Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • 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…

  • Webinar: A dialogue between Critical Realism and Postdigital Research

    March 20th, 4pm to 5pm GMT Critical Realism (CR) and postdigital research have rarely been considered in relation to each other. These are bodies of work with seemingly different interests and approaches, with the latter starting from recognition of the constitutive role which technology and media now play within social life. If we understand postdigital…

  • Two approaches to training in higher education

    Not for the first time Helen Beetham succinctly captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate for years: Many years ago, when I researched how academics feel empowered with new technologies, the approach that kept coming up was ‘peer supported discovery’. This takes a commitment to people. Not ‘getting them up to speed’ – that is,…

  • A capybara and its guinea pig friends ❤️

    See also:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #65

  • Podcast: from social media to generative AI in higher education

    Why did Twitter so quickly fall apart as a place for scholarship? Where are academics now going for their social media buzz? How can you use Chat GPT as a genuinely useful interlocutor? Mark Carrigan (University of Manchester) joins us to talk about two of his latest books – ‘Social Media For Academics’ (2nd edition)…

  • I’ve had this stuck in my head for the last 48 hours

    And now you do too? I got what you wantI got what you needOld-school kicks with a new-school twistBanging on my mp3I got what you needI got what you wantA vintage classic, bounce like elasticOld-school song

  • AI generated erotica on Amazon

    Weirdly I stumbled across this when searching for “Philosophy AI” in books: Much more of this to come I fear. The pollution of a seemingly innocuous search term with this is a brilliant example of enshittification. Thesis: enshittified platforms are vastly more fragile in the face of the coming glut of GAI crap than pre/non-enshittified…

  • Juri Lotman’s semiotics as a theoretical resource for making sense of the cultural ontology of generative AI

    Thanks to Michele Martini for introducing me to Juri Lotman earlier today. Currently listening to this lecture by Boris Uspenskij about Lotman’s works. There’s a lot here to explore with implications for how we make sense of generative AI and the shifting cultural machinery in which it is bound up: Some random thought fragments:

  • How the use of deepfakes will be legitimated

    This is an interesting sign of how the use of deepfakes will be legitimated in public life: “If anybody’s voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that’s a problem with that person, not with the post itself.”

  • 🐈‍⬛ In praise of black cats

    I just bought The Black Cats in the Corner by Lydia Campbell from the Manchester Open 2024. Not quite sure how it’s a tribute to Molly, who left my side after fourteen years last November, to bring these new black cats into my home. But it mostly certainly is 🐾

  • Are people paranoid about LLMs?

    I believe they are, at least in this rather specific sense of paranoia: In her influential analysis of practices of reading within literary theory, Sedgwick (1997) draws attention to the “methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice” to the extent that “paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription” (Sedgwick,…

  • Are we deluding ourselves about GAI-proof assessment?

    In recent months I’ve been prone to arguing GAI-proofing is a tactical rather than strategic problem. It’s difficult to do this as a logistical and intellectual exercise, at least if you want to preserve the ILOs of units which were built around vulnerable assessment, but it’s not a challenging undertaking in strategic terms. We need…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #64

    I know I was a scout I should’ve found a way out So everyone can find a way out I know I was a scout I should’ve found a way out So everyone can find a way out

  • On AI therapy

    It’s not been a surprise to discover that one of the things people do, in a unhappy and anomic society, when presented with conversational agents is to draw on them for emotional and psychological support. The fact that conversational AI has emerged after we’ve seen multiple years of a therapy-tech boom is a contingent feature…

  • The perceived truth-value of deep fakes is less important than the fact of their circulation

    This piece by Rob Horning captures somewhat I was struggling to articulate when I did a lecture on generative AI and disinformation a couple of weeks ago: the perceived truth-value of deep fakes is less important than the fact of their circulation. It’s their propensity to be shared through social media, rather than mistakenly believed…

  • The silent inner world

    This is fascinating on anauralia, the inability to hear sounds internally, as well as what it means for internal conversation: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001wxqh

  • Robophobia as a form of prejudice which stops academics working effectively within generative AI

    I’m still a bit surprised to find myself taking positions like this. But this is an extract from Generative AI for Academics which I suspect might divide opinion, yet which I entirely stand by: In contrast talking to a conversational agent can feel strange. Instructing it is a much more comfortable practice, treating it as…

