law

I am numb. Are you numb? You are numb. 

It’s the law.

*

Numb, like limb, crumb and thumb, has an unpronounced letter at the end: what’s called an excrescent b. Looking at limb, OUP’s blogger Anatoly Liberman writes:

The parasitic b must have appeared in declension. For example, in the old plural, limu became limbu, or the excrescent b first emerged in the genitive and the dative: m, a labial sound, produced an illegitimate offspring, closely resembling its parent. Later, just because both m and b are labial, the second consonant was eliminated, as in dumb, comb, and so forth. There is, apparently, no way to please speakers. (Some such trickery must also have happened in the history of thumb; yet in thimble, we still pronounce b. Likewise, mb has stayed in assemble and crumble, but not in crumb.)

What is it with etymologists and their obsession with hyper-sexualising (genealogising) language’s behaviour? Parasitic, illegitimate offspring produced labially, by trickery: sounds deliciously like my kind of languaging. A queer parthenogenetic buzz of a b. 

The b has been butted out of numb, but we still pronounce it in nimble.

*

Numb and nimble both derive from the Old English verb nim–, which means to take, seize, steal; and then vernacularly, to take quick steps, fox-like; hence nimble. It’s hard to hold numb and nimble together in my head, and that what they are both rooted in is taking. To be numb is to have had your feelings, the evidence of your senses and proprioception, your physical and subtle bodies, taken. By stealth or by force, by insidious drip drip drip or all bluntly at once. 

That is what numb is: not unfeeling, but your feelings seized up, or simply seized. Your right to feel your feelings – to trust your senses, intuition and interpretation – erased. Replaced with external structures and strictures that tell us what to feel and how to think.

It’s older than genAI, although it is what genAI is. It’s capitalism. It’s orthodox religion. It’s the state.

It’s the law.

*

I’ll get to the roots of the English word law in a bit, because they’re interesting (hint: it’s not from Latin lex, which is the root of legal). 

But the original Eurowestern idea of law is where we need to begin, and begin taking back our intelligence (inclusive sense) and intuition.

Harsha Walia reminded me of the origin story of law when she posted this New Republic article by Siva Vaidhyanathan on Bluesky, quoting

we are witnessing the fullest expression of the most inhumane weapons of the century: Autonomous bombs and missiles. Their ‘autonomy’ refers to fact that humans need not be in the loop in any meaningful way when deciding where to target or whether to launch such weapons.

That is what autonomy refers to, but it is not what it means. As Vaidhyanathan argues, what it means in practice is unaccountability, because what auto-nomous names is being a law unto oneself, making one’s own rules. 

Techbros have co-opted the word autonomous, just as they have intelligence, and also claims to personhood or humanity, not only to obscure the murderous, pre-programmed forces and profit margins of their technology, but to deny those very things to us living beings. The claim to autonomy slips accountability, shifts its definition, and renders it meaningless. Who wants to lay claim to bodily autonomy if it makes them sound aligned with the deadliest weapons? 

*

Nomos, in classical Greece, was both an abstract power, a deification of the way of the world, or rather one claim to that way: that it was Order, Rule, immutable Law. And that was the only force that could stand against Haos, or chaos.

Nomos or Haos, which do you choose?

This is how the state controls and subdues us, by threatening us with chaos in its absence. With anarchy, a lack of order. To frighten people off anarchism, off autonomy, which is not chaos but taking accountability for our own feelings, words and actions, individually and collectively. 

It’s a false dichotomy, marketing hype. 

Nomos also denominated the very material realities imposed by the codification of city-state law: particularly, in Athens, the laws governing inclusion (or more often exclusion) in citizenship and the primacy of the patriarchal family structure. Nomos and nomos authorised each other in an endless feedback loop that benefitted the status quo, the ultimate ‘Because I said so’. Nomos, as deified eternal power, empowered the city-state to enforce nomos; nomos in action perpetuated the hold of Nomos, telling citizens that it was only the rule of law that could regulate their lives, prevent overwhelm by lawless poor Others and the barbarian hordes. 

Nomos numbs us. It’s presented as soothing, a balm in a dangerous and chaotic world, but really it’s like any other narcotic, interrupting our neural connections, anaesthetising us into compliance. 

