I.

They say the point of washing your windows is so you won’t see the glass. This is the grand conceit of critical thinking: to improve the mind is, at the transcendent limit, to make it disappear. But thinking is something that feels more like sharpening, like shaping blunt masses into tools — tools that are to be held, and therefore held with purpose. In the transcendent limit, thinking is a world-making endeavor; the chief source of anxiety of all transcendental philosophy is how to account for the kind of thinking necessary to make any kind of benign world. All reasoning is, thereafter, motivated reasoning.

II.

I have been coming back to truth and reconciliation a lot lately. For a long while, mainstream culture told us that “polarization” was about a hollowing-out of debate in such a way that aligning disparate strands of motivated reasoning was harder and harder as camps became entrenched. But the issue of alignment is always directed; something fluid is actively set as a function of something fixed. This is where magic words come to be invoked: civic duty, democracy, justice, the general interest. But our ever-growing political malaise was never about misalignment. Heck, it was never even about tribalism. If anything ever has root causes, it’s this: political polarization arises out of widespread thinking. The Lights of Kant, Diderot, Lagrange, Hegel — they’ve finally become cancerous.

Now: taking the concept-process of truth and reconciliation to your favorite sites of controversy (ICE in Minneapolis? Bolsonaro in jail? Barbells versus machines?) should be immediately nauseating. What, in almost every instance it becomes truncated so that “truth commissions” can be raised to rewrite history. Can it ever work? Can a sufficiently clear window on further controversies ever be produced?

asemic horizon has always been about leaving questions like these hanging in the air, but I fear this whole discussion is lost if an answer is not stated/staked out here: I don’t think so. I think the best we can do is to dial back our investment in the presumed value of truth, and deal in mealy-mouthed peacework.

III.

The crux of asemic horizon — yes, a project amidst the years of accumulating cruft — is the idea that the only way forward is to find a new understanding of purpose. Because all thinking happens inside purpose, this quickly degrades into an infinite recursion — understanding “understanding “understanding “…..”””. The gambit of theory is that turning this recursion upside down gives us workable terms towards this hidden pearl: theory is the theory of generic structure. Classic asemic horizon then claims theory to be fundamentally apraxic — no time but in tempo; no ethics but in chroma. But this means theory doesn’t go; it’s not only that, as Baudrillard puts it, the secret of theory is that truth doesn’t exist, it’s furthermore that this doesn’t matter. Not, at least, in that last zinc spark-like emergence of the matter that really matters, i.e. General Axiology.

The epochal error of asemic horizon, its very own self-referential paradox, is that it seems to operate as if truths of theory matter even if theory and truth do not. General Axiology is then an artifact of a cheap Sorites (how-many-grains-of-sand-in-a-heap) puzzle: there exists a sufficient degree of understanding such that all discord is resolved, and from there a simpler degree of understanding that would allow us to understand that ultimate dissolution. It doesn’t go, General Axiology.

IV.

Silvio Rodriguez tells us in La Maza that, if not for his beliefs, he’d be an awkward mass of strings and tendons, wood and flesh (he fuses himself with his guitar, which contra Heidegger shall never be broken tool on a shelf) — purpose-less, like a sledgehammer outside a quarry. Because of his noted role as one of the core propagandists of the Cuban revolution, we’re prone to quickly conclude that such beliefs are political as-such. But as almost everywhere else in his mature repertoire, Silvio’s poetry is ambiguous enough that it may well be (malgré lui-même; it’s rather likely that he doesn’t understand this) fundamentally a poetry of indeterminacy.

This actually works in two different “levels”. First, the contents of Silvio’s beliefs are vague (although not fully generic, rather pervaded by a Goethean rational-romantic individualism) but — we’re told — necessary, through a reduction to the absurdity of purposelessness. Yet this is not the fleeting reductio of mathematical proof; the florid indeterminacy (“what would I be, my heart, what would I be”) of life sans purpose makes the bulk of the song, up to its very title. We’re not meant to be touched by the reason behind his beliefs; we’re meant to understand these are the only beliefs he can have.

V.

The key to grappling with asemic horizon is thence to understand the core concepts and motifs of theory are (as far as I can tell) the only ones that stave off the basic rudderlessness of intellectual effort: if not for the chroma shift and General Axiology, what the fuck would I even be doing? Writing political takes? Moralizing the widespread breakdown in social harmony? Doing careful exegeses, one line at a time, of Baudrillard or Luhmann or Deleuze? What the fuck would I be doing, my heart, que cosa fuera?

But note: this is true of basically any project. Everywhere across the over-reified political spectrum, people and orgs and belief-sets have painted themselves into corners. Axiological collapse: rather than “swimming upward, toward General Axiology, ultimate unity of purpose, infinite power, infinite bliss”, warring parties find themselves mimicking their opposition’s bad faith tactics, making it their own. But, hark, there lies the fundamental sin: the ends may well justify the means, but the means corrupt the ends.