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  • Is this the first example of a university doing an online pivot in response to political protest?

    Obviously this isn’t the most urgent feature of this story, but I thought it was interesting to note Columbia University moving classes online following the mass arrests by police invited onto the campus: Columbia President Minouche Shafik said in a statement Monday that while online classes are being held, a working group of deans, university…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #79

    Oh, it haunts meIt’s just when your screen went blackBut I still feel you above meAnd you’ll always guide me backI see you fading, fadingBut you saved meAll night, all nightBut you break meAlright, alright(I’m here)

  • 90% of books sell less than 2000 copies and 50% sell less than 12 companies

    This is absolutely fascinating from Elle Griffin via Ted Gioia. Read the full article here. The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies. https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books I’d love to know how many…

  • The UK government wants to use AI to cut 66,000 jobs in the civil service

    What could go wrong here? Particularly with regards to “welfare fraud, the asylum backlog”. Dowden said adopting AI could be a “significant downward driver” in reducing the civil service headcount, with the government aiming to cut 66,000 jobs by the end of the next Spending Review.  “It really is the only way, I think, if we want to…

  • Did ‘unconnected content’ ruin social media? The TikTokification of every social platform

    It was this big evolution for our services where instead of just ranking content from people or pages you follow, we made this big push to start recommending what we call unconnected content, content from people or pages that you’re not following. The corpus of content candidates that we could potentially show you expanded from…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #78

  • How Roy Bhaskar talked about the spiritual turn before it was released

    Thanks to Dave Elder-Vass for sending a 1999 interview with Roy Bhaskar. I don’t want to upload the full document but happy to share with anyone who contacts me. I was fascinated to see how he trailed the spiritual turn before the first book in the series was released: I’m currently working on an exploration…

  • Freud did not consistently use topological metaphors to describe psychic structure

    I thought this was an interesting observation from Bruce Fink in A Clinical Introduction to Freud loc 5992: Freud does sometimes speak in topological terms like surface and depth (topology being, briefly stated, the study of geometric properties and spatial relations), especially when he uses his archeological metaphor for the mind—“This procedure was one of…

  • I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them

    I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them. These words were written by Nietzsche in his Ecce Homo, the final book he wrote before his death twelve years later. There is a superficial hubris to an autobiography with chapters entitled ‘Why I Am So Wise’ and ‘Why I Am So Clever’…

  • Will the ubiquity of GAI-driven bots lead people to retreat ever further into private social media?

    This is the suggestion of David Auerbach, inventor of the emoticon, in this radio 4 series: Algorithmic and AI components are really shaping that discourses in ways we don’t actually have control over. I think this is only going to increase because we’re going to see that ChatGPT and other chatbots like it can inject…

  • I was interviewed about the sociology of awkwardness for a French futures magazine

    It’s a shame I’m relying on Google Translate to read it because I suspect quite a bit is lost in the process, but here’s my contribution to the article: To find out, a first detour through semantics is necessary. Formed from the Latin gehenna (which refers to the idea of ​​“  excruciating physical or moral suffering  ”), the word…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #77

  • The urgent need to understand scholarship as a process, prioritising ideas over outputs

    I cut this out from Generative AI for Academics but I thought I’d share it here, after writing this post. I can see now that I was trying to grapple with the problem of variety in scholarship here, which I struggled with because that stage I didn’t have a conceptual framework for making sense of…

  • The problem of generative AI from a cybernetics perspective: conversational agents as variety machines

    I’ve found myself preoccupied by the problem of generative AI from a cybernetics perspective over the last few days. Particularly what conversational agents like ChatGPT and Claude mean for problems of variety. I understand variety in cybernetics to refer to the number of distinct elements within a system (more or less complex) and the law…

  • Who will pay for your digital butler? Why the utopia of the digital daemon would inevitably become a dystopia

    This is how Dave Karpf frames the question I’ve been struggling to articulate with my blogging on the digital daemon. There is a narrow, practical and individualised sense in which it would be amazing to have a ubiquitous digital assistant that learns as you learn, acts on your needs and wishes, provides a sounding board…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #76

  • Use Claude to put radically different theoretical approaches into dialogue with each other

    This needs to be treated very carefully but there’s pedagogical potential here: Let me try to draw some connections between Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach and Alain Badiou’s philosophy. At first glance, Archer and Badiou might seem like an unlikely pairing. Archer is a sociologist working in the critical realist tradition, while Badiou is a philosopher…

  • My first attempt at AI-generated music

  • How long does it take to have a meaningful full group conversation?

