His argument is that the West is experiencing decline and that the subjective side of this, the sense of loss, is even more challenging than its objectivity. He lists the latter as ageing populations, economic deprivation, stretched healthcare and transport systems, housing inequality and, of course, ecological degradation - among the other recognisable signs of decline we are used to reading about.

The pertinent point he makes is that although such signs are well-known - the US rust-belt, for example, is almost a cliche - but their meaning does not fully register because we are still beholden to the idea of progress. This, however, is changing, with dangerous consequences.

What is socially and politically important here is how we come to terms with this drastically changed expectation. If we deny it, then its persisting reality will only breed resentment. This explains populism and its false promises of renewal. If we go all in and catastrophise, we remain fatalist and paralysed. We need instead to recognise it and work to integrate it into the myriad personal and social stories that provide the fabric of our being. Psychotherapy here is the model.

What resonates with me is his recognition of the duality here of the tangible signs of loss at odds with the meta-narrative of progress that has dominated Western in the post-WWII era of seemingly unabated material growth, sometimes known as the Great Acceleration.

I’ve written in similar terms about how no amount of knowledge about the declining state of the biosphere can produce integrated meaning so long as we have a readily available progress meta-narrative. Bad news just slides right off it. The master signifier - Progress - is a Teflon signifier (just as Trump is a Teflon signifier who was right when he said that he ‘could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue’ and not lose voters).

From Reckwitz’s vantage point, the West is in the process of coming to terms with loss - a process that is painful and tortuous. While we are becoming more and more familiar with signs of the West’s decline, it still does not make sense. Coming to terms with loss means letting go of the ‘secular religion’ of progress. ‘Freedom from loss’ is the modern West’s ‘foundational lie’, he claims.

Reckwitz’s argument goes to the heart of the dialectic of interpretation and the power of the meta-narrative. Under Progress, economic growth makes sense as part of the natural order of things. Economic decline doesn’t accord with the natural order and so can be glossed over - until it persists to the point that people begin questioning the meta-narrative. When a questioned meta-narrative becomes no meta-narrative at all, losses cannot be ideologically insulated against.

The next stage is that a meta-narrative of decline starts to set in. Reckwitz places the contemporary moment along this scale. Of course the dynamics of society are driven by the fact that it does - and does not - exist. The relation between the micro and the macro is dialectical and in tension, something recognised by Marxists too. In a deeply unequal society, many are experiencing this loss (at ideational if not material level) while some appear to be on an upwardly-mobile trajectory as exhilarating as ever - and a few, of course (think, the 1 percent of the 1 percent) have never had it better.

World-historical shifts - political-economic but also social and cultural - are filtering through layers of culture, ideology, biography and so forth. A sedimented and deeply invested master-narrative that had worked its magic at all these levels is being overturned. This process is material and ideational, like everything. Reading it ideationally begins with considering the logic of legibility that Reckwitz is prompting but not quite airing directly.

This is where Progress can also be understood as a smooth surface of inscription, as what Ernesto Laclau calls a social imaginary. That is, it is the condition of legibility. Not in the sense of being able to rationally parse something, but in the sense of making it meaningful at what some would call an embodied level.

The social imaginary is, in almost every respect, equivalent to the meta-narrative, and this fact needs to be brought home given that meta-narratives have recently returned from exile and are, to anybody who is willing to concede the death of postmodernism, back with a vengeance (see, Anthropocene, Climate catastrophe, MAGA, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, etc.)

This will become evident when we consider the process by which Progress sinks, the appearance of the void that it used to dissimulate, and the appearance of one or another candidate meta-narrative in its place.

This is over-investment in a master-signifier (which begs the tricky question of how much is too much investment in a signifier that is virtually defined by over-investment). We love our master-signifiers so much that we can arguably live a debased, bare life with little else. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have tangible signs of progress so long as we live under the Progress master-signifier.

They are probably better off being unchallenged by anything too proximate, though (look how God’s still doing pretty well, despite it all). As Reckwitz rightly points out, at some point the worm turns. Teflon doesn’t last forever. Man might be the interpreting animal but he can also interpret his interpretations and is known to adjust them at times, however painful that may be.

As a friend and colleague recently concluded an email cheerily announcing some events, which made me laugh simply because it offers itself to the dark ironists among us just as it is available to the naive to give it a straight reading (and thereby is itself a commentary on the dialectic between master-signifier and signifier):

Believe that at your peril, Reckwitz warns.

On the weekend I gave a presentation at the ‘Worldmaking and Ecological Justice: Dialogues with China’ workshop organised by LMU and Heidelberg, at LMU.

There were some inspiring presentations and some satisfying q-and-a sessions. I gave a paper based on my research into how Big Tech is attempting to propagate their favoured imaginaries of climate change. I focused specifically on how Silicon Valley is crafting public imaginaries of AI to prepare the ground for the explosive growth of energy demand from the vast data centres popping up across the globe supporting the consumerisation of AI.

I’d given the public lecture at the Rachel Carson Centre two days earlier, in which I’d focused on the use of subject-positioning and meta-narratives by Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. That talk received extremely positive feedback, and I could have reused it for the Worldmaking conference, but I chose to instead craft something regarding the next project for me, which is the AI-climate nexus and how Big Tech is attempting to use it for legitimation purposes, amidst extremely dubious assumptions.

