#reflexivity — Public Fediverse posts

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.

Edward Said's lecture anno 1993: "Gods That Always Fail":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtU0KnI-cx8

#colonialism #intellectual #research #politics #reflexivity #palestina

What I never understood about #PredictionMarkets like #Polymarket: how do they deal with the problem of #reflexivity and the moral issue of creating potentially troubling incentives for undesireable events to happen (to reward those betting on those outcomes)?

What I never understood about #PredictionMarkets like #Polymarket: how do they deal with the problem of #reflexivity and the moral issue of creating potentially troubling incentives for undesireable events to happen (to reward those betting on those outcomes)?

What I never understood about #PredictionMarkets like #Polymarket: how do they deal with the problem of #reflexivity and the moral issue of creating potentially troubling incentives for undesireable events to happen (to reward those betting on those outcomes)?

What I never understood about #PredictionMarkets like #Polymarket: how do they deal with the problem of #reflexivity and the moral issue of creating potentially troubling incentives for undesireable events to happen (to reward those betting on those outcomes)?

What I never understood about #PredictionMarkets like #Polymarket: how do they deal with the problem of #reflexivity and the moral issue of creating potentially troubling incentives for undesireable events to happen (to reward those betting on those outcomes)?

What do you need to become who you are?

It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come… – The Gay Science

When I was a 17 year old student it felt urgent that I found my way to London as quickly as possible. I didn’t know why, it just did. In contrast the vast majority of students at my college were trying to stay as near possible to Manchester. Indeed many of them went to Leeds en masse and it seemed, until I deleted Facebook, many of them remained connected. Why did I want to break apart and why did they want to stay together? It was the first sociological question I ever asked and it’s one which in many ways I’ve spent my entire career circling around. It’s an exemplar of what Margaret Archer terms the problem of reflexivity: why do people in similar circumstances nonetheless make different choices? There’s a whole conceptual vocabulary she developed which speaks to that initial question in rich and sophisticated ways. It wasn’t that I hated my environment, in the sense in which I needed to get away. I was already drifting towards a life in central Manchester, away from my college, finding a community in the anarchist movement. In this sense I wasn’t what she termed in The Reflexive Imperative a rejector but rather a disengaged in the stance I took towards this context:

“They manifested a critical detachment from their parents and dissociation from the modus vivendi in which they had been reared. Reviewing the dissensus characterizing their parents’ way of life, these subjects’ evaluation was that ‘there must be better than this’ and an avowed desire that their own would indeed be different.”

I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I couldn’t find it here. I was experiencing what in her earlier work she described as contextual incongruity: a mismatch between nascent aspirations and the cultural resources of my environment. It’s one of the least well developed concepts in her framework but I think one of the most salient. It’s not simply the fact of social change, novel situations which intergeneration socialisation can’t prepare someone for, but an active incongruity between the existential challenges raised by those situations and the cultural resources offered by the environment for thinking them through. It’s not just that you can’t identify a way of knitting together concerns into a mode of life within the environment, it’s that you can’t find what you need to see how to do this. There’s just a diffuse sense that something more is needed. The horizon needs to expand in some way. This immediately takes us into terrain which is more characteristic of philosophy and psychoanalysis than sociology, even if I think the dividing lines between these fields are more porous the tends to be assumed. There’s a preverbal element to it which I went through a phase of describing as a discursive gap, which is a theme I explored through my asexuality research.

I found myself reflecting on this in late December because I suddenly had the urge to read Nietzsche for the first time in years. Almost a decade in fact, since I read the Gay Science and Ecco Homo after finishing my PhD in 2014. In the preface to Human, All Too Human describes what he terms “the great separation”:

“For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out – it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in the senses.”

What he describes as “a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy” is, I think, a particularly forceful response to what Archer calls contextual incongruity. In his description of “this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorzation” we can perhaps begin to excavate the philosophical richness of the predicament that Archer addresses in a sociological register: if I don’t have what I need here, where do I go? Indeed what is it that I need and for what purpose? The way Nietzsche describes the retrospective illumination of these questions, in which one “begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory” speaks of (meta)reflexivity in Archer’s sense:

“You had to gain power over your For and Against and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment.”

You have to learn what matters to you. Which is hard. Harder I think then Archer often seems to suggest, sympathetic though she is to the difficulties of her research subjects. As Nietzsche puts it “Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present”. We know we need to do something but we’re not yet sure what that is. Or if we know what matters to us, we cannot see how to live in a way that expresses this. This is where Archer’s fondness for Taylor’s ‘unity of a life’ (which I concur with ontologically but which increasingly strikes me as psychoanalytically untenable) leads to a smoothing over of the messiness of this process. However when I read this alongside Nietzsche’s Ecco Homo I’m struck by the utterly quotidian way in which he talks about this challenge. He’s articulating a craft of living, the way to better or worse decisions in real world situations, in a way that would sound almost Aristotelian if you changed the mode of expression somewhat. I wonder how many people have tended to overlook the almost fussy quality of Nietzsche’s observations here, regarding them as empirical fluff alongside the philosophical substance.

#archer #change #development #metaReflexivity #Nietzsche #personalMorphogenesis #reflexivity

What do you need to become who you are?

It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come… – The Gay Science

When I was a 17 year old student it felt urgent that I found my way to London as quickly as possible. I didn’t know why, it just did. In contrast the vast majority of students at my college were trying to stay as near possible to Manchester. Indeed many of them went to Leeds en masse and it seemed, until I deleted Facebook, many of them remained connected. Why did I want to break apart and why did they want to stay together? It was the first sociological question I ever asked and it’s one which in many ways I’ve spent my entire career circling around. It’s an exemplar of what Margaret Archer terms the problem of reflexivity: why do people in similar circumstances nonetheless make different choices? There’s a whole conceptual vocabulary she developed which speaks to that initial question in rich and sophisticated ways. It wasn’t that I hated my environment, in the sense in which I needed to get away. I was already drifting towards a life in central Manchester, away from my college, finding a community in the anarchist movement. In this sense I wasn’t what she termed in The Reflexive Imperative a rejector but rather a disengaged in the stance I took towards this context:

“They manifested a critical detachment from their parents and dissociation from the modus vivendi in which they had been reared. Reviewing the dissensus characterizing their parents’ way of life, these subjects’ evaluation was that ‘there must be better than this’ and an avowed desire that their own would indeed be different.”

I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I couldn’t find it here. I was experiencing what in her earlier work she described as contextual incongruity: a mismatch between nascent aspirations and the cultural resources of my environment. It’s one of the least well developed concepts in her framework but I think one of the most salient. It’s not simply the fact of social change, novel situations which intergeneration socialisation can’t prepare someone for, but an active incongruity between the existential challenges raised by those situations and the cultural resources offered by the environment for thinking them through. It’s not just that you can’t identify a way of knitting together concerns into a mode of life within the environment, it’s that you can’t find what you need to see how to do this. There’s just a diffuse sense that something more is needed. The horizon needs to expand in some way. This immediately takes us into terrain which is more characteristic of philosophy and psychoanalysis than sociology, even if I think the dividing lines between these fields are more porous the tends to be assumed. There’s a preverbal element to it which I went through a phase of describing as a discursive gap, which is a theme I explored through my asexuality research.

I found myself reflecting on this in late December because I suddenly had the urge to read Nietzsche for the first time in years. Almost a decade in fact, since I read the Gay Science and Ecco Homo after finishing my PhD in 2014. In the preface to Human, All Too Human describes what he terms “the great separation”:

“For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out – it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in the senses.”

What he describes as “a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy” is, I think, a particularly forceful response to what Archer calls contextual incongruity. In his description of “this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorzation” we can perhaps begin to excavate the philosophical richness of the predicament that Archer addresses in a sociological register: if I don’t have what I need here, where do I go? Indeed what is it that I need and for what purpose? The way Nietzsche describes the retrospective illumination of these questions, in which one “begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory” speaks of (meta)reflexivity in Archer’s sense:

“You had to gain power over your For and Against and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment.”

You have to learn what matters to you. Which is hard. Harder I think then Archer often seems to suggest, sympathetic though she is to the difficulties of her research subjects. As Nietzsche puts it “Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present”. We know we need to do something but we’re not yet sure what that is. Or if we know what matters to us, we cannot see how to live in a way that expresses this. This is where Archer’s fondness for Taylor’s ‘unity of a life’ (which I concur with ontologically but which increasingly strikes me as psychoanalytically untenable) leads to a smoothing over of the messiness of this process. However when I read this alongside Nietzsche’s Ecco Homo I’m struck by the utterly quotidian way in which he talks about this challenge. He’s articulating a craft of living, the way to better or worse decisions in real world situations, in a way that would sound almost Aristotelian if you changed the mode of expression somewhat. I wonder how many people have tended to overlook the almost fussy quality of Nietzsche’s observations here, regarding them as empirical fluff alongside the philosophical substance.

#archer #change #development #metaReflexivity #Nietzsche #personalMorphogenesis #reflexivity

What do you need to become who you are?

It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come… – The Gay Science

When I was a 17 year old student it felt urgent that I found my way to London as quickly as possible. I didn’t know why, it just did. In contrast the vast majority of students at my college were trying to stay as near possible to Manchester. Indeed many of them went to Leeds en masse and it seemed, until I deleted Facebook, many of them remained connected. Why did I want to break apart and why did they want to stay together? It was the first sociological question I ever asked and it’s one which in many ways I’ve spent my entire career circling around. It’s an exemplar of what Margaret Archer terms the problem of reflexivity: why do people in similar circumstances nonetheless make different choices? There’s a whole conceptual vocabulary she developed which speaks to that initial question in rich and sophisticated ways. It wasn’t that I hated my environment, in the sense in which I needed to get away. I was already drifting towards a life in central Manchester, away from my college, finding a community in the anarchist movement. In this sense I wasn’t what she termed in The Reflexive Imperative a rejector but rather a disengaged in the stance I took towards this context:

“They manifested a critical detachment from their parents and dissociation from the modus vivendi in which they had been reared. Reviewing the dissensus characterizing their parents’ way of life, these subjects’ evaluation was that ‘there must be better than this’ and an avowed desire that their own would indeed be different.”

I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I couldn’t find it here. I was experiencing what in her earlier work she described as contextual incongruity: a mismatch between nascent aspirations and the cultural resources of my environment. It’s one of the least well developed concepts in her framework but I think one of the most salient. It’s not simply the fact of social change, novel situations which intergeneration socialisation can’t prepare someone for, but an active incongruity between the existential challenges raised by those situations and the cultural resources offered by the environment for thinking them through. It’s not just that you can’t identify a way of knitting together concerns into a mode of life within the environment, it’s that you can’t find what you need to see how to do this. There’s just a diffuse sense that something more is needed. The horizon needs to expand in some way. This immediately takes us into terrain which is more characteristic of philosophy and psychoanalysis than sociology, even if I think the dividing lines between these fields are more porous the tends to be assumed. There’s a preverbal element to it which I went through a phase of describing as a discursive gap, which is a theme I explored through my asexuality research.

I found myself reflecting on this in late December because I suddenly had the urge to read Nietzsche for the first time in years. Almost a decade in fact, since I read the Gay Science and Ecco Homo after finishing my PhD in 2014. In the preface to Human, All Too Human describes what he terms “the great separation”:

“For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out – it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in the senses.”

What he describes as “a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy” is, I think, a particularly forceful response to what Archer calls contextual incongruity. In his description of “this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorzation” we can perhaps begin to excavate the philosophical richness of the predicament that Archer addresses in a sociological register: if I don’t have what I need here, where do I go? Indeed what is it that I need and for what purpose? The way Nietzsche describes the retrospective illumination of these questions, in which one “begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory” speaks of (meta)reflexivity in Archer’s sense:

“You had to gain power over your For and Against and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment.”

