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This blog is my public notebook. You can find me in lots of other places: LinkedIn | Twitter | Soundcloud Youtube | Padlet | TinyLetter | LetterBoxd For a more formal record of what I do, please see my institutional homepage. You can subscribe by e-mail or browse my archives using the button in the top-right corner.
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Critical Realism & Technology Reading Group
How do critical realists make sense of technology? What are the major themes, challenges and debates concerning technology within critical realist social theory? The purpose of this reading group is to explore these questions through monthly meetings to discuss relevant works on technology and critical realism. We meet from 1pm to 2pm on the final…
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The Evisceration of the Human Under Digital Capitalism
This is a pre-print of Carrigan, M. (2018). The evisceration of the human under digital capitalism. In Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina (pp. 165-181). Routledge. Please see the final version if you want to cite this. Introduction In the summer of 2008, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and techno-evangelist Chris Anderson wrote a much circulated article…
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I’m young enough to be all pissed off but I’m old enough to be jaded
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Digital Scholarship after Covid-19: an overview of my next book
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We are ugly but we have the music
I remember you well in the Chelsea HotelYou were famous, your heart was a legendYou told me again you preferred handsome menBut for me you would make an exception And clenching your fist for the ones like usWho are oppressed by the figures of beautyYou fixed yourself, you said: Well, never mindWe are ugly but…
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Notes on the conceptual grammar of platforms
To recognise that platforms intervene in this profoundly asymmetric way doesn’t negate the agency of their users, as Burgess and Baym’s (2020) insightful study of Twitter makes clear. They point to the many features of the social platform, such as the retweet and the hashtag, which actually began with user behaviour. As opposed to a…
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Post-horror and the obscene character of (post-pandemic?) parties
What better place is there for a party then a stunning mansion in a remote location? Obviously the answer to this question changes if the party is taking place in a horror film. Bodies Bodies Bodies tells the story of one eventful drug fuelled night which begins with a reunion between old friends and ends…
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André Gorz and the concept of hygiene
From David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work pg 149-150: As Bruce described his self-care habits, I was reminded of Gorz’s definition of ‘hygiene’, which for Gorz means something much more than the mundane rituals of preening and cleanliness. For Gorz hygiene consists in a more rigorous attempt on the part of individuals to understand their…
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Reflexivity, contingency and platforms
I enjoyed this recent paper by David Beer on what he terms ‘the looping of the social‘. This is a useful way of framing the recursive character of social life in which the outcome of a process feeds into the unfolding of a subsequent process. There is nothing inherently technological about this process, in so…
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The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)
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What do you do, exactly?
I often suspect that millennial British sociologists are uniquely prone to reflecting on their intellectual and professional trajectory. It’s a habit I picked up long ago, exacerbated by how readily blogging and tweeting lends itself to thinking about these things in public. It’s one I wondered if I might begin to lose now my odd…
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Flourishing as freedom
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Does Big Tech have too much power in the post-pandemic university?
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Cruel optimism and living for the present
Over the last few days a number of theoretical issues have fallen into place for me as I (belatedly) read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. The book explores objects of attachments which are self defeating because the nature of the object frustrates the inclination which led us to it in the first place. For example the…
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Day man, fighter of the night man ☀️
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Cruel optimism and the possibility of renewal
I first came across Laurent Berlant’s concept of Cruel Optimism in an LRB essay by Marina Warner about the ‘disfiguring of higher education‘. Warner invoked the concept to explain the self-exploitation she saw in academics around her who “open themselves to exploitation when the sense of self-worth that derives from doing something they believe in…
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Going back to previous moments in your life through films
I watched Boyhood yesterday for the first time in eight years. For those unfamiliar with Richard Linklater’s astonishing film, it tells the story of Mason Evans Jr growing from the age of six to eighteen in Texas after the divorce of his parents. It was filmed over eleven years and captures the unfolding of his…
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Do you work with social media in universities?
Do you work with social media in universities? We’re launching monthly online seminar @DTCEManchester for researchers, practitioners and trainers to discuss emerging developments, share best practice and shape sector trends. Get in touch here for more info: https://atomic-temporary-16563158.wpcomstaging.com/get-in-touch/
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The difference between being post-pandemic and post-covid
This was a distinction which Liz Morrish used in a recent e-mail conversation and it captured something which I’ve been keen to articulate for some time. The risk of talking about post-pandemic is that it is taken to apply we are post-covid, in the sense of SARS-CoV-2 no longer posing a threat. The fact it…
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We’ll go someplace, we’ll get a new start
We’ll go someplace, we’ll get a new startYou gotta move on when things fall apartWe’ll go someplace, we’ll get a new startYou gotta move on when things fall apart We’re all around, you see me yet?But I can’t hear any word you saidWe don’t fit in anywhereLet’s grab our things and goLet’s grab our things…
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How do you have rewarding conversations about social theory?
