• TikTok

    I Why does TikTok come from China? The opening ceremony for the 1980 Moscow Olympics featured a message from space and almost two hours of dances from the manifold peoples of the Soviet world, from Cossack to Khirghiz. The closing ceremony featured a bear-shaped balloon who flew high and then higher than high. The 1984…

  • Guest post: Stronger stronger stronger

    One reason I put us through that rambling essay about the I/we voices was to prepare the ground for our first guest post by a friend of the blog who opts to identify himself simply as B. It follows in italic. I didn’t touch up a comma of his text, but did take the liberty…

  • Minimaxima

    I. (Mirror scene) My twitter bio bears a mangled quote from asemic horizon that witnesses (a phrase is a witness; think of this for a while) to the fundamental distinction between the I and the we voices: it says Theory is, after all, a praxis of intelligibility; and there is nothing intelligible about the inevitability…

  • The Game

    The Game

    I. A lot of theory-making is about taking words way too literally — to the end of their meaning, their asemic horizon. If there is any truth to the analytic account of “slips of the tongue”, then language is a buildup of such accidental disclosures. If only for this reason, there’s often profit in staring…

  • Breathe

    Breathe

    I. Could you explain Galilean relativity to an anatomically modern human from 25,000 years ago? Galilean relativity is at the core of what natural science defines to be the world. Its threefold tenets: (1) that the world is stable (i.e. it obeys eternal laws), (2) homogeneous (ontically uniform, there being no privileged locations) and (3)…

  • How to do things with theory

    How to do things with theory

    I. In Outwards we have the seminal (if  “more badly-written” than the average AH text) essay on what we’ll keep calling physics — to the dismay of I-fucking-love-science fans and maybe even some scientists. There’s something to the dynamics of theory-making (and not just AH, but philosophy, continental and analytic alike, linguistics, psychoanalysis, etc.) that leads…

  • Protected: Fooled by convexity

    Protected: Fooled by convexity

    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • Breadcrumb trails

    It’s difficult to parse asemic horizon without going over the whole thing; but the following previously-unpublished fragment cuts directly to the soaring strings. My last text introduced (not accidentally) a non-concept, the scenario. The scenario is a framing device. It sets up some patch of the Situation for some human drama, which is surely contrary to…

  • Jairwave (2018-2020)

    Jairwave (2018-2020)

    Brazil’s relatively large (if well under-proportional) weight in international affairs notwithstanding, you may still not be informed that Jair Bolsonaro dun goofed. His anomalous character — his glitch — had been chipping away in small pieces in the last baker’s dozen of weeks. But this is something different now. It isn’t in truth-rain. It doesn’t…

  • Glitchy

    Glitchy

    I. asemic horizon continuously hesitates to comment on salient, event-like anomalies because it cultivates a particular conceit called “theory”. The intellectual import of this conceit is that, in theoretical work, an all-consuming effort is placed on making sense of salient structure-like anomalies. The philosophical import of this all-consuming effort is that systems thinking implies there is a single structural…

  • 37+ layers

    37+ layers

    I. Once in a while, we have to start again from the top. If the Situation is indeed a polyrhytmic pattern of clicking, it makes sense that we skitter every so often from its groove and have to go five and four and three and two and hum to get back on track. And so we have,…

  • Guerra cultural

    Guerra cultural

    I.  Praxis is at once the agitating mechanism and the key site of misosophy, the hatred of wisdom. Philosophy teaches, on the contrary, ambivalence and detachment. Contrary to philosophy, theory-in-the-world is of-praxis, specifically the praxis of deferral. Taking a loan is the theory of being able to pay it back at a later time. This deferral operator also…