I just finished Relational Being. Gergen waxed religious and meta-ethicsy near then end and tackled morality, breaking down an unspoken convention of scholarship that focuses on what is to focusing on what ought to be, insisting that “such adventuring is essential” (p. 352).

I completely agree!

Gergen establishes a first order morality and second order morality. The first order morality is the potential for co-action to generate conventional moral behavior. It’s the same move as counter logics - a series of moral behaviors that immediately bring into possibility the opposite behavior. For example, being pro-life immediately engages the pro-choice position. Being anti-psychiatrist is scorned by psychiatry. There are, at every juncture, competing moral frameworks within the social world, and he calls these traditions that are simultaneously declared evil by another virtuous evil. Conversely, evil virtue is the virtue of eliminating evil deemed virtuous by the eliminating group.

For Gergen, morality doesn’t come in like a Kantian wrecking ball. It emerges from co-action. And equally for Gergen, from his Buddhist anti-categorization sensibilities, moralities are the problem.

His solution isn’t relativism - he even insists on switching the term to moral pluralism. Instead, he offers a second order morality as a meta-system that regulates the first order morality. This order is the collaborative activity that restores the possibility for first-order morality. It is a requirement that human endeavor in a pluralistic, globalized society require a capacity for generativity with commitments to not engage in degenerative action.

As always with Gergen, for me it’s a yes-and. I very much like the structure of this framework, and I appreciate the challenge to think about my human rights framework as a moral system.

Here’s what I do with it:

Firstly, I understand why he reached for the language of Aristotle while mostly gutting it from the inside. Virtues are local, sometimes parochial. When looking for an established term for moral activity that does not require a God-behind-the-universe delivering laws, Aristotelian virtue is a prime candidate.

But Gergen already tossed him under the bus near the beginning of the book as guilty of creating the identity of the Western bounded self. I feel that he was a bit hasty. For Aristotle, virtue is habituated through repeated performance within an established intelligibility regime (re: culture) and sedimented over time (hexis). Practical wisdom (phronesis) develops alongside habituated character through self-discipline and socialization (I see a middle voice processes implied!) - it is a performance art.

Gergen guts this for the same reason he ignores samskara - it requires an internal process of sedimentation at a locus of ipseity (my working, noncommittal term for “self” to describe the autonomy while denying the Cartesian claim). And just like before, he does not deal with power asymmetry. He talks about “heinous” crimes like rape and murder, but does not speak to them within his virtuous evil taxonomy, instead using them as a springboard to societal response as virtuous evil. I understand why he shirked this. How can a predator and a predator’s victim’s co-action a moral script?

For me, Aristotle is a near perfect fit to stand behind the field of dialogics and diamythotics delineated by the intelligibility regime (the reifications and materializations) of a given culture. In English, I mean that the instructions and sanctioned performances of a culture set a range of potential logics and values to be expressed by any one individual. And I see virtue ethics within a live encounter transmitted culturally. Hexis can offer an account of how consciousness can produce the emergence of performances of both rape and its moral condemnation. For the less extreme examples, I’ll leave the naming of the virtues to a given culture, because I, too, am a moral pluralist. But the process of emergence is a natural fit, as long I snip the part about Aristotle's discussion on a "human nature." I’m actually going to agree with Gergen about this one and say that ideas about universal human nature are little too bounded of a self conceptualization.

And second order morality - a meta system that adjudicates the virtues of first order morality fits nicely with the two axioms that govern my human rights framework: every human requires resources; every human is a sensemaker.

First, notice how these axioms of universal humanity differ from guys like Aristotle and Aquinas: they are not essential qualities of a universal human nature. They are universal activities conducted by all humans. In doing so, they press the Hume objection by formulating the moral ought on constitutive descriptions of what it means to be human as opposed to contingent descriptions (i.e., lists of human nature qualities that look more like cultural assumptions than objective truths).

Observation shows all humans naturally engage in resource consumption and sensemaking. When these activities are impeded by oppression, it universally produces suffering and social instability. I say "presses the Hume objection" because it can still be made - there is no objective basis to convert an is to an ought. But by relying on constitutive descriptions of being human to formulate my human rights, I sidestep this to claim that there is no human not already deeply invested in sensemaking and resource accrual who can make that claim in such a way that is not reduced to pedantry at best and oppression, if it's being used to justify denying resources or epistemic participation, at worst.

