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 do an analysis of my intellectual style by exploring a sample of my blog posts

It’s slightly unsettling it has written this in the first person! This is all GPT 5.2 rather than me:

What follows are not positions so much as habits of thought.

1. Take the narrow problem frame, then widen it until the stakes show up

A recurring pattern is to start from the immediate debate, assessment integrity, detection, social media engagement, and then widen the frame to institutional adaptation, labour, incentives, and harms. It is a refusal of the convenience of technical fixes.

2. Treat technologies as structures with powers, not tools with uses

This is the move that underpins most of my work on platforms and now on LLMs. Once you treat the object as structure, you start asking different questions: what does it condition, what does it incentivise, what does it make easy, what does it make costly, and who bears those costs.

3. Look for mechanisms that connect political economy to inner life

Distraction, cognitive triage, communicative escalation, epistemic flooding: these are not just descriptive flourishes. They are the conceptual bridge between macro conditions and what it feels like to think and act in a given environment.

4. Refuse the pro anti binary, without collapsing into fence sitting

I often try to hold ambivalence, because technologies can enable solidarity and flatten hierarchies while also generating toxicity and new burdens. The move is to specify conditions and distributions rather than deliver a verdict.

5. Use time as an analytic dimension, not just a background variable

I keep returning to biographies, trajectories, and the temporal conditions for critique. Acceleration matters because it changes the conditions under which reflection is possible, and it changes what kinds of work can be done well.

6. Convert everyday scenes into theoretical probes

A film, a management practice, a platform feature, a cultural artefact becomes a way of getting at a mechanism. This is how the blog often works: theory is tested against scenes, and scenes become legible through theory.

7. Treat institutions as moral economies, not neutral containers

Universities are not just rule sets. They are systems of responsibility allocation, blame distribution, and risk management. A lot of my writing on AI in higher education is really about this, who gets trusted, who gets suspected, who gets protected, and who is made to absorb uncertainty.

8. Read “inexorability” talk as a political manoeuvre

When someone says “this is inevitable,” I tend to hear a bid to foreclose alternatives and dissolve responsibility. The counter move is to insist on mediation: incentives, infrastructures, and choices.

9. Treat the epistemic environment as an object in its own right

Instead of focusing only on claims and counterclaims, I focus on the conditions under which claims circulate, stick, and become actionable. Epistemic chaos and epistemic flooding are ways of shifting attention from content to environment.

10. Translate abstract theory into a vocabulary that can travel

The blog repeatedly works as a translation machine: taking Archer, Habermas, psychoanalysis, and pulling out handles that can be used in everyday description. If it cannot travel, it cannot do explanatory work outside a small circle.

11. Turn reflexivity itself into an object of inquiry

Rather than treating reflexivity as a given capacity, I treat it as variable, patterned, and historically conditioned, and I keep asking what kinds of environments cultivate what kinds of inner dialogue.

12. Use the blog as a method of serial thinking

There is a recurring practice of working through a book, a concept, or a problem in public, chapter by chapter or post by post, because writing clarifies. This is a methodological commitment, not just a communication choice.

13. Keep returning to dependence

From early writing on the self as an object of control and dependence, through social media as moral psychology, to LLMs as embedded in lifeworld activity, the recurring question is what we become dependent on, what dependency does to agency, and how dependencies are organised.

14. Treat degradation as a process, not an event

This is why enshittification matters as a concept, and why I care about how concepts themselves get degraded by platform circulation. The analytic focus stays on how, not merely that.

15. Look for feedback loops

Generative systems feed platforms with more content, which intensifies attention competition, which worsens epistemic conditions, which increases the appeal of tools that promise relief, which further embeds those tools. A lot of my recent writing is trying to name these loops early, before they harden into “common sense.”

#blogging #deepResearch #GPT52 #theorising #theory

Is there a middle ground between bourgeois theory and avant-garde theory?