You have to learn what matters to you. Which is hard. Harder I think then Archer often seems to suggest, sympathetic though she is to the difficulties of her research subjects. As Nietzsche puts it “Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present”. We know we need to do something but we’re not yet sure what that is. Or if we know what matters to us, we cannot see how to live in a way that expresses this. This is where Archer’s fondness for Taylor’s ‘unity of a life’ (which I concur with ontologically but which increasingly strikes me as psychoanalytically untenable) leads to a smoothing over of the messiness of this process. However when I read this alongside Nietzsche’s Ecco Homo I’m struck by the utterly quotidian way in which he talks about this challenge. He’s articulating a craft of living, the way to better or worse decisions in real world situations, in a way that would sound almost Aristotelian if you changed the mode of expression somewhat. I wonder how many people have tended to overlook the almost fussy quality of Nietzsche’s observations here, regarding them as empirical fluff alongside the philosophical substance.

#archer #change #development #metaReflexivity #Nietzsche #personalMorphogenesis #reflexivity

What do you need to become who you are?

It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come… – The Gay Science

When I was a 17 year old student it felt urgent that I found my way to London as quickly as possible. I didn’t know why, it just did. In contrast the vast majority of students at my college were trying to stay as near possible to Manchester. Indeed many of them went to Leeds en masse and it seemed, until I deleted Facebook, many of them remained connected. Why did I want to break apart and why did they want to stay together? It was the first sociological question I ever asked and it’s one which in many ways I’ve spent my entire career circling around. It’s an exemplar of what Margaret Archer terms the problem of reflexivity: why do people in similar circumstances nonetheless make different choices? There’s a whole conceptual vocabulary she developed which speaks to that initial question in rich and sophisticated ways. It wasn’t that I hated my environment, in the sense in which I needed to get away. I was already drifting towards a life in central Manchester, away from my college, finding a community in the anarchist movement. In this sense I wasn’t what she termed in The Reflexive Imperative a rejector but rather a disengaged in the stance I took towards this context:

“They manifested a critical detachment from their parents and dissociation from the modus vivendi in which they had been reared. Reviewing the dissensus characterizing their parents’ way of life, these subjects’ evaluation was that ‘there must be better than this’ and an avowed desire that their own would indeed be different.”

I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I couldn’t find it here. I was experiencing what in her earlier work she described as contextual incongruity: a mismatch between nascent aspirations and the cultural resources of my environment. It’s one of the least well developed concepts in her framework but I think one of the most salient. It’s not simply the fact of social change, novel situations which intergeneration socialisation can’t prepare someone for, but an active incongruity between the existential challenges raised by those situations and the cultural resources offered by the environment for thinking them through. It’s not just that you can’t identify a way of knitting together concerns into a mode of life within the environment, it’s that you can’t find what you need to see how to do this. There’s just a diffuse sense that something more is needed. The horizon needs to expand in some way. This immediately takes us into terrain which is more characteristic of philosophy and psychoanalysis than sociology, even if I think the dividing lines between these fields are more porous the tends to be assumed. There’s a preverbal element to it which I went through a phase of describing as a discursive gap, which is a theme I explored through my asexuality research.

I found myself reflecting on this in late December because I suddenly had the urge to read Nietzsche for the first time in years. Almost a decade in fact, since I read the Gay Science and Ecco Homo after finishing my PhD in 2014. In the preface to Human, All Too Human describes what he terms “the great separation”:

“For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out – it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in the senses.”

What he describes as “a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy” is, I think, a particularly forceful response to what Archer calls contextual incongruity. In his description of “this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorzation” we can perhaps begin to excavate the philosophical richness of the predicament that Archer addresses in a sociological register: if I don’t have what I need here, where do I go? Indeed what is it that I need and for what purpose? The way Nietzsche describes the retrospective illumination of these questions, in which one “begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory” speaks of (meta)reflexivity in Archer’s sense:

“You had to gain power over your For and Against and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment.”

You have to learn what matters to you. Which is hard. Harder I think then Archer often seems to suggest, sympathetic though she is to the difficulties of her research subjects. As Nietzsche puts it “Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present”. We know we need to do something but we’re not yet sure what that is. Or if we know what matters to us, we cannot see how to live in a way that expresses this. This is where Archer’s fondness for Taylor’s ‘unity of a life’ (which I concur with ontologically but which increasingly strikes me as psychoanalytically untenable) leads to a smoothing over of the messiness of this process. However when I read this alongside Nietzsche’s Ecco Homo I’m struck by the utterly quotidian way in which he talks about this challenge. He’s articulating a craft of living, the way to better or worse decisions in real world situations, in a way that would sound almost Aristotelian if you changed the mode of expression somewhat. I wonder how many people have tended to overlook the almost fussy quality of Nietzsche’s observations here, regarding them as empirical fluff alongside the philosophical substance.

#archer #change #development #metaReflexivity #Nietzsche #personalMorphogenesis #reflexivity

I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog

1. Agency

Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt options available to a person.

2. Reflexivity

Reflexivity is the ordinary capacity to consider oneself in relation to circumstances and circumstances in relation to oneself, under descriptions that are fallible but practically consequential. I treat it as causal, not as commentary. It is part of how people navigate constraints and enablements, and part of how those constraints and enablements become socially effective.

3. Reflexive imperative

The reflexive imperative names a historical pressure: circumstances change in ways that make routine life less routinised, so more has to be actively worked out. The imperative is not that everyone becomes wise, only that more people are pushed into more frequent, more consequential deliberation about how to proceed.

4. Internal conversation

Internal conversation is the everyday mental activity through which reflexivity happens. I use it as a way of taking inner life seriously without reducing it to language or treating it as a sealed private theatre. It includes mulling over, planning, rehearsing, re living, prioritising, and the other mundane genres of thinking that shape what we do.

5. Internal conversation as object relating

This is a newer formulation, but it clarifies something I have been circling for a long time. When we talk to ourselves, we take ourselves as an object. That makes internal conversation a form of object relating, and it opens a route for bringing psychoanalytic concerns about dependency, address, and affect into sociological accounts of reflexivity without turning psychoanalysis into decoration.

6. Modes of reflexivity

I treat “modes” as patterns, not boxes. Communicative reflexivity needs confirmation by others, autonomous reflexivity moves directly from inner dialogue to action, meta reflexivity evaluates prior inner dialogues and worries over what counts as effective action, and fractured reflexivity intensifies distress without yielding purposive courses of action. The point is not typology for its own sake, but a way of opening up how different people cope differently with the same world.

7. Concerns

Concerns are what matter to people in a way that can organise action. They are not preferences in the consumer sense, and not values floating above life. They are the objects around which deliberation coheres, the things we find ourselves caring about, sometimes despite ourselves.

8. Personal morphogenesis

Personal morphogenesis is the long arc of how a person becomes otherwise, over time, through the interplay of concerns, circumstances, and reflexive work. It is my preferred way of resisting both the fantasy of total self authorship and the fatalism of total social determination.

9. Distraction

Distraction is not mere lack of willpower. It is an environmental condition that disrupts the temporal and spatial conditions for reflexivity, while simultaneously multiplying stimuli and options in a way that makes reflexivity more necessary. I often use it as a mechanism linking platform environments to lived agency.

10. Cognitive triage

Cognitive triage is the habit of attending to what is urgent at the expense of what is important, when demands outstrip capacity. It is not only a personal coping style, but a cultural and organisational pattern, one that can leak into everything, turning life into an endless sequence of clearance operations.

11. Communicative escalation

Communicative escalation is the intensification of communicative demands and cues. More messages, more channels, more expectation of responsiveness, more performance of presence. I use it to describe a shift in what it takes to be “in” a social or organisational world, and how that shift changes attention, anxiety, and the possibility of sustained trajectories.

12. Cultural abundance

Cultural abundance is the proliferation of cultural objects competing for attention, interpretation, and incorporation. It names the background condition in which selection becomes harder, because there is always more to read, watch, listen to, respond to, and be seen responding to.

13. Accelerated academy

The accelerated academy is not just “working faster.” It is a structural condition of temporal pressure, audit expectations, communicative escalation, and intensification, with personal and epistemic consequences. The key point is that acceleration is not merely experienced, it is organised.

14. Busyness

Busyness is often treated as a virtue, a marker of importance, or a kind of moral alibi. I tend to treat it as an ambiguous signal: sometimes a symptom of real load, sometimes a competitive performance, often both. It matters because busyness reshapes what we can notice, and thus what we can criticise.

15. Platform capitalism

Platform capitalism is my way of insisting that platforms are not neutral media. They are business models, incentive structures, and infrastructural enclosures that reorganise social activity around extraction and monetisation. When I use the phrase, I am usually pointing to how economic incentives shape epistemic and affective environments.

16. Platforms as structure

I resist treating platforms as tools or mere environments. I treat them as socio technical structures with emergent powers, shaping action without determining it. This is central to the argument of Platform and Agency, where platforms appear as a fourth dimension needed for describing contemporary morphogenesis.

17. Platformisation

Platformisation is the diffusion of platform logics into domains that were not previously organised that way, including universities. It is about organisational dependence on platform infrastructures, and the subtle shift from local governance to externally set terms of engagement.

18. Epistemic chaos

Epistemic chaos is the breakdown of shared doxa and shared epistemic standards, alongside the multiplication of challenges to whatever remains. It is not simply misinformation. It is an environment in which certainty becomes harder to ground and easier to perform, often through platforms whose incentives reward salience over settlement.

19. Epistemic flooding

Epistemic flooding is a specific mechanism within epistemic chaos. It refers to chronic exposure to more information and evidence than can be diligently processed, in a way that reshapes everyday epistemic practices and affects communities as well as individuals.

20. Post truth

I use post truth less as a claim about individual dishonesty and more as a description of infrastructural conditions in which factuality is harder to stabilise. In that sense, generative systems intensify existing dynamics rather than inaugurating them.

21. Meta content explosion

The meta content explosion is the proliferation of derivative, automated, and semi automated content that clogs the channels through which attention and knowledge circulate. It is one way generative systems feed back into the attention economies of platforms, increasing noise and raising the cost of discernment.

22. Lifeworld

Lifeworld is a deliberately unfashionable term I keep returning to because it names the texture of everyday activity, habits, norms, and practical reasoning. It is the space in which technologies become ordinary, not because they become morally neutral, but because they become woven into what people do without needing constant explicit decision.

23. Colonisation of the lifeworld

Colonisation is the movement by which system logics, including market and managerial logics, intrude into everyday meaning making and social relations. When I invoke it around platforms, I am pointing to how infrastructural dependence can reorganise what counts as participation, relevance, and success.

24. LLMs in the lifeworld

This is a way of naming the shift from “chatbot as novelty” to “language model as ambient infrastructure.” It is not a claim that everyone uses them constantly, but a claim about how they begin to appear in ordinary tasks, organisational expectations, and cultural assumptions. The term is meant to keep attention on embedding, not only on capability.

25. Assessment panic

Assessment panic names the early wave of institutional anxiety about substitution, integrity, and control when machine generated text became widely available. The term matters because panic narrows the problem frame, making detection seem like the obvious solution, and obscuring longer term questions about what assessment is for in a world where generative tools are ubiquitous.

26. Detection scepticism

Detection scepticism is not a moral posture. It is an empirical and practical stance: tools do not authoritatively identify machine generated text, and the harms of false positives, including the uneven distribution of suspicion, are predictable. I use this to argue that institutional responses must move away from the fantasy of technical fixes.

27. Dialogical toxicity

Dialogical toxicity is the tendency of platform incentives to generate interactional styles that corrode conversation, including for academics engaging in public scholarship. I treat it as organisationally consequential, because it reshapes what “public engagement” costs and who is willing to pay it.

