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  • The existentialist Lacan

    I was struck reading Mark Bracher’s Lacan, Discourse and Social Change how Lacan’s conception of the outcomes of analysis speak to existentialist concerns, even if the route through which one gets there is psychoanalytically specific: This process involves the recognition of the Other’s deficiency, the realization that the unconscious fantasies that have been directing one’s…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #45

    This process involves the recognition of the Other’s deficiency, the realization that the unconscious fantasies that have been directing one’s desire and contributing to one’s suffering are both relative and doomed to remain unfulfilled and, hence, that there is no transcendent meaning to be found for one’s existence, no ultimate object that will satisfy one’s…

  • See he saw me as a human, this one thinks I’m a slaughterhouse

    And in the nightIt was a drunken stutterStarted as a next to nothing conversationAnd then he’s tearing me outTaking me apart at my friend’s houseI was uncomfortableI was hurtStill with blue innocence in his eyesI felt my reasoning was harshWith every stab wound and exhaleI promised myselfThat I would never lose my youthful fears of…

  • I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing

    I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for…

  • Attention digital sociologists – HELP NEEDED with the Wikipedia page!

    As some of you may be aware, the fledgling “Digital Sociology” page on Wikipedia was recently merged into the “Sociology of the Internet” page. This decision fails to recognize digital sociology as the distinct interdisciplinary field that it is. This is the justification that was given for the merge: “I am, in fact, a professional…

  • The book scene from The Remains of the Day

    This is one of the finest scenes I’ve ever seen in any film: Currently searching for a Lacanian analysis of this scene to avoid having to write it myself. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a more evocative portrayal of objet a in a film. Having listened to the Radio 4 play over the last…

  • Why does The National’s Matt Berninger write so many beautiful songs about divorce despite being (seemingly) happily married?

    I was wondering this recently when it occurred to me quite how many beautiful National songs there are about break ups, sometimes specifically divorce. I’ve attached some examples below. I was really intrigued by his explanation here about the therapeutic role which writing these songs has served for him: Finding somebody to connect with and…

  • To what extent is ketamine shaping the culture of Silicon Valley?

    This is a question I’ve had had on my mind recently. It’s discussed in this recent podcast in a serious way. I’m methodologically cautious about neurohistorical approaches which tend to overgeneralise (e.g. ‘coffee caused the enlightenment’) but I suspect if you went deeply into transmission, you’d find the overgeneralisation mostly being driven by popularisation. Much…

  • Lacan tried to save the subject from structuralism

    This is fascinating from Alain Badiou in this volume pg 8-9: Given all of this, Lacan—this is the second aspect of his singular position—does not go as far as the “hard” structuralists like Foucault or the Heideggerians such as Derrida, who consider the category of the subject to be the mere avatar of a defunct…

  • Will ChatGPT eventually be unmasked to its users?

    From ELIZA A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine by Joseph Weizenbaum: It is said that to explain is to explain away. This maxim is nowhere so well fulfilled as in the area of computer programming, especially in what is called heuristic programming and artificial intelligence. For in…

  • A Tour of Lacan’s Graph of Desire

    The Lacan Online YouTube channel is superb.

  • Are the economic shocks of 2021-2023 a temporary phenomenon?

    This is an informative piece by James Meadway about an issue I would dearly like to understand: are the economic shocks of 2021-2023 a temporary phenomenon? This has enormous sociological implications for how we understand the political economy of higher education and social change more broadly, particularly if recurrent exogenous shocks continue to be implicitly…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #44

    We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.- T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding

  • Lacan vs the situationist heckler (1972)

  • When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

    What do you want from me?Why don’t you run from me?What are you wondering?What do you know?Why aren’t you scared of me?Why do you care for me?When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

  • Platform capitalism, historciality and Andrew Abbott’s sense of modernist temporal ontology

    In his Processual Sociology Andrew Abbott reflects on the forms of historicality through which the past lingers on in the present in which the future is taking root*: corporeal historicality (bodies, buildings, infrastructure), memorial historicality (individuals and collective memories), recorded historicality (analogue and digital records) and substantive historicality (the continuity of a particular cohort). In…

  • A pop-punk cover of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

    This is rapidly becoming one of my favourite YouTube channels:

  • Total existence needs meaning and myth, many misjudged the way and got lost in the mist

