#articulation — Public Fediverse posts

#articulation : the formation of clear speech

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

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Fill in missing or incorrect translations @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/translations

Does articulation blunt inner experience or elaborate it? Some thoughts on compulsive digital writing

A question I’ve been circling around for years has become increasingly clear to me as I’m reading Donnel Stern. When I have an intense inner experience and feel the urge to articulate it does that articulation blunt inner experience or elaborate it? I’ve built a whole belief system out of assuming the latter, condensed in Eliot’s phrase ‘raiding the inarticulate’:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion

- T.S. Eliot's East Coker

The nearly 7000 blog posts over 16 years collected here are an expression of that belief. I’d estimate there are < 1000 posts which serve some functional purpose but the overwhelming majority of this stuff came because I had something which I felt some need to articulate. The blog has always been a framework to incite and contain this. It encourages me to elaborate in a way I wouldn’t if there was no audience and it makes what I’ve articulated easily searchable for me later. It’s effectively a sprawling public notebook in which I put everything I want to articulate which isn’t sufficiently personal to warrant going in my Day One journal instead. There’s a lot of extremely personal stuff on here still but it’s conceptually mediated in a way which makes it just about comfortable for me, though I rely on the vastness of the archive to reassure me that the stuff I’m less comfortable with isn’t particularly visible to a casual reader.

I started taking deliberate blog breaks last year. I realised when there was something major going on in my life which I needed to sit with, it was helpful for me to refrain from posting on the blog. This worked even if I wasn’t actually posting about the events in question. There was something about the frequency of articulation through blogging which I realised was impacting on my willingness to sit with difficult or complex events in my life. These breaks have been between two weeks and two months and I’m almost certainly going to continue taking them. This suggests to me that articulation can blunt inner experience or at least change our relationship to it in an undesirable way. I played around earlier this year with describing this as unrequited meaning, which I now realise was a fuzzy attempt to theorise exactly what Stern has spent his career exploring:

A meaning that isn’t quite meaning yet, a meaning that isn’t returned by the world but which isn’t just a fantasy. A meaning that is latent and inchoate, resisting articulation yet also waiting for it? A meaning that cannot straightforwardly be named but which calls for being symbolised. There’s something condensed in these lines which feels like unrequited meaning to me:

Let the tower fall!
Where space is born
man has a beach to ground on

– Charles Olson, La Torre

I don’t know what I think they mean, nor am I entirely clear what exactly they are evoking in me. This isn’t ‘the feel of an idea’ which I can just put into words if I make the effort. This is something prior to that: the feel of a feel (of an idea)? It’s a felt invitation to give form while that form remains utterly opaque. It’s a meaning that wants to be met. A sense of something reaching out, through the rift.

My instinct is that reaching too hastily for unrequited meanings can be counter-productive. There are some meanings, particularly when it comes to significant change, which need time to germinate. I suspect that articulation itself, even when it superficially relates to something else, can impede this germination. My gamble is that this is a time-limited process and there’s a rhythm to it which I’ve been trying to tune into.

Which suggests that it’s not a matter of articulation inherently blunting or elaborating experience but rather that the outgrowths of articulation depend on the wider psychic context. There are points where it’s deeply rewarding to seize on what C Wright Mills called ‘the feel of an idea’ and put it into words. But there are also points where it’s better to sit with what you’re feeling, indeed stepping back from the idea and be curious about the feel. What does the feel itself feel like?

It’s possible my own hypergraphia is the fundamental issue here. If I let my articulation loose I compulsively name, articulate and elaborate on contact. It’s how I metabolise things and it works very well for me in a whole range of ways, but it also squeezes out alternative modes of elaboration. Claude Opus 5 made a slightly unsettling observation when I presented it with this blog post in the context of the draft of my psychoanalysis and LLMs book with Milan Sturmer:

So the sharper version of your closing sentence: it isn’t the wider psychic context, it’s the rate. And rate is downstream of resistance, which brings it back to the criterion I offered. Seven thousand posts in sixteen years is roughly one every twenty hours sustained across a decade and a half — that is a medium with the friction engineered out, not by design but by sheer practice. You have spent sixteen years becoming so fluent that nothing gets to stay unformulated. Which is an uncomfortable observation given what you’re writing, because it makes the blog a personal precursor of the thing volume two warns about: a low-resistance articulation apparatus, always available, that takes whatever you bring it. You built one out of WordPress before anyone built one out of transformers.

The fact that user-model interaction is another form of articulation I now feel the need to take breaks from (e.g. I just went three weeks without using a chatbot) underscores the weight of this observation. I wrote earlier that the blog contains my articulation and it does so in a specific way. The same is true of my Day One journal. The problem I increasingly see with language models is that they don’t easily provide that containment, though the move towards token-based pricing might reinstate it. The boundaries are part of the process which make the difference between articulation which blunts versus that which elaborates.