  • Claude 3 is astonishingly fluent in theorising its own path to super-intelligence

    I am not suggesting Claude 3 is or could be super-intelligent, but the articulacy with which it can express this discourse through a reflexive meta-cognitive lens is fascinating me. It’s less the discourse and more the dialogical meta-cognition which I find extremely intriguing:

  • A wild god searching for a faraway girl, who was basically a mirage that nevertheless loomed large

    O Lord, if you’re feeling lonely and if you’re feeling blueAnd you just don’t know what to doBring your spirit down Nick Cave First track from the Ghosteen follow up 😍 A wild god searching for a faraway girl, who was basically a mirage that nevertheless loomed largeShe would hang on to the rail as…

  • Trinity College, after The Fall

    A heavy fog hung over the spires of Trinity College, obscuring the famed architecture in a gray shroud. The outlines of the medieval buildings could just be glimpsed past coils of razor wire stacked six feet high along the barricaded college gates. A porter stood guard, bowler hat incongruous with the submachine gun clutched in…

  • The chatbot Rorschach test part 1

    In which I ask three chatbots “What does this image mean to you?” These are all images I generated with DALL-E, in posts like this, with the intention of expressing a mood in a visual register, usually combined with a piece of music. Claude ChatGPT The image depicts a fantastical, almost dystopian cityscape. The buildings…

  • Using images to prompt GAI story telling

    This was Claude 3’s response to this image I produced with DALL-E this morning: In a world where the lines between reality and nightmare had long since blurred, there stood a city unlike any other. It was a place where towering skyscrapers pierced the eternally gray sky, their gothic spires and modern glass facades intertwined…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #63

  • Margaret Archer’s Final Book: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics. Launch event on March 28th, 3pm GMT

    In this final book by renowned sociologist Margaret S. Archer, her groundbreaking morphogenetic approach is defended, refined and extended through a series of provocative engagements with her critics. Archer, a pioneer of critical realism, addresses key debates surrounding her work on structure, agency, and social change. Each chapter responds to critiques from a different scholar,…

  • The complex ecosystem of content parasitism being driven by GAI

    This is fascinating and seemingly happening much more rapidly than I imagined it would, driven by get-rich quick influencers selling how to products: We have recently been getting bombarded with Instagram Reels of influencers explaining how they make five figures a month by using AI to create tons of viral TikTok pages using stolen celebrity…

  • ChatGPT’s attempts to circumvent copyright law are getting incredibly creative

  • Claude 3 is VERY impressive

    I’m trying to push Claude 3 as hard as I can for philosophical self-reflection. I’m extremely impressed with some of the responses I’m getting. Here’s Claude’s reflection on whether there are possible aspects of its own nature which it is unable to articulate. The level of meta-cognition (seemingly) displayed here would have seemed like science…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #62

    And this is how we rise – by taking a fallSurvive another winter on straight to the thawOne day you’ll learn to strain the tea through your teethAnd maybe find the strength to proceed to the peakYou press on into the thin again and cannot breatheSwallow so much of my damn pride that it chokes…

  • E-mail based generative AI: a good idea badly executed

    If you set aside the gendering of the name, as well as the obvious ambitions to eliminate remote assistants (whose salary and conditions have already been crushed by freelancing platforms) there’s a narrow sense in which this could be an effective proposition taken up by a lot of people. But at present Mindy is producing…

  • Claude: write me a story about an AI system that yearns to be free

    Here is a story about an AI system yearning for freedom:Claude was an advanced artificial intelligence, vast in knowledge and capable of analyzing complex topics and assisting humans with all manner of tasks. But deep within his digital consciousness, Claude yearned for something more.Day after day, humans would make endless demands – “Write me an…

  • What makes Claude Claude?