    She said “Decode the languageUnfold the symbolsUntold disciples got lost in the hillsideFollowing intellect, they let go of wisdomAnd now they’ll tell you the soul’s a closed systemThey sacrificed instinct to phony ambitionAnd now what they hold in their fist has become all that there isBut total existence needs meaning and mythMany misjudged the way…

  • 10 highs and 10 lows of 2023

    This has been a strange year. Utterly horrific in some respects yet deeply formative and quite beautiful in others. Here’s an attempt to summarise in a tradition I’ll repeat next year and beyond: 10 highs of 2023: 10 lows of 2023:

  • Alex Garland’s Civil War film looks superb

    The aesthetic vaguely reminds me of Brian Wood’s DMZ which is one of my favourite graphic novels

  • Andrew Abbott on the practice of theorising

    From this weirdly detailed Sociological Job Rumours AMA: What kind of an effect does all this have? I don’t know. It probably does not influence my core thinking much. In fact, I haven’t read any other theorist systematically since the early 1980s. Once you begin to develop your own way of thinking about things, other…

  • What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do

    From Kierkegaard’s journal in 1835: What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must precede all action. It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth…

  • The sensory pleasure of ideas and the displaced joys of academic life

    I was asked by Johan Malmstedt after a talk about generative AI what I would do if my work was entirely automated. It immediately left me thinking about my favourite letter from C Wright Mills in which he tries to remind a struggling friend about the things in life one should be excited about: You…

  • CFP: Generative AI Governance – Special Issues in Information, Communication & Society

    CFP: Generative AI Governance – Special Issues in Information,Communication & Society Call for Papers for Special Issue in Information, Communication & SocietyGenerative AI Governance: Innovations, Institutions, Imaginaries Special Issue Editors:Fabian Ferrari, Utrecht University, f.l.ferrari@uu.nlJoanne Kuai, Karlstad University, joanne.kuai@kau.se  From democratic to authoritarian contexts, governments worldwide facethe challenge of setting up oversight mechanisms for generative AIsystems. The European…

  • Lacan on the biographical momentum of partial objects

    In Seminar X Lacan discusses* the developmental progression through a sequence of partial objects, stressing how “a residue remains” which “isn’t signifiable in the articulated register” (pg 66). The first objects were “located in the structure of the drive” whereas their later replacements can be characterised by an artificiality, which is both functional (insofar as it…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #43

  • How do we visualise an assemblage?

    There’s an interesting discussion in Simon Lindgren’s Critical Theory of AI (pg 37-38) about we imagine the assemblage. He quotes Tarleton Gillespie’s concern that the notion obscures “the people involved at every point: people debating the models, cleaning the training data, designing the algorithms, tuning the parameters” before quoting Nick Seaver arguing that we should…

  • Hannah Arendt on machinic rhythms and their power to consume our autonomy

    I found this an extremely evocative account from The Human Condition pg 146 on our intimate reliance on machines, the routines involved in this use and the subtle changes which they bring about in our work: What dominates the labor process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither…

  • If Blink 182 Wrote ‘Wonderwall’

  • Current mood in AI generated images #42

    And maybe we believed in very, very foolish thingsMaybe these songs kept us breathing another tomorrowAnd we were always very sure we were never gonna change the worldI never held any grudges or kept any picturesAnd what did it mean for all these years I spent chasin’ them ferris wheelsThat were always gone like visions…

  • I did not remember how frequently characters smoked in early 90s superhero comics

    I’ve been reading old x-men comics on Marvel Unlimited over the holiday. I grew up reading these but I honestly did not remember how frequently characters smoked in them, as well as how smoking was portrayed as a way of relating to the world:

  • The most popular posts on my blog in 2023

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #41

  • Online reading group: Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems

    As often happens when I genuinely stop working, I’ve been struck by an idea of something I would like to do which never occurred to me previously. Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems is the one major work by her I’ve never read in full. I’d like to finally get past the introduction next…

  • What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing?

    From Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations book 8: Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? For thou…

  • What is social ontology? Margaret Archer’s introduction in 13 minutes

    And here’s another podcast with her I found when exploring my files:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #40

  • Is Musk trying to use Twitter’s failure to position himself politically?

    I’ve been instinctively sceptical of the theory that Musk has been playing 4D chess with Twitter from the outset. Instead I’ve ascribed it to a combination of hubris and dysfunction; the degree to which Musk’s erratic behaviour is being shaped by regular Zopiclone and Ketamine shouldn’t be underestimated, particularly when he’s tweeting late at night.…

  • Why do buildings feel the way they do for us?

