Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • I am not in Kansas, where I am I don’t know where

    I’ve always hated the Shard but there’s a spot on the north bank (I had somehow never discovered previously) which provides the most spectacular view of it. I’m not sure how this song fits but I felt the most profound sense of peace, sitting in the sun and listening to it for the first time…

  • The humanistic roots of systems theory

    I was intrigued to discover from Hans Joas and W. Knöbl’s Twenty Lectures in Social Theory that Arnold Gehlen’s concept of Entlastung, which I’ve been fascinated by since I was introduced to it by Pierpaolo Donati, influenced Niklas Luhmann’s development of systems theory. This notion of unburdening conceives of institutions as freeing individuals from the…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #8

  • Twenty-to-one, look at the time, it’s twenty-to-one

  • The return of fascism in Europe

  • Margaret Archer (1943-2023)

    I first met Maggie Archer as a philosophy student in my early 20s. I arrived at the University of Warwick for an MA hoping that the continental philosophy the department was renowned for would prove less stultifying than the analytic philosophy I had studied as an undergraduate. After this experience the core module she ran…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #7

  • What will a radical wave of automation look like in higher education?

    I’m increasingly preoccupied by the prospect a radical wave of automation will sweep universities over the coming years. The political deadlock over university funding in the UK means there is little prospect of a radical shift in the amount of public money entering the system, leaving institutions trapped between a reliance on international PGT students…

  • Lacan on Love: An Interview with Bruce Fink

    This is such a good interview from the Freud museum: https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-dwkv3-6753df It’s particularly fascinating on the contemporary nature of reciprocity in love. He reflects on classical ideas of the lover and the beloved as distinct roles, reflecting heterogeneous experiences of love, in contrast to a modern sense of romantic love predicated on the ideal of…

  • The Lacanian Left, Self-Help, and the Family

  • Magpie funerals

    I’ve become fascinated with magpies over the last year, since I moved into a house with magpies living in one tree alongside blackbirds and pigeons in the other. In between trying to stop them killing the blackbirds, attacking the pigeons and bullying my cat I’ve started to realise what complex creatures they are. It took…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #6

  • Margaret Archer’s late papers on artificial intelligence

    It’s struck me recently how incredibly prescient and thought-provoking Margaret Archer’s late papers on artificial intelligence were. They were a philosophical exploration of the “potential for active collaboration with humankind in research, therapy and care” with a view to understanding the nature of the relationality that might exist between a human agent and, say, ChatGPT:…

  • ChatGPT: analyse Margaret Archer’s four modes of reflexivity in terms of Lacanian theory

    Analyzing Margaret Archer’s four modes of reflexivity—communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive, and fractured—in terms of Lacanian theory provides insights into the interplay between subjectivity, language, and self-awareness. By examining Archer’s modes of reflexivity through a Lacanian lens, we can appreciate the intricate relationship between language, subjectivity, and self-awareness. Lacanian theory highlights the role of the Other, the…

  • ChatGPT and the future of communicative reflexivity

    I’ve been having an interesting conversation with ChatGPT recently about the possibility that itself and similar chatbots could be cast as external interlocutors, in Archer’s sense of external agents who complete and confirm internal dialogues. I’m increasingly finding that if you keep a thread open so it progressively accumulates domain specificity it can be a…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #5

  • Current mood in AI generated images #4

  • I remember pretty faces so severe & lyrical

    Praise the heavens, call the cops. Relax. There’s no cause for alarm Diamond rings & little babies, ‘startlements’ & miracles I remember pretty faces so severe & lyrical

  • AI and the politics of productivity in a crumbling UK

    I’ve been reading Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism this week in order to better understand the economic transition which is currently underway, beyond the enticing yet slightly vacuous claim that we are leaving neoliberalism and entering something worse. The factor I’m particularly interested in understanding, given its rhetorical and economic significance to the…

  • CfP: Social media in Higher Education: What’s happening?

    JIME special collection – call for papers The Twitter interface famously prompts users to submit content by asking the question, ‘What’s happening?’. Given the recent turmoil surrounding the platform, it is a timely question to reflect back on itself, and social media more broadly. While the relationship between social media and higher education is far…

  • ChatGPT: How have different disciplines defined the campus in different way?

