the queue

Violins tell me:

with the best of intentions, i have nominated our governor, to rule the largest queue ever formed, long enough to go around the world.

and there wasn’t a single man on earth there weren’t in the queue. and all waited with bodies so full of soul, like a radio with new batteries.

even when the last man in the queue spread the perverse rumor, that not everyone would fit in. the reaction brought forth in families was an indifference to cause laughter. not a single place in the queue was altered. not even a single pair of anxious people dispersed. and we saw in the face of these people the sign of an endless wait.

nobody left for nothing.
and i laughed my ass off
from the first place in the queue

i see no other way of construing this, except taking the queue to be human economy. everyone has got an economic standing, strictly ordinal. when prompted with the (fairly reasonable) proposition that “not everyone will fit in”, i. e., some people will be left without resources, incredibly nobody moves.

no revolutions, no one at each other’s throats. almost inhumanly so.

which leads us to think if economic standing is not driven by things beyond human will. no one moved – primarily – because there is no way to move. Gregory Clark seems to be the name here.

but then again, the first man in the queue, the one who nominated the governor, why is he laughing about? the meaninglessness of his position? of position itself, since everyone in line showed signs of an endless wait? it’s cryptic.

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anarchy

i’m well aware of the etymological fallacy. so, this is not a logical argument about the meaning of words.

anarchy is the absence of arkhé, which is to say ruler – but also beginning or end. anarchy has no genitive, no genealogy, no teleology. it’s unengendered, transcendental. all cosmos is anarchic, which is to say that anarchy is order. the chaos ordering.

thus, anarchy is a circuit of power: it can be democratic, aristocratic, thymocratic, even plutocratic. at any given point, it’s all of those. it can’t, by definition, be oligarchic, or monarchic, nor demarchic, not even panarchic. it has no ruler, but power always flows.

anarchy cannot be the object of an ideology – that would imply that time itself is within time – a mere being, not Being. it’s sad that anarchist has come to mean anything but “anything”. anarchy is, right now, and will ever be – there’s no “after” the Revolution. the Revolution has never failed to happen.

in the process of eating all absolutes, mutual excitation makes itself the only Absolute. this process, just as modern as it has been ancient, is anarchy.

 

a few simple questions for neoabsolutism

in the wake of a similar post by the Imperial Energy, and given that for all that matters, neoabsolutism and lrx-mutualism are forever locked in a cosmic cage-match, i figured i should map a few of the most prominent questions that i feel the neoabsolutists haven’t really answered so far (i believe it’s obvious why unanswered questions are way more of a problem for them than it is for me):

1. where does power come from? a lot of the writing in Reactionary Future, as well as in Imperial Energy and Neoabsolutism has to do on how insecure power seeks to secure itself through centralisation, etc. but not once have i seen any definition of power (something like this), nor any account of the ways power comes to be.
2. how universalist is neoabsolutism? i’ve made this argument before (2, 3), but if division of power is seen as something to be avoided, then delegation is not really the greatest idea. with that in mind, can anything short of a global centralized empire be enough for neo-absolutism? parallel centers of power can or cannot coexist? and if they can, how far really is this from individualism?
3. what is sovereignty if not a relation between divided powers? this arises immediately from the previous questions: isn’t freedom-as-power the exact same thing  as freedom-from(-other’s)-power? isn’t a sovereign, by definition, an individual, atomized in relation to other individuals?
4. finally, what’s neo in neoabsolutism? how does the theory you are sketching differ significantly from early modern absolut kings, those enlightened despots?

thoughts #3

the myth of given is critique of foundationalist epistemology that basically asserts “data can never be given, but always be built”.

of course, nothing is simply “given” in nature. things have to be produced. (D+G would add “even production itself”).

but to go from this to “data aren’t ever real” or, worse, “data could be indefinitely different” is a stretch. analogies: a plane is produced, and is very real. a mobile phone can be produced in a myriad of forms, but they all pay respect to some invariances (you can’t make a mobile phone that violates, say, thermodynamics).