# Full Text: Cognitive Sovereignty & Active Inference in the State of Exception

> Extracted from `2023_CognitiveSovereignty.pdf`

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Cognitive Sovereignty & Active
Inference in the State of Exception
Daniel Ari Friedman 1,2
1. Active Inference Institute
2. Cognitive Security & Education Forum (COGSEC)
ORCID: 0000-0001-6232-9096
Email: Daniel@ActiveInference.Institute
October 24, 2023 ~ Version 1.1 ~ 10.5281/zenodo.10038232
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Abstract
This paper provides an analysis of Giorgio Agamben's book Homo Sacer in the tradition of
Active Inference. Homo Sacer articulates the relationship between bare life and political
existence in Western politics and metaphysics. Agamben argues that politics is founded on the
inclusive exclusion of bare life, where natural biological life – the physiology and cognition of the
body – is politicized only through its exclusion as an exception. Drawing on Aristotle's definition
of man as a political animal, Agamben traces the historical development of this structure and its
continuation in modern biopolitics.
Here we develop the above concepts in the setting of cognitive sovereignty and connect
Agamben’s framing of the political state of exception with Thomas Kuhn's theory of revolutionary
science. We assert that realized epistemic agency is grounded in the enacted policy selection of
the cognitive sovereign. A given paradigmatic framework, whether in the normal political or
normal scientific setting, establishes what counts as valid knowledge and action. Such
normative establishments periodically enter crises, which are exited by cognitive and material
restructuring downstream of the sovereign’s cognitive agency (an agent’s cognitive sovereignty).
The paper explores how Active Inference, a theoretical framework for scientific inference, can
enhance our understanding of sovereignty, agency, and the state of exception. As an
introductory offering into this space, several concordances are drawn between Active Inference
and Homo Sacer. Specifically: the state of exception is discussed in terms of affordances, bare
life is discussed in terms of variational free energy, and sovereign agency is discussed in terms
of expected free energy. Pseudocode of an “Active Stateference” entity is provided.
Overall, this paper offers an initial accounting of Homo Sacer from the Active Inference
perspective, and sketches some salient directions for understanding the dynamics of power,
knowledge, and sovereignty in politics and science.
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Table of Contents
Abstract.................................................................................................1
Table of Contents..................................................................................2
Homo Sacer and the Logic of Sovereignty........................................... 3
Normal and Revolutionary Science........................................................................4
A Fully Synthetic Cognitive Sovereignty...............................................5
Active Inference in the Social Sciences............................................................ 6
Active Inference in the State of Exception............................................7
Affordances and the State of Exception............................................................7
Variational Free Energy and Bare Life.............................................................. 8
Expected Free Energy and Sovereign Agency................................................. 9
Active Stateference: A sovereign agent in the state of exception.......10
Pseudocode for the Active Stateference model.............................................. 11
Some next steps for Active Stateference........................................................12
From Active Stateference towards Active GovernAnts................................... 13
Conclusions........................................................................................ 14
Works Cited........................................................................................ 16
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Homo Sacer and the Logic of Sovereignty
In the work Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben analyzes the relationship between bare life and
political existence in Western politics and metaphysics [1]. Here I provide an overall summary
and contextualization of the work, to provide a foundation for the coming sections which will
augment these ideas with perspectives from cognitive sovereignty, philosophy of science, and
Active Inference.
Agamben argues that politics is founded on the inclusive exclusion of bare life, meaning that
natural embodied life is politicized only in its exclusion as an exception. Conversely, politics is
founded on the inclusive exclusion of bare life. The politicization of bare life is the originary
activity of sovereignty. Agamben traces this structure back to Aristotle's definition of man as a
political animal and examines the implications of Aristotle separating mere life (zoē) from
politically qualified life (bios). Agamben suggests that modern biopolitics continues this
metaphysical tradition of deciding on the humanity of living bodies through the politicization of
bare life.
The book's protagonist concept is “homo sacer”, an obscure figure of archaic Roman law whose
life could be taken with impunity but who could not be ritually sacrificed. This liminal figure is
used to interrogate and articulate the thresholds between bare life and political existence in the
Western tradition.
Homo Sacer offers a political-philosophical analysis of biopower, tracing the fraught relationship
between natural life and politics from Aristotle and Roman law down to modern biopolitical
states and phenomena like the concentration camp [2]. Agamben examines the state of
exception and how it creates zones of indistinction between law and lawlessness. The state of
exception, initially proposed by Carl Schmitt [3], describes the sovereign's meta-/extra-legal
maneuver that steps outside or straddles the law; transiently existing both inside and outside it.
