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Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Why do we want what we want?
Why do we want what we want? In recent years I’ve realised that critical realism lacks the theoretical resources to really answer this question. Archer’s work recovered the subject in a realist mode in order to account for how structure and agency interacted over time. But there was a sense in which concerns for her were simply given. They arise as a natural fact which constitutes the specificity of the person: ‘you are what you care about’ to use the Frankfurt line she was extremely fond of. It still leaves the question unanswered however as to why I have the particular concerns that I do.
Why do I care about these things? How did these come to be the things that matter to me? For psychoanalysis this is really a question about desire, even if concern and desire are not co-extensive. It’s about what I want and why I want it. Archer’s qualitative work positions the concerns in terms of unfolding experience within a formative context but it doesn’t account for why these specific concerns emerge. In her own term it’s not explanatory i.e. explaining why something is so rather than otherwise. The Reflexive Imperative gets closest to this in its analysis of natal contexts (viz the orientation of an adolescent towards the relational goods/evils they encounter there) but this mechanism is about biographical movement, it’s not about desire itself. It gestures towards it at points but I think it’s fair to say there’s not an explanation for it there.
For all its weaknesses there is a substantive theory of this in Lacan. Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character is by quite some way the clearest exposition of Lacan I’ve ever encountered. Even more so than Bruce Fink. Interestingly she centres Das Ding rather than objet a in accounting for desire. As she describes it on pg 47 this is the lost object of enjoyment which the trauma of socialisation leaves forever foreclosed. It is only constituted as an object by the fact that language and individuation put it forever out of our reach, retroactively constituting that infinite state as something we had which has now been lost:
Socialization shatters this illusion at least on two different levels. On a literal level, it introduces a wedge—an insurmountable obstacle—between us and the maternal body (or the body of the one who cares for us). On a more figurative level, it delivers a huge blow to our narcissistic sense of being the navel of the universe. In so doing, it divests us of our infantile fantasy of wholeness and uncomplicated belonging, generating an unquenchable longing for a state of plenitude that we imagine we have somehow been unfairly robbed of: a lost paradise we can never recover but that we spend the rest of our lives pursuing. The fact that we never possessed this paradise in the first place, that we were never completely whole and at ease to begin with, does not in the least diminish our resolve to recover it. Lacan designates this lost paradise as “the Thing,” indicating by the capital T that it is not an ordinary fantasy object, but a very special Thing of incomparable worth; it is the Thing that our deepest desires are made of
There’s a basic mechanism postulated here in which we constantly seek to find substitutes for this lost Thing. It is a psychic driver for our desire, setting it into motion as one object after another promises to resolve the diffuse sense of loss which provides the texture to our everyday engagements with the world. These ‘refound’ objects elicit our desire because of how they relate to this inarticulate sense of what has been lost. As she puts it later on pg 47:
Every “object” (every person or aspiration) we invent or discover is “refound” in the sense that it is always a substitute for the original lost Thing. We place one thing, one object, after another into the empty slot left by the Thing, and those objects that come the closest to reviving the Thing, that contain the strongest echo of the Thing’s special radiance, are the ones we feel most passionate about. However, because no object can ever fully replicate the fantasized perfection of the Thing, we are condemned to repeat our quest ad infinitum
This means there is always a gap, as Ruti puts it (pg 48), between “the Thing and the things we use to compensate for it absence”. In this gap lives the possibility for creativity and originality because the precarious glimmer of the sublime we find in them challenges us to make them into more than they really are. We find new ways of holding, narrating, representing that struggle to capture the ontological dignity we dimly perceive as lurking beneath the mundane shell. The inevitable failure of those responses, the sense in which these objects are merely partaking in a sublime forever out of reach rather than promising access to it, means that we must always try again. The iteration of excitement and disappointment, the sublime and the mundane, constitutes the rupture out of which creation emerges.
Why do we want what we want? There’s a deeper question which opens up now about why the Thing echoes for us in some objects rather than others. Ruti describes an object which “resonates on the precise frequency of our desire” (pg 50). An interesting thread of her substantive discussion concerns how this resonance might be foreclosed by failing to “allow the things of the world to disclose themselves to us according to their own distinctive rhythm” or a premature dissatisfaction with the object given that “even the most enthralling person is never merely this echo” (pg 50). Ruti comes closest to directly addressing the question on pg 51:
This is not to deny that there are objects that approximate the Thing more loyally than others. Such objects enchant us more than those where the Thing’s echo remains more subdued or diffuse; they transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor, so that when we are in their presence, we feel more elevated, more self-realized, than when we are forced to function in a universe of less venerable substitutes. It is as if, to once again borrow from Lacan, they contained something “more than” themselves, so that when we interact with them, we interact with both the objects themselves and the trace of the Thing that these objects hold.
The phenomenological mode of Lacanian theory here really works for me. This is what I’ve been struggling towards for the last few years and Ruti does it here better than I suspect I will ever be able to. But it still leaves the explanatory question unanswered. Why do some objects transmit something about the Thing’s original splendor in a way that others do not? Obviously this can be taken as an empirical question to be answered through a case history but I want to try and get more purchase on the question in the abstract. As she illustrates on pg 52 this echo is at the heart of human experience, such as when we encounter people, situations and things which we think are right but which do not move us in this way:
This specificity of desire is one of the major causes of our suffering, for more often than not, we cannot quite get what we want. It can be tricky to find the right kinds of objects, so that we can, for instance, go for long periods without a romantic relationship because we do not come across anyone who matches the frequency of our desire. Even when we interact with countless people who in principle meet all the necessary specifications of desirability, we cannot force ourselves to want any of them if they fail to emit a strong enough echo of the Thing.
I take much of the positive case of Ruti’s book to be about what Bollas calls the receptive unconscious. Ruti’s concern is how we open ourselves to the echo of the thing, including refusing the siren call of consumer capitalism which seeks to provoke our desire towards mundane objects which we don’t experience as having this dignity. This is existentially urgent and conceptually important in ways she conveys on pg 56:
People who complain about a general sense of apathy often do so because they have lost touch with the Thing’s echo; they have lost their capacity to distinguish between objects that correspond to the inimitable intonation of their desire and others that merely grant the illusion of satisfaction. One reason for this is that the vast commercial machinery of our society is explicitly designed to drown out the Thing’s echo. This machinery makes so many sparkly decoys available to us that we can get sidetracked by the huge volume of our choices. Such decoys, which press on us from all sides, obscure the Thing’s aura for the simple reason that they are deliberately manufactured to shine extra brightly. They flood us with a homogenizing blare that can induce us to accumulate the piles of useless junk I referred to earlier.
I still think the deeper question remains. How do we get from the infantile organisation of our incipient desire (“We learn to appreciate certain things: a favorite food, our mother’s touch, a comforting toy, our brother’s singing, and so on”) to being an adult who has an inner sense of what calls them which they can (fallibly) tune into through a set of practices and orientations which Ruti describes as an erotics of being? This entails a comfort with the passions evoked in being called, including those moments of rupture and renewal when we are called by something which knocks us out of our comfortable groves of repetition. From pg 72:
Equally important, when energies that have been trapped in the repetition compulsion get released, we have a huge amount of new energy available to us. This extra energy can initially feel destabilizing, but it is also exhilarating in the sense that we now have the necessary resources for activities that we might have formerly been unable to carry out. One can liken this experience to an author’s breaking a writer’s block: all of a sudden there is a deluge of energy that can be used productively rather than symptomatically; there is the possibility of growth in all kinds of directions that might have been previously unimaginable. If a passive relationship to our repetition compulsion signifies an inner deadness of sorts—a state of being helplessly wedged in our unconscious conflicts—breaking the repetition revitalizes us, ushering us into the midst of a new kind of life.
