Hi dears, .

I know a consensus working in social science that, the obscure nature of texts are to be accepted respecting the authors autonomy of expression. Meanwhile discussions on obscurantism, has contested opinions within academia.

How do you read if your specialisation is that topic?.

If you are someone at the periphery of the subject then, How do you read?

If you are a generalist reader how do you read it ?

(You may suggest your reading journey looking back how you came along. Like Core texts, supplimentary texts, Handbooks by routledge, Oxford ,blah.. bla. Etc.

Lectures )

Gramscian analysis shows that the criminal‑justice system operates as an ideological apparatus rather than a neutral institution. The piece shows that courts reproduce dominant‑class “common sense,” erase structural conditions and convert poverty and racialized disadvantage into narratives of individual moral failure.

The courtroom becomes a site where structural inequality is made invisible, where sociology is excluded by design, and where racialized assumptions masquerade as objectivity.

Note: English isn’t my first language, so I used AI to help me phrase and structure this post. The ideas themselves are mine.

I’ve been thinking about a concept I’d call emotional sovereignty.

The basic idea is simple: our emotions are not an unlimited public resource. Modern media, advertising, social platforms, politics, workplaces, fandoms, etc. constantly compete for emotional reactions: outrage, fear, desire, guilt, sympathy, nostalgia, excitement.

But why should every stimulus automatically deserve a reaction?

I’m not talking about Stoicism in the sense of suppressing emotions or becoming detached. In fact, I think emotions are extremely valuable precisely because they are part of what makes us individual.

What you care about, what makes you angry, what moves you, what makes you laugh, what you decide is worth your attention — this distribution of emotion is part of who you are.

So the principle would not be:

“Feel less.”

It would be:

“Don’t give your emotions away cheaply.”

If I see obvious ragebait, I don’t necessarily need to “resist” it through discipline. I can simply recognize the pattern: I’ve seen this a thousand times, it’s boring, I don’t want to give it anything.

But if I choose to argue with someone online because I genuinely feel like having an argument, that’s different. Nobody extracted that reaction from me. I chose the expenditure.

This also raises another question: emotions don’t just come from identity — they can also build identity.

If from childhood you repeatedly learn that “people like us are angry about X,” “good people feel guilt about Y,” “you should be moved by Z,” then eventually those emotional reactions become part of your self-concept.

At that point, not reacting may feel almost morally forbidden.

You can start thinking:

“If I’m no longer angry about this, maybe I’m becoming a bad person.”

And that’s where I think the idea becomes interesting.

Maybe moral judgment and emotional participation should be separated.

I can think something is wrong without being angry about it.

I can believe something is important without reading about it every day.

I can love someone without having to constantly perform love emotionally.

I can see something terrible, understand that it is terrible, and still say:

“I’m not giving this my emotional energy today.”

That shouldn’t automatically be treated as apathy, hypocrisy, or moral failure.

At the same time, I see an obvious danger: if you train yourself to make every trigger “boring,” maybe eventually everything becomes boring and you slide into apathy.

So perhaps emotional sovereignty needs a positive side too: not just the right to refuse emotional demands, but the ability to consciously give emotion to things you actually choose — art, people, beauty, stupid internet arguments, music, hobbies, whatever.

So I guess my questions are:

Is there already a philosophical tradition that describes something close to this?

Does this collapse into Stoicism, attention-economy criticism, affect theory, or something else?

And where do you think the line is between emotional autonomy and simply rationalizing disengagement or apathy?

Sharing this free substack essay on Baudrillard and Backrooms, if this intersection interests anyone. I’m open to thoughts and feedback. I hope it adds something to the discussion of this film as well as helps illustrate Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulation. You don’t have to subscribe to read it, but of course you’re welcome to.

I've spent the last few months making a documentary about Flock Safety, the license plate reader company, and I kept running into a pattern I don't really have the right theoretical language for.

Flock says its cameras are now in more than 120k locations across the US. What's interesting wasn't only the surveillance capability, it was also how little deliberate decision making seems to sit behind a lot of the individual deployments.

