'summery' dismissal (and a summary of some summer reading, for Australian winter too)

given it's going to be a vacant month around here...

seal shit and sunshine, Melbourne Zoo, June 2022

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.

…this is much more of an ‘essay’ than the way this blog has iterated toward a ‘disciplined practice of spontaneous expression’.

…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.

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.

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).

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.

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

1. stress

2. cynicism

3. self blame

and in her follow up research, she found the following six ‘qualities’, usually at the level of the organisation:

1. workload high, resources low

2. control, autonomy (or: lack of control, heteronomy [back to Gorz])

3. reward, recognition (or: no acknowledgment or recognition of effort or achievement)

4. work climate, supportiveness (or: toxic cultures of fear, see BoM and toxic culture)

5. fairness, (or: unfairness, rackets and fiefdoms)

6. 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.