I was struck by how well this passage from Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads describes my experience of the best theoretical conversations. There’s a way of joining in depth conversations about abstract issues which goes with the rhythm in order to elaborate upon it, listening in order to build upon what has been heard, rather than barging…
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Why do we read philosophy?
This is a question which Milan Stürmer and I keep coming back to as we work our way through Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy. The straight forward character of the question can be complicated by pointing to who ‘we’ are as people who aren’t professional philosophers (I escaped that fate after a political philosophy MA I…
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I choose this
Now I don’t lightly use words like foreverBut I will love you ’til the end of todayAnd in the morning when I remember everything that you areWell, I know I’ll fall for you over againNow I know someday this all will be overAnd it’s hard to say what most will I missJust give me one…
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Why is learning theory important?
I had a conversation earlier today which clarified why I see learning theory as inherently useful, even if this promise is rarely realised in practice. There’s an indispensability to theoretical reasoning which I see as an obvious feature of social inquiry in the sense that describing or explaining anything involves the use of concepts which…
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How many times must we be shown the outcome of the pattern?
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Could we have a university without e-mail?
I’ve been thinking about this question since reading productivity guru Cal Newport’s provocatively titled book A World Without E-mail. Even asking the question can feel absurd given the centrality which e-mail enjoys in the university. This was clear to me from early in my time as a postgraduate student, even if email was a relatively…
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Human augmentation and the future of warfare
I’ve been reading a fascinating (though unsettling) report from a military futures exercise on human enhancement. It argues for a view of human beings as platforms, rather than as the “interchangeable components of military units or the material with which to operate the platforms – vehicles, aircrafts and ships”. It suggests that human augmentation will…
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George Simmel on Eye Contact
One reveals oneself in the look that receives the other into oneself; in the same act with which the human subject seeks to recognize its object, it surrenders itself to the object. One cannot take through the eye without at the same time giving. The eye reveals to the other the soul that he or…
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Dream, dream, for this is also sooth
After a deeply unpleasant week (fine now though, thankfully) I find myself obsessing over The Song of the Happy Shepherd By Yeats. Particularly the final lines about the necessity of dreaming in the face of all which has been lost. Read by Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. whose voice I find hypnotic: I must be gone:…
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What am I trying to do with my research?
I recently had someone suggest to me that I was no longer an early career researcher. I was immediately resistant to the proposal in a way which suggested I’m quite attached to the category. I’m 9 months into my first lectureship which certainly looks like an ECR position but I’m 9 years since my PhD…
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On Rain
Via Milan Stürmer
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And I can feel things changing
None of this was written in stoneThere is nothing we’re forbidden to knowAnd I can feel things changing Even when I’m weak and I’m breakingI’ll stand weeping at the train station‘Cause I can see your faces There is so much peace to be found in people’s faces I saw it roaringI felt it clawing at…
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A cybernetic black pill
Almost a decade ago I was sitting eating a sandwich in the strange little cafe in the foyer of the Social Science Building at the University of Warwick. For no discernible reason I was suddenly hit with the realisation that I’d always assumed the world would trend towards stability and that there was absolutely no…
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How we survive is what makes us who we are
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The grim reality of ‘living with Covid’
I’m old enough to remember when people talked about ‘herd immunity’. The idea was that eventually enough people would either catch Covid or get vaccinated that the virus would no longer pose a meaningful threat. The problem, if I understand correctly, stems from the continual evolution of the virus and the related possibility for immune…
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What is my research about?
