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Design-L activity continued at... AZ: Glossolalia, "speaking in tongues"...
 

A/SCIENCE II


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+  From: "carr0023@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <carr0023@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+  Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 06:06:04 CST
____________________________________________________________________________
C o m m e n t a r i e s .2

* * *

Here the market is understood as a technology of process, formerly
informed by craft, now by science. It thus becomes obvious why the law
in its service to the market must accept efficiency.

The state is necessarily limitless taking its agenda, as it does,
from science which itself knows no limits. The form of the state is
recepticular; it names only the containment of actions, which are
exhausting. The power of the state resides in its capacity for action
which is sustained by science. The condition of the state is the state
of science, as it once was the state of God.

Democratic institutions may exist, but are no longer political,
being structural instead, and a consideration of efficiency. The polity
like the market is seen as a technological endeavor.

Power accrues rapidly in the state but diffusely, tending not to
aggregate easily, because of the extensive nature of the science in which
it is vested.

* * *

The accomplishments of recent political movements are not anomalous.
The environmentalists were almost animist and deficient in theory. Their
antique idols were simply mounted down by the state and recast as science
and utility and such was the nature of their victory. The rights move-
ments have eroded the former heirarchies based on sex, class, age, race
and culture, but the hierarchies of science and state have been the
implicit beneficiaries of the displaced power.

* * *

This description is an attempt to take stock of the relationship
between science and state. By its nature it is unacceptable in the terms
of the state it seeks to describe. Apostasy is so.

Its politics are in its language and in the power of naming.
Science is the orthodoxy, but it is largely quiet on the question
of itself. In a world of artifice, science is the central feature.
But how shall we know it, then if not in terms of itself?

* * *

In a world of imminent and impending artifice, the question of
the state must be reopened.

* * *
 
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