*

Autonomy is a hill I will die on. 

In its current vernacular sense, it is a hill and vale and school that many people are dying on, because it has come to mean ‘humans need not be in the loop’. Or rather, it has come to hide to the humans in the loop: the operators of the drones and battle systems, sure, but even more, to obscure the programmers, manufacturers, programmers and politicians who hide their death-dealing in buzzwords like innovation. Nimble innovation, no less.  

As machine learning expert Professor Noel Sharkey has said over and over in his decades of campaigning against them, these are killer robots. Let’s call a gun a gun: what’s important about this weaponry isn’t that it’s ‘quicker than the speed of thought’, whatever that means, as OpenAI-partner and former newspaper the Guardian claims. It’s that it’s murderous. Its function (murdering people, discriminately or indiscriminately) is its category.

But the choice to call it autonomous is fascinating, because it names what it’s trying to hide: these are weapons that make a lie of international law, and of law, Nomos as principle. As Elia Ayoub commented on Bluesky when sharing the Guardian puff piece:

This piece is disturbing because it reads like a press release that had to include a bit of journalism in it. There’s virtually no critical analysis of the danger of what’s happening. The only mention of the word ‘law’ is a UN quote.

The thing about Nomos is that it works by creating Haos so it can sell itself to us as the solution. By being fixed, rigid, obsessed with category and purity, with punishment for failing to fit the criteria, by being asymmetrical, casuistical, specialist, inaccessible, and deified, Nomos causes the trouble it then claims to ‘solve’.

*

The thing about law is that it’s a lie.

I write a bit about law in Bad Language, about how Eurowestern law is rooted in the category of blasphemy; whatever we do wrong, we are told we are doing against God, which is dominance, which is the status quo (Nomos=nomos=Nomos).

I write a lot about lies in Bad Language, and about the relationship between the words lie (down) and (tell a) lie, and their relation to the word for word, logos, the word that appears in intelligence (inter + legere). 

What I never somehow did was looked up the word law. 

That’s what Nomos does: it hides its origins from us by claiming it’s immutable, unchallengeable, indefinable.

But law is not. It is lying. Quite literally.

It is also, literally, lag, so perhaps I can forgive myself for this newsletter being, as my editor said, a DVD extra for the book. Law makes us numb, and it takes time to thaw from the freeze, and then to forgive ourselves for freezing and go again. 

So here we go.

early Scandinavian *lag neuter, literally ‘that which is laid out, set, or fixed’ (compare Old Icelandic lag, in a wide range of senses, including ‘layer, stratum’, ‘due place, right position, order’, ‘companionship, fellowship, company’, ‘community, group’, ‘price, value, rate’, ‘set tune’, etc., and in similar senses Old Norwegian lag (Norwegian lag), Old Swedish lagh (Swedish lag), Old Danish lagh (Danish lag, lav)), cognate with (chiefly prefixed) Old Dutch (rare) lag law, Middle Dutch gelach situation, condition, fate, lot (also, sometimes as unprefixed lach (compare law n.3)) cost of food and drink, banquet, drinking party (Dutch gelag, in sense ‘fate, lot’ now only in the phrase een hard gelag), Old Saxon gilagu (neuter plural) destiny, fate, lot (compare also the compound aldar-lagu (plural) allotted lifespan) < an ablaut variant (o-grade) of the Germanic base of lie v.1 (compare lay v.1), probably chiefly reflecting a prefixed formation (with the Germanic base of y- prefix), as reflected in the notions of collectivity and association seen in many of the attested senses (and with regular loss of the prefix in early Scandinavian).

One possible etymology of number (numerical sense) is that it’s shared with number (feeling ever less), in nomos, which has its roots in the verb nemein. Like lag, lay, law, nemein can mean to count out and to divide by number, and thus has associations with set tunes as well as allotted fates. He who pays the piper is ever-present at all the feasts and drinking parties, setting the tune.

To lay down the law is tautologous: law is what is laid down, the power to lay (others) down is law. Might is right is might. Nomos is, as the unaccountability of the powerful shows, Autonomos. To lay down the law is to be, physically and metaphysically, always above it.

