Absolute Power (S10-S12)

The Absolute Gamification Of Justice

(Click here for Sections 7-9)

Image: Schopenhauer’s antithetical response to a revolution.

S10: The Absolute Double Negation: Culture Is Messy, Justice Is Too

A hypermodern plurality of identities and subjectivities split culture, whether it is the cursed, problematic identity of a skin tone, a historically developed national culture, or an international people or religion, each identity reaches outside of itself into the world to embolden and empower itself. It is hypermodern insofar as one person can hold a variety of identities, and algorithms split and confuse knowledges and ends of a multitude of subjectivities with each other. Each claim has knowledge bases which reference culture, power, history, as well as a relation to justice as a feature of all three of the previous categories of culture, power, and history. The category of justice provides an immediate antithesis to specific cultures and identity claims and references a body of law to mediate all peoples within a framework of national or international law. International law is typically criticised for not working, and this is a fair critique of international law. In a sense, it isn’t really justice because it doesn’t really have any claim to power unless specific nations unionize on specific issues, but even then, justice still is messy.

A desire for a universal and international justice is not the only illusion, even a national justice is struck through by bias and counter-bias. A specific identity does not guarantee which side of bias one will fall down upon. Bias is defined as a gravitational tilt towards the goals of one identity which go beyond the desire for universal fairness. Counter-bias has the same gravitational pull but in the opposite direction, universal fairness is derided in favor of overcoming bias in the direction of a group with a claim to historical oppression.

Justice emerges as a true antithesis to the plurality of identities, and must encompass force within itself. This is to say, justice has two negations within itself: the failure of itself, and force beyond itself.

S11: Dreams, But Justice Anyway

Different identities, split both consciously and algorithmically, mean that we have no universality in fact within a single life; rather, we have the dream of a singular justice despite these hypermodern splits. Nonetheless, a reference to a singular justice emerges as a necessity as an antithesis to the mindboggling plurality of hypermodernity. Not only is it a psychological necessity to make sense of the world, but it is also the true antithesis to the problem of bias, counter-bias, and the failure of itself. Justice can contend with its own failures.

Zizek has critiqued the critique of justice and multipolarity for creating a degradation of justice and recreating the argument against Socrates where Socrates is forced to debate through brute force. I aim to argue that justice is always a combination of power and fairness or justice itself, and that justice is not a clean transcendental category, and one must think it with power.

A question emerges: should we still reference justice if justice inevitably is self-contradictory and contains the negations within itself of its own failure as well as its necessity to contain its direct antithesis, bias and power without reference to justice at all? This is to say, justice contains self-interest beyond justice, so should it be still referenced or should we reference power beyond justice? To make an argument at all, despite all arguments being flawed, I argue that justice must always be referred to if one is to speak at all, even if one is representing a biased position. This justice must also be related to a general fairness in addition to its own technical features, as its technicalities exist to structuralize fairness in general, which is the true and greatest antithesis to the plurality of self-interested identities and subjectivities.

S12: Absolute Gamification

A game is compromised if it is seen as something which is corrupted. Nonetheless, it is true that corrupted games exist. It is true that all countries stamp a currency, even if that currency ends up not being able to function as currency. In the same way, power and fairness combine in justice to create a plurality of game currencies. The technicalities of games, despite their nature of being constructed, does not take away the fact that technicalities structure the notion of fairness beyond a specific identity.

The other feature of gamification is behavioral psychology. There is a reinforcement of the currency of games on the level of experience which create a validation for a game which is not explicitly written down. Power is necessary to structure rules, but that power continues through a felt validity, an experiential feeling of the validity of games, biases, and justice itself.

Justice then takes the form of Absolute Gamification, which encompasses its own devalued currency in the world, the psychological characteristic of the dream which shows its plural nature, the behavioral psychology feature of reinforcement of validity, and the actuality of the powers which reinforce it. Justice as a category is truly hyperpsychological in the domain of the real forces within it, but it can reference itself through its own symbolic rules. The effectiveness of it depends on the currency of itself.