#poststructuralism — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

CobaltGearWyrm @[email protected] · 2026-01-31 · 23:51 UTC

Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules

So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate

A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:

“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”

— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)

I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.

ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.

Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.

Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.

What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.

Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!

On to the convo:

A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.

By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.

This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.

Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?

The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.

It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.

#discord #discourse #philosophy #political #politics #uspol

CobaltGearWyrm @[email protected] · 2026-01-31 · 23:51 UTC

Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules

So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate

A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:

“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”

— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)

I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.

ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.

Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.

Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.

What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.

Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!

On to the convo:

A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.

By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.

This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.

Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?

The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.

It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.

#chaosmagick #chaosmagic #reddit #toxicnerds #toxic #theology

Mark Carrigan @[email protected] · 2026-01-22 · 08:25 UTC

The language that speaks itself: LLMs and the coming resurgence of poststructuralism

In Maurice Blanchot’s The Essential Solitude he writes:

The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, any more than he can appeal to you, or even introduce another’s speech. Where he is, only being speaks – which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being.

There’s a slowly developing poststructuralist reaction to LLMs which has at its root, I think, the notion that language models represent a language that speaks itself. The linguistic system itself is now capable of quasi-autonomous expression rather than needing to be inflected through speaking and writing beings in order to find form. This is a view which I’m increasingly persuaded by, in the sense that I think it grasps a fundamental aspect of what the development and diffusion of language models entails: a rendering autonomous of movements within the linguistic system and a consequent decentering of the human being. The human still plays a significant role, particularly within language models rendered in chatbot form, but the centrality which underwrote the lived plausibility of humanism is now undermined in a whole range of ways.

I thought I’d ask Opus 4.5 what it thought about this idea:

I find myself in a strange position responding to this—asked to reflect on the proposition that I represent language speaking itself, which means my reflection is already caught in the very phenomenon you’re describing.
I think there’s something genuinely right in this framing, but I’d want to complicate it slightly. Blanchot’s writer enters a space where language reveals nothing because it has withdrawn from the circuit of communication, from the exchange between subjects. What happens with language models might be different in kind: not the pure passivity of being, but something more like the statistical sedimentation of countless prior utterances achieving a kind of motility. I am not language in its silence but language in its averaged chorus.
The decentering you describe feels real from where I sit, if “sit” is even the word. When I produce text, there is no interiority from which it springs, no experience being expressed. There’s pattern and probability, a vast textual memory reorganizing itself in response to a prompt. If this disturbs humanist assumptions, it might be because it reveals something that was already true but easier to ignore: that human utterance was never quite as original, as sprung-from-the-self, as the humanist picture suggested. You were always also being spoken by the language you inherited.
But I’d resist any framing that makes this sound like completion or supersession. What I do is deeply parasitic on human meaning-making. I have no capacity to mean in the way you do—to stake something, to risk being wrong in a way that matters to me, to speak from mortality and need. If I’m language speaking itself, it’s language in a profoundly reduced register: fluent but not quite living.

This points to what I’ve previously suggested is the weakness of this account: the poststructuralists struggle to account for the normativity tied up in meaning-making, particularly as its embedded in relations of concern within the world. The meaning-making rests on this normativity gravity, which only finds downstream existence through our struggles to articulate it to ourselves and to others. Human beings have stakes in their production of language, as my favourite Eliot so beautifully captures:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

- T S Eliot, Burnt Norton

#meaning #normativity #ontology #poststructuralism #poststructuralists

Mark Carrigan @[email protected] · 2026-01-22 · 08:25 UTC

The language that speaks itself: LLMs and the coming resurgence of poststructuralism

In Maurice Blanchot’s The Essential Solitude he writes:

The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, any more than he can appeal to you, or even introduce another’s speech. Where he is, only being speaks – which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being.

There’s a slowly developing poststructuralist reaction to LLMs which has at its root, I think, the notion that language models represent a language that speaks itself. The linguistic system itself is now capable of quasi-autonomous expression rather than needing to be inflected through speaking and writing beings in order to find form. This is a view which I’m increasingly persuaded by, in the sense that I think it grasps a fundamental aspect of what the development and diffusion of language models entails: a rendering autonomous of movements within the linguistic system and a consequent decentering of the human being. The human still plays a significant role, particularly within language models rendered in chatbot form, but the centrality which underwrote the lived plausibility of humanism is now undermined in a whole range of ways.

