I set out today to write an essay on the “pick-up arts” — the various methods and underlying theories whose goal is to increase your body count.

I. It‘s either the case that power is scalar and a concept of “total power in existence” is logical (there is a logic — hopefully one that matches widely held intuitions — in which this concept is sound), or that it‘s not. I’m not handling this latter case today. It‘s either the case that the…

(Parts 1 and 2 here) I. Libertarianism is the conspiracy theory that there’s such a thing as a legitimate State. Thatcherism made this conspiracy more palatable by introducing the claim that there’s no such thing as *society*. This claim is false in Durkheim and true in Luhmann; but even in the absence of fancy citations,…

1a. There’s a thread from Hokusai to Messiaen. I don’t want to describe it as much as I want to seize it. I want to grab and hold on to it; know it by its friction on my palms; pull and be pulled. On one knot stand 36 views of Mount Fuji; on the next,…

I. The cookie crumbles as follows: causation feels equivalent to inevitability, and inevitably feels like it precludes meaningful human action. This would be far more devastating than it seems at first: it’s not just that “your life has no meaning” implying a spiritual void; rather, if nothing can be otherwise, then no communication is possible.…

As usual we have to take umbrage in etymologies: axios meaning “worthy”; this, apparently (there are scholarly doubts) from, ἄγω ‎+ τιος, to “draw down”, presumably in a scale — and thus also examination. This gives us a procedural account of primeval axiology; on the one side, not moral, but practical; on the other, predicated…

I. I’ve been working on a concept I call the sources of policy. This hasn’t happened in the context of asemic horizon, meaning: it’s mercenary treason of the project of theory. Instead, I’ve been developing the notion of “sources of policy” as part of a larger project that precedes me and that I hope to…