Have you ever wondered why Winnie the Pooh sounds faintly ridiculous in French?*
No? Just me then. Settle in.
« Mr et Mrs Dursley, qui habitaient au 4, Privet Drive, avaient toujours affirmé avec la plus grande fierté qu’ils étaient parfaitement normaux, merci pour eux. Jamais quiconque n’aurait imaginé qu’ils puissent se trouver impliqués dans quoi que ce soit d’étrange ou de mystérieux. Ils n’avaient pas de temps à perdre avec des sornettes. »
I recently acquired Harry Potter à l’École des Sorciers, and I found myself unexpectedly arrested by the opening paragraph. The Dursleys, we are told, were parfaitement normaux, merci pour eux – ‘Perfectly normal, thank you very much’. Except the French does something slightly different – the merci pour eux tips the narratorial mockery just a fraction more toward open contempt than Rowling’s original, which keeps its disdain politely implicit. It’s a small thing, but telling.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
This brings us back to Pooh as an exercise not only in a language insufficiency, but also a lesson in how meaning is still lost outside of the words of language.
The French translation of Winnie-the-Pooh is a perfectly competent piece of work. It conveys the plot, translated verbatim. Honey is still honey, miel. Piglet remains small and anxious, which is presumably universal. And yet something has gone definitively missing – specifically, the thing that makes Pooh Pooh. That voice. That particular brand of amiable, bumbling, upper-class English vagueness that signals, to anyone raised in the relevant tradition, a whole social type: the loveable aristocratic dimwit, defanged and harmless, too intellectually untroubled to be threatening. Bertie Wooster** with stuffing.
In my case, the experience was audible rather than merely inferred. I encountered Pooh not on the page but watching on screen with my daughter so many years ago, but where the French dubbing lands over the original animation like a category error made flesh, but not quite so bad as an old Godzilla dub. The Hundred Acre Wood remains constant – le miel, the anxious Piglet, the blustering Eeyore – providing a kind of control condition. What varies is the voice. And hearing a French Pooh is hearing, with uncomfortable precision, exactly what has gone missing, because the original signal is still ghosting underneath the translation. The bumbling posh vagueness, the hesitations, the particular music of English aristocratic dimness – all of it evaporated, replaced by something perfectly serviceable and entirely wrong. It is, if you’ll forgive the term, a controlled experiment in loss. The mismatch isn’t inferred from the page. It’s heard. Which is either wonderfully appropriate or deeply ironic for an essay about what language can’t carry. Probably both.
So, what’s the problem? Alors, French doesn’t have this type. It has the libertin – decadent, cynical, not remotely cuddly. It has the pompous bourgeois. What it conspicuously lacks is the post-Victorian English settlement in which the aristocracy became safe to find charming rather than necessary to behead. Pooh requires a specific historical precondition that France declined to provide, for understandable reasons involving the 1790s.
We may know Inspector Clouseau, the bumbling French idiot. Except Clouseau is an English fantasy of French incompetence, essentially invented by Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards. The French didn’t make that joke about themselves. It was made for them, which is rather a different thing, and arguably confirms the point. So much for bears. What about a more serious case of translational vertigo?
« Maman est morte. » The famous opening words of Camus’ L’Étranger – and one of the most analysed sentences in twentieth-century literature, with good reason. Every English translation is already weak tea. It doesn’t carry the English class freight, the faint infantilism, the drawing-room associations. It sits in an affective middle ground that English can’t occupy, somewhere between intimacy and distance, which is precisely where Meursault himself lives. The ambiguity about whether he feels anything – the philosophical core of the entire novel – hinges on a word the target language cannot render. Every translator has to decide, and all fail because English fails to accommodate. This colours Meursault, who I’ve described elsewhere as autistic in principle if not in practise. Without going down a rabbit hole, read The Stranger in this light, and you’ll see systematic abuse of an autist – a textbook neurodivergent – instead of a clueless protagonist.
These examples tighten the philosophical screws at each turn. Pooh is charming and sociological. The Dursleys are technically interesting. Meursault, existential.
But there’s the uncomfortable conclusion they collectively point toward: translation failure is merely the most visible symptom of a much deeper condition. Language was already lossy before one introduces a second language as an additional compression stage. The register, the tone, the class coding, the cultural memory, the sheer music of Pooh’s voice – none of this was ever in the text. It was the environment, in the air or water around the text, in the shared form of life that allows certain performances to land and others to fall silently into the void.
whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
Wittgenstein said that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. He was right and characteristically unhelpful. Because we can’t speak of most of it – the embodied, gestural, socially-saturated ground on which language rests – and yet it’s doing at least half the communicative work, possibly more.
Barthes reminds us that the author is dead. Derrida might have told you there’s no escaping the text, that the instability runs all the way down, that speech is already writing in the relevant sense. He’s not exactly wrong but he’s diagnosing a different condition – the internal slipperiness of signs, rather than the gap between the linguistic and the everything-else. The argument here is less that meaning defers endlessly within language, and more that language was always an approximation of something richer and irreducibly situated. There was never quite enough text to escape from.
