Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“My thinking about the centrality and fragility of the juridical causes me to revise my understanding of power as “centered ordinality.” Power is ordered through imperatives, command and obedience within a team organized around some shared purpose, but that observation always leaves open the question of the form of the imperative (the crafting of imperatives, we could say) as well as the imperative gap, or the difference between the imperative issued and the imperative obeyed. The imperative must be deemed to be the same across this distance, but through some ritual of succession, which itself then defines power. Liberalism fills the imperative gap with what I have called “supersovereignties,” drawn ultimately from the disciplines, centered in law but reaching across all the media, social scientific and even physical scientific disciplines needed to determine the application of law. The gathering of these concepts into a new model of power confronts the supersovereignties even more directly by sharing its centering of the law. For liberalism, power derives from the leveraging of rights claims presumably constitutive of the legitimacy of the state itself—that makes it a kind of succession ritual itself, insofar as it’s a way for power to be transferred from one agency of debt enforcement/forgiveness to another. As is always the case with liberalism, it’s a succession ritual that must disavow itself. Nevertheless, liberal transfers of power must take place through judgments, in claims against itself and often other parties that the state empowers.”

— Adam Katz, A New Model of Power · Nov 05, 2023 · Bouvard Substack