defmacro discarded bits

(I’m cleaning up my drafts box. This hails from the early weeks of the pandemic.)

The original intent of asemic horizon was not to publish kiloword-increments on a theoretical construction that was alleged (air quotes: allegedly) to be required to understand current affairs. It was, on the contrary, expected to comment on current affairs themselves, albeit from a perspective enabled by an increasing detachment from the ongoing terms of debate. Even the choice of doing so in English was largely a product of this: a self-imposition of intelligibility to people far removed from the local insanity would both require and make possible a refactored explanation of the ongoing context. This explanation would be analytical and hopefully daring — if only the value-added concept of producing intel from Brazil (“from the edges of meaning”, our original motto) could ever stick.

How long did this even last? Writing in English was a surprising first stumbling block, given that I’m nominally adept (and dare I say, far above my peer group in fluency and plain being-at-ease) at writing complex academic and para-academic (read: think-tank work that gets presented to policy-makers) text. But the constraints here were different: *asemic horizon* is decidedly unscholarly in that it sidesteps the charliework of compiling references and backlinks; it is so as a matter of style of thinking and writing but also because “we’re short-staffed”. Unsurprisingly (in retrospect, anyway) the language barrier became a much softer constraint as the journal started focusing on ever-more abstract fare — the kind in which I’m actually a better writer than many native users of English.

“Write what you know”, says standard writing advice. But this is what I know: theory.

II.

Jair is thus an abstraction too; it is, to the best of my hermeneutical skills, the core of what animates the man’s political project. But also takes the role of a metonym for a type of turbulent eddy showing up in many major political situations (in highly-linked regions of the Situation). Almost everywhere these eddies have been crassly classified as “nationalist populism”, “right-wing rhubarb rhubarb” or even “proto-fascism”; these Peppa Pig-smart models either leveraging frameworks already in use or haphazardly assembled to generate opposition rhetoric. But there is more to Jair; a claim that would be exceptionalistic if it implied there is a heroic content to Messias Bolsonaro that produces most of Jair.

But philosophy stops there. Philosophers are called to explore the Truth, but the Truth has long been dissolved in the Brazilian condition. In it stead, we started doing theory, unadjectivated and unqualified: from a soteriology derived from outward ethical commitments, we refined the theory of the ambient conditions of truth. But that has technical complications (namely the problem of quabilities); in turn, those were made clearest by their application to the (potentially and simultaneously impossibly) correlated-to-politics framework of General Axiology — itself a higher-order soteriology of sorts with messy technical implications leading us to diegesis and choppy tempo and who knows what else.o

So what the hell is new?

III.

Every so often I try to set up an entry to develop some news about Brazil. Each time getting the news across ends up requiring major theoretical breakthroughs which obscure the mere facticity that was expected to be waiting for us, as if naked on a casting couch. The side effect is that in junctures where we’re looking at an empty pipeline in theoretical development, some important turns of events (or even the occasional whiplash) go unreported. Part of the blame, I see clearly now, falls on Jair-as-initial-abstraction: not all of Bolsonaro’s behavior, particularly in the last six weeks, is especially Jair-like. But it’s not the case either is that a clean breaking-bad fault-line can be established — either in time or as a conceptual support vector establishing what is Jair-like (and therefore legitimating _of theory_ — we never set out to give legitimacy to what already amounts to a major historical figure; what, with complex nonstandard concept Jenga and long-tail median readership?) and what is not. Our style of theorymaking affords us the easy way out: we claim to be founded on an abstraction, like Lacan’s languagelike unconscious, and disclaim the messy ongoingness from which it was scraped off.

Personally I have major ethical qualms with this. As marginal a cultural project this is, it shouldn’t go full Ezra Pound on mythologizing Messias Bolsonaro as a kind of historical necessity that pushes against noxious and frankly artificial political forces. And this is something I don’t want to claim as high moral ground — who knows what would have been my take in a society with some preexisting order of meaning. There are specific ambient conditions that lead to the specific ambivalence in which Messias Bolsonaro is raised to power and with which the Jair abstraction is constructed. These specific ambient conditions matter; to be a fascist in Brazil would be a lot like being a Mennonite preacher in a leather sex dungeon — or, maybe more realistically, a leather chains-and-collars pair of aggressive gay men leading Christmas Mass. (The former image possibly amuses moralistic Americans; the latter paints the full impossibility of transgression under Brazilian conditions.)

IV.

We could have spent much more time in analysis paralysis between Jair and Messias Bolsonaro; we could also have given up by now. The chain of events that set us free had to do with new complications in the Brazilian situation that were not _directly_ related to his behavior but rather to the system’s “institutional”, organistic response to it — namely in the progressive power grab by the Revolutionary Guard that pretends to be a Supreme Court. We were at a loss for words; we needed a language that allowed us to plainly express this ambiguous superposition of powers in a form that was plainly consistent with David Easton’s and others’s systems description of politics and legitimacy. Being suckers for abstraction, this led in a couple of hours to a semi-general theory of power and legitimacy in one meaning-making churro where right axiologies ooze from left axiologies as one squeezes the whole thing. It took a while more for the messianic version of General Axiology to emerge — but from that point on Jair was clearly no longer the only knot in our throats.

Why do I keep recounting this journal’s short history? A practical reason is that there’s simply _too much to read_ to get up to speed.