A minor textual detournement of Lifeload and Multitude

Kind of sort of of a cut up of a passage from Lifeload, a fantasy novel by Jo Walton, (p. 1) and a passage of Multitude by Paol Virno (pp. 52-53 and 61).

If you go far enough to the defect of semanticity, they say, you come to the lands where people are like statues, going through a defined series of monotonous signals each day out of pure routine. The world dries up. Acts are without power.

Contrariwise, if you set off to the excess of semanticity, people become feyer and stranger, more powerful maybe, but less able to remember who they are from moment to moment, until at last they run together and separate as fast as rainbows, an unstable and contained continuum, and only the gods can keep themselves whole. Power is without acts.

Between these extremes falls the katechon, where folks have wit and will enough to oscillate between the negative and the positive, to restrain but not remove the regression to the infinite.