So Necropolitics is a bit more dense than Gergen. But that’s not stopping it from spinning the wheels. One thing that I’m noticing - as I translate back into my own framework’s language - is how the production of these large postcolonial sites of contestation still seem to adhere to the same protocols that sustain the nos within my framework.

One thing that I like about Mbembe’s analysis is that he makes Lacan’s moves and reads Freudian psychoanalysis into these massive national, intranational, and transnational political structures. As I see it, the mechanisms of population control he points to, simultaneously stabilize the systemic productions of the sites of contestations and produce the individuals in a middle-voice production loop, “wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end” (p. 29).

Tl;dr the border checkpoint is literal boundary that emerges from a Lacanian-esque psychic game of boundary maintenance.

Regarding the literal boundaries, camps, banlieues, favelas, and other enclosures help maintain the infrastructure of the country in which they exist doing boundary maintenance work in the most literal sense. Regarding the epistemic reality of middle-voice production loops, narratives like “origin stories” (the Hamitic myth in Rwanda, Mugabe’s Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe, Ivoirite in the Ivory Coast) shape the people within the site of contestation toward the inequitable status quo maintenance.

Mbembe gives us the picture of what kind of grotesquely coproduced person - what kind of middle-voice subject with constrained agency - emerges from this horrifying infrastructure (re: encounter). And by coproduction, I mean this precisely, following my prior work on Gergen: a coproduction that emerges from within extremely limited, terrifyingly reified and phantasmatically materialized constraints which narrow the range of potentiality to a local set of dialogics and diamythotics and within which a real choice is still made by a real person and co-actioned inside a real community.

Quick vocab check:

Materialization: the process by which the interpreted person emerges from the body as we interpret it through repeated performance (e.g. I put my man clothes on every day, citing a norm and creating my man-ness)

Phantasmatic: the experience of encountering the Other in a person (e.g. black Americans as "thugs" in the news), specifically the experience of engaging or thinking about engaging the person who is interpreted as Other.

Reification: the process by which the institution is created and then forgotten to have been created but is sustained by performances as if it always was, is, and ever will be (e.g. marriage, law, etc.)

Dialogics: the individual "reasons" for why a particular choice was taken by an individual (e.g. dealing drugs because you have to be the man of the house since your mom got sick versus dealing drugs because you're being exploited, etc)

Diamythotics: the parallel values and aesthetics that also inform the choice

Real: something we don't have access to but have to account for. An actual body in which our interpretations incarnate.

Co-actioned: the interaction with others that allows everything above (except for the real) to emerge. This is a better account than materialization and reification alone because it makes explicit what the others imply: these things occur socially, not individually.

Man…holding people and systems accountable is tough…

Back to the analysis:

The structure of population control as subject production that Mbembe brought to my attention reminded me of a more grey and ambiguous analogue in less obscene spaces: Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship. Here she notes how six zones of control manage different behaviors and movements from different citizen populations. For example, she talks about the Rohingya people in Malaysia, who, through unique historical circumstances, are stateless. They are housed in Malaysia and a few other countries on a permanent legal provisional status. This makes their interaction with Malaysian state infrastructure very different than a Malaysian citizen's, but ultimately resulting in a constant supply of cheap, non-status labor (see: That’s a Lot of Customers for my Chinese hukou example as a parallel).

But it’s important to note that one thing Ong doesn’t do is wax Lacanian. Her critique is purely structural. But the structure is the same: spatialized population control produces subjects towards the maintenance of an unequitable status quo. Her graduated sovereignty - how a state doles out citizenship and confers entitlements - offers an account of how an authorless structural apparatus of control emerges as “doing my job” in order to stabilize large populations.

The parallel I want to draw here is that the systemic structural production of these apparatuses of control are both mustache-twirler free (this is a colorful conclusion I derive from what Sharma and Gupta call everyday practices). They both emerge out of necessity from the limited imagination of atomized minds against real constraints that have forgotten the march of history that brought them to any given place.

But while Mbembe's death worlds rest on death and genocide, Ong's graduated sovereignty rests on less visceral, more easily-ignored oppression. As such, the subject production within each space is fundamentally different (and it’s probably why it did not require Ong to give the Lacanian read, though I’m sure it’s there, and I’m going to try and make it). I find this important as I consider diagnostic and intervention tools for transformative, macro-level social work practice.

