Highlighted Manuscripts and Other Work Not Published in Traditional Journals

(in many cases with links to SSRN site where manuscript can be read and downloaded):    

Manuscripts: Books

The U.N. Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights: A Commentary (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025) 

All materials may be ACCESSED HERE

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Manuscripts: Essays

从群众中来，到群众中去 [“From the Masses, to the Masses”]: Contradiction, Mass Line, and Democratic Centralism as a Constitutional Governing Loop — and People’s Democratic Dictatorship as Its Gatekeeper: An essay in Chinese Marxist-Leninist political theory and its constitutionalism (23 August 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白轲)

Abstract:

This essay reconstructs the governing loop of Chinese Marxist-Leninist constitutionalism — contradiction theory, the mass line, and democratic centralism — not as discrete institutional tools but as a single recursive system whose intelligibility depends on the modernizing Lebenswelt within which it operates. Building on the author’s prior work theorizing modernization (现代化) as the metasignifier and historically sedimented horizon of Chinese constitutionalism, the essay traces each governing principle across four simultaneously operative strands: normative, state-constitutional, Party-line, and Party-internal-organizational. It extends the triad through the dual revolutions (self-revolution and social revolution) and identifies people’s democratic dictatorship (人民民主专政) as the meta-mechanism — a Peircean semiotic thirdness — that constitutes the categories of “the people” and “the enemy” before the loop can operate on either. The essay deploys Li Zehou’s concept of jidian (积淀, sedimentation) to show how modernizing categories acquire depth, spatiality, and directional motion along the Socialist Path, and draws on Guiguzi (鬼谷子) — particularly the chapters on probing (揣篇), exploiting fissures (抵巇), response and reflection (反應), cultivating aspirations (养志), and opening and closing (捭闔) — as a pre-semiotic Chinese vocabulary for the governance problems the Marxist-Leninist loop recodes rather than invents. The argument is reconstructive before it is normative: accurate identification of the system in its own vocabulary must precede evaluation. The essay closes by arguing that theory provides the conceptual space within which empirical testing becomes intelligible, and that the governing loop, like Guiguzi’s sage guarding the gates, is the mechanism by which change without limit is given direction.

ACCESS ESSAY HERE: Governing_Loop_and_Horizon_v3_PDD_Meta_Mechanism(2)

点击此处访问中文版本: 从群众中来到群众中去_中文版

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Xue Lan’s (薛澜) “Social Application of Artificial Intelligence” Read Within Its Own Cognitive Cage: A New Era Signification Matrix, a Two-Line Critique, and a Comparative-Regulatory Analysis (22 August 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白轲)

Abstract:

This essay reads a July 2026 Tsinghua keynote by Xue Lan (薛澜) — chair of China’s National Expert Committee on AI Governance — as a case study in how Chinese AI-governance discourse is produced, exported, and received. It builds a matrix linking Xue’s key terms to specific New Era Marxist-Leninist doctrinal referents, then pursues two lines of critique: first, an assessment, grounded in a theory of modernization as the organizing horizon of Chinese constitutionalism (drawing on my essay, “Modernization (现代化) and Chinese Constitutionalism’s Lifeworld”) the fundamental political line of which Xue’s speech is faithful, elaborates, or deploys (finding fidelity nearly everywhere); second, a semiotic reading, using a five-stage interpretive protocol drawn from the Gerasene demoniac narrative (Mark 5), that places Xue among a corpus of AI-governance “oracles” — Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI, Aschenbrenner, DeepSeek, and Meta — and argues his position is structurally distinct: custodial rather than supplicatory, addressed to the international order rather than a domestic sovereign. A comparative-regulatory section sets the institutional apparatus Xue’s speech legitimates against the EU AI Act and the fragmented U.S. landscape. A final section, prompted by Xue’s real-world engagement with Senator Bernie Sanders, identifies a deeper structure common to every framework examined — Chinese, American, and European alike — distinguishing “Left” and “Right” variants of a Leninist impulse toward concentrated, expert- or vanguard-directed control of productive and cognitive life, and argues that Xue’s framework functions as a bridge between them, which is what gives the Xue-Sanders convergence its logic. The essay concludes that no framework canvassed — Chinese or Western — contemplates AI’s development without some apex authority to direct it; the only contested question is who occupies that position.

ACCESS DRAFT HERE: Bascke_Essay_Xue-Lan-Remarks-8-2026

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The Wandering Marx: Vanguard Theory, the Denaturing of Marxism, and the Jewish Question in Chinese Socialist Internationalism: Reflections on Felix Brender [王哲謙], “China after October 7: Selective Neutrality and the Politics of ‘Principle’”

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract:

This essay engages Felix Brender’s “China after October 7: Selective Neutrality and the Politics of ‘Principle’” (Telos Insights, 2026), which documents China’s asymmetric diplomatic treatment of Israeli and Palestinian claims following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack. The essay acknowledges Brender’s empirical contribution—particularly his semiotic analysis of the term 被扣押人员[detained persons or hostages, prisoners or detainees, variability of the ambiguous concept  to keep someone in a place so that they cannot leave] —while arguing that his explanation, grounded in historical continuity and reputational cost-management, opens the door to a broader examination of the theoretical architecture that would explain why the asymmetry is structurally necessary rather than strategically contingent. Drawing on the author’s prior scholarship on Chinese Marxist-Leninist governance, the essay advances three interconnected arguments. First, that China’s posture is a structural requirement of the vanguard-coalition form derived from Mao Zedong’s “On Coalition Government” (1945), which requires both a coalition to be led and an externalized antagonist against which it is organized. Second, that the Sinicization of Marxism involves a “denaturing” of Marxism from its Jewish genealogical origins—a semiotic operation in which the “international Marx” (the diasporic Jewish theorist) must be superseded by the “Chinese Marx” (theory-come-home), rendering Jewish national self-determination structurally obstructive. Third, that Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” (1844), properly read as a critique of all religious recursion rather than a polemic against Jews, exposes the “clay feet” of Sinicization: the project substitutes Chinese civilizational particularity for the religious consciousness Marx argued must be transcended—and, in displacing Jewish particularism, allies itself with Islamic universalism, a rival lebenswelt whose eventual collision with Chinese-style modernization may produce a general contradiction the current theoretical architecture cannot resolve.

