I've spent years looking for a theory of what can't be automated that doesn't collapse into negative theology. Close readings of philosophy are helpful, but at my most pessimistic, I worry that mental reification makes it harder for even savvy scholars to appreciate philosophical nuances in full. I'm worried that the ability to think and articulate differences between living language and commodified language is slipping away for everybody.
I am still trying to do this work. It takes up a lot of my time these days.
I'm not really adding anything to your post. I'm just saying that what you're picking up is clear to other people too. This was a nice thing to read in an ocean of apologetics, disingenuous pieces on AI "safety" and ethics, and lightweight criticism.
Have you written anywhere else on 'the ideological campaign against conversation?' Is there anyone you read on that topic? I read Richard Sennett's 'The Fall of Public Man' and he talks about how metropolitan people start to be silent in public in order to shield themselves from revealing their 'personality' in involuntary ways.
Just the past few days I've been wrestling with the implications of this passage, from Walter J Ong's *Orality and Literacy*, 2nd ed p. 116:
"The first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceable-part techniques which printers had worked with for three hundred years. Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, **it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word,** and, with it, poetic activity." (emphasis mine)
Ong also cited Elizabeth Eisenstein for more about how print "affected the development of capitalism." It was that turn of phrase, of the "effectively reified word," that struck me. For some mysterious reason, this is the only use of any relative of the word "reification" in the whole book, even though the book itself is essentially concerned with the subject and Ong dots the text elsewhere with many clunky constructions like "thing-like," "similar to things," "the 'objective' world of things," "a thing, a manufactured product." He does this so much that the shorthand "thingyness" entered the lexicon of my inner monologue while I was reading. "Thing-like" alone appears five times in the book while reif- appears only that once. (I searched the PDF to check this—maybe computers have further reduced words to statistics in that way, too.) I suspect the precise concept of the reification of language, though it had to be mentioned, had to be mentioned in combination with this discussion of the origin of capitalism in the production of printed books.
All that aside. I feel that the transition toward "castigating human relationships as first inefficient and inconvenient, and then dangerously chaotic, and then a kind of menace to the established order" was completed long ago. In light of the fact that we can *all* be "toxic" sometimes, even to those we love, the widely propagated advice to "cut off toxic people" taken to its logical conclusion always meant to cut off relations with everyone, even with the thinking self. (Conventional psychotherapy/psychology's framing of all mental suffering as caused by "harmful thoughts," let alone the popular repetition of the senseless slogan "You are not your thoughts," interiorize the discarding of relationships to a self-obliterating extent. Who, what are you if not your thoughts?) Maybe you have been blissfully insulated from these developments; I would like to dismiss it as a generational matter, but even my Gen X mother has bought books with solipsistic titles like "The Highly Sensitive Person's Guide to Dealing with Toxic People." Clearly, the established order would like for us all to exist in a permanent limbo: as consumers we are all preternaturally empathetic, all beautiful and kind and good, and all destined for greatness as soon as we can shake the people and inner monologues holding us back; but as people other people know we are all objects of either derision or fear, manipulators and narcissists or laughingstocks, unworthy of respect or empathy. And the option of identifying with our conscious, thinking selves, with our own thoughts, is denied to us, explicitly.
Regarding "You are not your thoughts," and “Who, what are you if not your thoughts?”: Yes, thoughts such as “you are not your thoughts” have become commodities, or virtue currencies in purchasing the perceived status of a false transcendence of thinking (which rejects thinking, rather than truly transcending it).
However, thought itself is a commodity, shrink-wrapped to fit a pre-packaged language. Something more than these pre-assigned meanings moves the blocks of language into shapes of idiosyncratic thought. No thought ends up meaning quite what is true. Because thought tends towards conclusion, which puts an end to learning, rejecting further thinking. So, whatever moves these blocks of thought and language is not identical with the thoughts that form.
So, it’s reasonable to suggest that thought and language are merely proxies or metaphors for a for a far more nuanced and unnamable source. And any conflation of identity with particular thoughts (or with any linguistic bundle too neatly tied) is commodification. Any literal depiction of “who we are” undermines our capacity for shape-shifting, for not being entirely conflated with the forms we take (the shape of the thoughts we momentarily inhabit). If we make this conscious distinction between thought and being, we are able to move in and out of the shapes imposed on perception by thought and language. Then we begin to relate to thought and language AS metaphors or proxies (and not merely “think” of them as such), which allows us to remain somewhat aloof, but vividly engaged with language and thought.