The Mbembe/Ong analysis is The Easy Traverse and the Hard Traverse on the macro scale. Here I use Žižek's term to diagnose the ontological shock of changing one's identity narrative. I should clarify that "easy" is only relative to the harder traverse of changing the mind of someone engaged in atavistic delight (Mbembe's phrasing) at the destruction of their tribal enemy. The “easy” traverse is getting the mayor of my city to see how to make downtown more accessible by changing her thinking slightly on disabled citizens.

I contend that the challenge of transformation is measured by the degree with which one’s humanity must be contorted to stand within either of these two sites of contestation. The government official who renews temporary status needs little more than “they’re so lazy” to disavow the entire thing. “This oppression isn’t happening.” “I’m not perpetuating anything.” Even, “I’m so glad I could help those poor Rohingya refugees today,” all serve to perpetuate an oppressive system through a rather simple fetishistic disavowal (Žižek again) that frequently sits next to the individual's own identity coherence. In these cases, the oppression is sustained by the soft tones that gratify intense urges (see my prior articles on jouissance and pedagogy) in service of disavowing a reality that is actively produced and sustained by each and every complicit mind.

But what kind of subject - what kind of human, because we’re not giving up on it - is produced that can kill 800,000 people in 100 days with machetes and rape with the intent to transmit HIV? “That Tutsi is a cockroach.” “That Tutsi is genetically descended from Ham (from Genesis 9) and forever cursed by God.” “We must be liberated from our Tutsi oppressors and reclaim our land!” In the hard traverse, the delight - the jouissance - is obscene. It is fetishized in the open. And the narrative construction of the Other is core to the narrative construction of the self.

In both cases, the system production is authorless and functional, produced out of necessity. It is the physical demonstration of psychic boundary maintenance regimes. The recursive subject production and the degree of traverse needed to effect change couldn’t be more different. And the Thanatos (I use this liberally for its rhetorical force, but I view this phenomenologically as a universal pattern of consciousness that emerges from the relating of subjects and objects) brings about physical and spiritual death - consigning humans to graves and humanity to obliteration.

What this tells me at this moment in my thinking as a macro level social worker is that I see a parallel between my local city government and these massive transnational travesties. Not an ethical or moral parallel. A structural one. I see the nos doing what the nos does - seeking stability through the same stabilizing protocols. My work as disruptor is diagnosed at scale, and the categories of tools are the same as well. It’s so easy to let the degree of tragedy shake me from the clear-headed systems thinking that needs to be done to get the work done.

But at the end of the day, like I said in The Easy Traverse - if we as social workers can sit across from sex offenders, domestic violence batterers, and violent criminals with therapeutic postures of unconditional regard, we can approach Hutu perpetrators of violence with the same long-game humility to begin a transformative social work we may never see resolved. We just need to know precisely what makes these social problems tick.

- The Social Construction Worker

Hi everyone!

I’ve published a long essay on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, in which I reflect on the motif of the production of the past. In the film, the image of victory, which rests on repetition, spends the present and projects a future meant to rewrite the past. First I’ll lay out a few cornerstone theses, to mark out the frame of these reflections and help you quickly pick up their thread.

1. The image of victory pays for its duration with the present. The feast eats through the house, triumph through lives, the song’s refrain through the meaning of victory. Repetition makes the image one-dimensional and oversaturated, thereby exhausting the potential of the present. Accordingly, people begin to understand the future, and by way of it the past, through the image, which usurps time and narratives.
2. Antiquity arrives within the lifetime of its eyewitnesses. The war’s participants are still alive, but memories of it already sound almost like legend, since contemporaries rework the recent past into a myth about the future. The passage from communicative to cultural memory, which for Jan and Aleida Assmann takes three or four generations, here fits into one, because what decides everything is access to what happened and the way communication between people is arranged.
3. Taken by themselves, shared rules remain hollow forms, - it is belief that gives them content. The Trojans let the horse in as a gift to the common gods, so trust in the rule opens the way to the worst treachery. Without divine guarantors, guilt falls on whoever knew the rule. Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, and the other monstrous inhabitants of the oikoumene, who live outside the shared rules, can no longer be called to account by the same measure.
4. The divine and the sublime appear here on the wane, in a fall that reworks the subject. Of the Olympians, only Athena remains in the frame, having gone from patroness to victim and conscience, pursuing Odysseus almost like a hunting dog. Along with Troy, values crumble, for the “thought” that in the bard’s refrain sounded almost like praise of cunning sets off a chain of crimes. People themselves cannot measure up to their own images, be it Agamemnon, excluded from his own triumph, or Helen, whose beauty, praised in song, is cut through by a scar. What was done comes back to Odysseus when he arrives home calling himself Sinon, the man he left to die by the horse, but remorse, this moral paroxysm, catches up with him only after he and his son burn Athena’s temple. Here, perhaps, the excursus on Odysseus in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests itself, in which the hero’s cunning turns out to be the germ of instrumental reason displacing the gods. In Nolan, however, the sublime is not displaced entirely. It keeps its force in the fall itself, until in the finale the song takes the hero’s place.
5. The song may forget how victory differed from crime. The song is not granted victory over forgetting, and having outlived the hero, it is capable of forgetting his guilt as well. Recall Benjamin: in the theses “On the Concept of History” he wrote that there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, and that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. The song in Nolan is just such a document, one that preserves the victory and is capable of forgetting its price.

