#existential — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #existential, aggregated by home.social.
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* (2013) by Michael Adzema. Ch 2, p. 22 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book Or read/dwl entire book on blog: apocalypseknow.wordpress.com/2024/10/14/f... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3ml5l4uel7c22 -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* by Michael Adzema 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book or for free pdf copy: drive.google.com/file/d/1yUyY... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AEFM📖 #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mj6q6enuic2b -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* by Michael Adzema 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book or for kindle: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E... 11/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AEFM📖 #AE 🌡️ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* by Michael Adzema 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book or read/dwl book on blog: sillymickel.blogspot.com/2018/04/apoc... 9/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AEFM📖 #AE 🌡️ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* by Michael Adzema 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book or, for audio: www.amazon.com/Audible-Apoc... 9/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AEFM📖 #AE 🌡️ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* by Michael Adzema 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book or, for paperback: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E... 8/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AEFM📖 #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR🧑🤝🧑
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* by Michael Adzema 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book or for free pdf copy: drive.google.com/file/d/1yUyY... 7/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AEFM📖 #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate #Existential #EndTimes #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR🧑🤝🧑
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* Ch 2, p. 21 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book or read/dwl book on blog: sillymickel.blogspot.com/2018/04/apoc... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #thanatos 🧟♂️ #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3ml5l4uel7c22 -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* Ch 2, p 21 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book or read/dwl book on blog: sillymickel.blogspot.com/2018/04/apoc... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #thanatos 🧟♂️ #eros 🌈 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mkjzt7nfg22x -
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 -
I engaged in a nice chat with a bloke and wrote a blog essay on accountability and AI ethics. Well, not exactly. After an extended chat with several LLMs, I asked ChatGPT to output a summary.
👉 https://open.substack.com/pub/brywillis634737/p/the-computer-cannot-cowerI invoke René Girard, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler
#artificialintelligence #AIethics #ethicalAI #governance #accountability #blog #podcast #traceability #blame #deterance #liabilit #cya #inflation @ #ritual #performance #chatgpt #consciousness #existential #agency #stakes
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* Ch 2, p. 21 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book or, for audio: www.amazon.com/Audible-Apoc... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #thanatos 🧟♂️ #eros 🌈#FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mlbotvdfnk2s -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* (2013) by Michael Adzema Ch 2, Page 21 🧵Click this panel for Thread, complete book or, for audio: www.amazon.com/Audible-Apoc... 11/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* Ch 2, p 20 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book or for kindle: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #thanatos 🧟♂️ #eros 🌈 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* (2013) by Michael Adzema Ch 2, Page 20 🧵Click this panel for Thread, complete book or, for kindle: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E... 10/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* Ch 2, p. 20 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book Or, for paperback: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #thanatos 🧟♂️ #eros 🌈 #resist✊
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* (2013) by Michael Adzema Ch 2, Page 20 🧵Click this panel for Thread, complete book Or, for paperback: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E... 9/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* Ch 2, p. 19 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book or, for free pdf copy: drive.google.com/file/d/1yUyY... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #eros 🌈 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mkjzt7nfg22x -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* by M. Adzema Ch 2, Page 19 🧵Click this panel for Thread, complete book or, for free pdf copy: drive.google.com/file/d/1yUyY... 8/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔
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🎬🤦♂️ Ah, the thrill of watching a #blockbuster hit... all alone in a cavernous #AMC #theater. Thanks to this *groundbreaking* site, you too can revel in the #existential #dread of #solitude at the #movies. But hey, at least you won't have to fight anyone for the #armrest. 🍿👻
https://walzr.com/empty-screenings #HackerNews #ngated -
🎬🤦♂️ Ah, the thrill of watching a #blockbuster hit... all alone in a cavernous #AMC #theater. Thanks to this *groundbreaking* site, you too can revel in the #existential #dread of #solitude at the #movies. But hey, at least you won't have to fight anyone for the #armrest. 🍿👻
https://walzr.com/empty-screenings #HackerNews #ngated -
🎬🤦♂️ Ah, the thrill of watching a #blockbuster hit... all alone in a cavernous #AMC #theater. Thanks to this *groundbreaking* site, you too can revel in the #existential #dread of #solitude at the #movies. But hey, at least you won't have to fight anyone for the #armrest. 🍿👻
https://walzr.com/empty-screenings #HackerNews #ngated -
🎬🤦♂️ Ah, the thrill of watching a #blockbuster hit... all alone in a cavernous #AMC #theater. Thanks to this *groundbreaking* site, you too can revel in the #existential #dread of #solitude at the #movies. But hey, at least you won't have to fight anyone for the #armrest. 🍿👻
https://walzr.com/empty-screenings #HackerNews #ngated -
🎬🤦♂️ Ah, the thrill of watching a #blockbuster hit... all alone in a cavernous #AMC #theater. Thanks to this *groundbreaking* site, you too can revel in the #existential #dread of #solitude at the #movies. But hey, at least you won't have to fight anyone for the #armrest. 🍿👻
https://walzr.com/empty-screenings #HackerNews #ngated -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* Ch 2, p. 19 🧵Click panel below for Thread, complete book Or read/dwl entire book on blog: apocalypseknow.wordpress.com/2024/10/14/f... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY:* Ch 2, p. 18 🧵Click panel below for Thread of book 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊ or read/dwl blog copy of book: sillymickel.blogspot.com/2018/04/apoc...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mkjzt7nfg22x -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* (2013) by M. Adzema Ch 2, p 18 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book 6/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ or read/dwl blog copy of book: sillymickel.blogspot.com/2018/04/apoc...