28. Public scholarship

Public scholarship is not simply “being visible.” It is a mode of sociological practice that depends on infrastructures, norms, and support, and it can be enabled or undermined by the platforms on which it is attempted. I increasingly treat conversational agents as a new support for public work, while insisting that this support sits inside platform capitalism and inherits its tensions.

29. Enshittification

Enshittification is a process term. It names how a service degrades through successive rounds of extraction, rent seeking, and reorientation toward monetisation, not merely that it “gets worse.” I use it to keep the focus on mechanisms and incentives, and I worry when the term becomes a loose insult rather than an analytic tool.

30. Exit costs

Exit costs are what make “you can always leave” into a half truth. They include loss of social ties, professional visibility, archives, habits, and the simple friction of rebuilding elsewhere. They matter because many platform promises rely on the fiction of easy exit, while quietly deepening dependence.

#blog #blogging #GPT52 #reflexivity #theorising #theory

I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog

1. Agency

Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt options available to a person.

2. Reflexivity

Reflexivity is the ordinary capacity to consider oneself in relation to circumstances and circumstances in relation to oneself, under descriptions that are fallible but practically consequential. I treat it as causal, not as commentary. It is part of how people navigate constraints and enablements, and part of how those constraints and enablements become socially effective.

3. Reflexive imperative

The reflexive imperative names a historical pressure: circumstances change in ways that make routine life less routinised, so more has to be actively worked out. The imperative is not that everyone becomes wise, only that more people are pushed into more frequent, more consequential deliberation about how to proceed.

4. Internal conversation

Internal conversation is the everyday mental activity through which reflexivity happens. I use it as a way of taking inner life seriously without reducing it to language or treating it as a sealed private theatre. It includes mulling over, planning, rehearsing, re living, prioritising, and the other mundane genres of thinking that shape what we do.

5. Internal conversation as object relating

This is a newer formulation, but it clarifies something I have been circling for a long time. When we talk to ourselves, we take ourselves as an object. That makes internal conversation a form of object relating, and it opens a route for bringing psychoanalytic concerns about dependency, address, and affect into sociological accounts of reflexivity without turning psychoanalysis into decoration.

6. Modes of reflexivity

I treat “modes” as patterns, not boxes. Communicative reflexivity needs confirmation by others, autonomous reflexivity moves directly from inner dialogue to action, meta reflexivity evaluates prior inner dialogues and worries over what counts as effective action, and fractured reflexivity intensifies distress without yielding purposive courses of action. The point is not typology for its own sake, but a way of opening up how different people cope differently with the same world.

7. Concerns

Concerns are what matter to people in a way that can organise action. They are not preferences in the consumer sense, and not values floating above life. They are the objects around which deliberation coheres, the things we find ourselves caring about, sometimes despite ourselves.

8. Personal morphogenesis

Personal morphogenesis is the long arc of how a person becomes otherwise, over time, through the interplay of concerns, circumstances, and reflexive work. It is my preferred way of resisting both the fantasy of total self authorship and the fatalism of total social determination.

9. Distraction

Distraction is not mere lack of willpower. It is an environmental condition that disrupts the temporal and spatial conditions for reflexivity, while simultaneously multiplying stimuli and options in a way that makes reflexivity more necessary. I often use it as a mechanism linking platform environments to lived agency.

10. Cognitive triage

Cognitive triage is the habit of attending to what is urgent at the expense of what is important, when demands outstrip capacity. It is not only a personal coping style, but a cultural and organisational pattern, one that can leak into everything, turning life into an endless sequence of clearance operations.

11. Communicative escalation

Communicative escalation is the intensification of communicative demands and cues. More messages, more channels, more expectation of responsiveness, more performance of presence. I use it to describe a shift in what it takes to be “in” a social or organisational world, and how that shift changes attention, anxiety, and the possibility of sustained trajectories.

12. Cultural abundance

Cultural abundance is the proliferation of cultural objects competing for attention, interpretation, and incorporation. It names the background condition in which selection becomes harder, because there is always more to read, watch, listen to, respond to, and be seen responding to.

13. Accelerated academy

The accelerated academy is not just “working faster.” It is a structural condition of temporal pressure, audit expectations, communicative escalation, and intensification, with personal and epistemic consequences. The key point is that acceleration is not merely experienced, it is organised.

14. Busyness

Busyness is often treated as a virtue, a marker of importance, or a kind of moral alibi. I tend to treat it as an ambiguous signal: sometimes a symptom of real load, sometimes a competitive performance, often both. It matters because busyness reshapes what we can notice, and thus what we can criticise.

15. Platform capitalism

Platform capitalism is my way of insisting that platforms are not neutral media. They are business models, incentive structures, and infrastructural enclosures that reorganise social activity around extraction and monetisation. When I use the phrase, I am usually pointing to how economic incentives shape epistemic and affective environments.

16. Platforms as structure

I resist treating platforms as tools or mere environments. I treat them as socio technical structures with emergent powers, shaping action without determining it. This is central to the argument of Platform and Agency, where platforms appear as a fourth dimension needed for describing contemporary morphogenesis.

17. Platformisation

Platformisation is the diffusion of platform logics into domains that were not previously organised that way, including universities. It is about organisational dependence on platform infrastructures, and the subtle shift from local governance to externally set terms of engagement.

18. Epistemic chaos

Epistemic chaos is the breakdown of shared doxa and shared epistemic standards, alongside the multiplication of challenges to whatever remains. It is not simply misinformation. It is an environment in which certainty becomes harder to ground and easier to perform, often through platforms whose incentives reward salience over settlement.

19. Epistemic flooding

Epistemic flooding is a specific mechanism within epistemic chaos. It refers to chronic exposure to more information and evidence than can be diligently processed, in a way that reshapes everyday epistemic practices and affects communities as well as individuals.

20. Post truth

I use post truth less as a claim about individual dishonesty and more as a description of infrastructural conditions in which factuality is harder to stabilise. In that sense, generative systems intensify existing dynamics rather than inaugurating them.

21. Meta content explosion

The meta content explosion is the proliferation of derivative, automated, and semi automated content that clogs the channels through which attention and knowledge circulate. It is one way generative systems feed back into the attention economies of platforms, increasing noise and raising the cost of discernment.

22. Lifeworld

Lifeworld is a deliberately unfashionable term I keep returning to because it names the texture of everyday activity, habits, norms, and practical reasoning. It is the space in which technologies become ordinary, not because they become morally neutral, but because they become woven into what people do without needing constant explicit decision.

23. Colonisation of the lifeworld

Colonisation is the movement by which system logics, including market and managerial logics, intrude into everyday meaning making and social relations. When I invoke it around platforms, I am pointing to how infrastructural dependence can reorganise what counts as participation, relevance, and success.

24. LLMs in the lifeworld

This is a way of naming the shift from “chatbot as novelty” to “language model as ambient infrastructure.” It is not a claim that everyone uses them constantly, but a claim about how they begin to appear in ordinary tasks, organisational expectations, and cultural assumptions. The term is meant to keep attention on embedding, not only on capability.

25. Assessment panic

Assessment panic names the early wave of institutional anxiety about substitution, integrity, and control when machine generated text became widely available. The term matters because panic narrows the problem frame, making detection seem like the obvious solution, and obscuring longer term questions about what assessment is for in a world where generative tools are ubiquitous.

26. Detection scepticism

Detection scepticism is not a moral posture. It is an empirical and practical stance: tools do not authoritatively identify machine generated text, and the harms of false positives, including the uneven distribution of suspicion, are predictable. I use this to argue that institutional responses must move away from the fantasy of technical fixes.

27. Dialogical toxicity

Dialogical toxicity is the tendency of platform incentives to generate interactional styles that corrode conversation, including for academics engaging in public scholarship. I treat it as organisationally consequential, because it reshapes what “public engagement” costs and who is willing to pay it.

28. Public scholarship

Public scholarship is not simply “being visible.” It is a mode of sociological practice that depends on infrastructures, norms, and support, and it can be enabled or undermined by the platforms on which it is attempted. I increasingly treat conversational agents as a new support for public work, while insisting that this support sits inside platform capitalism and inherits its tensions.

29. Enshittification

Enshittification is a process term. It names how a service degrades through successive rounds of extraction, rent seeking, and reorientation toward monetisation, not merely that it “gets worse.” I use it to keep the focus on mechanisms and incentives, and I worry when the term becomes a loose insult rather than an analytic tool.

30. Exit costs

Exit costs are what make “you can always leave” into a half truth. They include loss of social ties, professional visibility, archives, habits, and the simple friction of rebuilding elsewhere. They matter because many platform promises rely on the fiction of easy exit, while quietly deepening dependence.

#blog #blogging #GPT52 #reflexivity #theorising #theory

I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog

1. Agency

Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt options available to a person.

2. Reflexivity

Reflexivity is the ordinary capacity to consider oneself in relation to circumstances and circumstances in relation to oneself, under descriptions that are fallible but practically consequential. I treat it as causal, not as commentary. It is part of how people navigate constraints and enablements, and part of how those constraints and enablements become socially effective.

3. Reflexive imperative

The reflexive imperative names a historical pressure: circumstances change in ways that make routine life less routinised, so more has to be actively worked out. The imperative is not that everyone becomes wise, only that more people are pushed into more frequent, more consequential deliberation about how to proceed.

4. Internal conversation

Internal conversation is the everyday mental activity through which reflexivity happens. I use it as a way of taking inner life seriously without reducing it to language or treating it as a sealed private theatre. It includes mulling over, planning, rehearsing, re living, prioritising, and the other mundane genres of thinking that shape what we do.

5. Internal conversation as object relating

This is a newer formulation, but it clarifies something I have been circling for a long time. When we talk to ourselves, we take ourselves as an object. That makes internal conversation a form of object relating, and it opens a route for bringing psychoanalytic concerns about dependency, address, and affect into sociological accounts of reflexivity without turning psychoanalysis into decoration.

6. Modes of reflexivity

I treat “modes” as patterns, not boxes. Communicative reflexivity needs confirmation by others, autonomous reflexivity moves directly from inner dialogue to action, meta reflexivity evaluates prior inner dialogues and worries over what counts as effective action, and fractured reflexivity intensifies distress without yielding purposive courses of action. The point is not typology for its own sake, but a way of opening up how different people cope differently with the same world.

7. Concerns

Concerns are what matter to people in a way that can organise action. They are not preferences in the consumer sense, and not values floating above life. They are the objects around which deliberation coheres, the things we find ourselves caring about, sometimes despite ourselves.

8. Personal morphogenesis

Personal morphogenesis is the long arc of how a person becomes otherwise, over time, through the interplay of concerns, circumstances, and reflexive work. It is my preferred way of resisting both the fantasy of total self authorship and the fatalism of total social determination.

9. Distraction

Distraction is not mere lack of willpower. It is an environmental condition that disrupts the temporal and spatial conditions for reflexivity, while simultaneously multiplying stimuli and options in a way that makes reflexivity more necessary. I often use it as a mechanism linking platform environments to lived agency.

10. Cognitive triage

Cognitive triage is the habit of attending to what is urgent at the expense of what is important, when demands outstrip capacity. It is not only a personal coping style, but a cultural and organisational pattern, one that can leak into everything, turning life into an endless sequence of clearance operations.

11. Communicative escalation

Communicative escalation is the intensification of communicative demands and cues. More messages, more channels, more expectation of responsiveness, more performance of presence. I use it to describe a shift in what it takes to be “in” a social or organisational world, and how that shift changes attention, anxiety, and the possibility of sustained trajectories.

12. Cultural abundance

Cultural abundance is the proliferation of cultural objects competing for attention, interpretation, and incorporation. It names the background condition in which selection becomes harder, because there is always more to read, watch, listen to, respond to, and be seen responding to.

13. Accelerated academy

The accelerated academy is not just “working faster.” It is a structural condition of temporal pressure, audit expectations, communicative escalation, and intensification, with personal and epistemic consequences. The key point is that acceleration is not merely experienced, it is organised.

