Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“This is understandable, because how could we have little tribunals set up to address every disagreement between clerks in the DMV? But it’s also the case that judicial rulings generate rules, explicitly (more so in recent decades than previously?) or implicitly, insofar as one can draw conclusions from the way a court rules now to the way a similarly constituted court will rule in the future—so, avoiding acting in such a way that is very likely to get you on the losing side of a lawsuit is functionally identical to following an administrative rule. In that case, bureaucracies are fossilized legal traditions. But what would replace bureaucracy, then, is not endless lawsuits at every level of every institution, but a juridical order governed by anthropological awareness of the basic purpose of the juridical: to prevent the recrudescence of the vendetta from below and the emergence of antinomic agencies (those that would in effect put the order itself, its mode of property, on trial) from above. Again, we aim at the paradox that the perfection of the juridical tends asymptotically toward its abolition—but only the incorporation of any awareness of this paradox into juridical institutions can ensure this.”

— Adam Katz, Continuum of Power · Aug 20, 2024 · Bouvard Substack