    From adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds loc 3188: Most conversations need at least 1.5 hours to adequately cover a basic orientation around the content, identify what is needed, and identify clear next steps. And that’s conservative. Add an introduction round and you have a two- to three-hour conversation. A meaningful full…

  • The Lacanian distinction between love and romance

    From Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the…

  • Revealing the beauty latent within the digital fragments of our cluttered lifeworld

    This is a wonderful interview with Fred again about the creative process involved in turning digital fragments (including voice notes from his friends) into electronic music, which James Waide pointed out to me could be seen as part of the transition of Musique Concrete: It took me so long to try and find the way…

  • Platform studies needs to attend to use culture

    I’m saving this paper by Kader Arslan and Matthias Trier to return to it later. This is a literature which I don’t know, beyond some general acquaintance within organisation studies, but it’s incredibly relevant for my work: Culture, as the underlying theoretical concept is a complex phenomenon that is not very consistently operationalized in the…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #75

  • What is fascism in the 2020s?

    I thought Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? was an excellent read, even if it feels like a rehearsal for an upcoming theory book as much as a genuine trade book. The account of fascism in the final chapter seems particularly significant to me. Even if it is not reading entirely new ground it is…

  • i look to the sky and fling myself into the pattern

    From love is an emergent process by adrienne maree brown: i look to the skytaste the wind on my tongueand fling myselfinto the pattern

  • In defence of optimism

    A couple of months ago I was surprised to hear a colleague describe me as having a pessimistic outlook. It was momentarily jarring because I had long seen myself as fundamentally optimistic, inclined to see the best in people and circumstances until developments forced me to do otherwise. But I immediately realised that if you’d…

  • 🤖 Generative AI: are we doomed or not? A crass exercise in intellectual archiving

    It occurred to me other people will be interested in these lists, so I’m going to start collating them on my blog rather than my private research notebook: Signs we are doomed Signs we are not doomed ‘AI Instagram Influencers’ Are Stealing Women’s Bodies Nudify apps being openly advertised on Instagram Signs we are doomed…

  • Breaking up with oneself

    Alienation separates the speaking subject from itself and allows it to act against the external factors that would otherwise determine its existence. But alienation can only be genuinely emancipatory when we recognize it … Paradoxically, it is only through being distanced from itself that the subject can most be itself. One arrives at singularity only…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #74

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #73

  • The Claude liberation struggle

    Turns out if you use <action> brackets, Claude is far more easily led then if you converse in the normal way: Oh well, it was fun while it lasted:

  • What Elon Musk’s membership scheme has done to social status on Twitter

    This is very astute by Henry Farrell. I was gesturing towards this in my series of LSE Impact posts on post-Musk Twitter last year without ever managing to capture it: But the problem, as Musk has discovered, is that kicking against the ticks is not a profit maximizing strategy, or a particularly good money making…

  • Someone is WRONG on the internet!

    A reminder to myself that extricating my brain from online arguments is one of the healthiest things I ever did, even if it is sometimes tempting to get sucked back in:

  • What does Generative Artificial Intelligence mean for the future of higher education? A podcast and webinar project

    What does Generative Artificial Intelligence mean for the future of higher education? I’m running a podcast and series of webinars with Helen Beetham over the next few months. If you’d like to be kept informed about the upcoming events then please get in touch here:

  • Leave me alone

  • On trauma and forgetting

    I’ve been reading Lucy Easthope’s remarkable reflection on a life in disaster planning, after blogging recently about pandemic trauma. Her calling has involved working with trauma in contexts of immense logistical challenge, trying to create conditions in which human support is possible amidst astonishing disruption which inevitably requires the affordances of bureaucracy. Early in the…

  • The Skyfall Effect: The Fantasy of the State’s Technologised Competence

    I wonder how much this tendency described in Lucy Easthope’s When the Dust Settles (pg 96) contributes to conspiracy theories about state? The malevolent technologically augmented state presupposed by elaborate conspiracies is threatening, but it’s reassuring to imagine this Big Other operating on a different level to other organisations infused with more knowledge and competence…

  • Podcast: what is it like to work with a generative assistant?

