asemic horizon :: asema chromata :: casino rhizome

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, it’s a respectable *political* claim, as it lunges into the competing claim that the social is the stuff (the matter, the hylos) of politics and government. Thatcher gets bonus points for not mentioning Arrow’s Terrible News. But it stops short of libertarianism by attacking government rather than State. Good girl Thatcher! She imbues right-liberal politics of the ensuing half decade with the same smooth qualities of the soft-serve ice cream she’s credited with inventing.

There’s a leap in reasoning from “there’s no such thing as society” to “no overarching structure can ever re-present, speak for, simulate its constituent men and women”. This leap is in full bijection with the gap between the legitimacy invested by normal people in the State and the desert-of-the-real claimed by libertarians. On both sides of this leap are axiological matters (even if only due to the is-ought firewall). But to the extent that they can be characterized as matters belonging to *different axiologies*, they amount to *political foundations* to the idea, core to “asemic horizon” but always just short of intelligible, that there *are* different axiologies.

Particularly salient here is how strongly parameterized this bijection is by the idea of *representation*. In a way, the core problem is passing from social representation (it may be worthwhile here to recall Latour’s golden formula relating *society* to *association*) to legitimate representation (implicitly, of *legitimacies*). In philosophy alone there’s a whole spectrum of potentially relevant frameworks for this, from Plato’s cave to Deleuze’s open-ended immanence. But here, as everywhere else, philosophy meets the world with the infuriating dynamic of teasing — nay, edging — us with relevance and applicability, never leading us past the finish line. This is where philosophy and theory part ways. The kind of abstract sexuality of tease-and-denial is an intense lived experience, whether for degenerates, scholars or monks. But theory is distance. Theory is waiting.

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