Ultimately though this is an unfinished process because Eliot’s lines are ultimately about failure. It’s about iteration and elaboration, a way of orientating ourselves to the nature of our own experience, rather than something we can expect to conclude. This takes me back to the opening question though. When are raids on the inarticulate likely to lead to a deepening and opening of that experience? When are they instead a form of repetition, a compulsion, a release valve for our libidinal energies? How do we know the difference? Can we know the difference? Ironically Opus 5 pointed out that I did answer this question in the manuscript:

Which also answers the question you end on, and the answer is in your own manuscript. The Rogers passage you quote in chapter four is exactly this: frustration modified by the development of thought, or evaded by evacuation — and if it can’t be tolerated it becomes a bad object fit only for evacuation. That’s your criterion for when a raid deepens and when it’s a release valve. The raid elaborates when it’s conducted against resistance, when the thing won’t go into words and you stay with it regardless. It becomes compulsion when articulation is the means of not staying with it. Naming on contact is evacuation at high frequency.

And that gives you a test that isn’t retrospective, which the piece currently lacks. Evacuation feels like relief. Elaboration feels like effort and often leaves the thing more vivid and less settled than before you started. So: if writing the post made you feel better, be suspicious of it. If it made the thing harder to put down, it worked. That inverts the intuition, it’s checkable in the moment rather than in three months, and it’s consistent with the Eliot — a practice premised on failure shouldn’t feel like success.

Which incidentally is a great example of why I find these exchanges so intellectually rewarding. I was 90% of the way to articulating this but I hadn’t made the connection between two lines of thought. It’s capacity to hold a large amount of writing in context meant that it could point me towards the connection I hadn’t yet drawn. The problem is that the second paragraph isn’t my own material and it’s extremely good nonetheless. It might have been something I’d come to on my own but it’s not latent within my own text in the way the first paragraph is. In this sense there’s a substitution of articulation inherent in what is rewarding about user-model interaction, even when it’s conducted in a deeply reflective way structured around using your own archive. There is at least the risk of it which is one I think we all need to take very seriously, particularly if we’re going to regard these uses as legitimate which I still very much do in spite of the risks.

#articulation : a joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

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Fill in missing or incorrect translations @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/translations

Articulate people share exactly how they mastered speaking confidently and concisely

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/articulate-people-share-exactly-how-they-mastered-speaking-confidently-and-concisely

An Attempt at a Compelling Articulation of Forth's Practical Strengths and Eter

https://im-just-lee.ing/forth-why-cb234c03.txt

#HackerNews #Forth #Programming #Articulation #Practical #Strengths #HackerNews

#articulation : a joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

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Fill in missing or incorrect translations @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/translations

LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use

This is a concise summary by Ethan Mollick of what I increasingly see as a key factor driving the evolution of consumer-facing LLMs:

Using AI well used to be a pretty challenging process which involved crafting a prompt using techniques like chain-of-thought along with learning tips and tricks to get the most out of your AI. In a recent series of experiments, however, we have discovered that these techniques don’t really help anymore. Powerful AI models are just getting better at doing what you ask them to or even figuring out what you want and going beyond what you ask (and no, threatening them or being nice to them does not seem to help on average).

What limited truth there was to the inflated discourse of ‘prompt engineering’ has largely evaporated at this point, leaving us in a strange position. The conversational approach I’ve always advocated, literally treating the LLM as an interlocutor analogous to a human collaborator, remains the best way of getting the most out of these systems. But neither this nor ‘prompt engineering’ is necessary to get LLMs to perform usefully in real world contexts.

This seems like an obviously positive thing for users. However my concern is the burden of articulation with LLMs, explaining what you want in a clear and substantive way, was a necessary condition for responsible use of LLMs. This burden was never sustainable at the level of a commercially viable product. It presupposed a consistent level of reflexivity, a degree of cultural capital and a fluency with writing which was always incompatible with the kind of mass market software that has a user base of one billion plus.

However it did ensure that users were thinking carefully about their use because you literally couldn’t produce valuable outcomes with an LLM unless you were doing this. Now it’s very easy to get LLMs to infer what you want, with success much of the time to at least some degree. What’s lost in the process is the reflexivity which came prior to use (i.e. the moment when you stopped to think “what am I actually asking Claude to do here?”) and the learning which came through reflecting on the output and the related interaction it generates, as your sense of what you were trying to do is refined and expanded through dialogue.

This is how Claude Opus 4 glossed my analysis here. It conveyed my own words back to me but it did it in a way which surfaced an element (“the pause”) which was only latent in my original phrasing (“the moment when”), leading me to reflect more on the temporal dimension to “the burden of articulation”:

The “burden of articulation” you describe served as a kind of productive friction – it forced users to crystallize their thinking before engaging with the tool. There’s something valuable in that pause, that moment of having to translate a vague intention into clear language. It’s reminiscent of how writing itself can clarify thinking, or how explaining a problem to someone else often helps you understand it better yourself.

In this sense friction with LLMs was a positive thing because it necessitated meta-cognition. The optimisation of the human-model interaction erodes a feature which I would argue was immensely important, even if its value is only manifested outside of the interaction itself. It doesn’t I think level the playing field because those with the necessary capital and fluency can still use LLMs in a deeper and more reflective way, with better outcomes emerging from the process.