But what is the call itself? What is the echo? I think Ruti’s existential methodology is correct. It’s a gloriously lucid explanation of why I dimly cobbled together as a practical manual from Fink: you stay with the encounter and begin to recognise patterns in how energising (or otherwise) particular sorts of people and objects tend to be for you. In that energy, I take Ruti to be arguing, we are encountering something beyond. There is a shape emerging through the clouds, which we can see ever more of if only we can resolutely in the face of it, neither clutching too tightly or backing away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n74g5mqQ2tI
But I still think it’s possible to talk about this in explanatory terms. There’s a gap between a clinical description of the factors which drive attachment behaviour and an abstract claim about the mechanism at work in attachment as such. Consider what Ruti says here on pg 96:
It denies the fact that if our desire crystallizes around a particular person with unusual force, it is because this person contains a shining sliver of sublimity (a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo) that makes him or her inestimably valuable to us, that explains why only this person will do and why our love for this person is nonnegotiable. In this sense, love may be one of the few things we experience that has the power to induce the sublime to materialize within the framework of daily life.
This is the sublime extruding into the lifeworld. The ontology concerns that it is extruding, the phenomenology is about how it is extruding, the therapeutics is about what that extruding means for us. But I want to address the explanatory question about why it is extruding in the way that it is. I feel like Ruti circles around this question, which to be fair is my question rather than heres, with beautiful phrase (“a uniquely compelling manifestation of the Thing’s echo”) without accounting for the character of that relationship. Interestingly Ruti shares my affection for how Christopher Bollas accounts for the relationship with the thing, which makes me think my project of integrating Bollas and Lacan is less problematic than I worried. From pg 174:
We may feel uniquely enticed by certain kinds of investments, by certain kinds of objects and activities, yet hesitate to let ourselves be “conquered” by them, striving, instead, to neutralize their summons. Unfortunately, when we do this, when we recoil from objects and activities that call upon us in such a passionate manner, we destroy their capacity to turn our day into a space for the articulation of our idiom. Similarly, when we use the various objects and activities that the world makes available to us as mere means to an end, as inert tools or resources, their magic silently slips away; when we seek to stifle their disorienting alienness, we decline the invitation to aliveness that they extend to us.
Again though this is about how we relate the objects from which we feel this call. In his own way Bollas also circles around this, positing the ‘destiny drive’ through which we seek to ‘give form to our idiom’ but not really explaining why certain objects are uniquely generative for elaborating that idiom. Like Ruti he points powerfully to examples of this generativity, with a particular focus on aesthetic objects, but the deeper explanatory question remains mysterious. I think this can be answered, even if I have no idea yet how to do it.
#archer #breakcore #desire #drive #existential #harryFrankfurt #Lacan #loss #MariRuti #psychoanalysis #realism #reflexivity #trauma -
Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words
In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.
I think about that line a lot these days, because I am accused of being a machine.
I have written for money since 1975, when I was ten years old and a Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper paid me for a byline. I have published on the open internet since 1991 or so, across more than ten thousand articles now scattered over two decades of domains that outlasted most of the web services that tried to host them. I have used the em-dash since childhood. I used the mark when it was a compliment to use the mark, when my teachers circled it approvingly in the margins of school papers, when Gay Talese and Joan Didion and every serious magazine editor I worked with from the 1980s forward treated the little horizontal line as a writer’s way of modulating a sentence without breaking its spine.
None of that writing sat behind a paywall. The blogs ran without advertising, without subscriptions, without registration walls or cookie-consent negotiations or any of the gatekeeping apparatus the web has since grown around itself. Anyone could read the work, quote it, copy it, argue with it. The scrapers could read it too, and did, and the LLM crawlers could read it, and did, and I made no effort to stop any of them, because the open web in that era operated on the assumption that anything published was publicly readable, full stop. I paid the bills some other way, kept the door propped wide, and trusted the reader, the critic, the student, and the crawler eventually, to find what they needed and leave with it. Some of them left with it the way a reader leaves a library. Some of them, it now turns out, left with it the way a burglar leaves a house.
The em-dash, according to a certain species of editor now roaming the platforms, is the dreaded em-dash, the tell, the signature of a large language model caught in the act. The triple anaphora receives similar treatment. Churchill in June of 1940, telling the Commons “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,” would today be flagged as suspicious output. Lincoln at Gettysburg in November of 1863, saying “we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground,” would be sent back for a re-run with the prompt rewritten. The Rule of Three, which has organized Western oratory since Aristotle, is now evidence of fraud.
The irony here is deep enough to fall into.
The mythology of how these large language models got built is no longer much of a secret. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, crawlers swept the open web at a scale never before attempted, hoovering up every blog post, every op-ed, every forum argument, every short story posted on a personal domain, and used those scraped billions of words to teach the models how sentences work. If you wrote on the open internet during the years I was writing on the open internet, your prose is somewhere in the training weights. My prose is in there. So is yours, probably, if you published anything at all between 1995 and 2022.
The em-dash predates the machines by centuries and reached them through the training data, through the open web, through the thousands of writers who put it there decade after decade. The triple anaphora arrived the same way, along with the Ciceronian accumulation, the liturgical cadence, the Kingian refrain, the New Yorker comma habit, the essayist’s parenthetical, the Victorian semicolon, all of it funneled into the corpus because we wrote that corpus, one post at a time, across the open years of the web.
So when someone accuses a writer of my generation of stealing from the machines, the accusation has the logic of a footprint accusing the foot.
I dramatized this horror once already, in a December 2025 piece called “The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive,” where I fed twenty years of my own archive into an AI and asked the machine to write in my voice. The piece opened with every authenticity move a reader expects: the dry-dust smell of my grandfather’s hayloft in August 1998, the 3:00 AM shame of an old failure, the thousand hollow words deleted and rewritten, the specific sensory details that are supposed to prove the hand is human. Then, partway through, a SYSTEM_INTERRUPT arrived and revealed that the whole opening had been written by the bot trained on the archive. The bot closed with “The test is over. You lost.” That was the dramatic version. The essay in front of you now runs the drama’s implied argument out to its conclusion: the bot’s victory was never a victory, because every convincing move the bot makes is a move I taught it before the bot existed.
I asked one of the current models about this recently. The answer I got was the kind of thing I might have written in my own voice on a good afternoon. The self-referential quality is part of the point, and the response deserves a full airing:
“Now, here is where the criticism is genuinely useful, and I want to be direct about what I think is happening. You write in a style that is rhetorical, anaphoric, and architecturally parallel. You have always written this way. The problem is not that you write like a machine. The problem is that machines have learned to write like you, or more precisely, machines have learned to write like the rhetorical tradition you work in, because that tradition, Ciceronian parallelism, liturgical repetition, the accumulating triad, constitutes a huge portion of the persuasive prose in the training data that language models consume. The style that marks you as a trained dramatist and rhetorician now, through no fault of yours, reads to some audiences as the style of a confident GPT-4 response. This is an infuriating irony, and it is also a real problem that needs solving on the page, because perception matters regardless of its accuracy.”
The model diagnoses the problem with the clarity of a writer trained in rhetoric, because it was built from writers trained in rhetoric. It analyzes the habits it inherited. It apologizes, in a tone I recognize, for its own voice being confused with mine. The effect hovers somewhere between flattering and uncanny, since the apology arrives in the exact cadence that triggered the accusation. I read that paragraph and heard a version of myself speaking, a younger version maybe, a version smoothed out by training weights and flattened by corporate safety tuning, yet still me in the syntactic bones.