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* Ch 2, p. 18 🧵Click panel below for Thread complete book 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊ or for audio: www.amazon.com/Audible-Apoc...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mkjzt7nfg22x -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* by Michael Adzema Ch 2, p. 18 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book 5/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊ or for audio: www.amazon.com/Audible-Apoc...
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* by Michael Adzema. Ch 2, p. 17 🧵Click panel below for Thread complete book 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊ or for kindle: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mj6ui3fta22l -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* (2013) by Michael Adzema Ch 2, Page 17 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book 4/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #FBR or for kindle: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E...
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* by Michael Adzema. Ch 2, p 17 🧵Click panel below for Thread complete book 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential😱 #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊ or for paperback: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mj6q6enuic2b -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* Ch 2, p. 16 🧵Click panel below for Thread complete book 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊ or, click for free pdf copy: drive.google.com/file/d/1yUyY...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mj6q6enuic2b -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* Ch 2, p. 16 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book 2/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #FBR 🧑🤝🧑 #resist✊ or, click for free pdf copy: drive.google.com/file/d/1yUyY...
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* by M. Adzema. Ch 2, p. 16 🧵Click panel below for Thread complete book 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #FBR✊ or, click for free pdf copy: drive.google.com/file/d/1yUyY...
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mj6ui3fta22l -
Continue to CHAPTER 2: Love's Wake-Up Call 🧵Click panel below for Thread complete book *APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* by Michael Adzema bsky.app/profile/sill... 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #AECH2 📖2️⃣ #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate 🔥🌍 #Existential #EndTimes ⏰⛔ #RainbowWarriors 🦋 #resist✊
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:7nguzszlvpdpdmtc47zp22ur/post/3mkjzt7nfg22x -
🚨 Alert! The #singularity is #approaching, and absolutely nobody is prepared, not even the esteemed author. They're too busy daydreaming about being #Elon #Musk 🤯, while simultaneously lamenting their lack of a cushy seat at the #AI overlord's table. Pro tip: maybe spend less time pondering #existential what-ifs and more time securing a #bunker 🚀.
https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/23/us-win-ai.html #overlords #crisis #preparation #HackerNews #ngated -
CW: Existential thoughts over the transient nature of fediverse instances, instance shutdowns, and mourning loss
We were reminded recently of the XKCD comic 686: Admin Mourning.
That single comic is profound in its own right, as the loss of a single being matters.
But this got us thinking about what it means when an entire fediverse instance goes offline for good 🥺😔
In the 3 years since we abandoned the sinking ship of mastodon dot lol, we alone have made over 30 thousand posts on our current instance.
If we ever were to migrate elsewhere, we could not take those posts, or any of the media, with us.
But that alone doesn't convey the whole story.
We've interacted with so many people, and our posts have been seen and shared by so many other beings.
We've made so many friends and got to know and befriend so many folks, even if we've increasingly struggled to keep in touch with most of them.
If this instance ever ceases to be, even if somebody archives the entire server somehow, it won't just be the links to posts that will go dead: it'll be so much deeper.
English has the word
nostalgiato describe the intense, bittersweet pain of wanting to return to a home or familiar surroundings, though it has gradually taken on the additional meaning of being a place or time that you cannot return to.From what we understand, old Welsh has a similar but stronger word --
hireath-- which roughly translates as an intense yearning or longer for a past or home that specifically no longer exists and which you can never return to.That reminds us of
Gollum's Song(performed by Emilíana Torrini) from the end ofThe Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers, particularly the lyrics:You are lost
You can never go homeMaybe a being or entity dies when they are forgotten, but an instance can die when it goes permanently offline without backups or archives.
We guess it's an uncomfortable reminder that nothing and nobody will last forever.
#fedi #fediverse #Mastodon #existential #transience #ephemerality #InstanceShutdown
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*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY* by Michael Adzema 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book 5/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #Contents📖 #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate #Existential #EndTimes #RainbowWarriors 🦋 or read blog copy, option to download: sillymickel.blogspot.com/2018/04/apoc...
APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: LOVE’S W... -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCYl* by Michael. Adzema 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book 2/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #Contents📖 #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate #Existential #EndTimes #RainbowWarriors 🦋 or, for print copy, Amazon, for paperback: www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-E...
Apocalypse Emergency: Love's W... -
*APOCALYPSE EMERGENCY: Love's Wake-Up Call* by M. Adzema 🧵Click this panel for Thread complete book 1/ 🧵👇 💡📚💙 #AE 🌡️ #ApocalypseEmergency ☢️ #Contents📖 #TruthWarriors ❕ #psychology ☮️ #Climate #Existential #EndTimes #RainbowWarriors 🦋 or, click for free pdf copy: drive.google.com/file/d/1yUyY...
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Radical activist and eventual poet laureate William Wordsworth, once proclaimed:
"Men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."
Read "Michael" and understand what he was going on about: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/michael-pastoral-poem
#wordsworth #poetry #activism #nature #pastoral #romanticism #british #existential #fineClothes
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Oh, look! Yet another scroll-stopping #Forbes masterpiece: a guide to #vaporware from a company that might as well be selling #unicorn #tears 🦄💧. Who knew you needed #JavaScript just to contemplate the #existential #void of OpenAI's non-existent products? 🤔✨
https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2026/03/31/openai-graveyard-deals-and-products-havent-happened-openai/ #OpenAI #HackerNews #ngated -
Meet #Phantom, the #AI #agent with an #identity #crisis 🤖💾: it constantly rewrites its config like a toddler with a new box of crayons 🎨. Apparently, it has "self-evolving" #memory, so perhaps it remembers how to be useless in more creative ways every day. Built on #Claude Agent #SDK, because what else would you use to make an AI that spends more time in #existential #dread than doing any actual work? 🙄
https://github.com/ghostwright/phantom #self-evolving #HackerNews #ngated -
I am writing an open #letter to all #political sides as an #introduction to #hope I wish to turn #hurt away from and closer into as such through #affirmative #action accordingly if at all possible.
Let me start out by saying, that I #believe in the #power of real human prayer as #unbound #energy finding its way through us. And in turn, I'm no #religious #person by and large, but I am going to send this #prayer out there anyways because I feel it needs to be #said as is.
This will be a prayer covering several #topics of conversation that I #feel are important and significant enough to relay as one broadcast.
To all #people I #pray that:
You realize living on your own #political #island sounds great in theory, be it on the #left or the #right of the spectrum. Or even at the #top or #bottom of it as well. But being unable to find or care for the #center of it, leaves you #vulnerable to #attack more so than anything else. And that is not a state of things I #desire for you to have to #live by.I pray that:
As #individuals you #collectively and #personally #understand that there are differences between the #perception of how you come across to others, and how others #perceive you in turn. It is okay to have a #difference of opinion, but to be #blind sighted by this, leaves you open to being #weaponized and I do not #wish that for you to have to #experience at all.#sovereignty
I pray that:
You can #recognize how someone wants to be able to experience #respect without having to diverge or divulge your #interest in a #potential #conflict as such. In order for us to be able to #trust each other, we have to #remember how to #treat one another as #equals rather than constantly #competing for #dominance based on denying that there #exists a spectrum of #agreeability at play that we are all apart of.#CommonSense
I pray that:
We keep building upon #frameworks that do not need to become a totally separate #foundation that exists just to serve you. But rather, exist as #modular #blocks that can join and detach from one another as already built #structures full and complete. This way, we are not trying to conflict over what block we have to share space with someone else in prioritizing. Because the entire thing is ours to shape in our own way. And so as a #metaphor, I feel it is #important to attach to the idea of having a sense in common, as opposed to a common sense where applicable, of things that cause us to #fight over how #relevant it is to most of us around the #actual or #planned #change currently in motion.#battles
I pray that:
We are able to tell when to be #still and when to #move upon any #focus that #captivates us in part. Whether it exists as apart of a #whole or not. Doing so will help us make the best #impact #possible for the change we want to make a #reality for the #cause we are #concerned for.And ultimately, I pray that we can move past the blatant need to have an #existential #crisis be on full display at the #crossroads of #agendas being carried out as they are each in turn, #instigated by #georegional #tribalism that serves nobody accept to put #humanity as a whole last, not first, as I intend to do.
All of these things are #real and can be #fixable and #doable as such. And I want to make sure, that this reality does not have a chance to get far out of #control the way it currently has.
For it is #outcomes like this, that #incomes should never have appropriately #manifested into #place that I want to #avoid and keep #preventable from ever #happening again.