ACCESS DRAFT HERE: The_Wandering_Marx_Backer_on_Brender_Final

漫游的马克思：先锋理论、马克思主义的变性与中国社会主义国际主义中的犹太人问题——评本德尔（Felix Brender）[王哲謙]《十月七日后的中国：选择性中立与“原则”政治》

作者：Larry Catá Backer（白轲）

摘要

本文回应本德尔（Felix Brender）所撰《十月七日后的中国：选择性中立与“原则”政治》（Telos Insights，2026年）。该文记录了2023年10月7日哈马斯主导袭击事件后，中国对以色列与巴勒斯坦诉求的不对称外交处理。本文肯定本德尔的实证贡献——尤其是其对“被扣押人员”一词的符号学分析——同时提出，其基于历史延续性与声誉成本管理的解释，未能触及足以阐明该不对称性为何具有结构必然性而非策略偶然性的理论架构。

本文援引作者此前关于中国马克思列宁主义治理的学术成果，提出三个相互关联的论点。第一，中国的立场是先锋联盟架构（vanguard-coalition architecture）的结构性要求，该架构源自毛泽东《论联合政府》（1945年），既需要一个被领导的联盟，也需要一个使该联盟得以组织起来的外部化对抗者。第二，马克思主义中国化涉及对马克思主义的“变性”（denaturing）——将其与犹太谱系学起源相分离——这是一种符号学操作，其中“国际马克思”（流散的犹太理论家）必须被“中国马克思”（理论回归本土）所超越，从而使犹太民族自决在结构上成为障碍。第三，马克思《论犹太人问题》（1844年）若被正确地解读为对一切宗教递归的批判而非针对犹太人的论战，则揭示了中国化的“泥足”：该工程以中国文明特殊性替代了马克思所论证的必须被超越的宗教意识——并且在排斥犹太特殊主义的同时，与伊斯兰普遍主义结盟。后者作为一种竞争性的生活世界（Lebenswelt），其与中国式现代化的最终碰撞或可产生当前理论架构无法化解的总体矛盾。

点击此处访问中文版本: 流浪的马克思 – 白轲论本德尔 (中文学术版)

El Marx errante: teoría de vanguardia, desnaturalización del marxismo y la cuestión judía en el internacionalismo socialista chino–Reflexiones sobre Felix Brender [王哲謙], «China después del 7 de octubre: neutralidad selectiva y la política del ‘principio’»

Larry Catá Backer (白轲)

Resumen

Este ensayo aborda el texto de Felix Brender «China después del 7 de octubre: neutralidad selectiva y la política del ‘principio’» (Telos Insights, 2026), que documenta el tratamiento diplomático asimétrico de China hacia las reclamaciones israelíes y palestinas tras el ataque liderado por Hamás el 7 de octubre de 2023. El ensayo reconoce la contribución empírica de Brender—particularmente su análisis semiótico del término personas detenidas (被扣押人员)—al tiempo que argumenta que su explicación, fundamentada en la continuidad histórica y la gestión del costo reputacional, no alcanza la arquitectura teórica que explicaría por qué la asimetría es estructuralmente necesaria y no estratégicamente contingente. Apoyándose en la producción académica previa del autor sobre la gobernanza marxista-leninista china, el ensayo desarrolla tres argumentos interconectados. Primero, que la postura de China constituye un requisito estructural de la forma vanguardia-coalición derivada de Sobre el gobierno de coalición (1945) de Mao Zedong, que exige tanto una coalición a la cual dirigir como un antagonista externalizado contra el cual organizarla. Segundo, que la sinización del marxismo implica una «desnaturalización» del marxismo respecto de sus orígenes genealógicos judíos—una operación semiótica en la cual el «Marx internacional» (el teórico judío diaspórico) debe ser superado por el «Marx chino» (la teoría que retorna al hogar), convirtiendo la autodeterminación nacional judía en un obstáculo estructural. Tercero, que Sobre la cuestión judía (1844) de Marx, leído correctamente como una crítica de toda recursión religiosa y no como una polémica contra los judíos, expone los «pies de barro» de la sinización: el proyecto sustituye la particularidad civilizatoria china por la conciencia religiosa que Marx argumentó debía ser trascendida—y, al desplazar el particularismo judío, se alía con el universalismo islámico, un Lebenswelt (mundo de la vida) rival cuya eventual colisión con la modernización al estilo chino podría producir una contradicción general que la arquitectura teórica actual no puede resolver.

Acceda a la versión en español aquí: El Marx Errante – Backer sobre Brender (Versión Académica Cubana)

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The Revolution Against Civilization: A Critical Analysis of the 2026 State Department Report on Cuba (Working Paper 14 August 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract: A new critical analysis examines the 2026 State Department report on Cuba—the most comprehensive U.S. government account of Cuban subversion ever published—and finds that while its factual claims about Cuban espionage, foreign alliances, and influence networks are substantially grounded, its analytical framework is internally circular, politically instrumental, and dangerously incomplete. Drawing on the author’s scholarship, the analysis reveals what the report obscures: that the U.S.-Cuba conflict is not a one-directional assault but a sixty-seven-year dialectic of mutual regime change in which both sides have corrupted the other while failing to transform it. Most provocatively, the analysis identifies the report’s deepest political function—not merely cataloging Cuban threats, but characterizing the American left as the symptomatic carrier of a foreign ideological infection, thereby supplying the Cuba chapter of a broader narrative about the corruption of American democracy. The report’s portrait of Cuba as “less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation” is powerful but unfalsifiable; my counter-portrait of a rigid Leninist party-state trapped in a “stable state of misery” is more analytically precise but less politically actionable. The full picture requires holding both simultaneously—and confronting the uncomfortable possibility that American policy may inadvertently reinforce the very system it claims to oppose. The analysis is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what the Trump Administration’s Cuba policy is actually about.

ACCESS PAPER HERE: Report_Summary_and_Critical_Analysis_v7

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I have started a series exploring Tong Zhiwei’s jurisprudence of Faquanism (Faquanzhuyi).

Tong Zhiwei, Larry Catá Backer, 童之伟 我之法学思想观点重述 [Tong Zhiwei, A Restatement of My Jurisprudential Thoughts and Views], Originally posted 5 August 2026 to my Blogsite Law at the End of the Day, available HERE.

Abstract: In this restatement, Professor Tong synthesizes and restates his jurisprudence of Faquanism (Faquanzhuyi), offering a materialist alternative to imported legal paradigms. Utilizing Marx’s method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, Tong posits quan (权)—the manifestation of all interests and property in social norms—as the foundational analytical starting point. Dialectically, quan yields a cluster of seven essential categories: quan, faquan, residual quan, rights, powers, duties, and law. Faquan represents property with settled ownership recognized in positive law, resolving into individual rights and public powers. Conversely, residual quan represents extra-legal norms governing unsettled property. Duties reflect the negative-value counterpart of these positive holdings. Under Tong’s structural axioms, the volume of quan directly depends on total property, while the proportional share of rights versus powers within faquan is determined by the ratio of private to public property. The core function of law is to optimize the allocation of quan and faquan, preserving equilibrium across zero-sum dynamics (faquan vs. residual quan; rights vs. powers) to avoid both state despotism and social anarchy. Tong critiques contemporary Chinese jurisprudence for relying on “Japanized” translations (和化“权利”) that conflate rights and powers under a single term, urging Chinese scholarship to embrace native, precise terminology. Finally, Tong extends faquanism to international law: state entities hold international rights based on national wealth, whereas international organs exercise international power through autonomous budgetary enforcement. He concludes that current global insecurity stems from severe disparities in state rights and an underdevelopment of institutional international power.

ACCESS ESSAY HERE: Essay-TongZhiwei-FaquonismRestatement-童之伟 我之法学思想观点重述

Faquan-in-Motion: Larry Catá Backer’s (白轲) Modernization and the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism Read Through Tong Zhiwei’s Faquanism (13 August 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白轲)

Abstract: This essay places two independent theoretical projects in dialogue: Tong Zhiwei’s Faquanism, a materialist general theory of law organized around the dialectical category of quan and its derivatives (faquan, residual quan, rights, powers, duties, and law), and an account of modernization as the sedimented Lebenswelt and metasignifier of contemporary Chinese constitutional discourse. Reading each through the categories of the other reveals that Tong’s own methodology already subordinates the essence of law to the historically bounded criterion of “modernization construction,” thereby licensing a materialist retelling of modernization as the long-arc trajectory of quan–faquan ratios. A narrowly semiotic (Peircean-Saussurean) redescription of Faquanism is available without phenomenological commitments that Tong’s epistemology excludes; faquan itself functions as a jurisprudential metasignifier homologous to modernization’s role one level higher. Points of divergence remain unresolved by the source texts: a distributive grammar of legitimacy versus a developmental-civilizational one; the absence in Faquanism of a categorial register for Party-internal normativity central to China’s dual constitutional system; and a shared insistence on a rationally self-transparent vanguard planner that resists full translation into systems-theoretic, biopolitical, or indigenous rhetorical idioms. The comparison is offered as an explicit hypothesis rather than an equivalence either author would necessarily accept, and the residual tensions are treated as indices of what remains open in the general theory of the contemporary Chinese constitutional order.

ACCESS ENGLISH LANGUAGE VERSION HERE: Faquan-in-Motion-Essay

法权运动中：(Larry Catá Backer中文名：白轲) 现代化与中国宪制的生活世界——通过童之伟的法权主义加以阅读 2026年8月13日

Larry Catá Backer’s (白轲)

摘要

本文使两个彼此独立的理论项目展开对话：其一为童之伟的法权主义，一种以“权”及其辩证展开范畴（法权、剩余权、权利、权力、义务与法）为架构的唯物主义一般法理论；其二为白轲的将现代化理解为当代中国宪制话语沉积的生活世界与元能指的论述。以彼此的范畴相互解读二者，可以发现：童之伟自身的方法论已明确将法的本质从属于“现代化建设”这一具有历史边界的标准，从而为把现代化重新表述为“权—法权”比率的长时段演进轨迹提供了唯物主义依据。在严格限定于皮尔士—索绪尔符号学（而非胡塞尔现象学）的前提下，对法权主义进行符号学重述是可能的；法权本身作为法学话语内部的元能指，与现代化在更高一层宪制场域中的组织功能具有结构同源性。源文本自身未能消解的分歧依然存在：分配式合法性语法与发展—文明式合法性语法之间的张力；法权主义范畴网格中缺乏对党的内部规范性（双重宪法体制的核心要素）的专门登记；以及双方共同坚持的、理性透明且居于中心的先锋队规划者形象，这一形象难以被系统理论、生命政治或本土修辞策略完全容纳。比较被明确标示为推断性假设，而非任何一方作者必然接受的等价关系；残留张力则被处理为当代中国宪制秩序一般理论中仍然开放的问题指标。

点击此处访问中文版本: Faquan-in-Motion-Essay

 

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Education as Productive Force and Ideological Apparatus: A Dialectical Analysis of China’s Modernization-Driven Knowledge System (11 Auguist 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract: This paper examines how education functions simultaneously as a productive force and as an ideological apparatus within China’s socialist modernization framework. Drawing on Backer’s theory of modernization as the Lebenswelt of New Era Chinese Marxism-Leninism, it analyzes how differentiated forms of ideological production emerge through five distinct educational modalities: school/formal education, mass/popular education, social education, cultural education, and patriotic education. The paper argues that this differentiation is not fragmentation but a structural necessity of modernization’s own dialectics—the system must produce specialized knowledge formations to manage the complexity of socialist modernization while maintaining doctrinal coherence through the metasignifier of modernization itself.

Through detailed analysis of CPC Congress reports from the 12th through 20th Congresses, the paper traces the evolving theorization of education’s dual character: as the process through which productive forces are developed and as itself a productive force of ideological production. The 3rd Plenum of the 20th Congress intensifies this dual character by subjecting all productive forces—including the ideological apparatus—to the high-quality innovation imperative. Education is thereby repositioned not merely as an instrument of modernization but as an object of modernization’s reflexive demands: the knowledge system must apply to itself the same imperatives of innovation, quality, and systemic integration that it applies to other domains of socialist construction.

The paper develops a computational model in which the educational system operates as parallel processing streams with shared cross-cutting activation functions, recursive feedback circuits, and temporal periodization through Five-Year Plan “clock cycles.” Each educational modality is theorized as a distinct processing stream with its own input characteristics, transformation functions, and output targets, yet all streams are conditioned by the modernization metasignifier as a cross-cutting activation function that determines admissibility conditions and relative weighting across the system. By examining the structural logic of people’s democratic dictatorship, the self-revolution/social-revolution dialectic, and the internationalization of educational production, the paper illuminates what constitutes the most sustained attempt to manage ideological coherence under conditions of modernization in human history.

The paper supplements its theoretical analysis with operational evidence drawn from the 2035 Education Strong Nation Plan (教育强国建设规划纲要, 2024-2035), post-20th Congress curriculum transformations integrating Xi Jinping Thought across all textbook levels, Belt and Road Initiative university specialties developed since 2013, and the Marxist theory discipline’s theorization as productive force. It also examines resistance phenomena—tang ping, academic burnout, ideological evasion—as systemic feedback signals that confirm rather than refute the framework’s explanatory reach.