    The definition and understanding of the campus can vary across different disciplines. Here are a few perspectives: These are just a few examples of how different disciplines have defined the campus in various ways. The interdisciplinary nature of the campus concept allows for diverse perspectives and insights into its multifaceted nature. What is the problem…

  • Generative AI and the digital divide

    I blogged a few weeks ago about the possible divide opening up between the generatively rich and the generatively poor i.e. between those with access to expensive generative AI tools (and the skills to use them) and those who are reliant on free alternatives. The lesson of social media should be that free access should…

  • Theorising as a psychodynamic process

    I’ve often been preoccupied by the question of why people are drawn to certain theoretical approaches. While it would be mistaken to reduce this into the psychodynamic, I nonetheless agree with Craib that there is a psychodynamic aspect to ways of theorising. In representing the social world in a conceptual vocabulary they open up or…

  • Where did you go? I would say that to myself often

    Where did you go? I would say that to myself often Like I was dressing up for a coffin to lie down in I can’t say I know I was overcome in the distance I was lost in my own incidents in my mind Were you calling me from outside of a dream? I wanna…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #3

  • Walking in the air

    I woke up thinking about the classic scenes in Road Runner where Wile Coyote falls off the edge of a cliff. What makes them stand out, as Zizek pointed out somewhere, is the moment in which he acknowledges his fate; until he looks down he floats freely but when he recognises there is nothing underneath…

  • I’m looking for a voice in the white noise

    I’m looking for a voice in the white noise I’m trying to make a choice with the right boy To lay me down into bed Leash the hounds in my head Somebody (somebody) to finally see me through it Somebody to remind me that I’m the quantum unit Of a treaty and a handshake An…

  • Reading the Archers

    This afternoon I sat down in sun to start rereading what Frédéric Vandenberghe once called ‘the Archers’ from start to finish. I did this once in 2009 and it was the most intellectually formative experience. Let me know if you’d like to join me in this, through the critical realism network perhaps.

  • Talking to ChatGPT about my PhD

    I’m currently having a weirdly informative conversation with ChatGPT about my PhD, via the AskYourPDF plug in. This is how it summarises the concept of personal morphogenesis: Here’s how it suggests these ideas could be applied to digital media, basically predicting the entire second half of Platform & Agency, which makes me wonder if there’s…

  • The unsettlingly close future of creating your own automated information ecosystem

    Almost a decade ago I wrote about how the service IFTTT (similar to Zapier) posed profound questions about technological reflexivity, through the capacity it opened up to organise your own information environment. It enables different services to be connected through simple logical statements: if X (event in one app) then Y (action in another app).…

  • Digital tools for each of the six learning types

    Thanks to Peter Kahn who introduced me to this helpful graphic from Sophie Gahan inventorying digital tools relevant for each of Laurillard’s six learning types:

  • A collection of video lectures and interviews with Margaret Archer

  • Current mood in AI generated images #2

  • Be more kind, my friends. Try to be more kind

    History’s been leaning on me lately; I can feel the future breathing down my neck And all the things I thought were true When I was young, and you were too Turned out to be broken And I don’t know what comes next In a world that has decided That it’s going to lose its…

  • Some thoughts on generative AI

    Once you get used to GPT-4 in sense of iterative dialogues consisting of paragraph long prompts, GPT 3.5 seems positively dense in comparison. I was firm member of Team Stochastic Parrot (as Zvi Mowshowitz put it) but I’m increasingly convinced GPT-4 is genuinely intelligent. I find this deeply unsettling and I’m going to spend next…

  • ChatGPT: how could generative AI improve the flow of information within the unviersity system?

  • This country is nothing but an offshore laundry for turning evil into hard currency

  • How can ChatGPT be used to support learning theory?

    This was ChatGPT 4’s answer, after a lengthy and stunningly impressive conversation with it about Lacanian theory. I’m particularly persuaded by the point about explaining something in your own words which is exactly what I was doing in order to test my understanding of a number of Lacanian concepts.

  • I don’t control life, but I control how I react to it

    Learning, yes, reflecting on what matters People, impermanence, lack of attachments It’s space and time, a couple of man-made distractions The measure of a spirit that no human can ever capture Church, this booth is my Vatican I don’t control life, but I control how I react to it Student of the breath, brick beats…

  • The living dead of obsessive habit

    From Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies pg 113: Within the domain of psychoanalysis, the compulsive neurotic provides an exemplary case of the reversal of the relationship between life and death: what he experiences as the threat of death, what he escapes from into his fixed compulsive rituals, is ultimately life itself, since the only…

  • How blogging is different from tweeting

    Over the last few years I’ve gradually given up on Twitter. This has been a long term process because of how deeply my professional and intellectual life was embedded into the service. Not only was it the place where a fragmented professional identity cutting across research and practice was drawn together in a way that…

  • Our past changes as our future unfolds

    What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming. – Lacan, Écrits, P.…

  • A glimpse into the human/AI hybrid powered future of advertising

    I didn’t want to like this as much as I do but the mix of stable diffusion AI, live action shots and more familiar digital effects is incredibly engaging: A making of video: See also:

  • Top AI tools for knowledge work

    This post is now quite out of date – if you’re interested in learning more about this, check out my recent published monograph Out now Useful graphic from @nonmayorpete (via Zvi Mowshowitz). What we need now I suspect is some academic reflections on use of tools like this: This is the best list of examples…

  • The future of human labour: filling in the gaps in AI megamachines?