What were main takeaways from the workshop?

First, that worldmaking as it was used there was an even emptier signifier than anything I have encountered. I feel like you could ask, Is worldmaking compatible with social construction, with social imaginaries, with semiotics, with discursive practice? and you would either receive a resounding yes or, even, that ‘compatibility’ is not the right question - that’s like asking if oxygen and water are compatible - one makes up half the other. All of social life is either worldmaking or world-maintaining, which amounts to the same thing given that the social must be constantly renewed, even to stay the same. In fact, worldmaking was used in such an inclusive fashion that I think it reached some kind of limit point where it was relevant to nothing and yet also to everything. It was a conference about nothing that operated as if it was about everything.

Which I wasn’t particularly perturbed about because I, for one, am in the dark about the concept as used by the scholars who it is often associated with - Goodman, Haraway, Tsing. In some ways, because I’ve been attending to questions of how the social world is made and remade through my work on discourse theory, social imaginaries, and psychoanalysis, I wasn’t really expecting some new form of theory to announce itself to me. But I would have liked a few more papers that spoke to the how questions of worldmaking. Instead, there were many papers that simply seemed to belong because they dealt with how humans live in the world. Which is hard to escape in social science (perhaps possible to transcend through the humanities - poetry, music, metaphysics, perhaps).

Besides that, what did I take away?

I took away the knowledge that I could give a credible presentation based on less preparation than usual. Given my commitments, I could only snatch a few hours to prepare this presentation, whereas I put in four days prep for my public Colloquium.

I took away the knowledge that my work has credibility, that I can engage clearly and compellingly, and that my political commitments still drive my work forward with passion while not overwhelming my analytical rigour. I’m particularly proud of the latter fact.

I took away the fact that maybe, just maybe, many scholars of ‘environment and society’ adopt the language of new materialism without having taken on the ontology. They return to things in themselves - as networks, assemblages or comminglings - without having attempted to disentangle the social from the material first. And thereby not realising that one cannot simply return to things in themselves.

What troubles me about such a short circuit is that the faintest notion of the constitutive role of representation (discourse, images, sign systems) doesn’t seem to have been absorbed, for some scholars. And so the basic idea of worldmaking (that the material ‘plane’ defies objective totalisation) is either fresh and new or is resisted or disavowed. New materialism is not simply old materialism back for round two.

But I think the point here is that I am much more at home with those who have taken on the ‘discursive turn’ or the ‘linguistic turn’ and, like most, having pushed it as far as postmodern idealism, return to some kind of troubled notion that recognises both the ‘immaterial’ uniqueness of signification and its imbrication within what we used to call ‘objective’ material networks.

All in all, the workshop left me with a mixed but ultimately affirming sense of where I sit in these debates. I came away affirmed by the clarity it gave me about my own methodological and theoretical commitments. If anything, the workshop reinforced my sense that the discursive turn still has critical power, especially when navigating the seductions of techno-optimism. At the least, the workshop confirmed that the struggle over how we narrate and mediate the ecological present remains as urgent and as contested as ever.

I’m pretty disturbed today. I’ve learned about a book that claims that Rachel Carson had a queer relationship with a woman she’d met on Southport Island, Maine, where Carson had a plot of land. The academic author titled the book, Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love.

It is based on 900 letters between the pair, and it completely, in my opinion, colonises a relationship between two women based on shared love of nature and a deep affection for one another, with the term ‘queer’. It is, in essence, ‘outing’ the mother of modern environmentalism with zero evidence or even hints of it. Simply because it would be big news and a win for the queer movement.

What’s going on here can be easily seen through the lens of the excesses of left-liberal academic culture. That certainly exists. But the real abuse is the abuse of reason. The author’s argument is built upon sentences that begin, ‘I suggest’. And the core term of the argument, ‘queer love’, is applied in scare quotes and even the additional qualifier ‘what I call “queer love”.

This is clickbait, red meat for certain queer and left activist and scholarly communities, who are under pressure to accept this extension of the domain of queerness lest they be seen to be kicking one another. Even if they wish merely to point out the obvious tenuousness of claiming a deep friendship, expressed in letters of longing while absent, means that a scandalous (for the time) sexual element is present. The work tries to dress up this scandal-mongering in a conceptual assemblage bringing together wonder for the natural world with wonder for another person’s ineffable being - thereby apparently queering also the childlike sense of joyous curiosity at nature’s magnificence.

On the other side, the book centres capitalism around heteronormative institutions like the nuclear family and heterosexual love. So on the one side we have environmental destruction, consumer excess, colonialism, war, and everything bad - all driven by the heteronormativity. And on the other side, queerness, the font of all things nice and beautiful. There’s no bleeding between the sides of this binary opposition, despite pink consumerism, non-queer leftism, and so on, clearly having a major presence in the contemporary West.

It’s not good enough. I deplore it as opportunistic, shoddy, indulgent. It’s more than just plain bad scholarship - it’s an abuse of it and of the institutions that exist to steward the application of reason (in its many forms) to the world we live in. And I support the advancement of equality for queer people as for everybody.

But the reason that this work has attracted positive attention, being published by Stanford and even getting a moderately praiseworthy review in Scientific American, is it belongs to a type of rationality that would have been thrown out tout court mere decades ago, but is now becoming a sure-fire formula for attention and success.