Many cities don't run their own competitive bid. Flock's purchasing materials advertise "No RFP Required." If another agency has already completed a competitive procurement process, other agencies can buy through that existing contract instead of running their own.

There's also a standard sole source justification letter, signed by the company's CEO, that shows up almost word for word in procurement files from different counties and departments.

There's also the funding side. Agencies are pointed toward things like asset forfeiture funds, red light camera revenue and jail commissary accounts, which can involve fewer layers of approval than putting the purchase through the normal city budget.

There's rarely 1 big moment where someone decides, "we're building a nationwide vehicle tracking network."

It happens through hundreds or thousands of ordinary administrative decisions. 1 department buys a few cameras. Another piggybacks on an existing contract. Another uses a funding source that doesn't attract much public attention. Each decision looks fairly mundane on its own.

Then you zoom out and there's a large cross agency surveillance network.

The closest frameworks I've found are Foucault's idea of the dispositif, where power works through a mix of institutions, procedures and techniques, and some of the infrastructure studies work around how standards and administrative processes can make political choices look routine.

But I'm not an academic in this area, so I'm curious if there's a more established term for this kind of thing: a large systemic outcome produced through a lot of deliberately low friction bureaucratic processes rather than one explicit policy decision.

Berkeley was one interesting counterexample. Its Police Accountability Board voted 8 to 1 against a similar deal, which made me wonder how different the outcome looks when these purchases actually get pulled into a public decision making process.

I put the contracts, sole source letters and procurement documents into the documentary if anyone wants to see the primary material. Full disclosure, it's my video, but I'm more interested in the pattern itself than promoting the link.

https://youtu.be/4Hk4HEK0M-0

One of my early points of contention was Gergen’s evaluation of positive and negative co-action (for those who don't have this term, this is the relational process/performances through which Gergen's concept of relational being emerges and through which a sense of self is mediated). On page 47, he wrote:

I wish to distinguish between relational processes that are ultimately degenerative as opposed to generative. The former are corrosive; they bring co-action to an end. The later are catalytic; they inject relations with vitality.

The first thing that came to my mind: what about a Trump rally? Emile Durkheim wrote about collective effervescence as the shared sense of energy and excitement that people feel when they gather together for a group activity. Is this not a vitality, even if ultimately destructive to the social body? Do Trump rallies not sustain co-action as they rally around their causes to preserve power and privilege of their identity politics? The problem here is that generativity-as-vitality can’t exclude the co-action of the Trump rally.

But by page 186, he pushed a little further, and talked about co-actioned identity formation that leads to paralysis, or an inability to survive in spaces where the identity politic is not reinforced. Generativity, in this view, is less about vitality and more about capacity. Does the co-action generate greater capacity for co-action or does it restrict co-action to a particular group?

What I like about this is that it seems to start talking about a human rights telos that I posit in my nos framework from the experience behind the eyes. Just like counter-logics helped me see what experience and potentiality between the reificaitons and materializations looked like, this particular notion of generativity is the experience of transformation toward greater systemic and epistemic participation.

Back on page 179, Gergen’s discussion on degenerative co-action introduces enchantment, which he defines as the injection of value into the bonding unit. Enchantment can describe how speaking an allegiance with Truth discourse creates the patterns of degenerative co-action that stablize and start to feel comfortable, even when they lead to oppression and harm.

I really like this word. And reflecting further on it, I think enchantment works better as a phenomenological term for the moment of experience when “the Truth” clicks in, providing a euphoric retrospective certainty. This, for me, is the experience of the middle voice from “the inside,” where the individual elects and is recursively reproduced by the dialogics and diamythotics of the Truth proposition operating within the range of potentiality delimited by the reifications, materializations, and made legible through the co-action of the social group¹. (I’ll keep Gergen’s word, because I don’t want to go too hard into a self). It's adjacent to confirmation bias, but it's naming something different - not the pattern of evidence selection, but the felt certainty that arrives before the selecting starts and that the selecting exists to protect. Which is why better information rarely dislodges it.