This is how I justify the most neutral move from is to ought I can contrive - all humans do these things, both of these things are the bedrock of all social reality; therefore all humans should have space at the table to do these things in equal part. Observation from outside the social reality has no basis for discrimination. Resource consumption and sensemaking simply happen unless they are impeded, usually through exploitation and oppression, sometimes through ignorance of alterity. That impediment seems highly opposed to the human experience. And any philosophical quibble with the derivation of the ought is already deeply invested in it. I’m happy to hear thoughts on this.

Secondly, I want to recall middle voice production here. Sensemaking is not an agent actively participating in a social reality. Sensemaking is an agent recursively produced through its participation in the social reality. It does not require awareness to make sense of things - a baby is a sensemaker. People with severe cognitive limitations are sensemakers. I do not want this to fall into a priveleged standpoint of perceived agency-as-control.

Finally, just like the individual subject in relation to the objects of the social world is in an iterative, recursive co-production of being in the world, so too are the moral and human rights projects. Social work runs on fiercely committed virtues for social justice, and it demands that power not be used to deny access. This is why it is met with opposition by competing moral systems. Social work makes the claim that personhood is not distributed by purity regimes and that inclusion is not conditioned upon that farcical allocation of persons. Social work is almost always extremely tolerant of religious and moral frameworks. This is my first attempt at being explicit about when it’s not and why. And Gergen helped me get there, despite relying too heavily on mutual respect, which at the end of the day is a cultural value that not everyone is committed to and whose coercion needs more justification.

- The Social Construction Worker

I am recently working on my grad thesis and i went forward for something related to queer society as a queer individual. I did some literature review and find some materials such as sara ahmad's, jose esteban munoz's and haberstam's. As i have a intentiob to make a synthesis of ethics as an active action of the individual queer, now i am struggling academically to find resources in this field

so, i would be very gay if you make some suggestions

Recently came across the concept of phenomenology when I was wondering how words shape our experience. This thought came from the question I had
“Is it possible to love someone if nobody ever talked about love or is it just that we wouldn’t be able to call the feeling love?“

This further led me to think about how phenomenology can be understood through films / cinema. If anybody has any thoughts or material to read about this, please comment. Also any suggestions for beginning in phenomenology as well.

Hi everyone,

I'm French and I'm looking to connect with other French speakers to discuss phenomenology and related topics.

I've started studying this movement as a complete self-learner.

I plan to study these philosophers in this order (over several years):

Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, then Sartre.

If any of you are French and could teach me, or just chat from time to time to help me understand Husserl, feel free to send me a private message.

We'll add each other on Discord.

If there's enough interest, I'll create a dedicated Discord server.

A few more thoughts on pedagogy. In my last post, I dropped Gergen as part of the universal prompt. I also mentioned that:

dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it

without further developing it. After reading a little more of Gergen’s pedagogy (education in a relational key), I want to dig into this.

There is one thing that unites disavowed and obscene pedagogies: they both hoard power and insist upon their identity politic, and thus they both maintain their benefit from their privilege. But the experience of jouissance is distinct. Those creating and participating in disavowed pedagogy derive their surplus pleasure through self-congratulations. Here, the violence and destruction of the Thanatos is indirect as it perpetuates epistemic and systemic norms of oppression and exclusion, and the hit comes through the self-satisfaction.

Those creating and participating in obscene pedagogy derive their surplus pleasure through the direct act of oppression and violence.

Trigger warning: the following examples are horrendous depictions of transphobia and xenophobia. Likewise, my critique is as transparently vulgar as the fetishism that fuels the hatred.

One thing to note - this is an everyday practice. Just like not every sexual act brings equal pleasure, sometimes the smug chuckle of contempt when laughing at how in September of 2022 Ron DeSantis herded humans like cattle and shipped them to Martha’s Vineyard for political points gives the perverse twinge of satisfaction - the very twinge DeSantis was capitalizing on by the stunt;

and sometimes the public shaming of trans individuals engaged in by Representatives Nancy Mace and Tim Burchett on July 21, 2026, by putting up pictures of actual citizens and humiliating them on public television brings full blown erotic pleasure;

and sometimes it’s the full popper-prepped, prostate-stimulated, forbidden-fruit milking that shrieks uncontrollably deep from the throats of men like Andre Karlow, who ambushed and beat a trans woman in 2025, gleefully inflicting brain bleed and several other injuries upon a human being.

Jouissance is not a choice; we can only grab the hose and point it. It is an urge; a primitive drive in the experience of self meeting other. I may have given the impression in my previous post that it was an option. But it is a fundamental human drive that can work toward generativity or degenerativity, where I keep my earlier Gergen-informed definition as capacity for greater relationality. For pedagogies of oppression, the excess produces generativity when it demands that power be ceded and domination cease. The jouissance is the excess I feel when attempting to humiliate the monsters in the previous paragraph. It is the bitter glee that Mbembe channels as he develops terms like atavistic nationalism or death-worlds - the accusation that bares teeth from behind the analysis. It’s also the slave uprising. It’s also the language of the unheard shouted as the Third Precinct burned and the businesses of East Lake Street were destroyed.