There have been so many examples of this kind of reasoning, where the activism determines the empirical, that we need to examine it systematically.

The larger pattern is what I call unmooring. A master-signifier like "queer" starts to float free of the semantic field in which it had coherence and force. Instead, it gets "overdetermined" by relations with other master-signifiers—"nature," "capitalism," "love," etc.—from discursive terrains where it originally had no stake.

The signifier becomes unmoored from its original referents and drifts into conceptual Escher space, where categories seem to interlock and loop but do not resolve into stable meaning. In this space, the master-signifier continues to function rhetorically and emotionally, but its meaning is sustained not by internal coherence but by its network of horizontal associations with other master-signifiers.

This can be seen in other examples:

1. Nature has become a zombie category. It continues to function rhetorically while its predicates have been hollowed out. It is a secular transcendental: remote, pristine, eternal, yet utterly detached from actual ecosystems.

2. Industry and modernity likewise persist as affirmative signifiers, despite ample empirical evidence of their negative consequences. Their persistence owes more to their rhetorical positioning than their empirical referents.

3. Love is another such signifier: it is a baptismal attachment between sleek surfaces, made semiotic and symbolic, yet often empty of stable meaning.

What we are seeing is a kind of catachresis—the misuse or strained application of a word in a way that disrupts the coherence of its original domain. But this is not just error. It is a performance: a gesturing beyond meaning, toward some outside. In that sense, it is an anti-performative, a refusal of reason masquerading as hyper-reason.

Unmooring is not just a mistake—it is a structural transformation in how meaning circulates. The vertical relationships of signifier to signified dissolve into horizontal jostling among signifiers, where meaning is always deferred, always relational, never anchored. This is how a concept like "queer love" can be made to stand in for everything beautiful and resistant without ever needing to specify what it excludes, qualifies, or displaces.

The tragedy is that such a move pretends to illuminate—but in truth, it destabilizes the very conditions under which meaning, reason, and critique can function.

I’ve been getting about between Munich and the countryside Landhaus retreat for nearly six weeks now and I’ve almost tripped over a good half dozen buzzwords, risking serious intra-cranial damage. And the weather hasn’t even been that bad!

I mean, the caper began with the Anthropocene. And that’s a mild one. And it exploded out into ‘littoral’, ‘desiccation’, and a novel use of ‘climate’. I define buzzwords as terms that you can simply plug into anything and cast it in a new, fresh, edgy, political, aware, now, light. They are called buzzwords because they are… buzzy.

I went to a talk by a prominent UPenn anthropologist whose work on Climates of Infrastructure has gained a lot of interest in certain circles. Nikhil Anand presented on ‘The Climate of Infrastructure: Desiccation and Dispossession of Littoral Worlds in India’. I can’t go into all the detail, but a lot was turning on his designation of the lifeworld of the fishers of Mumbai as a climate, something subject not just to global long-term weather patterns but to the building of bridges or the reclamation of land.

Now, reclamation of land is a biased term, clearly. But Anand overcorrects when he deconstructively flips it to ‘dessication’ - another buzzword that does a lot of atmospherics without being justified conceptually. Almost all of human existence relies upon solid foundations for the sake of shelter, hygiene. I’m pretty happy I sleep in a desiccated bed and have my academic conferences in desiccated rooms. But perhaps I’m an old-fashioned modern.

It’s the attempt to use climate as an atmospheric in the title of the book Climates of Infrastructure that riles me most, though. Fishers are indeed subject to changes wrought upon them by nature and society. Can’t argue with that. But his elongation of the concept is no different in substance to me somehow connecting the academic job market to climate change and writing a book about Climates of Scholarship: Heat and Exploitation in the Liminal Zones of the Academy. It would hit some affect-receptors of two markets and a hot-zone where both intersect. And by connecting climate change to academia it would cast the latter with a critical edge, connecting the deficencies of climate action to the mismanagement of the university in ways that reviews might praise as ‘productive’, ‘generative’, ‘troubling of modernist distinctions’, so long as I doused the paper with a patina of erudition. Comparing infrastructural policy questions on university campuses to Benjamin’s Arcades, for instance.

Other contenders for these buzzwords that - again, I am open to should they prove their worth in terms of building community and adding conceptual insight - that I’ve tripped over of late include generative, carceral, settler-colonial, and diffraction (I wrote a whole post on this just a week ago: here). They include , and a very flexible body-without-organs.

Of course, I know I’m swimming against the tide in calling out these impostures. I’m aware that plenty of scholars harbour similar animosity towards the poststructuralist and psychoanalytical theory that I work with. Chomsky famously called out Lacan as a ‘self-conscious charlatan’ and said we don’t need people like Foucault because even a factory worker knows that knowledge is sometimes subject to power. Derrida’s honorary doctorate at Cambridge was of course subject to intense opposition.

But so much of the critique of such scholars comes from those with a seeming inability to even see the most rudimentary ways in which language both obscures their relation to the world and their self-knowledge. And what they pass off in capital-T theory as obfuscation and charlatanry they either have not read, not read properly, or not grasped the pragmatics of. Derrida and Lacan and Delezue and Guattari are pragmatists in the sense that a text is not a representation of the world but a machine for doing something to the reader. Representationalism is a fallacy and is complicit in the same rhetorical trickery that blinds us to our own subjection to the ideology of dominant elites.