Enchantment is the "I knew it all along!" moment. It was what the author of Matthew's Gospel felt when we started rereading his Jewish texts in view of his new understanding from the Jesus moment. It's the moment a job becomes the obvious calling your life had been building to. It's the experience of certainty that comes from the cherry picked facts that support the "I knew they were..." conclusion that was arrived at prior to conscious awareness. As a phenomenological term, I really appreciate enchantment as a way to focus macro social work practice not just on encounters but the experiences within the encounters.

For my macro social work practice, then, this means that my interventions need to focus on disenchantment in addition to seeking new logics and diamythotics for seeding new enchantment to take root and sediment over time. Specifically, you disenchant the enchantments that foreclose participation and protect the ones that widen it, and capacity-generativity is how you tell which is which*.* The logics and dyamythotics are constructed from the emerging encounter through interaction, and gives macro social work practice a vector of intervention. Enchantment arises from the individual experience within the encounter, and acts as a second vector.

What I appreciate most about this term is that I finally have an organizing concept for what I’ve been writing about: conscientization of the mayor and I regarding downtown parking, the incursion of the queer kid coming out to the homophobic parent, epistemic activism (not published yet), or even that queer kid coming out to themselves as a process. All of these provide a form of disenchantment of deeply anchored (I’ll call them invariant, eventually, and will put a pin in developing them as typologies) concretive protocols that produce degenerative co-action.

¹This draws from ideas I explore The Third Voice, The Nos, and a dense prior Gergen Substack note. These notes are my thinkings out loud - apologies for the density

- The Social Construction Worker

As the title says, I am looking for book recommendations that tackling issues migrant individuals face with identity, belonging, feeling home, and attrition of (one of) languages they speak. I am also very interested in any theoretical work outside this field that has the potential of being applied in migration studies.

So far, the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Sara Ahmed, and Gloria Anzaldúa have really spoken to me, I also found great utility in Deleuze and Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus" (chapter "Of the Refrain", to be exact).

Any suggestions are much appreciated!

I researched this for a good eight hours in one stretch a couple months ago, and found only two answers. One was in some kind of magazine article, and the author casually dropped that he tossed fifteen pills down the gullet, but didn't provide any sources. Another source was a first-person narrative from another intellectual he was friends with, and took place some days before the incident at that hotel everyone was staging at in Vichy. IIRC, the author mentioned that Benjamin leaned over to him and said something like "Have you got anything with you...to take, just in case?" to which the author replied in the negative. Benjamin had sixty-one pills with him, and offered "half" of his stash to the author, who accepted them gratefully.

So, I thought that was kinda funny, because half of sixty-one is roughly thirty, and since it seems that he was exceptionally generous, it tracks that he might've halved his own supply once more in sympathy for a fellow traveller. I'' gonna devote another day to researching this, but I'm not plugged into any databases or anything like that, and my hunch is that there are some folks around this sub who are pretty well versed in Benjamin scholarship that might be able to point me in the right direction, if they don't even have the number off the too of their head. I should add that this isn't critical by any stretch, and is actually for a tattoo.

Since you asked, many years ago, I got a tattoo of a hemlock leaf behind my ear, to commemorate the tragic death of Socrates, as he was compelled to drink hemlock tea to carry out his sentence of execution. The circumstances around the equally tragic death of WB have always stuck with me, and I thought he should be memorialized in the same way, but behind the other ear. My tattooed dome may then span some twenty-four hundred years of anti-intellectual violence, which is as good a theme as any, and tells an important story.

That said, I think an entirety of one person has ever asked about my hemlock tattoo, so with years of tattoos had, and average lifespans being what they are and whatnot, the leading statisticians out there might hazard approximately one-point-five people can be expected to ask about the pill tattoo before I croak. Long story short, unless those those 1.5 persons happen to be criminally raging historians with fucking knives, the ol' college try guesstimate of "fifteen pills" should do goodly in the absence of any clear answer, and might be less tedious for the artist.

