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.
For most of human history, written Latin looked something like THISISASENTENCEABOUTPHILOSOPHYORWARYOUCHOOSE, and readers were simply expected to get on with it. And of course, in ALL CAPS. This was not considered a problem. The Romans were not known for their sensitivity to the needs of others.
The Romans did, briefly, experiment with the interpunct – a modest dot deployed between words, giving the reader something like THIS·IS·A·SENTENCE·ABOUT·PHILOSOPHY·OR·WAR·YOU·CHOOSE – before apparently deciding this was excessive hand-holding and abandoning it entirely. Punctuation’s first appearance in Western prose was thus also its first act of self-destruction. A precedent, as we shall see, that held.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Relief came, eventually, from the most unlikely of sources: monks. Specifically, Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks in the 7th and 8th centuries, who were copying Latin texts they couldn’t actually read fluently, and who introduced spaces between words as a personal coping mechanism. Civilisation has strange bedfellows.
The comma, the full stop, and their assorted relatives arrived with the printing press – Aldus Manutius and the Venetian humanists essentially standardising the breath-marks of prose into something reproducible at scale. Punctuation became, in this period, the bureaucratisation of rhythm. A noble project. Mildly tyrannical in execution.
The em dash, meanwhile, had an entirely respectable career throughout the 18th and 19th centuries — a mark of genuine syntactic energy, used to interrupt, to pivot, to hold two thoughts in productive tension — before being left largely to the eccentric and the emphatic.
Then came the large language models. Within approximately eighteen months, the em dash was resurrected from the dead to become the default unit of thought, issuing them faster than Oprah Christmas giveaways. Every clause got one. Sometimes a sentence received two, bracketing a thought that required neither a bracket nor a thought. The em dash ceased to mean interruption and began to mean I am text generated at scale. Readers noticed. Then they mocked it. Then, following the immutable logic of cultural exhaustion, they stopped using it entirely. The em dash is now extinct — which is a shame, really.
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.
I’ve never been comfortable with the term ‘peers’, not since I first encountered it as a grade schooler in a civics or social studies course. It felt like nonsense at first utterance, but much energy is expended indoctrinating children and adolescents.
Thinking about the Frege–Geach problem has trebled my interest in ontological grammars. It’s also got me thinking about the ontology of peer groups. I’ve always been an eccentric, so I never felt I had any peers. Sure, I’ve had friends, colleagues, bandmates, and acquaintances I’ve genuinely liked and respected, but none were peers. Our connexions might best be described as ‘thin’. We connected through shared work, music, interests, and so on, but peer would have been stretching it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
So, what do I feel qualifies as a peer? And what is a standard definition? I suppose we should start with the latter.
OED:A person who is associated or matched with another; a companion, a fellow, a mate.
Fair enough. This definition works fine. The devil remains in the details. What does it mean to be associated or a match?
As a moral noncognitivist, I don’t think the concept arrives trailing clouds of metaphysical glory. But it doesn’t need to. The interesting question is grammatical: what ontological conditions would have to be shared for ‘peer’ to mean something thick rather than merely administrative?
The legal system answers in the thinnest way possible. If you are recognisably human, that’s enough. Close enough for the government. Peer means person. Case closed.
When the system invokes ‘a jury of one’s peers’, it doesn’t care whether they are one’s peers in any thick or serious sense. It needs performative placeholders – tokens. Rather, it needs them to be peers of the court: those sufficiently aligned with its assumptions, procedures, and admissibility rules to reproduce its worldview in the form of judgement.
The court decides what counts as legible, what counts as relevant, what counts as rational, and what counts as legitimate. It does not discover peers. It manufactures a category of acceptable judges and then calls the result fairness. The deck is stacked before the first card is turned.
I like two examples, one historical and one fictional, to make my point.
Nuremberg
This case should be obvious. The peers here are precisely not their peers, but adversaries. The defendants were not tried by those who shared their grammar of legitimacy, history, necessity, authority, or even the relevant category boundaries. They were tried by agents operating within a rival grammar – one that had already classified the defendants’ framework not as a competing ontology, but as criminal pathology.
The Nazi grammar was effectively annulled. Not refuted, not outargued – annulled. And as with more typical civil and criminal courts, symmetry was never the goal. The institution ruled by fiat. I call this ontological imperialism in a yet unpublished manuscript. The dominant system merely declares the adversarial grammar invalid and inadmissible.