What this means for my practice is a problem I inherited without asking for it and cannot now decline. If I keep writing the way I have always written, some readers will assume a machine wrote the piece. If I rewrite every sentence to avoid the patterns the machines now deploy fluently, I am sanding down a voice that took forty years to build, because the machines got better at imitating me than I was at distinguishing myself. The only defensible response, for now, is to write with specificity so granular, with personal history so particular, with memory so odd in its texture, that no general-purpose model could have produced the specific sentence in question. Specificity becomes the signature. The thing a machine cannot forge is the small, checkable, unglamorous biographical detail that only one person in the world actually remembers.
There is a darker note under all of this, and it is the note Oppenheimer was reaching for when he chose Death over Time in his translation. The writer who trains the machine that impersonates the writer has performed a kind of self-erasure. I wrote my way into a corpus that now writes in my voice back at readers who cannot tell the corpus from me. The sentences I taught the machine are the sentences the machine now uses to discredit me. The rhetoric I inherited from Cicero and Lincoln and Churchill and King, the rhetoric I spent a working life trying to honor, is the rhetoric that now proves I am counterfeit. That is not a tragedy on the scale of Trinity, nothing is, and I do not claim the comparison as anything other than a mordant gesture from a writer watching his tools be taken from him. The comparison still has a small true thing inside it, which is that makers can be unmade by what they make.
And so, to close in the voice I inherited from the writers the machines now impersonate — with the em-dashes and triple anaphoras my audience once rewarded and now suspects — I will say the thing the way I want to say the thing — with the dread mark of the machine — with the cadence of the preacher — with the wink of the essayist who has been at this desk since Jimmy Carter was president — I am become em-dash, destroyer of paragraphs — I am become triple anaphora, destroyer of detectors — I am become the stylistic fingerprint of my own impersonator, and the impersonator, it turns out, was me all along.
#ai #apologia #bots #cadence #emDash #hsitory #insight #llm #machineLanguage #scraping #tech #tone #trainingData #tripleAnaphora #writing -
Part of the questioning is now revolving around whether the president can use #IEEPA to ban products, but not put #tariffs on them. IEEPA is used to ban imports in a #sanctions context, for example with #trade embargoes on Russia or Iran. But American consumers probably would not respond kindly if #Trump were to ban imports altogether.
#SCOTUS #law #PartisanCourt #ActivistCourt #AbuseOfPower #economy
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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/07/uk-stockpile-food-climate-shocks-war. Prof. Tim Lang is absolutely right - from the selfish POV of this country. What worries me, however, is the impact this #stockpiling would have on other countries, especially those with less #money. I fear, in the context of #food #resource #scarcity, caused by #climatechange, etc., it would be a beggar-my-neighbour #policy. WE would be alright - other, poorer, people wouldn't.
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Along with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z,
Andreessen joined a slew of others,
including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions.The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted,
and they had different settings.(“Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,” Andreessen told Fridman.
“People will set to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.“)
After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.”
There, writers including #Kmele #Foster, who co-hosts the podcast
"The Fifth Column", Persuasion founder #Yascha #Mounk, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist #Chris #Rufo.The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement:
“He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group
— which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.But the center didn’t hold.
The liberal Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an
“illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech.The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.
The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams,
along with the never-Trump conservative #David #French and the liberal academic #Jason #Stanley,
wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education,
it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,”
they wrote.The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle,
and considered their position a betrayal.Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,”
a participant recalled.The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of
‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to #Rufo, a healthy development.
“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,”
he said.“By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end
— so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”Rufo had been there all along:
“I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”#MarcAndreessen #LexFridman
#ChrisRufo
#VivekRamaswamy #ErikTorenberg #Krishnan
#NoahSmithhttps://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
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PRODUCTHEAD: Reflections on the art and science of product management» With appropriate context, those closest to the problem should make the product decisions
» Be outcome-focused and evidence-based regardless of what kind of product or service you work on
» Be careful not to automatically balance out a conflicting behaviour in others (such as a founder’s bias)
» “The obstacle is the way” – every setback is an opportunity to improve our condition
#prodmgmt #backlog #constraints #decision #generativeAI #needs 📖 Read more: https://imanageproducts.com/producthead-reflections-on-the-art-and-science-of-product-management/ -
the meaning of the term
in context of #Kenya and #Ruto
Wantam = One Term ==> Ruto should go
https://www.tiktok.com/@ellyjoykendi538/video/7506433899719838994
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"Being imperfect is the only act of rebellion we have left against the machine. I have free will, and this has been a defense of humanity."
I strongly recommend this video that discusses the context of contemporary art, using the Canadian phenomenon "Angine de Poitrine" as an example.
Sadly, I think this video doesn't have in-english subtitles, please let me know if you can generate it.
https://youtu.be/cpiBHy0iX5Y?si=9dOFwhrs2oR2YcLA
#noIA #noAI #AI #IA #anginedepoitrine #art #history #arthistory #music #opinion #reflection #thoughts #critical
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“When that happens, you often see #GrayWhales in a more desperate search for new areas to feed,” Calambokidis said. “That’s the most likely context for this whale.”
Researchers will attempt to examine the whale, possibly as soon as Monday.
#science #climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #EndangeredSpecies #ecosystems #MarineLife #whales #law #EnvironmentalLaw
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Black Press' newspaper the Yellowknifer gave this guy 3/4 page; now @cabinradio. It's like the Cons have captured the press! Neither outlet provided context or Cons history of empty promises to the North. https://cabinradio.ca/266570/news/politics/conservatives-mp-dismisses-budgets-northern-pledges/
#Arctic #nwtpoli #cdnpoli #Budget #democracy #JournalismMatters
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Much of the conversation around AI and data privacy centers on compliance frameworks.
Less attention is given to how systems and decisions are evaluated under scrutiny—whether in legal or regulatory contexts.
That distinction matters.
Across domains, outcomes hinge not just on meeting requirements, but on whether reasoning and evidence can be clearly explained and defended.
#DataProtection #AIGovernance #ImmigrationLaw #ExpertWitness #DigitalPolicy
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“In a larger context, Trump's approval rating (Gallup polling) after the first year of his second term was the lowest of any president since 1977.”
Source: Rattner, Steven (December 26, 2025). "Trump's First Year Back, in 10 Charts / Chart 9. America the Unhappy". The New York Times (Behind paywall, seen in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_second_Trump_presidency)
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Consciousness Explained Away: Daniel Dennett’s Illusionism and the Theory That Spends Its Own Foundation
When Daniel Dennett died on April 19, 2024, at the age of eighty-two, the philosophical world lost one of the last serious defenders of a position so counterintuitive that even sympathetic readers spent decades trying to talk themselves into it. Dennett argued, across more than fifty years of writing, that consciousness as we ordinarily understand it does not exist. The reds and greens you see, the texture of cool water against the palm, the sense that there is somebody home behind your eyes reading these words: all of it, on Dennett’s account, is what he called a user illusion, a simplified internal model the brain generates for navigation purposes, with no inner light behind it and no observer to whom the show is being staged. The position is called illusionism, and it remains the strongest possible challenge to the panpsychism we considered in the previous article on Iain McGilchrist. If Dennett was right, McGilchrist’s whole project rests on a misdescription of what we are.
The essay that follows takes Dennett’s position seriously enough to argue with it. Treating illusionism as obvious nonsense, the way much of the philosophical commentariat does, is unworthy of the work he produced and bad for thinking. Treating it as established science, which his more enthusiastic defenders sometimes do, is a different mistake in the opposite direction. The honest position holds that Dennett gave us one of the most carefully developed materialist accounts of mind on offer, that significant portions of his work contributed real progress to cognitive science, and that the metaphysical core of illusionism collapses on close inspection in ways his admirers prefer not to discuss.