There’s probably little surprise that many of the buzzwords I’m objecting to come from certain politically motivated centres of academia. To some extent, I swim in feminist circles and I swim in new-materialist circles. But because I do - I go to workshops and so on, I think I can mount a sociology-of-knowledge case built on genuine knowledge of the work these buzzwords are doing, and not doing.

My critique can probably be divided into three claims: buzzwords are shallow, buzzwords are atmospheric, and buzzwords are shibboleths.

1. Buzzwords are shallow

Yes, this idea invites an obvious deconstructive criticism, but stick with me. The whole point of a concept is to give mobility to some complex conceptual architecture - so it can be applied, tested, in new environs. If there is something dialectical about our engagement in the world, generating concepts that do good work in certain spheres is central to what scholarship should be.

But, a concept is like a footnote, in that the claims made in its name should be able to be borne out when digging into the source. Life is complex. Modernity is deviously difficult to grasp. Socio-material assemblages that involve human subjectivity are wily and dialectical. Complex concepts with well-tested architecture are required!

A buzzword, on the other hand, is precisely the master signifier of Lacanian psychoanalysis: its role is to erect a screen that achieves two tasks: one, to promise something of great depth behind it, and two, to reflect back the projection of desire.

2. Buzzwords are atmospheric

The influence of new materialism and affect theory - which I support - has led to some seeming excessive tendencies that might be summarised as ‘if it feels right, it is right’. These are emblematised in the rise of the use of the term ‘vibe’. People are being praised for the ‘vibeyness’ of their research. As if humanities and social sciences have given up striving to surpass impressionistic accounts.

Many qualitative approaches, Ash Watson writes here, are ‘already very vibey’. Which is good, because ‘vibes are having a moment’. The need to lean in to vibey-ness is strong because it ‘helps us consider and work with the generative ambiguities of social life’ (and that’s just the abstract - the article proper begins: When I was fourteen, everyone started saying LOL out loud ironically, and now I am thirty-three and cannot shake it: I lol without irony.).

There is nothing wrong with atmospherics, but can we please not let them stand in for substance. Again, a point ripe to be deconstructed, but that stands because it is about depth of engagement and it goes to avoiding the trouble. When the Anthropocene was the buzzword de rigueur and was being thrown about here and there, a lot of the time it landed in book titles and was peppered through papers doing very little work except for expressing just how now the author was.

It didn’t add anything that couldn’t have been added by simply saying ‘in a climate changed world’, for some, or ‘under late capitalism’ for others. It simply signalled. And much of the time it misread the geological literature from which the term arose. Its use was as much to gain attention of book editors and search engines. And it succeeded.

Solid scholars like Latour and Clive Hamilton understood the complexities and conceptual productivity of the concept. Others promoted the simple idea that everything (from food practices to war to typography) had passed through some portal and was to be given a touch-up accordingly. Anthropocene created an atmosphere of temporal transition into a new moment that either meant simple newness, anthropocentric guilt, or look what whitey did now. Connected to these atmospheres of hipness and moral elevation, it did work at the level of social networks:

3. Buzzwords are shibboleths

There is no doubt. Buzzwords signal membership of a community. And because communities are constantly in flux, their borders being subject to policing, regular and consistent signalling is mandatory.

In that knowing nod that follows when the shibboleth is uttered in the right company, is a whole lot of sociocultural work. Often, the freightedness of that nod derives not just because we have entered a rarefied atmosphere, but betrays the little secret hidden within the term: that nobody knows what it is, why it arose now, or what to do should anybody poke around and expose this sham for what it is. Anthropologists know that there is no greater bonding force among humans than being shared witness to some atrocity, especially if the perpetrator we count as one of our own. A kind of honour among thieves.

Hitler’s ‘big lie’ was an example of this, too. Not necessarily because of its size and shameful content, but because of its circulation. It is an example of the imputed knowledge characteristic of discourse structured around a non-existent subject supposed to know. We all believe somebody believes in it - we believe it has come down from on high - through authority hierarchies we implicitly endorse. It follows a consensus theory of truth (what is true is what is accepted as true).

I still have faith that the ultimate good of the academy is that it knows that buzzwords are for outside the university walls, and concepts (and sometimes, non-concepts) are for within it. And, in some of these buzzwords, the excesses I’ve categorised as shallow atmospheric shibboleths, are not the whole story. There is a buzzword-ness of quality concepts, and my optimistic side would like to see a concept-becoming in buzzwords.

But the critical thinker in me doesn’t like lazy academics surfing off the top of something that provides for superficially novel insights that you can get outside the academy, and that serve to provide affects of hipness, belongingness, and moral superiority that are surely not the kernel of the enlightenment project that I still would like to claim has not died.

My Landhaus experience is psycho-geographically centred on this moorland between the Herrmannsdorf house and the bus stop. I took this on the way home last night.

As part of my project attempting to account for how disparate, fragmented socio-material assemblages 'in-source’ their contradictions to the individuals that respectively inhabit them, I’m leaning in to metaphors of refraction. I submitted a paper to a Laclau and Lacan workshop in which I argue that Laclau’s enthusiasm for the temporal-epochal dimension of discursive dislocation overshadows the more ordinary and messier everyday dislocations endured by individuals as they negotiate life as a portfolio-being, split between multiple contradictory subject positions that derive from the multiple, contradictory discursive-material assemblages they are forced to inhabit in late capitalism.