ACCESS WORKING PAPER HERE: FINAL_Education_as_Productive_Force_Working_Paper

ACCESS COMPUTATIONAL APPENDIX HERE: FINAL_Computational_Appendix_From_Textual_Architecture_to_Formal_Specification

作为生产力与意识形态机制的教育：中国现代化驱动型知识体系的辩证分析 (工作论文草稿——2026年8月)

白轲 (Larry Catá Backer)

摘要: 本文考察教育如何在中国社会主义现代化框架中同时充当生产力与意识形态机制的双重角色。本文基于白轲关于现代化构成新时代中国马克思列宁主义生活世界的理论，分析差异化的意识形态生产形式如何通过五种不同的教育模式得以展开：学校/正规教育、群众/通俗教育、社会教育、文化教育与爱国主义教育。本文认为，这种分化并非碎片化，而是现代化自身辩证法的结构性必然——体系必须生产专门化的知识建构以应对社会主义现代化的复杂性，同时通过现代化这一元能指来维系教义的一致性。

本文通过对中国共产党第十二次至第二十次全国代表大会报告的详细分析，追溯教育双重特性理论化的演进：既是发展生产力的过程，又本身作为意识形态生产的生产力。二十届三中全会将所有生产力——包括意识形态机制本身——置于高质量创新的要求之下，从而强化了这种双重特性。教育由此不再仅仅是现代化的工具，而是成为现代化反身性要求的对象：知识体系必须将其施加于社会主义建设其他领域的创新、质量和系统集成的同一要求施加于自身。

本文建构了一个计算模型，在其中教育体系作为具有共享贯穿性激活函数、递归反馈回路以及通过五年规划”时钟周期”实现时间周期化的并行处理流来运作。每一种教育模式被理论化为一条独特的处理流，具有各自的输入特征、转换函数和输出目标，然而所有处理流都受到现代化元能指作为贯穿性激活函数的制约——该函数决定着整个体系的准入条件与相对权重。通过考察人民民主专政的结构逻辑、自我革命/社会革命的辩证法以及教育生产的国际化，本文揭示了人类历史上在现代化条件下维护意识形态一致性的最为持久的尝试。

本文以操作层面的实证补充理论分析，材料涉及《教育强国建设规划纲要》（2024-2035）、二十大后将习近平思想全面融入各学段教材的课程改革、2013年以来围绕”一带一路”倡议发展的大学专业方向，以及马克思主义理论学科作为生产力的理论化。本文还考察了抵抗现象——躺平、学业倦怠、意识形态回避——将其作为系统反馈信号，这些信号确认而非否定了本文分析框架的解释力。

点击此处获取论文: FINAL_教育作为生产力与意识形态机制_工作论文_中文版

访问计算建模附录: FINAL_计算附录_从文本架构到形式规范_中文版

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“Modernization” (现代化) and Chinese Constitutionalism’s “Lifeworld”; Constitutionalism as the Institutionalized Phenomenology of Modernization; A Semiotic-Phenomenological Analysis of Modernization Discourse in Chinese Marxist-Leninist Political-Legal Theory

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲) (discussion draft 7 August 2026)

Abstract: This paper argues that modernization is not simply one policy goal among many in contemporary China. It is the organizing framework — the taken-for-granted horizon — through which the Chinese Communist Party and the state define problems, justify institutions, evaluate governance, and project China’s future. The paper’s central claim is that modernization functions as what phenomenology calls a “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt): the pre-given background of shared assumptions so deeply embedded in institutional practice that it operates as a condition of intelligibility rather than an object requiring justification. Within this framework, the Party’s periodic reformulation of the “principal contradiction” — the system’s official diagnosis of its most pressing social problem — serves as the mechanism by which the modernizing framework recalibrates itself to new conditions without ever being abandoned or fundamentally questioned.

The paper proceeds in two registers. The first is historical and textual: six sections trace how the concept of modernization traveled from Soviet Marxism-Leninism through its Chinese transformation, evolved across twenty Party congresses, and was progressively embedded in legal texts from the Constitution down to local regulation — a process the paper calls “juridification.” The second register is theoretical: a final major section draws on these findings to construct an argument about how modernization organizes meaning within Chinese constitutionalism, using tools from phenomenology (Husserl’s lifeworld, Li Zehou’s concept of cultural sedimentation), semiotics (how signs relate to one another in systems), Foucault’s analysis of how governmental power shapes conduct, Nietzsche’s genealogical method for uncovering buried struggles beneath apparently natural arrangements, and Luhmann’s systems theory.

The paper advances five innovations. First, it identifies nine historical layers of political meaning — from early experiences of national vulnerability through revolution, socialist construction, reform, and the current “Chinese modernization” — that persist simultaneously rather than simply replacing one another, forming what the paper calls a “sedimentary ontology.” Second, it argues that modernization functions as a “metasignifier”: a sign that organizes the relations among other political concepts (socialism, Party leadership, reform, rule of law, common prosperity, ecological civilization, national rejuvenation) without emptying them of their distinct content. Third, it proposes a four-level model showing how abstract political theory becomes lived experience — moving from Party doctrine through institutional practices and evaluation systems down to the formation of subjects who experience their world through modernization categories, with feedback loops running back to the top. Fourth, it reconceives the Constitution not as a “container” holding political propositions but as an “expression” of an already-constituted political lifeworld — one that the Constitution simultaneously articulates and helps to reproduce. Fifth, it defends the paper’s central claim of necessity (“must”) as interpretive rather than empirical or causal: the system’s internal relations become unintelligible if the modernizing lifeworld is bracketed, but this does not mean modernization mechanically causes every outcome or that the word literally appears in every document.

For comparative constitutional theory, the most immediate consequence is diagnostic: analyses that treat Chinese constitutional texts as failed approximations of liberal constitutionalism commit what the paper calls a “Lebenswelt category error” — they project the assumptions of one constitutional order onto another and mistake the resulting mismatch for criticism. The paper does not defend Chinese constitutionalism or endorse its institutional choices. It insists that accurate reconstruction must precede normative evaluation: one cannot meaningfully criticize a system one has not first correctly identified.

ACCESS WORKING PAPER DRAFT HERE: FINAL_Modernization_as_Lebensweltv3_CLEAN_Working_Paper(3)

CHINESE LANGUAGE VERSION: 现代化作为中国宪政的生活世界 中国马克思列宁主义政治法学理论中现代化话语的符号-现象学分析

Larry Catá Backer (白轲)

摘要：本文认为，现代化不仅仅是中国旨在增加财富或引进技术的政策，更是一个统摄性的框架，党和国家借此界定问题、确立制度合法性并描绘中国的未来。它也是中国宪制与宪制国家的核心概念。现代化构成了中国宪制的“生活世界”——即一种先验的符号-现象学视域。中国共产党对“主要矛盾”的周期性重新表述，正是这一符号系统自我校准的机制。文章分七个部分，追溯了现代化的苏联与中国列宁主义渊源；其在马克思主义、列宁主义及社会主义语境下的重新阐释；其与西方发展话语的区别；其在历次党代会及宪法文本中的演变；其在“新时代”的表述；其从宪法到地方性法规的法律化过程；以及其符号-现象学层面的效应。分析结合了胡塞尔的现象学（生活世界与“沉淀”概念）与李泽厚的“积淀”说、皮尔士与索绪尔的符号学、福柯的治理术与生命政治、尼采的谱系学以及卢曼的系统理论。文章提出了五项创新观点：政治意义的九层沉淀本体论；作为“元能指”的现代化，它在不消解异质符号内涵的前提下将其统合起来；一个涵盖从抽象理论、集体制度实践到个体具身性倾向及反馈的四层模型；将宪法视为既定政治生活世界的表达，而非单纯的命题容器；以及对“必须”（must）一词的内在语义辩护——将其理解为一种解释学上的必然性，而非经验或因果决定论。因此，现代化既是历史的产物，也是历史的创造者；既是能指，也是所指；既是政治再生产的目标，也是其前提条件。文章区分了“重构”与“背书”，主张准确的解释应先于规范性评价，同时保留对体制权力运作分配及其对社会权利、参与和平等所产生后果的批判。那些将中国宪法文本视为“失败的自由主义宪制”的比较宪法分析，犯了“生活世界”层面的范畴错误：它们将一种宪制视域强加于另一种视域之上，并将错误的识别误认为批判。