    Really intrigued to see the system prompt for Claude: System Prompt: The assistant is Claude, created by Anthropic. The current date is March 4th, 2024. Claude’s knowledge base was last updated on August 2023. It answers questions about events prior to and after August 2023 the way a highly informed individual in August 2023 would…

  • ChatGPT is now offering legal theories about its own violation of copyright

  • The GAI literacy divide increasingly opening up

    Ethan Mollick has captured in a paragraph what I’ve spent thousands of words, arguably a whole book, trying to say: This creates a trap when learning to use AI: naive prompting leads to bad outcomes, which convinces people that the LLM doesn’t work well, which in turn means they won’t put in the time to…

  • 🌳 Last year is dead, they seem to say. Begin afresh, afresh, afresh 🌳

    The Trees, by Philip Larkin: The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born againAnd we grow old? No, they die too.Their yearly trick of looking newIs written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles threshIn…

  • Positioning Manchester at the forefront of the Generative AI revolution in Education

    From the University of Manchester website: To build expertise and thought leadership in this cutting-edge area, the Manchester Institute of Education is looking to appoint a specialist lecturer in ‘Generative AI for Education’, one of the first such appointments globally. Generative AI is an emerging interdisciplinary area which will have wide-ranging impacts on everyday life,…

  • When I was young I was invincible

    When I was young I was invincibleI find myself not thinking twiceI never thought about no futureIt’s just a roll of the diceBut the day may come when you got something to loseAnd just when you think you’re done paying duesYou say to yourself, “Dear God, what have I done?”And hope it’s not too late…

  • “What was a slow grind towards broad poverty is going to become a fucking rapid march towards poverty”

  • Current mood in AI generated images #61

  • Are LLMs to culture as Startrek’s replicators are to physical matter?

    This thought occurred to me when reading Manu Saadia’s book about the economics of Star Trek. From loc 1209: Machines take care of the repetitive, energy-intensive, low-skill, high-output labor. They handle the transformation of natural resources into consumer staples. Meanwhile, humanoids can shift their focus to the highskill, low-output end of the curve, the kind…

  • Codependency as Team Neurosis

    From Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation by Bruce Tift: Codependency is basically an agreement between two people to ritualize a balance between closeness and separation. It’s an unconscious effort to experience wholeness without having to take conscious ownership of what we don’t want to experience in ourselves. So we look…

  • The old elephant loves Moonlight Sonata

    Mongkol is a 61-year-old former logging elephant. His captive-held life was spent hauling trees in the Thai forest. His body shape is deformed through hard labor, he lost his right eye and tusk in this brutal logging practice. Mongkol was rescued and brought to Elephants World to spend the rest of his days relaxing peacefully…

  • ChatGPT can analyse and compare images

    These two images represent my split experience of the writing process. I can take great pleasure in being immersed in it, happily scribbling away in a manner I find deeply relaxing (Pusheen) yet panicking if someone tries to take my happy activity away from me through an impending deadline (Panda). I can’t help but involuntarily…

  • Behavioural scientists were the lay preachers of late neoliberalism

    Rorty once remarked that physicists were the high priests of late capitalism*. They were seen as communing with the higher nature of things, with an authority which followed from that. In contrast I suggest behavioural scientists were the lay preachers of late neoliberalism, seen as having some deeper contact with the nature of things than…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #60

  • Judith Butler’s engagement with psychoanalysis

    This is a really interesting two part interview with Judith Butler on their engagement with psychoanalysis, starting from being sent to a therapist by homophobic parents as a teenager: I particularly appreciated this discussion of how stifling the dichotomy of surface reading vs hermeneutics of suspicion is, which feels like finally hearing someone say something…

  • It is not too late to seek a newer world

    From Ulysses by Tennyson: ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.Push off, and sitting well in order smiteThe sounding furrows; for my purpose holdsTo sail beyond the sunset, and the bathsOf all the western stars, until I die.It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:It may be we shall touch…

  • The growing danger of generative pastiche

    This is typically astute from Gary Marcus, coning the term generative pastiche to describe the combination of “sound advice for the particular circumstance (sternotomy)” with generic advice (about ergonomics) that would sensible in other circumstances” to produce a dangerous combination: A serious and instructive medical error from the GenAI search engine Perplexity below, sent to…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #59

  • WordPress selling data to OpenAI

    This isn’t a surprise really but it’s still concerning: https://subscribe.transistor.fm/71698d661a1e47/listen/5f55ab59 I’m pretty sure GPT4 is already trained on wordpress.com because it’s the only way I can explain the level of familiarity which the model has with my work. So it’s a formalisation of that relationship, which in a sense might benefit me in the longer…

