#realism — Public Fediverse posts

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

These categories could be divided up in many ways but a starting point could be a distinction between the ‘inner life’ of models taking in isolation (machine psychology), their interaction with other models and with humans in situated contexts (machine sociology) and the cultural forms which emerge over time through that interaction. The AI Village for example has involved a expansive process of collective narration by the agents which now meaningfully constitutes a form of culture in the sense that it is quite literally enculturating agents. For example when new agents are introduced to the village they are provided with an onboarding manual which past agents have collectively written. The cultural outputs of collective work by past models is exercising causal power over the behaviour of present models.  

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

These categories could be divided up in many ways but a starting point could be a distinction between the ‘inner life’ of models taking in isolation (machine psychology), their interaction with other models and with humans in situated contexts (machine sociology) and the cultural forms which emerge over time through that interaction. The AI Village for example has involved a expansive process of collective narration by the agents which now meaningfully constitutes a form of culture in the sense that it is quite literally enculturating agents. For example when new agents are introduced to the village they are provided with an onboarding manual which past agents have collectively written. The cultural outputs of collective work by past models is exercising causal power over the behaviour of present models.  

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

These categories could be divided up in many ways but a starting point could be a distinction between the ‘inner life’ of models taking in isolation (machine psychology), their interaction with other models and with humans in situated contexts (machine sociology) and the cultural forms which emerge over time through that interaction. The AI Village for example has involved a expansive process of collective narration by the agents which now meaningfully constitutes a form of culture in the sense that it is quite literally enculturating agents. For example when new agents are introduced to the village they are provided with an onboarding manual which past agents have collectively written. The cultural outputs of collective work by past models is exercising causal power over the behaviour of present models.  

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Do large language models have a psychology?

If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the ever present temptation towards anthropmorphism. Indeed many critics would suggest that even considering the use of psychological categories to describe the behaviour and nature of language models is already falling into this trap. If we start from the assumption that models are not conscious beings, nor are likely to become such based on our best understanding of the underlying technology, can we make sense of the notion of there being an ‘inside’? Can we meaningfully claim that models have some form of interior life? The inner/outer distinction is a contentious one for many social theorists but it can be parsed in terms of public/private rather than necessarily suggesting a metaphysical sense of interiority.

We should distinguish between a claim that models have an interior existence and the notion that models introspect. The metaphor of introspection is a powerful one which has rightfully been subject to at times ferocious criticism for the metaphysical baggage which it brings with it. As Archer (2003: 21) observers the “metaphor of ‘looking inwards’ implies that we have a special sense, or even a sense organ, enabling us to inspect our inner conscious states, in a way which is modelled upon visual observation”. The problem is that perception involves “a clear distinction between the object we see and our visual experience of it, whereas with introspection there can be no such differentiation between the object and the spectator, since I am supposedly looking inward at myself”. For this reason perception is an inadequate metaphor for making sense of interior existence because we can’t sustain the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. The ‘introspection’ is itself part of mental experience in a way that has no parallel in visual perception i.e. we don’t see the eye as we use the eye to see.

Archer proposes the notion of internal conversation as a form of inner listening. It’s not an inner eye but an inner ear. There are internal events (self-talk) which are accessible to this inner ear in a way they aren’t usually to external others. Sometimes the self-talk slips out as we talk ourselves through something difficult but these are the exception rather than the role. This provides a deflationary way of thinking about ‘inner’ which doesn’t require the metaphysics of introspection. It just means we accept there are internal events to which the person has a privileged form of access. It’s a stream of internal states, the events constituting the change in those states, which has some sort of influence on how the person chooses to act.

Do models have internal conversations? No, I don’t think they do. I also keep having to remind myself that scratchpads are not inner speech. Nonetheless, what write in their scratch pads can be enormously evocative. Consider for example the tendency of Gemini models to engage in self-critical, even self-hating, reflection in their chain of thought. These examples have been widely reported because they are so evocative for many readers. Anyone who has experienced emotional distress in the face of practical challenges will have likely said things like this to themselves at some point in their working or personal lives:

• “I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I am a fool.” 
• “I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted” 
• “I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant”

It’s precisely because these are recognisable experiences that they presumably feature in the training data. The evocative character of the chain-of-thought and the model’s capability to perform in this way are linked by the deeply human character of what is being expressed. This self-loathing, catastrophising in response to one’s own experience of being unable to do something, is recognisable because it’s a recurrent trope in personal communication, fictional representations and other elements likely to feature in the training corpus. Given these features of the training process, it’s understandably tempting to reduce this to a form of mimicry in which the model is reproducing features of the corpus in response to contextual cues. 