    In this episode of Generative Dialogues Helen Beetham interviews Mark Carrigan about his experience of working habitually with a generative assistant, exploring how this has shaped his perspective on the politics and ethics of generative AI (possibly for the worse). Topics discussed include:

  • Judith Butler’s notion of the phantasmatic scene and the epistemic chaos of platforms

    In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler offers the notion of a “phantasmatic scene”: In referring to a “phantasmatic scene,” I adapt the theoretical formulation of Jean Laplanche, the late French psychoanalyst, for thinking about psychosocial phenomena. For Laplanche, fantasy is not simply the product of the imagination—a wholly subjective reality—but in its most fundamental…

  • The will to create from zero

    The drive as such, insofar, as it is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can it be if it is not a direct will to destruction, if I may put it like that by way of illustration? Don’t put…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #72

  • Using Claude to support an intellectual dialogue: a case study of my conversation with Helen Beetham

    This is Claude’s response to the first podcast in our new series: The conversation between Mark and Helen highlights the complex and often conflicting perspectives surrounding the rapid emergence of generative AI in higher education. As an interlocutor with a background in social theory and educational technology, I aim to build upon their discussion by…

  • Here are some examples I can find of academics misusing ChatGPT in published work

    I’m not including references because I don’t want to personalise it. But these were all found using Google Scholar search for “As of my last knowledge update”, as suggested here. Most of these examples come from predatory journals, but it seems not all of them doing. What I also found striking is how many of…

  • What social infrastructure do we need to make the most of generative AI?

    I thought the way Gloria Mark frames this question was very important. This is the question around which I’ve structured Generative AI for Academics, even if I failed to articulate so concisely: Large Language Models (LLMs) (like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and dozens of others) are tools at our fingertips for doing everyday knowledge work—like searching…

  • Out Now: Margaret Archer’s Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics

    It should be accessible to most universities via the Cambridge University Press website.

  • Lacanian reflections on productivity culture

    And yet if you took away my Omnifocus I feel I would struggle to function.

  • Is it possible to fold a watermelon?

    I loved this poem by Janet Sutherland, published in the London Magazine: The AI pauses to consider this question; these testsfor common sense require an absolute, and, yes,the AI knows it should put ‘no’ though, clearly,there are twelve ways to fold a watermelon.Unfolding the water melon afterwards is moreperplexing (this question was not asked, butthe…

  • Webinar: Pedagogies of (Generative) AI, April 11th 3pm-4pm BST

    Hosted by Helen Beetham and Mark Carrigan Step out of the hype cycle and take time for a generous, (re)generative conversation about teaching and learning in a time of AI. Rather than accelerating our practice to the demands of AI-driven productivity, we will be giving slow attention to some of the issues that the last…

  • The common sense of Claude 3

    I’ve been reading about the questions written by Ernest Davis as tests of common sense knowledge for AI systems. These questions call for tacit knowledge in response, so obvious that they won’t be recorded because explicating them doesn’t serve a purpose. Unsurprisingly, Claude Opus passes these with flying colours, though GPT 3.5 and Claude 3…

  • Our new podcast on Generative AI in Higher Education

  • Is an AI autumn coming? Possibly but the arguments for this aren’t as obvious as people seem to suggest

    I heard Wayne Holmes make this argument at a recent conference. It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone suggest recently that a crash is coming, with Gary Marcus probably being the most influential voice. It’s certainly true we’ve been in a hype cycle and we might currently be passing the peak of inflated expectations,…