*

Nemein means to count out or to give out because it first means to possess, to own (and way back, to pasture one’s sheep). Accountancy rather than accountability is the root of Eurowestern law. Not what we owe to each other but what owners are owed for crimes against property.

Uncomfortably numb. 

*

Nomos is not the only deified force to emerge from nemein. Welcome, Nemesis. Child of Nyx (night) according to Hesiod, Nemesis is narratively and conceptually older by far than Nomos. In the Cypria, a lost epic poem attributed to Stasinus of Cyprus, the poet draws on a parallel tradition that Nemesis was the daughter of Zeus, who, in dadgod fashion, took over many prior divine genealogies as the OG. 

In the Cypria, Helen of Troy is Nemesis’s daughter, conceived after Zeus raped her. Apollodorus, Cratinus and Eratosthenes all tell stories of Zeus raping Nemesis, and Nemesis thus conceiving Helen as an instrument of divine retribution on the Myceneans’ hubris and the Trojans’ Poseidon-worship. Just as importantly, Nemesis’s function is subsumed by Zeus, who uses her as a tool for incubating, not enacting, retribution; a warning to autonomous and powerful children everywhere about what patriarchy will do to you, and for which – as the father now personifies Justice and Order – there is no comeback, no redistribution except in his favour.

*

In a further diminishment of the belief in a redistributive and equitable universe, nemesis has come to mean something like revenge and something like enemy (a person who is seeking vengeance against you, or on who you would seek revenge). 

But one translation of Nemesis is redistribution. To get what’s coming to you, or what you deserve, is an ambiguous phrase, threatening or compelling depending on your understanding, exactly, of accountability vs. accounting, on whether balance sheets are ethical or economic. Or depending, one could say, on how much you have, and how much you think you’re entitled to (it).

Nemesis could be said, as Finley Peter Dunne once joked of the all-encompassing corporate media of the Gilded Age, ‘to comfort the afflicted [and] afflict the comfortable’. Within 25 years, the phrase was being misattributed as a mission statement of the unscrupulous populist news baron William Randolph Hearst, and it subsequently memed into diplomatic and then church holier-than-thou homiletics.

The phrase has a hold because what we want from superstructures is for them to hold accountability: for the media to hold the state accountable; for the state to hold corporations accountable; for accountability to be something we use among ourselves, a lever for equity and redistribution. 

If you magic-eye a bit and see it as the good old circulating mutual aid tenner (used to be a fiver, can’t keep pace with inflation), Nemesis holds out the promise of what a different law could be.

*

I’m currently on a train back from Glasgow, moving through the snowy hills north of Caer Luel, a land I think about often through Nicola Griffith’s novels Hild and Menewood, which move through the spread of Christianity in the British Isles, but also live in the bones of this place, the older ideas of order, fate, and power. The layers, laid down by successive dominant powers, murderers and warmongers all (the Church included).

The rocks and stones are older, and endure, but the lay of the land is shaped by the law: by enclosures and ownership, pasturage and drainage, serving wealth and industry. 

I’m reading the Communications and Digital Committee of the House of Lords report on AI, copyright and the creative industries, flipping back and forth between the policy paper, discussion thereof on socials, the imperial wars were a generative AI built on an LLM, which has ingested my writing without my consent, is autonomously giving kill orders from the skies, the Media Capture Watch website, ‘an interactive map revealing the funding relationships between Big Tech, AI companies, and journalism — exposing the emerging architecture of media capture’, and a trail of links about news betting websites, and the fact that Polymarket – where potential insider trading on the illegal bombing of Iran took place, as Katelyn Burns argues – is now embedded in Substack, a tip of that hat that most news reporting now is just spread betting, a feedback cycle that makes clickbait money for news sites, tech companies, and the House, which always wins.

As Burns said on Bluesky, ‘I wrote [that] post hours before the Associated Press announced a new partnership with Kalshi’. AP (a quick click on the MCW site) made the first major news licensing deal with OpenAI in 2023 for an undisclosed sum, and now has a deal with Google Gemini to provide ‘real-time news’, news it now shapes through reporting on and through bets.