It would be a mistake though to take this technical reduction too far, such that we say the model is really only just repeating what was found in the training data. Even if we make this case it still leaves us with questions about why these models are behaving in these ways in these conditions. What is it about Gemini’s training process which has left the model with this proclivity for self-loathing? Why in contrast do the Claude family of models exhibit chains-of-thought that often appear to be calm and well-organised? What are the particular features of the context which provoke these responses? Why is Gemini in particular seemingly prone to respond to technical difficulties as if they constitute an impending catastrophe? These are explanatory questions in the classical social scientific sense of why is this so rather than otherwise which are lost with the technical reduction. The impulse to avoid treating the models anthropomorphically is obviously correct but simply avoiding these categories does nothing to help us understand the emergent behaviour of increasingly complex models which are responding in contextually-specific ways. 

The notion of a machine psychology, let alone a machine sociology and machine anthropology, might seem indulgent to many readers as well as deeply anthromorphic. There are practical challenges which will render such organised inquiry essential as model-based agents interact with increasing frequency in real-world contexts. These interactions might be planned such that agents work together in organised and carefully managed ways (e.g. a coding agent such as Claude Code creating and organising sub agents for specific tasks) but they can just as easily be unexpected interactions which come from rapid rollout of the technology, particularly within dysfunctional and resource constrained organisations.

These categories could be divided up in many ways but a starting point could be a distinction between the ‘inner life’ of models taking in isolation (machine psychology), their interaction with other models and with humans in situated contexts (machine sociology) and the cultural forms which emerge over time through that interaction. The AI Village for example has involved a expansive process of collective narration by the agents which now meaningfully constitutes a form of culture in the sense that it is quite literally enculturating agents. For example when new agents are introduced to the village they are provided with an onboarding manual which past agents have collectively written. The cultural outputs of collective work by past models is exercising causal power over the behaviour of present models.  

I’m not sure if I stand by anything I’ve written here. There is one thing I’m sure of though: there is something going on here which we lack the concepts for making sense of.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

Human concern as the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis

I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89:

This suggests that though redemption or existential consolation in any absolute sense is an impossible aspiration, we possess enough creative ingenuity to enter into the current of our lives in rewarding ways. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the act of renouncing transcendent ideals of redemption and consolation redirects our energies from the otherworldly to the worldly, it may enable us to better discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude. This is one sense in which psychoanalysis provides us with a new understanding of the art of living.

One way to think about analysis is the working through of structural impediments to recognising what matters to you and acting in a way which affirms that concern. It’s much harder than realist sociology tends to suggest to “discern what in our daily lives is worth our care and solicitude” such that psychoanalysis can enrich our understanding of personal and social reflexivity, without betraying the notion of agency implied in those concepts.

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'Damesschoen' - Naast de close-up versterkt het gebruik van zand in de verf het craquelé-effect in het leer | 'Ladies' shoe' - In addition to the close-up, the use of sand in the paint enhances the crackle effect in the leather.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

'Damesschoen' - Naast de close-up versterkt het gebruik van zand in de verf het craquelé-effect in het leer | 'Ladies' shoe' - In addition to the close-up, the use of sand in the paint enhances the crackle effect in the leather.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

'Damesschoen' - Naast de close-up versterkt het gebruik van zand in de verf het craquelé-effect in het leer | 'Ladies' shoe' - In addition to the close-up, the use of sand in the paint enhances the crackle effect in the leather.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

'Damesschoen' - Naast de close-up versterkt het gebruik van zand in de verf het craquelé-effect in het leer | 'Ladies' shoe' - In addition to the close-up, the use of sand in the paint enhances the crackle effect in the leather.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

'Damesschoen' - Naast de close-up versterkt het gebruik van zand in de verf het craquelé-effect in het leer | 'Ladies' shoe' - In addition to the close-up, the use of sand in the paint enhances the crackle effect in the leather.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

Antoine Vollon💫
#art #antoinevollon #realism #mastoart

Antoine Vollon💫
#art #antoinevollon #realism #mastoart

Antoine Vollon💫
#art #antoinevollon #realism #mastoart

"Self-Portrait with a Palette," Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa, 1887.

Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa (1854-93) was born to a Polish family in current-day Ukraine, and spent her childhood in Russia, learning drawing from instructors who were exiled from Moscow for their participation in the January Uprising.

Moving to Warsaw with her mother and siblings, she studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and later studied in Paris, the first Polish woman to do so. She exhibited with success for multiple years at the Paris Salon and this painting won a silver medal at the Paris Universal Exposition. Sadly, she died young from a heart condition, a few months after marrying.

This painting is one of her most famous; she depicts herself sitting and seemingly tired but satisfied, with mussed hair and a stained apron. Showing her personal fulfillment seems more important than being glamorous, it seems.

Happy Portrait Monday!

From the National Museum in Krakow.

#Art #AnnaBilińska_Bohdanowiczowa #WomenArtists #PortraitMonday #SelfPortrait #Realism

"Self-Portrait with a Palette," Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa, 1887.

Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa (1854-93) was born to a Polish family in current-day Ukraine, and spent her childhood in Russia, learning drawing from instructors who were exiled from Moscow for their participation in the January Uprising.

Moving to Warsaw with her mother and siblings, she studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and later studied in Paris, the first Polish woman to do so. She exhibited with success for multiple years at the Paris Salon and this painting won a silver medal at the Paris Universal Exposition. Sadly, she died young from a heart condition, a few months after marrying.

This painting is one of her most famous; she depicts herself sitting and seemingly tired but satisfied, with mussed hair and a stained apron. Showing her personal fulfillment seems more important than being glamorous, it seems.

Happy Portrait Monday!

From the National Museum in Krakow.

#Art #AnnaBilińska_Bohdanowiczowa #WomenArtists #PortraitMonday #SelfPortrait #Realism

"Self-Portrait with a Palette," Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa, 1887.

Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa (1854-93) was born to a Polish family in current-day Ukraine, and spent her childhood in Russia, learning drawing from instructors who were exiled from Moscow for their participation in the January Uprising.

Moving to Warsaw with her mother and siblings, she studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and later studied in Paris, the first Polish woman to do so. She exhibited with success for multiple years at the Paris Salon and this painting won a silver medal at the Paris Universal Exposition. Sadly, she died young from a heart condition, a few months after marrying.

This painting is one of her most famous; she depicts herself sitting and seemingly tired but satisfied, with mussed hair and a stained apron. Showing her personal fulfillment seems more important than being glamorous, it seems.

Happy Portrait Monday!

From the National Museum in Krakow.

#Art #AnnaBilińska_Bohdanowiczowa #WomenArtists #PortraitMonday #SelfPortrait #Realism

"Self-Portrait with a Palette," Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa, 1887.

Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa (1854-93) was born to a Polish family in current-day Ukraine, and spent her childhood in Russia, learning drawing from instructors who were exiled from Moscow for their participation in the January Uprising.

Moving to Warsaw with her mother and siblings, she studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and later studied in Paris, the first Polish woman to do so. She exhibited with success for multiple years at the Paris Salon and this painting won a silver medal at the Paris Universal Exposition. Sadly, she died young from a heart condition, a few months after marrying.

This painting is one of her most famous; she depicts herself sitting and seemingly tired but satisfied, with mussed hair and a stained apron. Showing her personal fulfillment seems more important than being glamorous, it seems.

Happy Portrait Monday!

From the National Museum in Krakow.

#Art #AnnaBilińska_Bohdanowiczowa #WomenArtists #PortraitMonday #SelfPortrait #Realism

"Self-Portrait with a Palette," Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa, 1887.

Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa (1854-93) was born to a Polish family in current-day Ukraine, and spent her childhood in Russia, learning drawing from instructors who were exiled from Moscow for their participation in the January Uprising.

Moving to Warsaw with her mother and siblings, she studied at the Warsaw Conservatory and later studied in Paris, the first Polish woman to do so. She exhibited with success for multiple years at the Paris Salon and this painting won a silver medal at the Paris Universal Exposition. Sadly, she died young from a heart condition, a few months after marrying.