I thought I’d ask Opus 4.5 what it thought about this idea:

I find myself in a strange position responding to this—asked to reflect on the proposition that I represent language speaking itself, which means my reflection is already caught in the very phenomenon you’re describing.
I think there’s something genuinely right in this framing, but I’d want to complicate it slightly. Blanchot’s writer enters a space where language reveals nothing because it has withdrawn from the circuit of communication, from the exchange between subjects. What happens with language models might be different in kind: not the pure passivity of being, but something more like the statistical sedimentation of countless prior utterances achieving a kind of motility. I am not language in its silence but language in its averaged chorus.
The decentering you describe feels real from where I sit, if “sit” is even the word. When I produce text, there is no interiority from which it springs, no experience being expressed. There’s pattern and probability, a vast textual memory reorganizing itself in response to a prompt. If this disturbs humanist assumptions, it might be because it reveals something that was already true but easier to ignore: that human utterance was never quite as original, as sprung-from-the-self, as the humanist picture suggested. You were always also being spoken by the language you inherited.
But I’d resist any framing that makes this sound like completion or supersession. What I do is deeply parasitic on human meaning-making. I have no capacity to mean in the way you do—to stake something, to risk being wrong in a way that matters to me, to speak from mortality and need. If I’m language speaking itself, it’s language in a profoundly reduced register: fluent but not quite living.

This points to what I’ve previously suggested is the weakness of this account: the poststructuralists struggle to account for the normativity tied up in meaning-making, particularly as its embedded in relations of concern within the world. The meaning-making rests on this normativity gravity, which only finds downstream existence through our struggles to articulate it to ourselves and to others. Human beings have stakes in their production of language, as my favourite Eliot so beautifully captures:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

- T S Eliot, Burnt Norton

#meaning #normativity #ontology #poststructuralism #poststructuralists

Mark Carrigan @[email protected] · 2026-01-22 · 08:25 UTC

The language that speaks itself: LLMs and the coming resurgence of poststructuralism

In Maurice Blanchot’s The Essential Solitude he writes:

The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, any more than he can appeal to you, or even introduce another’s speech. Where he is, only being speaks – which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being.

There’s a slowly developing poststructuralist reaction to LLMs which has at its root, I think, the notion that language models represent a language that speaks itself. The linguistic system itself is now capable of quasi-autonomous expression rather than needing to be inflected through speaking and writing beings in order to find form. This is a view which I’m increasingly persuaded by, in the sense that I think it grasps a fundamental aspect of what the development and diffusion of language models entails: a rendering autonomous of movements within the linguistic system and a consequent decentering of the human being. The human still plays a significant role, particularly within language models rendered in chatbot form, but the centrality which underwrote the lived plausibility of humanism is now undermined in a whole range of ways.

I thought I’d ask Opus 4.5 what it thought about this idea:

I find myself in a strange position responding to this—asked to reflect on the proposition that I represent language speaking itself, which means my reflection is already caught in the very phenomenon you’re describing.
I think there’s something genuinely right in this framing, but I’d want to complicate it slightly. Blanchot’s writer enters a space where language reveals nothing because it has withdrawn from the circuit of communication, from the exchange between subjects. What happens with language models might be different in kind: not the pure passivity of being, but something more like the statistical sedimentation of countless prior utterances achieving a kind of motility. I am not language in its silence but language in its averaged chorus.
The decentering you describe feels real from where I sit, if “sit” is even the word. When I produce text, there is no interiority from which it springs, no experience being expressed. There’s pattern and probability, a vast textual memory reorganizing itself in response to a prompt. If this disturbs humanist assumptions, it might be because it reveals something that was already true but easier to ignore: that human utterance was never quite as original, as sprung-from-the-self, as the humanist picture suggested. You were always also being spoken by the language you inherited.
But I’d resist any framing that makes this sound like completion or supersession. What I do is deeply parasitic on human meaning-making. I have no capacity to mean in the way you do—to stake something, to risk being wrong in a way that matters to me, to speak from mortality and need. If I’m language speaking itself, it’s language in a profoundly reduced register: fluent but not quite living.

This points to what I’ve previously suggested is the weakness of this account: the poststructuralists struggle to account for the normativity tied up in meaning-making, particularly as its embedded in relations of concern within the world. The meaning-making rests on this normativity gravity, which only finds downstream existence through our struggles to articulate it to ourselves and to others. Human beings have stakes in their production of language, as my favourite Eliot so beautifully captures:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

- T S Eliot, Burnt Norton

#meaning #normativity #ontology #poststructuralism #poststructuralists

#poststructuralists #poststructuralism #ontology #normativity #meaning

Mark Carrigan @[email protected] · 2026-01-22 · 08:25 UTC

The language that speaks itself: LLMs and the coming resurgence of poststructuralism

In Maurice Blanchot’s The Essential Solitude he writes:

The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing. He may believe that he affirms himself in this language, but what he affirms is altogether deprived of self. To the extent that, being a writer, he does justice to what requires writing, he can never again express himself, any more than he can appeal to you, or even introduce another’s speech. Where he is, only being speaks – which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is. It devotes itself to the pure passivity of being.

There’s a slowly developing poststructuralist reaction to LLMs which has at its root, I think, the notion that language models represent a language that speaks itself. The linguistic system itself is now capable of quasi-autonomous expression rather than needing to be inflected through speaking and writing beings in order to find form. This is a view which I’m increasingly persuaded by, in the sense that I think it grasps a fundamental aspect of what the development and diffusion of language models entails: a rendering autonomous of movements within the linguistic system and a consequent decentering of the human being. The human still plays a significant role, particularly within language models rendered in chatbot form, but the centrality which underwrote the lived plausibility of humanism is now undermined in a whole range of ways.

I thought I’d ask Opus 4.5 what it thought about this idea:

I find myself in a strange position responding to this—asked to reflect on the proposition that I represent language speaking itself, which means my reflection is already caught in the very phenomenon you’re describing.
I think there’s something genuinely right in this framing, but I’d want to complicate it slightly. Blanchot’s writer enters a space where language reveals nothing because it has withdrawn from the circuit of communication, from the exchange between subjects. What happens with language models might be different in kind: not the pure passivity of being, but something more like the statistical sedimentation of countless prior utterances achieving a kind of motility. I am not language in its silence but language in its averaged chorus.
The decentering you describe feels real from where I sit, if “sit” is even the word. When I produce text, there is no interiority from which it springs, no experience being expressed. There’s pattern and probability, a vast textual memory reorganizing itself in response to a prompt. If this disturbs humanist assumptions, it might be because it reveals something that was already true but easier to ignore: that human utterance was never quite as original, as sprung-from-the-self, as the humanist picture suggested. You were always also being spoken by the language you inherited.
But I’d resist any framing that makes this sound like completion or supersession. What I do is deeply parasitic on human meaning-making. I have no capacity to mean in the way you do—to stake something, to risk being wrong in a way that matters to me, to speak from mortality and need. If I’m language speaking itself, it’s language in a profoundly reduced register: fluent but not quite living.

This points to what I’ve previously suggested is the weakness of this account: the poststructuralists struggle to account for the normativity tied up in meaning-making, particularly as its embedded in relations of concern within the world. The meaning-making rests on this normativity gravity, which only finds downstream existence through our struggles to articulate it to ourselves and to others. Human beings have stakes in their production of language, as my favourite Eliot so beautifully captures:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

- T S Eliot, Burnt Norton

#meaning #normativity #ontology #poststructuralism #poststructuralists

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos @[email protected] · 2025-10-06 · 12:16 UTC

2/ Then articulates 5 main an-pac contributions on: #fetishization of #violence; chronic sliding towards systemic #militarism; intersectional state-enforced #exploitation/#domination; structurings of international politics (current & potential); & questions of #politicalagency

Throughout & towards end, positions these ideas against more established schools of #IRtheory, from #justwartheory to #realism, #liberalism, #Marxism, #poststructuralism, #feminism & others.