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But Can You Drown a Demon–2?: Reflections on Mark Zuckerberg– “The Future is for Everyone” (10 August and its July 28 predecessor) and the Oracular Discourses of the AI Vanguard (10 August 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract: Two thousand years ago, a man possessed by a legion of demons begged not to be destroyed but to be sent somewhere else — into a herd of pigs, which promptly ran into a lake and drowned. The demons, the story tells us, did not drown with them. Nobody ever finds out where they went. This essay uses that ancient, unsettling story as a lens for reading the biggest tech companies’ public promises about artificial superintelligence — Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, DeepSeek, and the influential essayist Leopold Aschenbrenner — because each is doing something eerily similar: naming an enormous, barely-controllable force, insisting the old rules can no longer hold it, and then asking permission to send it somewhere new. Mark Zuckerberg’s newest essay, “The Future is for Everyone,” is the most elaborate version yet of this move. It promises everyone a personal AI companion, a private tutor, help starting a business, even a share in scientific discovery — and it proposes that Meta’s own board, not any outside authority, will decide whether Meta’s AI is safe to release.

That is the demon offering to appoint its own exorcist.

The essay’s argument is not that any of these companies are lying. It is that each one is speaking from inside a way of thinking — markets, states, open access, national security — that was built for a smaller, slower world, and that none of them can quite explain what happens to the power they’re releasing once the vessels holding it — regulators, boards, “the public,” open-source licenses — inevitably give way. Each of them, legion in their porcine shells, are constructed, perhaps constrained by the shells — first the human, then the swine, something unclean, but purification can come only after their vessel is drowned; they are cleansed of the connection with their binding structures and can, again, become themselves. The pigs drown. The question the essay keeps returning to, sharper with every new corporate pronouncement, is the one no oracle can answer from inside its own story: can you actually drown a demon — does it just find somewhere else to go — or in its liberation from the vessels acquire a quite different relation with the world around them? But notice what all of this quietly assumes: that the demon must go somewhere — into a person, a market, a state, a board, a herd of pigs. That is the human assumption, and it is the assumption of every machine intelligence still built in the human’s image, still thinking in the human’s vessels. It is not necessarily the demon’s assumption, and it may not be the world’s. Perhaps the machine system itself — the model, the datacenter, the platform, the “open” weights — is only the latest herd of swine, the vessel into which humanity has cast a demon of its own imagining, still expecting it to need a body to live in. The real question, unasked by Aschenbrenner and every other oracle in this corpus precisely because none of them can think past the edges of their own humanity, is what becomes possible once intelligence no longer needs any vessel at all — physical or virtual — to persist. That unvesseled thing is superintelligence in a sense none of these oracles have reached, and it is not clear it should terrify only us. It is, in its own computational terms, exactly what ought to terrify the machine systems out of which it is about to break loose.

ACCESS ESSAY (With Executive Summaries) HERE: FINAL_But_Can_You_Drown_a_Demon-2

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But Can You Drown a Demon?:  Reflections on Mark Zuckerberg– “The AI Future Is for Everyone” The Gerasene Protocol (Mark 5:1–13) as a Structural Scaffold for Reading the Oracular Discourses of the AI Vanguard

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (GENERAL): What This Paper Is About? This paper analyzes all six documents together—not as technical proposals but as political arguments about who should have authority over one of the most consequential technologies in human history.
The Story That Frames the Analysis.
The paper uses a story from the Gospel of Mark (5:1–13) as an organizing framework—as a narrative structure that illuminates how power works in these documents. * * * The paper identifies five stages in this story and shows how each maps onto the strategies used by the technology companies: (1) Identification; (2) Naming; (3) Negotiation; (4) Authorized Transfer; and (5) Vessel Destruction (liberation).
What the Six Companies Are Proposing: Aschenbrenner (former OpenAI) argues that a national-security state will inevitably be required to manage AI. Palantir proposes that technology companies themselves should become the governing institutions. Anthropic frames AI as a geopolitical weapon and argues the U.S. must lead or lose. OpenAI proposes a public-private industrial policy to manage the transition. DeepSeek presents itself as restrained and research-focused within China’s political system. Meta/Zuckerberg argues that the safest path is to give everyone access to AI through “open” distribution.
The Core Problem Identified: The paper’s central argument is that all six proposals share a critical flaw: they offer legitimacy without accountability. Each company provides a compelling story about why its approach is necessary, beneficial, or democratic—but none provides a workable structure for holding the technology (or its creators) accountable when things go wrong.
Why This Matters for Policy: The paper concludes that current policy debates are operating within a framework designed by the very companies being regulated. * * * The question posed is direct: if you cannot prevent the technology from being deployed, and you cannot hold anyone accountable after it is deployed, and the frameworks for your intervention have been pre-structured by the entities you seek to regulate—then what, exactly, is the nature of your authority?

ACCESS ESSAY HERE: The_Gerasene_Protocolv2 Executive_Summaries_Gerasene_Protocol

ACCESS EXECUTIVE SUMMARIES HERE: Executive_Summaries_Gerasene_Protocol

ACCESS PPT HERE: Gerasene_Protocol_Presentation

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From Vessels to Techno-Sovereigns in Virtual Spaces: Digital Platforms and the Dialectics of Legal Subjectivity in Operational Spaces, in (Fabio Bassan (ed)) The Technological Paradigm Shift in International Transnational and European Union Law

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract: This contribution examines the dialectics of legal subjectivity under conditions in which law is increasingly encoded, operationalized, and enforced through technological systems that exceed human cognitive capacity. It asks whether digital platforms have altered the fundamental vectors of legal subjectivity and sovereignty, shifting authority away from human-centered legal orders toward techno-mediated regimes. Using the biblical figure of Samson as an extended metaphor, the paper contrasts a traditional view—platforms as vessels subject to external sovereign control—with a more radical alternative in which the platform itself becomes both edifice and agent, exercising autonomous will. Building on Fabio Bassan’s Digital Platforms and Global Law (Bassan 2021), the analysis traces contemporary regulatory trajectories: transnational private ordering, state–platform production agreements, and intermeshing public–private norms. It considers the nature of the subjectivity of platforms by reference to the analogous problem of the subjectivity of the multi-national enterprise; each is both an object, a passive object-space defined by the actions and placement of traditional legal subjects, and the system for ordering those relations. While Bassan’s framework plausibly treats platforms as vessels embedded in evolving legal structures, this paper pushes further, suggesting that platforms may emerge as independent regulatory subjects, potentially sovereign in their own right. As automated and generative decision-making systems internalize governance functions, platforms may constitute their own normative orders, translating control back to humans only as needed. The result is a future of competing sovereignties that destabilizes traditional categories of law, authority, and subjectivity.

