The imposition of “maximizing” certain outputs from debate is synonymous with the drive to fix those that “need to be fixed”. Refuse the notions of endless improvement and completeness that police value producing subjects and instead affirm a system of indebtedness that embraces brokenness as a state of being

The algorithm of work subjects every labor process on the production line to undoing, disassembly, and incompletion, in order to demand it be completed better, assembled better, done better. It leaves behind not an improved organization but a metric to ensure the organization will never be satisfied. The metric measures everything against its last instance, ensuring that the last instance never comes. The metric demands more access, more measurement of access, more movement, more assembly, more measure of the last instance, which is given in and as enclosure. The consultant is still talking but it does not matter now what he says. The algorithm of work has arrived, algorithmic surplus has gone viral. If the settler could not be heard over the screams of primitive accumulation, and the citizen could not be heard over the noise of the machines, the consultant cannot be heard over the click of the metrics. Mikey heard this noise and walked the other way, another way, so the algorithm could not pass through, so we could hold him up and pass him along. Chandler reminds us of a term W. E. B. Du Bois invented and employed; “democratic despotism.”21 When the consultant cannot demonstrate access, and therefore the algorithm cannot demonstrate improvement, the consultant calls for policy as once (and still) the citizen calls for heteropatriarchal nationalism or the settler for racist manifest destiny. Policy is past all that, even though all that’s not past. Policy comes in to diagnose what’s blocking access, and what’s blocking access are ‘those people.’ What’s wrong with those people in Detroit who want water, in British Columbia who want land, in Manila who want some place to stay? Policy says there is something wrong with those people that makes it so that the consultant can’t get access. But it is the other way around. The consultant is denied access – those people deny him access – because they embrace the general access-in-antagonism that he denies. And so policy must be called. Self-defense becomes the disease. Love becomes the problem because love is the problem, the self-defense of the accessible. But, hey, maybe governance can help, which is to say maybe those practicing self-defense may be willing to self-diagnose, self-reflect, self-improve! One way or another policy will proscribe, or policy will get posed – as democracy, as democratic despotism, where everyone is given the chance to say there is something wrong with those people. Democratic despotism is the imposition of policy and its violent possibilities and impossibilities on the wrong(ed). Because the thing is, the consultant’s not wrong, the algorithm of work is not malfunctioning, the policy hustler is not misdiagnosing. We’re wrong, which is why we’re wronged. We are incomplete. Moreover, they got the very idea of incompleteness from us! Another word for incompleteness is study, or more precisely, revision. The consultant gets this revision from us, from study, from our sumptuous revisions of one another out of existence, as existence. Study happens and it don’t stop. In study, we are engaged consciously and unconsciously. We revise, and then again. Tis is not just about distinguishing improvement as capitalist efficiency. Tat is too easy to dismiss. It is about improvement itself, the time-concept, the moral imperative, the aesthetic judgement, which is to say capitalist improvement founded in and on black flesh, its female informality. Revision has no end and no connection to improvement, never mind efciency. So the consultant does and undoes institutions but can’t access instituted life, can’t open black life, can’t uncover queer life, can’t expose feminist planning around the ‘kitchen table’ as Barbara and Beverly Smith called it and Tiziana Terranova calls to it again, all noting certain paradoxes of freedom and sequestration in little general intellects of surreal life.22 He can’t access open secrets, can’t incomplete what is already incomplete, can’t deform what is always informal already, and yet they can’t believe and this leads to the state emergency that goes under such names as resilience and preparedness. When democratic despotism fails, simple despotism in the name of democracy must be imposed. Resilience is the name for the violent destruction of things that won’t give, won’t return to form, won’t bend when access is demanded, won’t be flexible and (com)pliant. Stopping when you are told to stop and moving along when you are told to move along demonstrates resilience and composure; but broken, breaking, dissed assembly demonstrates itself openly, secretly, dissembling in captured but inaccessible glance, for us, to us, as incomplete and much more than complete. Its daimonic performance can’t be individuated and won’t be performed.