This painting is one of her most famous; she depicts herself sitting and seemingly tired but satisfied, with mussed hair and a stained apron. Showing her personal fulfillment seems more important than being glamorous, it seems.

Happy Portrait Monday!

From the National Museum in Krakow.

#Art #AnnaBilińska_Bohdanowiczowa #WomenArtists #PortraitMonday #SelfPortrait #Realism

'Pulcinella met gitaar' 1923
Vooral de achtergrond achter het witte pierrotpak maakt dit schilderij fascinerend | It is the background behind the white Pierrot costume in particular that makes this painting so fascinating.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

'Pulcinella met gitaar' 1923
Vooral de achtergrond achter het witte pierrotpak maakt dit schilderij fascinerend | It is the background behind the white Pierrot costume in particular that makes this painting so fascinating.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

'Pulcinella met gitaar' 1923
Vooral de achtergrond achter het witte pierrotpak maakt dit schilderij fascinerend | It is the background behind the white Pierrot costume in particular that makes this painting so fascinating.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

'Pulcinella met gitaar' 1923
Vooral de achtergrond achter het witte pierrotpak maakt dit schilderij fascinerend | It is the background behind the white Pierrot costume in particular that makes this painting so fascinating.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

'Pulcinella met gitaar' 1923
Vooral de achtergrond achter het witte pierrotpak maakt dit schilderij fascinerend | It is the background behind the white Pierrot costume in particular that makes this painting so fascinating.
Gino Severini‪ in #Museum More.‬
‪#museummore #artmuseum‬ ‪‪#art‬‬ ‪‪#surrealism‬ #realism ‬

Oh how nice it is to wake up and do my first stretches of the day!

Title: First Stretch of the Day
Size A5

Art prints are available here: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/first-stretch-of-the-day-print
Separate sticker: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/stretching-kitten-sticker
Cats sticker sheet is available: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/cats-sticker-sheet-colorful-laminated

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Oh how nice it is to wake up and do my first stretches of the day!

Title: First Stretch of the Day
Size A5

Art prints are available here: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/first-stretch-of-the-day-print
Separate sticker: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/stretching-kitten-sticker
Cats sticker sheet is available: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/cats-sticker-sheet-colorful-laminated

#MastoArt #TraditionalArt #Art
#Cats #Realism #Artwork #Watercolor #Aquarelle

Oh how nice it is to wake up and do my first stretches of the day!

Title: First Stretch of the Day
Size A5

Art prints are available here: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/first-stretch-of-the-day-print
Separate sticker: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/stretching-kitten-sticker
Cats sticker sheet is available: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/cats-sticker-sheet-colorful-laminated

#MastoArt #TraditionalArt #Art
#Cats #Realism #Artwork #Watercolor #Aquarelle

Oh how nice it is to wake up and do my first stretches of the day!

Title: First Stretch of the Day
Size A5

Art prints are available here: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/first-stretch-of-the-day-print
Separate sticker: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/stretching-kitten-sticker
Cats sticker sheet is available: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/cats-sticker-sheet-colorful-laminated

#MastoArt #TraditionalArt #Art
#Cats #Realism #Artwork #Watercolor #Aquarelle

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@InsurgoFormica
Inequality and Inequity both have sharply increased the gulf between the wealthy and the rest of us. This is especially so since the mid-70s and the crazy notion that markets self-regulate and wealth trickles down from the top (how did we ever get hoodwinked into believing this shit?)

Now, the whole economic edifice is shaking from its foundations and the #oligarchy is lost to the rest of humanity (just as scrooge was to his family). You all know what comes next don’t you…? Scrooge was ‘saved’ but that’s fairy tale stuff, our reality is much less forgiving.

#Pessimism #Realism

/time_to_change_subject_I_am_leaving_the_Keyboard_for_a_while/

@InsurgoFormica
Inequality and Inequity both have sharply increased the gulf between the wealthy and the rest of us. This is especially so since the mid-70s and the crazy notion that markets self-regulate and wealth trickles down from the top (how did we ever get hoodwinked into believing this shit?)

Now, the whole economic edifice is shaking from its foundations and the #oligarchy is lost to the rest of humanity (just as scrooge was to his family). You all know what comes next don’t you…? Scrooge was ‘saved’ but that’s fairy tale stuff, our reality is much less forgiving.