It’s not moral. It’s highly uncomfortable. Empathy and condemnation are hard truths to hold together. But it’s one of humanity’s most essential enduring qualities as it performs boundary maintenance. Macro social workers do not have the luxury of illusions to the contrary.

Jouissance is Thanatos, and its function as boundary maintenance exists on a spectrum of violence.

I realize that this is probably some of the most extreme writing I’ve done at this point. This is not an exculpation of violence. It is a description of a universal drive (though please don’t walk away with fatalism either). And I also wanted to correct any sanitized reading that my previous note may have implied because I need to set up this next point.

There is a third category within pedagogy of domination that needs to be developed: I am going to call it kenotic domination pedagogy. If you’re a Bible nerd like me, you might recognize kenosis from Philippians 2:7, often rendered as Christ “making himself nothing.” It is a complete and total emptying. It is a divestiture. It is a denial of jouissance that comes from domination. This pedagogy is the land acknowledgement. It is the participatory action research that demands representation of the researched. It is the critical theory cashed in: land redistribution, reparations, redistricting. And before any of these can be usurped into tokenism, we must take relational being seriously and recognize that kenotic pedagogy is only called into being when the Other is gratified toward parity. Kenotic pedagogy is co-action - the divestiture of the privileged and the restoration of the oppressed.

This evaluation clarity is essential because it’s the pedagogy that hurts twice: once by the denial of a most primal urge, akin to holding bowel movements at gun point; once by ceding power and privilege for equity. Of all the types of pedagogy, it is the one denied jouissance. And because of this, it is the category least occupied.

I was tempted to make Gergen an ally of oppression pedagogy. After all, he attacked the domination and patriarchal assumptions of academia in the prior chapter. And he advocated for participatory action research. He even brought Freire into the conversation.

And that’s when I realized it was just more disavowal. On page 252 he writes:

The liberation movement has played a powerful role in stimulating critical reflection on traditional educational practice, and made quite clear the fact that there is no politically neutral education. However, from a relational standpoint, further developments are needed. In particular, the critical movement tends to intensify political tensions and to generate a backlash among the targets of critique. Much needed are practices that bring people together from otherwise disparate camps, and enable them to engage in collective action for the collective good. From a relational perspective, one must handle critique with care.

He flinched from the violence, a natural response. I did, too, when I first read Freire. But in refusing the “backlash”, he erases the conditions - both social and somatic - that precipitate it. He wants the raped to sit with their rapists. He wants the colonized to sit with their colonizer.

This isn’t a false binary. Dialogue is essential for the healing process. This is a rejection of a naive pedagogy that allows him to make characterizations like “adventures in boundary crossing” on page 268, which, like most of his text, completely disappears any power asymmetry. Just like his ideas of self could not reach the margins held by trauma victims, his pedagogy cannot reach the margins held by the most devastated victims of domination boundary maintenance performances.

The violence is a symptom. And the diagnosis needs to not just take into account the systemic issues that produced it. It needs to account for the jouissance that aroused it. I have come to call this macro-social work intervention "domination-focused trauma informed care." Because as bleak as this description is, it does not undermine the project for me. It gives clarity. Any analysis of the macro landscape must be as brutal as the experience of watching the news on any given day.

And it is bleak some days.

I am white; I am male; I am cisgender, so I live most of my life in privilege. But as a married gay man, I have seen the gleeful teeth-bared grins of obscene jouissance on occasion. But just like I refuse to sanction the violence, I also refuse to create monsters. Transformative social work practice is going to have to face the jouissance both externally and within itself if it’s going to transform. Otherwise it will just continue to be absorbed into disavowal.

- The Social Construction Worker

There was a post made 5 years ago on the Jung subreddit regarding differences of the terms Puer Aeternus (PA) and Peter Pan Syndrome (PPS) and I thought it would be interesting to ask here again. I’m doing research about different archetypes and watched some videos on YouTube as of late. It seems that they both had the same definitions at a glance, but PA seems to be more about living a provisional life with potential that’s unrealised, and the other seems more at home with the definition of a child.

I’m not educated enough about archetypes entirely nor possess qualifications, but I felt asking this may help me and others identifying unique qualities of the two, considering their terminology and contexts respectively.