There’s a blistering critique in Gary Hall’s Masked Media of what he terms, drawing on McKenzie Wark’s account of the novel, bourgeois theory. As he puts it on pg 185, bourgeois theory is rendered unserious and slightly ridiculous by being stuck in antiquated modes which leave it unable to address new conditions. To the extent it tries to address these conditions, it does so in a deeply superficial way:

Bourgeois theory clearly ‘isn’t working’, then. The nonhuman, anthropogenic climate breakdown, ecocide, the Anthropocene: all exceed what the form of proper theory can currently express. Like the novel, theory has not adapted to the new reality ushered in by the Anthropocene, including all those laws and legal decisions that are starting to pile up around the question of the rights of nature. (For sure, the last thing bourgeois legacy theorists want is for any of this to actually impact on their own ways of performing as great authors.) Instead, theory ‘imposes itself on a nature it cannot really perceive or value’ (Wark 2017d). Just as ‘serious fiction, like bourgeois culture, now seems rather unserious, indeed frivolous’, so too does serious theory (2017d). The nonhuman may be what a lot of contemporary theory studies and writes about, but it cannot take seriously the implications of the nonhuman for theory. As a result, the current landfill of theoretical literature on the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism smeared with nonhuman filler – objects, materials, technologies, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, viruses, microbes, stones, geological formations – to make it appear otherwise.

He frames a concern with biography as quintessentially bourgeois but a reflexivity in regards to practice as anti-bourgeois. The problem I see is that this draws the boundary of what constitutes anti-bourgeois theory so restrictively that I’m not sure who, other than Gary Hall some of the time, actually falls within it. It’s a combination of impacting upon actual practice, one’s own and that of others, but furthermore doing so in a conceptual mode predicated upon the evacuation of the inherited conceptual legacies which inevitably litter thought and speech. From pg 143-144

The performance of serious theory today is therefore as formally limited to bourgeois liberal humanism as the novel. (As Wark says in her earlier text on Moretti and the bourgeois novel: ‘It is about making something of this world, not transcending it in favor of another’. When it comes to the ‘bourgeois sensibility’ there is no adventuring into the unknown, ‘no spontaneous bravery’, ‘“few surprises”’. It might be ‘hard work’, being a bourgeois writer or theorist, then, ‘but it’s a steady job’ [2013].)79 This means that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for even the most radical of political theories to do anything other than exclude the diversity of human and nonhuman presences. To sample and remix Wark’s text on the novel in the Anthropocene in order to further undercut notions of the author as self-identical human individual: anything that would actually impact on the concealment of theory’s established scaffolding, how it is created, disseminated and monetised, is regarded as not proper, eccentric, odd and risks banishment. ‘But from what? Polite bourgeois society?’ (2017d). The for-profit world of Verso books and Routledge journals where proper theory is to be found?

My love/hate relationship with Gary Hall’s work comes, I think, from sharing aspects of his critique of bourgeois theory but finding avant-garde theorising even more off putting. Firstly, it imagines itself as standing outside of the circuits of (academic) accumulation whereas the valorisation of conceptual and linguistic novelty is a primary strategy to accumulate status and prestige within significant parts of the academy. Secondly, it takes what can sometimes feel like a sneering stance towards accepting the doxa of the field, misconstruing a necessary condition of working within a social field as a failure of cultural imagination. It’s another variation of the ‘sociology as a calling’ / ‘scholarship as a vocation’ tendency which I’ve come to see as deeply psychically pernicious, postulating a sphere of autonomous enjoyment (good thing) which I suspect for many people is functionally a disavowal of the conditions of their own labour (bad thing). Thirdly, it hinders the emergence of a middle ground between these two categories by predicating the cultivation of scholarly reflexivity under changing sociotechnical conditions (i.e. the project which animates my educational work) upon a particular style of conceptualising those conditions.