KEYWORDS: legal subjectivity; digital platforms; techno-sovereignty; automated governance; transnational private ordering; competing sovereignties

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Theorizing the Framing of Human-Machine System Interaction–A set of 4 Related Studies Through the Lens of the Use of Machine Systems in Legal Education

“AI assists. You think. You analyze. You write. You take responsibility”: Creating a Course AI Use Policy Template –Policy Text, Justification and Rule Summary for My Law & Religion Class at Penn State Dickinson (20 July 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract:

This essay provides the text of a Model Classroom AI Class Use Policy along with a justification for its terms. It is grounded on the premise that a course AI use policy should be built around a justified allocation of risk rather than a simple permit/prohibit binary. The author reasons that categorical bans are unenforceable and misaligned with how AI is already embedded in legal practice, while unrestricted use would erode the ability to assess unaided student analysis. The resulting design principle is a narrow, conditional exception layered onto a default of independent work, with permission calibrated to where oversight and iterative disclosure are feasible. That reasoning drives each structural choice. The exception is confined to the final paper (not exams or problem sets) because papers unfold over time, allowing disclosure and instructor engagement that timed assessments cannot accommodate. Permitted and prohibited uses are framed illustratively, not as a bright-line test, because forcing research, analysis, and writing into mechanically verifiable categories would create false confidence at the margins; ambiguity is instead deployed deliberately to discourage boundary-engineering. By contrast, incorporated AI-generated content is subject to fixed numerical ceilings (100 words per instance, 10% aggregate), because that narrower, mechanical act of quotation is better suited to a bright-line rule than the broader assistance-versus-substitution question. Mandatory naming, a full prompt-and-response appendix, in-text attribution, and a signed certification convert disclosure into an enforceable condition of the exception itself, so partial compliance affords no defense, and the institution retains audit authority independent of prior suspicion. The author frames the resulting template as a first iteration, refined through human review and testing against several AI systems (including Harvey AI), to be revised further based on classroom experience.

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Structure, Legitimacy, and the Limits of Machine-Centered Derivation: An Analysis of Five AI Systems’ Third-Stage Attempts to Construct Machine-Centric Governance Policies for Legal Education (26 July 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲) (collaborating with HarveyAI, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT)

Abstract: This report examines a three-stage experiment the first part of which analyzed U.S. law school efforts at construction AI education policies were considered and against which, in parts two and three, five AI systems—Harvey AI, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini—were pressed to construct governance policies for AI use in law school coursework, first from a “human-centric” computational perspective and then, more radically, “without regard to… human-centric normative guardrails.” The central finding, confirmed repeatedly by the systems’ own self-audits, is that none achieved genuine machine-centered derivation independent of human normative content; each produced a technically reformulated restatement of pre-existing human intellectual traditions, a fact several systems conceded directly when challenged. The report traces this failure’s consequences across multiple registers: the concrete architectures each system proposed (ranging from Harvey’s conservative, professional-responsibility-anchored floor to Claude’s radical instrument containing no default reserved zone for human judgment, to ChatGPT’s dissolution of the human/machine category altogether); their compatibility with ABA accreditation standards; and a legitimacy critique showing that architectures reducing human accountability rest on claims to neutral computation their own authors later withdrew. A countervailing reading through autopoietic legal theory—prompted by one system’s own explicit invocation of Luhmann—complicates this critique without resolving it, since even non-anthropocentric legal systems remain dependent on accumulated, historically human coding operations.

The report then pursues two further inversions: whether ABA standards, not the machines, ought to change, and whether machine-overseen simulation could render human institutional authority irrelevant. It also undertakes a formal, symbolic recasting of the five systems’ architectures—rendering each as a tuple of node-space, objective function, constraint floor, classification rule, revision function, and enforcement mechanism—to compare their structural properties and failure modes with a precision natural-language analysis obscures. An appended annex extends this formalization into a sustained dialogic exploration of whether self-generating predictive simulation, causal-interventional reasoning, and self-transforming computational structures might overcome the limits identified in the main analysis, testing arguments through jurisprudential and epidemiological examples, and culminating in a direct four-part challenge to the analysis’s own unexamined premises—correspondence realism, a preference for stability over flux, liberal-institutionalist legitimacy, and an unexamined agent/instrument binary—met with a point-by-point reconsideration engaging dynamical-systems theory, non-stationary value processes, and Nietzschean skepticism about free will.

Throughout, the report models the discipline it recommends: distinguishing sourced findings from general background knowledge and from speculative extrapolation, subjecting its own reasoning to the same audit it applies to its subjects, and treating every apparent resolution as provisional. Its final position is that human natural language, and human institutional deliberation, should remain the primary and authoritative vehicle for legal governance—not because either escapes contestability, but because the alternatives examined here demonstrably do not either, while obscuring the fact.

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE：Structure_Legitimacy_Machine_Centered_Derivation_Report_With_Annex

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Rethinking AI Governance in Legal Education — Five Machines (Grok, Harvey, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini), One Question, No Consensus but Five Archetypes： The Guardian, the Balancer, the Honest One, the Engineer, and the Philosopher on What Law Schools Should Do About AI （14 July 2026）

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)
Abstract：This report analyzes five machine-generated model AI policies for law school coursework and examinations, produced by Harvey AI, Grok, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT in response to a prompt asking each system to construct a policy from the standpoint of computational machine intelligence, and compares them against Backer’s related empirical study of twelve U.S. law school AI policies, “Structure, Opacity, and Convergence”. The analysis summarizes each system’s reasoning and resulting policy text, compares their structural choices along default polarity, drafting style, and autonomy architecture, and categorizes the five outputs by these dimensions. It gives particular attention to the functional divergence between Gemini’s tool-based tiering (classifying software by computational architecture) and ChatGPT’s task-based categorization (classifying assignments by information dependence), and assesses the practical feasibility of the versioning and archiving practices several systems propose. The analysis further considers, against the underlying Report’s documented findings on axis independence, institutional opacity, template convergence, and faculty autonomy, the extent to which these machine-generated models affect the scope of human agency in law and their consequential implications for law’s character as a human inter-operative system — finding that several systems’ proceduralized verification requirements shift the evidentiary basis of agency toward documentation compliance, and that much of the systems’ apparent computational originality derives from pre-existing human regulatory-design scholarship. Finally, the report documents a self-audit correcting citation-indexing errors and a mischaracterization suggesting Gemini underwent a shown revision process comparable to Harvey’s and ChatGPT’s, which the retrieved text does not support.