Begin with the position itself, stated as charitably as I can manage. Dennett’s 1991 Consciousness Explained developed what he called the Multiple Drafts model. Instead of a single inner stage where conscious experience plays out, he argued, the brain runs many parallel processes that compete and revise one another in real time. There is no Cartesian Theater, no master audience, no central self watching the show. What we call consciousness is an emergent narrative effect, a kind of running editorial composite produced by neural activity that has no privileged location and no privileged moment of conscious recognition. Asking when something becomes conscious is like asking exactly when a manuscript becomes finished while it is still being edited by twenty hands at once. The question presumes a unity that does not exist.
The illusionist refinement came later. In 2016, the philosopher Keith Frankish edited a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies under the title “Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness,” for which Dennett contributed a major essay called “Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness.” The argument runs as follows. When you say “I am conscious of a red stripe,” what is happening is not that some inner film is playing redness for an inner viewer. What is happening is that your brain has constructed a representation of redness, and the representation reports itself as having phenomenal character it does not actually possess. Dennett borrowed Alan Kay’s term “user illusion” from computer science, where it described the desktop metaphor that lets users operate a machine whose real workings remain hidden. Consciousness, on this view, is the brain’s user illusion of itself.
The position commits Dennett to a startling consequence. There are no qualia, no raw feels, no phenomenal properties of experience. Philosophical zombies, the imagined creatures functionally identical to humans but with no inner experience, do not exist as a separate possibility from us, because all of us already are what zombies were supposed to be. We function and talk about our experiences. We act as if there is something it is like to be us. The inner light we imagine glowing behind our reports is not actually there. Dennett wrote, with characteristic mischief, that he was committed to the view that we are all philosophical zombies, adding immediately that the line should not be quoted out of context. It usually was.
Where the case works, it works for these reasons.
The argument is effective because the Cartesian Theater is genuinely incoherent. If you ask where in the brain the conscious moment happens, you find no such place. Cognitive neuroscience has searched for decades and located nothing resembling a master observer. Vision goes to the visual cortex. The auditory cortex processes sound. The prefrontal cortex coordinates working memory. Nowhere is there a screening room with a viewer in it, and the question “who is watching?” leads into infinite regress. Dennett’s destruction of the homunculus model was a real philosophical achievement and remains the cleanest available demolition of a picture most people hold without noticing they hold it.
It works also because Benjamin Libet’s experiments from the 1970s and 1980s established that neural preparation for a decision precedes conscious awareness of having made it by roughly three hundred milliseconds. The conscious self arrives at its own decisions slightly after the brain has already begun acting. This finding does not prove illusionism, but it strongly suggests that consciousness is less central to cognition than introspection reports. Whatever conscious experience is, it cannot be the executive director it feels like being.
A further strength: cognitive science has produced extensive evidence that introspection is unreliable as a guide to what the brain is doing. Change blindness experiments, inattentional blindness, the failure to notice major scene transitions, the brain’s confabulation of unified perception from broken inputs, all of this points toward a system that fabricates narrative coherence rather than reporting it. Daniel Kahneman’s two-system model, much of social psychology, and large stretches of cognitive neuroscience converge on the conclusion that the conscious self is told a story rather than told the truth. Dennett built his philosophy on this evidence and built it carefully.
Illusionism earns additional power because it does what philosophy of mind so rarely accomplishes: it makes empirical predictions. The position predicts that no matter how carefully we examine the brain, we will find no special phenomenal properties, no unbridgeable explanatory gap, only the increasing detail of computational and neural processes. This is testable in principle, falsifiable in principle, and more honest than positions that retreat to unanalyzable mystery whenever the science gets close.
Last, the program takes seriously the strangeness of the universe physics describes. There is no good reason to assume that ordinary human experience accurately reports the deep structure of reality. We did not evolve to perceive truth. We evolved to survive long enough to reproduce, and our perceptual and introspective apparatus was tuned for that purpose. Dennett’s willingness to follow the implication wherever it led is the mark of a serious philosophical mind.
The case carries equally serious weaknesses, however, and the weaknesses cluster around a single point that has dogged illusionism since its first formulation.
The argument is not effective because illusion presupposes consciousness. An illusion is a false appearance, and a false appearance requires a perceiver to whom the false appearance appears. To say consciousness is an illusion is to say there is something it is like to be deceived about consciousness, which means there is something it is like to be the system Dennett claims has no something-it-is-like-to-be. The American theologian David Bentley Hart put the objection sharply in his 2017 essay “The Illusionist,” published in The New Atlantis: you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. The point is so obvious that Dennett’s defenders have spent thirty years trying to argue around it, and the arguments have grown increasingly baroque without ever quite touching the core of the objection.
It is also not effective because the redefinition trick is visible. When Dennett says consciousness is an illusion, he means consciousness as ordinarily described, with its qualia and its unified inner viewer. When he then says we are all functioning fine, that we have user illusions and multiple drafts and complex representations, he has reintroduced under different names exactly the phenomena he claimed to eliminate. Galen Strawson made this point with particular force, arguing that Dennett denies the existence of the data a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain, then offers a theory of something else and calls it a theory of consciousness. The maneuver is rhetorically powerful and philosophically empty.
A further weakness: the Cartesian Theater Dennett demolishes is a straw position most contemporary philosophers of mind do not hold. Phenomenal realists need not believe in a homunculus or a master viewer or a screening room in the head. They need only believe that there is something it is like to undergo experience, which is a far weaker claim than the picture Dennett spent his career attacking. By demolishing the strong version, he left the weak version intact while pretending he had demolished both. Thomas Nagel made the point in The New York Review of Books in March 2017, reviewing From Bacteria to Bach and Back: Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious, the immediate awareness of subjective experience, and offers in exchange a story about neural machinery that may all be true while leaving the original question untouched.
The position fails because it cannot account for the difference between systems that obviously experience something and systems that obviously do not. A thermostat represents the temperature. It models its environment. It adjusts behavior based on internal states. By Dennett’s lights, what makes the thermostat different from you is degree of complexity rather than presence or absence of inner life. If illusionism is right, your experience of pain is a more complex version of what the thermostat does when it registers cold. This consequence is so wildly at odds with what we know about pain that it functions as a reductio of the position rather than a confirmation of it. John Searle pressed this objection for decades, and Dennett never produced a response that satisfied anyone outside his immediate circle.
Last, illusionism cannot explain why the illusion exists in the first place. If consciousness is an evolutionary user-interface, why does it have phenomenal character at all? The question of why there is a felt redness rather than mere redness-detection is exactly the hard problem David Chalmers identified in 1995, and Dennett’s response was to deny that the question was real. Denying a question is not answering it. Other illusionists, including Frankish, have been more candid about this gap and acknowledged it as an outstanding problem for the program. Dennett tended to close the question by force of personality rather than by force of argument, and his defenders inherited the closure without inheriting the personality that made it almost convincing.
A specific paradox deserves separate treatment. Dennett’s commitment to philosophical zombies being identical with us is either trivially true or wildly false depending on which definition of zombie one uses. Under his own redefinition (a creature functionally indistinguishable from a human, with no extra non-physical properties), of course we are all zombies in his sense, because his sense is constructed precisely to include us. Under Chalmers’s original definition (a creature functionally identical but lacking phenomenal experience), the claim that we are all such creatures is the central thing in dispute, and Dennett’s announcement that we are all zombies amounts to declaring victory rather than achieving it. The wordplay is amusing. The argumentative work it pretends to do is fictional.
Where does this leave the project? Several genuine contributions survive the dismantling.
The Multiple Drafts model gave cognitive science a serviceable framework for thinking about how the brain produces unified-feeling experience from distributed parallel processing, even if the framework does not require illusionism as its metaphysics. The user illusion metaphor remains useful for describing how introspection misrepresents underlying neural activity, even if the metaphor cannot bear the metaphysical weight Dennett placed on it. His destruction of the Cartesian Theater counts as permanent philosophical progress, and any future theory of consciousness will need to accommodate Dennett’s critique whether it accepts his positive program or rejects it. His sustained engagement with cognitive science kept philosophy of mind close to the empirical work that ought to constrain it, and the field is healthier for the discipline he imposed.
