'summery' dismissal (and a summary of some summer reading, for Australian winter too)
given it's going to be a vacant month around here...
Hello all,
well, out of runway here before heading away for a month.
If you’re interested, it might be worth re-reading the following posts, given that the discipline I’m practising leads to a kind of ‘A cause de moi, le déluge’. Mea culpa.
~
so then:
This was ‘the animus behind the impetus’ here; pivotal life moment.
Black Boxes, Double Alienation, & the Formative Loss of Depression
In the published version of this text here I’ve changed the names of the building and removed the name of the institution to draw attention away from the particularities. Late on a Monday in early August my tutor emailed to let me know that someone had killed themselves on campus. By the next morning, before the day’s lecture, details emerged. It was an …
…this is much more of an ‘essay’ than the way this blog has iterated toward a ‘disciplined practice of spontaneous expression’.
On Resilience
This is another archival post, this one from April 2021, and originally made as a video… I re-listened to it this morning, in considering whether it was still valid and worthwhile to share with my 2022 students, as they cope with stressors that, for them, tend to trigger a lot of anxiety – up to the point where they’re incapable of functioning well enou…
…this was a ‘translation’ of a video I made for my students, and contains a whole direction I haven’t had the time or capacity this year to pursue, that I want to in the coming years. It’s as close to self help or advice or ‘wisdom’ as I’d like to get to. If you like this, and/or you’r interested in Buddhism but don’t want self help or New Age, I also really recommend Ken McLeod’s Wake Up to Your Life, which is also available at no further cost on archive.org, Apple Music and Spotify. Like Heidegger with heart and no Nazi bits, or like Pema Chödron with more Heidegger, or like Tara Brach without the ‘American Buddhism’ self actualisation self help bits.
Ten quick fragments on psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis has a chequered history treating psychosis and schizophrenia, as well as autism. Then as now, but especially in the 21C, the movement has hung its hat on clinical efficacy in treating ordinary unhappiness, especially neurosis, as well as the very many angsts, sadnesses and unrealities unamenable to prescription biochemistry and ten-sessio…
This was my ‘summary’ of a lot of thinking on psychoanalysis. Reading back, it’s as clear and accurate as I can make it… I’ll return to psychoanalytic social theory later this year when re-tackling Marcuse to get to Stiegler and take what we can from Deleuze and Guattari’s post ‘68 response to Lacan, as well as Fromm, where we can, and Horney, most of all – the most incisive and courageous psychoanalytic thinker, and someone who I think has been diminished because she was a woman who dared criticise everyone’s Daddy. In a movement where everyone has theirs, Horney is my Daddy.
Notes on an unhappy age without philosophy
Refrain: I share an intuition that the time from which I write does not yet have a set of ordering concepts capable of encapsulating its permutations; this intuition intimates, instead, that this conjuncture has a definite smell, something like carpet wet by receding sewage, in the footwells of a car left in a flood-swollen creek, having been joy ridden…
This post lays out a lot of the ‘background’ assumptions for everything I’m riffing off here: alongside working through Gorz and Stiegler, Beck’s insights on spatial and temporal de-bounding resonate most strongly for me in helping us think about how the world actually works now. If we say, with Gibson, that ‘the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’, then debounding is one way in to ‘how’. Read this paper of Beck’s (ignore the bits on ‘terrorists’ and think about covid and supply chains instead), and read it alongside this classic by Carolyn Nordstrom (and focus on needs and think about Maslow and the Fromm of Man for Herself).
Things that make you go HMM
In a podcast conversation that’s oriented a lot of my posting over the past several months, Chris and I did some work trying to name the signature of the political present. This appears all the more difficult, insofar as the geist of the zeit now is marked by complexity, ambiguity, indeterminacy.
This post tries to explicate some of my own ‘tensions’ by crossing them over some of the substantive tensions ‘across’ supply chains now, and how we tend to, prefer to not see them. This is a lot of my starting point for where the podcast series is doing to head; you can also read this chapter I wrote on this (or the thoughts that led in to this, before covid), here. You could also think about this through the form of offshoring, and offshoring processes, here. I think one of the ways through complexity via this set of topics is to think about ‘designed processes’, the complex ‘how’ of how improbable and fragile things are made to work. I hope this is better than the fluid mechanic metaphoric of ‘flow’ or lazy metaphoric of ‘networks’ from the 2000s.
What did we catch during the pandemic, and how are we to catch what we've caught?
Something happened to us during the pandemic. Many things, indeed. We don’t really yet know the toll of the pandemic in its fullness, for whom the toll tolled, and how. We may never. We ‘know’ it killed anywhere between 6.9 to 30.1 million people: a huge toll and a huge margin of t|error. This was some kind of war.
Finally, I’m really interested in psychosocial effects, lived contradictions, and the banal and surreal phenomenology of everyday life (how this all feels and appears), and tried to capture this here. I want to go further with some of these observations. One thing I haven’t traversed… burnout… just to finish with a copy paste to provoke reflection, we need to think not only about what we ‘caught’ during the pandemic (if we could catch it without hurting ourselves… how we’ve become more avoidant, more brittle, eventually unable to have conversations with one another.
So I think given this: how can we attend to the world and one another, listen, and try to get past our avoidant, brittle, burnt out aspects?
copy/paste, Maslach:
Maslach has found burnout has three phases, and it’s an organisational issue, not individual.
These phases
stress
cynicism
self blame
and in her follow up research, she found the following six ‘qualities’, usually at the level of the organisation:
workload high, resources low
control, autonomy (or: lack of control, heteronomy [back to Gorz])
reward, recognition (or: no acknowledgment or recognition of effort or achievement)
work climate, supportiveness (or: toxic cultures of fear, see BoM and toxic culture)
fairness, (or: unfairness, rackets and fiefdoms)
values, meaning (or: anomie, nihilistic, no values, etc… [back to Gorz])
See you in a month… on returning, Friday will become the new posting day, due to teaching commitments.