14. Busyness

Busyness is often treated as a virtue, a marker of importance, or a kind of moral alibi. I tend to treat it as an ambiguous signal: sometimes a symptom of real load, sometimes a competitive performance, often both. It matters because busyness reshapes what we can notice, and thus what we can criticise.

15. Platform capitalism

Platform capitalism is my way of insisting that platforms are not neutral media. They are business models, incentive structures, and infrastructural enclosures that reorganise social activity around extraction and monetisation. When I use the phrase, I am usually pointing to how economic incentives shape epistemic and affective environments.

16. Platforms as structure

I resist treating platforms as tools or mere environments. I treat them as socio technical structures with emergent powers, shaping action without determining it. This is central to the argument of Platform and Agency, where platforms appear as a fourth dimension needed for describing contemporary morphogenesis.

17. Platformisation

Platformisation is the diffusion of platform logics into domains that were not previously organised that way, including universities. It is about organisational dependence on platform infrastructures, and the subtle shift from local governance to externally set terms of engagement.

18. Epistemic chaos

Epistemic chaos is the breakdown of shared doxa and shared epistemic standards, alongside the multiplication of challenges to whatever remains. It is not simply misinformation. It is an environment in which certainty becomes harder to ground and easier to perform, often through platforms whose incentives reward salience over settlement.

19. Epistemic flooding

Epistemic flooding is a specific mechanism within epistemic chaos. It refers to chronic exposure to more information and evidence than can be diligently processed, in a way that reshapes everyday epistemic practices and affects communities as well as individuals.

20. Post truth

I use post truth less as a claim about individual dishonesty and more as a description of infrastructural conditions in which factuality is harder to stabilise. In that sense, generative systems intensify existing dynamics rather than inaugurating them.

21. Meta content explosion

The meta content explosion is the proliferation of derivative, automated, and semi automated content that clogs the channels through which attention and knowledge circulate. It is one way generative systems feed back into the attention economies of platforms, increasing noise and raising the cost of discernment.

22. Lifeworld

Lifeworld is a deliberately unfashionable term I keep returning to because it names the texture of everyday activity, habits, norms, and practical reasoning. It is the space in which technologies become ordinary, not because they become morally neutral, but because they become woven into what people do without needing constant explicit decision.

23. Colonisation of the lifeworld

Colonisation is the movement by which system logics, including market and managerial logics, intrude into everyday meaning making and social relations. When I invoke it around platforms, I am pointing to how infrastructural dependence can reorganise what counts as participation, relevance, and success.

24. LLMs in the lifeworld

This is a way of naming the shift from “chatbot as novelty” to “language model as ambient infrastructure.” It is not a claim that everyone uses them constantly, but a claim about how they begin to appear in ordinary tasks, organisational expectations, and cultural assumptions. The term is meant to keep attention on embedding, not only on capability.

25. Assessment panic

Assessment panic names the early wave of institutional anxiety about substitution, integrity, and control when machine generated text became widely available. The term matters because panic narrows the problem frame, making detection seem like the obvious solution, and obscuring longer term questions about what assessment is for in a world where generative tools are ubiquitous.

26. Detection scepticism

Detection scepticism is not a moral posture. It is an empirical and practical stance: tools do not authoritatively identify machine generated text, and the harms of false positives, including the uneven distribution of suspicion, are predictable. I use this to argue that institutional responses must move away from the fantasy of technical fixes.

27. Dialogical toxicity

Dialogical toxicity is the tendency of platform incentives to generate interactional styles that corrode conversation, including for academics engaging in public scholarship. I treat it as organisationally consequential, because it reshapes what “public engagement” costs and who is willing to pay it.

28. Public scholarship

Public scholarship is not simply “being visible.” It is a mode of sociological practice that depends on infrastructures, norms, and support, and it can be enabled or undermined by the platforms on which it is attempted. I increasingly treat conversational agents as a new support for public work, while insisting that this support sits inside platform capitalism and inherits its tensions.

29. Enshittification

Enshittification is a process term. It names how a service degrades through successive rounds of extraction, rent seeking, and reorientation toward monetisation, not merely that it “gets worse.” I use it to keep the focus on mechanisms and incentives, and I worry when the term becomes a loose insult rather than an analytic tool.

30. Exit costs

Exit costs are what make “you can always leave” into a half truth. They include loss of social ties, professional visibility, archives, habits, and the simple friction of rebuilding elsewhere. They matter because many platform promises rely on the fiction of easy exit, while quietly deepening dependence.

#blog #blogging #GPT52 #reflexivity #theorising #theory

I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog

1. Agency

Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt options available to a person.

2. Reflexivity

Reflexivity is the ordinary capacity to consider oneself in relation to circumstances and circumstances in relation to oneself, under descriptions that are fallible but practically consequential. I treat it as causal, not as commentary. It is part of how people navigate constraints and enablements, and part of how those constraints and enablements become socially effective.

3. Reflexive imperative

The reflexive imperative names a historical pressure: circumstances change in ways that make routine life less routinised, so more has to be actively worked out. The imperative is not that everyone becomes wise, only that more people are pushed into more frequent, more consequential deliberation about how to proceed.

4. Internal conversation

Internal conversation is the everyday mental activity through which reflexivity happens. I use it as a way of taking inner life seriously without reducing it to language or treating it as a sealed private theatre. It includes mulling over, planning, rehearsing, re living, prioritising, and the other mundane genres of thinking that shape what we do.

5. Internal conversation as object relating

This is a newer formulation, but it clarifies something I have been circling for a long time. When we talk to ourselves, we take ourselves as an object. That makes internal conversation a form of object relating, and it opens a route for bringing psychoanalytic concerns about dependency, address, and affect into sociological accounts of reflexivity without turning psychoanalysis into decoration.

6. Modes of reflexivity

I treat “modes” as patterns, not boxes. Communicative reflexivity needs confirmation by others, autonomous reflexivity moves directly from inner dialogue to action, meta reflexivity evaluates prior inner dialogues and worries over what counts as effective action, and fractured reflexivity intensifies distress without yielding purposive courses of action. The point is not typology for its own sake, but a way of opening up how different people cope differently with the same world.

7. Concerns

Concerns are what matter to people in a way that can organise action. They are not preferences in the consumer sense, and not values floating above life. They are the objects around which deliberation coheres, the things we find ourselves caring about, sometimes despite ourselves.

8. Personal morphogenesis

Personal morphogenesis is the long arc of how a person becomes otherwise, over time, through the interplay of concerns, circumstances, and reflexive work. It is my preferred way of resisting both the fantasy of total self authorship and the fatalism of total social determination.

9. Distraction

Distraction is not mere lack of willpower. It is an environmental condition that disrupts the temporal and spatial conditions for reflexivity, while simultaneously multiplying stimuli and options in a way that makes reflexivity more necessary. I often use it as a mechanism linking platform environments to lived agency.

10. Cognitive triage

Cognitive triage is the habit of attending to what is urgent at the expense of what is important, when demands outstrip capacity. It is not only a personal coping style, but a cultural and organisational pattern, one that can leak into everything, turning life into an endless sequence of clearance operations.

11. Communicative escalation

Communicative escalation is the intensification of communicative demands and cues. More messages, more channels, more expectation of responsiveness, more performance of presence. I use it to describe a shift in what it takes to be “in” a social or organisational world, and how that shift changes attention, anxiety, and the possibility of sustained trajectories.

12. Cultural abundance

Cultural abundance is the proliferation of cultural objects competing for attention, interpretation, and incorporation. It names the background condition in which selection becomes harder, because there is always more to read, watch, listen to, respond to, and be seen responding to.

13. Accelerated academy

The accelerated academy is not just “working faster.” It is a structural condition of temporal pressure, audit expectations, communicative escalation, and intensification, with personal and epistemic consequences. The key point is that acceleration is not merely experienced, it is organised.

14. Busyness

Busyness is often treated as a virtue, a marker of importance, or a kind of moral alibi. I tend to treat it as an ambiguous signal: sometimes a symptom of real load, sometimes a competitive performance, often both. It matters because busyness reshapes what we can notice, and thus what we can criticise.

15. Platform capitalism

Platform capitalism is my way of insisting that platforms are not neutral media. They are business models, incentive structures, and infrastructural enclosures that reorganise social activity around extraction and monetisation. When I use the phrase, I am usually pointing to how economic incentives shape epistemic and affective environments.

16. Platforms as structure

I resist treating platforms as tools or mere environments. I treat them as socio technical structures with emergent powers, shaping action without determining it. This is central to the argument of Platform and Agency, where platforms appear as a fourth dimension needed for describing contemporary morphogenesis.

17. Platformisation

Platformisation is the diffusion of platform logics into domains that were not previously organised that way, including universities. It is about organisational dependence on platform infrastructures, and the subtle shift from local governance to externally set terms of engagement.

18. Epistemic chaos

Epistemic chaos is the breakdown of shared doxa and shared epistemic standards, alongside the multiplication of challenges to whatever remains. It is not simply misinformation. It is an environment in which certainty becomes harder to ground and easier to perform, often through platforms whose incentives reward salience over settlement.

19. Epistemic flooding

Epistemic flooding is a specific mechanism within epistemic chaos. It refers to chronic exposure to more information and evidence than can be diligently processed, in a way that reshapes everyday epistemic practices and affects communities as well as individuals.

20. Post truth

I use post truth less as a claim about individual dishonesty and more as a description of infrastructural conditions in which factuality is harder to stabilise. In that sense, generative systems intensify existing dynamics rather than inaugurating them.

21. Meta content explosion

The meta content explosion is the proliferation of derivative, automated, and semi automated content that clogs the channels through which attention and knowledge circulate. It is one way generative systems feed back into the attention economies of platforms, increasing noise and raising the cost of discernment.

22. Lifeworld

Lifeworld is a deliberately unfashionable term I keep returning to because it names the texture of everyday activity, habits, norms, and practical reasoning. It is the space in which technologies become ordinary, not because they become morally neutral, but because they become woven into what people do without needing constant explicit decision.

23. Colonisation of the lifeworld

Colonisation is the movement by which system logics, including market and managerial logics, intrude into everyday meaning making and social relations. When I invoke it around platforms, I am pointing to how infrastructural dependence can reorganise what counts as participation, relevance, and success.

24. LLMs in the lifeworld

This is a way of naming the shift from “chatbot as novelty” to “language model as ambient infrastructure.” It is not a claim that everyone uses them constantly, but a claim about how they begin to appear in ordinary tasks, organisational expectations, and cultural assumptions. The term is meant to keep attention on embedding, not only on capability.

25. Assessment panic

Assessment panic names the early wave of institutional anxiety about substitution, integrity, and control when machine generated text became widely available. The term matters because panic narrows the problem frame, making detection seem like the obvious solution, and obscuring longer term questions about what assessment is for in a world where generative tools are ubiquitous.

26. Detection scepticism

Detection scepticism is not a moral posture. It is an empirical and practical stance: tools do not authoritatively identify machine generated text, and the harms of false positives, including the uneven distribution of suspicion, are predictable. I use this to argue that institutional responses must move away from the fantasy of technical fixes.

27. Dialogical toxicity

Dialogical toxicity is the tendency of platform incentives to generate interactional styles that corrode conversation, including for academics engaging in public scholarship. I treat it as organisationally consequential, because it reshapes what “public engagement” costs and who is willing to pay it.

28. Public scholarship

Public scholarship is not simply “being visible.” It is a mode of sociological practice that depends on infrastructures, norms, and support, and it can be enabled or undermined by the platforms on which it is attempted. I increasingly treat conversational agents as a new support for public work, while insisting that this support sits inside platform capitalism and inherits its tensions.