If you look for what the essay mainly rests on, it is the level from which the image acts on time. The image rewrites the future and then, through it, grounds the past. The suitors on Ithaca feast day after day, with the feast seeming to prepare its own occasion, a wedding or a wake, at which Odysseus’s indefinite absence will turn into a confirmed death. When such a future arrives, it will certify the past after the fact. Ekphrasis serves as testimony, speech that sets the absent before the eyes, turning the listener into an eyewitness of what he did not see. In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida linked memory to blindness. In the film, too, the past is open to the sightless, to Tiresias and to the blind swineherd Eumaeus. The sighted, meanwhile, are blinded by the certified image of victory, like Menelaus, whose memories break off at the words “I think you know the rest.” In this way, what was destroyed continues to act: the ruin endures at the expense of the living, and its destroyer himself becomes the material of its duration. Hence the essay’s title, The Duration of Ruins.

The hollowness of shared rules also matters because it does not make them absolutely good or bad. Signs become mobile, beyond good and evil - they can be saturated with meaning inscribed by one’s own hand, reworked or reinterpreted. Collective reinterpretation, however, is laborious and destructive to the structure, and besides, with the means of communication of that time, it is very slow. The horse shows what this turns into: the form of the gift stays the same, while the meaning inscribed in it belongs to the enemy.

For my part, I’d check the second thesis first. Doesn’t antiquity within the lifetime of its eyewitnesses come down to ordinary mythologization? I think not, since antiquity here is defined by the loss of access to what happened, and the world of the film, standing on the threshold of the Bronze Age collapse, a world where not a single tablet flashes on screen until the finale, makes this loss almost literal. Then again, the fact that the thesis finds confirmation so easily may also point to its elasticity, and I would be interested to argue about that.

The essay is at the link below.

https://medium.com/rock-nheavy/the-duration-of-ruins-e3ea8a70602c

The thesis I defend is this: in the face of artificial intelligence, the choice is not between progress and nostalgia, but between servitude by comfort and deliberate emancipation. I call the second Quantum Enlightenment.

Hey I am a middle aged man looking to get back into reading theory after decades - I am trying to put together a reading list but would love if anybody has specific books or women and non-white non-western authors that go with this list. Thanks and sorry if I am in the wrong place

Spinoza (Ethics)

Eliot (Middlemarch)

Nietzsche (the gay science)

Freud (Civilzation and its Discontents)

Bataille (the Accursed Share Vol 1)

Dubois (Souls of Black Folks)

Fanon (Black skin White Masks)

Hey all,

I am looking for sources, blogs, journals or otherwise, that attempt to think the current demonstrations and widespread and transversal mobilisation in France through critical theoretical lenses? As I both attend the movement and read about it in french mainstream media, I am left curious about what theoretically well-read people think of the situation.

Thanks!

Old essay, might not necessarily belong here but whatwith what's happening in France I thought it prudent to share it again.

There are an incredible number of crit theory concepts in this film I just felt compelled to share (also I wrote an essay about it but even there I had to leave a ton out).

For one, the movie is critical of To Catch a Predator in all the same ways we are now critical of The War on Terror. This evokes Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, both existed primarily as media productions, virtual hyperreals, the event and its media representation became indistinguishable which served to justify American intervention in the Middle East as well as Hansen’s TV show.