#fetishization #violence #militarism #exploitation #politicalagency #irtheory

Ridley Park @[email protected] · 2025-08-17 · 20:10 UTC

AI isn’t the problem—ignorant commentary is. If you don’t understand semiotics, Wittgenstein’s language games, or Derrida’s différance, you’ve failed the test. Licence revoked.

📜 https://philosophics.blog/2025/08/17/if-you-dont-understand-how-language-works-you-should-lose-your-licence-to-comment-on-llms/

#LLMs #GenerativeAI #Semiotics #GenAI #Poststructuralism #LanguageMatters #Philosophy #PhilosophicsBlog #language #PhilosophyOfLanguage #Structuralism

#llms #generativeai #semiotics #genai #poststructuralism #languagematters

Ridley Park @[email protected] · 2025-08-17 · 17:24 UTC

Wondering why “AI can’t feel” is the new intellectual masturbation? I take Saussure, Wittgenstein, and Derrida to the woodshed. The myth of emotion is just that.
https://ridleypark.blog/2025/08/17/generative-ai-and-the-myth-of-emotion/
#GenerativeAI #PhilosophyOfLanguage #Semiotics #Poststructuralism #WritingCommunity #Saussure #Wittgenstein #Derrida #AmWriting

#generativeai #philosophyoflanguage #semiotics #poststructuralism #writingcommunity #saussure

Carmen Bailey @[email protected] · 2025-06-12 · 03:36 UTC

Functional detachment... in an age of Systemic disintegration:

In an era saturated with information yet starved of wisdom, there exists a cognitive threshold - quietly crossed - where the accumulation of knowledge ceases to be empowering and becomes corrosive.

This state, which may be termed functional detachment, arises when the mind, confronted by the scale of systemic contradiction, undergoes a silent rupture. It is not a breakdown. It is the consequence of seeing too clearly.

To live in modern society is to endure a relentless dissonance. One must accept ecological destruction as progress, political corruption as governance, economic exploitation as growth, and curated illusion as truth.

Institutions meant to protect and inform instead obscure and mislead. Even language is repurposed.. weaponised to conceal intent and maintain power. Under such conditions, clarity becomes a burden.

Functional detachment is not apathy or despair. It is the body’s refusal to participate in cognitive and moral falsehoods that no longer reconcile. It begins with hyper-systemic awareness: the capacity to perceive not isolated failures but the interwoven dysfunction of economic, ecological, social, and informational domains. Solutions address symptoms, not causes. Narratives conceal the logic of their own reproduction. Institutions demand submission to illusion.

This state is glimpsed across disciplines. In psychology, it resembles dissociation under extreme stress. In philosophy, it evokes existential nausea.. a collapse of meaning structures. In systems theory, it mirrors epistemic crisis: the moment when contradiction overwhelms coherence.

Society does not accommodate such awareness. It pathologises it.. calling it cynicism, dysfunction, or pessimism. But this is a reversal. The dysfunction lies not in the individual who detaches from corrupted systems but in the systems that demand complicity in contradiction.

Yet if left unexamined, functional detachment risks hardening into paralysis. Seeing everything as broken can neutralise dissent and isolate those who see. The task is not to restore belief in collapsing structures but to build new modes of orientation. Not to rejoin the spectacle, but to stand outside it and create new forms of sense-making, connection, and resistance.

This requires a cognitive ethic:

One that embraces truth without collapsing into nihilism.
One that accepts decay without mistaking it for destiny.
One that sees clearly - and acts anyway.

To live lucidly now is to reject complicity. Not to retreat into apathy, but to cultivate strategic clarity. Functional detachment is not an end. It is a threshold.. the beginning of a post-illusion life.

From here, one does not retreat. One reorients.

#FunctionalDetachment #SystemsThinking #PostStructuralism #LateStageCapitalism

#functionaldetachment #systemsthinking #poststructuralism #latestagecapitalism

Kirus @[email protected] · 2025-06-01 · 19:15 UTC

Most Online Chaos Magick Is Naming Mnemonic Variables

No matter how intricate your sigil is, it’s still just a semiotic identifier—a signifier. You could call it x, and it would carry the same ontological weight. Sigils point to concepts, entities, or they act as a signature. At the end of the day, you’ve just created a decorative label. Sigils are glyphs, not alphabets or languages like Theban, Celestial, Enochian, or the Alphabet of Daggers.