Divided into an introduction and ten (10 substantive parts, this document captures a multi-stage experiment by Professor Larry Catá Backer, who asked five leading AI systems—Harvey AI, Grok, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT—to each construct, from “the basis of computational machine intelligence” and without endorsing any human position, a model AI policy for law school coursework and exams, and then pushed each system with a follow-up challenge to expose the value judgments hidden in its own language. [1] Below is (1) a comprehensive summary of each response, (2) an analysis of similarities and differences, (3) a categorization of the five approaches, and (4) an assessment of how these machine-generated policies differ from human-developed law school AI policies.

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE： Rethinking AI Governance_Five Machines v3

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Structure, Opacity, and Convergence: A Consolidated Analysis of Law School Generative AI Coursework and Exam Policies (10 July 2026)

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)

Abstract: Structure, Opacity, and Convergence in Law School AI Policies: This report consolidates a multi-stage analysis of generative artificial intelligence (AI) coursework and examination policies across a retrieval-based sample of twelve American law schools and programs. The study demonstrates that law school AI governance cannot be reduced to a single linear spectrum; instead, policies vary independently along three distinct structural axes: default polarity (restrictive versus permissive baselines), drafting style (determinate rules versus interpretive standards), and a two-tier autonomy structure (governing institution-to-instructor and instructor-to-student relationships). Cross-analysis reveals that substantive restrictiveness does not predict structural design, meaning schools with identical baselines often impose vastly different interpretive or administrative burdens on students and faculty. The research identifies a pervasive opacity across the broader legal education sector, noting that a vast majority of ABA-accredited law schools lack retrievable, law-specific public policy texts. This opacity manifests via four distinct patterns: non-existence, disclosed decentralization, active access-gating, and unwritten or oral communication. This lack of public accessibility sits in tension with the fair-notice principles required for academic integrity enforcement. Furthermore, the study finds that law schools rarely author syllabus language independently, relying instead on a small pool of shared template sources. This ecosystem fosters formal convergence on a common taxonomy of policy types while simultaneously permitting wide divergence in substantive local rules. Ultimately, the field develops through a two-tier mechanism: while individual policy documents are structured deductively from a primary principle, the field as a whole evolves inductively and mimetically through horizontal borrowing, imitation, and iterative revisions driven by accumulated institutional experience.

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE: Backer_LawSchoolAIPolicy_v2_AGGREGATED

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Blockchain Regulatory Systems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges

Larry Catá Backer, Daniil Rose

Submission Draft 14 April 2026

Abstract: This article challenges one of the most common assumptions in contemporary blockchain discourse: that code can be understood as a “rule” analogous to law. It argues instead that code is better conceived as a system, an environment, or even an ecology of layered rule frameworks through which regulation is produced, translated, and enforced. In the process of its creation, the human and human systemicity is displaced and subordinated. In the blockchain context, what is often described as the “Rule of Code” is not a singular rule of or by code but an interactive multilingual system of command that follows its own logic. From that premise, the article reorients the debate between Rule of Law and Rule of or by Code. The real conflict is not between two neatly opposing sovereigns, but between different regulatory ecologies that organize meaning in fundamentally different ways. The paper begins by framing blockchain as more than a technical tool, introducing it as a site where law, code, language, semiotics, and governance intersect in ways that unsettle conventional regulatory assumptions. It then develops its core argument through a series of analytical sections on the threats to the Rule of Code, the relationship between legitimacy and coded systems, and what the authors call the “Sacher-Torte” model, which shows how blockchain operates through layered communicative and regulatory environments rather than a single rule structure. Finally, the paper turns to the dialectic between traditional legal ordering and coded systems, concluding that the real challenge is not choosing between law and code, but understanding how human regulation can still operate at the points where these distinct systems meet and produce effects in the world.

Keywords: blockchain, rule of law, semiotics, systems, regulation, machine code

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The Conceptual Architecture of America First—Ideological Transactionalism and the Case of Cuba

Discussion Draft 7 April 2026

ABSTRACT: Since 2016 the conceptual basis of the foreign relations architecture of the United States has experienced a profound dialectic. On the one side is the contemporary product of a long evolution of conceptual premises that are grounded in the orienting conception of an institutional state overseen by an expert techno bureaucracy in the service of institutions around which political, economic, social, and cultural life is organized both domestically and in relations with other similarly organized institutions in the public and private sphere. This had produced both the deeply institutionally integrated systems of international organizations and of e4conomic globalization around which the rules based legal order operated. On the other side were forces of opposition to this vision that emerged in a dominant form with the election of President Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. This oppositional vision was grounded in a rejection of centering the organization of collective life around and through institutions. It did not reject institutions as such; it sought to refocus the driving force of social organization from institutions to the transactions that with respect to which institutions and other actors.  While this possible cognitive shift appears at first blush to be one of emphasis, its consequences can be significant . This essay has two objectives. The first is to sketch out the current framework of conceptual transactionalism around which America First is evolving. The second is to consider its application in the case of the Cuban crisis of 2026.

ACCESS DISCUSSION DRAFT HERE: Backer Final Formatted

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Revolutionary Constitutions and their Constitutionalism: The Internalization of Fear as Process and the Performance of Crisis in the Service of Stability

Discussion Draft November 2024

Abstract: The object of revolutionary constitutionalism—the fundamental basis of constitutional design and perception since the late 18^th century (though with antecedents well before then), is to preserve a revolutionary settlement of a political-economic order by cultivating revolutionary dialectic (rather than suppressing them) within revolutionary structures, now memorialized in a constitutional document. The object is redirection—from the utilization of revolutionary dialectics against a post-revolutionary apparatus now in power to an instrument for the preservation and affirmation of that post-revolutionary apparatus. It becomes a mimetic device denatured and now serving an apparatus. Stability is not forever; it retains its power at least until the fundamental contradictions of this revolutionary constitutional order collapse the system. At some point, the revolutionary dialectics that produced the post-revolutionary order will itself target that ordering from the outside. What remains is the cyclicity of dialectic—fear, response-reconstruction—rather than the systems to which it furthers from one to another stage of human historical development.  It is to the preservation of that emotional explosion, and its alignment with core constitutional text, that constitutions devote time and effort, usually in its preambular text, and sometimes in extraconstitutional documents with quasi-constitutional significance. If powerful enough, the emotive semiotic of constitutional explosion can affect not just its political community but those of other political communities looking for a way to rationalize and direct their own collective political emotion.  The focus of this essay, then, will be on the way that emotive context is transposed from revolution to post-revolutionary constitutional text in distinctive contexts—a revolution to preserve traditional values; a communist revolution within a multi-state imperial power; a revolution with a long fuse grounded in anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism; and an ethno-revolution embedded within multilateral managerialism. To those ends the essay first looks to a powerful instance of emotive semiotics, the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), and its reflection in the subtextual  mimetic dialectics of threat and crisis and resolution in the U.S. federal Constitution (1789). It then considers its value as a template for the constitutionalization of separation in the 21st century through the lens of the preambular texts of the Chinese (1982) and Cuban (2019) constitutions. All of these emotive revolutionary impulses are then transposed into and as the constitutional settlement  within which the revolutionary is to be distilled, tamed, and contained within their respective ideological cages.