It bundles together two moves which I don’t think are necessarily connected and I suspect are probably antithetical to each other. It’s a heavily aestheticised mode of concept-work geared towards the hyperactive (and implicitly) competitive production of linguistic and conceptual novelty. Whereas if we see it as desirable that we do work which, to use Hall’s work, would “actually impact on the concealment of theory’s established scaffolding, how it is created, disseminated and monetised” this raises the question of the relationship between theory and this outcome. I’m persuaded enough by Jana Bacevic’s core thesis (see also) that it seems obvious theory does not and could not automatically produce this outcome. Hence the question of the relationship, as well as our meta-theoretical, methodological and reflexive relationship to that relationship, which are exactly the things I think Hall’s approach unintentionally obfuscates alongside what can at other points be examples of remarkable lucidity.

I admire Hall’s real impact through the many initiatives he’s played a leading role in but I struggle to see how his theoretical approach helps those undertakings and suspect it might actually hinder them. There are modes of theorising between the bourgeois and the avant-garde which, it seems to me, could more directly serve these purposes.

(Plus when a billion people worldwide are regularly using the most sophisticated machinery for conceptual and linguistic novelty that has ever existed, the quality of that novelty becomes even more important than it has been previously)

#avantGardeTheorising #bourgeoisTheory #mckenzieWark #RosiBraidotti #theorising #theory

The practice of social theory

This has come up a few times this week for various reasons. I did a summer school with Jana Bacevic at Cambridge in 2017 and the resources are still available here:

#janaBacevic #socialTheory #theorising #theory

Call for Short Papers – One-Day Symposium (The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory)

Call for Short Papers (750 – 1,000 words by 28th February 2025, 5pm GMT)

The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory (One-Day Symposium)

A BSA Theory Study Group & BSA Early Career Forum Event

To be held on Friday, 23rd May 2025 at the University of Cambridge

We are delighted to invite short paper submissions for a One-Day BSA Theory / ECF Symposium titled ‘The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory’ and scheduled to be held on the 23rd of May 2025 at the University of Cambridge. This Symposium will provide a platform for Early Career scholars to discuss papers as part of themed workshops, receive feedback from distinguished discussants and peers, engage in constructive dialogue, and meet other social theorists from across a wide range of social theoretical disciplinary fields.

Rationale for the event: 

The process of producing social theory is often assumed to be self-explanatory within academic institutions. With the current ‘crisis’ of higher education and intensification of academic precarity disproportionately affecting theoretical scholarship, centres, departments, and institutes, the co-organisers of this Symposium wish to create a space for Early Career scholars interested in social theory to receive feedback on their ongoing research/papers and discuss the day-to-day experiences, challenges, and opportunities of continuing to undertake theoretical scholarship.

The Symposium will include two elements: 

• Papers will be grouped into thematic workshops (based on overlapping areas of interest) where each paper will be allocated a 25-minute slot for collective discussions. Each paper will be allocated a discussant from among four distinguished scholars (introduced below) and all other workshop attendees will be encouraged to read the papers in advance in order to contribute to a wider discussion and offer constructive feedback. These insights will, we hope, contribute to informing and refining your work for future publication.
• A roundtable event where the four guest discussants will share reflections from their own theoretical work (the processes by which they undertake social theoretical scholarship, highlighting the methods they employ to generate original concepts and insightful interventions), followed by a wider discussion where we will consider further aspects of the conditions of producing social theoretical work.

We are honoured to announce that our guest discussants are Sarah Bufkin (Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Birmingham), Birgan Gokmenoglu (Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University), Teodor Mladenov (Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Dundee), and Kristin Surak (Associate Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics).

We encourage the submission of short papers embedded within social theory and a wide range of sub-fields such as (but not limited to): political sociology, elites, nationalism, and international migration; disability, independent living, international social policy, (post)socialism and social justice; political ethnography, social and political change, time and the future; Black Atlantic political thought, cultural studies, and feminist and Marxist theory.