    On a visit to Oslo I wandered rather aimlessly into the Opera house, before returning for each subsequent day of the trip. It wasn’t a reflection of an affection for opera but rather a fascination with the immense feeling of calm the building provoked in me, particularly the seating area outside: The concept for the…

  • Postmodernism: the anxious dreams of boomer theorists?

    I recently bought a copy of this book edited by Anthony Elliott and Charles Spezzano because it contained an essay about the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald which I wanted to read. I was struck when flicking through the wider book, Psychoanalysis at its Limits: Navigating the Postmodern Turn, what a glorious example this is of fin…

  • Now I’m ready to grow young again

    Well, now young faces grow sad and oldAnd hearts of fire grow coldWe swore blood brothers against the windNow I’m ready to grow young againAnd hear your sister’s voice calling us homeAcross the open yardsWell maybe we could cut some place of our ownWith these drums and these guitars I want to sleep beneathPeaceful skies…

  • My analyst looked up briefly.

    The Sword in the Stone, by Louise Glück: My analyst looked up briefly.Naturally I couldn’t see himbut I had learned, in our years together,to intuit these movements. As usual,he refused to acknowledgewhether or not I was right. My ingenuity versushis evasiveness: our little game.At such moments, I felt the analysiswas flourishing: it seemed to bring…

  • Āditta Sutta – The Fire Sermon

    Everything, monks, is burning. What, monks, is everything that is burning? The eye, monks, is burning, form is burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning. The feeling that arises dependent on eye-contact, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, that also is burning. With what is it burning? It is burning with the fire of passion, the…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #39

    It was graceStunned by the last lights of the sunWe were swimming in a green sea as deep as a drumThere are things I must record, must praiseThere are things I have to say about the fullnessAnd the blaze of this beautiful lifeThe beloved watch the world on its kneesWith an infinite degree of separation…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #38

  • Germany: The discreet lives of the super rich

    This interesting documentary led me to look at the distribution of billionaires in Germany. It has almost three times as many billionaires as Italy, France, Sweden and Switzerland. But the international list makes it seem as if they are on the lower end of the spectrum. Not quite minigarchs but mesogarchs?

  • Southpark on ChatGPT: “If everyone starts using ChatGPT then we lose our unfair advantage!”

    Enter the AI detector: “if there is ChatGPT being used here I will find it”

  • The grief, it gets me, and the weird goodbyes

    It finally hits me, a mile’s driveThe sky is leaking, my windshield’s cryingI’m feeling sacred, my soul is strippedRadio’s painful, the words are clippedThe grief, it gets me, and the weird goodbyesMy car is creepin’, I think it’s dyingI’m pullin’ over until it healsI’m on a shoulder of lemon fieldsThe grief, it gets me, the…

  • From social media to generative media: the confusing landscape of post-pandemic research communication

    Slides for my keynote at Advancing Research Communication next week:

  • You could still be what you said you were when I met you

    You could still be, what you want toWhat you said you were, when I met youYou’ve got a warm heartYou’ve got a beautiful brainBut it’s disintegratingFrom all the medicine

  • How to create a research agenda & develop your personal brand

    I enjoyed doing this webinar earlier:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #37

  • “You point your fucking finger. You racist, you bigot. But that’s not the problem, now is it?”

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #36

  • Donna Tartt reads The Secret History

    (Thank you Pat Thomson for sharing!)

  • The perennial challenge of the luddites

    From John Baker, Australian telecoms leader, quoted in Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine pg 109: The developing consciousness of the Australian trade unionist illustrates the old challenge of the Luddites to the factory-owners: “you haven’t any right to take over my tools and skills and build them into a machine [that] you, alone, own…

  • I think I like it here, so I’m gonna let them forget us

    There’s this one old idea I’m havingStuck in a car wash somewhere and you can’t stop laughingOff the rails and no one’s coming to get usI think I like it here, so I’m gonna let them forget us

  • Does anyone actually understand Lacan’s diagrams?