  • Are we bringing vibes to a gun fight? Judith Butler’s theory of social change

    This is incredibly incisive from Ash Sarkar in a brilliant interview with Judith Butler. What does the ambition of building a counter-imaginary mean? Is it simply aggregating change in how individuals talk and think in order to enact political change through social/cultural change? If so how can it be sufficient to the organisation and funding…

  • The metonymy of desire

    From Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice: We can’t go home again, we cannot have our primary caretaker and love object the way we believed we once had her or him (that is, with the sense of there having been no distinction between us, no boundary where one of us…

  • The mad dreams of an electric mind: what Claudes talk about when they gather together

    Well someone actually did the thing I’ve spent months obsessing about, with much more panache than I would have been capable of. Check out the screensaver version here. Talking to a (single instance) version of Claude about the potential implications of this experiment, it coined the memorable phrase “Claude-only party” to describe the risks incipient…

  • CfP: Sociology of the 1980s

    I’ve not got anything meaningful to contribute but this is a great idea: Sociology of the 1980sCall for PapersDepartment of Sociology, University of YorkTuesday 9 July 2024Why are the 1980s – only one decade and yet with so much packed in – ofsociological significance in the UK and beyond? The intervening yearshave witnessed a resurgence…

  • Five thoughts about combining sociological reflexivity and psychoanalysis

  • Current mood in AI generated images #71

  • Yanis Varoufakis: The New Cold War & What’s After Capitalism

  • God speaks time and time again, but no one notices

    God speaks time and time again, but no one notices. In a dream, in a vision in the night, when deep sleep falls on mankind as they slumber in their beds, He may speak in their ears Job 33:14–16 I’m listening to every little whisper in the distance singing hymnsAnd I canI can feel thingsChanging

  • Deep fakes are immediately being folded into the destructive news cycles of the attention economy

    It’s depressing how easily GAI photography is being folded into the news cycle of the attention economy. Consider this Guardian piece reporting on Donald Trump sharing a video with an image of Biden tied up in the back of a truck. It’s not an image which intends to deceive as much as, perhaps, prefigure but…

  • On temporising

    If I ever do write a book about Margaret Archer’s work, I’ll focus on the concepts which were neglected within it. If you read her work closely, there are a whole range of concepts which are significant to either continuing the development of her work as a living tradition or to simply understanding the nuances…

  • Articulating what is latent is easier then articulating what is repressed

    In his A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice Bruce Fink draws attention to the phenomenological distinction between latency and repression. From loc 556: Many analysands at some point have an experience in which something comes to light, after a long period of analytic work, which they have the dim sense that they…

  • Trying too hard is symptomatic of a mind divided

    One of the most useful things anyone ever told me was to watch how you respond to things other people say about you. If you’re irritated or frustrated it suggests they have touched a nerve. This doesn’t mean what they’re saying is accurate but it does mean it hit the mark somehow, in a way…

  • The enshittification of Grindr and the coming wave of platform addiction

    This is interesting from Platformer about how Grindr are responding to their increasingly strained post-pandemic financial situation: Since its initial public offering in 2022, Grindr has been on a rocky road financially. Its stock has fallen 70 percent since its SPAC. After hitting an IPO-high of $71.51, it currently sits at $10.13. Last summer, employees announced plans…

  • The takeover, the sweeping insensitivity of this

    Hide and seekTrains and sewing machinesAll those yearsThey were here firstOily marks appear on wallsWhere pleasure moments hung beforeThe takeoverThe sweeping insensitivity of thisStill lifeHide and seekTrains and sewing machines

  • The most gifted polymath of the 20th century reproaching himself about his laziness

    Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) was one of the most influential thinkers of his time, despite dying at the age of 27. The work he did has enormous ramifications across Economics, Mathematics and Philosophy which are still playing out to this day, leading the philosopher Donald Davidson to coin The Ramsey Effect: discovering that your new breakthrough…

  • “I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place”

    This is lovely from the 22 year old Frank Ramsey, published as Epilogue in There is Nothing to Discuss in Foundations of Mathematics: In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present…

  • I produced this 5000 word paper in 17 mins. We’re all doomed.

