1.

There are certain notions asemic horizon holds to be self-evident — if only at the cost of irreparably mangling what “notion” and “evidence” even mean. A more honest version of this catchy opener is that there are certain theorems we hold to have value in a way that propels (de suyo) the epistemological Noah into the axiological belly of the fish. But mathematics has come to own the word “theorem”, which historically means not just “proposition”, but also intuition, spectacle, vision. This is not only a might-makes-right deal — the power of maths compels us all — but also a philosophical enclosure that structurally underwrites the very edifice of human achievement. After all, mathematics as the scramble for “knowledgeness” (“mathema”) is built on de suyo truth — from itself, from the fact that it is itself. Thus knowledgeness is achieved by a powerful armada of mathematical theorems. As theorems, they grow on our intellectual power as intuition, vision and sometimes spectacle, but as mathematical statements they grow our intellectual power itself.

To start again: asemic horizon holds intuitions, visions and spectacles; but these visions do not relate to actual ongoing scenarios but (yes, we keep retiring the term and bringing it back) quability conditions that are adequated by the ongoing thing-of-the-world. At some point, I came to use the word “verified” for how Capullo de Jerez animates the music-theoretical notion of the duende (the Andalucían diabolus in musica), but that’s something that slipped through thanks to my own inattentiveneness. The apparent claim that Capullo gives truth-content to the metaphysics of Andalucían flamenco, but it is his ability to access duende that bestows him with a standing as cantaor flamenco. (When I say “access”, you can think “affect” or “ready-to-hand”; this choose-your-own-adventure character is in the quability conditions of theory).

Now, this project has long promised to clean house with so many loose concepts of “early theory” that, in its beginning, protected it from falling too much into the grumpy, frumpy role of political commentary. I find continual fascination in politics de suyo and continual abjection in politics as such. Therefore: even if we’ve touched on political matter time and time again, we abandoned the as-such after the first handful of texts. Remember: theory is something that comes to me like a feverish waking dream, sentences typing themselves, sometimes in circles, sometimes entirely adrift; trying to cover politics-as-such was annoying, as in our earlier texts, and trying to bring sparse theoretical ideas to bring new lights to thing was like approaching a woman with canned pick-up lines and techniques. The advice we’ve given to incels and awkward men in general — tell each person a different name, dress normal, let the interfacticity carry you, don’t be yourself; just be — is, in retrospect, a thinly disguised confession of a theoretical praxis.

2.

A philosopher wrote — “writing is not about meaning, but about landsurveying and measurement, including that of lands yet to come”. I’m serious about the germinal turn of asemic horizon, as I was about each phase of the project that, at each turn, denounced, built on, and ignored (in varying proportions) the previous material. Yet this “seriousness” is earnest and open, like an improvising musician who integrates some of his wrong notes and lets others flow away. Perhaps the key takeaway of this project is this general attitude to theorymaking: too open-ended to be “gonzo philosophy”, too abstract to bea teenage girl’s journal, too Deleuzean for Heideggereans, too Lacanian for Jean-Yves Girard, too self-referential for Valuable-Insights blogging, too political for Literotica, too rational for TPOT mystics, too weird for engineers and inventors.

The danger of proclaiming self-indulgences like these (“we’re here! get used to it get used to it!) is that the generic structure in the formula “theory is the theory of the theory of the theory…”) silently shifts in scope to mean “the generic structure of theory”. A cool name for this would be the Kantian flytrap. Yes, there’s a rock’n roll swagger to our mannerism — the rushed writing, the self-authority, the way we swerve and circle around aporetic black holes like a nouvelle vague director might film a jolie fille’s legs. But I find myself spending hours engrossed in my own material. Perhaps much fo this is because the near-automatic writing means I find freshness and verve; but it’s also the case that even old, flawed texts that say “quable” have a vatic effect — distinct, palpable, haptic. This is how I know to avoid the Kantian flytrap: try to be neat, yes, but never disavow the messy, numinous shit in your past.

I assume one of the effects of a rigorous editing protocol is to reencounter the text enough times that the author is sick of it, preventing him from being high on his own supply. But I, myself, have had the experience of having text polished and mangled for publication; there’s a spectral quality to the results in that what survives is only what you “mainly meant”; the record of all the amputated outward resonances of the original text is hidden in plain sight — holes and stubs, painful to the touch — but no one else can see them. asemic horizon, for one, has no such stubs — except for the handful of initial texts that tried to achieve cogency about politics while, at the same time, trying to make theoretical advances.

Yet — something is happening.

3.

If asemic horizon hadn’t completely veered off its course after those initial months, it would feel like a failure: the then-latent legitimacy crisis in the sources of policy has come to an absolute collision, yet after all these years we have little explanatory power — at least none that is legible without getting lost in the weeds. In many ways, this project has survived a car crash by virtue of not being in the car. But the funny thing about automobile collision is that it doesn’t always terminate the colliding objects — it’s often possible to not only drive away, but also to circle back and strike again (whether with malicious xor psychotic intent.) It’s therefore never enough to sit in a high chair and say these two objects won’t move along this path because they would collide — not when the point is to destroy the car.