To me, I find it very #unfortunate that we are living through #times of such blatant #hardship that should not have to be so unnecessary in today's day and age. For in this latest #protest #style #news #video we see this very inteersection of mounting, preventable #activities #culminating all at once in a display of #violent #behaviour best #repurposed for other #interests in my #opinion acordingly.
#posted by #YouTube #reactor and #media #podcaster #RebelNews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjT3kK5lHKk
In #America #israel and #Canada or anywhere else in our #world we should not have to worry about #migration #problems at home #effecting the #symptom of #indifference at the #core of #ineffective #deference as such. Rather, if we simply #agree to #adapt our time towards #focusing on the #things we can #bear #witness to as our own #personal #legacy then I say we have done enough for our #community be it or we tied to a particular #faith or not.
I say this, in my own #human name for all it is worth. Because that is who I am now, and if any #guardian #angel believes this to be #true then all I ask, is that you add yours to this prayer and pass it forward.
Thank you for your #attention to this #matter as such. I #appreciate it and you very much for the #blessing that you are.
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I am writing an open #letter to all #political sides as an #introduction to #hope I wish to turn #hurt away from and closer into as such through #affirmative #action accordingly if at all possible.
Let me start out by saying, that I #believe in the #power of real human prayer as #unbound #energy finding its way through us. And in turn, I'm no #religious #person by and large, but I am going to send this #prayer out there anyways because I feel it needs to be #said as is.
This will be a prayer covering several #topics of conversation that I #feel are important and significant enough to relay as one broadcast.
To all #people I #pray that:
You realize living on your own #political #island sounds great in theory, be it on the #left or the #right of the spectrum. Or even at the #top or #bottom of it as well. But being unable to find or care for the #center of it, leaves you #vulnerable to #attack more so than anything else. And that is not a state of things I #desire for you to have to #live by.I pray that:
As #individuals you #collectively and #personally #understand that there are differences between the #perception of how you come across to others, and how others #perceive you in turn. It is okay to have a #difference of opinion, but to be #blind sighted by this, leaves you open to being #weaponized and I do not #wish that for you to have to #experience at all.#sovereignty
I pray that:
You can #recognize how someone wants to be able to experience #respect without having to diverge or divulge your #interest in a #potential #conflict as such. In order for us to be able to #trust each other, we have to #remember how to #treat one another as #equals rather than constantly #competing for #dominance based on denying that there #exists a spectrum of #agreeability at play that we are all apart of.#CommonSense
I pray that:
We keep building upon #frameworks that do not need to become a totally separate #foundation that exists just to serve you. But rather, exist as #modular #blocks that can join and detach from one another as already built #structures full and complete. This way, we are not trying to conflict over what block we have to share space with someone else in prioritizing. Because the entire thing is ours to shape in our own way. And so as a #metaphor, I feel it is #important to attach to the idea of having a sense in common, as opposed to a common sense where applicable, of things that cause us to #fight over how #relevant it is to most of us around the #actual or #planned #change currently in motion.#battles
I pray that:
We are able to tell when to be #still and when to #move upon any #focus that #captivates us in part. Whether it exists as apart of a #whole or not. Doing so will help us make the best #impact #possible for the change we want to make a #reality for the #cause we are #concerned for.And ultimately, I pray that we can move past the blatant need to have an #existential #crisis be on full display at the #crossroads of #agendas being carried out as they are each in turn, #instigated by #georegional #tribalism that serves nobody accept to put #humanity as a whole last, not first, as I intend to do.
All of these things are #real and can be #fixable and #doable as such. And I want to make sure, that this reality does not have a chance to get far out of #control the way it currently has.
For it is #outcomes like this, that #incomes should never have appropriately #manifested into #place that I want to #avoid and keep #preventable from ever #happening again.
To me, I find it very #unfortunate that we are living through #times of such blatant #hardship that should not have to be so unnecessary in today's day and age. For in this latest #protest #style #news #video we see this very inteersection of mounting, preventable #activities #culminating all at once in a display of #violent #behaviour best #repurposed for other #interests in my #opinion acordingly.
#posted by #YouTube #reactor and #media #podcaster #RebelNews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjT3kK5lHKk
In #America #israel and #Canada or anywhere else in our #world we should not have to worry about #migration #problems at home #effecting the #symptom of #indifference at the #core of #ineffective #deference as such. Rather, if we simply #agree to #adapt our time towards #focusing on the #things we can #bear #witness to as our own #personal #legacy then I say we have done enough for our #community be it or we tied to a particular #faith or not.
I say this, in my own #human name for all it is worth. Because that is who I am now, and if any #guardian #angel believes this to be #true then all I ask, is that you add yours to this prayer and pass it forward.
Thank you for your #attention to this #matter as such. I #appreciate it and you very much for the #blessing that you are.