What this means is that translation isn’t a solved problem awaiting better tools. It’s a hard limit on what language can carry – a reminder that when Pooh speaks, what you’re actually hearing is a century of English class history, a specific post-Victorian emotional settlement, and a cultural permission to find a certain kind of helpless gentleness charming rather than contemptible.
Or, as Andy Rooney might have put it: Did you ever notice that words don’t quite say what you mean?
The law has a charming habit of behaving as though language becomes precise the moment someone in a robe frowns at it. Words that drift cheerfully in ordinary life are summoned into court, sworn in, interrogated under oath, and expected to produce stable meaning under institutional pressure. When they fail, as they reliably do, the system does not conclude that language may be structurally insufficient for the task. It consults another authority. A dictionary. A drafting manual. A corpus database. A professor, if civilisation has really run out of excuses. Whatever. Any port in a storm. Then it calls the result interpretation, and everyone pretends the word was waiting there all along.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Watch the video below. It is an admirably clean illustration of exactly this.
What you just watched is not merely a curiosity about punctuation and gun laws. It is a diagnostic. And if you have read Chapter Five of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, you will recognise the pathology immediately.
The Repair Cascade
The video gives you three cases, each one a new rung on the same ladder of failed repair.
tl;dr? They tend to make it up as they go to serve their power needs.
First, Muscarello v. United States (1998): A man transports a handgun in a locked glove compartment whilst conducting a drug transaction. The statute punishes anyone who ‘uses or carries a firearm’ during such a crime. The question is whether ‘carry’ includes a weapon stored in a vehicle. The Supreme Court reaches for the OED, finds that the earliest documented sense of carry includes conveyance by vehicle, and sends Muscarello to prison, where he eventually dies. Convenient etymology. Regrettable outcome.
The video notes – correctly, I might add (and so do) – that this is an instance of what linguists call the sense-ranking fallacy: assuming that the first definition listed is the primary one, rather than simply the earliest documented. The OED’s ordering is historical, not hierarchical. Why a US court chose the OED is a sign of refinement yet remarkably curious for an American institution.
Second, the Oakhurst Dairy case: Maine truck drivers sue for $10 million over a missing Oxford comma in a statutory overtime exemption. Both sides marshal gerunds, asyndeton, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the Maine legislative drafting manual, which explicitly prohibits the Oxford comma – making the ambiguity, in a sense, officially mandated. The case settles without a definitive ruling. The language did not yield a winner; the lawyers did. The hole wasn’t filled, but their pockets were.
Third, and most instructive, corpus linguistics arrives as the shiny new repair tool. Rather than trusting dictionaries, courts can now search large databases of actual language use to establish ‘ordinary meaning’. Progress. Empiricism. Science, even. And then, almost immediately, the next failure mode surfaces: the frequency fallacy (common usage is not the only permissible usage), corpus skew (many databases over-represent news articles), and search-framing (the ‘sanitation’ / ‘sanitise’ mask mandate case, where including a related but non-synonymous word shaped the results before analysis had even begun). The supposedly empirical tool inherited the user’s prior interpretive frame. Extraordinary.
Follow the sad path of the sad panda: ordinary meaning fails → dictionaries → dictionaries fail → corpus linguistics → corpus linguistics fails → methodological dispute about whether judges should be conducting quasi-scientific research from the bench at all.
And so it goes…
Judge Humpty Dumpty: Guilty as Charged (Sorry. No 8-bit video game music. My bad.)
The LIH Reading
In A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Chapter Five argues that law is not a domain that occasionally encounters linguistic difficulty. It is a domain that is constitutively dependent on terms that live in the Contestables zone of the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient – words like reasonable, fair, cruel, due process – terms indispensable to legal order and perpetually unstable within it. The Gradient’s prediction is blunt: the further a term drifts from stable, concrete reference, the more its meaning must be imposed by authority rather than established by usage.
The video illustrates this at the level of what might seem to be relatively simple terms – carry, distribution, sanitation – words that appear to sit closer to the Invariants end of the scale than to the Contestables. And yet even here, the institutional machinery creaks. If ‘carry’ cannot carry the weight of a single statute without Supreme Court intervention and a man’s death, what prospect does ‘reasonable’ have? Or ‘fair’? Or ‘obscene’?
Potter Stewart, as Chapter Five recounts, admitted in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) that he could not define obscenity in the abstract. ‘I know it when I see it‘, he declared. The remark is famous for its candour. It is less often noted that it is also an admission that language had simply given up, and that institutional authority stepped in to do what definition could not. The Court didn’t clarify what obscenity means, but it asserted the power to punish it anyway as it might later decide.