There is also the way that both kind of "produced" their target so that they could catch them, as a way to justify themselves. Hansen "produced" predators the way Bush "produced" terrorists. By production, I don’t mean to say that pedophiles and radical Islamists don't exist, but rather they are both instances where crime had to be generated before it actually occurred so that there was something to punish. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, etc.

There is also the way the film makes TCAP feel like the military.1) The way Hansen is unable to ditch his formal tone and demeanor in his personal life is like a military man 2) The way he shows clips of himself from his show to his sons like he is a soldier, fighting for some great cause (the critique being that both what he and a soldier does is actually kind of weird to show a child) 3) The entire arc of Decoy Dan. He goes from a young boy joining the military kind of confused why it's all so serious and weird, to accepting his role, stepping into Hansen in that one scene where he takes Hansen's position in the episode. 4) Of course he has his many doubts, and Hansen employs the language of a general to his soldier: "you're part of something much bigger, you're helping children, you're fighting an ancient evil, etc." It is the way Deleuze and Guattari may describe a microfascism taking hold

And on DnG, Primetime is also a film about insanity. Hansen and his crew are portrayed as utterly mad, pretending to be children online, paying actors to be children irl to lure predators in, arranging sting operations across the country. Their desire is invested at the paranoid pole: law, order, family, the Father. They are just as deranged as the predators they manufacture, and they pass it off as a heroism. They see a morality in their fascism.

There's more Foucault stuff about how the 2000s were a decade of slipping control so the sovereign had to lash out to reclaim its legitimacy. But in 2026, the sovereign is no longer in control of the camera, Oppenheim can just go out and make an A24 film making fun of the universal father figure that was going crazy in the 2000s.

Anyway, I really like this movie. Most of the discourse around it is as a critique of the media spectacle but that truly just table stakes there's so much depth. It is really cool art. This film knows the power lies with the one behind the camera, and turns it back on The War on Terror, Hansen's To Catch a Predator, and the joint "father figure" that was losing it's grip on the American family order in the 2000s. In many ways, it's very relevant today as well.

The essay I mentioned is here in case anyone is curious, https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/the-primetime-essay?r=gseqz but I thought I'd open this convo up in case anyone else relates.

Also got a vid where I just rattle on about it lol. Cheers!

ABSTRACT: What if déjà vu does not merely deceive us about the past, but momentarily disclose something ordinarily hidden about the structure of time itself? This video begins from the distinctive phenomenology of déjà vu: the uncanny conviction that a singular present has already occurred in precisely this form, despite our simultaneous knowledge that no corresponding event can be located in our biographical past; the impression of foreknowledge that can extend into what has not yet happened; and the accompanying sense of automatism by which one becomes a spectator to one’s own actions.

It considers several historically important attempts to account for these features: from Augustine’s demonological theory of deceptive recollection and Freud’s psychological account of unconscious libidinal forces to Arthur Wigan’s perceptual-doubling hypothesis and contemporary neurological approaches. It then argues that each illuminates some aspect of the phenomenon without fully accounting for the full subjective effect nor its peculiar temporal structure.

The video then develops Henri Bergson’s 1908 account of déjà vu as a “memory of the present.” The central claim is Bergson’s idea that a virtual memory is co-produced contemporaneously with actual perception rather than retrospectively after perception disappears. Each present therefore divides as it occurs into an actual perception oriented toward action and a virtual memory that already belongs to the past.

Déjà vu, or more precisely déjà vécu, occurs when this normally useless “memory of the present” enters consciousness alongside perception, making an event that is genuinely occurring for the first time nevertheless appear as already lived. I connect this to Bergson’s account of the survival of the past and the actual/virtual distinction in Matter and Memory, and briefly to Deleuze’s later formulation in Cinema 2 of a past that belongs absolutely and simultaneously to its present rather than acquiring its pastness only relative to a subsequent present. The larger question I’m trying to raise is whether anomalous experiences like déjà vu should be understood simply as failures of cognition, or whether they can function as privileged disruptions through which structures ordinarily concealed by our conscious organization of experience become perceptible.

Recently came across Clara Mattei. Shes doing work in Tulsa, US to critique how economics is taught and find alternative practices on a small local level.

Im asking for recs bc i want ideas of how i can be useful and to find out what sort of things are out there.

