish.

The stories and songs passed from one generation to the next communicate these patterns and tell of great deeds to be emulated. He who secured a great harvest through wise planning, he who fed his whole family through winter after felling a great beast, he who defended against a rival tribe through great courage. Positions of authority are created and proto-institutions, generally religious or martial in nature, are founded. Everything is formed around the way of being present in the tribe. Every tradition, leadership position, instruction, piece of literature, or song is created within the context of these patterns. Every belief, every piece of culture, every aspect of social organization is coded for the survival of a specific tribe and the continuance of their way of life.

The patterns, the roles, the structures of being are sacralized through ritual and repetition. All communication, verbal and nonverbal, is referential to this way of being. Legend, art, song, and language layered upon each other. Each form of expression references the other and the wider experiences specific to the tribe. Passage into adulthood, oaths of battle, marriage, and death are defined by these patterns. The child is born into these patterns, raised in these truths, and is honored in death by these rituals. Every thought, every belief, every concept entertained is molded by this web of cultural symbols.

The information passed from one generation to another through tradition carries the code for replicating that specific civilization. The traditions are for those which experience a specific way of being in a specific context. Taboo and custom create negative feedback, allowing the society to achieve homeostasis. The code resists novelty in favor of stability, only that which succeeds over a long series of trials is incorporated into the tradition. Moments of challenge may call for radical divergence, but radical success must follow before changes are made to the code. In some cases, the tribe would rather die as themselves than alter the code and survive as something else. The code creates civilization by binding identity. The tradition forms a great chain of being, which many mistake for a shackle, by defining what the individual can and should be.

This tradition, this code, this accumulation of intelligence specific to the tribe can be understood as its own entity. Individual actors may make their own decisions, but those decisions are thoroughly informed by the code that has defined their world. Every thought they have ever had, every word they have ever uttered, every action they have ever taken was shaped from the ground up by that code. The code is pre-rational, informing underlying conceptions and actions well before any string of logic has been applied to justify those actions. The member of the tribe whose world is defined by the code serves the code, just as the code serves the tribe.

This phenomenon can be demonstrated by observing the central role of binding rituals. Synchronized dance, harmonious song, and rhythmic chants work to create a sense of oneness with the tribe. The military unit drills with perfect precision to ensure that its members can strike as one. The individual has agency, but the ability to sublimate that agency to a larger will brings on an almost trance like state. In these moments the collective animating spirit is more obvious, but it is always present. Even when the individual is not aware, their actions can be driven by the code and serve the ends of the collective entity.  

Mankind may begin in more basic formations like families, clans, or tribes, but over time flourishing civilizations expand. Sometimes they do so through peaceful cooperation, more often they do so through war, but inevitably one nation finds itself in a position of governing other peoples. When this occurs, the dominant nation must find a way to reliably and profitably interact with the other peoples they now rule. If the governed peoples share a culture similar to the dominant nation this can be relatively easy to achieve. A shared language often means not just the ability to communicate but a shared mode in which concepts themselves take shape. A shared religion will usually mean a similar moral vision, allowing for small compromises to accommodate custom while retaining the binding nature of the faith.

The code which defined the tribe must find a way to organize the new population which has now come under its control. A certain level of unity must be achieved to join the outsiders to the body as a whole. The more elements of being, or lines of code if we must translate terms into something vulgar and modern to avoid being embarrassed, that the two peoples share the easier their integration into one entity becomes. Certain traditions will remain unassimilable to the whole, and a good ruler will recognize the prudence of allowing those behaviors which do not radically destabilize the collective to be practiced by the independent tribes or clans. Small differences in custom may even become treasured markers of identity. Members of Clan A have always celebrated the marriage feast with the goat while Clane B has always served the traditional duck, but both take their vows in front of the same priests worshiping the same deity. And in this moment, we see the emergence of the first overcode.

The overcode is layered on top of the primal construction of the civilization. The primary code served the tribe, and the tribe became a united entity which served the code. Now the overcode alters some of the behaviors, processes, desires, and beliefs of the tribe to serve the larger entity. If the code and overcode share significant overlap, then the process can avoid being overly disruptive. The tribe can even retain a certain level of autonomy and differentiation. But the more radical the departure the more disruptive the over code must be to the assimilated peoples, in many cases destroying their way of life entirely.

A more radical difference in language, religion, and way of being can make direct governance incredibly difficult as basic communication, mediums of exchange and production, and moral understanding can vary wildly. Many empires throughout history have recognized this fact. Empires are almost always multiethnic by definition and often contain different religions or languages under one rule as well. Tyrannical rulers may attempt to completely snuff out local cultures, but wise conquers recognized that allowing a healthy degree of local authority and autonomy actually strengthened their rule. The complex web of tradition, identity, belief, and culture which constitutes the code was simply too integral to society to remove or overwrite without destroying the functionality of the community. If all a conqueror wants to do is pillage the land and move on than social destruction is of no concern, but if they have any interest in controlling and ruling the people then eliminating their ability to be productive is foolish.