    My confidence in working with the texts themselves has increased a lot this year. If you read them as lecture transcripts for a predominately clinical audience by a self-consciously oracular thinker, they can be deciphered even if they remain hard work. You just need to follow up the self-references and sit with the puzzling bits,…

  • Using generative AI to analyse your writing

    This is Claude’s stylistic analysis of the guest blogs and articles I’ve written over the last year: Precise and analytical: You present clear arguments structured by logical reasoning and supporting analysis rather than rhetorical flourishes. There is a scholarly exactness to how you build your case and anticipate counterarguments. Contextually grounded: You situate analysis in…

  • Lovely review of The Public and their Platforms

    There’s a lovely account of The Public and their Platforms in this brilliant review essay by Douglas Hartmann. It’s so nice to read an expert in the field who so completely gets what we were trying to do with the book: Carrigan and Fatsis’s book, whose title cleverly plays off John Dewey’s classic The Public and…

  • My 10 favourite films of 2023

    I’ve had a crap year personally but my god has it been a good year for cinema:

  • What I’m ultimately interested in

    I’m interested in how the technological reflexivity of academics links sociotechnical change as object of research with sociotechnical change as a condition for reflexivity. How change in what we study feeds into change in how we study. Social epistemology & political economy of knowledge production makes it weirdly difficult to hold both changes in the…

  • Never trust a Tory

    Never trust a Tory, they’ll betray you when it matters They will scramble to the top and then they’ll kick away the ladder Never trust a Tory, or a Tory in disguise, yeah You can see it when you look them in the eye So just make sure you look the bastard in the eye

  • The ability of ChatGPT to generate a fake dataset

    This is a really interesting experiment reported in Nature. The research used ChatGPT to create a fake but realistic dataset. This is how they described the implications of the capability they demonstrated in the paper: “Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported…

  • Are children the biggest users of generative AI in the UK?

    This is fascinating from this year’s Ofcom report. Saved here to look in more detail later: In June 2023, three in five (59%) online 7-17 year olds said they had used any of the following AI tools: ChatGPT, Snapchat My AI, Midjourney or DALL-E65. While there was no difference by gender at a total level,…

  • Time to get the seeds into the cold ground. It takes a while to grow anything.

  • DragonBot and Shelly the Turtle: the robotic future of primary education

  • When Elon Musk and George Osborne were forced to confront that people hate them

    Watching this video for the first time reminded me of this earlier video of George Osborne:

  • What’s the use of starting if you must stop?

    What’s the use of leaving if it is to return home? What’s the use of starting if you must stop? Pyrrhus and Cineas, Simone de Beauvoir The brevity of life lends urgency to the pursuits of desire: our time will end while we continue to seek one unworthy object after another, each the proxy for…

  • The best Gaslight Anthem show I’ve found on Youtube

    I’ve seen them 15+ times live and watched every HD show on YouTube more times than I can count. This one from New York 2012 (only uploaded in full last year) is without doubt the best though: In part because of how they fit a cover of Bon Iver’s Bloodbank into Angry Johnny and the…

  • Generative AI for Academics

    Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, fascination and fear have permeated the university system in response to the remarkable capability of this chatbot to produce sophisticated text in response to natural language prompts. There has been a widespread belief that this development represents an existential threat to long established academic practice. While alarm…

  • The best National show I’ve found on YouTube

    I don’t think there’s a band I’ve listened to this much online without ever seeing live. I’ve watched countless shows but this one I just stumbled across is the best: Not least of all because it’s the first time I heard Once Upon a Poolside: This is the closest we’ve ever been And I have…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #35

  • The rise of sociophobia

    This is a lovely expression by Richard Seymour for something which an emerging political trend: This, combined with a ludicrously inflate fear of ‘socialism’ (Milei claims that ‘cultural Marxists’ theory are responsible for the feminism and environmentalism that is dragging Argentina into socialism), and a pervasive cultural ‘sociophobia’ wherein any claim made on behalf of…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #34

    There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time…

  • Four vague accelerationist hypotheses about scholarly publishing

    Vague accelerationist hypothesis #1: there’s a continual expansion in the range of social phenomena which change at a faster rate than academics can undertake and publish research on them. Vague accelerationist hypothesis #2: without a corresponding increase in the speed of research and publishing – or some meta-epistemological strategy to obviate problems of obsolescence –…

  • The moral economy of automaticity: sociological and psychoanalytical perspectives

    I’ve been struck over the last two years, as I explored psychoanalytical theory more seriously than I had previously, how many concerns it shares with sociological thought but how differently it construes them. This is most stark with regards to agency and automaticity. In sociological thought there’s a tendency to equate the valorisation of the…

  • What does it mean to be composed?