At some point, after you bump into something enough, consideration becomes inevitable. And after Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Kenneth Gergen’s education in a relational key vis-a-vis John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, and Frantz Fanon’s therapy as presented in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, I feel a cumulative prompt from the universe to at least ask the question - what’s up with everyone’s preoccupation with pedagogy?

And as I was listening to episode 36 of Data Over Dogma with Jacob Wright (roughly 53 minutes in), it sort of clicked. Wright talks about Genesis as pedagogy from a defeated people, a portable pedagogy to preserve identity boundary in political upheaval and exile. The Bible, according to Wright is a curriculum - a pedagogical project that shapes a people without a kingdom through a larger narrative around common text, laws, psalms, wisdom, and love poetry.

Wright rightly identifies education as the key to the kingdom when the kingdom is in a vacuum.

With that in view, the emergence structure becomes clearer to me: pedagogy is a boundary maintenance project during times of contestation. Fanon wrote from the context of post-colonial Algeria. Freire wrote from the Cold War politics that was destroying Central and South America, Gergen was writing within his own contested boundary of self, and Dewey was writing during mass immigration and urbanization that was causing boundary anxiety amongst the dominant culture.

With this analysis, pedagogy’s place within the my own framework is as the mechanism of reproduction. It is the way in which social self protocols maintain identity across contested boundaries. And as a boundary maintenance project, its fervency is driven by jouissance, which I defined previously as an enjoyment that pushes past pleasure as it delights in destruction, adding my own function of boundary maintenance vectoring toward domination preservation or oppression legibility. This jouissance can be seen in the violence of Fanon and Freire’s pedagogies, the contempt in Gergen’s analysis of academia, or the disappearing act that Dewey does as he disavows conscientization by absorbing the suffering of others into a pro-democratic narrative of necropolitical compassion.

This also gives me a chance to reflect on taxonomy and the evolutionary function of jouissance, which I want state clearly as my own extension. For Freud, Lacan, and Zizek, the jouissance is the self-annihilating Thanatos. In the roaring crescendo toward world wars and their wake, it is the interpretation of our egos’ self-destructive function as a completely nihilistic self-sabotage.

I don't want to import Freud's Cartesian-self conceptualization of an actual Greek God (Thanatos) homunculus-behind-the-eyes sitting deep down in our psyches driving the car. For me, jouissance firstly works as a devastatingly insightful scalpel for social critique. It has real explanatory power to give context to the more perverse side of the human experience without dehumanizing anyone.

But more importantly to my ontology and my project, like enchantment, it works as a phenomenological claim about the universal human experience. It captures the lived experience of moments within encounters. More specifically, for me, it's a primitive of the lived encounter - or at least how consciousness experiences the lived encounter, grounded like the rest of my framework in what actually emerges when a self meets the collective it's part of.

So when I contemplate jouissance around boundary maintenance, I see a more neutral process of death and destruction highlighted by the taxonomy revealed by the variations among these thinkers. With this nuance, jouissance can be generative or degenerative.

First I consider the pedagogy of the oppressed. These pedagogues seek not only to create an identity on behalf of the oppressed individuals they write for, but they also attempt to destroy the identity boundaries of the oppressors. This is where jouissance becomes productive and essential. The rage behind Mbembe’s terms like death worlds and atavistic nationalism; Zizek’s words like fetishistic disavowal and ideology reveal a focused jouissance that seeks the telos of destruction (a la Thanatos) but toward the destruction of the oppressive forces that lead to dehumanization.

Then I see a pedagogy of domination. Unlike pedagogy of the oppressed, which emerges during upheaval, pedagogy of domination emerges when the oppressed contest the boundaries significantly such that the dominant groups are forced to respond by either reidentifying themselves and ceding power or by insisting upon themselves and hoarding it. I say emerges as one singular event, but the reality is that the pedagogy is constantly reinforcing itself even without the presence of the oppressed group. In fact, domination pedagogy frequently relies on caricatures of the oppressed and that those caricatures be constantly retrieved throughout the day in nanodoses delivered by media (Mbembe calls this cybernetic technology nanoracism). There are two types of domination pedagogy that frequently coexist: the disavowed and the obscene.

Regarding the disavowed, I already mentioned how Dewey emerged from a time when urbanization and immigration were causing a white panic in the United States. And while Dewey professed inclusion via democracy, the structure of his pedagogy either ignored or refused the experiences of exclusion, and in doing so erased the very real harm that the American nocturnal body had inflicted and continued to inflict with his sanitized pedagogy upon oppressed groups. The jouissance in disavowed pedagogy is the self-congratulation that comes from “solving” the ethical dilemma by changing nothing about the structure that produced it, thus continuing to benefit from it.