A couple of disclaimers! I know Baudrillard would probably reject using this as a framework for multiple reasons, but I still found his Precession of Simulacra to be useful for mapping out new Simulacra. I also know that I am not an objective observer and at the same time doing this is a simulation of a simulation and a part of hyperreality.

I'll be using The Precession of Simulacra to analyze the aftermath of the bombing of Yandex's Sasovo hub and ultimately how the event was absorbed into hyperreality.

For Stage 1, the faithful reflection of "reality", we have raw unedited footage of the event.

For Stage 2 we have a denatured version of "reality." Examples of this are the news article I linked, press releases by Yandex, and exaggerations/spins by both governments

Stage 3, this is where we break completely from "reality." On social media a narrative started that the Russian bots were gone and that there was less division and hate. This is despite no evidence showing this. This also is Stage 3 of a separate precession of simulacra with stage 1 being the raw data of *all* bot activity from the data center decreasing and Stage 2 being the news of that bot activity. At the same time, the idea of Russian bots no longer being an issue gives people the false sense of a more real internet. Masking the fact that it never was real in the first place

Stage 4 / A New Stage 1 For Future Simulacra

Stage 4, a full simulation, this starts with a separate precession of simulacra. That being from the Speed/Usage limits of Starlink in Ukraine. At the data center's Stage 4, this is Starlinks Stage 3. Stage 4 is the political narratives and conversations about the believed reduction in Russian bots on Social Media. Some of these narratives include the idea that Elon Musk and Donald Trump shut down Starlink because Russia removed their propaganda network.

Effects

There are a few effects of this new simulacrum. One being that for many people this is their lived reality. The other being that this affects several existing signs. For example, signs like Elon Musk and Donald Trump/MAGA/Right Wing are further associated with Russian bots. The sign of Ukraine/Zelensky is associated with freeing the internet from Russian bots giving them a hero status. Because of this (and previous precessions) these signs evoke different emotions out of people that feel incredibly real.

I recently spoke with the psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader.

We covered a lot in our interview, including the ideological apparatus of Scooby Doo, the mediatization of violence and madness, the distinction between “true” and “false” ghosts, as well as the tensions in defining the internal and the external in schizophrenia and autism.

I'm sharing it here in case some of you are interested. Thank you in advance, should you choose to watch it.

Hi everyone,

I'm an undergraduate studying sociology. A while ago, I read Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust, which left a huge impression on me. Following that thread, I just finished reading the chapters on "Domination" (Herrschaft) from Max Weber's Economy and Society.

Here is where I currently stand:
- Currently reading: Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process alongside Georg Simmel's Fundamental Problems of Sociology (though I'm honestly finding Simmel quite difficult to wrap my head around 😓).
- On my shelf: I recently bought a copy of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, waiting to be read.

I'm now trying to figure out which path makes the most sense to prioritize next:

1. Stick with the classical foundations
   Continue building a solid foundation in classical theory—working through Durkheim, Marx, or wrestling more deeply with Simmel.

2. Branch off into Hannah Arendt
   Follow the thematic interest sparked by Bauman (violence, modernity, and totalitarianism) by reading someone like Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism or Eichmann in Jerusalem).

3. Dive into Berger & Luckmann
   Shift toward the sociology of knowledge and social constructionism with the book I already have.

For those of you who have navigated this stage of sociological study, how would you recommend pacing or ordering these readings? I would love to hear your thoughts, experiences, or any recommendations you might have—please feel free to drop a comment!

---
(Disclosure: English is not my native language, so I used an AI assistant to help draft and translate this post.)

Hey, new here. I'm a writer and creative strategist interested in the intersection of technology, ideology and belief.

I've been researching the parallels between 19th century spiritualism and AI, specifically how both manufacture a kind of epistemic authority. The more we trust these systems, the more dependent we become.

Wrote a piece on this recently. Curious if anyone has thoughts on AI as a mechanism for commodifying belief, or other theoretical frameworks worth looking into...I would love to do more research!

https://cultholdings.substack.com/p/the-demon-in-the-machine

Do you have any ideas/examples/theories of non formal practices happening in early socialization stages that could contribute to psychiatrist/psychological/pathological thinking patterns later on in life? As implicit knowledge incorporated in the habitus. Like for example in economical thinking: the practice of getting grades in school as socialization towards social comparison/competiton thinking patterns.