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The Congressional Apportionment Ammendment (CAA) was a resolution passed by both houses of Congress and a majority of the states along with a slate of other ammendemnts which would go on to become the American Bill of Rights and, aproximately two centuries later, the 27th ammendment, which regulates congressional sallary raises. Unlike resolutions like the ERA, this ammendment came with no time limit, and is therefore one of the six unratified ammendments still eligeable for doption. 

Were the CAA to be in effect, the House of Representatives would increase in number of members in proportion to the number of constituents living within the united states, at a rate of thirty thousand (30,000) persons per representative until the number of representatives reached 100, after which the formula would switch to fourty thousand (40,000) persons per representative until that number reached 200, then fifty thousand (50,000) until the House’s members number 300. Under this formulation and the current population of the United States (over three hundred million (300,000,000), “the House would have grown to 6,000” representatives, more then an order of magnitude above its current composition.

However, the formula for this repaportionment is somewhat contested due to an aparent scrivener’s error. Acording to the text, had the ammendment been ratified it would have resulted in a recuring mathematic paradox for which no integer could meet the contradictory legal formula for determining the size of the House for certain population sizes. Under such circumstances, the number of Representatives (R) would be an Impossible Number.

[The above information paraphrases the wikipedia article on the Congretional Aportionment ammendment.]

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I find this information utterly fascinating and inspiring. I would like to take this opportunity to announce my undying support for the immiediate ratification of this ammendemnt and the consequent establisment of an Impossible Congress. However, the forces of gridlock in DC and the various state capitals being what they are, this seems unlikely to be passed in the near furture. Therefore, I am calling upon american residents regardless of age, gender, race, or citizenship status to begin organizing themselves into committees intended to carry out extra-legal elections to a legislature whose authority will rest on fundemental legal, philosophical, and mathematical impossibilities. 

The Impossible Congress should then undertake the following project: to promote and manufacture new constitutional crises premised on legal, economic, social, and mathematical paradoxes. 

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Impossibilism is a response to the contradictory demands placed upon us by the black iron prison of class society, patriarchy, white supremacy, and Empire.

(The Empire Never Ended.)

Impossibilism does not intend to restrict itself to a fetish of the impossible, a move which would likely lend itself to various forms of nihilism and inaction. It does not state that only impossible goals are worth pursuing, though it does insist that the act of pursuing impossible goals can be in itself a valuable liberatory practice. 

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Impossibilism is also a response to the Originalism which was initiated by the plain-reading of the Bible popularized under the Great Awakenings and the (tel-)Evangelist revivals, and which has been projected onto constitutional law through the Federal and State Judiciary. Originalism presents itself as populist, arguing that every person can access the true, “plain” meaning of both the Bible and the Constition, without the intermediation of any Priest, Translator, Historian, or Interpreter. The guise of democracy is therefore mobilized in order to mobilize the latent (gut-)reactionary tendancies on the part of a broad swathe of the population. 

While prioritizing the individual, the petite-ego, as it were, the mere farmer. Originialst epistimology is the epistimology of reactiony, entrenched forces which, having built their own house, are now too weak and divided to reform it to their own evolving needs. It is a heuristic which denies all heuristics. It finds common cause with the post-ideology ideology of the neoliberalist tendency.

 rejects pluriontology, precisely because it assumes that every individual will (or rather must) agree on a single “plain reading” of the text. The removal of the Interpretor is simultaniously a rejection of interpretation as such, and thereby obfuscates the “post-modern” but in fact quite old historical observation that to read is necessarily to interpret, that there exists a dialectic between ever Reader, the Text, and the World of references and referential-relationships which the Text simultaniously activates and is contained within. 

Originalism interacts symbiotically with the identity of the “silent majority,” a democratic-authoritarian constituency which, in the predictible fascistic tradition of viewing oneself as the embattered hero, must understand its enemies as both too strong and too weak, an existential threat against all one holds dear and an aesthic blemish too disgusting in its weakness to exist on the same conceptual field as oneself. This is to say that originalism also rests on paradoxical conditions. 

This is to be expected. As every student of set theory knows, the impossible is simultaniously contained in, generated by, and places limits upon all referencial systems. Bertrend Russel’s demonstration of the fact that a system which is both complete and self consistent exists as an impossibility is both a limit and an incitation. The paradox is simultaniously the mark of the impossible and an asepct the absence of which is itself impossible. 

That said, originalism is not itself an example of impossibilism, nor is it particularly likely to become one. {why?}

It is the specific and partially-contingent ways in which systems are forced to turn back upon themselves, to become more self-concious, and in doing so to point beyond themselves is a source of wonder and inspiration which we Impossibilists take as a both a limit and a point of departure. It is both a fierce incitation to think beyond thought and a reminder that our ideological enemies remain embeded within systems which, even though partially of their own devising, still contain and constrict themselves, all the more intimately because they are committed to the preservation of their very chains.