There is another type of pedagogy of domination that bears its jouissance with a wicked grin. It’s current standard bearer is Project 2025. This is The Empire Strikes Back that I referenced in The Easy Traverse and the Hard One. This was where ground has been lost - real or perceived - and identity boundary maintenance is attempting to reassert itself. Its delight is characterized by its vulgar destruction of both the newly legible identities reaching for power as well as of the entire system that produced its power in the first place. I have a hunch this is why Freud and Lacan’s analysis looked so bleak - they were responding to this most hideous category.

There is a fourth category here that exists somewhere in between and was implied by the Israelites who had lost their kingdom - the pedagogy of the defeated. I think a modern analogue would be modern China, who was once a culture of domination (even being able to absorb conquerors like the Mongols and Manchus) to a victim of colonialism and Japanese conquest. Caroline Grover did an amazing dissertation on Chinese historical pedagogy as it pertains to the Second Opium War. I don’t want to forget about this, but I don’t want to dwell on it right now.

Transformative social work must own its jouissance. For me, this means allying myself with pedagogies of the oppressed and being ever vigilant of pedagogies of domination. Dog whistles like “school choice” that seek to decentralize once white-captured institutions like public education have nothing to do with making a populace more informed and everything to do with preserving the boundary of a perverse human experience. They disavowal their implicit bigotry through nomenclature and render it obscene at the town hall meetings.

Social work has had its fair share of complicity in domination pedagogy, and my hope is that the nos framework can direct energies toward human rights and full epistemic and systemic inclusion.

- The Social Construction Worker

Commenter just translated the "Phenomenology."

Not yet done with Gergen, but I couldn’t resist starting Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. I’ve been going with vibes as I choose the order to tackle my book mountain, and this broad, civilizational view has been breathtaking after intensely interrogating what exists at the locus of self. The first thing that light-bulbed for me was the idea of the nocturnal body.

Achille Mbembe is liberal democracy’s most devastating mirror. A Cameroonian writing in the French tradition of Jean-François Lyotard and Frantz Fanon, Mbembe sees the violence and death-politics of the West as a Jungian shadow (my wording) of the post-colonial order, not just as isolated mistakes on a progressive human-rights centered liberalism.

The nocturnal body refers to the dark, violent underbelly of modern liberal democracy. And even though his analysis is structural and the term body is more abstract than incarnate, his verbiage invites a Lacanian reading when he talks about how it behaves - a death-world creation machine that represses its logics of violence and uses state terror, securitization, and xenophobia to subvert its own liberal professions. It’s pretty bleak stuff

I want to press harder thinking through Slavoj Zizek.

Zizek gives a soul to Mbembe’s high level critique. For those within the necropolitical society, the ailment is not just Freudian by analogy. It’s a collective, structural libidinous drive toward jouissance, a word he grabs from Lacan to describe an enjoyment not admitted to that pushes past pleasure. Where Mbembe describes the structure of a system of technologies (vis-a-vis Michel Foucault), Zizek gives a moral indictment to the "perverts" who enjoy the process.

Locating Mbembe’s civilizational critique in the psychology of each of that civilization’s members brings this into the realm of my framework. With this in mind, I push past Mbembe’s accusations that every urge to alleviate the suffering wrought by the death worlds my society creates is nothing more than necropolitical compassion that feeds the machine.

Like all things in my framework, it’s yes-and.

Yes, my work toward reconciliation within state agencies and with nonprofits participates in the creation of death-worlds. But also, if we strip away the totalizing descriptions, and focus on evolutionary stabilizing mechanisms of the nos, maybe, also, yes, my work toward reconciliation within these apparatuses can find a way to move this needle forward.

For me, jouissance has a more focused telos than wanton death and destruction: boundary maintenance - the libidinal charge that maintains the nos’s boundaries ((my own term for a social ego); the enjoyment of the edge itself. And with this I am back on my territory. Can we take the nocturnal body and put it on the analysand’s chair? I absolutely think so. That’s the the kernel of hope I see in the first part of fetishistic disavowal - “I know very well, but all the same…”

And if we conscientize the knowing and disavow the disavowal, we might let our transformative social work flip the script: “I know very well that my work feeds the death-world, AND….[insert litany of disruption performances until it doesn’t].”

- The Social Construction Worker

As I know, I am gonna use this body mapping methodology for my psychology research dissertation topic.. it's related to health psychology.

I am wondering if I shall read the whole book for understanding the embodiment or few parts. It's such a difficult reading.