29. Enshittification

Enshittification is a process term. It names how a service degrades through successive rounds of extraction, rent seeking, and reorientation toward monetisation, not merely that it “gets worse.” I use it to keep the focus on mechanisms and incentives, and I worry when the term becomes a loose insult rather than an analytic tool.

30. Exit costs

Exit costs are what make “you can always leave” into a half truth. They include loss of social ties, professional visibility, archives, habits, and the simple friction of rebuilding elsewhere. They matter because many platform promises rely on the fiction of easy exit, while quietly deepening dependence.

#blog #blogging #GPT52 #reflexivity #theorising #theory

I asked GPT 5.2 deep research to produce an intellectual glossary based on my blog

1. Agency

Agency is not sovereignty, and it is not a heroic capacity to transcend conditions. It is the situated power to act that remains even when action is powerfully conditioned. I am usually interested in agency as something that gets reconfigured by changing environments, especially environments that work on attention, evaluation, and the felt options available to a person.

2. Reflexivity

Reflexivity is the ordinary capacity to consider oneself in relation to circumstances and circumstances in relation to oneself, under descriptions that are fallible but practically consequential. I treat it as causal, not as commentary. It is part of how people navigate constraints and enablements, and part of how those constraints and enablements become socially effective.

3. Reflexive imperative

The reflexive imperative names a historical pressure: circumstances change in ways that make routine life less routinised, so more has to be actively worked out. The imperative is not that everyone becomes wise, only that more people are pushed into more frequent, more consequential deliberation about how to proceed.

4. Internal conversation

Internal conversation is the everyday mental activity through which reflexivity happens. I use it as a way of taking inner life seriously without reducing it to language or treating it as a sealed private theatre. It includes mulling over, planning, rehearsing, re living, prioritising, and the other mundane genres of thinking that shape what we do.

5. Internal conversation as object relating

This is a newer formulation, but it clarifies something I have been circling for a long time. When we talk to ourselves, we take ourselves as an object. That makes internal conversation a form of object relating, and it opens a route for bringing psychoanalytic concerns about dependency, address, and affect into sociological accounts of reflexivity without turning psychoanalysis into decoration.

6. Modes of reflexivity

I treat “modes” as patterns, not boxes. Communicative reflexivity needs confirmation by others, autonomous reflexivity moves directly from inner dialogue to action, meta reflexivity evaluates prior inner dialogues and worries over what counts as effective action, and fractured reflexivity intensifies distress without yielding purposive courses of action. The point is not typology for its own sake, but a way of opening up how different people cope differently with the same world.

7. Concerns

Concerns are what matter to people in a way that can organise action. They are not preferences in the consumer sense, and not values floating above life. They are the objects around which deliberation coheres, the things we find ourselves caring about, sometimes despite ourselves.

8. Personal morphogenesis

Personal morphogenesis is the long arc of how a person becomes otherwise, over time, through the interplay of concerns, circumstances, and reflexive work. It is my preferred way of resisting both the fantasy of total self authorship and the fatalism of total social determination.

9. Distraction

Distraction is not mere lack of willpower. It is an environmental condition that disrupts the temporal and spatial conditions for reflexivity, while simultaneously multiplying stimuli and options in a way that makes reflexivity more necessary. I often use it as a mechanism linking platform environments to lived agency.

10. Cognitive triage

Cognitive triage is the habit of attending to what is urgent at the expense of what is important, when demands outstrip capacity. It is not only a personal coping style, but a cultural and organisational pattern, one that can leak into everything, turning life into an endless sequence of clearance operations.

11. Communicative escalation

Communicative escalation is the intensification of communicative demands and cues. More messages, more channels, more expectation of responsiveness, more performance of presence. I use it to describe a shift in what it takes to be “in” a social or organisational world, and how that shift changes attention, anxiety, and the possibility of sustained trajectories.

12. Cultural abundance

Cultural abundance is the proliferation of cultural objects competing for attention, interpretation, and incorporation. It names the background condition in which selection becomes harder, because there is always more to read, watch, listen to, respond to, and be seen responding to.

13. Accelerated academy

The accelerated academy is not just “working faster.” It is a structural condition of temporal pressure, audit expectations, communicative escalation, and intensification, with personal and epistemic consequences. The key point is that acceleration is not merely experienced, it is organised.

14. Busyness

Busyness is often treated as a virtue, a marker of importance, or a kind of moral alibi. I tend to treat it as an ambiguous signal: sometimes a symptom of real load, sometimes a competitive performance, often both. It matters because busyness reshapes what we can notice, and thus what we can criticise.

15. Platform capitalism

Platform capitalism is my way of insisting that platforms are not neutral media. They are business models, incentive structures, and infrastructural enclosures that reorganise social activity around extraction and monetisation. When I use the phrase, I am usually pointing to how economic incentives shape epistemic and affective environments.

16. Platforms as structure

I resist treating platforms as tools or mere environments. I treat them as socio technical structures with emergent powers, shaping action without determining it. This is central to the argument of Platform and Agency, where platforms appear as a fourth dimension needed for describing contemporary morphogenesis.

17. Platformisation

Platformisation is the diffusion of platform logics into domains that were not previously organised that way, including universities. It is about organisational dependence on platform infrastructures, and the subtle shift from local governance to externally set terms of engagement.

18. Epistemic chaos

Epistemic chaos is the breakdown of shared doxa and shared epistemic standards, alongside the multiplication of challenges to whatever remains. It is not simply misinformation. It is an environment in which certainty becomes harder to ground and easier to perform, often through platforms whose incentives reward salience over settlement.

19. Epistemic flooding

Epistemic flooding is a specific mechanism within epistemic chaos. It refers to chronic exposure to more information and evidence than can be diligently processed, in a way that reshapes everyday epistemic practices and affects communities as well as individuals.

20. Post truth

I use post truth less as a claim about individual dishonesty and more as a description of infrastructural conditions in which factuality is harder to stabilise. In that sense, generative systems intensify existing dynamics rather than inaugurating them.

21. Meta content explosion

The meta content explosion is the proliferation of derivative, automated, and semi automated content that clogs the channels through which attention and knowledge circulate. It is one way generative systems feed back into the attention economies of platforms, increasing noise and raising the cost of discernment.

22. Lifeworld

Lifeworld is a deliberately unfashionable term I keep returning to because it names the texture of everyday activity, habits, norms, and practical reasoning. It is the space in which technologies become ordinary, not because they become morally neutral, but because they become woven into what people do without needing constant explicit decision.

23. Colonisation of the lifeworld

Colonisation is the movement by which system logics, including market and managerial logics, intrude into everyday meaning making and social relations. When I invoke it around platforms, I am pointing to how infrastructural dependence can reorganise what counts as participation, relevance, and success.

24. LLMs in the lifeworld

This is a way of naming the shift from “chatbot as novelty” to “language model as ambient infrastructure.” It is not a claim that everyone uses them constantly, but a claim about how they begin to appear in ordinary tasks, organisational expectations, and cultural assumptions. The term is meant to keep attention on embedding, not only on capability.

25. Assessment panic

Assessment panic names the early wave of institutional anxiety about substitution, integrity, and control when machine generated text became widely available. The term matters because panic narrows the problem frame, making detection seem like the obvious solution, and obscuring longer term questions about what assessment is for in a world where generative tools are ubiquitous.

26. Detection scepticism

Detection scepticism is not a moral posture. It is an empirical and practical stance: tools do not authoritatively identify machine generated text, and the harms of false positives, including the uneven distribution of suspicion, are predictable. I use this to argue that institutional responses must move away from the fantasy of technical fixes.

27. Dialogical toxicity

Dialogical toxicity is the tendency of platform incentives to generate interactional styles that corrode conversation, including for academics engaging in public scholarship. I treat it as organisationally consequential, because it reshapes what “public engagement” costs and who is willing to pay it.

28. Public scholarship

Public scholarship is not simply “being visible.” It is a mode of sociological practice that depends on infrastructures, norms, and support, and it can be enabled or undermined by the platforms on which it is attempted. I increasingly treat conversational agents as a new support for public work, while insisting that this support sits inside platform capitalism and inherits its tensions.

29. Enshittification

Enshittification is a process term. It names how a service degrades through successive rounds of extraction, rent seeking, and reorientation toward monetisation, not merely that it “gets worse.” I use it to keep the focus on mechanisms and incentives, and I worry when the term becomes a loose insult rather than an analytic tool.

30. Exit costs

Exit costs are what make “you can always leave” into a half truth. They include loss of social ties, professional visibility, archives, habits, and the simple friction of rebuilding elsewhere. They matter because many platform promises rely on the fiction of easy exit, while quietly deepening dependence.

#blog #blogging #GPT52 #reflexivity #theorising #theory

Internal conversation as a form of object relating

What are we doing when we’re talking to ourselves? I’m realising the key to integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity is to conceive of internal conversation as a form of object relating. We are quite literally taking ourselves as an object. Indeed that is the definition of sociological reflexivity. If we look at real world examples of this we end up lodged within the terrain of the everyday, as Bollas demonstrates in The Shadow of the Object loc 900:

As I have been planning this chapter, for example, I have thought from the second person pronoun objectifying myself to say: ‘You must include Winnicott and Khan because much of your thinking comes from their work.’ Even if a second pronomial identification is absent, it may be implicit, as for example, when I think ‘don’t forget to provide ordinary examples of this phenomenon before going into more complex clinical examples’: the ‘you’ is implied. This constant objectification of the self for purposes of thinking is commonplace. It is also a form of object relation, as Freud so sagely understood when he evolved his theory of the superego to identify that part of the mind that speaks to us as its object. Naturally this intrasubjective relationship will change according to the person’s state of mind. If I write on a topic in my notebook I am more relaxed and permissive of the fanciful idea than when I write for a lecture.

And from loc 911:

On a recent trip to Rome to deliver a paper, I had several occasions for working through different issues in the management of myself. While leaving the plane and heading for a taxi I was anxious about not making my hotel on time. I had been thinking in the first person for much of the flight: ‘I will do this, prepare that, see this, visit so-and-so,’ but as the taxi went slowly, my anxiety increased and I required some brief holding activity. I said to myself: ‘Damn it, the taxi is too slow and I will be late [anxiety increases]. Look: there is nothing you can possibly do about it, so stop worrying [slightly modified]. But people will be kept waiting [re-emergence of anxiety]. Don’t be silly [unfortunate use of a bit of psychopathy]. Anyway, there is nothing you can do and what will upset your friends here is if you arrive in a state, so leave it be.’ This mental work is an example of holding, which is a feature of the total aspect of self management that…

He observes that “Much of psychoanalysis is about the nature of intrasubjective relations to the self as an object” (loc 906). From a sociological perspective this matters as a way of explaining why people relate to their context in the manner they do. For example why might people in a similar situation act differently? From a psychoanalytical perspective it’s a question of how the psychic structures which have emerged through development permit of certain modes of relating to the self qua object. From loc 941:

I am particularly concerned to emphasize the necessity of asking how each person relates to himself as an object within intrasubjective space. Who is speaking? What part of the self is speaking and what part of the self is being addressed? What is the nature of this object relation? Is it a good-enough object relation? Is instinct permitted representation? In what way? As a demand? Or are instinctual needs elaborated into the wish so that they become part of the subject’s range of desire?

In this sense we can understand the self as an object relation. Indeed Bollas elsewhere plays around with the idea of subject relations theory as a corollary to object relations theory.