States of exception are situations in which the normal rules and procedures of governance are
suspended in order to deal with a crisis or emergency. Examples include declarations of
emergency and martial law. The state of exception creates zones of indistinction between law
and lawlessness, while distinguishing friend and enemy. Such states of exception have become
a key political technology over the previous centuries and decades. This history has led to rich
exploration of the topologies (structure, interfaces, and connectednesses) and topographies
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(geometric spatialities and instrumented measures) of political technologies enacted by states
today, which exclude bare life while including it as the object of power [4].
There is an irreducible link between violence and justice (enacted as law via the juridical order).
Law relies on the violence that posits it, as well as the violence that preserves it in a dialectical
oscillation (through the nomos, “the underlying set of laws that structure societies” [5]).
Agamben describes inoperativeness (defined as the relational capacity of the sovereign to the
law to symbolically and actually “suspend its old use, and ideally, repurpose it to a new use that
is post­use, not a means to any end” [6]) as a way to break the dialectic between law-making
and law-preserving violence, as inoperativeness is a potentiality that is not exhausted in the
actualization of work.
Overall, Homo Sacer conducts a political-philosophical interrogation of the fraught thresholds
between bare life and political existence in the Western tradition, with the aim of understanding
modern biopolitics and sovereignty.
Normal and Revolutionary Science
Scientific research is a complex and multifaceted process that involves different stages,
methods, and goals. In his seminal work from 1962 "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,"
Thomas Kuhn proposed a novel way of understanding the dynamics of scientific knowledge and
practice [7]. According to Kuhn, science is not a linear and cumulative process of accumulating
knowledge and refining theories, but rather a dialectical and discontinuous process of normal
science and revolutionary science. Normal science refers to the dominant mode of scientific
research that operates within a given paradigm or framework of assumptions, methods, and
values. In normal science, scientists work within a shared set of concepts, models, and methods
that allow them to solve problems, test theories, and accumulate knowledge. Normal science is
characterized by incremental progress, routine research, and a high degree of consensus
among the professional scientific community or a sub-field.
Normal science is not immune to anomalies, contradictions, and failures. When the
accumulated data and evidence challenge the assumptions and predictions of the prevailing
paradigm, a crisis emerges. The crisis can lead to the emergence of a new paradigm or a shift
to revolutionary science, which involves a radical and transformative change in the basic
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concepts, models, and assumptions of a scientific field. Revolutionary science is characterized
by a period of intense debate, innovation, and experimentation, where different paradigms
compete for dominance. Revolutionary science is not just a matter of replacing one theory with
another but involves a fundamental restructuring of the foundations of knowledge and practice.
Revolutionary science often leads to the creation of new disciplines, subfields, and
methodologies, which challenge and transform the existing scientific landscape.
Over the recent decades, Kuhn's theory of normal science and revolutionary science has been
extended, critiqued, and utilized in many ways. Contemporary authors continued to focus on the
role of paradigms, anomalies, crises, and paradigm shifts in scientific research [8–10].
A Fully Synthetic Cognitive Sovereignty
Cognitive sovereignty is a concept that has undergone significant development in recent years,
drawing on ideas from various disciplines including philosophy, sociology, and political science
[11–13]. In this section, we seek to explore the concept of cognitive sovereignty in preparation
for an analysis involving Agamben's logic of sovereignty in Homo Sacer, Kuhn's model of
revolutionary science, and Active Inference cognitive modeling.
Agamben's work on sovereignty provides a framework for understanding the essentially political
relationship between power and knowledge. In his view, and building in the long tradition of this
idea, the sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception, that is, the circumstances
under which the law can be suspended (the coincidence of law and fact). This decision is not
subject to any external authority; rather, it is grounded in the sovereign's own enacted power.
This action- and outcome-oriented definition of sovereignty leaves open questions such as
internal/cognitive agency (about any sovereign action, synchronic or diachronic individuals may
differ in how they evaluate that action as it relates to e.g. localization of agency and free will).