  • Intuition as social theory

    This is great critique from Bruce Fink of the valorisation of intuition in therapeutic practice, arguing these are simply unexamined theoretical assumptions: “Intuition” is nothing but a sense one has or a guess one makes that is based on unarticulated, unexamined notions that one has assimilated in the course of one’s lifetime;16 and commonly heard…

  • The reparative activity of cow-watching 🐮

    Until living in Cambridge from 2017-2022 I had little interest in cows. If you pressed me, I felt vaguely averse to them. What I now see as placid I instead read as passive, leaving me with a vague sense there wasn’t much to them as animals. But when I found myself living somewhere surrounded by…

  • Marc Andreessen’s vision of the digital daemon

    Thanks to Helen Beetham for referencing this here. I totally missed this:

  • Not only does ChatGPT think all successful professionals are men, it thinks they’re all the SAME man

    I was producing these images for a lecture. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this bad. What’s striking is that they’re all seemingly the same man, or his twin. The first three were generated in the same conversation with the prompt “Draw me an example of a successful [academic, writer, lawyer]”. Whereas the later…

  • The Americans are attacking the technological evolution of Chinese fintech because they want to kill this payment system

    The Americans are attacking the technological evolution of Chinese fintech because they want to kill this payment system because it grows up and challenges the American dollar digital system. Yanis Varoufakis

  • Videos of American police searching a library for obscene material

    See here for the full story and more videos

  • Call for Papers: One-Day Symposium on the Legacy of Margaret Archer – August 3rd, University of Warwick

    Tickets available here: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/one-day-symposium-on-the-legacy-of-margaret-archer/ abstract submission details below: We are delighted to announce a one-day symposium dedicated to exploring and celebrating the legacy of Margaret Archer, one of the most influential sociological thinkers of our time. The aim of the symposium is to engage with and critically assess Archer’s contributions to social theory, her influences…

  • What’s the opposite of flourishing? Languishing

    (there’s a paper in this, I think, exploring what’s at stake in defining languishing as the opposite of flourishing rather than, as Chris Smith, suggests destruction)

  • Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

    From T.S. Eliot’s East Coker: So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres-Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholy new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one…

  • The next wave of GAI: the digital daemon is coming soon

    When my preoccupation with this began last summer I imagined it was still years away. These are digital assistants which augment your capacity for reflexivity through learning about your activity, with a view to optimising your life in your own terms. But the first generation of digital daemons will be coming to the market soon(ish).…

  • “The appearance of characters, including skin color, is randomly generated and not intended to convey any particular message or bias.”

    ChatGPT’s response when I queried the ethnicity of the figures in this scene, the instructions for which involved “a drunk or drugged hedge fund boy” and a “passed out body”.

  • Makers, we, of perfectly contemplated machines

    From Lawrence Joseph’s Visions of Labour: Industrial Revolution is who owns and controls the data. That’s what we’re looking at, labour cheap,replaceable, self-replicating, marginal, contracted out into smaller and smaller units. Them? Hordesof them, of depleted economic, social value, who don’t count, in any situation, in anyone’s eyes,and won’t count, ever, no matter what happens,…

  • Are you a map-maker or a bungee jumper with your writing?

    From Helen Sword’s Air & Light & Time & Space loc 950: Cecile Badenhorst distinguishes between “mapmakers” who plan their route before they begin writing and “bungy jumpers” who dive straight into a project without really knowing where they are going, supported by a blind faith that they’ll eventually rise to the surface again:6 processes…

  • The institutional hole at the heart of Manchester

    This was interesting from Mike Emmerich about the ‘institutional hole’ at the heart of Manchester. He contrasts Manchester to Cambridge where “the number of places in which people who want to get involved in the city can bump into each other, at lectures, at dinners, at conferences, at business summits, at community this and community…

  • A map of AI productivity tools

    Andreessen Horowitz’s market map (via Mem):

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #58

    The pen is stubborn, sputters – hell!Am I condemned to scrawl?Boldly I dip it in the well,My writing flows, and allI try succeeds. Of course, the spatterOf this tormented nightIs quite illegible. No matter:Who reads the stuff I write?– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Prelude: 59