This tactic can be contrasted (even to the point where they seem like complete antinomies) with the “CIA” tactic. This is not to make the actual CIA into a major structural force, at least not the same level of abstraction of our previous example-by-analogy. The crashing car is about using something to effect its own destruction; the CIA is about creating an instrument that ends up instrumentalizing its creator. The crashing car destroys itself as such at the same time it comes into its own (as an accelerating engine) de suyo. When it creates this hypothetical CIA-like autonomous instrument, the state apparatus (gradually, like the car that comes back and back) destroys itself as a de-suyo source of policy, even as (through international regime change ops) it projects policy as such.

While the former dynamic comes to a stop — it’s meant to come to a stop — when the instrument is rendered impotent, the latter is able to renew itself as long as its host is kept alive, zombie-like, as an as-such projection. Of course, because power relations are never as simple, the host is never simply enslaved; even the upkeep of a hollow structure would cost, but a real state apparatus (even under near-complete capture) costs much more.

The capturing instrument (CIA-like) scenario is, therefore, never like Baudrillardian simulation — nor even like The Matrix, for that matter. The reality of politcs de suyo (even in the scenario where it predominantly enacts an exogenous agenda as such) weighs down on the slick technocratic machine that never hesitates to break a few eggs to make marmalade. But this “de suyo reality” of politics is not (at all, at all) necessarily experienced by anyone outside the very core of the state apparatus where the machine’s policy is rehydrated and modified until it becomes state policy. Dude, if there’s anything you should have learned from the 365-day slice of history that immediately precedes this, it’s that political parties are as-such. Which is why they can be terminated without disrupting “de suyo reality”.

The crashing car, on the other hand, comes a lot closer to Baudrillard. We, the hoi polloi, are vaguely aware of the collisions, but are rarely — if ever — awake to the ourobouros of it all. Much like a manifold is flat around any point, we think that moving towards the collision path is moving through history; the crash is experienced as a shock, a betrayal, a dialectical antithesis. But dialectical sublation is supposed to be about the emergence of a roving contradiction — an unresolved superposition of terms — yet history looks more like a succession of open fires. The French Revolution never really sublates; Americans see it again and again in their Civil Rights movement and in “antiracism” politics and Women’s Lib and the gender revolution. The CIA-like thing is in a way of preparing to lose (better to surrender to the Agency than to communists); the crashing car is in a way of confronting and winning and confronting and winning.

4.

The task that faces us as political creatures is to tell the truth — not a truth grounded on facts, but a moral truth, grounded in what for practical issues is a self-evident gradient from bad to good that lets us make an epistemic cut: acceptable, unacceptable. General Axiology was/is an utopian project was all about making gradients from cuts from gradients from cuts. But we have no General Axiology at hand — our problems haven’t been dissolved yet — and still many political questions (both ongoing issues and discrete events) on the cusp of outright catastrophe seem to require very little moral and ethical capabilities — let alone refinement — to be sorted out.

And yet we’re lost: because the dominant philosophy (the discourse of the Master) tells us that godliness follows from factfulness, the sphere of facts is permeated by noise that drowns out signal. The same dominant philosophy tells us that the political gridlock (and sometimes one is theorized into existence) stems from an attachment to the values and beliefs of one’s camp over reality, which in the context of gridlock has the structure of some consensus (or the promise of a consensus horizon). If this seems like an unworkable structure, that’s because it is one. This is a car meant to crash again and again. The ultimate goal of democracy is to destroy itself. It can’t really go anywhere else.

The opposite of this is, of course, the “deep state” — the structure that politics de suyo builds in order to become as-such (a transition that is never complete, like those that involve surgery and opposite-sex hormones). There is (at least in principle and in historical semi-myth) a best form of this — paideia, the total ideal of excellence in which every man is expected to be a geometer, an athlete, a philosopher, an orator, a warrior. But to obtain paideia from current arrangements we would need the state apparatus to first invert its notion of a civic education to then realize what we’re about to lose (societal and cultural integrity) and then create the instruments to which the sources of policy de-suyo will be dislocated. Politics as such might remain a fun horse race in such a scenario.

But instead: civic education subordinates everything else to raison d’etat. Civics is the ultimate recurring crashing vehicle: it attacks again and again the irrepressible human flourishing that makes civics thinkable despite the bare essentials (disease, darkness and hunger). Civics is a murrain; there is no delocalization scheme that can protect the sources of policy from it. Every last strength we manage to put towards political action must be against civics before it destroys civic life de suyo and towards the takeover of society by paideia — the only thing that can ultimately protect and promote boundless, spontaneous, asemic human flourishing.