#donnelstern — Public Fediverse posts

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.

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.

Expanding the very possibilities of being

What does it mean to ‘work through’? In psychoanalytical theory working through is often opposed to acting out. As Mari Ruti summarises in Reinventing the Soul loc 1915:

While repetition entails the subject’s tendency to act out its past traumas in painful and self-undermining ways, interpretation provides the possibility for the kind of insight that potentially dissolves trauma; while acting-out merely displaces psychic tensions along an endless chain of repetition, working-through changes the internal conditions that gave rise to such tensions to begin with, thereby ending the cycle of repetition.

To work through means to bring about a change. There is not merely a different outcome but a change in the psychic organisation which produces these outcomes. From the Lacanian literature I’ve developed the habit of talking about this in terms of ‘libidinal economy’: a change in organisation is essentially a change in the subject’s relationship to their own desire and enjoyment. The value in the Lacanian approach is that it firmly moves us beyond a focus on insight, as Bruce Fink conveys in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytical Technique loc 2315:

Lacan’s approach to interpretation aims at something beyond inciting the analysand to bring forth ever more new meanings, although that is obviously important at the beginning of an analysis; later on, the emphasis goes on bringing about a change in “subjective position,” a change in the way the analysand gets enjoyment in life, a change that puts an end to the attempt to endlessly try to explain what is ultimately unexplainable.

New meanings might be part of how you get here. But the impulse towards meaning can itself become a neurotic fixation: if only I can find the truth about myself lurking over the horizon my wounds will finally be healed. The Lacanians in contrast argue that those wounds are constitutive, with ‘healing’ being a matter of finding sustainable forms of enjoyment in spite of what is broken and incomplete. The search for meaning can become another melancholy investment through which the subject displaces the reality of their own experience as this person, in this place, constituted in this way. The working through comes from confronting these melancholy investments, traversing the fantasy in order to find some way of going on which is sufficiently satisfying in spite of it all.

I’ve recently discovered Donnel B. Stern’s approach to psychoanalysis which draws on Charles Taylor to theorise the structure of the psyche and the nature of change. It rests essentially on articulation, the formulation in a medium of something which has not yet been expressed, as a link between the unconscious and the conscious. It’s the point of connection between the two domains, reciprocally organising what is found within each through how the subject engages in it. It’s yet another example of something I thought I was going to have to spend months or years cobbling together, only to discover someone else has already done it rather effectively. This leaves him with a rather distinctive sense of working through described on loc 3075 of The Infinity of the Unsaid:

When something new is manifested in the clinical situation, it is not only the capacity for thought and feeling that is affected, however significant we all agree the growth of the mind is in our work. We are, in addition to that, expanding the very possibilities of being. We are affecting what life can become, and we are doing so not only for the present moment but also for the moments that have yet to arrive; and not only for ourselves but also for many others we have not yet encountered.

I find in this a much more optimistic view of change, which I think can be read alongside Christopher Bollas and the transformational object. It should be stressed that Stern is quite clear there is not an infinite mutability… in a sense he conceives of this elaboration as a path dependent process, in which what can be elaborated at one moment is constrained by the psychic and social context in which the subject finds themselves. It nonetheless presents the ‘possibilities of being’ as what is at stake in working through. It means a growth in the mind in which “A greater and greater proportion of unformulated experience can be accommodated within the self: articulated or realized, accepted and used” (loc 3033).

I wonder if we could see a change in libidinal economy in terms of a more foundational change in the psyche. What Stern points to is a growing capaciousness in which more or the subject’s experience can be identified, accommodated and elaborated upon. This suggests to me how articulation can be extraordinarily powerful, if it has a lived connection to inner experience. It means that something unformulated comes to be formulated, which changes the subject in a way that leaves them as the person who can accommodate this element of themselves. I’m conscious though that this is obviously at odds with Fink’s conception of clinical practice and I’m not sure how to resolve this tension between different psychoanalytical theorists I’m drawn to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvNyKfGcdNw