now, sadoo,
your views on the law are surely more nuanced than you’ve led us to believe
here. on the one hand you raise olafa, using a simplistic example and
unsophisticated thinking we might add, as a subtle model of one who transcends
binaries and then you yourself construct a binary between olafa’s non-binarism
and the law’s binarism. as you very well know the law’s binarism is itself
offset by non-binarism within the law – it requires no offset outside itself.
all this smacks of those gurus you deride who claim to have achieved
non-duality or enlightenment and whom you and every other reasonable person
know are still just chained to the vast complexities of flesh like everything
else
the law –
whether in the form of its makers, the government; the form of its external
enforcers, the military; its internal enforcers, the police and penal system;
its interpreters, lawyers and judges; its chattel and feedstock, the citizenry
– is, despite inevitable inconsistencies, failures, contradictions, disagreements,
successes (often euphemized as checks and balances), primarily the
state-sanctioned and organized use of force to support capitalism’s interests:
a highly restrictive and dubious apparatus of values that privileges a few
humans at the expense of many and a notable majority of other living things and
environments on earth. while the commons sentimentally celebrates the rare
exercise of the law in correcting gross societal forms of injustice and, while
flipping channels between sports extravaganzas and netflix serial killer
retrospectives and reality shows of hoarders and cheaters, expressing necessary
and scripted outrage at the murder or halfway house around the corner, lives in
fear or respect of the law's invasive capacities, the law serves not the people
but the systems that the people are required to serve, that they were born into
as commodity requirements
you
certainly wouldn’t like it if these systems of control you so easily despise
were removed. while you may question the use of legitimized force – random
brutishness, violence, and barbarism (which we know rapidly manifests when the
former are diminished) would only be claimed to be an alternative or superior
arrangement by the sickest or simplest of minds
naturally i
recognize a certain efficacy to the law. bound in my criticisms are a root
mistrust of tribal, grouped, mass humanity to behave sensibly, intelligently,
creatively, contextually. so an implemented anarchy is, as you point out,
highly problematic and we deal with this by organizing, hierarchizing violence,
recognizing that such an arrangement, while still highly flawed, will at least
provide the semblances sufficient for a public to be sufficiently consensual in
its approval, a sufficiency it is largely trained in from birth
and yet you
still complain. you’re a crass dreamer, a whimsical protester, a vain
utopianist, a quixotic charlatan, a human unable to be pragmatic and thus
effective, separating reality and concept, policy and practice, showing little
or no awareness of history, civilization, diplomacy or even the actual daily
society, culture, and life humans exist within. you would return to an
arbitrariness rank with needless blood and suffering far inferior to the
systems we’ve struggled to construct – which, while imperfect, at least
function far better than any system you can point to elsewhere in time or space
the object
of your advocacy aims at the middle and hits it firmly. and for this aiming and
achieving you defend it. yet in being the system and expression of the middle –
of raising and maintaining a middle – it fails in the very core of its success
and limitation: that is, it must punish its transgressors: those who deviate
from the middle and it ignores (and by ignoring, punishes) the non-human world
on which the human depends. olafa has organized herself and her life to be
vapour wafting around and through your monumentalizings. she would be a social
or political anarchist but she knows anarchy, while perhaps a more superior
system in theory, depends on a society of superior humans – that is, humans who
are intelligent, creative, respectful, contextual rather than greedy,
protective, conniving, ego- and anthropocentric. so she is an individual
anarchist and bypasses the law until she can no longer. the law is necessary
for the undeveloped and those who engage in the law – whether as policy-makers,
enforcers, interpreters, or citizens – regardless of their relative cleverness
or stupidity, ethical orientations or corruption – are profoundly drawn into
the law’s material and spiritual composition, inevitably internalizing it and
thereby incorporating it into their collective and individual constructions.
yes, we can say a rare reformer – often at great cost to itself – can influence
the law so that it drags the law in a certain aspect one more decimeter toward
justice … but as long as this dragging largely takes place within parameters
that are decontextualized, middling, tied to elitist interests, and
antithetical to outside superior forms – whether mycelium or artistic
expression – one must question the efficacy you with such pragmatic
enculturated interest defend. olafa does not bypass the law from power,
privilege, money, corruption – these tools of the law, the tools that sanction
the bypassing of the law by the law: that which you refer to as the non-binary
offset within the law’s binarism – but by the strength of the current within
herself. the bypassing within the law the people may envy and resent but they
fear it for they long for it, but it is this other bypassing that is beyond
their comprehension, for they have never moved away from their training in
their functions as commodities. and so it is not that we don’t recognize that
there is a spectrum of justice within the law and that there are thus degrees
of worthy and unworthy barristers, but that from this other bypassing we call
all barristers bare-assters and all lawyers cloyers and all professors poofessors and all artists fartists and autists and …
we are all père and mère ubus
... – for how else do we breathe but through play? – and we watch the knowledge of olafa guide her on her way
seems as if
you’re one of those who’s walked away from society and needs to rationalize
your estrangement through cheap superiority
seems as if
you’re one of those who’s never questioned the assumptions of the psychopathic
society you were born into and rationalize your blind conformity through cheap
derision
and you
argue against the binary?
it is a
question in my land to what extent the methods used to emigrate to it and
retain one's citizenship – that is, to continue to reside in polypolarity
rather than binarism – in the act itself of emigrating and retaining replace
one in a new binarism, a new law, a new incarceration
there's no
escape. you might as well join us
olafa is my
reference. and my pal voomwyrd writes that in the individual justice universe
the individual subject's universe is like the
person-as-the-walled-moated-castle-town. it is under constant siege and desperately,
obsessively seeking to keep the body – this body made out of food – away from
others and retain it for ourselves alone. any attempt by others at sharing is
regarded as an outrage, an injustice, that must be resisted to the hilt. in the
other, heraclitean universe, being in your body is more like having a volume
out from the library, a volume subject to more or less instant recall by other
borrowers—who rewrite the whole story when they get it. olafa and voomwyrd
don’t deny the binary – they see it replicated everywhere and everywhere in
gradations. rather than orient myself to your world's exigency and pragmatism,
manifest in the law you defend, a law that is leading in its insufficiencies to
the brute anarchy you say it is superior to – an orientation that is genociding
thousands of species, ruining the forests and oceans and air, and now seriously
threatening humanity’s future – i orient myself to olafa, a world not of
accumulation, aggression, castles, and genocide, hardly one of light and ease and
prestige, but one sustainable, mature, contextual – using the human capacity to
intelligently care, with vision and wisdom, using technology cautiously and
judiciously, for the benefit of all living systems. this is olafa’s walk and
laughter
you’re not
going to go very far in your solipsistic delusions
i don’t want
to go very far
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