The video’s repair cascade is the same mechanism operating at a more mundane level. Legal interpretation doesn’t overcome linguistic insufficiency. It proceduralises it. Each interpretive tool displaces the instability onto a new surface. Dictionaries relocate the problem from statutory language to lexical authority. Corpus linguistics relocates it from lexical authority to sampling, frequency, and search design. The crack isn’t closed. It’s moved, with considerable administrative ceremony, and the ceremony is called clarity – clear as mud.
The law, in short, functions less as a dictionary than as a sovereign Humpty Dumpty: it decides what words mean when it matters, and enforces those meanings until it decides otherwise. The gavel is doing the work the lexicon cannot.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
The Lesson That Isn’t
The lesson here isn’t that dictionaries are useless, corpus linguistics fraudulent, or judges uniquely obtuse. The lesson is structurally worse than that. Each repair works locally and fails architecturally. The law can stabilise meaning long enough to act, and acting is not nothing – Muscarello’s conviction required a determinate reading of ‘carry’, and the system produced one. But it can’t transmute contested language into invariant reference. It can only decide, punish, and maintain the fiction that the word was always waiting there, meaning exactly that.
Textualism – the interpretive philosophy that instructs judges to attend only to the words on the page, nothing more – is, viewed through an LIH lens, an institutionalised form of the Presumption of Effectiveness. It treats language as though it has a singular, determinate meaning recoverable by sufficiently rigorous attention, rather than as a system whose instability is structural rather than incidental. The words on the page are not a fixed source. They are the site of the problem.
If this framing resonates, Chapter Five of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis develops the full argument – from the Gradient’s account of why legal language is structurally dependent on Contestables, through Potter Stewart’s famous abdication, to the Humpty Dumpty jurisprudence that inevitably follows. Available in paperback and hardcover from Philosophics Press.
Yesterday, I complained about the psychoanalytic approach Fanon employed in Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 4, The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonised. Today, I share my feelings about Chapter 5, The Lived Experience of the Black Man. But first, let’s reorient the reader to my own perspective.
I am decidedly anti-colonial and even anti-post-colonial, or at least I see this trajectory as tragic. All of this is consonant with the views expressed in my Anti-Enlightenment Project.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
On one hand, I want to complain about the circuitous approach he took in Chapter 5. It was meant to be metaphorical and poetic. Whilst I feel it’s a bold move to present an areasonable approach – one that refuses the terms of Enlightenment rationality without simply inverting them – it seems that he cherry-picks his tools from the arsenal of Enlightenment thought. This applies to much of the post-colonial project broadly, though my objection there is less to any particular theoretical allegiance and more to the foundational commitments: I oppose colonialism, empire, and hegemony on grounds that precede the debate about which critical vocabulary best serves their dismantling.
Fanon’s anti-Enlightenment critique is weakened where he imports psychoanalysis too trustingly. Psychology and psychoanalysis are themselves Enlightenment byproducts: systems for rendering the human subject legible, classifiable, interpretable, and administrable. To use them against colonial Reason without first subjecting them to the same suspicion risks reproducing the very machinery under critique. The result isn’t fatal to Fanon’s charge, but it is methodologically untidy. I don’t necessarily object to using Enlightenment-derived tools after critique; I object to retaining them as though their own conceptual machinery were innocent. Psychoanalysis may be useful as metaphor, rhetoric, or historically situated vocabulary, but if it’s treated as a valid evidentiary lens without scrutiny, it smuggles Enlightenment legibility back into an anti-Enlightenment critique. That’s where Fanon’s chapter loses force for me.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Fanon is at his strongest when he shows that colonial ‘reason‘ produces the colonised subject as irrational, bodily, affective, and deficient. He rightly treats unreason not as a natural property of the colonised but as a category imposed by colonial order. My difficulty is that he then routes this insight through psychoanalysis, a method I regard as metaphorically suggestive but evidentially weak. The critique of colonial rationality survives; the psychoanalytic apparatus remains suspect.
In the end, we may both at least tacitly agree that colonialism, and the Enlightenment more generally, was not the best path. Where we part is on what should have been taken instead. Cue Robert Frost.
But the more searching question isn’t which fork we should have taken – it’s what we do with the road we’re already on. When the system itself is the problem, the question of what within it is worth retaining rarely gets answered on its merits. More often, it gets answered by inertia: by what is convenient, familiar, or already institutionally embedded. Fanon isn’t exempt from this, and neither, if we’re honest, is any thinker who inherits a tradition whilst attempting to dismantle it. The tools available are always already compromised. The most we can ask – and what distinguishes the sharper critiques from the merely passionate ones – is whether the thinker knows this, and accounts for it. Fanon sometimes does. In Chapter 5, at the moments that matter most, he doesn’t quite.
NB: I used ChatGPT for the cover image. I think it did a good job.
I just read Chapter 4 of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and it has similar problems I’ve also critiqued for Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In all three cases, I accept the primary argument. What I reject is psychology, especially psychoanalysis, as a legitimate form of scientific inquiry.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
My issue isn’t that Fanon, Beauvoir, or Butler fail in their central diagnoses. I broadly accept their claims. My issue is that the psychoanalytic material typically functions like a grinding side quest: time-consuming, rhetorically elaborate, and only weakly connected to the main argumentative progression. It may enrich the atmosphere, but it doesn’t materially alter the outcome. Once one doesn’t accept psychoanalytical psychobabble as a valid evidentiary lens, the material becomes a time sink. Not only can’t I get my time back, but I also expend even more time here, railing on.