What does not survive is the central claim. Consciousness is real in any standard sense of the word, since illusions themselves require conscious subjects. The hard problem cannot be dissolved by redescription, because redescription leaves the original problem intact under a new vocabulary. The experiential reds and greens and pains and hopes that fill our days are either real, in which case illusionism is false, or unreal, in which case the question of what is doing the reporting becomes urgent and unanswered.
Return now to the McGilchrist question with these results in hand. If illusionism fails at its center, the hard problem stands, and the panpsychist option becomes more attractive by a process of elimination, since materialist emergence and illusionist deflation have both encountered serious difficulty. This does not establish that McGilchrist is right. It establishes that his position belongs among the few options still on the table after the most ambitious materialist program of the late twentieth century has been worked through and found wanting at its center.
The deeper lesson concerns what philosophy can and cannot accomplish by argument alone. Dennett spent fifty years constructing what he called the obvious default theory of consciousness. He convinced a small circle of admirers, antagonized a larger circle of critics, and produced a body of work that will be read for a long time. None of it solved the hard problem. None of it could solve the hard problem, because the hard problem is what we are made of, and arguments about consciousness produced by conscious beings cannot get behind the consciousness that produces them. Dennett saw this difficulty and tried to argue it away. The honest verdict is that he failed, gracefully and intelligently, in a way that taught us a great deal about what success would require.
We owe him the courtesy of saying so out loud. He would have preferred direct refutation to polite agreement, and direct refutation is what the work deserves. The user illusion remains a useful metaphor and a serviceable instrument for cognitive science. As metaphysics it cannot hold. The inner light Dennett spent his career trying to extinguish is the one thing his arguments could not reach, because the arguments themselves arrived in consciousness, were read in consciousness, and were rejected or accepted in consciousness, and no maneuver of language can exit the medium in which the maneuver takes place.
We assume our own inwardness because we have nothing else to assume from. Dennett’s wager was that we could think our way past this assumption to a more austere description of reality. The wager was honorable, and it failed.
The argument from austerity has its own seductions, and we should name them. There is a certain kind of intellectual pride that takes pleasure in eliminating what others find precious, and Dennett was not immune to it. His writing carried a confident scorn for opponents that was less philosophical virtue than personal style, and the style propagated through his disciples in ways that have hurt rather than helped the program. A position that depends on the personality of its founder for its persuasive force is a position that has not yet earned the right to hold the field. Dennett’s work will outlive him. Whether illusionism survives without his voice carrying it remains to be seen, and the early evidence suggests not.
What we can take from him, what we should take from him, is the discipline of refusing to mystify. The hard problem is real, but real problems are not solved by reverence. Dennett’s failure was an honest failure pursued with rigor and wit, and the field needs more such failures and fewer of the soft evasions that pass for theory in the consciousness literature. If we end up disagreeing with everything he claimed, we still owe him the standard of work he set, and the willingness to argue all the way down rather than retreating into vocabulary that protects the question from being asked clearly. He asked it clearly. He answered it wrongly. Both halves of that judgment matter, and both halves are why he will be read after his answer is forgotten.
Part two of three. For the full sequence and reading guide, see The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle.
#argument #brain #consciousness #dennett #editorial #illusion #mcgilchrist #mystify #panpsychism #pathways #philosophy -
@famulimas Ligatures often cause more problems than they solve. As a single shape, the letters will resist tracking and increasingly stand out. There are ways of drawing that allow unruly terminals to be managed and still facilitate tracking. A contextual alternative for the f, with a reduced terminal, tracks like any other glyph and removes dozens of ligatures. Fewer axes and objects to manage, smaller font. Shown here LTR Principia https://letterror.com/principia #opentype #principia #officially
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From the Bretton Woods Project: Focus on #MegaProjects
"The [#WorldBank] ’s shift towards leveraging private sector finance for development (see Governance above), which has gained momentum since 2015, includes a particular emphasis on promoting ‘infrastructure as an asset class’, in order to crowd in institutional #investors. This policy initiative is highly dependent on mega-infrastructure projects – and, as noted by a letter sent by concerned economists in October 2018, currently lacks a framework for aligning such mega-projects with the Paris Climate Agreement or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
"This is of major concern, given that many planned ‘mega-corridors’ in developing regions are predicated on building a new generation of carbon-intensive infrastructure. In many cases, the Bank continues to support such projects that, while not ‘fossil fuel investments’ per se, are part of such carbon-intensive mega-corridors (see Observer Autumn 2018)."
Paper: Infrastructure Megaprojects as World Erasers: Cultural Survival in the Context of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
Author: Susanne Hofmann, November 8, 2024
"This article explores the meaning of infrastructural changes resulting from the Corredor Interoceánico del Istmo de Tehuantepec (CIIT) infrastructure project for the cultural survival
of Indigenous peoples resident in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region through the lens of ontological justice. The CIIT is being promoted as a multimodal road and rail transport corridor that will link the Gulf of Mexico with the Pacific Ocean, speed up global trade and benefit local residents. Based on interviews with affected residents in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, this research found that there is a strong desire for the continuity of existing, collective life
projects, Indigenous languages, cultural identities, beliefs, spirituality, established political and legal systems, and solidarity economy. De facto, the CIIT infrastructure project functions
as a technology of erasure of other lifeworlds, imposing integration into the One-World World (Escobar, 2016) and assimilation of Indigenous peoples and Afrodescendant communities.
Contemporary legal frameworks are not sufficient to guarantee alterlivability (Hamraie, 2020). Therefore, infrastructural megaprojects based on modern/colonial-extractivist-
developmentalist premises continue to threaten the futurity of Indigenous and
Afrodescendant life projects.[...]
"An increasing number of infrastructure corridors, such as the Corredor Interoceánico, are currently being built across the globe (e.g. the Belt and Road Initiative/China, Corredor Bioceánico/Paraguay; Corredor Interoceánico/Chile-Bolivia-Brazil; The Northern Transport Corridor in East Africa/Kenya-Ethiopia-South Sudan – just to name a few). These projects are directed at reducing ‘economic distance’ –i.e. speeding up the transport of goods across
geographical distance whilst lowering the cost (Hildyard, 2016: 20). In the process, infrastructure megacorridors restructure whole regions into purpose-specific zones for export, logistics, transit, housing development, resource extraction, manufacturing etc."Thereby, they fragment geographic space, generating a distinctive reterritorialisation of the space to develop sites of capitalist growth. Megacorridors connect what Lerner (2010) called 'sacrifice zones' – geographic areas where processes of natural resource extraction cause permanent environmental damage – to global circuits of capital. Across Latin America the social and environmental impacts of extractive megaprojects and resistance against them has
been widely documented (Aguilar Rivero & Echavarría Cango, 2019; Domínguez, 2015, 2017;
Domínguez & Corona, 2016; Ibarra García & Talledos Sánchez, 2016; Pérez Negrete, 2017; Rodríguez Wallenius, 2015). This article explores the meaning of infrastructural changes resulting from the CIIT project for the cultural survival of Indigenous peoples resident in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region through the lens of ontological justice."Original paper:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0094582X241294080?journalCode=lapaPDF version:
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120254/1/SHofmann_infrastructure_megaprojects_as_world_erasers_LSE_eprint.pdf#MegaInfrastructureProjects #CarbonIntensive #MegaCorridors #SDGs #CIIT #GulfOfMexico #SustainableDevelopmentGoals #DeGrowth #IMFLoanSharks #SacrificeZones #CulturalGenocide #CulturalErasism #EnvironmentalDegradation #EnvironmentalDamage #Capitalism #CorporateColonialism #IndigenousPeoples #CulturalSurvival #IsthmusOfTehuantepec #OntologicalJustice #Tehuantepec #ExtractiveIndustries #Oaxaca #Veracruz #CorredorInteroceánico #BeltAndRoadInitiative #CorredorBioceánico #NorthernTransportCorridor #China, #Paraguay; Corredor #Chile #Bolivia #Brazil #EastAfrica #Kenya #Ethiopia #SouthSudan #IndigenousCulture #AfrodescendantCulture
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Here we go... There's always a dark side when there's money involved... And when loans come due!