#Pessimism #Realism

/time_to_change_subject_I_am_leaving_the_Keyboard_for_a_while/

@InsurgoFormica
Inequality and Inequity both have sharply increased the gulf between the wealthy and the rest of us. This is especially so since the mid-70s and the crazy notion that markets self-regulate and wealth trickles down from the top (how did we ever get hoodwinked into believing this shit?)

Now, the whole economic edifice is shaking from its foundations and the #oligarchy is lost to the rest of humanity (just as scrooge was to his family). You all know what comes next don’t you…? Scrooge was ‘saved’ but that’s fairy tale stuff, our reality is much less forgiving.

#Pessimism #Realism

/time_to_change_subject_I_am_leaving_the_Keyboard_for_a_while/

@InsurgoFormica
Inequality and Inequity both have sharply increased the gulf between the wealthy and the rest of us. This is especially so since the mid-70s and the crazy notion that markets self-regulate and wealth trickles down from the top (how did we ever get hoodwinked into believing this shit?)

Now, the whole economic edifice is shaking from its foundations and the #oligarchy is lost to the rest of humanity (just as scrooge was to his family). You all know what comes next don’t you…? Scrooge was ‘saved’ but that’s fairy tale stuff, our reality is much less forgiving.

#Pessimism #Realism

/time_to_change_subject_I_am_leaving_the_Keyboard_for_a_while/

@InsurgoFormica
Inequality and Inequity both have sharply increased the gulf between the wealthy and the rest of us. This is especially so since the mid-70s and the crazy notion that markets self-regulate and wealth trickles down from the top (how did we ever get hoodwinked into believing this shit?)

Now, the whole economic edifice is shaking from its foundations and the #oligarchy is lost to the rest of humanity (just as scrooge was to his family). You all know what comes next don’t you…? Scrooge was ‘saved’ but that’s fairy tale stuff, our reality is much less forgiving.

#Pessimism #Realism

/time_to_change_subject_I_am_leaving_the_Keyboard_for_a_while/

Gustav Klimt was just 17 years old when in 1879 he drew this charcoal and black chalk portrait, titled "Portrait of a Girl, Head Slightly Turned Left".

Already at that young age he demonstrated superb technical mastery of the use of shadow to create a three-dimensional image on paper.

#Art #Portrait #Realism

Gustav Klimt was just 17 years old when in 1879 he drew this charcoal and black chalk portrait, titled "Portrait of a Girl, Head Slightly Turned Left".

Already at that young age he demonstrated superb technical mastery of the use of shadow to create a three-dimensional image on paper.

#Art #Portrait #Realism

Gustav Klimt was just 17 years old when in 1879 he drew this charcoal and black chalk portrait, titled "Portrait of a Girl, Head Slightly Turned Left".

Already at that young age he demonstrated superb technical mastery of the use of shadow to create a three-dimensional image on paper.

#Art #Portrait #Realism

Gustav Klimt was just 17 years old when in 1879 he drew this charcoal and black chalk portrait, titled "Portrait of a Girl, Head Slightly Turned Left".

Already at that young age he demonstrated superb technical mastery of the use of shadow to create a three-dimensional image on paper.

#Art #Portrait #Realism

You probably know the feeling when an eyelash is in your eye and you have to take it out somehow. What if it where whiskers that were attached to your face? And you were just trying to wake up as well?
Title: It's Too Early in the Morning to Open My Eyes

Art prints: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/too-early-to-open-my-eyes-print
Separate sticker: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/it-too-early-sticker
Cats sticker sheet: https://www.
iseriksonartist.com/store/p/cats-sticker-sheet-colorful-laminated

#MastoArt #TraditionalArt #Art
#Cats #Realism #Artwork #Watercolor

You probably know the feeling when an eyelash is in your eye and you have to take it out somehow. What if it where whiskers that were attached to your face? And you were just trying to wake up as well?
Title: It's Too Early in the Morning to Open My Eyes

Art prints: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/too-early-to-open-my-eyes-print
Separate sticker: https://www.iseriksonartist.com/store/p/it-too-early-sticker
Cats sticker sheet: https://www.
iseriksonartist.com/store/p/cats-sticker-sheet-colorful-laminated

#MastoArt #TraditionalArt #Art
#Cats #Realism #Artwork #Watercolor