asemic horizon

I.

The style and thrust of theory (especially, but not exclusively on asemic horizon) is in a way of stuttering. There is an awkwardness, a meandering tendency to weave between simple and clear accounts only to come up with what, to overwhelming majorities, must seem like unnecessary complication. What’s worse, asemic horizon is, to an uncomfortable degree, made up: it multiplies road blocks (often) without justifying their particular distribution, even as they vie for load-bearing status in this whole structure which, well, is there — in such a way that we can’t apparently even purge old, embarrassing themes.

The stuttering is, of course, integral to the role of theory. What, even the most sober of philosophies can’t really do without some degree of stuttering, lest the natural anamnesic flow of thought flood over careful attempts to reason at higher levels of abstraction: our deepest model of reason is founded in a situationship of sorts between the gadfly and the hoi polloi. But asemic horizon characteristically throws all care and rigor to the wind; it wants ultimately to reach something beyond epistemorphic prejudices (sic, as they fail to resist the anamnesic flow) of reason and truth.

Our ultimate goal (and here I’m again taking care of the I/we distrinction — I do mean “yours and mine”) here is, as by now stated, staked hundreds or thousands of times, General Axiology. Yet General Axiology has nothing to do with stuttering. At this point, we could do away with the whole flawed model that had us falling down a tunnel through increasing genericity until it flips over into generality. We can replace all that crap with the barenaked assertion that the way of General Axiology is in a general kind of fluency.

II.

The best actual illustrations I’ve actually been able to make so far have to do with marriage. The healthiest, most robust relationships are fraught with conflict: as partners slip out of generic profilicity into great openness and vulnerability, all kinds of sharp edges come out. But there’s a right way to deal with marital rows — simply, to bring into the focus the higher-order telos of the relationship itself over whatever banal thing is apparently at stake. This is, of course, a stuttering description of the real thing, which would be near-unspeakable even if all couples were fundamentally the same (and the point of coupling is that they’re not). Instead: the whole thing is in a shared fluency and in the overarching notion that partners ultimately want to agree, to be of the same mind — to live, in short.

III.

Pressed for a clear definition of what’s clearly undefinable, I have, in past asemic horizon material, described General Axiology as a kind of ultimate consensus. This is a violent oversimplification: at the barest level of syntax, “consensus” is a transitive form — it has to be about something, and to make things worse, something generically epistemorphic. Ultimate consensus is definite, even if its praxis allows for a kind of implicitness that distinguishes it and gives it more feasibility than plain “agreement”. It’s in this implicitness that we find consensus to be a useful, if provisional mental model: Arrow’s (preference aggregation) theorem tells us that three people can’t really agree on what color to paint a wall; the ensuing Terrible News is that neither can we emerge as decision-making instance amidst the internal cacophony we like to present as a “self”.

What’s more: the key differences between “agreement” and “consensus” model the key step from Universal Consensus to General Axiology. If General Axiology is a general form of fluency, then it should dissolve the transitivity of “consensus”, leaving us with a flowing form that’s as implicit and natural and peaceful as consensus, but moves beneath the surface of “aboutness” that characterizes disagreement, debate, imposition and consensus. Universal embrace, universal goodwill, but not in the form of a regression to basic common values: not basic literacy, but infinite wisdom and infinite bliss.

IV.

Politics is always predicated in leaps of faith — at the very minimum, faith in the polis and the polity. In the classical model, politics was further predicated in paideia, the generalized education-like ideal that expected each man to reach for general excellence — in war, geometry, sports, statecraft. The fact that this was, in the classical era, an aristocratic model, does not seem capricious or contingent on the universal history of social strife: paideia demands men that are worthy of itself rather than looking for common ground and minimal dignity in whatever is found in all men.

That’s not, of course, how we roll now: politics is unqualified men and women that concern themselves with agitating and backroom-dealing for politics (note the beautiful circularity of this formula). Yet politics authorizes itself as such (and not as a social game or as the Mafia) by occupying the polis. Now: is there any viable concept of the polis (the generalized city) that survives occupation by a naked protection racket? Or is the (generalized) city an artifact of the polity, such that politics can only claim to be politics by making itself the “politics of the polity”? Or does politics generate the polity (imposing extraneous social structure on the mass of human flesh it claims sovereignty over) as needed? These are silly, abstract questions bordering on wordplay; devoid of any realistic social texture, they nevertheless illustrate how any conceivable genealogy of state power relies on lowest common denominators: politics/city/polity are founded on that which city/polity/politics will bear.

In General Axiology, of course, the distinctions between politics/city/polity become blurred, hopefully to the point of epistemic collapse. Polity is brotherhood — as universal or local as it presents to you at any given moment; city is the material presentation of such brotherhood (and yes, you can lock your doors; I can love you as you are because you can love me as I am, and because General Axiology changes us). Politics is that fluent form of intransitive, flowing metaconsensus I was just discussing a few paragraphs above.

V.

Before General Axiology: carry water, chop wood. After the onset of General Axiology: carry water, chop wood. Although this whole project was spurred back in 2018 by political events, it really centers around what would normally be characterized as a spiritual pursuit. Yet this vortex needs not be an all-consuming spiritual obsession: much of the human experience as it exists now can be explained by how it is not moving toward General Axiology. The “axiological turn” underlying theory tells us to look at reality in specific ways: tempo, chroma and so on as infrastructure, but more importantly values over truth, agreement and disagreement (and all the ensuing levels of meta — like married couples agree they’d like to agree even if they disagree where sharp edges cut) over debate and even persuasion; surface effects (as in Baudrillard); the discourse of the Analyst (as in Lacan); territory over meaning (as in Deleuze). This is how I justify the cheeky soubriquet “research and consulting”.

Yet — when all else is said; with General Axiology frankly recognized as utopia that may or may not be counter to human nature; after the admission is made that making theory is rewarding for its own sake even as it fails to have any kind of real-world footprint — I’m left with the distinct feeling that this all implies desirable change, necessary change. Politics clearly swims in the opposite direction of General Axiology as universal fluency, infinite bliss, ultimate embrace; yet doesn’t the whole thing seem to imply a political program? There is true power and grandeur in this vision, and the only real bottleneck seems to be my own ability to conjure it in some way that begins the process of reassembling the polity.

Inapt as I seem to be at this, que cosa fuera, corazón, que cosa fuera? What the fuck should I be doing instead?