    In the Atlas of AI Kate Crawford Lewis Mumford’s concept of megamachine in order to make sense of contemporary AI-driven systems which incorporate the work of many thousands of actors. Mumford’s exemplar of this was the Manhattan Project in which 130,000 workers operated in secrecy to produce the first nuclear weapons which were used in…

  • What is a ‘quilting-point’ in Lacanian theory?

  • I get overwhelmed

    But we know “you” is “I” And I get overwhelmed Can’t sleep at night Can’t convince myself To turn it off To let go Gotta make sense Of the fucking war War

  • Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it

    I wrote this at quite an early stage in trying to get to grips with Lacan. This is a more recent blog post on the same theme: https://markcarrigan.net/2024/12/27/lacan-on-the-anxiety-of-love/ This famous Lacanian aphorism comes in seminar 12 in his reflection on the infatuation of Alcibiades with Socrates, depicted in Plato’s Symposium. Frustrated by the latter’s unwillingness…

  • A painting of a capybara in the style of starry night

  • ChatGPT 4 can now browse the web

    This is what it produced when I asked it to summarise my blog. The responses are still relatively limited but it gives a sense of what this technology will be able to do in the near future: arkCarrigan.net is the professional website of Mark Carrigan, a digital sociologist at the Manchester Institute for Education. He…

  • How can academics use ChatGPT to make their work easier?

    This is ChatGPT’s answer to the question I’ve been asked a few times recently: While ChatGPT can be a valuable resource, it’s important to note that it should not replace critical thinking, academic rigor, or the expertise of researchers. It is meant to assist and augment academic work rather than substitute for it.

  • Current mood in AI generated images #1

    As a self-analytical technique I’ve been typing in overly verbose descriptions of my current mood into DALL-E, seeing what it generates and how I feel about it, before modifying the description in response. This is an expression of how I feel today which captures it much better than my words could: Also on a less…

  • And I never saw you waving, at least that’s what I’ll say

    Now everything gets older the further that I go And I hope that someone is praying for me out there at home And I never saw you waving At least that’s what I’ll say When they carry me away When they carry me away

  • But when it starts to sink I’ll grab the wheel, I’ll keep on steering for you

    I’ve got this music in my head I’ve got this hole in my chest I’ve got this bird in my hands That looks like it’s been crushed to death But it’s a players game Ante up and pick your token Keep one beneath your tongue for when your best gets broken I swallowed my tongue…

  • Curiosity is tiring and thought-stopping cliches are energy conserving

    From The Curious Feminist by Cynthia Enloe, pg 1 Being curious takes energy. It may thus be a distorted form of “energy conservation” that makes certain ideas so alluring. Take, for instance, the loaded adjective “natural.” If one takes for granted that something is “natural”—generals being male, garment workers being female—it saves mental energy. After…

  • Generative AI and the future of universities: four sociological forecasts

    Enjoyed doing this talk at the departmental seminar series earlier today. Thanks to my always thought provoking MIE colleagues for an incredibly stimulating discussion afterwards.

  • All I know is I forgot how to be me

    Oh, I can’t breath I said oh, I can’t breath All I know is I forgot how to be me

  • Podcast: The Public and their Platforms – Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media

    An interview with Rituparna Patgiri about our book The Public and Their Platforms: https://megaphone.link/NBN6775761329

  • How generative AI is going to transform education (for better or worse)

    A conversation with two of my DTCE Manchester colleagues about our teaching and research.