Kuhn's work on revolutionary science helps us to understand how a given epistemic paradigm
can be disrupted and transformed. According to Kuhn, scientific revolutions occur when the
existing paradigm is no longer able to explain or accommodate new observations. At this point,
a new paradigm emerges, accompanied by a shift in the criteria for valid knowledge. This
process of revolutionary science is analogous to the sovereign decision on the state of
exception. Just as the sovereign's decision on the state of exception grounds the law,
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knowledge is grounded in a paradigm that establishes what counts as valid knowledge and what
does not. This new scientific paradigm, like the sovereign, is (at least initially) not subject to
external authority; rather, it is the product of a historical process of consensus-building among
experts (themselves subject to the “laws”, or at least regularities, of nature).
In both the political and scientific cases, theory describes a breaking discontinuity with the
existing order, followed by the establishment of a new order based on different criteria. While the
sovereign political decision is arbitrary, intersubjective, and involves the law-violence dialectic,
the process of revolutionary science is guided by empirical evidence, rhetorical argumentation,
and ultimately the regularities of nature. A tantalizing direction from here is to explore the woven
nexus of scientific and political technique in past, present, and future biopolitical regimes.
This section has introduced the concept of cognitive sovereignty and its relationship to politics
and science. In the coming sections, we will embrace and extend this Agambenien-Kuhnian
synthesis using Active Inference, a theoretical and methodological framework that provides a
formalization of the process of scientific inference. We will explore how Active Inference can
help us to understand and extract actionable information from the relationships among cognitive
sovereignty, political sovereignty, and scientific discovery.
Active Inference in the Social Sciences
Active Inference is an analytical framework for modeling cognitive ecosystems [14,15]. Sentient
behavior is modeled with Active Inference in terms of how agents perceive and interact with
their environment [16,17], specifically in terms of flows on partitioned maps [18]. Active
Inference is a scale-free theory that can be used to account for the working of brains, bodies,
colonies, and organizations [19,20]. Active Inference agents are modeled as (topological
quantum) flows of perception, cognition, and action [21] under the auspices of the Free Energy
Principle. The resulting Bayesian Mechanics [22,23] enables the consideration of paths of least
action in arbitrary informational spaces [24].
Active scientific agents are constantly generating hypotheses about the world around them and
testing these expectations against incoming sensory information [25–27]. This active scientific
process, which manifests low-level novelty and productivity while at a higher-level stationarity, is
similar to what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science," where scientists work within a particular
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paradigm to test and refine theories, making minor or quantitative changes as needed. Active
Inference can also be applied to situations of abductive reasoning [28] and revolutionary
science, both inside and outside the purely intellectual sense of science. Active Inference
provides the tools to build multiscale material and cognitive generative models of ecosystems of
shared intelligence, considered in the following sections in the setting of a state of exception.
Active Inference in the State of Exception
The following sections discuss the state of exception in terms from the Active Inference
Ontology [29]: the state itself is analyzed in terms of affordances, bare life is considered in terms
of variational free energy, and sovereign agency is explored in terms of expected free energy.
Affordances and the State of Exception
One key concept in Active Inference, drawing from ecological psychology, is that of affordances
[30]. Affordances are the action possibilities that are opened up by a given environment. For
example, to a given agent, a chair may afford sitting, a door may afford opening, and so on. By
perceiving and engaging with the affordances in their environment, living systems can select the
actions that will minimize their free energy.
Considering the causes and consequences of different types of affordances, we can analyze
how states of exception arise and are perpetuated. In such situations, the sovereign (the entity
that can afford to declare the state of exception) has access to a different set of affordances
than in normal times. For example, the sovereign may have the affordance of modifying the law
or using enhanced security powers. In modern settings, this could be reflected by suspension of
habeas corpus, declaration of war, emergency proclamations, and so on. These exceptional
affordances are not present in normal (or civic non-martial) times, but emerge as a result of new
precision dynamics of the system.
Changes in overt (bodily) and covert (attention) policy selection regimes are associated
instrumentally with changes in precision – a measure of the uncertainty or confidence in the
system's internal model of the world [31]. In states of exception, the precision dynamics change
and intertwine with the emergence/creation of new affordances and constraints. The perception
of the state as dangerous or threatening is also crucial for the perpetuation of exceptional
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states. By perceiving the state as dangerous, the system can maintain and internally/externally
justify the exceptional affordances that were opened up by the declaration of emergency.
By analyzing the precision dynamics and the perception of danger, we can gain insights into
how exceptional states arise and are perpetuated. Beyond the political, an epistemic state of
exception would be associated with an ungrounding and reconstitution of basic concepts and
relations. This reformulation manifests in mind however has to be enacted in order to be
realized.