Timeline and requirements:

• Submit a short paper with a  theoretical contribution (between 750 – 1,000 words, excluding references) by Wednesday, 28th February 2025, 5pm GMT. 
• If your short paper is selected for the Symposium, you will be invited (in early March) to submit a full draft (between 6,000 – 9,000 words, excluding references) by Monday, 28th April 2025, 5pm BST.

How to submit:

• Please send your short paper to bsatheory@gmail.com in a Word Document or PDF file. 
• Include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), four keywords related to your paper, three keywords related to your wider scholarly interests, and a very brief statement confirming your Early Career status.

Attendance:

• Attendance will be free. We encourage early career scholars who are also BSA members to access the BSA Support Fund for transport/accommodation costs of up to £1,000. Lunch and refreshments will be provided for attendees at the symposium. 

To all recipients of this email: we would be grateful if you could forward this email to your networks and Early Career colleagues and friends.

The organisers of this symposium are Ioana Cerasella Chis, Joe Davidson, and Sebastian Raza Mejia (co-convenors of the BSA Theory Study Group). For further inquiries, please contact us at bsatheory@gmail.com. We look forward to your submissions and to a lively symposium!

#socialTheory #theorising #theory

CfP: The New Urgency: The Use(lessness) of Theories in Educational Research

Special Issue: Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory Editors: David Lee Carlson and Mirka Koro, Arizona State University

Overview

This special issue explores the use(lessness) of theories in educational research in current political, neoliberal (post-capitalistic), and ecological contexts. It examines how theories linger, return, and transform research, while research transforms theories.

Key Questions for Submissions

1. What is the potential use(lessness) of theories in educational research given the current social-economic-political-ecological climate?
2. What do theories activate? How would you recognize and activate different uses of theory in educational research? To what extent does theory’s definitional and practical incoherence contribute to or hinder knowledge production?
3. What makes theories critical, or what is the “criticality” in educational theory?
4. How do theories attune to research methodologies and perspectives? How do they challenge (or not) traditional positivist views of research? How do theories impede (or not) knowledge production?
5. What theories are left out, ignored or dismissed from educational research that could assist with current socio-political-economic issues in the present moment?
6. How can post-qualitative inquiry and post-structuralism address current social issues?
7. How do theories function in educational research in the context of diverse epistemologies and ontologies?

Timeline

• Abstract Submission (300-500 words): March 15, 2025
• Invitations for Full Articles: April 15, 2025
• Article Submissions (6000 words): October 15, 2025
• Peer Review: August 15-October 15, 2025
• Revisions: October 15-December 15, 2025
• Final Submissions: January 1, 2026
• Issue Submission to Journal: February 1, 2026

Submission Details: Abstracts should be submitted via email to David Lee Carlson (David.L.Carlson@asu.edu)

The special issue welcomes manuscripts using academic, experimental, situational, material, creative, critical, and exploratory writing styles.

#theorising #theory

The enshittification of enshittification

I wonder if Cory Doctorow finds the misuse of the concept of ‘enshittification’ as annoying as I increasingly do. It had a precise analytical meaning which is increasingly lost in an idiomatic use which means something ‘gets shit’. The concept concerned HOW this happened rather than THAT it happened. The idiomatic use could be deployed to say “the concept of ‘enshittification’ has itself been enshittified”. It would be attention grabbing and catchy but it simply wouldn’t fit with what the word actually means. Yet social platforms have made the concept of enshittification a bit, well, shit.

Don’t get me wrong, I like academic buzzwords. I must have used the phrase ‘accelerated academy’ literally thousands of times in 2010s. But they serve a purpose for coordinating attention rather than performing analysis. It’s sad when an analytical concept becomes a catchphrase.