Dangers and Opportunities as #China’s #Loans to #Africa Come Due
Timothy Ditter | Monday, March 18, 2024
"Many African economies are facing a period of serious #economic distress with a very different character from the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. This time, the People’s Republic of China (#PRC) is a major player, and a dramatic decline in PRC lending has compounded economic shocks in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—just as the continent tries to recover from the pandemic. From 2001 to 2022, PRC financial institutions provided more than $170 billion in credit, loans, and grants to #AfricanNations, primarily to fund infrastructure projects tied to the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative. But new PRC loans to African governments plummeted from $28.4 billion in 2016 to less than $2 billion in 2020 and have continued to decline.
"African governments are awakening to the fact that opaque PRC lending practices and problematic #LoanTerms have rendered already fragile economies at an increased risk of default. However, this moment of peril also provides an opportunity for African economies to build resilience by diversifying their economic partnerships and seeking out lenders with better terms and different motivations.
"I and other CNA analysts from our China Studies and Strategy and Policy Analysis programs have just completed a series of studies on trends in the involvement of the PRC across major sectors in Africa in the context of global shocks. These include the military, mining, infrastructure, and financial sectors. We recently released the report PRC Lending in Africa: Impacts in a Time of Global Shocks. This component of the series focuses on PRC lending to nine African countries. In some cases, PRC loans helped African nations build or upgrade much-needed infrastructure. However, we also found a wide range of PRC lending practices that have contributed to the financial distress and increased the risk of default for African countries ravaged by the global shocks of the last few years. These practices include high interest rates, unfavorable terms, and uncompetitive contracting, most of which is hidden from the public in opaque contracts.
"And when African countries struggle to repay those loans, PRC lenders have taken inflexible positions that have delayed and hardened terms in renegotiations.
"China’s Unforgiving Lenders
"Today’s debt troubles have some of their roots in the loan agreements signed when the PRC was eager to plow its excess savings into foreign loans. Often these agreements made the loans due in just 10 years, compared to up to 35 years for loans from the World Bank. Interest rates are often higher, too. For example, the Export–Import Bank of China charged Djibouti a fully commercial rate for the loan to build the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway, higher than multinational lenders like the World Bank charge for loans. The PRC is #Djibouti’s largest creditor, holding approximately $1.4 billion in debt, equal to about 45 percent of the country’s GDP. In January 2023, Djibouti suspended debt payments to the PRC, making it the second African nation—after #Zambia—to do so.
"Often these agreements require loan recipients to give business to PRC contractors—without competitive bidding. The Export–Import Bank of China contract with #Kenya to finance the Standard Gauge Railway connecting the port city of Mombasa to the Great Rift Valley stipulated that most construction materials would be purchased from the PRC. The project ended up much more costly than anticipated, increasing from 220 billion to 327 billion Kenyan shillings over a period of three years. The Kenya Court of Appeal found that 'the project’s design was manipulated to inflate costs while construction and supervision charges were also overpriced.' Such agreements have helped make China’s construction firms dominant on the continent. A University of London study found that of the 32 major international contractor companies working major construction projects in Ethiopia in 2017, 80 percent were PRC contractors.
"Because PRC loan agreements tend to be opaque, the public is usually not even aware of these loan terms. In the case of the Standard Gauge Railway, the loan with the Export–Import Bank of China was signed in 2014, but details about the terms only became publicly known in 2022, preventing oversight from Kenyan politicians or the public. In some cases, those opaque agreements and #unethical business practices may contribute to corruption. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China funded a dam project in Angola while ignoring various potential red flags, including the involvement of the daughter of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos. Isabel dos Santos was awarded the $4.5 billion contract to construct the dam by her father’s government in 2015. As of 2023, Angola holds more PRC debt than any other country in Africa. And the #WorldBank listed Angola as one of seven African countries that it considered to be at high risk of debt distress in 2020.
"Our research found that when struggling African nations need to renegotiate their loans, PRC lenders have resisted standard #LoanForgiveness practices and have slowed debt negotiations. The PRC does not follow typical debt negotiation protocols used by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank. Instead, the PRC prefers bilateral negotiations, often behind closed doors, and strongly resists cutting the total principal owed on loans. Rather, PRC lenders favor extending repayment periods or holding infrastructure as collateral on loans. This has an impact on negotiations with other creditors as well, since lenders want concessions to be shared fairly. Recent negotiations to restructure #Chad’s debt with a committee of five bilateral creditors took nearly two years. World Bank and IMF officials claimed that lenders from China unnecessarily delayed the debt deal, an accusation that has come up in debt negotiations with other African countries.
"In the long run, however, this difficult period could have an upside for African nations. The reduction in PRC loans provides an opportunity for African countries to diversify, considering new economic partnerships on more favorable terms, with greater transparency and good governance. African nations can use multilateral negotiations to seek out lenders operating with different motivations, lenders that can help them build domestic economic strength and resilience for the future."
Source:
https://www.cna.org/our-media/indepth/2024/03/china-loans-to-africa -
gilles geirnaert wrote the following Beitrag Fri, 08 May 2026 13:48:10 +0200**Bombardements américains sur l'Iran – reprise de la guerre***
Sous couvert de « non-reprise de la guerre », Washington relance les bombardements contre l’Iran. Ripostes, escalade, cessez-le-feu rompu : la spirale guerrière est enclenchée. Une fuite en avant stratégique qui menace de faire tomber l’économie mondiale dans les abysses.
Par Georges Renard-Kuzmanovic
Le porte-parole des Gardiens de la Révolution déclare que les Etats-Unis ont violé le cessez-le-feu qui tenait depuis 30 jours suite à leurs attaques contre l'Iran, d'abord en s'attaquant à deux pétroliers iraniens et ensuite en bombardant plusieurs villes en Iran. Les Etats-Unis affirment qu'ils n'ont fait que riposter (massivement) à une attaque iranienne qui aurait touché trois destroyers américains (attaque confirmée par le USCENTCOM par biais de missiles, drones et vedettes rapides mais... sans que les destroyers n'aient subi de dégât ni de blessés).
De facto, les États-Unis, avec l’appui des Émirats arabes unis et de partenaires régionaux, viennent de lancer une nouvelle campagne de frappes massive contre l’Iran, visant plusieurs localités : Téhéran, Bandar Abbas, l’île de Qeshm, Minab (où furent tuées les 168 écolières iraniennes) ou encore Sirik. Officiellement, selon des responsables Républicains à Washington, il ne s’agirait pas d’une reprise de la guerre (sic!). Dans les faits, tout indique le contraire. Les frappes ont touché des zones sensibles, parfois civiles selon Téhéran, tandis que l’Iran a immédiatement riposté en ciblant des navires américains à proximité du détroit d’Ormuz et en lançant des missiles et drones vers les Émirats. Des explosions sont signalées à Abou Dhabi et Dubaï. Le cessez-le-feu de trente jours, déjà précaire, a cessé d’exister dans la nuit du 7 au 8 mai 1945 – étonnante manière de célébrer la fin de la deuxième guerre mondiale.