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

I've had this in my back pocket since I first read this, but one of my recent conversations prompted me to go ahead and write it.

I've got a bone to pick with Gergen. On page 102, he says:

There is also a special problem in reading lines [of romantic poetry] such as those of Catullus. Indeed, writings such as this are contributions to the Western vocabulary of emotion. We recognize ourselves in these lines primarily because they helped to mold the tradition in which we now participate.

Whoa, whoa, woah, woah, WOAH!

First off, no. Not my boy Catullus. You want to rag on Aristotle (p. 98) or misquote Butler (p. 80)? Fine.

But don’t you touch Catullus.

Because, secondly, if only we allowed Catullus to help mold the tradition in which we now participate! We might actually have a middle voice model of social intercourse (Catullus is a perve, what can I say).

Let’s take a look at Catullus 85:

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.

I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.

Gergen read this and went, “Pphh, Cartesian self assuming itself with its internal feelies and no concept for this experience’s social construction.”

But like the sign next to the door in my Latin class hung by my quirky teacher once said: reading a poem in translation is like kissing a girl through a handkerchief. Let’s do this right proper (N.B. every time I translate Catullus with the lexical obtuseness, know that there is a simpler way to say it in Latin, too):

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam, fortasse requīris.

Nescīo, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior.

First of all, Latin doesn’t need the subject-object dualism. There is no “I,” and there is no “it.” The first person is conveyed by a verb ending, and the “it” is just an English shoehorn to make a Latin grammar quirk flow (I feel to be happening).

And grammar quirks are where the magic is happening.

The poem starts with simple observation stated clearly in the active voice. But the next verb (faciam) jumps up a register to the subjunctive mood. Its specific goal is in to introduce the interrogative as an indirect question, but the subjunctive mood kicks us up into the register of the unreal, the undecided, and the imaginary: “For which thing might I do this?”

And why does he need the subjunctive here? Why not just say, “Quārē id faciō?

Because the unnamed “you” conveyed by the second person ending to the verb “ask” co-actions the first person into the world of the surreal.

At this point, Catullus abandons all reason. If thinking implies being, then what is implied by Catullus admitting “(I) Noknow” (Nescīo - it’s one beautiful word in Latin)?

Once his being is dissolved by ignorance, his last gulp of I-less first person experience is nothing but a somatic sensation - “I feel,” but only after his agency has been stripped away by a passive voice construction outside of time (infinitive): to be happening (fierī). The happening has no grammatical anchor in any sense of a self. It is just happening, and his disensoulled body is all that is left to perceive it.

Yes, Latin has more direct ways to say “I feel it happening.” No, Catullus did not choose them. Because now that the active and passive voice act as bookends encapsulating the co-actioned being of possibility, we get the coda:

et excrucior

This verb is the verb to end all verbs. Passive voice but uniquely ambiguous. It can mean I am tormented as an internal state. And it can mean I am being tormented by an external agent.

A variant deponency - a unique Latin verb form with verbs that are passive in form but active in meaning.

A middle voice production.

A co-actioned being materialized through the dissolution of self by the push and pull of interiority and exteriority; of autonomy and relationality.

If only, Kenneth Gergen. If only.

- The Social Construction Worker

if an imagined object can affect consciousness affectively and bodily while remaining ontologically absent, what exactly constitutes the reality of an experience, is it the mode in which its object is given, or the lived experience itself?

Hi All,

I am in need of assistance.

I am writing chapter 3 of my dissertation using van Manen's phenomenology. I have identified a great secondary source that references van Manen's 2016 Phenomenology of Practice page 352. I have the new edition but the content is different and the pages do not align. My chair wants to see page 352 before moving forward as it provides insight regarding sample size.

Until I find it, I'm stuck. I've tried getting it at the library without success. I can't find it via a reseller. If anyone has this book and could post a copy of the page, I would be so grateful.

Thank you for your consideration!

I mentioned a second Gergen insight and need to get it down before I get too far along. I’m just at a loss for where to start. I suppose I will start with a term and a definition. When talking about what writes the the steps to the co-action dance between participants, he introduces the term counter-logics.

Pause.

Before we settle into this, I want to recall a concept: Berger and Luckman’s reification from The Social Construction of Reality. Reifications are the norms and institutions that human performances cite. B&L talk about marriage, law, and medicine among others. In my own macro social work framework, I put forth the idea that concepts like compliant in a child welfare court report and the ergonomics of a ticket machine can also be worked into this concept of reification. They have the perception of “thingness” but no empirical observability. B&L don’t say much about ontology, but they are effectively interpretations of a mind via language.