The standard legitimation story for Nuremberg is natural law: there exist moral facts so fundamental that they transcend positive law and sovereign authority. ‘Crimes against humanity’ was coined precisely to name offences no ontological framework could render legitimate. The phrase does the work – against humanity, not against a particular legal code or polity, but against the species as such. It presupposes exactly the universal semantic accessibility that the philosophy of language has shown to be unavailable.
Man in the High Castle
Now switch venues to a fictional universe. Philip K. Dick asks what would have happened had the Axis won the Second World War. The answer, structurally speaking, is: practically nothing — except that a different ontological grammar would now be dominant.
That is the value of the thought experiment. It doesn’t change the species, the cognitive architecture, or the capacity for deliberation. It changes the constitutive act – the moment at which a grammar gets installed as the world’s grammar. And everything downstream shifts with it. In Dick’s world, the inhabitants don’t experience their moral order as imposed or artificial. They navigate it as the background of intelligibility, the way things simply are. The I Ching functions for Tagomi the way human rights discourse functions for a postwar liberal – not as a choice, but as the grammar within which choices become possible.
The counterfactual is devastating because it is structurally symmetric. Had the Axis won, there would have been trials. Those trials would have applied retroactive categories – perhaps ‘crimes against racial destiny’ or ‘crimes against civilisational hygiene’. Allied leaders would have been the defendants. And the verdicts would have felt, to the inhabitants of that world, exactly as self-evidently correct as Nuremberg’s feel to us.
I don’t secretly wish the Axis had won. But the dialectic is worth consideration, and the discomfort it produces is itself the datum. Not evidence that the examination is wrong – evidence that the grammar is working.
So when modern institutions speak reverently of ‘a jury of one’s peers’, I hear not a triumph of fairness but a legitimating fiction. The phrase conceals the fact that institutions do not seek the defendant’s peers. They seek their own. They seek judges formed within the same order, obedient to the same grammar, and willing to mistake its categories for universal reason.
A peer, in any meaningful sense, would have to share enough ontological grammar with me that the same things register as real, salient, and intelligible in roughly the same way. By that standard, peers are rare. Institutions know this perfectly well. Which is why they do not look for them.
They appoint their own and call the matter settled.
“Whom do you serve?” is the unasked question in the Grail story. Parsifal’s failure is usually treated as spiritual unreadiness, moral immaturity, or some such medieval hush. I’ve never had much sympathy for that reading. My own experience has made it difficult to leave certain questions politely untouched.
In my late teens and early twenties, I worked in Los Angeles as a musician, recording engineer, and producer. That meant spending a good deal of time around wealthy celebrities, not at parties but at work. The useful lesson was not glamour. It was status. More precisely, it was learning how often status functions as atmosphere: something to be indulged while present and ignored once it passes.
Berry Gordy once walked into a mixing session at his own studio and imposed a round of suggestions on a track headed for film. Nobody contradicted him. We didn’t need to. We knew that when he left, we would reset the console and write off the lost hour as weather. That is what aura often is: not wisdom, not competence, merely a temporary distortion field around a person whom others have learned not to challenge in the moment.
Gordy was an exception. Most days, there were no sacred cows in the room. Egos were bruised, feelings hurt, and compromises made. Work got done. If anything, the greater impostors were the label middle managers, appeased when present, ignored when absent, and forever acting as though they were paying for decisions that would ultimately be recouped from the artist anyway.
By the time I left music and went legit, I had already learnt the useful part: never mistake decorum for truth. I was never fully indoctrinated into pedestal-thinking, and I have never since managed to treat institutional aura as anything but local theatre. That is why the Grail story catches me at an odd angle. I do not identify with the knight who withholds the question. I identify with the person who asks it anyway, or with the child in Andersen who has not yet learned that collective performance outranks plain observation.
That, perhaps, is the real training most institutions require: not belief, but acculturation into silence. Some of us never quite acquire it.
What if the biggest trick language played on you is convincing you that the world is made of things?
Every sentence you speak installs a hidden assumption. ‘The rock falls.’ ‘The mind thinks.’ ‘The electron orbits.’ Each one presupposes a thing – a noun – that exists before anything happens to it. Your grammar tells you: first, there are objects, then they do stuff. But what if that’s backwards?