Variational Free Energy and Bare Life
This section introduces and elaborates upon connections between “Bare Life” from Giorgio
Agamben's Homo Sacer, and the concept of “Variational Free Energy” (VFE) from Active
Inference.
Homo sacer is a figure of archaic Roman law whose life could be killed with impunity but who
could not be sacrificed. Homo sacer represents bare life (zoē) - biological life stripped of political
protections. Bare life is included in the political order solely through its exclusion as an
exception. The sovereign decision on the exception is what politicizes bare life.
In Active Inference, organisms minimize variational free energy to maintain their integrity and
existence [32]. The surprise-bounding VFE represents the real-time divergence between an
organism's beliefs and its sensory states. Minimizing VFE entails perceiving and acting on the
world to bring internal states and sensory states into alignment.
Bare life can be understood as biological integrity devoid or apart from political representation.
Minimizing VFE also corresponds to maintaining biological integrity [33]. Thus via a transitive
construction we can anchor the association between “bare life” and VFE. The sovereign
exception politicizes bare life by stripping organisms of political protections for their intrinsic
drive to minimize VFE. Including bare life in the political order solely through its exclusion
mirrors the violence of politicizing the basic biological drive for integrity.
The sovereign exception introduces novel regimes or types of generative model uncertainty by
altering normal protections in discontinuous fashion. In this state of exception, for example
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during a political or bioregional crisis, the political subject must minimize their variational free
energy — weighing integrity, complexity, risk, and survival. The figure of homo sacer represents
the predicament of VFE-minimizing bare life in this complexified world where cognitive and
material integrity are jeopardized.
Expected Free Energy and Sovereign Agency
This section introduces and elaborates upon connections between the kind of agency exhibited
by the sovereign in the state of exception, and the concept of “Expected Free Energy” (EFE)
from the theory of Active Inference.
EFE describes a proactive approach towards policy selection that bounds future sensory
surprise under a generative model of the world. Organisms minimize EFE to allostatically
maintain their integrity and existential homeostasis. On the other hand, the state of exception
suspends the normal order, introducing chaos and uncertainty. In this state, the generative
model P(s,a|θ) is destabilized, and prior parameters θ no longer apply. The key point of
connection between EFE and the state of exception is that minimizing EFE now requires
balancing end-to-end integrity and multi-scale flexibility in updating the generative model itself.
In other words, the sovereign decision in instituting the exception mirrors the structural
recapitulation of the generative model. It is unprestatable in what ways the agent-world
unfolding occurs as symmetries break and form [34].
One of the critical aspects of Active Inference and ecological psychology more broadly is
“optimal grasp”, describing a stance or posture related to a tool or concept which optimally
prepares its use [35]. Optimal grasp, and the policy decisions that lead to such grasp, can be
deployed in the setting of normal or revolutionary epistemic foraging (e.g. getting a better grip
on the flashlight or magnifying glass while trying to read in a dark room; getting a better
understanding of a scientific concept or political scenario). In this political context, the decisions
of the sovereign may have a bent or ratchet towards better (optimal) or simply tighter grasp over
the citizen through Law/Politics/Bureaucracy [36]. This leads to an increased drive to reduce
uncertainty about personal details (via e.g. domestic and foreign surveillance) and to reduce
uncertainty about future states (via e.g. agentic regulation and intervention).
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The figure of homo sacer represents bare life in the chaos of the exception (a VFE that is
subject to another’s EFE). Stripped of prior forms of bios, homo sacer must use VFE to bound
surprise in conditions of an ungrounded, recapitulated generative model. The sovereign, in that
moment for themselves and beyond (within the total the scope of that cognitive ecosystem), is
the one who materialized their cognitive EFEas the new structural order. Homo sacer comes to
embody the subject(ed/ive) contingency and uncertainty inherent in the state of exception.
Hence, through the crucible/regime of the state of exception, the {VFE - Bare Life} connection of
the political subject grounds the {EFE - Sovereign Agency} relationship of the sovereign. In
summary, Active Inference concepts provide meaningful tools to formally understand the
dialectic of subjective (sensemaking about) bare life and sovereign decision-making.