In trying to think how this fragmentary form of intra-subjectivity does not seem to provoke social or psychological crises (people do very well living with contradiction, as do polities, it seems), I began with a sense of diffraction (individuals have distorted awareness and communication - but awareness and communication nonetheless) between their disparate subjectivities. Late in the drafting, however, I tried to hew more rigorously to the meaning of diffraction and decided that it was too ‘sexy’ (and too alliterative, i.e. too cute) a term - my paper’s title was ‘From dislocation to diffraction: Rethinking the political subject in Laclauian theory’.

And so I changed it, very late in the drafting to: ‘From dislocation to refraction’.

As one does, sometime after submitting something important, one reads it, usually with a mixture of trepidation and narcissism. And I found, to my not insignificant pique, that the late change of terminology was a self-own. An own goal. I should have stuck with diffraction because that evokes much more clearly this relationship I am hypothesising exists between our very contradictory subject positions and how they manage to hang together and even project some hologrammatic image of unity despite themselves.

Thankfully I was accepted to the Essex workshop and not only that, given a week or two to offer the ‘final’ work-in-progress paper. Mine was already something like 6500 words so it is a chance to also cut some of the front-end excesses - as well as to rethink and rework diffraction into it. But, in one of those synchronicitous moments that are desynchronising, it was when working on something else - a short paper for a workshop on ecological justice and world-making - that I came upon something very, very useful. (I want to record it here because I feel like the metaphors of reflection, refraction and diffraction are going to be something central to this overall project of intra-subjective fragmentation: something hyper-relevant to environmental hypocrisy and corporate environmentalism, my RCC project).

The paper I stumbled upon is a report from a Swedish author, Maria K. Udén, applying a critical curiosity to the explosion in the use of the term diffraction in feminist scholarship since it was coined by Donna Haraway and then used extensively by Karen Barad. Both are feminist materialist post-humanists. The report reminded me of my recent paper on the social imaginary, because it seems to blend awkwardly (‘diffractively’) a cool scepticism to the popularity of this term with a deep disdain for the fashion-prone nature of feminist scholarship. One cannot write too polemically in many forms of scholarship. One is also duty bound to serve the discipline (and its political purpose) by serving in a self-corrective mode. So she appears to tread this line somewhat cryptically, urging the reader on to find out if heads are going to roll.

And one suspects that they may well, given this thinly veiled attack on cultishness at hold in feminine scholarship. Diffraction, she writes:

Her motivation is to understand why this metaphor has taken hold, and she asks questions of a corpus of 51 papers published between 2001 and 2016, of how they use the paper and why they do. But she first outlines the scientific concept of diffraction, being careful to state that even in science, these are merely observations of apparent phenomena. Then, she maps out the way the term is used across her corpus. Largely it is a determinate rejection of the reflection model of knowledge. “Unlike reflections, which purport to mirror reality, diffractions describe interdependency and disruption as well as continuity”, she quotes Laurel C. Smith.

Citing other examples, she shows that diffraction actively works in favour of matter over mind, nature over culture. Rather than the modernist, scientistic notion of knowledge reflecting the world, diffraction emphasises that the myriad material manner of knowledge-making is an active participant in that knowledge. If we understand diffraction as the way that obstacles distort waves and induce them to warp, we can see the scientific apparatus as one of these obstacles, leaving immutable traces of its own on the picture of knowledge produced.

We can extend this, it seems clear, to all knowledge practices - not just science - that they rely on this purified notion of objectivity. While acknowledging the productive intent behind the metaphor, Udén now declares that while wave theory of diffraction can help ‘calibrate an X-ray diffraction instrument’, it is not fit for ‘sexuality education, activism or journalism’. Udén takes aim now at feminist authors who do not explicitly reference diffraction as a metaphor, but take it as saying something profound about the relation between feminist knowledge production and the natural sciences.

I am not entirely across Barad’s work, but I do know that it attempts a sort of feminist philosophy, an assemblage theory that levels social and naturalistic modes of knowing. She spends time on the very assemblages that make up the microscopic and astronomical observer. I am not to judge whether she has genuinely found something in scientific practice that is philosophical, or whether she has used rhetoric in a supremely skilful manner that has birthed a new movement within feminist studies (which she has, in either case). Doesn’t this mirror so many cases in which some touchstone work that did genuinely remarkable work is widely exported through and across fields but in its shorthand version. Purist adherents to the original always seem to lose out to the fast-growing trend and its frisson of contemporaneity, partly because their challenges are too true and therefore repressed, and partly because the counter-charge is that we are creatively repurposing the original, a la Deleuze’s monstrous hybrids. And, moreover, isn’t the point of diffraction that we take the distortions and warping and make that a feature, not a bug. Besides, the parties are better over here.

These touchstone moments might be termed baptismal. You might argue that Barad here lies in a long line of such (mis-)appropriated foundations going back to Jesus and certainly including Marx. Their work works on its own terms and in its context, and the derivations, whose primary feature is the use of the messiah’s very name as their master-signifier work in their own context too, but when it comes to reconciling the two levels/contexts, we run into numerous discontinuities and plain-out sloppiness. This of course does not demolish the absconding movement - quite the contrary. The controversies produce piles more discourse arguing in one way or the other, and given that the entire procedure at sub-field level is emergent, no foundational knowledge can cancel the new production and in fact operates retroactively to produce its own foundations, its own consecrations - and the cost of having unmoored from the original is no cost at all but the originary violence that grounds a new order.