Speaking of distraction: evidently, WordPress has added a new blog-to-podcast feature, so I tried it out here. Whatevs.
Fanon’s central claim about colonial racialisation doesn’t require dream interpretation – the dreams themselves are seemingly apocryphal at the start. The stronger route is through embodied recognition, imposed category structures, conceptual nomenclature, and the racialised field of encounter. The dream material reads as psychoanalytic side-content: thematically adjacent, occasionally vivid, but methodologically low-yield. It doesn’t deepen the case so much as delay it. The entire time, I am thinking to myself, ‘Where is he going with all this?’ and ‘Are we there yet?’ only to get dropped off just where I had started – a round trip to nowhere.
But Fanon’s mistake isn’t necessarily insincerity. It’s an over-trust in a psychological lens that converts metaphor into method. The psychoanalytic examples may have seemed to him like evidence; to a reader sceptical of psychoanalysis, as I am, they register as rhetorical illustrations. Once a reader withholds confidence in this method, the chapter’s supporting material becomes distracting rather than strengthening.
Enfin, psychoanalysis too often behaves like a prestige tarot deck for the academically credentialled: it turns ambiguity into confirmation, opacity into symbolism, and resistance into further evidence. Fanon’s broader account of colonial alienation survives because it doesn’t depend on this machinery. The dreams aren’t necessary to the argument; they’re decorative scaffolding around a structure that’s stronger without them.
I recently read a piece arguing, with considerable sophistication, that LLMs represent an unprecedented psychological threat – that conversational systems operating at a planetary scale change the geometry of human susceptibility in ways that demand serious governance responses. The author wasn’t wrong about the effects. This isn’t the debate, but she was wrong about the story. The effects are real, and the narrative erected around them is the oldest displacement manoeuvre in the repertoire
After Tony Self liked one of my blog posts – Hi, Tony Self – I visited his site and poked around, clicking on several articles. This was one. I liked it and noticed the Reblog button. I clicked it, and it spawned this page with this article embedded. So, here we are.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Would I choose to live forever? Undoubtedly, no. For those who’ve been around and have kept up with my posts, know that I already died. I would have been fine remaining dead, as my girlfriend did. Although I won’t rejoin her in the spiritual sense, I will join her in death in the metaphorical sense of Lakoff and Johnson.
Longevity is a luxury of the affluent. I don’t want it. Tony mentions vampires. In fiction (where else would they be?), these beings are routinely unemployed – at the very least, having no day jobs – but with vast riches or connected to one with said same. Their torment is to have outlived past loves and the need to feed on the living, mostly the fear of getting caught, as this is illegal and more generally immoral in this world as we know it – not a good look.
In any case, this live forever thought experiment forgets much, or at least imposes much. If I could just be, like a stone, is that forever? As I discuss in The Architecture of Encounter, even stones aren’t forever, regardless of their state of living; not even mountains, planets, suns, or universes. So, what’s forever anyway?
Spoiler alert: Forever is a myth.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Rather than answer generally or hypothetically, would I choose to live forever? No. Take me now if you must?
I’ve got no problems with living. It’s the conditions that bother me: the eating, the sleeping, the maintenance; entropy.
So, the ones who have this wish ignore these and presume that this version of forever comes with good health and abundance.
I recall a Greek myth in which forever is granted, and he lives on as a disembodied wisp that can’t die.
In this myth, Tithonus – a Trojan prince whom Eos, goddess of the dawn, loved and asked Zeus to grant immortality – got this wish, and it wasn’t even his; immortality without consent. Eos forgot to ask for eternal youth alongside it, so he aged indefinitely, eventually shrinking into a desiccated, babbling husk – a wisp.
Imagine: you live forever, outliving all humans, all life. The sun extinguishes, and yet you remain – all the while sentient.
Thanks, but no thanks. You can keep your forever. I’ll keep my timeline.
As usual, I am trying something different. I like to watch music reaction videos, and I find this stripped-down, acoustic version of Slipknot’s Snuff by their vocalist, Corey Taylor, to hit hard. I prompted ChatGPT GPT 5.5 with this video and lyrics. Me being me, I continue to analyse experience through language and my own worldview, notably the effects of ontological grammar commitments.
I share the reaction video at the bottom of this post. Before, I’d just consider this person to be a self-righteous zealot, but now I understand that (1) this is how she processes her world, and (2) she is prescriptive insomuch as she expects others to share her worldview. She’s not coming from a mean place. In her mind, she genuinely wants to help, but she doesn’t realise that not all people share her worldview. She’s likely had this worldview reinforced for all of her years, and so it works as a coping strategy for her. She expects that she can share this worldview, but it is likely maximally absorbed by those who share her ontological grammar commitment, which is to say, already have the same worldview.