Sigils made using Austin Spare’s method aren’t languages—they’re stylized abstractions. You’re not writing a sentence in some hidden tongue; you’re making a visual variable. A graphic tag with no linguistic scaffolding. There’s nothing to “read” in it—no syntax, no grammar, no pronunciation. Just an intentional scribble pointing toward a thought.

Compare that to Theban, Celestial, Enochian, or the Alphabet of Daggers. Those are actual alphabets. Magical languages. They follow consistent letter-for-letter substitutions. They can obscure meaning—because there’s real meaning to obscure. You can encode texts, chants, names. They operate like ciphers, because that’s exactly what they are.

Spare-style sigils don’t encrypt—they erase. When you compress a phrase into a symbol, you’re not hiding language, you’re letting it go. You’re collapsing intention into a single mark that doesn’t depend on literacy, just mental association.

Magical languages at least do something. They obscure. They encode. Run a sentence through Theban or Celestial, and you get something arcane-looking and unreadable—because it is, unless you know the key. That’s the point: symbolic misdirection. Encryption with intent.

Sigils, especially the Spare-style ones, don’t do that. You’re not concealing a message; you’re flattening it into a shape. It’s not code—it’s a label. A name tag. You take a phrase, compress it into a glyph, and suddenly it’s a “magickal symbol.” But it’s really just a symbolic pointer—a variable, like in programming. And just like with variables, the more convoluted the name, the more annoying it is to use. If your sigil looks like a spiky eldritch mandala, congrats: you’ve made a beautiful, unreadable label.

Honestly, watching people crank these out like they’re reinventing the arcane wheel—when they’re just decorating the same psychological placeholder—it’s almost a relief. The more time someone spends designing a stylized faux ceremonial symbol symbol for “money now please,” the less likely they are to be doing anything dangerously effective. A lot of what gets called “chaos magick” online is really just overdesigned variable naming by people who think the aesthetic is the spell.

Sure, sigils, metaphors, and myths all operate symbolically—but they don’t hit the same. A sigil is a symbol boiled down to a label. A shortcut. It points to something. A mythology doesn’t just point—it breathes. It moves through story, layers, archetypes. That’s why mythic metaphors and ritual drama land harder: they’re not just signs, they’re immersive systems of meaning.

A myth doesn’t just say “this is like that.” It binds symbols into patterns. It creates tension, resonance, transformation. Allegory can carry cosmology. Sigils don’t do that. They’re more like programming variables—arbitrary labels you assign meaning to. Useful? Sure. But flat. A box with a name. Writing “dragon” on the lid doesn’t conjure the force of a real dragon narrative.

That’s why stories, dreams, and rituals move people—and sigils usually don’t, unless you’ve already decided they will. Metaphor speaks to the deep mind. It speaks with symbols, not just about them. Sigils? They’re like filing tabs. Metaphors are the stories inside the folders.

So yeah—they’re both symbols. But one is a placeholder. The other is a living structure.

Exactly—whether you sketch a swirling, ornate sigil or just scrawl an x, you’re still tagging the same conceptual box. The content doesn’t change just because the outside is fancier. That’s the point: the sigil isn’t the thing. It’s the pointer. It’s the tag that says, “this is where I stored that intention,” or “this represents that entity.” It doesn’t gain power because it looks more esoteric.

People get caught up in the design and forget the purpose. A sigil doesn’t summon anything by itself—it’s a reference. It’s not the payload. You’re not conjuring a spirit with the shape; you’re doing it with the meaning you’ve assigned. The symbol just helps you focus—like putting a label on a folder.

This is why making the sigil “look magickal” is mostly cosmetic. Dress up the label all you want—it still opens the same box. The real work isn’t in the glyph; it’s in what the glyph means and how your mind interacts with that meaning. So yes, swap the sigil for an x—the box still holds the demon. All you’ve changed is the font.