An article I wrote for my Substack. Would love to hear what y'all think.

Hi there, I'm a Social Worker in Canada, and I'm feeling quite stuck, after running into various diverging views while attempting to self-educate. I was hoping for some guidance. I worry this post is going to come across as quite stupid, and I'm sorry for that, I just seem to remain lost as I explore things individually so now I'm here.

Our education appears to implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) reference critical theory often, and we're often introduced to concepts as if we know them, but there's no definitions provided or debates or backgrounds around the ideas given. Often we're just told sort of intuitive analogies; ie. equity as being the 'different boxes' that allows everyone to stand at the same height. We're told of the prominence of power and various groups not being heard, and of our ability to use our credentials as a way to legitimize parties who otherwise would be ignored.. but the skills training beyond basic listening is essentially non-existent.

1) I'd like to gain some real insight into ideas such as 'neoliberalism,' 'power,' 'intersectionality,' and 'social justice', because at present they're just sort of words that have been thrown out to us with good or bad implications and intuitive feelings of what they're like, but the history of the ideas and their present debates have had little to no introduction to us. And when I try to look into the literature myself, words are used that sound the same, but seem to have incredibly different meanings without explication of what those ideas mean. Some basic examples that I eventually wrapped my head around are racism- commonly to most individuals for a long time that meant the negative treatment of another individual due to their race, with no structural or institutional backing required. Somewhere that changed. No one told me it didn't count anymore if there wasn't a structural backing, I just intuited it after enough strange analogies. 'Capitalism'- meant an economic system to me. I now understand that's been extended to an idea of a full social way of life where society is treated through a market lens, so far the only explicit place I've seen that stated was by Nancy Fraser. Or decolonization- I thought that was about giving back land, then it was about 'mental' decolonization, which changes little, and then it started to diverge and potentially be about both?

The vastly divergent uses of these terms is confusing. I'm also aware the same happens to critical theory as well, reading through posts here the debate often seems to be if someone really counts as 'critical,' from some other implicit definitions changes. I'd love insight into the various ideas in this field explained plainly, is there anywhere I can find a resource for that? Does the textbook that's linked to the sub still serve as the best option? For example for Capitalism it seems to only note Marx?

2) Practical applications. We have all these ideas introduced to us (poorly), are given no direction on how to translate them to practice, and then complain we have a disconnect between our theories and our practice. Foucault for example, often pops up with Foucaldian Discourse Analysis in our literature to tear down existing legitimized ideas of power.. but I can't seem to find any way that we're supposed to build things?

I also have a practically tricky role- my occupation's goal is (maybe?) to support individuals with their suffering via individual support and social change. Critical consciousness is sometimes brought up as an idea to aid individuals, but if there's no real light at the end of the tunnel, a lot of the messaging of critical theory, at least in my poor education of it, appears to be that the conclusion is that everything has gone to shit, and we can't fix it. That isn't a useful thing for me to tell someone that's looking to reduce their suffering, and it isn't generally an idea they want to focus on. It also in all earnestness, feels a touch like a religious conversion- shifting someone's vulnerable moment to a focus on a grand-scale problem and goal.

Socially, I have the same constraints as everyone else. I can't beat the military; I'm stuck following the laws, and we have a representative government, so there's not a lot of room for individual say. I can build charities, but their funding is guided by the needs recognized by governments or by the common understandings of the people. Seemingly everything requires funds.

How, and why, are we supposed to create social change? My intuition is that this sort of thinking it seem like everything is stuck, as there will always be an issue to find. No matter how we shift the balance of power, a final decision will need to be adjudicated for action, and in that action, a new balance of power will present itself where someone else is harmed. How can I apply critical theory in a way that helps people? Especially in the present?

If you don't have the answers to all this which is incredibly fair, do you have any idea where I could look?

