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.
Mark Carrigan 