Developing a new conceptual model for understanding the socialisation process when social platforms are ubiquitous, as well as the forms of literacy which are necessitated by this process Analysing policy and practice with regards to professional use of social media by academics Developing ‘bootcamp’ formats for professional learning within higher education, particularly with regards to…
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Peter Sloterdijk and the concept of the sphere
I recently finished the first volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s enormous Spheres trilogy. It’s difficult to briefly summarise such a strange and eclectic work but I think it can ultimately be read as an extended conversation with Heidegger’s Being and Time. Sloterdijk sees this foundational work as fundamentally incomplete in its prioritisation of time over space,…
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A Book Discussion on The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media
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A first attempt to theorise socialisation in a way which is adequate to the challenges of platform society
This was originally published in Carrigan, M. (2021). Growing up in a world of platforms: What changes and what doesn’t?. In What is Essential to Being Human? (pp. 103-131). Routledge. Please use this reference if you’re citing this article. The ubiquity of personal computing, as well as the smart phones and tablets which followed from it, make it…
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A critical realist critique of Rosi Braidotti’s Posthumanism
This was originally published in Carrigan, M., & Porpora, D. V. (2021). Introduction: Conceptualizing post-human futures. In Post-Human Futures (pp. 1-22). Routledge. Please use this reference if you’re citing this article. Introduction: Conceptualizing Posthuman Futures Mark Carrigan & Douglas Porpora It is widely held that emerging technologies call into question common assumptions about human beings…
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Long Covid in the post-pandemic university
Over the last ten days I’ve been slowly recovering from my first encounter with Covid. I’ve started writing this post on the tenth day since my symptoms emerged, though it’s only been five days since my first positive test. Apart from 24 hours when I was worried by increasingly bronchial coughing, it’s been a relatively…
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Psychoanalysis, Capitalism and Resistance
“I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would…
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Critical realism needs to be a living tradition
I couldn’t agree more with these remarks from Dave Elder-Vass in a thought-provoking interview. We should be uncomfortable with the idea that the under-labouring has been done: I’ve never been comfortable with the belief that early critical realism in general, or Bhaskar’s work in particular, is a fully coherent and consistent set of ideas that…
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An interview with Margaret Archer about her life and work
This was originally published in Brock, T., Carrigan, M., & Scambler, G. (2016). Structure, culture and agency: Selected papers of Margaret Archer. Routledge. Please use this reference if you’re citing this interview. Part 1: The London School of Economics Mark Carrigan: What was the experience of graduate school like? How did it shape you intellectually? Maggie…
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Will you forgive my soul when you’re too wise to trust me and too old to care?
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The drama of seeing real thinking
I’ve often felt there can be a drama to seeing people think. In the sense of watching someone think deeply about what they’re saying, struggling with the content of it in the process of sharing it. This is how Rudolf Carnap describes watching Wittgenstein speak during his brief participation in the Vienna Circle: When he…
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We are already living in the collapse
I thought this was a really important point by James Meadway which captures something I’ve been trying to articulate across a series of gloomy blogposts: There is a difficulty for left political strategy here. It is the same one as presented by the ongoing presence of covid: that there is an urgent need to rethink what…
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These poor people live in these tiny apartments: Zoom as a window into the lifeworld in an unequal society
Until working on a paper about Zoom culture this afternoon, I’d completely forgotten this incredible interaction which was shared by Lukas Gage after a director forgot to mute himself during an audition:
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On not swimming in circles
I had a strange interaction at the swimming pool yesterday. I approached my usual lane which had three people swimming in it. I could feel the discomfort as I came towards the pool, in spite of the fact I can barely make out people’s faces without my glasses these days. There were three swimmers in…
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The tragedy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
I wrote earlier this week about Wittgenstein’s loneliness. I realise I didn’t explicitly acknowledge his own struggle against this, expressed not least of all in the shift from his earlier to later work. I watched Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein earlier today and I was struck by how beautifully the script interpreted this transition in existential terms,…
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Hold your own
When time pulls lives apartHold your ownWhen everything is fluid, and when nothing can be known with any certaintyHold your ownHold it ’til you feel it thereAs dark, and dense, and wet as earthAs vast, and bright, and sweet as airWhen all there isIs knowing that you feel what you are feelingHold your own
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Why education matters
I’m interested in how significant shifts in social life take place, often expressed through theoretical terms such as individualisation, acceleration and digitalisation. These concepts often have limitations but, in so far as they participate in what Wolfram Eilenberger describes as “the adventure of providing a relevant contribution to the understanding of its own age”, I…
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No guilty party
I say your nameI say I’m sorryI know it’s not workingI’m no holidayIt’s nobody’s faultNo guilty partyWe just got nothingNothing left to say Another year gets awayAnother summer of loveI don’t know why I careWe miss it every summer I say your nameI say I’m sorryI’m the one doing thisThere’s no other wayIt’s nobody’s faultNo…
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The loneliness of Ludwig Wittgenstein
The decision Wittgenstein made to give away his family fortune and take up primary school teaching mystified his siblings, leading his eldest sister Hermine to express dismay at his philosophically trained mind being put to such a purpose. His response illustrates something important about the character of Wittgenstein’s loneliness, described by Wolfram Eilenberger as “an…
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Does Big Tech have too much power in the Post-Pandemic University?