Strange, then, that feminist post-colonial thinkers might adopt the very same settler-colonial revisionist historical techniques of the imperial powers they, at parties (and I include conferences here), might profess less than a whole-hearted endorsement.

In another useful passage, from Prophet and Pritchard (their proper names), we learn that

Haraway writes that “Diffraction is a mapping of the interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction”. Diffraction patterns “record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference”.

Udén has played it fair so far and has not been harsh. But here, she doesn’t take kindly to the reverse cause-and-effect of Haraway’s language. Diffraction, Udén insists, is the product of certain relations between waves and objects. Haraway would have us understand, however, that diffraction is itself the process that detects interference. The accusation is that a metaphor from science, methodologically productive for social science, has undergone such slippage that the very scientific procedure it is based upon has been reversed.

I don’t know that this is fair, because Udén is here using x-ray diffraction analysis (of crystals) as the stand-in for diffraction. It is not clear that Haraway sees this scientific procedure as the basis for her notion of diffraction, a much more general phenomenon.

The main opposition here is that between diffraction and reflection. But Udén points out that what is really doing the work here is not diffraction at all. Rather, that is the foil against which this in-group term diffraction emerges. Her protest is that the metaphor strays far from, and indeed abuses, the very natural science from which it originated. Yet she is a feminist activist too. Her activist and scholar hats her appear at odds. And so she comes to reconcile her conflict here by shifting focus from the main term ‘diffraction’ - with which she takes issue - to ‘reflection’. Not to side with the latter, but to join her diffractionist interlocutors in common opposition to the metaphor of knowledge as reflection, which is surely patriarchal. (Interesting that this entire body of feminist work is not concerned to critique the ocular-centrism of both of these metaphors, but that is a story for another day). It appears, she writes, that ‘as wave theory is of no consequence for the subjects investigated, it is of no consequence… how it is handled.’

In conclusion, she seems to weigh her preferred option of retaining some fidelity to wave theory on the one hand, and, on the other, bringing people to the table with the novel concept of diffraction. What she is in fact doing is deconstructing the feminist fascination with diffraction by pointing out its utter logical-structural dependency on its patriarchal reflection forebear, from which it gains its entire political and semantic valence.

Concluding remarks

I had the opportunity myself to survey some recent feminist diffactionist works and, I must say, as a feminist and somebody with a penchant for the intellectual energy and scenography produced by conceptual innovation, I couldn’t so much as stay on the fence. Prominent articles popped up that involved diffraction simply as reading against, and that used the term as some coded in-group marker in the introduction, and then didn’t use it at all again in the sections purporting to do the diffraction. Of course the conclusion comforted us by reminding us what we had witnessed was genuine diffraction, settling the constitutions of less edified readerse who had thought they were merely witnessing the juxtaposition of ideas.

This is bad. I had come to the notion of diffraction, as I explained up top, as a way of thinking through how subject positions belonging to discrete assemblages relate to one another intra-subjectively. Initially diffraction seemed right because of it evoked feeling one’s way through the dark around something clearly there but indefinable, and doing so in a hall of prisms (which I had thought a natty displacement of hall of mirrors, and was somewhat pleased with). On final revision, the hall of prisms read literally was refraction and thus I had to dump my baby (kill my darling), which I duly did, to another triumphant mini-fanfare of swallowing your scholarly medicine for truth, justice, and hopefully a publication point.

Turns out, I am talking about diffraction, and not in any manner that really speaks to the tradition dealt with in Udén’s review, and so I shouldn’t have dropped it on the basis merely to keep my hall of prisms metaphor. But, and here’s the kicker, I’m talking also of refraction and also of reflection. If it is good enough for light waves to do all three in many, many interactions, surely it is too early to foreclose either of the trio when we are dealing with how much-less understood intra-subjective phenemona interact with each other.

Which takes me to my current concern, and the motivator for this post:

Can I write about intra-subjective positioning as all three? As partly reflective, partly diffractive and just a little bit refractive? Or, for the sake of keeping an audience, do I need to just pick and stick to one metaphor and milk it until it self-deconstructs?

I’m going to think about this once some of my other tasks are done.

Greetings from the south of Germany!

I’m Ben Glasson, an environmental political theorist by training with a strong grounding in poststructuralist media and discourse analysis. My postdoc was on the environmental communication strategies of the worldwide Olympic movement (the IOC and each edition of the Summer and Winter Games), based out of Monash University, Australia. I gained my doctorate from the University of Melbourne under Professors Robyn Eckersley and Adrian Little. My dissertation identified three structural constraints blocking climate policy consistent with the consensual scientific warnings.

In April 2025, I started as a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment & Society based at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. With nine other Fellows from around the world, I am housed in a classic old farmhouse at Herrmannsdorf, around 50km SE of Munich. The air is unbelievably fresh, with hints of forest, hay, and the odd aroma of happy hogs.

Twice a week we go into the Munich campus for colloquia and other events. This rhythmic oscillation between the rural and urban is something I’ve always found energising and illuminating. It’s a great privilege and very exciting to be here.