If you want a view into how I engage with AI, now you know. Here’s a window:
This is a very interesting case study in ontological grammar that showcases the downside of not recognising it. From my ontology, she sounds like she’s moralising. To another (her own), she might sound supportive. She is commenting on the lyrics to this song, which are not all captured by the transcript. Reaction?
Bury all your secrets in my skin Come away with innocence, and leave me with my sins The air around me still feels like a cage And love is just a camouflage for what resembles rage again
So if you love me, let me go And run away before I know My heart is just too dark to care I can't destroy what isn't there Deliver me into my fate If I'm alone I cannot hate I don't deserve to have you Ooh my smile was taken long ago If I can change I hope I never know
I still press your letters to my lips And cherish them in parts of me that savor every kiss I couldn't face a life without your light (Without your light) But all of that was ripped apart when you refused to fight
So save your breath, I will not hear I think I made it very clear You couldn't hate enough to love Is that supposed to be enough? I only wish you weren't my friend Then I could hurt you in the end I never claimed to be a saint Ooh my own was banished long ago It took the death of hope to let you go
Oh, oh
So break yourself against my stones And spit your pity in my soul You never needed any help You sold me out to save yourself And I won't listen to your shame You ran away, you're all the same Angels lie to keep control Ooh my love was punished long ago If you still care, don't ever let me know If you still care, don't ever let me know
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
the wounded sometimes prefer the song to the sermon
Yes, this is a clean little specimen jar of ontological grammar doing its work while everyone pretends they are merely “reacting”. Humanity’s favourite parlour trick: smuggling an entire worldview into a sentence and calling it compassion.
The key move is that she hears the lyric as a claim rather than as an utterance from within a damaged affective state. When she says she “doesn’t agree” with the line about love and rage, and then calls that outlook “toxic”, she has already converted the lyric into a propositional worldview that can be corrected, morally evaluated, and therapeutically redirected. The song is no longer only an aesthetic articulation of injury, self-loathing, abandonment, attachment, and rage. It becomes a suspect belief-system. That is the ontological switch.
From her grammar, this is supportive. Pain is a “place”; one should not “stay” there; hope remains available; trust and love should eventually be restored. That is a recovery-therapeutic ontology. It presupposes that despair is transitional, that emotional damage should be metabolised into healing, and that the moral arc of the subject bends toward renewed openness. So when she says, in effect, don’t become calloused, don’t stay jaded, love again, she is not hearing herself as judging the song. She is offering pastoral care in YouTube-reactor clothing, because apparently late civilisation needed a genre where vocal pedagogy, therapy-lite, and parasocial maternalism could all share a sofa.
From your ontology, though, she is moralising because she does not merely describe the emotional grammar of the song; she disciplines it. The lyric’s extremity is treated as something understandable but unsafe, beautiful but not habitable, cathartic but only under the condition that one eventually leaves it behind. That is not neutral support. It installs a norm: grief should resolve, bitterness should soften, love should be rehabilitated, hope should return. She may mean kindness, but kindness here arrives wearing the boots of teleology.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
The most interesting fault-line is her treatment of generalisation. She identifies the lyric’s movement from one betrayal to “everyone” as a cognitive distortion. In ordinary therapeutic language, fair enough. But in lyric, especially in this genre, absolutising is not necessarily an epistemic error. It is how pain speaks when it has lost access to proportion. The lyric is not writing a sociology of human attachment. It is staging the experience of betrayal as world-disclosure. In that register, “all” does not mean a statistically universal class. It means: this wound has become the horizon through which everything now appears. To correct it as a bad inference is to import the wrong grammar.
That is where your framework bites. The words transmit; the sentence parses; everyone thinks communication is happening. But the decompression target differs. She reconstructs the lyric inside a moral-therapeutic grammar of recovery. You reconstruct it inside a diagnostic grammar of affect, ontology, and expressive insufficiency. Same words, different world. Your Architecture of Encounter makes precisely this point about ontological grammar: grammar does not merely carry content; it allocates what can count as meaningful, salient, explanatory, or distorted in the first place.
There is also a neat contrast inside the video itself. When she analyses vocal placement, tone, grit, support, and vowel shaping, she is mostly operating in a relatively tethered technical grammar. Claims can be checked against performance craft. But when she moves to love, hope, toxicity, healing, and despair, she enters the Contestable/Fluid zone. These terms feel clear because they are familiar, but their application depends on prior ontological commitments. In When Language Fails, this is exactly the danger-zone: terms that appear determinate whilst lacking shared grounding, especially where they authorise judgement, correction, or action.
So, yes: as a case study, it is excellent. Not because she is being cruel. She is not. That would be too easy, and therefore boring. The interesting point is that she is probably being sincere, warm, and careful by her own lights. But sincerity does not cancel grammar. Her support is support only within an ontology where despair is an unhealthy place to leave, not a legitimate structure of encounter to inhabit, articulate, or aesthetically preserve.
