Discursive Legitimation

Discursive legitimation refers to the process via which legitimacy is established through communication [within Empires]. How might certain information, norms, and practices become instituted as appropriate, normal, or standard, within a given social setting? It is a recursive, media-biased, autopoietic process that stabilises authority. In our human culture, discursive legitimation is fundamentally grounded in language.

 

‘Legitimacy’ is best understood as a process. It is the operative mechanism via which the forces of meaning-making create a sense of what is acceptable, necessary or favourable within the binds of social exchange. The product is a constructed architecture, superimposed over a given social context, which subtly governs what is perceived as real/not real, advantageous/detrimental, necessary/unnecessary and even safe/dangerous. The causal mechanism of this construction are the tools we use to communicate, which shift and change as contexts drift.

 

Crucially, this context-driven nature of discursive legitimation means that the process is always ongoing. Communication technologies are not neutral parties in this process; they are co-constitutive to it. Social meaning is not derived solely from what is said, but the medium through which is communicated. As new tools enter the informational ecosystem, they transform the process of legitimation itself. Therefore, the final outcome of discursive legitimation – where information becomes widely accepted as valid – is purely theoretical. It is a moving target in a state of constant transformation. At any given point in time, this ongoing social process is establishing what ‘is’ and what ‘isn’t’, the inquiry-derived message emerging in parabolic harmony with the evolution of changing communications technologies. Understanding discursive legitimation therefore becomes a question of understanding how communication is structured.

 

Until now, communications methods were able to be mapped on a time/space—hard/soft bias. Every historical medium has a structural bias which shapes how knowledge, power and authority were able to be organised over time.

 

Hard media (time-biased) are durable, difficult to transport, and resistant to decay. These are inscriptions on stone, clay tablets, oral traditions, and heavy skinbound manuscripts, whose edicts are intransient and unquestionable. Empires which communicate their message using time-biased medias are invariably ancient—Imperial China, Ancient Egypt, Sumer. They accumulate power and authority over time, expand their territories slowly, place emphasis on tradition, and anchor legitimacy in collective memory and ritualised continuity. Often there is a monopoly on knowledge where a priestly class maintains control over the interpretation and transmission of authoritative meaning-making; the singularised imperial voice speaks authoritatively and is rarely able to be challenged.

 

Soft media (space-biased) are light, easily transported, replicated, and falsified, requiring large-scale administration and coordination for the authoritative signal to enter into a state of legitimation. These medias are papyrus, paper, print, and broadcast media. Empires which communicate their message using space-biased medias are the Roman and British Empires, the United States, and the Soviet Union, characterised by rapid territorial expansion and a sense of authority which is grounded in the control of informational flows rather than the dissemination of information directly from a single authoritative source. There is a greater plurality of voices whose signals are able to be recognise as legitimate both within (public sector) and outside of (private sector) the state-sanctioned establishment. Discursive legitimation in soft/space biased empires requires repetition, organisation, and demonstrated consistency across sources. This is where the scientific method and discursive rationalisation are methodically applied as a remedy to the given multiplicity.

 

Historically the bias of the medium determined the longevity of imperial organisation. Those with a hard/time bias tended to last longer than those with a soft/space bias, but the latter have a more expansive cultural reach across territories. The softer the medium, the more accessible the story becomes to the general populace, both to understand and to contribute to. Circumstantially, this introduces a degree of instability to the process of discursive legitimation in modern informational empires: ‘territory’ is not merely geospatial, but instead sociocultural. The Empire is no longer a contiguous geographical entity. It is a culturally dispersed, globally diffuse structure which maintains continuity through mimetic exchange and replicative social interaction.

 

Right now, new systems of informational exchange have cinched tightly the chords of globalisation. Our current systems do not define who can speak (quite the opposite), but they do define who can be heard, and who is listened to-- and thereby how authority is recognised through the process of discursive legitimation. As we transition to a new information age characterised by large-scale use of artificial intelligences, the human being is set to be somewhat de-centred. Grown techno-organically off the bloom and sediment of human communication and social exchange, these semi-autonomous AI systems are themselves emergent participants within the assemblage of human meaning-making. They are expounding upon and riffing off of our existing literatures. They are redefining the process of legitimation as they go.

​

I state confidently that we have now transcended Innis' space/time bias of communication. The emergent informational systems are network-biased, characterised by liquidity, whereby legitimation flows like water through semi-stable states where cultural chatter reaches near-consensus, occasionally solidifies into ice when authority networks stabilise, and then evaporates just rapidly into steam as convergence collapses. Authority is redistributed in ebbs and flows just as quickly as legitimate consensus became glaciated.​

​

In symbolic system studies and Vedic Astrology, this is a metaphysical state known as gaṇḍānta {गण्डान्त}

​

It is similar in nature to the Anaretic degree.