Active Stateference: A sovereign agent in the state of exception
Only in theory does the State of Exception exist in the realm of timeless Kairos. In actuality the
State is manifest on a Date of Exception — occuring within the timeful Chronos. It may be the
case that previous works of political theory (abstract/decontextualized/timeless) make good
theoretical sense, however did not (or could not) provide specific translatable tools (e.g. a
Process Theory, Low Road, or Policy selection approach). I assert that Active Inference
provides an appropriately-expressive/general semantics for (multi-)agentic epistemic settings
and hence already delivers epistemic and pragmatic value in the current scientific-political
setting; value which can be extended through formal developments as done here.
Here we provide a draft of pseudocode for “Active Stateference” an Active Inference generative
model of the state of exception. The pseudocode implementation includes consideration for:
importing libraries, defining the states and their prior probabilities, defining the generative model
relating states to observations, initializing the variational density over states from the prior
probabilities, declaring the state of exception, updating the generative model for the state of
exception, calculating the variational free energy, updating the variational density to minimize
the variational free energy, generating an action based on the updated variational density,
updating the environment based on the action, and running the main Active Inference loop.
The model implements an Active Inference agent with prior beliefs about states related to law,
justice, violence, and nomos. It uses a likelihood model to infer the posterior probability over
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states given observations. The beliefs are updated based on the posterior and transition
probabilities. Actions are sampled from the updated beliefs to fulfill the agent's goals and reduce
uncertainty about its environment. The prediction errors update the model if the observations
deviate significantly from the predictions. The section further describes how the generative
model operates during a state of exception, a moment of indistinguishability between lawful and
unlawful states, and the relationship between Justice and Violence. It also discusses how the
Sovereign acts to restore order through changing the world and changing the mind in this
moment of indistinguishability (the two routes for an agent to reduce free energy).
Pseudocode for the Active Stateference model
# Import necessary libraries
import numpy as np
from scipy.special import softmax
# Define the states and their prior probabilities
states = ['lawful', 'unlawful', 'just', 'unjust']
prior_probs = np.array([0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25])
# Define the generative model relating states to observations
gen_model = {
'lawful': ['order', 'peace', 'rights'],
'unlawful': ['chaos', 'conflict', 'oppression'],
'just': ['fairness', 'morality', 'ethics'],
'unjust': ['corruption', 'abuse', 'suffering']
}
# Initialize the variational density over states from the prior probabilities
variational_density = softmax(prior_probs)
# Declare the state of exception
def declare_exception():
print("State of exception declared.")
# Update the generative model for the state of exception
def update_gen_model_exception():
gen_model_exception = {
'lawful': ['unlawful', 'chaos', 'oppression'],
'unlawful': ['lawful', 'order', 'rights'],
'just': ['unjust', 'corruption', 'suffering'],
'unjust': ['just', 'fairness', 'morality']
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}
return gen_model_exception
# Calculate the variational free energy
def calc_vfe(observation, variational_density, gen_model_exception):
# Compute the negative log probability of the observation given the states
neg_log_prob = -np.log(np.array([gen_model_exception[state].count(observation) for state in states]))
# Compute the variational free energy as the expectation of the negative log probability under the variational density
vfe = np.sum(variational_density * neg_log_prob)
return vfe
# Update the variational density to minimize the variational free energy
def update_variational_density(vfe):
# Update the variational density using the softmax function to ensure it remains a valid probability distribution
variational_density = softmax(-vfe)
return variational_density
# Generate an action based on the updated variational density
def generate_action(variational_density):
# Sample an action from the variational density
action = np.random.choice(states, p=variational_density)
return action
# Update the environment based on the action
def update_environment(action):
print(f"Action taken: {action}")
# Main active inference loop
def active_inference_loop(observations):
declare_exception()
gen_model_exception = update_gen_model_exception()
for observation in observations:
vfe = calc_vfe(observation, variational_density, gen_model_exception)
variational_density = update_variational_density(vfe)
action = generate_action(variational_density)
update_environment(action)
print("State of exception ended.")
# Run the active inference loop with a list of observations
observations = ['chaos', 'corruption', 'peace', 'fairness']
active_inference_loop(observations)
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Some next steps for Active Stateference
The Active Stateference model could be enriched proximally by incorporating further important
concepts from the book Homo Sacer. These concepts can be used as a metaphorical
framework to structure and enrich the code, making it more understandable and meaningful to
those who are familiar with the work. We do not intend to literally simulate the concepts of the
book in code, but to use them as a guide to model the interactions among entities and artifacts
in terms of processes, properties, and perspectives [26,37].