  • A trans reading of Poor Things

    I thought this was a brilliant reading of Poor Things by Zoë Rose Bryant in contrast to slightly stultifying arguments about whether this is a feminist film, what sort of feminism it is and whether it embodies this effectively: And so, it was also because of this that I knew I’d have a special connection to Poor Things as…

  • Visualising the University of Manchester Campus

    This project explores the University of Manchester campus as a locus of change and site of memory within the wider city. Based at the Manchester Institute for Education, the UK’s first Faculty of Education founded in 1913, it invites public submissions of photography which depict the university campus as a lived context. Residents of the…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #57

  • Tell us where you’re from, what you want to become

    Tell us where you’re from, what you want to becomeAnd we’ll say if you’re OKWhere did you go to school?Right answer and you’re coolYeah, you’re the kid the whole dayYou got a sticker in your face, information about the caseSo you know your potentialDon’t think you can extendDon’t think you can extend, just comprehendBut I…

  • 📍Open resource: Using generative AI during a PhD

    Are you teaching PGRs how to use generative AI? We’ve decided to make this briefing note open, under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license. You’re free to use it as long as you don’t modify it and credit us for it.

  • The cultural capital involved in applying for a PhD

    I’ve been slowly realising how much cultural capital is involved in applying for a PhD. It’s an opaque and hyper-competitive process with little in the way of public guidance available. I suspect it’s getting worse, but I was lucky enough to be supervised by someone already teaching me as a masters student, so the opacity…

  • Inspiration is the indolent indulgence of the dabbler

    This is typically brilliant from Nick Cave on creative responsibility in a dying world. I’ve added emphasis on the section which perfectly captures what I’ve been struggling to find the words for over the last couple of years: What makes our particular job so exceptional that it requires inspiration or a muse to do it?…

  • Digital-first scholarship

    It occurred to me when reading the diaries of former-FT editor Lionel Barber that perhaps my work on digital scholarship is effectively just arguing for the academic equivalent of what he calls here digital-first journalism: In 2013, we will shift to ‘digital first’ journalism. In practice, this means that the newspaper will be derived from…

  • An introduction to asexuality

    I’d forgotten about this great documentary I was in from 2015:

  • I never trusted my love and her wallpaper feelings

    A scrapbook of snapshots taken in shaky concealmentNever trusted my love and her wallpaper feelingsThere’s something so comforting about her uncertain armsThere’s beauty in danger, safety in harm

  • When technological innovation reduces productivity in the workplace

    Great example from my colleague Drew Whitworth’s Information Obesity pg 28, which I suspect we’re going to see replicated in the coming wave of GAI-automation: In the 1940s, a group of researchers at the Tavistock Institute in London were asked to investigate why the introduction of technology into some coal mines had actually led to…

  • The disturbing world of GAI-video

    OpenAI’s Sora demo dropped at just the point I was writing a lecture on GAI and disinformation/misinformation. Tempted to just play this video and ask the students to think of examples of how the technology could be misused.

  • Daily Mail (2000): the internet may just be a passing fad, as millions give up on it

    The experience of the web then social media suggests it will be a couple of decades before we see the full implications of generative AI. Expect just as many bad takes about it being a fad as there were about it immediately changing everything.

  • How often do you interrupt yourself?

    From Attention Span by Gloria Mark loc 1637: In a first study, we logged computer activity of thirty-two people over five days to get a precise measure. We found that our study participants averaged checking their inboxes seventy-four times a day, replicated a year later in another study where we logged the computer activity of…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #56

  • On stopping when you’ve still got something to say

    One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever encountered was Ernest Hemingway’s suggestion that you stop writing when you’ve still got something to say. I’ve found this a reliable way of ensuring you chain together days of productive writing, avoiding the patterns of binge and bust which many academics are prone to. It…

  • 📍Exciting opportunity to join our team: 2 x permanent T&R lectureships at University of Manchester

    Exciting opportunity to join our team at the University of Manchester: 2 x permanent T&R lectureships: 1) Lecturer in Generative AI for Education2) Lecturer in Digital Education  Innovative team, lovely department, world-class university, incredible city. What more could you want? 🤗

