GPT

The disavowal of leadership or guidance doesn’t dismantle power but instead disperses it into the structure of things, making it harder to contest. The so-called meritocratic order is, as you point out, a eugenicist sorting mechanism disguised as neutrality, a way to manufacture consent to one's own disposability. The winners are granted the right not to know, while the unseen are burdened with hyper-visibility—recognized only as bodies, objects of policy, or as figures of failure.

Privilege furnishes the conditions for believing in a free-floating self, a fiction that justifies a lack of responsibility for others. Meanwhile, those consigned to ‘low status’ are expected to operate within a fully determined framework, pre-scripted and pre-legitimated. They are not permitted to engage in the collective authorship of meaning or social order, only to execute its dictates.

The effect is an enclosure of the political imagination, where even the notion of contesting the structure—of shaping the conditions of life rather than merely enduring them—becomes unthinkable. Would you say this is a matter of governance through absence, or governance through saturation—through the totalization of pre-scripted options?