#concepts #CoryDoctorw #enshittification #platforms #theorising

This is a great account in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking of how what I think of as avant-garde theorising, valorising conceptual and linguistic novelty as an end in itself, expresses the competitive individualism of the academy rather than being some sort of radical bulwark against it. From loc 471:

The need for a different way of being extends to all aspects of scholars’ lives, including—to return to the agonistic approach to advancing knowledge in the humanities that I mentioned earlier—our critical methodologies. This sense of agon, or struggle, encourages us to reject the readings and arguments that have gone before us and to focus on advancing new ways of looking at the material we study. It is this mode of argumentation that leads Fluck to posit a pressure to “outradicalize” one another, given the need to distinguish ourselves and our readings from the many others in our fields. However, the political orientation of our critiques is ultimately of lesser importance than the competitive drive that lies beneath them. Distinguishing our arguments from those of others working in our fields is the primary goal; that we often choose the terrain of the ideological, or wind up embroiled in what Paul Ricoeur describes as the “hermeneutics of suspicion” in order to effect that distinction is a mere by-product.

From loc 436, loc 448 and loc 461 on the competitive individualism more broadly:

However much we as scholars might reject individualism as part and parcel of the humanist, positivist ways of the past, our working lives—on campus and off—are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. Beginning with college applications, extending through graduate school admissions, fellowship applications, the job market, publication submissions, and, seemingly finally, the tenure and promotion review, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best—whatever that might mean in a given context—are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another—sometimes literally: it’s not uncommon for research universities to ask external reviewers in tenure and promotion cases to rank candidates against the best two or three scholars in the field.

The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually, with the result that even those fields whose advancement depends most on team-based efforts are required to develop careful guidelines for establishing credit and priority.

This is no way to run a collective. It’s also no way to structure a fulfilling life: as I’ve written elsewhere, this disengagement from community and singular focus on the race for individual distinction is a key factor in the extremely high risk of burnout among college faculty and other intellectual workers. It is all but impossible for us to structure our lives around the things that are most in line with our deepest personal values when we are driven to focus on those things that will create distinction for us, that will allow us to compare ourselves—or our institutions—favorably with one another.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/22/avant-garde-theorising-is-a-reflection-of-the-competitive-individualism-of-the-academy/

#academics #avantGardeTheorising #competitiveIndividualism #individualism #KathleenFitzpatrick #theorising #theory #universities

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx famously observes that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. Immediately after this frequently paraphrased line comes a remark just as evocative and interesting: The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. He was drawing attention to the ways in which the conflicts of the present are furnished by the ideas of the past:

And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language

But it also draws my attention to the way in which our present intellectual work is shaped by the past conflicts of those who have influenced us. Not only are we influenced by their work but we are influenced by the way they have been influenced, regardless of whether they are aware or not of those influences. The scholastic conceit is to imagine ourself as autonomous thinkers floating freely in our undisturbed balance, but the reality is that our scholarly dispositions were accumulated in a messy and contingent way obscured by the self-indulgent loquaciousness* which eventually emerges from it. To the extent we approach our work systematically, there is a convoluted story of how that systematicity came into being:

If one stands back from the day-to-day demands of professional routine, it becomes clear that an intellectual trajectory is not organised in advance, we do not begin by surveying the intellectual ground before deciding upon a line of enquiry; rather, as Hans-Georg Gadamer might put it, we fall into conversation; our starting points are accidental, our early moves untutored, they are not informed by a systematic professional knowledge of the available territory, rather they flow from curiosity; we read what strikes us as interesting, we discard what seems dull. All this means that our early moves are quite idiosyncratic, shaped by our experiences of particular texts, teachers and debates with friends/colleagues. Thereafter matters might become more systematic, we might decide to follow a discipline, discover an absorbing area of work or find ourselves slowly unpacking hereto deep-seated concerns. It also means that we can bestow coherence only retrospectively. This idiosyncratic personal aspect of scholarly enquiry is part and parcel of the trade, not something to be regretted, denied or avoided; nonetheless systematic reflections offers a way of tacking stock, of presenting critical reflexive statements in regard to the formal commitments made in substantive work.