During the pandemic platforms like Zoom and Teams became central to the core operations of the university, enabling teaching and research to continue in the absence of face-to-face interaction. The radical change involved in what has been called the online pivot built upon a much longer term process of growing reliance upon digital infrastructure across…
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Can we reclaim our agency by putting the internet in its place?
I found this Raptitude piece powerful enough to plan an internet sabbatical. This is how he describes his reclaimed agency, leaving beside a chronic state of ‘semi-doing’, once disconnected from the internet: This simplicity was disorienting in a way. Many times a day I would finish whatever activity I was doing, and realize there was…
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The shifting landscape of misinformation: from macro-conspiracies to micro-conspiracies
This was a fascinating comment by YouTube’s Chief Product Officer about how the misinformation landscape is shifting. We’re seeing a transition from stable narratives with broad support to rapidly evolving narratives with niche interest reflecting the compulsive search for signs which increasingly characterises social platforms: hundreds of millions desperately searching for order amidst the chaos,…
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And come morning, I am disappeared
And on the worst days, when it feels like life weighs ten thousand tons,I sleep with my passport, one eye on the backdoor, so I can always runI could get up, shower and in half an hour I’d be goneAnd come morning, I am disappeared, just an imprint on the bed sheets.
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What’s it like to spend your entire life as a cruise ship guest?
This thought provoking short film gives some sense of what seasteading would look like in practice, filled with depressed corporate executives loudly proclaiming to each other how happy they are while the staff awkwardly slink past them in the hope of avoiding being pawed by them:
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Our entire life is only 4000 weeks
I’ve been obsessing about this fact since reading Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 weeks (his earlier book the Antidote is also worth reading) which is predicated on the observation this is a typical human lifespan. In practice we have far fewer than 4000 weeks, in the dual sense that I’m reflecting on this in my 36th year…
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Civil inattention on public transport during a pandemic
After moving to Manchester I now find myself using public transport on a daily basis for the first time in years. It’s felt strange after rarely taking buses in my five years in Cambridge and only occasionally setting foot on trains during the pandemic. I’ve noticed I feel extremely awkward on busy trams and it…
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What does it feel like to be inspired?
This is how the twenty-nine year old Martin Heidegger conveyed the feeling to his wife after a summer of intense creativity: The visions, the problem horizons – real steps towards fruitful solutions – new ways of seeing in principle, possibilities of the most surprising formulations an character, simultaneous firing off of genuine combinations – it…
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Levelling Up Education: New Approaches to Place, Work and Education
Hybrid conference (Manchester-based, mid-June) and/or Journal special collection (Civic Sociology) For over 40 years, a liberal, individualistic approach to education has dominated policy and pedagogy based on the assumption that more education leads to greater social mobility. While true for select talented (and lucky) individuals, it is becoming increasingly clear that aggregate levels of mobility…
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The phenomenology of insomnia
I found this description of insomnia by Emil Mihai Cioran incredibly resonant. Mine has thankfully never been this extended but he captures the ordeal of being expected to be fully functional when you’ve barely slept for days at a time: So, instead of starting a new life, at eight in the morning you’re like you…
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Groping nervously towards the expression of inner life
This is an expression the critic Joy Grant uses to describe the biography of Harold Monro, founder of the Poetry Bookshop and an influential figure in London’s literary scene in the early modern era. If I understand correctly she’s pointing towards the relationship between his own unhappiness and the ideal which animated him: “poetry at…
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Three books that shaped my work
I’ve always been fascinated by the internal conversations we have with ourselves but until I read this book I didn’t realise this was something it was possible to study. I used this approach in my PhD to explore the internal conversations of students as they confronted the opportunities and challenges of undergraduate life. This is…
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The Enemy Bacteria
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The bloody scene is bloody sad
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To every thing there is a season
To every thing there is a season,and a time to every purpose under the heaven:A time to be born, a time to die;a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;A time to kill, and a time to heal;a time to break down, and a time to build up;A time…
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Mark Carrigan 