- It is not a multiverse that we live in, but a plurally articulated universe (pluriverse).
- This pluriverse is dense with living things, defined by potentially infinite modes of being. (The other modes of being are known to some of us as the expressions of “inorganic life.“)
- A given articulation of the universe is expressed from networks of beings, relations between them in their modes.
- The construction of reality is like an act of creative empathy, the feeling of the real a wholeness or cognitive atmosphere that radiates from multiple edges between two or more nodes. Real is what it feels like to be in relation. (More relation, more real.)
- Outside of the relational context of this network, its “atmosphere of coherence”, the real falls back into a turbulence maximally saturated with entities, the “clamor behind the wall”.
- Commerce with these “entities at the edge”, the very creation of reality through the construction of new relations, is a taboo - ostensibly relegated to the edges, while covertly animating the center. At the edges, it’s art; at the center, it’s statecraft.
- The magical persona throughout history transgresses this taboo, constructing games of relation beyond Overton’s window. By colliding art and statecraft into a personal practice of selfhood, they embody an imaginal sovereignty.
- The state is a double edged sword: On the one hand, by offloading cognitive function into the administrative dependency, memory and implied violence of the state (all of which create reliability or “hardness”), civil subjects ostensibly have more space to dedicate to exotic relations. On the other hand, the taboo on reality-creation restricts those relations to within the state’s administrative “regime of coherence.”
- As a result, those who pursue exotic relations with “entities at the edge” compromise their access to the cognitive and material benefits of civil subjecthood. Some slip through the cracks, but the choice is generally clear: cooptation (relegation of practice to the disciplined category of art), insanity, or death. Imaginal sovereignty is effectively outlawed in favor of administrated sovereignty.
- The tension of this enclosure or administered myopia threatens to degrade the very foundation of the state: resource sustainability depends on reciprocity with “entities at the edge”- the enclosed system becomes a parody of itself, ceases to touch the real, suffers from “simulacrum drift” .
- What is needed is a regime of imaginal sovereignty, an open State, with all the hardness and ‘cognitive offload’ benefits of the administrative state, but with infrastructure that facilitates creative legibility on the threshold of the real. The projects of art and statecraft become unenclosed, democratized, and the general population takes on the burden and adventure of active participation in the pluriverse.
- Ethereum has the potential to be such a regime.