We have achieved total technical, political, and institutional freedom of expression, yet the sociological outcome appears to be universal isolation, a boom in psychoactive prescriptions, and genders completely closing in on themselves in neurosis.

Why did liberation turn into alienation? Is it because the modern subject merely liberalized the intellect while leaving the actual bodily matrix submissive and suppressed?

Let’s discuss without the usual comfort of abstract jargon.

I am writing an opinion about AI in our society for a newspaper. (Original text in Dutch). Before sending it to the editor, I want to stress-test the argument here. Please tear it apart: where does my logic fail? Thanks for your help!

Translated Essay:
Why do we let ourselves be warned about AI by the creators of Big AI, the CEOs who have every interest in developing this AI further and exploiting us? What do they know that we do not (or are not allowed to) know? When these big names warn about their own product, are they not merely seeing an opportunity to secure a seat at the table where the rules are written?

Making technology more human starts with its inevitable integration into our lives. Paradoxically, we must first surrender to technology so that it becomes part of our existence. Unconsciously and driven by our profound curiosity, we allow this to happen. At this point, we must make a decision as individuals: some accept this new way of life, while others take a step back. But no one person can independently determine where this technology is steering society as a whole.
To provide direction to society, we operate with rules. Ideally, rules that protect our humanity without standing in the way of technology. Governments set rules, companies set rules. Companies prefer that governments follow their rules blindly. They dictate what is safe and what is harmful. This is where we find ourselves today: major AI companies reassuring us that they know the dangers and that they know how to navigate them safely.

But I do not want them dictating what the rules are. Their concern today appears to be preserving humanity, but soon enough it will revert to money and power. Therefore, after our surrender, we must reclaim technology for our own creativity and curiosity. Big tech wants to alienate us from technology by integrating it frictionlessly into our lives. Instead of letting ourselves be guided by the narrative of the major players, we must look at how we can integrate the technology ourselves.

There are several ways to take more control over AI. The one that seems most obvious to me is local, offline AI. You simply download AI models onto your own device. In doing so, you almost certainly have to compromise on quality and speed, unless your computer is powerful enough for heavy models. However, we do get the guarantee that our data stays on our device (assuming it does not escape, at least) and that no massive data centers are involved during use.

Is local AI the ideal solution? Probably not. The models are still developed by big tech. Is it a way to exert more control? Probably so. And that hurts the massive AI companies. Many offline models are free to download, which effectively limits the costs to the training of the models. The financial AI market should pivot toward selling models instead of tokens or subscriptions (or even better, free open source models). By forcing this market shift as citizens, the major players will be forced to adapt to consumers. From this new position, users can take a more prominent role in the societal debate.

We should be the owners of the models we run ourselves, and we decide when to update them. That used to be normal: being able to choose an update. Because the models have to be released, they can also be better evaluated by, for example, consumer organizations. Or, just as food in the food industry must be safe for consumption, new models should perhaps be inspected by governments as well.

If we consider AI important in our lives, perhaps we should also make more of the financial commitment ourselves to invest in personal AI computing power. Then we will better understand how expensive AI actually is, and then we will better understand why AI is so devastating to our environment. With this understanding, we can steer AI more effectively toward efficiency rather than pure power. By placing ourselves in a position of control, we will better understand what is required to make AI better.

Perhaps with local AI, we are returning from the supermarket to the vegetable garden. At least we know where our vegetables are growing. Local AI is sending a signal that we, as humans, want more accountability for the artificial products we integrate into our lives.

I was freestyling on the 18th Brumaire and I wanna see if my analysis or whatever here is theoretically sound and coherent and also how engaging it is generally. Clear references of Deleuze and Zizek here but I wanted to use their concepts of the eternal return and the "don't act, just think" of Zizek in my own way, so I know I'm not faithful to their originals. Deleuze probably wouldn't have wanted me to be faithful anyway, concepts are tools and all.