The Mediated Encounter Ontology – MEOW – proposes that it is. Reality isn’t made of things. It’s made of structured interactions. Encounter-events – relational, patterned, constrained – are what’s ontologically basic. Objects, subjects, minds, worlds: these are all downstream. They’re what you get when structured interaction stabilises within a given scale of encounter.
The first step is to stop pretending that ‘truth’ names a single thing.
Philosopher Bernard Williams helpfully distinguished between thin and thick senses of truth in Truth and Truthfulness. The distinction is simple but instructive.
In its thin sense, truth is almost trivial. Saying ‘it is true that p’ typically adds nothing beyond asserting p. The word ‘true’ functions as a logical convenience: it allows endorsement, disquotation, and generalisation. Philosophically speaking, this version of truth carries very little metaphysical weight. Most arguments about truth, however, are not about this thin sense.
In practice, truth usually appears in a thicker social sense. Here, truth is embedded in practices of inquiry and communication. Communities develop norms around sincerity, accuracy, testimony, and credibility. These norms help stabilise claims so that people can coordinate action and share information.
At this level, truth becomes something like a social achievement. A statement counts as ‘true’ when it can be defended, circulated, reinforced, and relied upon within a shared framework of interpretation. Evidence matters, but so do rhetoric, persuasion, institutional authority, and the distribution of power. This is the sense in which truth is rhetorical, but rhetoric is not sovereign.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. I prompted NotebookLM to illustrate a 4-layered model that shows how removed language is from encounter, attention, conception, and representation of what we normally consider to be reality. This view is supported by both MEOW and LIH.
Human beings can imagine almost anything about the world, yet the world has a stubborn habit of refusing certain descriptions. Gravity does not yield to persuasion. A bridge designed according to fashionable rhetoric rather than sound engineering will collapse regardless of how compelling its advocates may have been.
This constraint does not disappear in socially constructed domains. Institutions, identities, norms, and laws are historically contingent and rhetorically stabilised, but they remain embedded within material, biological, and ecological conditions. A social fiction can persist for decades or centuries, but eventually it encounters pressures that force revision.
Subjectivity, therefore, doesn’t imply that ‘anything goes’. It simply means that all human knowledge is mediated.
We encounter the world through perception, language, culture, and conceptual frameworks. Every description is produced from a particular standpoint, using particular tools, within particular historical circumstances. Language compresses experience and inevitably loses information along the way. No statement captures reality without distortion. This is the basic insight behind the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
At the same time, our descriptions remain answerable to the constraints of the world we inhabit. Some descriptions survive repeated encounters better than others.
In domains where empirical constraint is strong – engineering, physics, medicine – bad descriptions fail quickly. In domains where constraint is indirect – ethics, politics, identity, aesthetics – multiple interpretations may remain viable for long periods. In such cases, rhetoric, institutional authority, and power often function as tie-breakers, stabilising one interpretation over others so that societies can coordinate their activities. These settlements are rarely permanent.
What appears to be truth in one era may dissolve in another. Concepts drift. Institutions evolve. Technologies reshape the landscape of possibility. Claims that once seemed self-evident may later appear parochial or incoherent.
In this sense, many truths in human affairs are best understood as temporally successful settlements under constraint.
Even the most stable arrangements remain vulnerable to change because the conditions that sustain them are constantly shifting. Agents change. Environments change. Expectations change. The very success of a social order often generates the tensions that undermine it. Change, in other words, is the only persistence.
The mistake of traditional realism is to imagine truth as a mirror of reality – an unmediated correspondence between statement and world. The mistake of crude relativism is to imagine that language and power can shape reality without limit. Both positions misunderstand the situation.
We do not possess a final language that captures reality exactly as it is. But neither are we free to describe the world however we please. Truth is not revelation, and it is not mere invention.
It is the provisional stabilisation of claims within mediated encounter, negotiated through language, rhetoric, and institutions, and continually tested against a world that never fully yields to our descriptions. We don’t discover Truth with a capital T. We negotiate survivable descriptions under pressure.
There is a vulgar little myth still circulating among the managerial classes that capitalism, for all its blemishes, is at least good at ‘unlocking human potential’. It is not. It is very good at monetising human potential, disciplining it, redirecting it, and, where necessary, grinding it into forms useful to administration and exchange. This is not quite the same thing.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
One of capitalism’s less discussed achievements is its ability to rob society not merely of comfort, leisure, health, and life, but of minds. Not always by censorship. Not always by prison or direct prohibition. More often by something duller and therefore more effective: fatigue, schedules, rent, invoices, commuting, institutional obedience, and the constant low-grade humiliation of having to sell the best hours of one’s life in order to remain housed and fed.