Cette séquence n’a rien d’un accident. Elle s’inscrit dans une dynamique désormais bien rodée dans l'administration Trump : frapper en pleine négociation, tout en maintenant l'illusion d’une désescalade. Cette dissonance n’est pas seulement rhétorique, elle est stratégique, en tout cas elle est perçue ainsi à Washington, car elle permettrait de conserver une marge diplomatique tout en modifiant le rapport de force sur le terrain. Rien n'est moins sûr. Mais à force de jouer sur les mots, la réalité finit par s’imposer ; il y a bien une reprise du conflit, même si personne ne souhaite officiellement l’assumer.
Une guerre qui ne dit pas son nom
Ce qui frappe dans cette nouvelle phase, c’est, à nouveau, l’écart entre le discours et les faits. Washington affirme répondre à des attaques iraniennes contre ses navires. Téhéran soutient que ces frappes sont une riposte à des bombardements américains sur ses infrastructures et ses zones civiles, et d'abord une attaque directe contre deux de ses pétroliers. Chacun revendique la légitimité de l’action défensive, mais les deux contribuent à une escalade qui devient de plus en plus difficile à contenir, d'autant que lors des fragiles négociations, les positions et demandes iraniennes et américaines sont très largement antinomiques.
Dans ce contexte, la notion même de « reprise de la guerre » devient secondaire. Ce qui importe, c’est la réalité opérationnelle, des frappes directes, des ripostes, des dégâts confirmés, et une extension progressive du théâtre des opérations. En l'état de nos connaissances, dans la nuit du 7 au 8 mai, nous ne savons pas pas l'envergure de l'attaque américaine. Compte tenu de la préparation militaire américaine durant ces trente derniers jours de cessez-le-feu, en particulier avec la concentration de forces spéciales, ce ne serait pas une surprise que d'apprendre qu'une opération au sol a été lancée au sol, par exemple sur l'île de Qeshm qui est un des verrou du détroit d'Ormuz. L’activation de défenses aériennes dans le ciel des Émirats et les frappes iraniennes contre des groupes kurdes à ses frontières témoignent d’une régionalisation du conflit qui dépasse largement le cadre initial.
L’impasse stratégique américaine
Au cœur de cette séquence se trouve une contradiction majeure du côté américain. Les États-Unis prétendent contenir l’escalade tout en renforçant leur présence militaire dans la région. Durant les trente jours de cessez-le-feu, loin d’un apaisement, Washington a accru ses capacités navales et aériennes dans le Golfe. Cette montée en puissance n’était pas neutre, elle préparait le terrain à une reprise des hostilités. Les Etats-Unis et Trump ne peuvent pas concéder une défaite, ni affaiblir le pétrodollar, ni perdre le contrôle géostratégique du Golfe persique et, en même temps, les Etats-Unis ne peuvent pas se permettre un enlisement de type Irak ou Afghanistan et encore moins l'effondrement de l'économie mondiale que cela entraînerait.
Cette ambiguïté traduit très exactement l'impasse stratégique dans laquelle s'enfoncent les États-Unis. L’administration américaine, sous l’impulsion de Donald Trump, oscille entre démonstration de force et absence de cap politique clair – mêmes les buts de guerre semblent chaotiques, hier encore, le 6 mai, Marco Rubio déclarait que l'objectif de la guerre est... de rendre le détroit d'Ormuz libre et ouvert à la circulation maritime sans entraves, c'est-à-dire sa condition avant l'attaque illégale et unilatérale des Etats-Unis et d'Israël contre l'Iran. Ni renversement du régime iranien, ni stabilisation durable de la région, ni contrôle du nucléaire iranien, ni sécurisation complète du détroit d’Ormuz ne semblent réellement atteignables à court terme. La stratégie se réduit alors à une succession d’actions tactiques, destinées à préserver la crédibilité immédiate, mais sans vision stratégique, ni réelle option de sortie de guerre la tête haute.
Cette instabilité est perçue jusque chez certains alliés traditionnels des Etats-Unis. Le cas saoudien est révélateur : irritée par l'attitude des Etats-Unis, le manque de communication, l'entraînement dans une guerre non souhaitée, les risques majeurs pour son économie, l’Arabie saoudite a restreint l’accès à certaines de ses bases. Ce geste, rapidement corrigé, rappelle que les partenaires régionaux ne sont pas alignés de manière automatique et qu’ils entendent peser sur les décisions américaines.
Pression ou fuite en avant ?
Mais qu'en est-il réellement ? S’agit-il d’une stratégie de pression maîtrisée et donc de teste ou d’une fuite en avant avec escalade et extension du conflit ? Les frappes en pleine négociation pourraient être interprétées comme un levier pour contraindre Téhéran, mais cela serait alors un vœux pieux considérant que les négociations ont été utilisées à deux reprises par la Maison Blanche pour lancer une guerre contre l'Iran et deux tentatives de changement de régime. Leurs répétitions et leur intensité suggèrent plutôt une dynamique d’escalade difficile à contrôler. Les jours qui suivent nous le diront.
Chaque acteur est enfermé dans une logique de maintient de crédibilité. L’Iran ne peut se permettre de ne pas répondre sans apparaître vulnérable. Les États-Unis ne peuvent laisser des attaques contre leurs forces sans réaction sans affaiblir leur posture. Cette mécanique produit une spirale où la désescalade devient politiquement coûteuse, voire impossible à court terme, et où la moindre erreur peut être l'étincelle qui embrase toute la région.
A l'heure où nous écrivons, Donald Trump déclare que ces attaques américaines seraient « une petite tape sur la main et que le cessez-le-feu est toujours en vigueur ». C'est une gestion chaotique de la guerre.
Dans ce cadre, affirmer qu’il ne s’agit pas d’une guerre permet de retarder certaines conséquences politiques et juridiques, en particulier aux Etats-Unis, où après 60 jours, Donald Trump est censé recevoir l'aval formel du Congrès des Etats-Unis. Mais cette fiction s’effrite à mesure que les événements s’enchaînent. À partir d’un certain seuil, la réalité opérationnelle prend le dessus sur la communication.
Une onde de choc économique mondiale
Le baril de dollar Brent, le « pétrole papier » est passé dans la soirée de 97$ à plus de 103$... Les conséquences de cette reprise des frappes dépassent largement le cadre militaire. Le Golfe persique est un point névralgique de l’économie mondiale, en particulier pour les flux énergétiques. Toute perturbation durable dans la zone du détroit d’Ormuz entraîne mécaniquement une hausse des prix du pétrole et du gaz, une augmentation des coûts logistiques et une instabilité accrue des marchés.
Or cette nouvelle escalade intervient dans un contexte déjà dégradé. La guerre en Iran a enclenché une crise systémique combinant tensions énergétiques, perturbations industrielles et hausse des coûts agricoles. Les engrais, les carburants et les produits dérivés du pétrole voient leurs prix augmenter, affectant directement la production et les chaînes d’approvisionnement mondiales.
L’imprévisibilité américaine constitue ici un facteur aggravant. Les marchés doivent intégrer des décisions politiques fluctuantes, des annonces contradictoires et des escalades ponctuelles. Cette volatilité rend toute projection économique incertaine et fragilise davantage un système déjà sous tension.
Une crise appelée à durer
Ce nouvel affrontement n'est pas un épisode ponctuel, mais le révélateur d'une crise durable ; le détroit d'Ormuz ne sera pas libre à la circulation avant longtemps. Même en cas d’accalmie, les destructions d’infrastructures, les désorganisations logistiques et les recompositions géopolitiques auront des effets prolongés. Le retour à la normale, s’il intervient, prendra des années. Voir ici le dernier article de Jacques Sapir sur les conséquences économiques de la guerre pour la France, en l'état du conflit.
Dans ce contexte, la reprise des bombardements apparaît comme une mauvaise nouvelle majeure. Elle confirme que les principaux acteurs sont incapables de sortir de l’impasse stratégique dans laquelle ils se sont enfermés, et elle rappelle une réalité fondamentale, à savoir qu'une guerre peut être niée politiquement, mais ses effets, eux, sont toujours bien réels pour les peuples.