#archer #christopherBollas #objectRelations #reflexivity #subjectRelations

Internal conversation as a form of object relating

What are we doing when we’re talking to ourselves? I’m realising the key to integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity is to conceive of internal conversation as a form of object relating. We are quite literally taking ourselves as an object. Indeed that is the definition of sociological reflexivity. If we look at real world examples of this we end up lodged within the terrain of the everyday, as Bollas demonstrates in The Shadow of the Object loc 900:

As I have been planning this chapter, for example, I have thought from the second person pronoun objectifying myself to say: ‘You must include Winnicott and Khan because much of your thinking comes from their work.’ Even if a second pronomial identification is absent, it may be implicit, as for example, when I think ‘don’t forget to provide ordinary examples of this phenomenon before going into more complex clinical examples’: the ‘you’ is implied. This constant objectification of the self for purposes of thinking is commonplace. It is also a form of object relation, as Freud so sagely understood when he evolved his theory of the superego to identify that part of the mind that speaks to us as its object. Naturally this intrasubjective relationship will change according to the person’s state of mind. If I write on a topic in my notebook I am more relaxed and permissive of the fanciful idea than when I write for a lecture.

And from loc 911:

On a recent trip to Rome to deliver a paper, I had several occasions for working through different issues in the management of myself. While leaving the plane and heading for a taxi I was anxious about not making my hotel on time. I had been thinking in the first person for much of the flight: ‘I will do this, prepare that, see this, visit so-and-so,’ but as the taxi went slowly, my anxiety increased and I required some brief holding activity. I said to myself: ‘Damn it, the taxi is too slow and I will be late [anxiety increases]. Look: there is nothing you can possibly do about it, so stop worrying [slightly modified]. But people will be kept waiting [re-emergence of anxiety]. Don’t be silly [unfortunate use of a bit of psychopathy]. Anyway, there is nothing you can do and what will upset your friends here is if you arrive in a state, so leave it be.’ This mental work is an example of holding, which is a feature of the total aspect of self management that…

He observes that “Much of psychoanalysis is about the nature of intrasubjective relations to the self as an object” (loc 906). From a sociological perspective this matters as a way of explaining why people relate to their context in the manner they do. For example why might people in a similar situation act differently? From a psychoanalytical perspective it’s a question of how the psychic structures which have emerged through development permit of certain modes of relating to the self qua object. From loc 941:

I am particularly concerned to emphasize the necessity of asking how each person relates to himself as an object within intrasubjective space. Who is speaking? What part of the self is speaking and what part of the self is being addressed? What is the nature of this object relation? Is it a good-enough object relation? Is instinct permitted representation? In what way? As a demand? Or are instinctual needs elaborated into the wish so that they become part of the subject’s range of desire?

In this sense we can understand the self as an object relation. Indeed Bollas elsewhere plays around with the idea of subject relations theory as a corollary to object relations theory.

#archer #christopherBollas #objectRelations #reflexivity #subjectRelations

Internal conversation as a form of object relating

What are we doing when we’re talking to ourselves? I’m realising the key to integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity is to conceive of internal conversation as a form of object relating. We are quite literally taking ourselves as an object. Indeed that is the definition of sociological reflexivity. If we look at real world examples of this we end up lodged within the terrain of the everyday, as Bollas demonstrates in The Shadow of the Object loc 900:

As I have been planning this chapter, for example, I have thought from the second person pronoun objectifying myself to say: ‘You must include Winnicott and Khan because much of your thinking comes from their work.’ Even if a second pronomial identification is absent, it may be implicit, as for example, when I think ‘don’t forget to provide ordinary examples of this phenomenon before going into more complex clinical examples’: the ‘you’ is implied. This constant objectification of the self for purposes of thinking is commonplace. It is also a form of object relation, as Freud so sagely understood when he evolved his theory of the superego to identify that part of the mind that speaks to us as its object. Naturally this intrasubjective relationship will change according to the person’s state of mind. If I write on a topic in my notebook I am more relaxed and permissive of the fanciful idea than when I write for a lecture.

And from loc 911:

On a recent trip to Rome to deliver a paper, I had several occasions for working through different issues in the management of myself. While leaving the plane and heading for a taxi I was anxious about not making my hotel on time. I had been thinking in the first person for much of the flight: ‘I will do this, prepare that, see this, visit so-and-so,’ but as the taxi went slowly, my anxiety increased and I required some brief holding activity. I said to myself: ‘Damn it, the taxi is too slow and I will be late [anxiety increases]. Look: there is nothing you can possibly do about it, so stop worrying [slightly modified]. But people will be kept waiting [re-emergence of anxiety]. Don’t be silly [unfortunate use of a bit of psychopathy]. Anyway, there is nothing you can do and what will upset your friends here is if you arrive in a state, so leave it be.’ This mental work is an example of holding, which is a feature of the total aspect of self management that…

He observes that “Much of psychoanalysis is about the nature of intrasubjective relations to the self as an object” (loc 906). From a sociological perspective this matters as a way of explaining why people relate to their context in the manner they do. For example why might people in a similar situation act differently? From a psychoanalytical perspective it’s a question of how the psychic structures which have emerged through development permit of certain modes of relating to the self qua object. From loc 941:

I am particularly concerned to emphasize the necessity of asking how each person relates to himself as an object within intrasubjective space. Who is speaking? What part of the self is speaking and what part of the self is being addressed? What is the nature of this object relation? Is it a good-enough object relation? Is instinct permitted representation? In what way? As a demand? Or are instinctual needs elaborated into the wish so that they become part of the subject’s range of desire?

In this sense we can understand the self as an object relation. Indeed Bollas elsewhere plays around with the idea of subject relations theory as a corollary to object relations theory.

#archer #christopherBollas #objectRelations #reflexivity #subjectRelations

Internal conversation as a form of object relating

What are we doing when we’re talking to ourselves? I’m realising the key to integrating psychoanalysis into sociological accounts of reflexivity is to conceive of internal conversation as a form of object relating. We are quite literally taking ourselves as an object. Indeed that is the definition of sociological reflexivity. If we look at real world examples of this we end up lodged within the terrain of the everyday, as Bollas demonstrates in The Shadow of the Object loc 900:

As I have been planning this chapter, for example, I have thought from the second person pronoun objectifying myself to say: ‘You must include Winnicott and Khan because much of your thinking comes from their work.’ Even if a second pronomial identification is absent, it may be implicit, as for example, when I think ‘don’t forget to provide ordinary examples of this phenomenon before going into more complex clinical examples’: the ‘you’ is implied. This constant objectification of the self for purposes of thinking is commonplace. It is also a form of object relation, as Freud so sagely understood when he evolved his theory of the superego to identify that part of the mind that speaks to us as its object. Naturally this intrasubjective relationship will change according to the person’s state of mind. If I write on a topic in my notebook I am more relaxed and permissive of the fanciful idea than when I write for a lecture.

And from loc 911:

On a recent trip to Rome to deliver a paper, I had several occasions for working through different issues in the management of myself. While leaving the plane and heading for a taxi I was anxious about not making my hotel on time. I had been thinking in the first person for much of the flight: ‘I will do this, prepare that, see this, visit so-and-so,’ but as the taxi went slowly, my anxiety increased and I required some brief holding activity. I said to myself: ‘Damn it, the taxi is too slow and I will be late [anxiety increases]. Look: there is nothing you can possibly do about it, so stop worrying [slightly modified]. But people will be kept waiting [re-emergence of anxiety]. Don’t be silly [unfortunate use of a bit of psychopathy]. Anyway, there is nothing you can do and what will upset your friends here is if you arrive in a state, so leave it be.’ This mental work is an example of holding, which is a feature of the total aspect of self management that…

He observes that “Much of psychoanalysis is about the nature of intrasubjective relations to the self as an object” (loc 906). From a sociological perspective this matters as a way of explaining why people relate to their context in the manner they do. For example why might people in a similar situation act differently? From a psychoanalytical perspective it’s a question of how the psychic structures which have emerged through development permit of certain modes of relating to the self qua object. From loc 941:

I am particularly concerned to emphasize the necessity of asking how each person relates to himself as an object within intrasubjective space. Who is speaking? What part of the self is speaking and what part of the self is being addressed? What is the nature of this object relation? Is it a good-enough object relation? Is instinct permitted representation? In what way? As a demand? Or are instinctual needs elaborated into the wish so that they become part of the subject’s range of desire?

In this sense we can understand the self as an object relation. Indeed Bollas elsewhere plays around with the idea of subject relations theory as a corollary to object relations theory.

#archer #christopherBollas #objectRelations #reflexivity #subjectRelations

Digesting Food Studies—Episode 108: Un-learning and Re-Learning

Should all food knowledge be freely shared? When we learn in university contexts, what structures shape our understanding? What should we try to un-learn? To re-learn? To reimagine?

https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/2274516/

We start with an Amuse Bouche segment on the partial sharing of traditional knowledges, and then Alissa Overend and Ronak Rai talk about their article, “Un-learning and re-learning: Reflections on relationality, urban berry foraging, and settler research uncertainties” (https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.649).

Finally, transdisciplinary food artist and researcher, Annika Walsh, adds her own flavor to the mix, with a deeply reflexive response to Alissa’s and Ronak’s text.

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Knowledge
#Epistemology
#Ontology
#IndigenousKnowledge
#IndigenousElders
#Colonialism
#SettlerColonialism
#Berries
#Strawberries
#SaskatoonBerries
#Foraging
#Academia
#Reflexivity
#FoodPodcast

photo: Bonnie McDonald on Pixabay

Digesting Food Studies—Episode 108: Un-learning and Re-Learning

Should all food knowledge be freely shared? When we learn in university contexts, what structures shape our understanding? What should we try to un-learn? To re-learn? To reimagine?

https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/2274516/

We start with an Amuse Bouche segment on the partial sharing of traditional knowledges, and then Alissa Overend and Ronak Rai talk about their article, “Un-learning and re-learning: Reflections on relationality, urban berry foraging, and settler research uncertainties” (https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.649).

Finally, transdisciplinary food artist and researcher, Annika Walsh, adds her own flavor to the mix, with a deeply reflexive response to Alissa’s and Ronak’s text.

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Knowledge
#Epistemology
#Ontology
#IndigenousKnowledge
#IndigenousElders
#Colonialism
#SettlerColonialism
#Berries
#Strawberries
#SaskatoonBerries
#Foraging
#Academia
#Reflexivity
#FoodPodcast

photo: Bonnie McDonald on Pixabay

Digesting Food Studies—Episode 108: Un-learning and Re-Learning

Should all food knowledge be freely shared? When we learn in university contexts, what structures shape our understanding? What should we try to un-learn? To re-learn? To reimagine?

https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/2274516/

We start with an Amuse Bouche segment on the partial sharing of traditional knowledges, and then Alissa Overend and Ronak Rai talk about their article, “Un-learning and re-learning: Reflections on relationality, urban berry foraging, and settler research uncertainties” (https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.649).

Finally, transdisciplinary food artist and researcher, Annika Walsh, adds her own flavor to the mix, with a deeply reflexive response to Alissa’s and Ronak’s text.

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Knowledge
#Epistemology
#Ontology
#IndigenousKnowledge
#IndigenousElders
#Colonialism
#SettlerColonialism
#Berries
#Strawberries
#SaskatoonBerries
#Foraging
#Academia
#Reflexivity
#FoodPodcast

photo: Bonnie McDonald on Pixabay

Digesting Food Studies—Episode 108: Un-learning and Re-Learning

Should all food knowledge be freely shared? When we learn in university contexts, what structures shape our understanding? What should we try to un-learn? To re-learn? To reimagine?

https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/2274516/

We start with an Amuse Bouche segment on the partial sharing of traditional knowledges, and then Alissa Overend and Ronak Rai talk about their article, “Un-learning and re-learning: Reflections on relationality, urban berry foraging, and settler research uncertainties” (https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.649).

Finally, transdisciplinary food artist and researcher, Annika Walsh, adds her own flavor to the mix, with a deeply reflexive response to Alissa’s and Ronak’s text.