In case you were wondering, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, published 1962, is widely considered the catalyst for the modern environment movement.

I’m working here on a project theorising new modes of corporate environmental communication employed by giant corporations such as Apple, Facebook, and IKEA. These corporations, despite being key beneficiaries of the global consumer capitalist system we are locked into, have ‘transcended’ greenwashing and are now portraying themselves as the sole saviours of climate change’s planetary and social risks. This demands that the public direct a critical gaze at this attempt to colonise the ecological public sphere. You can read about this current project, Greenwash 2.0: The Poetics of Corporate Environmentalism, here.

And, you can read some of my previous academic publications here:

Selected Publications:

• “Reality Offsets: Climate Meets Capitalism at the Olympic Games.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2025): 137–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231224398.

• with Brett Hutchins. “‘Carbon Partners’ and Collaborative Greenwashing: The Sustainability Partnership Between Dow Chemical and the Olympic Games.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 48, no. 5 (2024): 271–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/01937235241269849.

• “Environmental Myth-Work: The Discursive Greening of the Olympic Games.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (2022): 217–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2022.2095412.

• “Forward to Nature: Ecological subjectivity After the Discursive Turn.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 22 (2017): 87–105. https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2016.12.

• “Subversive Rearticulation Between Radicalism and Reform: The Case of Ecologism.” Journal of Political Ideologies 20, no. 2 (2015): 156–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2015.1034463.

• “The Intellectual Outside: Anti-Intellectualism and the Subject of Populist Discourses in Australian Newspapers.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 (2012): 101–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2012.630147.

The aim of this blog is to document my time at the Rachel Carson Centre. I’ll try to make it a mix of scholarly content tracking the intellectual side of the Fellowship as well as the practical side of living and working with a diverse group of environment and society scholars. A lot of this research will be done in full panoramic view of the spectacular, snow-capped Alps south of Munich - a wholesome reminder of the stakes of environmental scholarship and activism in these pivotal times.

I look forward to you joining me on this journey.

Ben Glasson
Upper Bavaria

Bali sunsets are quite something else…

Among the endless beaches and the rich and spicy nasi goreng, I am writing my paper on social imaginaries in Bali, Indonesia.

The purpose of the article is premised on the idea that we are seeing a rapid increase in the amount of scholarly research using the phrase “social imaginary of x” without so much of an explicatory hat-tip to what this high-level concept is supposed to be, and to do.

Much of the time this undeveloped theoretical concept is accorded a potent ability to either shape human affairs or explain them. The ‘skeptic imaginary’ has been credited with derailing US climate policy through the Trump era (Day and Mason). Social imaginaries guide state’s policies of energy and technology (Jasanoff et al). Shifts in Western social imaginaries are responsible for the transition from pre-modernity to modernity (Charles Taylor).

At least Taylor gives some - although not enough - explication of this apparently powerful theoretical category. He is not to blame.

The other major theorist of the social imaginary is Carlos Castoriadis, and he devotes a 400-page book, The Imaginary Institution of Society, to the subject, which is richly dense (if essayistic), so he is not subject to the same charge.

We can fault, I contend, the dozens if not hundreds of papers (all searchable on Google Scholar), that use the term social imaginary without even a cursory attempt to define what this category means. Many of them do not even cite Taylor or Castoriadis; it is assumed that the concept of social imaginary is common knowledge, and does not require explanation.

This is incorrect. Even when researchers employ similar - and similarly powerful - terms that are well-established (discourse and ideology, for instance) they are at pains to explain them or to at least ground their analysis in one or another well-defined theoretical school, whether that is poststructuralist discourse analysis or classical Marxist ideology critique.

We can probably intuit why the social imaginary is not subject to the same level of intellectual scrutiny while retaining just as strong explanatory weight for social and cultural analysts. The term is fashionable. That is one reason. But the term, should it be required to do the work often accorded to it, may not hold up to critical rigour.

The risk is real that it then acts as a phantom category. A kind of deus ex machina of circular reasoning. Sino-US political tensions are the result of mutual suspicion embedded in the nations’ respective social imaginaries. Explanandum, explanans. Easy.

Wait right there.

Without an explanation of the category of social imaginary, this is corrupt reasoning. And most papers do not unpack the category. So, the problem is real.

In my paper, I don’t set out to critically destroy the social imaginary. I believe the category has a valid place. I set out to offer some guidelines for its application. These are both more restrictive and more expansive when it comes to determining the extent of the social imaginary’s ontological existence and thus its analytical purchase.

It asks, quite simply, what is the social imaginary?

I answer this question by interpreting the theories of Castoriadis and Taylor (and others, to a lesser extent, such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in relation to five key questions.

1. What is the social imaginary composed of?

2. What does it do?

3. Where does it come from?

4. How is it changed?

5. How can we analyse it?

In the course of answering these questions, I find something I believe is quite consequential and worthy of further research. What I’ve discovered is that when we understand how social imaginaries circulate and do their work in society, it makes us see society itself in quite a different light. That is to say, the interesting thing about social imaginaries is not imaginaries per se, but about society - about, that is, the way a society must be structured in order for it to have social imaginaries.

That is, through investigating what social imaginaries are and how they work, I uncovered some realisations about what society is and how it works - overturning many of our commonplace preconceptions about these questions.