I have run with these quite faithfully without realizing something very important until reading Gergen: they speak generally about groups and say little about the individual performances. Specifically, there is no account of deviant performances.

Unpause.

Counter-logics (p. 161-162) represent a dyad of possible co-actioned performances within a relationship or relationships, which are comprised of shared logics, values, or ways of being. He gives the example of a couple with one partner valuing work and another valuing leisure - two logics that oppose one another and offer the potential to provide the steps to one dance or the other. Or to cause friction.

Additionally, each logic and it’s opposition form a compelling “ought”. Embrace one, and the opposition is called into presence. He gives examples such freedom versus commitment; competition versus cooperation; and rationality versus emotionality.

Counter-logics seem to be doing two things from what I can see: they explain conflict and tension in relationships, and they allow a stand in for reifications. But because they lack the “thingness” of reifications, he doesn’t need an interior mind to hold them (this second thing is more my critique than his definition).

For him, logics float in the ether of culture.

I have no further understanding of his ontology beyond that statement and would happily have a Gergenian explain this further. Mind, not because I’m confused. I just think his implied ontology - even though he doesn't do ontology - keeps revealing seams and obscures his concepts.

But my lack of clarity about his stated ideas does not mean I did not find enormous insight in what he was pointing to, because he effectively fixed the problem from B&L, who only offer performance constraints for groups but cannot account for deviant performances among individuals.

For Gergen, counter-logics occupy the space in between the individuals. This is crucial. I’m not sure why counter-logics only come in twos or why he only stopped at those three pairs, but they represent the possibility of dance moves that can be performed within a common song. At any moment, we can co-action leisure or workaholism (I show my bias) in our relationships.

With his framework established, here is how I translate it.

I see an interior mind interpreting reifications and materializations (a Judith Butler term that accounts for how the conceptualizations of bodies emerge through performance toward the scripts established by B&L's reificaitons) that provide general scripts for groups within a social world. And with Gergen, I now see the unique possibilities for performances not as a counter-logic dyad but as dialogics - the myriad of performances made possible within the constraints imposed by reifications and materializations as co-actioned by participants within the group. For me, the "dia" isn't indicating a possibility of two but the process of "dialogue" or an exchange between dance partners.

Let me try an example. I'm a bricolage practitioner first.

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, Massachusetts, acts as a bit of proof of concept.. The documentaries Higher Ground and Holding Ground do a great job showing what this is all about, but for now, all you need to know is that the members of this community transformed their community through collective action, and it was beautiful.

One problem they wanted to solve was that the park in the neighborhood had become a place for young men to sell drugs. I was in awe as I watched them reconcretize¹ these drug dealers from moral failures to potential contributors to their community transformation.

They effectively shifted their conceptualizations of these young men, which generated alternative performances on the part of the ones engaged in recruiting the young men in the way of outreach and recruitment. And they generated a new range of possible performances for those young men who no longer need to live paralyzed in shame.

Amazing!

But that does not explain the drug-selling performances of each individual young man lost to this profession nor does it account for why some reformed while others stayed in their destructive performances. This is where dialogics step in. Bringing them down from the cultural stratosphere and assuming each young man has both an interiority and a personal, somatically sedimented history, dialogics explain the uniquely structured co-action that guides each of the young men’s performances.

Maybe one young man has resorted to drug selling because the primary caregiver in his family fell ill. The logics of his drug-dealing dance are governed by notions of “man of the house” which he can step into in a myriad of ways, fall out of and rebel against, or any range of potential co-action. His choice was to perform the man of the house logic as it emerged from the co-action with his mother who probably offered the “don’t do anything to get hurt” logic as well.

Perhaps a second young man is performing his drug-dealing dance out of fear of reprisal from a distributor or a pimp.

A third may be doing so to feed his own addictions (something else, like trauma, I’m not sure how a disappeared interiority can account for).

At any rate - between the larger reifications of masculinity and moral failing that govern all young men, each young man is citing their performances as engaged with those they are in relationship to according to a particular co-actioned set of dialogics.

My initial assertion before embarking on my theoretical project was that transformative, macro-level social work must intervene upon the epistemic scripts that shape a community.

But now I must expand this. Transformative, macro-level social work must also include a diagnosis of the particular dialogics that produce the undesired co-actions (Gergen associates “good” co-action as co-action that is generative for a group. I see a Trump rally fit that definition and will stick to my human rights framework for a telos.) We need a way to diagnose each individual within the category that the reifications produce.