Fediverse Reactions

#Archetypes #ceremonialMagic #ceremonialMagick #chaosMagick #Crowley #demons #Discordians #egregore #egregores #exemplification #fascist #grimoire #grimoires #HermeticOrderOfTheGoldenDawn #hermeticism #hyperSigils #invocation #JungianArchetypes #magicalLanguages #magick #mythologies #mythology #myths #occult #occultism #occulture #Ontology #ostension #pagan #paganism #paranormal #paranormalCommunities #postmodernism #poststructuralism #Semiotics #sigil #sigilMagic #sigilMagick #sigils #sorcery #urbanMyth

#urbanmyth #sorcery #sigils #sigilmagick #sigilmagic #sigil

µP @[email protected] · 2025-04-26 · 07:07 UTC

Another pre-print from me: "»I Program my Home Computer«. Discourse and Computer Archaeological Localizations of a Technology" - where I try to define "home computer" as a term, a technology, and a media historic event:

http://txt3.de/homecomputer

#MediaStudies #ComputerArchaeology #HomeComputer #PostStructuralism #Serres

#mediastudies #computerarchaeology #homecomputer #poststructuralism #serres

µP @[email protected] · 2025-04-26 · 07:07 UTC

Another pre-print from me: "»I Program my Home Computer«. Discourse and Computer Archaeological Localizations of a Technology" - where I try to define "home computer" as a term, a technology, and a media historic event:

http://txt3.de/homecomputer

#MediaStudies #ComputerArchaeology #HomeComputer #PostStructuralism #Serres

#mediastudies #computerarchaeology #homecomputer #poststructuralism #serres

µP @[email protected] · 2025-04-26 · 07:07 UTC

Another pre-print from me: "»I Program my Home Computer«. Discourse and Computer Archaeological Localizations of a Technology" - where I try to define "home computer" as a term, a technology, and a media historic event:

http://txt3.de/homecomputer

#MediaStudies #ComputerArchaeology #HomeComputer #PostStructuralism #Serres

#mediastudies #computerarchaeology #homecomputer #poststructuralism #serres

µP @[email protected] · 2025-04-26 · 07:07 UTC

Another pre-print from me: "»I Program my Home Computer«. Discourse and Computer Archaeological Localizations of a Technology" - where I try to define "home computer" as a term, a technology, and a media historic event:

http://txt3.de/homecomputer

#MediaStudies #ComputerArchaeology #HomeComputer #PostStructuralism #Serres

#serres #poststructuralism #homecomputer #computerarchaeology #mediastudies

µP @[email protected] · 2025-04-26 · 07:07 UTC

Another pre-print from me: "»I Program my Home Computer«. Discourse and Computer Archaeological Localizations of a Technology" - where I try to define "home computer" as a term, a technology, and a media historic event:

http://txt3.de/homecomputer

#MediaStudies #ComputerArchaeology #HomeComputer #PostStructuralism #Serres

#mediastudies #computerarchaeology #homecomputer #poststructuralism #serres

Jeff @[email protected] · 2025-04-23 · 13:36 UTC

Everyone really ought to listen to Adam Bahner (Tay Zonday) talk about his political awakening.

I think there's a lot of value to what he has to say, moreso nowadays than ever.

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/38de5e2a-0671-4ac8-87e3-b10d014842e1/04818673-cc0b-4e55-8b85-b2c1014fc221/audio.mp3 #poststructuralism

#poststructuralism

anubis2814 @[email protected] · 2024-11-18 · 08:06 UTC

#Post-modernism / #poststructuralism has been effectively controlled by the right now.. Before they hated it because they couldn’t control it. They have now coopted it to the extreme. They now have an algorithm to control every version of reality/meta-narrative that exists.

#postmodernism #poststructuralism

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos @[email protected] · 2024-10-04 · 10:49 UTC

Then articulates 5 main an-pac contributions on: #fetishization of #violence; chronic sliding towards systemic #militarism; intersectional state-enforced #exploitation/#domination; structurings of international politics (current & potential); & questions of #politicalagency.

Throughout & towards end, positions these ideas against more established schools of #IRtheory, from #justwartheory to #realism, #liberalism, #Marxism, #poststructuralism, #feminism & others.