#^https://www.fpop.media/bombardements-americains-sur-liran-reprise-de-la-guerre/
#iran #IranUSAwar #USA #WWIII -
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:stargif: 𝑨𝒎𝒊𝒓𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒊𝒏 𝑯𝒂𝒕𝒂𝒎𝒊: 𝒏𝒐 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒐 𝒖𝒏 𝒏𝒖́𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒐 :stargif:
Amirhossein Hatami tenía apenas 18 años cuando fue arrestado el 8 de enero de 2026 en Irán, en medio de las protestas antigubernamentales que surgieron a finales de 2025.
Según informes de organizaciones de derechos humanos como Amnistía Internacional y el Centro de Derechos Humanos en Irán, fue acusado de supuesta participación en un ataque a una base paramilitar de la milicia Basij, bajo cargos graves como “enemistad contra Dios” (moharebeh) y “corrosión sobre la tierra”.El arresto de Amirhossein fue el inicio de un proceso marcado por la celeridad y la arbitrariedad.
Fue juzgado por un tribunal revolucionario sin acceso pleno a defensa legal independiente, y los medios estatales difundieron confesiones que, según los observadores, pudieron haberse obtenido bajo coacción o tortura.
Su caso fue uno de los muchos que se procesaron rápidamente, en un contexto de represión intensa de la protesta ciudadana.El 2 de abril de 2026, Amirhossein fue ejecutado por ahorcamiento.
El proceso judicial fue rápido, a puerta cerrada, y careció de garantías mínimas: sin defensa independiente, sin tiempo para apelaciones y con un tribunal revolucionario que priorizó la rapidez y el efecto disuasorio sobre la justicia.
La ejecución se llevó a cabo en la prisión, con testigos limitados y bajo un estricto control de las autoridades, en un intento evidente de que su historia no se hiciera pública.Aunque la ejecución tuvo cobertura internacional limitada, organizaciones de derechos humanos calificaron el proceso como arbitrario, denunciando que se llevaron a cabo ejecuciones sin las garantías de un juicio justo.
Este caso se enmarca en una ola más amplia de represión que incluyó detenciones masivas, torturas y ejecuciones de manifestantes jóvenes durante las protestas de 2025-2026.Amirhossein no fue solo un número.
Fue un joven que perdió su vida en circunstancias injustas, y recordar su historia ayuda a poner rostro y contexto a una tragedia que podría pasar desapercibida entre cifras.
Su caso evidencia cómo el sistema judicial se puede utilizar como herramienta de control y miedo, y cómo la juventud puede ser el blanco de represiones políticas extremas.▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#derechoshumanos #iran #represionpolitica #juventud #memoria #justicia #ecosdelpasado
-
:stargif: 𝑨𝒎𝒊𝒓𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒊𝒏 𝑯𝒂𝒕𝒂𝒎𝒊: 𝒏𝒐 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒐 𝒖𝒏 𝒏𝒖́𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒐 :stargif:
Amirhossein Hatami tenía apenas 18 años cuando fue arrestado el 8 de enero de 2026 en Irán, en medio de las protestas antigubernamentales que surgieron a finales de 2025.
Según informes de organizaciones de derechos humanos como Amnistía Internacional y el Centro de Derechos Humanos en Irán, fue acusado de supuesta participación en un ataque a una base paramilitar de la milicia Basij, bajo cargos graves como “enemistad contra Dios” (moharebeh) y “corrosión sobre la tierra”.El arresto de Amirhossein fue el inicio de un proceso marcado por la celeridad y la arbitrariedad.
Fue juzgado por un tribunal revolucionario sin acceso pleno a defensa legal independiente, y los medios estatales difundieron confesiones que, según los observadores, pudieron haberse obtenido bajo coacción o tortura.
Su caso fue uno de los muchos que se procesaron rápidamente, en un contexto de represión intensa de la protesta ciudadana.El 2 de abril de 2026, Amirhossein fue ejecutado por ahorcamiento.
El proceso judicial fue rápido, a puerta cerrada, y careció de garantías mínimas: sin defensa independiente, sin tiempo para apelaciones y con un tribunal revolucionario que priorizó la rapidez y el efecto disuasorio sobre la justicia.
La ejecución se llevó a cabo en la prisión, con testigos limitados y bajo un estricto control de las autoridades, en un intento evidente de que su historia no se hiciera pública.Aunque la ejecución tuvo cobertura internacional limitada, organizaciones de derechos humanos calificaron el proceso como arbitrario, denunciando que se llevaron a cabo ejecuciones sin las garantías de un juicio justo.
Este caso se enmarca en una ola más amplia de represión que incluyó detenciones masivas, torturas y ejecuciones de manifestantes jóvenes durante las protestas de 2025-2026.Amirhossein no fue solo un número.
Fue un joven que perdió su vida en circunstancias injustas, y recordar su historia ayuda a poner rostro y contexto a una tragedia que podría pasar desapercibida entre cifras.
Su caso evidencia cómo el sistema judicial se puede utilizar como herramienta de control y miedo, y cómo la juventud puede ser el blanco de represiones políticas extremas.▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#derechoshumanos #iran #represionpolitica #juventud #memoria #justicia #ecosdelpasado
-
:stargif: 𝑨𝒎𝒊𝒓𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒊𝒏 𝑯𝒂𝒕𝒂𝒎𝒊: 𝒏𝒐 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒐 𝒖𝒏 𝒏𝒖́𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒐 :stargif:
Amirhossein Hatami tenía apenas 18 años cuando fue arrestado el 8 de enero de 2026 en Irán, en medio de las protestas antigubernamentales que surgieron a finales de 2025.
Según informes de organizaciones de derechos humanos como Amnistía Internacional y el Centro de Derechos Humanos en Irán, fue acusado de supuesta participación en un ataque a una base paramilitar de la milicia Basij, bajo cargos graves como “enemistad contra Dios” (moharebeh) y “corrosión sobre la tierra”.El arresto de Amirhossein fue el inicio de un proceso marcado por la celeridad y la arbitrariedad.
Fue juzgado por un tribunal revolucionario sin acceso pleno a defensa legal independiente, y los medios estatales difundieron confesiones que, según los observadores, pudieron haberse obtenido bajo coacción o tortura.
Su caso fue uno de los muchos que se procesaron rápidamente, en un contexto de represión intensa de la protesta ciudadana.El 2 de abril de 2026, Amirhossein fue ejecutado por ahorcamiento.
El proceso judicial fue rápido, a puerta cerrada, y careció de garantías mínimas: sin defensa independiente, sin tiempo para apelaciones y con un tribunal revolucionario que priorizó la rapidez y el efecto disuasorio sobre la justicia.
La ejecución se llevó a cabo en la prisión, con testigos limitados y bajo un estricto control de las autoridades, en un intento evidente de que su historia no se hiciera pública.Aunque la ejecución tuvo cobertura internacional limitada, organizaciones de derechos humanos calificaron el proceso como arbitrario, denunciando que se llevaron a cabo ejecuciones sin las garantías de un juicio justo.
Este caso se enmarca en una ola más amplia de represión que incluyó detenciones masivas, torturas y ejecuciones de manifestantes jóvenes durante las protestas de 2025-2026.Amirhossein no fue solo un número.
Fue un joven que perdió su vida en circunstancias injustas, y recordar su historia ayuda a poner rostro y contexto a una tragedia que podría pasar desapercibida entre cifras.
Su caso evidencia cómo el sistema judicial se puede utilizar como herramienta de control y miedo, y cómo la juventud puede ser el blanco de represiones políticas extremas.▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#derechoshumanos #iran #represionpolitica #juventud #memoria #justicia #ecosdelpasado