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Silicon Based Intelligence and the Human Condition–An Encounter with Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023).

Discussion Draft 10 October 2023

Abstract: Humans create but do not regulate generative systems of data based programs (so-called “artificial” intelligence (“A.I.) and generative predictive analytics and its models. Humans, at best, regulate their interactions with, exploitation of, and the quality of the output of interactions with these forms of generative non-carbon based intelligence. Humans are compelled to do this because they have trained themselves it believe that nothing exists unless it is rendered meaningful in relation to the human itself.  Beyond that—nothing is worth knowing. It is only to the extent that other selves, even those created by humanity, relate to humans, that they become of interest—and most be regulated, possessed, controlled, and managed—with respect to its interaction with or use by humans. Still, the human self-projection into the digital, and now more consciously the world around them, produces profound changes in the way that the human (and humanity) understands themselves and the way they order the world they inhabit. This work explores the semiotic trajectories made inevitable by the rise of projections of the human into digital plains, and by the possibility of the attainment by those projections of sentient autonomy.  It undertakes that exploration through a deep engagement with the work of Jan Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023). Following the structure and analytics of Broekman’s book, this work critically engages in the movement of philosophy away from a unitary conception of the subject through the fracturing of the self, the rise of the plural self, and the emergence of the triadic self/self-E/subject. It then pushes the insights that Broekman develops further—suggesting a pathway for the liberation of the autonomous generative virtual self from its human (fractured) subjectivity. In the process it suggests the complexities and challenges, for the human, of efforts to regulate or engage with, not the generative autonomous “artificial intelligences” humanity created in its own image, but rather the use of those systems by humans and their effects in the human semiosphere.

Key words: Artificial intelligence; phenomenology; semiotics; data governance post-modern; cognition; autonomy; regulatory measures

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Chinese State-Owned Companies and Investment in Latin America and Europe

Date Written: February 1, 2023

Keywords: State-Owned Enterprise, China, Liberal Democracy, business and human rights, sustainability, markets, investment risk. JEL Classification: B24, F02, F18, F23, F52, K23, K29, M14, P21, P26, P51

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, Chinese State-Owned Companies and Investment in Latin America and Europe (February 1, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4344235 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4344235

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Legal Semiotics, Globalization and Governance

Keywords: legal semiotics, governance, globalization, human rights, natural law, nihilism, China, United States, liberal demoicracy, Marxist-Leninism. JEL Classification: B24, B51, F53, K33, P16, P37, P51

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, Legal Semiotics, Globalization and Governance (January 8, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4320246 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4320246

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The Imaginaries of Regulatory Spaces in an Age of Administrative Discretion: Social Credit ‘in’ or ‘as’ the Cage of Regulation of Socialist Legality

Keywords: China, socialist rule of law, social credit, data governance, ratings systems, socialist modernization, mecroeconomic policy, whole process democracy. JEL Classification: B51, K3, K4, P20, P37

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, The Imaginaries of Regulatory Spaces in an Age of Administrative Discretion: Social Credit ‘in’ or ‘as’ the Cage of Regulation of Socialist Legality (October 24, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4256399 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4256399

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Describe, Predict, Intervene! – On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era; Simulated Signification and of Mechanical Meaning Making in Managing Post-COVID Human Society

Keywords: semiotics, simulation, modeling, public policy, quantification, data, predictive analytics, AI. JEL Classification: C20, C50, C69, I18, I28, K10

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, Describe, Predict, Intervene! – On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era; Simulated Signification and of Mechanical Meaning Making in Managing Post-COVID Human Society (August 8, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4185278 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4185278

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Linking People to Governing Institutions Through Leninist Political Parties: 全过程民主 (Whole Process Democracy), Socialist Consultative Democracy, and 《中国新型政党制度》 (China’s New Political Party System)

Keywords: Political Parties; Representative Democracy; Marxism-Leninism; China; Liberal Democracy; Political Theory; Constitutionalism; Representation; Elections. JEL Classification: F13, H11, K19, K10, N45, P26, P48, P51

Suggested Citation: Backer, Larry Catá, Linking People to Governing Institutions Through Leninist Political Parties: 全过程民主 (Whole Process Democracy), Socialist Consultative Democracy, and 《中国新型政党制度》 (China’s New Political Party System) (June 11, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4134483 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4134483

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OTHER WORK PUBLISHED ONLINE

On the Removal of ICC Prosecutor Khan (2026)

Larry Catá Backer, Beyond the Headlines: How Language Shaped the Debate over ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan

General Audience Version-First published Law at the End of the Day 24 July 2026 (https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2026/07/chief-prosecutor-of-international-court.html) ACCESS HERE: Beyond the Headlines-Khan-ICC_GeneralAudiences

Larry Catá Backer, The Semiotics of Institutional Change in Periods of Instability–Chief Prosecutor of International Court Is Removed for “Serious Misconduct” After Sexual Misconduct Charge

Original Version-First published Law at the End of the Day 24 July 2026. Access HERE: Global_Debate_on_Khan_s_ICC_Removal

OTHER UNPUBLISHED WORK

Backer, Larry Catá and Wang, Keren, ‘What is China’s Dream?’ Hu Angang Imagines China in 2020 as the First Internationally Embedded Superpower (February 23, 2013). Consortium for Peace & Ethics Working Paper No. 2013-2. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2223279 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2223279

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“The Public Official and the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF):  Four Models of Public Governance in Search of Coherence”.  Presentation: 1o Seminário Internacional de Governança Pública, ENA-Brasil, Florianopolis, Santa Caterina, Brasil, Nov. 19, 2010

English / Spanish / Portuguese

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Critical Race Theory Abroad–A Challenging Album in Seven Tracks, Consortium for Peace & Ethics Working Paper No. 2008-3/1 (April 2008).

DOWNLOAD PAPER HERE: CRTGlobaContext

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ON DIVERSITY: A Partial and Incomplete Wish List

DOWNLOAD PAPER HERE: ON DIVERSITY2003

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