The overcode operates by altering the culture of the ruled peoples until it can properly interface with the dominant nation. While much of the original culture initially remains, if it stays in place long enough the overcode will slowly but inevitably alter key aspects of the tribe’s original code. The ruling nation establishes itself as the pinnacle of the social hierarchy, and those that are willing to adapt to the overcode are quickly elevated in status. The future of the tribe is now tied to its ability to profitably interaction with the dominate nation, and the community’s leadership is inevitably chosen for their ability to conform to the overcode. Aspects of the culture of the dominant nation work their way into the ruling class of the tribe and those tastes inevitably filter down to the rank and file. Often, without any aggressive campaign of cultural assimilation or even formal recognition of the process, the overcode comes to rewrite the code of the tribe.

While at first it would seem that the creation of the overcode alters only the subservient tribe, it also alters the dominant nation. The dominant nation must conform the operation of the subservient tribe to its own way of being, its own system, but to do so it cannot simply force its own code onto those it has conquered. The code of the dominant nation was particular to that people—their relationship to the land, the divine, and the ancestors. The subservient tribe does not share those experiences, those patterns of being, and can never truly adopt them in their original form.

To facilitate their adoption, the overcode must abstract the original code, stripping out the most particular aspects of the way of being and keeping that which is most easily universalized. The people of the dominant nation had likely never contemplated the nature of their original code as it was so natural to them. The code was emergent from the rhythms of life and traditions common to the nation, it was not intentionally structure. In order to extend this social understanding to those who do not come to it organically the leaders of the nation are often compelled to formalize this understanding into a document such as a constitution or table of laws. The document does not itself create the way of being, but it attempts to codify it into a form which can be agreed upon and shared with those outside the founding tribe.

In his book “The Ancient City” Numa Denis Fuestel De Coulanges documents the process as ancient law transforms from the unwritten code of the individual tribe into the overcode that would bind first the ancient Roman city-state and eventually the empire. According to Coulanges, the notion that a legislator would “make” a law, that a certain number of votes would create a binding code, was entirely foreign. Laws were an extension of religion, emerging organically. A priest or magistrate might eventually record these codes, but no one would confuse this with the individual being responsible for their creation. The recorder of the law did not make the law, and they could not write down and enforce that which did not already have the binding authority of religion and tradition.

The power of law emanated from its origins in the tribe, and it is only after the rulers gained the ability to consolidate power and unify the tribes that the notion of positive law began to emerge. The original code had been bound to the authority of tribal leaders. Disputes were settled inside those structures and subject to their codes. The patriarch of the family and the religion specific to the tribe held dominion. To unify the city and consolidate power the rulers had to undermine the authority of the families and tribes. The authority of the individual religions and patriarchs was made subject to an overarching law, an overcode.

These abstractions of the overcode are related to the code of the dominant nation, but they are not the same. At first, the dominant nation may see the overcode as serving only their interests, altering the operation of the subservient tribe to better meet the needs of the primary culture. This was certainly its original purpose, but over time the dominant nation also began to conform to the overcode. The constant need to profitably interact with subject tribes means that leadership is often selected for their ability to work within, or even exploit the rules of, the overcode.

Most of those that lived under the strict code of the dominant nation never considered the origins of those axioms, and now that they must regularly interact with other peoples, the particularity of their own civilization comes into question. The formalization of their way of being into the overcode becomes the easiest point of shared reference, especially due to its utility as a cross-cultural bridge. Slowly but inevitably the dominant nation comes to understand the overcode as the true embodiment of their culture, and so while the overcode is more closely related to the particularities of the dominant nation, those particularities are also abandoned in favor of the overcode.

The overcode began as tool of the dominant civilization, an extension of their organic way of being meant to profitably assimilate other peoples. It served the tribe, then the nation, and now the empire, but in the process it has transformed both the dominant and subject peoples. Leadership, both of the dominant and subject nations, is selected for their ability to profitably interact with the system they now share. Cultures are shaped by their ruling elite, and so the different peoples take on the character of their leaders who ascend to power primarily on their ability to conform to the overcode. At first the codes served particular peoples, but now those peoples are joined by the overcode they serve. The relevant selection pressure creates interests separate from any of the individual peoples, and so a hyperagent is born.

Each aspect of human existence begins deeply rooted, or territorialized, inside the organic code of the tribe. The emergent connections forged by shared experience, language, religion, tradition, and history create the context for all cultural interactions. But with the introduction of a new dominant overarching social organization those ways of being must be altered to fit the new structure. The functions of society must be deterritorialized, in the vocabulary of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and reterritorialized within the context of the new system. We will be borrowing the language of Deleuze and Guattari as it provides a useful conceptual framework, but do not confuse this as a commitment to their definitions or prescriptions.

The severity of the impact that the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization has on humans generally depends on how radically the new paradigm diverges from the old. Each layer of cultural abstraction allows for an increase of civilizational scale as a larger number of more diverse peoples can be brought under the operation of one system. But the further each iteration of the systems gets from anyone one particular way of being, the more unstable it becomes. Peoples are meant to be individuated, and the artificial homogenization required to allow their coexistence also hollows out the organic structures that give them meaning and identity. The incentives of profit and power will drive the ruling class toward more drastic degrees of abstraction in the interest of maximizing the efficiency and scope of the system they operate. The hyperagent demands a more rapid and thorough process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization and the human interest is left behind in service of the system.