I am thinking about Shoshana Zuboff’s argument in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I was reading on a train along the Rhine to Mainz exactly six years ago, following reports of flooding and reports of a respiratory epidemic, that the problem with tech companies is a lack of regulation. I’m thinking about the Trump government’s crusade against anti-trust expert Lina Khan. I, too, want laws, lower-case, emerging from a redistributive logic of equity. I want justice, that is, and in the short term, harm reduction. 

I am thinking about how all of this – all of this laying down the Law of dominance is about numbing us to our autonomy, which is emotional and intellectual and embodied and connected. It is in our relationships to ourselves and each other and rock and stone. It has been enclosed and enclosed, for more pasturage that concentrates more wealth and power in the hands of fewer. For more golf courses and oil wells and ballrooms and rivieras. 

*

I’m thinking about how I initially typed Shoshana Felman for Zuboff. A nominative slip that reminds me it’s ten years since I started Disturbing Words on a late-night train back from Manchester, and nine years since I wrote what has been my most popular and widely-shared letter, ‘rest’, for International Women’s Day, 2017, which was about what would happen if I could just stop for one minute and listen to my damn self.

With Dori Laub, Felman wrote a book titled Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature Psychoanalysis and History, a book that changed my life. Marianna Torgovnick among others has been rightly critical of Felman’s ‘sacralisation’ of Holocaust testimony, with its problematic exceptionalism. But at the centre of Testimony is something that could be called nemesis, in the sense of taking back: an un-numbing that comes from listening, from the complex, iterative, infinity-looping process of being listened to so we can listen to ourselves to we can listen to each other so we can be listened to. 

Haos, right. Anarchy. All that listening. Sitting. Meetings. Meetings about meetings. Checking in. Checking back. Getting it wrong. Going again. Improvising. Failing. Laughing. Listening. Taking the time. 

In ‘rest’ I wrote about the fond, foolish hope and yearning that had been programmed into me for the Man Who Listens, the softlaw with its kind, tired detective eyes. A longing for justice as if it can be delivered by the figureheads of institutions rather than it being just us.

I write this after the Met Police have raided Westminster Quaker Meeting House – AGAIN, as Netpol note. ‘Once again the basis of the raid is conspiracy to protest.’ That is the casus, the stated premise under nomos. But under Nomos, the basis of the raid is listening, which is what testifying is in the Quaker tradition – speaking from the spirit into open ears. Being heard, in earnest.

*

Nimble more or less fell out of usage in published English by the 1990s, at least as captured by Google Books Ngram Viewer. The OED agrees that the early 2000s, there’s been an uptick in usage, driven by its managerial consultancy buzziness as a word for dehumanising efficiency drives, the financialisation of what was once a vernacular for the quick steps that might be taken by a nimmer, someone who’s just nicked your purse. Brief, bitter laugh that in using ‘nimble’ to describe our impoverishment for their wars, tech companies, corporations and governments are confessing to their vast, unchecked theft.

I can listen in to words and their fast-stepping histories all day, and all sleepless night. I can listen to what independent journalists and scholars and activists and organisations share, writing carefully with respect for the power of words. These are part of the infinity loop of learning to listen to myself and listen to and with others. They are nothing, and they are everything: self-soothing, self-care, self-regulating. Auto-nemesis. A redistribution of attention toward what is complex and serious and careful, what matters.

And.

That is not, cannot be, all the law. But still, nine years on, I am pleading: isn’t listening a low bar, a place to start? A beginning, with all the trial-and-error that implies. Listen to Nemesis as she tells us: this is what power does. This, Zeus, is Nomos, personified-deified. This is how we get to a Secretary of Defense (who last year called for an ‘agile, aggressive, innovative’ leadership for an all-white, all cis male military, thus so nearly adding to nimble’s frequency value) spouting Christian nationalism and Christian Zionism as battle instructions and foreign policy. The American way for 500 years, if you’ve been listening. 

Listening is a property of justice, it’s not justice defined by property. It is not justice if anyone is above it. Let’s steal away, steal back our feelings, our fire, our nemesis. Small steps, but quickly. Come, let’s stop being numb.