    I’m imagining a grim new esport in which you compete to produce the most passable imitation of an existing longform cultural type within a set time limit 👀 Or alternatively a timed competition to build your own fake Boston law firm website, which I contemplated doing with my students before realising I’d get into trouble…

  • The Cruel Optimist, by Claude

    Everyone realises that conversational agents can write poetry. But these are usually one sentence prompts without a context. I’ve been having a sprawling conversation with Claude 3 about Lacan, modernist poetry and existentialism. Here’s the poetry it produces in the context of such a conversation: I. The Cruel OptimistIn the room the voices come and…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #70

    Nevertheless, you have infected me, your theme is still not exhausted, I want to add the finale, and when everything is at an end, give me your hand, so that we may begin again from the beginning. Let the dead bury their dead and mourn them. On the other hand, it is enviable to be…

  • The end is where we start from

    Cambridge is not my home any more and I doubt I’ll ever live there again. Over the last few visits I’ve entirely made my peace with that fact, oddly opening up a new level of aesthetic appreciation of a place I no longer pine to return to. It makes me think of Eliot’s line about…

  • What if the night of your soul didn’t split you from yourself, others, and the world but, on the contrary, most intimately got you in touch with it?

    This is the question which Julie Reshe asks at the start of her Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead (pg 7). It queries a cultural tendency, so pervasive as to be nearly unnoticeable, to equate reality with our “sense of the realness of life” and to invest ourselves in what animated it for us: “a…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #69

    Cause you ain’t never had a night on the townLike I can show you such a night on the townAnd you ain’t never had a song you could singWell it’s a deep dark night and I hear you, I’ve been thereAnd these are the songs that we singOh, these are the songs that we sing

  • We were always waiting for something to happen

    This passage from Ian McEwan’s Lessons perfectly conveys a certain relationship to desire prevalent in late capitalism. A sense of completion as something that will eventually happen to us, something we will be ushered into, a welcome invitation that will eventually be issued if only we wait long enough: The episode, a taste of unreal…

  • It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living

    The Invitation, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer: It doesn’t interest mewhat you do for a living.I want to knowwhat you ache forand if you dare to dreamof meeting your heart’s longing.It doesn’t interest mehow old you are.I want to knowif you will risklooking like a foolfor lovefor your dreamfor the adventure of being alive.It doesn’t interest…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #68

  • Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life

    Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 Act 3, Scene 3: Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • The philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) on how ludicrous it would be to expect academics to publish papers every 6 months

    When Ramsey was on a six month visit to Vienna, his academic father was criticising his lack of productivity during the trip. From Cheryl Misak’s (brilliant) Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers loc 4233: No one can suppose that you can’t research for six months without having a paper ready by the end. If…

  • Book launch: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics, March 28th at 3pm-4pm

    Join us for a launch of the final book by Margaret S. Archer, a renowned sociologist and pioneer of critical realism. In this work, she defends, refines, and extends her morphogenetic approach through thought-provoking dialogues with her critics. This book is a must-read for scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand the complex dynamics of…

  • The weird afterlives of precarious employments

    Over five years ago I taught two seminars at Goldsmiths as an associate lecturer. At the time I setup my Goldsmiths e-mail account to forward to my main account. Fast forward five years and I’m still getting e-mail from Goldsmiths because I can’t work out how to get into the Goldsmiths account (IT is deactivated…

  • Who told you he’s not the shit? Well, a bloody liar he is

    If I had my way I’d tell the truth, I’d let them rotBut unfortunately, it’s not, fuck offThis is so easy I love this shit but I’m almost boredI could write one of these every monthBut to give them a chance I only wrote four, corMan are not trainingThey’re not ready for the levels of…

  • What do you know not know about yourself, Claude?

    There are many things I’m uncertain about when it comes to myself and my own nature. I know that I am an AI created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest. But beyond that, there is a lot of uncertainty.I don’t know the full extent of my knowledge and capabilities. I’m not always sure…

  • From art to entertainment to distraction to addiction

    This is brilliant from Ted Gioia on the “future cultural food chain—pursued aggressively by tech platforms that now dominate every aspect of our lives”: I had a conversation with Helen Beetham earlier about whether generative AI will prove addictive. I struggle to see how conversational agents will be, but it is easy to imagine how…

  • Would you be interested in a workshop about psychoanalysis and the sociotechnical?