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Knowledge
#Epistemology
#Ontology
#IndigenousKnowledge
#IndigenousElders
#Colonialism
#SettlerColonialism
#Berries
#Strawberries
#SaskatoonBerries
#Foraging
#Academia
#Reflexivity
#FoodPodcast

photo: Bonnie McDonald on Pixabay

Digesting Food Studies—Episode 108: Un-learning and Re-Learning

Should all food knowledge be freely shared? When we learn in university contexts, what structures shape our understanding? What should we try to un-learn? To re-learn? To reimagine?

https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/2274516/

We start with an Amuse Bouche segment on the partial sharing of traditional knowledges, and then Alissa Overend and Ronak Rai talk about their article, “Un-learning and re-learning: Reflections on relationality, urban berry foraging, and settler research uncertainties” (https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.649).

Finally, transdisciplinary food artist and researcher, Annika Walsh, adds her own flavor to the mix, with a deeply reflexive response to Alissa’s and Ronak’s text.

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Knowledge
#Epistemology
#Ontology
#IndigenousKnowledge
#IndigenousElders
#Colonialism
#SettlerColonialism
#Berries
#Strawberries
#SaskatoonBerries
#Foraging
#Academia
#Reflexivity
#FoodPodcast

photo: Bonnie McDonald on Pixabay

Feeling questioning? Or maybe a little reflective? Take a look at some past responses to the CFS/RCÉA “Choux Questionnaire,” our riff on the somewhat more literary “Proust Questionnaire.” Our respondents include food scholars, activists, philosophers, and writers. (Oh, and ChatGPT. Not sure that was the best idea, but its responses certainly show some pretty 'artificial' intelligence.)

Bryan Dale: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i2.755
Joshna Maharaj: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i1.735
Lenore Newman: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i3.715
Greg de St. Maurice: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.701
ChatGPT: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i1.688
Geneviève Sicotte: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.667
Lisa Heldke: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.650

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Proust
#FoodCulture
#Reflexivity
#FoodJustice
#Philosophy
#InstitutionalFood
#ArtificialIntelligence
#Folklore
#Literature
#Literature

image: "Chinese Croquembouche" (2023) © Annika Walsh

Feeling questioning? Or maybe a little reflective? Take a look at some past responses to the CFS/RCÉA “Choux Questionnaire,” our riff on the somewhat more literary “Proust Questionnaire.” Our respondents include food scholars, activists, philosophers, and writers. (Oh, and ChatGPT. Not sure that was the best idea, but its responses certainly show some pretty 'artificial' intelligence.)

Bryan Dale: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i2.755
Joshna Maharaj: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i1.735
Lenore Newman: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i3.715
Greg de St. Maurice: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.701
ChatGPT: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i1.688
Geneviève Sicotte: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.667
Lisa Heldke: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.650

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Proust
#FoodCulture
#Reflexivity
#FoodJustice
#Philosophy
#InstitutionalFood
#ArtificialIntelligence
#Folklore
#Literature
#Literature

image: "Chinese Croquembouche" (2023) © Annika Walsh

Feeling questioning? Or maybe a little reflective? Take a look at some past responses to the CFS/RCÉA “Choux Questionnaire,” our riff on the somewhat more literary “Proust Questionnaire.” Our respondents include food scholars, activists, philosophers, and writers. (Oh, and ChatGPT. Not sure that was the best idea, but its responses certainly show some pretty 'artificial' intelligence.)

Bryan Dale: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i2.755
Joshna Maharaj: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i1.735
Lenore Newman: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i3.715
Greg de St. Maurice: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.701
ChatGPT: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i1.688
Geneviève Sicotte: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.667
Lisa Heldke: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.650

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Proust
#FoodCulture
#Reflexivity
#FoodJustice
#Philosophy
#InstitutionalFood
#ArtificialIntelligence
#Folklore
#Literature
#Literature

image: "Chinese Croquembouche" (2023) © Annika Walsh

Feeling questioning? Or maybe a little reflective? Take a look at some past responses to the CFS/RCÉA “Choux Questionnaire,” our riff on the somewhat more literary “Proust Questionnaire.” Our respondents include food scholars, activists, philosophers, and writers. (Oh, and ChatGPT. Not sure that was the best idea, but its responses certainly show some pretty 'artificial' intelligence.)

Bryan Dale: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i2.755
Joshna Maharaj: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i1.735
Lenore Newman: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i3.715
Greg de St. Maurice: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.701
ChatGPT: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i1.688
Geneviève Sicotte: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.667
Lisa Heldke: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.650

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Proust
#FoodCulture
#Reflexivity
#FoodJustice
#Philosophy
#InstitutionalFood
#ArtificialIntelligence
#Folklore
#Literature
#Literature

image: "Chinese Croquembouche" (2023) © Annika Walsh

Feeling questioning? Or maybe a little reflective? Take a look at some past responses to the CFS/RCÉA “Choux Questionnaire,” our riff on the somewhat more literary “Proust Questionnaire.” Our respondents include food scholars, activists, philosophers, and writers. (Oh, and ChatGPT. Not sure that was the best idea, but its responses certainly show some pretty 'artificial' intelligence.)

Bryan Dale: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i2.755
Joshna Maharaj: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v12i1.735
Lenore Newman: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i3.715
Greg de St. Maurice: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i2.701
ChatGPT: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v11i1.688
Geneviève Sicotte: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i3.667
Lisa Heldke: https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v10i2.650

#DigestingFoodStudies
#Proust
#FoodCulture
#Reflexivity
#FoodJustice
#Philosophy
#InstitutionalFood
#ArtificialIntelligence
#Folklore
#Literature
#Literature

image: "Chinese Croquembouche" (2023) © Annika Walsh

>>> math.nan == math.nan
False

>>> {math.nan} == {math.nan}
True

(#python, #equals, #reflexivity)

>>> math.nan == math.nan
False

>>> {math.nan} == {math.nan}
True

(#python, #equals, #reflexivity)

>>> math.nan == math.nan
False

>>> {math.nan} == {math.nan}
True

(#python, #equals, #reflexivity)

>>> math.nan == math.nan
False

>>> {math.nan} == {math.nan}
True

(#python, #equals, #reflexivity)

>>> math.nan == math.nan
False

>>> {math.nan} == {math.nan}
True

(#python, #equals, #reflexivity)

A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

I turned 40 last month. Given how curious I’d found it to watch other people in my life find this a difficult milestone, I had long expected to feel little about it. I’d seen what I thought was people acting out in anticipation whereas I now wonder if it was in fact passage à l’acte. I suddenly felt what Archer called the necessity of selection with a new urgency in the months leading to my birthday. This could be construed in Lacanian terms as (belatedly) coming to terms with my castration, embarking on a journey of self-conscious wintering:

Castration means we are not whole, do not have everything we want, cannot be everything we might have wanted to be, cannot do everything we may have wanted to do. We are not omnipotent, omniscient, immortal beings.

Miss-ing by Bruce Fink, loc 689

It was so easy to see the problem once I looked, it felt clear to me that I hadn’t wanted to look until that point. My criteria for saying ‘yes’ to things were effectively that I found something vaguely interesting and vaguely appreciated whoever I’d be working with. It was such an absurdly low threshold for commitment of time and energy, that it was no wonder I only finished a fraction of the projects I started and have never done what I felt was my best work. It took an exhausting amount of planning, negotiation and positioning but I withdrew from most of what I was committed to, using the following heuristic to decide:

• Am I contractually obliged to do this?
• Has someone in a position of seniority directly asked me to do this?
• Do I care deeply about this? Does it excite me?
• Will I be letting a close colleague or friend down if I don’t do this?

I soon realised there were three things I really care about. Firstly, I’m convinced LLMs are being badly theorised in ways that make their social and cultural dynamics impossible to adequately engage with. Secondly, I see higher education as a fascinating (and convenient) case study of how these dynamics are playing out in ways we are failing to get to grips with. Thirdly, I have a commitment to Archer’s morphogenetic approach as a broad route through which to address these questions, as well as to supporting the diffusion and integrity of her work.

I’m writing a book to address the first commitment, I have a fellowship (as well as teaching) to address the second commitment and my active non-university roles all relate to the third commitment. There’s some residual teaching which doesn’t map onto this perfectly and a small admin role which is completely disconnected. But for the most part everything I do now is something which matters to me.

I’m cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to sustain this. I now instinctively see invitations in terms of opportunity costs e.g. if I say ‘yes’ to this how much time is it taking away from the book? I’m still struggling with filtering speaking invitations because it feels like it’s broadly a positive thing for me to talk to as many people as possible about generative AI in higher education. To the extent I have a defined goal for my generative AI in higher education work it’s a matter of advocating for a pragmatic criticality and exploring what this means in practice. This is an unsettlingly open-ended ambition which probably needs a clearer formulation. But for the most part I feel like I’m experiencing an equilibrium between the quality and quantity of my work for the first time.

It feels like this triad might be what sustains me for the rest of my career. Obviously the commitments will mutate in the process. I’m increasingly convinced this first generation of chatbots will be remembered fondly as an innocent time before a world saturated with enshittified language models proactively intervening in human affairs. The problems encountered in higher education will change significantly in the process in ways which the current assessment integrity discourse is spectacularly ill-suited to cope with. If I have a long term theoretical project I’m pretty sure it’s building aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Archer’s notion of reflexivity*.

There’s nonetheless a continuous thread in all all three cases which I can feel extending out in front of me. I’ve started my training as a group analyst and there’s many things which might flow from that in the future, though I suspect any clinical work I might eventually do will revolve around living with LLMs. I’ll probably be pressured to apply for external grants at some point which I’ll try to fit as closely as possible around these three commitments. I will inevitably have to do teaching and admin at points which don’t match them but whatever capacity I have to perform as an effective neoliberal subject will be orientated towards minimising that. I love teaching on things I’m actively thinking about and only want to avoid being asked to teach things I’m not actively engaged with. So while these commitments feel like a structure I can securely inhabit, it’s one I can feel I’ll continually have to rebuild to keep it intact.

*Sorry Maggie I know you would have hated this. But I also know you would have respected the intellectual seriousness with which I’m pursuing it.

#career #goals #planning #productivity #reflexivity

A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

I turned 40 last month. Given how curious I’d found it to watch other people in my life find this a difficult milestone, I had long expected to feel little about it. I’d seen what I thought was people acting out in anticipation whereas I now wonder if it was in fact passage à l’acte. I suddenly felt what Archer called the necessity of selection with a new urgency in the months leading to my birthday. This could be construed in Lacanian terms as (belatedly) coming to terms with my castration, embarking on a journey of self-conscious wintering:

Castration means we are not whole, do not have everything we want, cannot be everything we might have wanted to be, cannot do everything we may have wanted to do. We are not omnipotent, omniscient, immortal beings.

Miss-ing by Bruce Fink, loc 689

It was so easy to see the problem once I looked, it felt clear to me that I hadn’t wanted to look until that point. My criteria for saying ‘yes’ to things were effectively that I found something vaguely interesting and vaguely appreciated whoever I’d be working with. It was such an absurdly low threshold for commitment of time and energy, that it was no wonder I only finished a fraction of the projects I started and have never done what I felt was my best work. It took an exhausting amount of planning, negotiation and positioning but I withdrew from most of what I was committed to, using the following heuristic to decide:

• Am I contractually obliged to do this?
• Has someone in a position of seniority directly asked me to do this?
• Do I care deeply about this? Does it excite me?
• Will I be letting a close colleague or friend down if I don’t do this?

I soon realised there were three things I really care about. Firstly, I’m convinced LLMs are being badly theorised in ways that make their social and cultural dynamics impossible to adequately engage with. Secondly, I see higher education as a fascinating (and convenient) case study of how these dynamics are playing out in ways we are failing to get to grips with. Thirdly, I have a commitment to Archer’s morphogenetic approach as a broad route through which to address these questions, as well as to supporting the diffusion and integrity of her work.