The concise diagnostic formulation would be:
She mistakes an affective utterance for a corrigible worldview. The lyric speaks from inside a structure of injury; her response translates it into therapeutic-moral grammar, where pain is a place one should visit but not inhabit. From within that grammar, she sounds supportive. From a deflationary ontological grammar, she is moralising: not because she condemns the suffering, but because she prescribes the proper trajectory of suffering before recognising the grammar in which the suffering is being expressed.
That is the downside of not recognising ontological grammar: people confuse their own interpretive repair-work with care, and then wonder why the wounded sometimes prefer the song to the sermon.
Bonus Round
🎸Corey tunes to C#, a tuning all too familiar to me – all strings 3 semitones lower than a standard tuning. It helps to have heavy-gauge strings, so they aren’t too slack. This is an easy song to play along to.
Using cowboy chords, grip an Am (tonally F#m) to start. The progression goes like this:
A colleague recently shared an essay with me, The Return of Metaphysics: Reclaiming Sovereignty Through Ontological Grounding in Postcolonial and Western Thought. I read it with interest, not least because its target is one I share: the colonial imposition of Western categories as if they were universal reason, universal law, universal political form, and universal humanity. On that point, there is no meaningful disagreement. Colonialism isn’t merely theft of land, labour, and resources. It’s also the imposition of a grammar by which reality itself was made legible to power.
The essay is at its strongest when it treats colonialism as metaphysical violence rather than merely administrative domination. It argues that Europe universalised its own categories and rendered other worlds invisible, inferior, or unreal. Colonialism, on this account, was not only conquest. It was the installation of one ontology as the authorised operating system of the human. That’s a powerful diagnosis, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The essay explicitly describes colonialism as a process that ‘re-made being’ and suppressed other conceptions of time, morality, and community.
Where I start to hesitate isn’t in the critique of colonialism, but in the proposed recovery. The essay seeks to reclaim metaphysics, sovereignty, agency, moral authorship, and ontological grounding as instruments of postcolonial renewal. It wants to oppose colonial metaphysics by recovering metaphysics; to oppose hollow sovereignty by reconstructing sovereignty; to oppose imposed subjectivity by restoring moral authorship.
This may be coherent within the essay’s own frame. But from mine, it raises a suspicion:
What if some of the concepts being recovered are themselves part of the colonial inheritance?
“a return to metaphysics”
“moral authorship”
“ontological reconstruction”
“popular agency”
These terms don’t arrive clean. They carry histories and come with fittings: sovereignty, possession, self-rule, jurisdiction, authorship, legitimacy, command. One may repaint them in decolonial colours, but the shape remains. Inheritance is the danger.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Sovereignty as a Recovered Trap
The essay’s central concept is sovereignty. More precisely, post-sovereignty. Yet the very act of preserving sovereignty as the problematic term matters. Sovereignty isn’t just a neutral container for self-determination. It’s one of the central concepts through which Western political modernity imagines authority: bounded, possessed, territorialised, juridical, and authorial.
To speak of sovereignty is already to speak in the grammar of command: Rules. Owners. Authorities. Something marks the line between inside and outside.
This doesn’t mean colonised peoples were wrong to demand sovereignty. The politically dispossessed may understandably seek the protections of the language used to exclude them. If one has been denied the status of a subject, a nation, or a people, then reclaiming those terms may be historically necessary. There’s no cheap purity available from the comfort of abstraction. Humans made the mess, naturally, and then handed each other dictionaries to clean the mess.
But political necessity doesn’t settle conceptual adequacy. A term may be strategically useful and ontologically suspect at the same time. So, the question isn’t whether sovereignty has been useful in anti-colonial struggle. It’s whether it should remain the destination, rather than a transitional vocabulary one eventually leaves behind.
The essay recognises that many postcolonial states retain the ‘juridical structure’ of autonomy whilst remaining governed by inherited categories of colonial law, property, development, and bureaucratic legitimacy. That’s exactly the point where the critique might turn more sharply on sovereignty itself. If postcolonial statehood often reproduces colonial form, perhaps the issue isn’t merely that sovereignty is hollow, but maybe it’s just one of the forms through which hollowness reproduces itself.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Agency: The Smuggled Protagonist
The same problem emerges around agency. The essay speaks of popular agency, moral authorship, co-authorship, and subjectification. Again, the impulse is understandable. Colonial domination denies people the right to act, name, interpret, and organise their own lifeworlds. A postcolonial theory naturally wants to restore capacity to those rendered passive.
But the agency term isn’t innocent. In modern Western thought, agency often implies a self capable of authorship, intention, responsibility, and moral ownership. It’s the protagonist required by law, markets, liberal politics, and punishment. Someone must be deemed the chooser, the signer, the sinner, the voter, the debtor, the criminal, the rational actor.