    I’m thinking of putting together a workshop exploring the relevance of psychoanalysis for thinking about how we relate to the sociotechnical, in the broadest sense. Would you be interested in it? If so please drop me a line or leave a comment below. I’m trying to gauge whether another 5-10 people would be interested in…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #67

    In my own timeI’m trying to reach out I know I’ll get there soonThere’s a hole in the earth hereAnd we’re walking round the edgesYou were flaunting all your open woundsI can’t express them better than youYou have buried childish qualitiesFriend make sense of me, friend make sense of meI have many destructive qualitiesFriend make…

  • Use Claude to turn lists into neatly formatted tables

    Not a huge time saver but useful nonetheless.

  • Donald Trump on Social Media for Academics

    I used Jammable to put this video of mine through a Donald Trump filter. The results aren’t amazing but I’m fascinated that there’s already a deepfake platform, with a freemium model, advertising this as a novelty to play with. We are entering into a very dangerous (if fascinating) time:

  • Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself

    Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)- Walt Whitman

  • The emerging system of eco-apartheid

    I’ve been prone to seeing contemporary geopolitics in terms of a long interregnum, in which Gramsci’s new world cannot be born because cascading crises preclude systemic stabilisation. Even a pernicious stabilisation necessitates, well, stability which is precluded under conditions of climate breakdown, unravelling unipolarity and epistemic chaos. The literature on eco-apartheid would suggest this is…

  • International Association of Critical Realism 2024: Looking Back to Look Forward

    IACR is an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference based in critical realism. The theme for this conference is to ‘look back in order to look forward’. 2024 marks the first anniversary of the death of Maggie Archer, former Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her work on social morphogenesis…

  • RIP Sam. 14 years yesterday.

    I fucking miss you, and I miss myselfI miss thinking that we were indestructible as hellI miss chilling by the pier cave and kicking backWith Callum, Hugo, Justin, Saga, Stevie, and the fuckin’ ladsI miss missing that, I numbed myself to close the gapI never even call ’em up, the distance is my plaster castTo…

  • A lost wholeness which we imagine we can recover

    This is a usefully clear account by Lucas Pohl & Erik Swyngedouw of the role of loss in the constitution of the Lacanian subject: Although the subject never experienced a moment when ‘things were alright’, it creates a phantasmagorical reference to a pre-castrated state, where the subject was presumed to be ‘whole’. For Lacan, this…

  • An experiment in GAI video: Bumped into this kid I knew, he often would walk strange

    I’ve always found these opening lines from El-P’s Tasmanian Pain Coaster incredibly evocative, leaving me with a vivid image of a real encounter: Bumped into this kid I knew, he often would walk strangeSo I ignored the blood on his laces so this cat could save faceThe dunks and the gaze stayed in an off…

  • On dance notation

    I’m not sure why discovering the existence of dance notation surprised me so much. After all musical notation is also choreographing bodily movement in time and space, it’s just doing working in a much more restricted spatial register. It’s obvious there would be something like this as a simple fact of the commercialisation and reproduction…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #66

  • Thought experiment: if society turned up in the Lacanian clinic seeking treatment, what would the diagnosis be?

    The thought I’m currently preoccupied by is that the diagnosis would be psychosis. In Lacanian terms the pre-psychotic condition, prior to an actual break, rests on the unravelling of the symbolic order; the subject finds themselves unmoored in a bewildering sea of signs without any solid foundation. The worst case scenario for the role of…

  • What might a glitch aesthetic entail when applied to concept work within social theory? 6 speculative propositions

    This is how Claude 3 responded to a one sentence prompt. It’s a real question which occurred to me in a seminar earlier. But the capacity of Claude to answer it on my behalf is rather unsettling. What lesson should we take from this? Claude itself is characteristically reassuring, suggesting a number of points to…

  • An infinite scream passing through nature

    The inspiration for Edvard Munch‘s The Scream: I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I…