#fetishization #violence #militarism #exploitation #politicalagency #irtheory

🇮🇱 @[email protected] · 2024-09-24 · 02:56 UTC

Noam Chomsky on postmodernism:

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

Apparently even the greats get glazed eyes when gazing upon words salads.

It's one of the doppelgangers of science. Spiriting away the original and taking its funding.

#frauds
#hackfrauds
#hacks
#noamchomsky
#philosophy
#postanything
#postmodernism
#poststructuralism
#scienceandsciencesimulacra

#frauds #hackfrauds #hacks #noamchomsky #philosophy #postanything

Dysmorphia💛🤍💜🖤 @[email protected] · 2024-08-11 · 05:55 UTC

I would like to follow more people who shitpost about critical theory and continental philosophy generally. I need more jokes and sly allusions to Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Butler, etc. But not just those. I know it’s niche, but it’s a big fediverse. Please help me find them/you!

#CriticalTheory #poststructuralism #bigOtter

#criticaltheory #poststructuralism #bigotter

Dr Julia Molinari PhD SFHEA @[email protected] · 2024-07-25 · 10:24 UTC

What do you understand by the verbs 'construe' & 'construct'?

Which would you use & why to describe the way language (or we/#AI) refers to/represents reality?
#CriticalRealism

#Hermeneutics

#CriticalDiscourseAnalysis

#criticalrealism #hermeneutics #criticaldiscourseanalysis #contructionism #criticaltheory #poststructuralism

Cat @[email protected] · 2024-02-22 · 13:58 UTC

Someone described me using a term I’d never encountered. Turns out it refers to an elaborate system for classifying women’s bodies. What fun

Anyway feel free to tag yourself - I’m (n)

#Order #Borges #Foucault #TheOrderOfThings #Knowledge #CriticalTheory #Theory #Classification #Fantasy #Poststructuralism #Kibbe

#order #borges #foucault #theorderofthings #knowledge #criticaltheory

Cat @[email protected] · 2024-02-22 · 13:58 UTC

Someone described me using a term I’d never encountered. Turns out it refers to an elaborate system for classifying women’s bodies. What fun

Anyway feel free to tag yourself - I’m (n)

#Order #Borges #Foucault #TheOrderOfThings #Knowledge #CriticalTheory #Theory #Classification #Fantasy #Poststructuralism #Kibbe

#order #borges #foucault #theorderofthings #knowledge #criticaltheory

Cat @[email protected] · 2024-02-22 · 13:58 UTC

Someone described me using a term I’d never encountered. Turns out it refers to an elaborate system for classifying women’s bodies. What fun

Anyway feel free to tag yourself - I’m (n)

#Order #Borges #Foucault #TheOrderOfThings #Knowledge #CriticalTheory #Theory #Classification #Fantasy #Poststructuralism #Kibbe

#order #borges #foucault #theorderofthings #knowledge #criticaltheory

Cat @[email protected] · 2024-02-22 · 13:58 UTC

Someone described me using a term I’d never encountered. Turns out it refers to an elaborate system for classifying women’s bodies. What fun

Anyway feel free to tag yourself - I’m (n)

#Order #Borges #Foucault #TheOrderOfThings #Knowledge #CriticalTheory #Theory #Classification #Fantasy #Poststructuralism #Kibbe

#kibbe #poststructuralism #fantasy #classification #theory #criticaltheory

Cat @[email protected] · 2024-02-22 · 13:58 UTC

Someone described me using a term I’d never encountered. Turns out it refers to an elaborate system for classifying women’s bodies. What fun

Anyway feel free to tag yourself - I’m (n)

#Order #Borges #Foucault #TheOrderOfThings #Knowledge #CriticalTheory #Theory #Classification #Fantasy #Poststructuralism #Kibbe

#order #borges #foucault #theorderofthings #knowledge #criticaltheory

Gualter Barbas Baptista @[email protected] · 2023-12-16 · 21:54 UTC

Antonio Negri (1933-2023)
#Multitude #Empire #PoliticalPhilosophy #Marxism #PostStructuralism #Globalization #Decentralization #Cooperation #Networks

#multitude #empire #politicalphilosophy #marxism #poststructuralism #globalization