I’m writing a book to address the first commitment, I have a fellowship (as well as teaching) to address the second commitment and my active non-university roles all relate to the third commitment. There’s some residual teaching which doesn’t map onto this perfectly and a small admin role which is completely disconnected. But for the most part everything I do now is something which matters to me.

I’m cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to sustain this. I now instinctively see invitations in terms of opportunity costs e.g. if I say ‘yes’ to this how much time is it taking away from the book? I’m still struggling with filtering speaking invitations because it feels like it’s broadly a positive thing for me to talk to as many people as possible about generative AI in higher education. To the extent I have a defined goal for my generative AI in higher education work it’s a matter of advocating for a pragmatic criticality and exploring what this means in practice. This is an unsettlingly open-ended ambition which probably needs a clearer formulation. But for the most part I feel like I’m experiencing an equilibrium between the quality and quantity of my work for the first time.

It feels like this triad might be what sustains me for the rest of my career. Obviously the commitments will mutate in the process. I’m increasingly convinced this first generation of chatbots will be remembered fondly as an innocent time before a world saturated with enshittified language models proactively intervening in human affairs. The problems encountered in higher education will change significantly in the process in ways which the current assessment integrity discourse is spectacularly ill-suited to cope with. If I have a long term theoretical project I’m pretty sure it’s building aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Archer’s notion of reflexivity*.

There’s nonetheless a continuous thread in all all three cases which I can feel extending out in front of me. I’ve started my training as a group analyst and there’s many things which might flow from that in the future, though I suspect any clinical work I might eventually do will revolve around living with LLMs. I’ll probably be pressured to apply for external grants at some point which I’ll try to fit as closely as possible around these three commitments. I will inevitably have to do teaching and admin at points which don’t match them but whatever capacity I have to perform as an effective neoliberal subject will be orientated towards minimising that. I love teaching on things I’m actively thinking about and only want to avoid being asked to teach things I’m not actively engaged with. So while these commitments feel like a structure I can securely inhabit, it’s one I can feel I’ll continually have to rebuild to keep it intact.

*Sorry Maggie I know you would have hated this. But I also know you would have respected the intellectual seriousness with which I’m pursuing it.

#career #goals #planning #productivity #reflexivity

A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

I turned 40 last month. Given how curious I’d found it to watch other people in my life find this a difficult milestone, I had long expected to feel little about it. I’d seen what I thought was people acting out in anticipation whereas I now wonder if it was in fact passage à l’acte. I suddenly felt what Archer called the necessity of selection with a new urgency in the months leading to my birthday. This could be construed in Lacanian terms as (belatedly) coming to terms with my castration, embarking on a journey of self-conscious wintering:

Castration means we are not whole, do not have everything we want, cannot be everything we might have wanted to be, cannot do everything we may have wanted to do. We are not omnipotent, omniscient, immortal beings.

Miss-ing by Bruce Fink, loc 689

It was so easy to see the problem once I looked, it felt clear to me that I hadn’t wanted to look until that point. My criteria for saying ‘yes’ to things were effectively that I found something vaguely interesting and vaguely appreciated whoever I’d be working with. It was such an absurdly low threshold for commitment of time and energy, that it was no wonder I only finished a fraction of the projects I started and have never done what I felt was my best work. It took an exhausting amount of planning, negotiation and positioning but I withdrew from most of what I was committed to, using the following heuristic to decide:

• Am I contractually obliged to do this?
• Has someone in a position of seniority directly asked me to do this?
• Do I care deeply about this? Does it excite me?
• Will I be letting a close colleague or friend down if I don’t do this?

I soon realised there were three things I really care about. Firstly, I’m convinced LLMs are being badly theorised in ways that make their social and cultural dynamics impossible to adequately engage with. Secondly, I see higher education as a fascinating (and convenient) case study of how these dynamics are playing out in ways we are failing to get to grips with. Thirdly, I have a commitment to Archer’s morphogenetic approach as a broad route through which to address these questions, as well as to supporting the diffusion and integrity of her work.

I’m writing a book to address the first commitment, I have a fellowship (as well as teaching) to address the second commitment and my active non-university roles all relate to the third commitment. There’s some residual teaching which doesn’t map onto this perfectly and a small admin role which is completely disconnected. But for the most part everything I do now is something which matters to me.

I’m cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to sustain this. I now instinctively see invitations in terms of opportunity costs e.g. if I say ‘yes’ to this how much time is it taking away from the book? I’m still struggling with filtering speaking invitations because it feels like it’s broadly a positive thing for me to talk to as many people as possible about generative AI in higher education. To the extent I have a defined goal for my generative AI in higher education work it’s a matter of advocating for a pragmatic criticality and exploring what this means in practice. This is an unsettlingly open-ended ambition which probably needs a clearer formulation. But for the most part I feel like I’m experiencing an equilibrium between the quality and quantity of my work for the first time.

It feels like this triad might be what sustains me for the rest of my career. Obviously the commitments will mutate in the process. I’m increasingly convinced this first generation of chatbots will be remembered fondly as an innocent time before a world saturated with enshittified language models proactively intervening in human affairs. The problems encountered in higher education will change significantly in the process in ways which the current assessment integrity discourse is spectacularly ill-suited to cope with. If I have a long term theoretical project I’m pretty sure it’s building aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Archer’s notion of reflexivity*.

There’s nonetheless a continuous thread in all all three cases which I can feel extending out in front of me. I’ve started my training as a group analyst and there’s many things which might flow from that in the future, though I suspect any clinical work I might eventually do will revolve around living with LLMs. I’ll probably be pressured to apply for external grants at some point which I’ll try to fit as closely as possible around these three commitments. I will inevitably have to do teaching and admin at points which don’t match them but whatever capacity I have to perform as an effective neoliberal subject will be orientated towards minimising that. I love teaching on things I’m actively thinking about and only want to avoid being asked to teach things I’m not actively engaged with. So while these commitments feel like a structure I can securely inhabit, it’s one I can feel I’ll continually have to rebuild to keep it intact.

*Sorry Maggie I know you would have hated this. But I also know you would have respected the intellectual seriousness with which I’m pursuing it.

#career #goals #planning #productivity #reflexivity

A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

I turned 40 last month. Given how curious I’d found it to watch other people in my life find this a difficult milestone, I had long expected to feel little about it. I’d seen what I thought was people acting out in anticipation whereas I now wonder if it was in fact passage à l’acte. I suddenly felt what Archer called the necessity of selection with a new urgency in the months leading to my birthday. This could be construed in Lacanian terms as (belatedly) coming to terms with my castration, embarking on a journey of self-conscious wintering:

Castration means we are not whole, do not have everything we want, cannot be everything we might have wanted to be, cannot do everything we may have wanted to do. We are not omnipotent, omniscient, immortal beings.

Miss-ing by Bruce Fink, loc 689

It was so easy to see the problem once I looked, it felt clear to me that I hadn’t wanted to look until that point. My criteria for saying ‘yes’ to things were effectively that I found something vaguely interesting and vaguely appreciated whoever I’d be working with. It was such an absurdly low threshold for commitment of time and energy, that it was no wonder I only finished a fraction of the projects I started and have never done what I felt was my best work. It took an exhausting amount of planning, negotiation and positioning but I withdrew from most of what I was committed to, using the following heuristic to decide:

• Am I contractually obliged to do this?
• Has someone in a position of seniority directly asked me to do this?
• Do I care deeply about this? Does it excite me?
• Will I be letting a close colleague or friend down if I don’t do this?

I soon realised there were three things I really care about. Firstly, I’m convinced LLMs are being badly theorised in ways that make their social and cultural dynamics impossible to adequately engage with. Secondly, I see higher education as a fascinating (and convenient) case study of how these dynamics are playing out in ways we are failing to get to grips with. Thirdly, I have a commitment to Archer’s morphogenetic approach as a broad route through which to address these questions, as well as to supporting the diffusion and integrity of her work.

I’m writing a book to address the first commitment, I have a fellowship (as well as teaching) to address the second commitment and my active non-university roles all relate to the third commitment. There’s some residual teaching which doesn’t map onto this perfectly and a small admin role which is completely disconnected. But for the most part everything I do now is something which matters to me.

I’m cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to sustain this. I now instinctively see invitations in terms of opportunity costs e.g. if I say ‘yes’ to this how much time is it taking away from the book? I’m still struggling with filtering speaking invitations because it feels like it’s broadly a positive thing for me to talk to as many people as possible about generative AI in higher education. To the extent I have a defined goal for my generative AI in higher education work it’s a matter of advocating for a pragmatic criticality and exploring what this means in practice. This is an unsettlingly open-ended ambition which probably needs a clearer formulation. But for the most part I feel like I’m experiencing an equilibrium between the quality and quantity of my work for the first time.

It feels like this triad might be what sustains me for the rest of my career. Obviously the commitments will mutate in the process. I’m increasingly convinced this first generation of chatbots will be remembered fondly as an innocent time before a world saturated with enshittified language models proactively intervening in human affairs. The problems encountered in higher education will change significantly in the process in ways which the current assessment integrity discourse is spectacularly ill-suited to cope with. If I have a long term theoretical project I’m pretty sure it’s building aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Archer’s notion of reflexivity*.

There’s nonetheless a continuous thread in all all three cases which I can feel extending out in front of me. I’ve started my training as a group analyst and there’s many things which might flow from that in the future, though I suspect any clinical work I might eventually do will revolve around living with LLMs. I’ll probably be pressured to apply for external grants at some point which I’ll try to fit as closely as possible around these three commitments. I will inevitably have to do teaching and admin at points which don’t match them but whatever capacity I have to perform as an effective neoliberal subject will be orientated towards minimising that. I love teaching on things I’m actively thinking about and only want to avoid being asked to teach things I’m not actively engaged with. So while these commitments feel like a structure I can securely inhabit, it’s one I can feel I’ll continually have to rebuild to keep it intact.

*Sorry Maggie I know you would have hated this. But I also know you would have respected the intellectual seriousness with which I’m pursuing it.

#career #goals #planning #productivity #reflexivity

LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LLMs become more dangerous as they rapidly get easier to use

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age

From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, pg 37

I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance. I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself.

From pg 86:

So anyway, my muscles right now are really tight, and stretching doesn’t loosen them up. I’m peaking in terms of training, but even so they’re tighter than usual. Sometimes I have to hit my legs with a fist when they get tight to loosen them up. (Yes, it hurts.) My muscles can be as stubborn as— or more stubborn than—I am. They remember things and endure, and to some extent they improve. But they never compromise. They don’t give up. This is my body, with all its limits and quirks. Just as with my face, even if I don’t like it it’s the only one I get, so I’ve got to make do. As I’ve grown older, I’ve naturally come to terms with this. You open the fridge and can make a nice—actually even a pretty smart—meal with the leftovers. All that’s left is an apple, an onion, cheese, and eggs, but you don’t complain. You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.

From pg 153:

Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have

#ageing #Murakami #reflexiveImperative #reflexivity #running

Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age

From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, pg 37

I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance. I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself.

From pg 86:

So anyway, my muscles right now are really tight, and stretching doesn’t loosen them up. I’m peaking in terms of training, but even so they’re tighter than usual. Sometimes I have to hit my legs with a fist when they get tight to loosen them up. (Yes, it hurts.) My muscles can be as stubborn as— or more stubborn than—I am. They remember things and endure, and to some extent they improve. But they never compromise. They don’t give up. This is my body, with all its limits and quirks. Just as with my face, even if I don’t like it it’s the only one I get, so I’ve got to make do. As I’ve grown older, I’ve naturally come to terms with this. You open the fridge and can make a nice—actually even a pretty smart—meal with the leftovers. All that’s left is an apple, an onion, cheese, and eggs, but you don’t complain. You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.

From pg 153:

Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have

#ageing #Murakami #reflexiveImperative #reflexivity #running