The Active Inference model presented earlier describes the cognitive dynamics and
environment of the sovereign in the state of exception. Some useful and interesting concepts to
integrate into the code could be: Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power, Bare Life, Biopolitics, The
State, The Camp, The Ban, The Wolf, The Sacred, The Profane, The Ambivalence of the
Sacred, The Paradox of Sovereignty, The Politicization of Life, The Rights of Man, The Life That
Does Not Deserve to Live, Leviathan/Behemoth, The Kingdom and the Glory, The Sacrament of
Language, The Highest Poverty, The Use of Bodies, The Oath, The Archive, The Witness, The
Monastic Rules, The Form-of-Life, The Nomos Basileus, The Potentiality and Law, The Form of
Law, The Vitae Necisque Potestas, The Sovereign Body and Sacred Body, and The Civil War as
a Political Paradigm.
Terms can be integrated with the creation of variables, functions, classes, or even entire
modules that encapsulate the concepts they represent. For example, we could create a
HomoSacer class with properties like sovereignPower, bareLife, and biopolitics, and methods
that model the interactions between these properties. We could also create functions that model
the processes described in the book, such as politicizeLife(), banish(), makeOath(), or
sacrifice(). These additions will make the code more interesting, useful, and connected with key
concepts from Homo Sacer. By enriching the code with these concepts, and working with
Generative Research Teams [38], we can create a more profound and meaningful model to
solve the problems at hand and also help us think about situations in new and creative ways.
From Active Stateference towards Active GovernAnts
There are developmental possibilities for the Active Stateference model, which implements the
state of exception with Active Inference generative model. Some possibilities include:
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●
Multi-agent settings. Currently the model only considers a single decision-making
agent. We can explore the use of multiple agents to enhance its capabilities and make it
more robust (e.g. into a fuller Active GovernAnts). This line could extend work on Active
Inference models of the Ant colony [39]. Here, nestmates-as-agents could interact via
direct cyberphysical interactions and via stigmergy (semiotic niche modification).
●
Cognitive Security Eventually we can explore the role of cognitive security in the
context of the Active Stateference model [40–43]. This can involve drawing on
cutting-edge work on law as a Bayesian inferential system [44] and developing new
techniques to protect the model from exoteric and esoteric psychological, social, and
cyber attacks.
●
Quantum Cognitive Sovereignty. We can explore the use of quantum mechanics to
improve the expressivity and performance of the model, drawing on Quantum concepts
of space, time, causality, and communication.
●
Quantum information has a key role in the future of mixed cyberphysical and
cognitive warfare: we can explore the use of quantum information to enhance the
applicability of the model in these settings [45], which may be a natural fit for the
Topological Quantum Control Flow models of Active Inference systems [21].
Overall, the Active Stateference model has potential for improving our understanding of complex
epistemic (eco)systems. By exploring these various developmental possibilities, we can
continue to enhance the performance of the model and make it even more useful for a wide
range of applications.
Conclusions
In this paper, we have explored the mechanics of the state of exception and its effects on the
dynamics of political power. By means that can be technically described as Active Stateference
(or “Bayesian State Mechanics”) in the state of exception, the Expected Free Energy (agentic
planning as inference) of the sovereign causally influences the Variational Free Energy (bare
life) of the subject. Through this means, power flows from agency in the direction of time
(especially during a crisis) and agency flows in time in the direction of power. The intensity of
this nexus is especially pronounced during times of crisis when time and power flow in a
complex manner.
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Here we have argued that for the sovereign, the state of exception represents a state of realized
expectations (only understood or clear, after the fact). This means that the sovereign is able to
realize their justified true beliefs (by truly justifying their realized beliefs) about the expected
pragmatic value of actions they take within a state of exception (whether as a means of ending
or extending that state). What happens after the decisive action is likely of epistemic value for
all, however especially and proximally of pragmatic value for the sovereign.
These insights allow us to better understand the complex power dynamics that arise during
times of crisis and the implications of these dynamics for those in positions of authority. By
recognizing the importance of Bayesian State Mechanics (implemented in the Active
Stateference program) and the role of realized expectations in the state of exception, we can
integrate perspectives to develop processes which blossom with the properties we expect and
prefer.
A closing quotation from [1] Part II, section 4.8 (page 221):
“One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in
order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after
the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is
born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its
own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage
that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a
state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated
or made juridical [46].”
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eit_1916_Translated_with_the_German_original_by_Eric_Levi_Jacobson
19


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*Extraction method: pymupdf*