Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“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.”

— Adam Katz, Modeling Thirdness · Feb 15, 2024 · Bouvard Substack