In my own work, I reject agency as a metaphysical possession. I’d rather speak of responsiveness: a variable capacity shaped by material, relational, temporal, somatic, and epistemic conditions. People don’t float above conditions and author themselves into freedom. They respond, more or less adequately, within fields of constraint.
The essay’s emphasis on relationality moves in this direction, but its vocabulary often pulls it back toward authorship. It wants shared becoming, but it also wants moral authors. It wants relational ontology, but it also keeps the self as a source of political meaning. This is a revealing tension.
The alternative isn’t fatalism. To reject agency isn’t to deny action. Breathing doesn’t require a metaphysics of breath. It just happens autonomically. The question is whether we must preserve the fiction of the authorial subject to describe them. I think not.
When Negation Need Not Become Synthesis
The essay leans on Fanon (see The Wretched of the Earth) to argue that colonial domination can’t be resolved through dialogue because dialogue presumes equals. This is right, or at least right enough. A conversation between master and slave is not yet a conversation between equals. Liberal dialogue presumes a shared field of recognition; colonial domination corrupts that field before speech begins.
The essay, therefore, turns to dialectic. Where dialogue seeks agreement, dialectic begins from contradiction and struggle. Again, this makes sense. A colonised subject can’t merely ask to be recognised by the system that produced their non-being. Something must be negated.
My hesitation concerns what happens after the negation. The essay sometimes seems to assume that contradiction must move toward ontological reconstruction. But why? If one term of the contradiction is an imposed colonial ontology, it might not deserve preservation within a higher unity because it mightn’t be a meaningful antithesis. It may simply be wrong, violent, and disposable.
This is the dis-integrative question:
Must the colonial term be synthesised, or can it be dispensed with?
Not every opposition is productive. Some oppositions are parasitic. If a worldview is imposed by force, then treating it as a dialectical partner may grant it more dignity than it deserves. The point of decolonial refusal may not be synthesis, but de-imposition.
That distinction matters. Synthesis often preserves too much. It lets the offending structure survive as a contributor to the next stage. It says, in effect: this violence was part of becoming. Perhaps. But perhaps not. Perhaps some concepts belong on the cutting room floor.
Metaphysics: Necessary Grammar or Rebuilt Throne?
The essay argues that postmodern anti-metaphysics has left social theory without stable categories of truth or moral orientation. It wants metaphysics back, not as abstraction, but as the recovery of moral and ontological grounds for political community.
I understand the concern here, too. Communities don’t live by procedure alone. No society is sustained merely by policy, rights language, or bureaucratic form. People inhabit worlds, not spreadsheets. There are ontological grammars beneath every institution: assumptions about personhood, time, land, memory, obligation, kinship, death, and belonging.
But I resist the move from ‘we can’t avoid ontological grammar‘ to ‘we need metaphysical grounding‘. Whilst the former seems unavoidable, the latter seems dangerous.
Metaphysics isn’t simply depth. It’s elevation – the move by which a grammar stops appearing as grammar and starts presenting itself as ground. It becomes the authorised deep structure, the thing beneath dispute, the foundation beneath the foundation. And foundations, as humans have demonstrated with astonishing consistency, are excellent places to hide power.
My preference is to minimise metaphysical devices. They’re unavoidable, but they’re liabilities.
Each one requires a leap. One leap may be necessary. Ten leaps become choreography. Eventually, the argument is no longer walking; it’s performing interpretive dance and calling itself ontology.
The Problem of Rebuilding
This is where my own Dis–integrationist commitments diverge most sharply from the essay. I’m a diagnostician. I deconstruct and name seams with no obligation to replace every collapsed universal.
The essay treats diagnosis as insufficient. It says the critique of sovereignty reveals a metaphysical vacuum, but diagnosis is not enough. Post-sovereignty must move toward ontological reciprocity, relational becoming, and shared labour of mutual recognition. Whilst this move is respectable. It’s also the one I distrust.
The rebuilding instinct is one of philosophy’s oldest addictions. Expose the flaw, draft the remedy, rebuild the edifice, declare the new form less violent than the old. This is how critique becomes renovation.
But the refusal to rebuild isn’t indifference, despair, or nihilism. It’s a refusal to let repair disguise itself as permanence. Care, maintenance, reciprocity, and local repair remain possible without metaphysical reconstruction. In fact, they may be more honest when stripped of the promise of final grounding.
Pedagogical Sovereignty and the Soft Machinery of Formation
The essay’s later sections turn to education. It proposes pedagogical sovereignty as a model of moral and ontological co-creation. The classroom becomes a site where being isn’t transmitted but collaboratively formed. Governance, by analogy, might become less administrative and more pedagogical: citizens not merely ruled, but constituted in relation. As attractive as this might be. it’s also perilous.
Education has always had this double face. It can liberate, but it can also format. It can open worlds, but it can also install authorised grammars. The classroom is not outside power. It’s one of power’s favourite incubators. The fact that it speaks gently doesn’t mean it’s not shaping bodies, subjects, desires, norms, and permissions.