• The social imaginary significations that make up the social imaginary are idealised, emblematic representations - through narratives and images, myths - that dramatise social norms and their contraventions

• the social imaginary is autonomous; it works from a place almost impossible to access and is detectable only in its consequences, its effects

• because of the ‘steps taken to erase its socially created origins’, it exerts an almost magical effect on the subject, who takes it as gospel - it is not that it appears beyond critique but rather that it does its work in selecting what comes to conscious attention rather than by working on the contents of consciousness

• it is neither social nor individual but both; the division of labour can be thought of as Durkheimian. That is, that it represents part of the individual given over to a larger logic of the social that operates as doxa

• This process, for Taylor and for Castoriadis, is intimately connected with the nature of social belonging, of collectivity. And it is more in line with Levi-Strauss’s theories of group life, and contra-disposed to what liberal theories of the rational autonomous individual might like to think.

• the nature of the social processes that lead to the construction of the social imaginary are what has been termed imputed belief. That is to say that the beliefs that constitute it - the essence of the social imaginary - are neither created by the individual or by the society. They are created, rather, through a process by which the individual second-guesses what are assumed to be social facts from other people who are themselves second-guessing what that self-same individual is presumed to know.

• my contribution is here.

  • my contribution is around the notion that this second-guessing represents a kind of ‘handpassing’ to others that in essence expresses the form and the structure of the social bond.

    • it is even an abductive logic given that the subject’s self-same beliefs are seconded to the group

  • how do I express this? I express it by saying that this notion of second guessing really gives us the key to the social bond because the social bond is composed of a faith, a deep reason, that doesn’t give anything away but gives everything to someone… who is presumed to know.

  • The social imaginary is not the contents that are identifiable - the front-end - but the back-end. Castoriadis is best on this because he identifies the social imaginary as that which carves out the spaces for certain things to appear as ready-made and socially-consensually approved — rather than the content that is ultimately ascribed to this space.

  • Cultural and social imaginaries comprise the affective and emotional qualities of a 'discursive dispositif that converts coercive and normative discursive demands into passionate attachments and affective symbioses’ (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 30).

  • They promise 'fascination and satisfaction - i.e. durable affective stimulation', thereby generating passionate attachments to an alluring and enchanted sense of self and thus motivating people to pour themselves in the social moulds in the first place' (Reckwitz, 2017, p. 30). A social imaginary thus proffers not only discursive resources but also - and most importantly - affective resources, emotional guidelines and sensuous trajectories for the formation of subjectivity and for sense making efforts.

I am still yet to determine what the proper way to theorise this back-end of the social imaginary is. The essential element is to try to understand how this social imputation logic retroactively creates the social bond. Because that is the key implication of both Taylor and Castoriadis — the notion of social imaginary implies a Durkheimian notion of social solidarity. Is the social imaginary produced by social solidarity or does social solidarity arise from some imputed sociality to the decanted, seconded, images and stories that the subject ‘receives’?

Consider road rage. In Australia’s large cities, Melbourne and Sydney, minor infractions on the road - as small as driving too slow or failing to indicate - might send a fellow driver into a flying rage. Undoubtedly, what pushed him (and it will be a him) over the edge of responsible conduct is that he’d had a bad day at work. That’s the individual dynamic at play. But what about the logic of society, a Durkheimian logic whereby society must take care of its primary needs, which it does by constructing something like ‘social reason’.

And so here the rage driver is simply the nominated enforcer of the general set of informal ‘laws’ of the road - common expectations that you should, for instance, let someone in if it will not unreasonably hold up traffic behind you.

Now, let’s remember that the road serves as a good enough metaphor for society at large. Here, the explanation for the seeming disproportionate punishment dished out for a minor road infraction, can be explained by the road, which serves as society in exactly the same way as Durkheim’s congregation did. In such a setting, man is split in two which, as Durkheim explains, is not so much body and soul as much as body and the ‘soul of collectivity’. Man hears the social

Man is subject to a voice ‘engraved’ upon him that expresses the ‘imperative norms of conduct’ which ‘come invested with an authority and a stature that our other inward states do not have’ (266). It is special, seperate, even though it comes only from our moral conscience. He cannot hear his own voice in it. Its very tone announces that it is not of us, even if it is heard inside us.

Man is ‘really made of two beings’, directed in opposing directions, unreconcilable to each other, with one standing superior over the other.

Therefore, road rage is spiritual. Spiritual infractions need to be punished if not always, then often enough to be mad man example of. The road-rager will probably be convinced that their motivation comes from inside, that it comes from their soul. Because it does, to an extent. The soul is that part of man that is given over to forces acting for the collective.

As Durkheim writes, the social is thoroughly social - it does not emerge from any individual as such, and it concerns facts that pertain to the social rather than the individual. And because of this strong sociality, the fact that it is collectively established and ‘hovers above all the minds and all the individual groups’, it commands the same impersonal validity as the law (Elementary forms 434).

It is this ‘strong sociality’ and its correlate, that man encounters some knowledge through a logic of imputation, indirectly, and takes it on trust - something Zizek develops akin to the category of interpassivity, which is more developed by Robert Pfaller. This is something like I’m coming to argue about the role of the social imaginary - how it lurks about and comes to shape psychological and social worlds.