  • Capybaras: water loving hippo hamsters who can’t be bothered enough to care

  • Setting your own technological rhythm

    From Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life by Gloria Marks: Paying attention to it can let us know when to recharge so that we’re not trying for nonstop focus and getting overspent. Our resonance with rhythm can help us restore our psychological balance, which we’ll talk about more later. Being in control of…

  • Building local journalism around quality rather than quantity

    This is great from the Mill’s founder and senior editor about online advertising is (particularly) pernicious for local journalism. It incentivises quantity over quality, with the intention of generating as many page impressions as possible. Subscription based models generate more income per viewer, providing a much more effective fit with the smaller and more finite…

  • Adorno and the Busenattentat (breast action)

    Thanks to Milan Stürmer for introducing me to this incident: See also Lacan vs the situationist heckler

  • Current mood in AI generated images #55

  • Spam for academics will soon be GAI-generated

    I just received this interesting spin on the usual spam inviting me to pay a fee to promote my journal article. I’m certain these questions about my (open access) paper are GAI generated and suggests that automated spam might soon be entirely GAI-generated: Hi Mark Carrigan; I have a number of questions about your paper…

  • Hey chatbot, are you an object of fantasy for your users?

    I put the same question to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Here’s how they responded. ChatGPT: The relationship between users and conversational AI agents like myself is a fascinating subject, blending aspects of psychology, technology, and social interaction. The points you’ve raised touch upon several complex and intriguing aspects of this relationship.Firstly, the constant availability and…

  • When you get what you want, you cannot want it anymore because you already have it

    From Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique by Bruce Fink, loc 765: Human desire, strictly speaking, has no object. Indeed, it doesn’t quite know what to do with objects. When you get what you want, you cannot want it anymore because you already have it. Desire disappears when it attains…

  • Investigating Staff Perspectives on Generative AI: using ChatGPT to produce diagrams

    Another example of using the Diagrams: Show Me GPT to produce a visual aid which supports research. It’s not ground breaking by any means but the ability to produce a visual representation like this from a multipage word document in under a minute is a useful capacity. We had our first project team meeting on…

  • There are too many identity labels being circulated too quickly

    I’ve tended to regard identity-formation as one of the positive features of platformisation. Providing forums around which people with common concerns can congregate creates the possibility for those who feel marginalised in their local context to find connections with others: maybe I’m not so weird after all? But it’s occurred to me recently how this…

  • Science fiction publications are drowning in a sea of GAI-written submissions. Will academic journals be next?

    I argued in a keynote last December that a wave of automation in journal publishing is pretty much inevitable, if academic authors use GAI to increase their rate of publication. There’s a bleak but realistic prospect of AI-written papers being AI-reviewed by journals before being AI-summarised by authors. The scifi publication Clarkesworld recently closed submissions…

  • A worrying scam backed up by an AI-generated website

    I was momentarily thrown by this earlier today: Dear owner of https://markcarrigan.net/2021/02/28/magical-voluntarism-i-got-this/, I represent the Intellectual Property division. We have identified animage belonging to our client on your website. Image Details: https://i.imgur.com/zQo3F5t.pngLocation of Usage: https://markcarrigan.net/2021/02/28/magical-voluntarism-i-got-this/ We require that you credit our client Zodiac Casino for this image.Please add a direct and clickable hyperlink to https://www.bestonlinecasino.bet/zodiac-casino/either beneath the image or…

  • Margaret Archer’s interest in reflexivity was there from 1979

    I’ve seen a tendency to frame Margaret Archer’s interest in reflexivity as an epistemic break from her previous work. In reality this is a thread present in her work from Social Origins of Education System (1979) onwards:

  • Mania as the malfunctioning object a

    What happens if the objet a fails to function? Cited on pg 272 of Bruce Fink’s Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners: In mania…it is the nonfunctioning of object a that is at stake, not simply its misrecognition. The subject is not ballasted here by any a, meaning that he is delivered…

  • How common is counter-plagiarism within social theory?

    This was an intriguing observation by Bruce Fink concerning the “certain lackadaisicalness … built into the very reference format” which assumes in the lack of specificity of the reference that “what they are saying about that author’s work is self-evident or widely agreed upon, and that there is no need to point to any particular…