Peter Preston, Arguments and Action in Social Theory

Keynes famously suggested that “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. The problem with academics I think is that we underestimate our formative influences, in the sense that we regard ourselves as inspired or persuaded by people rather than shaped by them. The influences which enables us to develop the capacity to be inspired or persuaded (i.e. to be quasi-autonomous thinkers) are much earlier and more formative, in a way that is difficult to reconcile with the scholarly conceit of autonomy.

But we simultaneously place the people who influenced us on a pedestal and forget that they too had formative influences. They didn’t emerge as fully formed thinkers writing the books and papers which shaped how we approach our work. They too had messy formative trajectories. Their starting points were accidental, their early moves untutored, to use Preston’s language. To the extent we have been shaped by their work, we have also been shaped by the way their work was shaped. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. There’s an unconscious to the texts we are working with**, a network of influences, assumptions and associations which exceeds the self-conception of our mentors and the narratives we habitually share about them. This is the nightmare of our intellectual influences, at risk of taking Marx’s metaphor*** too literally, in which we are bound up in unresolved conflicts we don’t apprehend, let alone understand.

What does this mean in practice? It means understanding your intellectual influences:

• Who influenced you? How did they influence you? Why did they influence you?
• What do you find helpful about their work? What do you find restrictive? What does it help you see? What do you suspect it obscures?
• Who influenced them? How did they influence them? Why did they influence them?
• What did they find helpful about their work? What did they find restrictive? What did it help them see? What do you suspect it obscured for them?
• How does their intellectual trajectory fit within broader traditions of thought, both ones they consciously subscribed to and ones they did not deliberately engage with?

I’m writing this in a slightly nostalgic mood a year after my mentor died. I did have these conversations with her and I did understand her influences, without realising why I felt so compelled to do so. But I wish I could still have these conversations. If you’re working with someone’s work after they’re gone, trying to keep it alive as a tradition rather than simply reproduce it as a body of authoritative sources, it’s crucial to understand this I think. But it’s also part of enjoying writing in the sense in which I focus on in this series because it’s the writerly equivalent of traversing the fantasy. If you understand these influences, if you understand the networks which have constituted you as a thinker and writer, you open up a space for freedom within them which is more substantive than the imagined autonomy of scholarly conceit****. You won’t cease to have a writer’s unconscious, that undercurrent which ‘rejects nothing’, but you will have changed where you stand in relation to it.

*The fact this phrase spilled out of my mind unprompted rather illustrates the point I was trying to make.

**Thanks to James Slattery for forcing me to (begrudgingly) accept this notion.

***It is a metaphor right, even though it looks like a simile? I need to leave for work so I’m not going down this rabbit hole.

****I keep using this phrase for some reason. I’m roughly gesturing towards the idea of humanistic creativity in which your work is an expression of individual particularity, with all influences being external and contingent in ways exhaustively registered in the machinery of citation.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/30/how-to-enjoy-writing-18-understand-where-the-ideas-which-influence-you-come-from/

#history #historyOfIdeas #intellectualBiography #marx #scholarship #theorising #writing

From Lacan: In Spite of Everything, by Élisabeth Roudinesco, loc 1257:

Distinct from the witticism – or portmanteau word – that aims to illuminate the many facets of a language, as in Rabelais or Joyce, the neologism can turn into delirious creation if an author resorts to it to rethink the whole of a doctrinal system and, above all, to imprint his name on a discourse from which a new set of concepts can spring ex nihilo. In this respect, ‘neologistic’ excess is an abuse of language that turns thought into a pile of words, into delirium.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/19/neologistic-excess-is-an-abuse-of-language-that-turns-thought-into-a-pile-of-words-into-delirium/

#avantGardeTheorising #Lacan #neologism #RosiBraidotti #theorising #theory #writing