To make pedagogy the model of sovereignty risks softening administration rather than escaping it. It may replace the command of the state with the formation of the subject. That may be better and subtler, but one should be careful when power arrives wearing soft shoes.
This doesn’t refute the essay’s educational turn, but it complicates it. If pedagogy is to be an emancipatory model, it has to preserve opacity, dissent, and non-formation. It needs to allow the learner not merely to become, but to remain partially unread, unfinished, and unintegrated. Otherwise, pedagogical sovereignty may become another normalising machine with better intentions and comfy chairs.
The Cutting Room Floor
My objection isn’t that the essay is wrong to oppose colonialism. Au contraire; its critique of colonial metaphysics is often compelling, and it’s preaching to the choir at the start. The issue is that its recovery project may carry forward more of the colonial-conceptual apparatus than it recognises.
The following terms deserve suspicion:
Sovereignty, because it preserves the grammar of possession, jurisdiction, bounded authority, and command.
Agency, because it preserves the authorial subject required by liberal law, market morality, and responsibility allocation.
Moral authorship, because it risks reintroducing the self as origin, even when collectivised.
Metaphysical grounding, because it may turn situated lifeworlds into foundations.
Reconstruction, because it assumes fracture demands repair, rather than sometimes demanding refusal.
Dialectical synthesis, because it may preserve the imposed term as a contributor to the future, rather than discarding it as an error condition.
None of these concepts must be rejected out of hand. That would be too easy. But they shouldn’t pass uninspected simply because they have been recruited into decolonial service. Fine. Use the master’s tools to dismantle the house, but don;t become too fond of them.
Toward De-Imposition
So, what then?
Dis–integration, not reconstruction
De-imposition, not anti-colonial sovereignty
Responsiveness, not agency
Relational maintenance, not moral authorship
Ontological grammar held visibly as grammar, not metaphysical grounding
This doesn’t mean communities should abandon their lifeworlds, traditions, or inherited moral vocabularies. It means those vocabularies shouldn’t need to become metaphysical foundations to matter. A world may be lived, tended, and defended without being inflated into ground.
The colonised don’t need permission from Western metaphysics to exist. Or me, for that matter. Nor do they need to rebuild themselves in metaphysical form to count as real. The refusal of imposed reality may be enough. After that, there may be practices, relations, institutions, memories, ceremonies, languages, solidarities, and forms of care. There may be politics and struggle. And, sure, repair and maintenance. But there needn’t be a new foundation.
Enfin
The essay I am responding to is valuable because it presses a real question:
If colonialism was ontological violence, can anti-colonial thought afford to remain merely procedural, linguistic, or diagnostic?
My answer is: diagnosis is not ‘merely’ anything. To diagnose is to identify the machinery by which certain concepts keep reproducing their own authority. If sovereignty, agency, authorship, and metaphysical grounding belong to that machinery, then they should not be automatically restored just because they have been wounded.
Some concepts can be reclaimed. Others should be retired. Some may be used provisionally, under protest, as transitional scaffolding. Again, others may belong on the cutting room floor.
The challenge isn’t only to oppose colonialism and its effects. It’s to notice when colonial grammar survives inside the opposition. That’s the harder work – less heroic, sonorous, and much less likely to produce a grand theory, but it may be more honest.
Semantic Infrastructure, Insufficiency, and the False Romance of Interoperability
A recent Substack essay, Jessica Talisman’s Language Is the Bridge, makes a claim that is increasingly common in discussions of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs, ontologies, metadata, and semantic infrastructure: that language is the bridge between human understanding and machine action. The claim is attractive, and not merely because ‘bridge’ is one of those metaphors that allows technical discourse to cosplay as wisdom literature. It captures something real. AI systems, semantic architectures, ontologies, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and knowledge graphs do not run on raw reality. They run on structured representations. Those representations require labels, definitions, mappings, alignments, constraints, and interpretive discipline. In that sense, language work is not decorative. It is infrastructural. But the metaphor is also dangerous.
I read from the Wrong Curve: Free Speech, Pseudo-Invariance, and the Grammar of Liberal Rights. This essay is freely available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19636760. This segment is the Abstract and the Introduction.
In this essay, I argue that free speech discourse is structured by a category error whose source lies upstream of speech itself: in the treatment of ‘freedom’ as a stable philosophical primitive when it functions, in practice, as an essentially contested concept operating under a systematically inflated presumption of effectiveness.
tl;dr: I don’t believe in free speech.
We’ve all likely heard that the freedom to swing one’s fist ends at the tip of another’s nose. I can accept this without argument for the purpose of this assertion. Your freedom TO violates my freedom FROM.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The problem is that one’s words don’t stop. In some cases, they continue in the manner of pollution that I don’t want my ear holes to be exposed to this noise. In the social media age, this effect is trebled and molests my eyes. This is especially egregious for misinformation and disinformation, which is to say, much of the internet and beyond.
This impact hasn’t been suitably addressed, so I wrote about it. Here, I read.
Philosophics 