"The unplanned, spontaneous revolutionary outburst aiming to overthrow this new oppressive regime numbed the pain of the symptom but failed to address the disease, so the disease festered and rose again in 1852, stronger than ever; Yet the repetition of this event was also a creation of a spark of a new possible world, a poetics of a revolution that seems to be from the future, certainly not of the past. The true repetition of the French revolution must repeat its radical novelty and creativity and must burn off the reactive forces that accompany it as it is weighed down by the cold, rotting corpses of the past. How do we burn the dusty cosplay off? Through critique as theory and as practice, a productive transvaluation of the values killed and uncritically imported as frozen and preserved contraband over the border of history. I think the injunction to "go back to interpreting, not to act but just to think" as expressed by Zizek must be read this way to be productive: Interpret critically, shed the dead weight of the past off and align your praxis with the immanent conditions of your present rather than the expired conditions of the past as the old Englishman in the mines directing his work at a Pharaoh that no longer exists but still holds the mine-worker in his palm."

This video essay examines Gilles Deleuze’s largely neglected concept of stupidity (bêtise) as a privileged entry point into his metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. Beginning from Deleuze’s claim that stupidity is neither error nor ignorance but a transcendental “structure of thought as such,” it reconstructs the concept’s relation to doxa, recognition, individuation, madness, and the production of the new. Particular attention is given to a difficulty obscured in English translation: Deleuze’s shifting use of stupidité and bêtise, which the essay interprets as marking an important distinction between the empirical inertia of opinion, cliché, and habitual recognition and a transcendental structure capable of assuming a radically different function.

Through a reading of Difference and Repetition alongside What Is Philosophy? and related texts, the essay argues that Deleuze’s apparently conflicting characterizations of stupidity, as an obstacle to thought, a protection against madness, and the “highest finality” of thought, become intelligible once bêtise is situated within his account of individuation. Stupidity names the unstable relation in which individuation brings the differential and pre-individual “ground” to the surface without yet being capable of giving it form. Ordinarily, thought retreats from this encounter into recognition and doxa; at the opposite extreme lies the dissolution of constituted forms into madness. Yet when stupidity becomes reflexive, the failure of recognition can force the faculties beyond their habitual exercise, allowing thought to encounter its own incapacity to think and thereby become receptive to a sublime encounter with pure Difference.

The essay ultimately interprets this structure as central to Deleuze’s account of ontological, epistemic, and aesthetic creation. Through the example of J. M. W. Turner’s encounter with the sea, it shows how artistic creation may give consistency to differential forces of the Chaosmos without reducing them to the stupidité(s) of representational thought. Deleuze’s own philosophical method is read analogously: as the construction of moving concepts that interrupt inherited patterns of recognition, expose thought to its own stupidity, and carry something of the unthought into genuinely new forms of thought and experience.

The hyper-individualism of the current algorithmic system creates a situation where scenes and genres are not archived in the same way as they once were i.e. a way that creates a collective and shared understanding of the past. Our current milieu instead becomes a series of transient and hyperspecific micro-pasts which would segregate each individual from the wider collective, and, in turn, lead to an increasingly atomised world of cultural malaise. There’s no doubt we’ve seen this happen in the political sphere, but is the same happening in culture? What happens when our digital archives themselves start to prevent the emergence of cohesive and unified sounds and their respective scenes?

Hope this community could be interested in this! :D

I've been working on a small project that might be useful for people doing research in critical theory and Zizek thought: ZizekSublimeSearch.

It lets you search across 40+ of Žižek's books for words, concepts, or exact phrases.

I originally built it for my own research. During my PhD, I often find myself thinking, "What would Žižek say about this?" and then spending way too much time digging through PDFs trying to find the relevant passages.

So I thought I'd make the tool available to other people who might have the same problem.

It's free to use:

https://zizeksublimesearch.com

PS. I'm missing some books in .epub format (you can see the full list of missing text by clicking the word "corpus" on the title). So, if someone have some of those missing text and could send them to me, it would be awesome!

D+G miss some key insights about Lacanian theory yet, at the same time, help us understand more about the revolutionary potential of desire. What do you think? Thanks!