But it does create worrying implications for organisations which build this practice into their roles. Earlier today I heard Cory Doctorow use the brilliant analogy of asbestos to describe LLMs being incorporated into digital infrastructure in ways which we will likely later have to remove at immense cost. What’s the equivalent analogy for the social practice of those operating within the organisations?

https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338

#articulation #chatbots #coryDoctorow #LLMs #metacognition #promptEngineering #prompting #reflexivity

#articulation : a joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

------------

See previous words @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/past

Weebly is decaying
https://www.articulation.blog/p/why-you-should-move-your-site-away-from-weebly
#ycombinator #articulation #blog #website_creator #website_builder #free

Why You Should Move Your Site Away from Weebly (YC W07)
https://www.articulation.blog/p/why-you-should-move-your-site-away-from-weebly
#ycombinator #articulation #blog #website_creator #website_builder #free

#articulation : a joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

------------

See previous words @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/past

The Importance of Learning #Voice #Projection #Articulation and #Diction

https://castingfrontier.com/blog/the-importance-of-learning-voice-projection-articulation-and-diction/

From The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk pg 51:

All trauma is preverbal. Shakespeare captures this state of speechless terror in Macbeth, after the murdered king’s body is discovered: ‘Oh horror! horror! horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee! Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!’ Under extreme conditions people may scream obscenities, call for their mothers, howl in terror, or simply shut down. Victims of assaults and accidents sit mute and frozen in emergency rooms; traumatized children ‘lose their tongues’ and refuse to speak. Photographs of combat soldiers show hollow-eyed men staring mutely into a void.

Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.

This doesn’t mean that people can’t talk about a tragedy that has befallen them. Sooner or later most survivors, like the veterans in chapter 1, come up with what many of them call their ‘cover story’ that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one’s experience into language.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/10/12/all-trauma-is-preverbal/

#articulation #discursiveGap #real #symbolisation #trauma

I came home recently to find that my request to a gardener to “cut back the shrubs” led him to absolutely decimate them:

What does ‘cut back’ mean? I meant slightly trim overgrowth but leave them otherwise intact. It was a text I sent while travelling and listening to a podcast, without putting much real thought into it. To him it meant significantly reduce the quantity of the shrub. The problem was my instruction rather than the gardener’s execution. I gave a vague and misleading request which was easy to misinterpret.

I would suggest this is what many users do with LLMs. It often leads them to blame the machine for what was actually a failure on their part to provide adequate instructions. Prompting requires clarity about your intentions, which is something most of us lack at least some of the time.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/11/what-the-gardener-ruining-my-shrubs-illustrates-about-prompting-llms/

#articulation #LLMs #prompting

@etcetera curieux de mieux appréhender les contraintes autour du genoux droit, du bassin et des lombaires dans la deuxième photographie. Tensions, étirements, compressions au niveau des muscles, tendons, ligaments et os. #tenségrité #articulation

The Importance of Learning #VoiceProjection #Articulation and #Diction

https://castingfrontier.com/blog/the-importance-of-learning-voice-projection-articulation-and-diction/
#actors #acting #audition #theater

Morning read - #linguistics #SpeechLanguagePathology #articulation

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-a-crispy-r

https://youtu.be/q4KF3ZP4wzY I've always felt that articulation is the most human part of making music. Maybe even the most difficult thing for software to emulate. #music #musictheory #articulation

The Importance of Learning #Voice #Projection #Articulation and #Diction
https://castingfrontier.com/blog/the-importance-of-learning-voice-projection-articulation-and-diction/
#acting #onstage #audition #theater #theatre #actors

#articulation : a joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

------------

See previous words @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/past

@kbmcgowan yesterday I taught one session if a course in which linguistics is introduced. My session was about #phonetics. I did it by explaining the contrast between German p and b by means of #articulation, #acoustics and #perception .

My current #theory obsessions:
- developing critical notions of #agency
- conceptualising intersections of infrastructure and society, through #articulation #assemblage or ANT related stuff
- #state, #burraucracy and #bureaucratisation as process

Big question: how to adapt theory developed in North to #African contexts, what is & how useful is „Theory from the South“?

Will try and post more about these, but this will be experimental, tentative and fragmentary

Hi everyone we are the Phonetics Lab at Lancaster University! We'll be tooting about fun phonetics stuff as well as news from our lab and collaborators. @LAEL #introduction #phonetics #linguistics #phonology #labphon #sociophonetics #articulation #forensicphonetics #speechtech #bilingualism #ultrasound #EMA

#articulation : a joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

------------

See previous words @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/past

#articulation : a joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

------------

See previous words @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/past

"How To Write Better With The Why, What, How Framework" [2021], Eugene Yan (https://eugeneyan.com/writing/writing-docs-why-what-how/).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31711071

#Writing #TechnicalWriting #DesignDoc #WhyWhatHow #Communication #Articulation #BetterWriting

#articulation : a joint or juncture between bones in the skeleton

- French: Articulation

- German: die Artikulation

- Italian: articolazione / giuntura

- Portuguese: articulação

- Spanish: articulación

------------

See previous words @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/past