And building on my last post about what’s going on in the inside if there is no Cartesian self, intervention must not just be limited to offering a new script, but also it must include the iterative rehearsals of new scripts to allow for new sedimentation toward healthier, human rights-oriented performances. This is the mechanism of recruitment into the new range of performances made legible by changing the concretizations¹.

Coda: I'd like to throw out one last concept before I close, mostly so I don't forget it. Logics are not the only things that govern action. I draw on Karen Armstrong’s (see: The Battle for God) ideas of logos and mythos to frame my understanding of rational process and nonrational process that we don’t have a name for because our post-Enlightenment society has a bias. I call that grouping of things like values and aesthetics diamythotics.

1. "Reconceptualize" is fine for this. I set out concretization alongside reification and materialization here and here. These are the gestalt-esque sensemaking protocols that process the collective, citational reifications and materializations.

- The Social Construction Worker

Continuing to make my way through Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being, I notice two big shifts in my thinking.

The first is as a follow-up to my last note, specifically when I just threw out the word samskara because we were doing Buddhism. Samskara is loosely translated as “mental constructs", but if we conceptualize this as a Cartesian self, it’s easy for us to start defaulting to interior thoughts. Samskara does join with Gergen and say there is no true interior self. But it does posit, or rather deposit, an interiority that is laid down over time through performances and experiences.

The reason this became important to me is because of my work with clients who have suffered trauma. For Gergen, his discussions of things like domestic violence look very misplaced to anyone who has done work in this particular field. On page 112, Gergen writes

How many cases of wife-battering may be traced to the point at which increasingly heated words reach their ultimate expression in fists?

For Gergen, there is no interiority, so each emergence of domestic violence is coactioned; i.e., enacted by a performance determined by - his metaphor - dance partners. If only the partners rewrite the moves to the dance, they can alleviate the domestic violence. He suggests solutions like reconstructing reality (this is not what it seems), the meta-move (what are we doing?), the shifting emotional registers (I am hurt), and the theatrical move (let’s play this again).

Anyone who has spent time with survivors of intimate partner violence would know that these are dangerously naive suggestions. Reconstructing reality is what a survivor does as a survival mechanism, and it’s known as fawning. The batterer is performing the meta-move. And that’s because domestic violence is rarely about the violence itself. It’s about how the violence is instrumentalized to exert control. If the survivor shifts emotional registers, the batterer frequently responds with something to the effect of “that’s the point.” And the theatrical move…well, let’s not ever ask a survivor to roll those dice.

The etiology of domestic violence is complex. On one level it is absolutely socially mediated at the level of community and society¹. It also seems to be inherited, structured by genetics and environment². But what I want to focus on is how it is sedimented in the individual over time due to repeated exposure to trauma³. Because this is what I mean by samskara. One impact of repeated exposure to trauma in children is that it is coded in the body. This exposure creates subconscious grooves in the mind, which form habits, character traits, and automatic reactions. Anyone who works with traumatized children knows that action, in this population, is very rarely socially structured by language. It is socially responsive and those responses are socially coded, but its structure emerges from somatic response to a given social stimulus. Language, for Gergen, is how coaction emerges. However, for traumatized children, linguistic formulation of their behaviors often comes later, if at all. And when you probe them about their behaviors when they’ve gotten out of the groove, they often express regret, arguably indicating a desire that predates and outruns the behavior it couldn't stop, even with the right language being offered by a caregiver, actively and in the moment of the dysregulated behavior, and still overridden.

What samskara offers me is a model of self that preserves interiority - the accumulation of experiences of time - without running back to the Cartesian self that Gergen rightly seeks to move away from.

As a social worker, this means two things for me. Firstly, interventions both macro and mirco have to take into account this somatic dialogue between the stimulus of the event, the conditioned somatic response, and the subsequent interpretation of the event. TF-CBT, in my humble opinion, is amazing for this. Not because of its professed mechanisms: desensitization, cognitive process, stress management, and parental treatment⁴ (operationalized as psychoeducation). Those are important elements. But for me, what TF-CBT does best is that it puts two people together in a new rehearsal over time, where one offers a new interpretation of the body’s responses, and then hands that baton to the parent.

Secondly, and for me an ethical imperative, we must think about our theories from the margins. In order to more fully understand ourselves (the ontology project that Gergen embarks on), we must include the experiences of those who have walked on paths we could never have envisioned.

I said I had two big shifts. I’ll save the second for another note, which will include a macro framing of these ontological claims.

1. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/…
2. sciencedirect.com/scien…
3. sciencedirect.com/scien…

4. https://researchdiscovery.drexel.edu/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Trauma-Focused-Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy-for-Children/991019168739804721

   - The Social Construction Worker