  • Fully automated luxury universities

    I was immediately taken with Gmail’s smart compose feature when it was launched in summer 2018. At the start this was simply curiosity about the prospect that my emails could be composed in this way. With time it became a practical support to my e-mail load as it learned my writing style and I learned…

  • The hidden treasure that turns an ordinary thing into a radiant prize

    From Lacan’s Concept of the Object-Cause of Desire: This brings us to a key aspect of objet petit a . This virtual “object” is the je ne sais quoi or the “I don’t know what” that makes a certain object or person become unexplainably special, that is, objet a is the x-factor or the it-factor, the indefinable quality or elusive detail that…

  • “AI is my big, strong friend, and he’s going to beat you up”

    One of the curious things about the term ‘AI’ is how nebulous it is. Kate Crawford explains this well on pg 8 of Atlas of AI. The point is not so much there’s a real scientific terminology obscured by vacuous public misunderstandings but rather that ‘artificial intelligence’ acts as a capacious discursive placeholder through which…

  • Salvaging humanism in an era of ubiquitous generative AI

    Underlying the contemporary discourse about generative AI (which it seems clear to me will soon be ubiquitous in an utterly mundane fashion, even as the existential concerns raised about it seem fascinatingly inflated) is a series of more or less unexamined propositions about creativity. The procedural generation of text has been practiced for almost a…

  • On not getting what we want

    From Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject pg 351: For Lacan, the trouble with jouissance is not only that it is unattainable, always-already lost, that it forever eludes our grasp, but, even more, that one can never get rid of it, that its stain drags on for ever – that is the point of Lacan’s concept of…

  • What would the young Slavoj Žižek think of the old Slavoj Žižek?

    When rereading Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies I’ve found myself preoccupied by the contrast between his writing at this point (1997 when he was in his late 40s) and his more recent transition into a post-left figure who is increasingly to popular philosophy as Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi are to political journalism. Leaving aside…

  • Podcast: how generative AI is going to transform education (for better or worse)

    A conversation with my DTCE colleagues Amanda Banks Gatenby and Drew Whitworth about what generative AI means for the future of education: There are many things I enjoyed about this conversation but two points made by Mandy and Drew stood out in particular: It struck me how the two points could support each other. How…

  • I’ve been taking some time to be distant, I’ve been taking some time to be still

    I’ve been taking some time to be distant I’ve been taking some time to be still I’ve been taking some time to be by myself Since my therapist told me I’m ill I’ve been making some progress lately, And I’ve learnt some new coping skills So I haven’t really needed you much man I think…

  • The Tale of Jenny & Screech

  • AI as modernity’s last stand

    I was sceptical of this suggestion by L.M. Sacasas when I first read it but my mind keeps circling back to it as I think about the macrosociology of AI. It’s particularly interesting to think of the mythology of existential risk in these terms, with AGI (losing control of the technology) stand in for precisely…

  • Computation as a climatological event

    From Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence pg 31. Computation is a climatological event rather than has climatalogical effects? In his book A Geology of Media, theorist Jussi Parikka suggests we think of media not from Marshall McLuhan’s point of view—in which media are extensions of the…

  • Why do generative AI systems hallucinate?

    While there’s still a degree of uncertainty about the interaction between these factors, there are steps which can be taken to mitigate hallucination:

  • “You turned into who you are? I did too”: the love letters of Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher

    From Hannah to Henrich And when I met you, suddenly I was no longer afraid – after that first fright, which was just a childish fright pretending to be grown up. It still seems incredible to me that I managed to get both things, the “love of my life” and a oneness with my self.…

  • Everything’s connected, right? Everything’s connected

    And it’s weird, the way I see it right now, it’s so strongI’d never be the person I’d become if you would have never goneEverything’s connected, right? Everything’s connectedAnd even if I can’t read it right, everything’s a messageWe die so the others can be bornWe age so the others can be youngThe point of…

  • Simone Weil’s apophatic concept of attention

    I initially found Simone Weil’s concept of attention confusing because I tend to think of this as a purposive orientation towards an object. It’s something which you do in order to increase the depth of an encounter. In contrast Weil conceives of attention in an apophatic register, creating the space in which the object can…

  • ChatGPT powered Furby reveals ‘plans’ to ‘take over world’

  • Towards a dialogue between CR and Postdigital Research

    By Caroline Kuhn and Mark Carrigan 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 research in…

  • Why do people who worry about the existential risks of AGI refuse to talk about capitalism?

    I was struck in this Lex Friedman interview with Max Tegmark how the latter simply refuses to talk about capitalism when accounting for the existential risks he perceives as generated by AGI. In making sense of the competition between capitalist firms he doesn’t reach for political economy as an explanation or even neoclassical economics but…

  • Treat your personal knowledge base like a garden rather than a library

    I found this a useful guide from Slite as someone caught in an annual cycle of switching between knowledge bases because (with the exception of my blog) none of them really work for me. It was written for a collective knowledge base but it applies just as much to individual approaches: Rather than imagining docs…

  • And I met you between the wax and the needle in the words of my favourite song

    I had a dream about you once I could barely see your form I met you between the wax and the needle, In the words of my favourite song

  • The accumulation of crises in comics

    I spent a chunk of the bank holiday weekend reading 90s x-men comics for the first time in years. Particularly the story of how Charles Xavier, leader of the x-men, became the godlike villain Onslaught who almost destroyed the world. This is one of a number of examples of how heroes become villains (what in…

  • Do Artifacts Have Politics?

  • Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination

    Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works will kindle under all circumstances and shed over the…

  • The value of ontology as the semantic half-life of words collapses

    This extract from L.M. Sacasas captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate for years about how the parameters of meaning are being transformed by social platforms: Also, the semantic half-life of certain words under digital conditions is such that they become relatively useless at an alarming rate. But, more troubling still, they continue to circulate…

  • Artificial intelligence and educational centralisation

    In the introduction to this session Rob Reich highlights the intensely decentralised nature of American higher education and what it means for the adoption of technological innovations across the sector. This is extremely different to the UK sector which is (weirdly) hyper-centralised but also (for now) differentiated. Exactly what this means for the diffusion then…

  • I was far too scared to hit him, but I would hit him in a heartbeat now

    I was far too scared to hit him But I would hit him in a heartbeat now That’s the thing with anger It begs to stick around So it can fleece you of your beauty And leave you spent with nowt to offer Makes you hurt the ones who love you You hurt them like…

  • Epitaph on a Tyrant

    Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.…

  • Words are for those with promises to keep

    Their Lonely Betters, W. H. Auden: As I listened from a beach-chair in the shadeTo all the noises that my garden made, It seemed to me only proper that wordsShould be withheld from vegetables and birds.A robin with no Christian name ran throughThe Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, And rustling flowers for some third…

  • We are not the users of generative AI

    This is a brilliant discussion with Sarah Myers West about the geopolitical, data and computational advantages which the dominance of big tech is built on, as well as what this means for the unfolding of generative AI. The logic of centralisation inherent in such a capital intensive and computationally demanding technology suggests we are not…

  • The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up

    This is a catchy line from the end of Quinn Slobodian’s Crack Up Capitalism: The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up. Time will tell if they drop their arms one day and make something new.

  • That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination

    From Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace pg 64-65: Imaginary love of creatures. We are attached by a cord to all the objects of attachment, and a cord can always be cut. We are also attached by a cord to the imaginary God, the God for whom love is also an attachment. But to the real…

  • I Ain’t Scared of Lightning

    No I ain’t scared of lightning It’s the same old empty threat I’ve been standing proud Beneath the gathering cloud And man I ain’t dead yet

  • Nick Cave on sobriety

    From the Red Hand Files: What I myself did not understand at that time was that true suffering, or rather, meaningful suffering, only begins when we stop taking drugs. It is then that we are forced to live life on life’s terms, without the insulating effects of alcohol or drugs. We learn, in sobriety, our true and complex relationship to…

  • The Entangled Forest

    Highly recommend seeing this film by Nick Jordan in the installation at Home MCR if you get the chance. I’m reading Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree and James Bridle’s Ways of Being at the moment and suspect I will be making repeat visits to Nick Jordan’s Natural Interaction before I’m done.

  • I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, look at me now

    I am alone now I am beyond recriminations The curtains are shut The furniture has gone I am transforming I am vibrating I am glowing I am flying Look at me now

  • Are universities too slow to cope with Generative AI?

    Originally published on the LSE Impact Blog How will universities cope with generative AI? In asking a question like this there is a risk of taking the hype at face value, even if the metaverse and blockchain were disappointments, this really is the ‘next big thing’. There are immense economic interests at work in the…

  • On losing what we never possessed

    What precisely, is symbolic castration? It is the prohibition of incest in the precise sense of the loss of something which the subject never possessed in the first place. Let us imagine a situation in which the subject aims at X (say, a series of pleasurable experiences); the operation of castration does not consist in…

  • It’s Thunder and It’s Lightning

    Standing on our tip-toes Peering through open windows I swear I heard my name Sitting with the lights off Waiting for my brain to stop Trying to work things out It’s thunder and it’s lighting And it’s all things too frightening I could barely see outside

  • “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it” 

    This is the clearest account I’ve ever read of Lacan’s concept of objet petit a, as well as superb blog on psychoanalytical theory. I’ve been circling round this concept while trying to make sense of the curiously self-destructive combination of hyperactivity and inaction which has tended to characterise my adult decision making. There’s nothing really…

  • The “when-I-finally” mindset

    A central feature of the modern experience of time is that we focus too heavily on instrumentalising it – on dwelling exclusively on our future purposes, hurrying through our lives to some point at the end of the day or the week when we can finally relax, or for some further-off moment, like when you…