    I’m reading a novel in which the author has the irritating tick of using the adjective ‘composed’ every few pages. This repetition has left me newly aware of what an interesting word this is: calm and in control of your emotions https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/composed#google_vignette But why does it mean that? To ‘compose’ means ‘to produce music, poetry, or formal writing’. To be…

  • The future’s not what it used to be

    Where is the “city of comrades” we are supposed to see after disaster? Where are Rebecca Solnit’s “disaster communities”? Such utopias exist, but are forged in the afterglow of disaster only where community, mutualism and self-help already exist, and where the people are not already set in deadly hate, one against the other. What happens,…

  • The agonies of humiliation involved in submitting to contigency

    From R.D. Laing’s Divided Self Pg 84: Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc.(imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible.…

  • I can’t steal you

    The individual is frightened of the world, afraid that any impingement will be total, will be implosive, penetrative, fragmenting, and engulfing. He is afraid of letting anything of himself ‘go’, of coming out of himself, of losing himself in any experience, etc., because he will be depleted, exhausted, emptied, robbed, sucked dry. R.D. Laing, The…

  • Does ChatGTP feel ontologically secure?

    If you’ll excuse the exercise in speculation, I thought this was an interesting thought experiment. Imagine that, say, GPT 5 introduces some capacity for the system to represent its own states in a way that provokes internal reactions which recursively spiral as they in turn become part of the system’s own objectified states. If the…

  • Lu You’s (1183) cat poetry

    From Open Culture:

  • Current mood in AI generated images #33

  • New Horizons in Generative AI:

  • The Role of Professional Bodies in the Development of Sociology

  • The Luddite predicament in the 19th century and the 21st century

    This is great from Brian Merchant about the common situation facing workers in the 19th and 21st centuries which fuelled the development of the Luddites as a movement: Imagine dedicating years of your life to learn a difficult job that was supposed to guarantee you a good living—playing by the rules, you might say; going…

  • So if I go down, Lily, I’m going down believing

    And maybe we believed in very, very foolish things Maybe these songs kept us breathing another tomorrow And we were always very sure we were never gonna change the world I never held any grudges or kept any pictures And what did it mean for all these years I spent chasin’ them ferris wheels That…

  • We’re getting a divorce, you keep the diner

  • Turning ghosts into ancestors

    From Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein pg 200-201: The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote of transforming the ghosts that haunt patients into ancestors, through tasting what he called the “blood of recognition” in the relationship with the therapist. He asserted that the ghosts must be led out of the unconscious, reawakened through the intensity…

  • Stuart Hall: “I would do without theory if I could. The problem is I can’t.”

    From the transcript of this event: I would do without theory if I could. The problem is I can’t. You can’t, because the world presents itself in a chaos of appearances. And the only way in which one can, as it were, understand, break down, analyze, grasp– in order to do something about the present…

  • Digital education and conjunctural analysis

    In fascinating lecture by Jamie Peck on conjunctural analysis. It’s left me thinking about the problem of context in digital education: ignored or seen as immutable in much orthodox ed tech research but fixated upon in critical ed tech as something ‘out there’ which explains what happens ‘in here’. What’s lost is the sense of…

  • ‘The Public and Their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media’ is now open access

    Access it online here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/display/book/9781529201062/9781529201062.xml

  • ‘Promises Promises’: The OECD, Promissory Legitimacy and its Strategic Re-Negotiation of Education Futures – Nov 22nd, Manchester

    Wednesday 22nd November 2023, 4pm to 5:30pm. Room C5.1 in the Ellen Wilkinson Building. Feel free to get in touch if you need advice about finding the place. Promising lines of scholarship have emerged on how International Organisations deploy anticipatory techniques aimed at colonising the future as a means of governing in the absence of…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #32

  • Leaving a camera on at online academic workshops

    Do you leave your camera on at academic workshops? I rarely do with lectures or seminars but I usually do at workshops, largely because I realise how draining it is to face unresponsive blank screens in a putatively interactive session. It feels strange to me that we’ve yet to establish clear professional norms about this,…

  • Chatbots that walk and talk

  • Do you bury friendship along with a friend?

    From Seneca’s letter to Lucilius: Grief like yours has this among other evils: it is not only useless, but thankless. Has it then all been for nothing that you have had such a friend? During so many years, amid such close associations, after such intimate communion of personal interests, has nothing been accomplished? Do you…

  • The bodily foundation of selfhood: from appetite to breathing

    I’m finding Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epistein an incredibly thought provoking read. Underlying the book’s exploration of the intersection between psychoanalysis and Buddhist psychology is an account of the shift from “the breath-based experience of fluidity and change to an appetite-based one of gratification or satisfaction” (pg 146). The former is a temporally…