I’m planning to now transition into a series of posts that will be modeling the work of Thirdness, so as to make the project plausible and interesting, and highlight what is innovative in it. I have been highlighting the juridical as a kind of irreducible, if less originary, middle term between ritual (originary distribution) and the disciplinary. In pre-juridical orders, all reality is organized ritually—it is in ritual terms that practices and things are named, sorted and affirmed. Imperial orders introduce the juridical, and then all reality must pass through that—even ritual orders are subordinated to the ritual because they come under the authority of the imperial, which in turn provides a kind of ritual backing for the juridical. (For example, churches and other religious institutions own property.) The political project advanced by Thirdness is to transition the juridical—opposing claims lifted out of the vendetta by being adjudicated by an enforcing third party—into data exchange, and thereby bringing the juridical closer to both originary distribution and the disciplinary. What is difficult and new, then, about Thirdness, is figuring conflicts submitable to judgment in terms of data exchange—each party donating and/or receiving data from the center in lieu of such things as punishment or damages. Not only every conflict, but every imaginable or hypothetical conflict, must be figurable in this way—this is a construction of reality, one which departs from while being continuous with existing constructs. And every relationship bears within it the possibility of any number of conflicts—ultimately, we find ourselves drilling down to the basic mimetic substructure of human reality, rendering the elementary mimetic emotions like envy, desire and resentment adjudicable, and therefore available to analysis in terms of data exchange and examination in terms of idioms of the center. I’m appealing to a certain self-evidency here, “daring” you to imagine any action or relationship that is immune or resistant to juridical categories, assuming you will fail; and by the same token, asking you to imagine that this imaginary would not, in fact intensify tendencies towards hyper-juridification of modern life (constant lawsuits, incremental criminalizing of previously normal behavior, etc.) but, rather, would have the opposite, pacifying, effect, of enabling us to anticipate and therefore defer actual encroachments upon the nomos. We would be giving more substance to concepts such as “fairness” as buffers protecting cooperative, norm-governed endeavors.
Modeling Thirdness
Modeling Thirdness
Modeling Thirdness
I’m planning to now transition into a series of posts that will be modeling the work of Thirdness, so as to make the project plausible and interesting, and highlight what is innovative in it. I have been highlighting the juridical as a kind of irreducible, if less originary, middle term between ritual (originary distribution) and the disciplinary. In pre-juridical orders, all reality is organized ritually—it is in ritual terms that practices and things are named, sorted and affirmed. Imperial orders introduce the juridical, and then all reality must pass through that—even ritual orders are subordinated to the ritual because they come under the authority of the imperial, which in turn provides a kind of ritual backing for the juridical. (For example, churches and other religious institutions own property.) The political project advanced by Thirdness is to transition the juridical—opposing claims lifted out of the vendetta by being adjudicated by an enforcing third party—into data exchange, and thereby bringing the juridical closer to both originary distribution and the disciplinary. What is difficult and new, then, about Thirdness, is figuring conflicts submitable to judgment in terms of data exchange—each party donating and/or receiving data from the center in lieu of such things as punishment or damages. Not only every conflict, but every imaginable or hypothetical conflict, must be figurable in this way—this is a construction of reality, one which departs from while being continuous with existing constructs. And every relationship bears within it the possibility of any number of conflicts—ultimately, we find ourselves drilling down to the basic mimetic substructure of human reality, rendering the elementary mimetic emotions like envy, desire and resentment adjudicable, and therefore available to analysis in terms of data exchange and examination in terms of idioms of the center. I’m appealing to a certain self-evidency here, “daring” you to imagine any action or relationship that is immune or resistant to juridical categories, assuming you will fail; and by the same token, asking you to imagine that this imaginary would not, in fact intensify tendencies towards hyper-juridification of modern life (constant lawsuits, incremental criminalizing of previously normal behavior, etc.) but, rather, would have the opposite, pacifying, effect, of enabling us to anticipate and therefore defer actual encroachments upon the nomos. We would be giving more substance to concepts such as “fairness” as buffers protecting cooperative, norm-governed endeavors.