Franz Kafka is the obvious mascot for this arrangement, which is precisely why he matters. He worked in insurance. The office consumed the day; the writing had to happen in the ruins of the night. His bureaucratic life helped furnish the atmosphere of his fiction, certainly. Human beings do enjoy confusing damage with justification. But the point is not that the office was somehow good for Kafka because it gave him material. A prison may furnish one with subject matter, too. That does not make incarceration a residency programme. Kafka’s employment constrained the very work for which he is remembered. The miracle is not the arrangement. The miracle is that anything survived it. And Kafka was not unusual in kind. He was merely famous enough to make the violence legible.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Capitalism’s defenders like to point to the artists and thinkers who produced great work while employed, underpaid, exhausted, or cornered by necessity. Fine. Let us grant them their exhibit. Bukowski had the post office. Pessoa had commercial correspondence. Einstein had the patent office. One can add a hundred more names with minimal effort and maximal melancholy. Yet this proves the opposite of what the defenders want it to prove. It shows that some people managed to create despite the arrangement, not because of it.
This is the first confusion worth clearing away. There is no symbiosis here. At best, there is a kind of reverse symbiosis, a parasitic bargain. The job steals the time and energy required for serious work, while art scavenges from the psychic wreckage whatever it can still use. The worker is depleted; the artwork is composed from depletion. Critics then arrive later, pince-nez trembling, to tell us how fruitful this tension was. Fruitful for whom? Certainly not for the unwritten books, the undeveloped theories, the unfinished scores, or the painter dead too early to become collectible.
That, in fact, is the real question. Not which celebrated figures managed to drag a masterpiece out of economic adversity, but which works never appeared at all.
We are asked, constantly, to admire the canon. We are less often asked to consider the anti-canon: the archive of the unmade. The novel that never got written because its author spent thirty years in clerical work. The philosophy never developed because its possible author was too busy meeting payroll. The music that belonged to a particular age, a particular voice, a particular historical moment, could not simply be written forty years later by a different self under improved circumstances.
This is one of capitalism’s cleverest vanishing acts. It leaves behind no body when it kills a possibility. The unwritten book does not appear in mortality statistics. The lost symphony produces no coroner’s report. The poem abandoned in favour of stable employment is not entered into the national accounts as a dead thing. GDP ticks on, cheerful and imbecilic, while whole modes of life are silently foreclosed.
Some will object that artists have always depended on subsidy. Quite right. That objection destroys rather more than it saves. Van Gogh depended on Theo. Marx depended for years on Engels. Tchaikovsky had patronage. Virginia Woolf, unlike millions of women before her, had both money and a room of her own, and had the clarity to state the matter plainly. The lesson is not that genius floats free of material conditions. The lesson is the reverse: culture has always depended heavily on someone, somewhere, being shielded from the full stupidity of economic necessity.
This means the canon is not a clean record of merit. It is also a record of subsidy, exemption, accident, family money, patrons, tolerant spouses, sinecures, inherited cushion, and occasional institutional slack. In short, it is partly a record of who had enough protection from the market to do something other than kneel before it. The rest, meanwhile, are told a moral fable about hard work.
This is where the sentimental cliché about the ‘starving artist’ should be discarded with force. There is nothing noble about preventable exhaustion. There is nothing spiritually elevating about watching one’s better projects dry out from lack of time. There is certainly nothing socially rational about a civilisation organised in such a way that its most reflective, gifted, or aesthetically sensitive members must defer their work until retirement, ill health, or redundancy grants them a little stolen air.
One might respond that practical life gives artists experience. True enough. So does grief. So does war. So does prison. Experience is not the issue. The issue is the conversion rate. If one must surrender decades of one’s most fertile attention in exchange for a modest accumulation of usable material, the return is abysmal. The economist might call this poor ROI. The philosopher might call it structural stupidity. The artist, if still awake, may call it theft. And the theft is not merely personal. It is civilisational.
A society that forces most of its creative and intellectual life into the margins should not flatter itself for the masterpieces that occasionally emerge. It should be haunted by the scale of what never did. For every Kafka who wrote at night, how many did not? For every theorist supported by patronage or inheritance, how many more were processed into middle management, consultancy, administration, compliance, sales, logistics, and the thousand dead dialects of modern necessity? How many minds were not defeated in argument, but merely preoccupied into silence?
The answer, of course, is unknowable. Which is convenient for the system because what cannot be counted can be dismissed, and what can be dismissed can be repeated indefinitely.
Capitalism’s admirers are fond of innovation. They should spend less time praising the gadgets that reached market and more time mourning the consciousness that never reached form. Not every loss is a corpse. Some losses are libraries that never came into being. Some are paintings that remained latent in the hands of the overworked. Some are ideas that would have altered the climate of a discipline had their author not been busy earning a living.
The old accusation that capitalism exploits labour is true enough, but it is no longer adequate. It exploits labour, yes. It also colonises attention, cannibalises vocation, and narrows the range of what a culture is permitted to become. It does not merely take from workers. It takes from history. And then it calls the remainder efficiency.
I’ve been writing. In fact, I’ve been clarifying A Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and expanding and extending it into a book with a broader remit. This might well be the cover, following the monograph layout for Philosophics Press.
Image: Mockup of cover art.
As shown, the working title is The Architecture of Encounter: A Mediate Encounter Ontology. I’ve swapped the slate cover for a magenta in this volume.
So what’s it all about?
I’m not going to summarise the book here, but I’ll share some tidbits. I’ve settled on these chapter names:
The Mediated Encounter Ontology
Ontology
Subjecthood
Logic
Epistemology
Perception and Affordances
Language
Social Ontology
Realism
Application
The Normativity Frontier
Conclusion
Chapter 1, The Mediated Encounter Ontology, is a summary and update of the original essay, which will be included in full as an appendix item for reference, but this update will become canonical.
Chapter 2, Ontology: Interaction, Constraint, and the Rejection of Substance, will describe what I mean by ontology and what my proposed ontology looks like.
Chapter 3, Subjecthood: Modal Differentiation Within the Field, will explain how the subject-object relationship changes, and what a subject is in the first place.
Chapter 4, Logic: Coherence Grammar Under Constraint, will explain what logic is and how it operates in this paradigm.
Chapter 5, Epistemology: Convergence, Error, and the Structure of Justification, will describe what knowledge looks like. IYKYK.
Chapter 6, Perception and Affordances: Encounter as Orientation, extends Gibson’s work to comport with MEOW 2.0 (or 1.1).
Chapter 7, Language: Synchronisation, Ontological Grammar, and Structural Limits, explains how language works and how it limits our perception. We’re not talking Sapir-Whorf here, but what respectable language philosopher wouldn’t reserve a chapter for language?
Chapter 8, Social Ontology: Second-Order Constraint Systems. MEOW has a lot to say about first-order constraints, but there are higher-order considerations. I discuss them here.
Chapter 9, Realism: Cross-Perspectival Convergence and the Invariant Anchor, talks about the real elephant in the room. Since MEOW challenges both realism and idealism, we need to talk about it.
Chapter 10, Application: The Apophatic Mind, is mostly an observation on artificial intelligence as it relates to the mind-consciousness debate, primarily scoped around LLMs and similar machine processes.
Chapter 11. The Normativity Frontier, doesn’t yet have a subtitle, but this is where I discuss issues like normative ethics and morality.
I probably don’t need to tell you how Conclusion chapters work.
I expect to have 3 appendices.
Summary of commitments, which will summarise and distil key topics – so like a cheat sheet for reference – a bit more robust than a glossary.
Bibliography of reference material. As this is not an essay, it won’t be chock-full of citations – only a few, where I feel they are necessary. Much of this work represents years of thinking, and in many cases, the attribution has been lost; I remember the contents and not necessarily the attribution. I will prompt AI to fill in some missing pieces, but that’s that. The bibliography attempts to capture the general flavour.
The original MEOW essay. This is already freely available on several platforms, including Zenodo. Download it here if you haven’t already – or wait for the book.
The rest of the story
This book not only extends MEOW, but it also ties in concepts from A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and other of my already published and yet unpublished work.
I expect to produce a decent amount of explanatory and support material, though to be fair, I tell myself that every time until I get distracted by the next project. I need a producer to manage these affairs.
Philosophics 