And when we’re no longer identical with thinking, we obtain enough freedom to avoid the tarpits of dogma, or the self-consuming fires of a staked position; and who we are never becomes commodified too literally as firm knowledge. Then the question, “who or what are we if we’re not our thoughts?” ceases to be a sarcastic question and becomes an eye-opening “event” that has no commodified answer, but lures us into deeper considerations; because whatever we are, we’re not found in passing thoughts. They are merely the traces of our passing.
I appreciate the usefulness of the term "phantom objectivity," and I admire the distinction between mechanized and organic language use. I'm a little unclear what to DO with this post. It offers a critical lens, which is of some help. Maybe it stiffens my resistance to the commodification of interaction. But if I'm a rising professional (I'm not, personally) in a world increasingly saturate with AI, how do I push back against the reification, say, at work? Insist on more organic conversations? Refuse to use agentic AI?
I've spent years looking for a theory of what can't be automated that doesn't collapse into negative theology. Close readings of philosophy are helpful, but at my most pessimistic, I worry that mental reification makes it harder for even savvy scholars to appreciate philosophical nuances in full. I'm worried that the ability to think and articulate differences between living language and commodified language is slipping away for everybody.
I am still trying to do this work. It takes up a lot of my time these days.
I'm not really adding anything to your post. I'm just saying that what you're picking up is clear to other people too. This was a nice thing to read in an ocean of apologetics, disingenuous pieces on AI "safety" and ethics, and lightweight criticism.
Have you written anywhere else on 'the ideological campaign against conversation?' Is there anyone you read on that topic? I read Richard Sennett's 'The Fall of Public Man' and he talks about how metropolitan people start to be silent in public in order to shield themselves from revealing their 'personality' in involuntary ways.
Just the past few days I've been wrestling with the implications of this passage, from Walter J Ong's *Orality and Literacy*, 2nd ed p. 116:
"The first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceable-part techniques which printers had worked with for three hundred years. Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, **it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word,** and, with it, poetic activity." (emphasis mine)
Ong also cited Elizabeth Eisenstein for more about how print "affected the development of capitalism." It was that turn of phrase, of the "effectively reified word," that struck me. For some mysterious reason, this is the only use of any relative of the word "reification" in the whole book, even though the book itself is essentially concerned with the subject and Ong dots the text elsewhere with many clunky constructions like "thing-like," "similar to things," "the 'objective' world of things," "a thing, a manufactured product." He does this so much that the shorthand "thingyness" entered the lexicon of my inner monologue while I was reading. "Thing-like" alone appears five times in the book while reif- appears only that once. (I searched the PDF to check this—maybe computers have further reduced words to statistics in that way, too.) I suspect the precise concept of the reification of language, though it had to be mentioned, had to be mentioned in combination with this discussion of the origin of capitalism in the production of printed books.
All that aside. I feel that the transition toward "castigating human relationships as first inefficient and inconvenient, and then dangerously chaotic, and then a kind of menace to the established order" was completed long ago. In light of the fact that we can *all* be "toxic" sometimes, even to those we love, the widely propagated advice to "cut off toxic people" taken to its logical conclusion always meant to cut off relations with everyone, even with the thinking self. (Conventional psychotherapy/psychology's framing of all mental suffering as caused by "harmful thoughts," let alone the popular repetition of the senseless slogan "You are not your thoughts," interiorize the discarding of relationships to a self-obliterating extent. Who, what are you if not your thoughts?) Maybe you have been blissfully insulated from these developments; I would like to dismiss it as a generational matter, but even my Gen X mother has bought books with solipsistic titles like "The Highly Sensitive Person's Guide to Dealing with Toxic People." Clearly, the established order would like for us all to exist in a permanent limbo: as consumers we are all preternaturally empathetic, all beautiful and kind and good, and all destined for greatness as soon as we can shake the people and inner monologues holding us back; but as people other people know we are all objects of either derision or fear, manipulators and narcissists or laughingstocks, unworthy of respect or empathy. And the option of identifying with our conscious, thinking selves, with our own thoughts, is denied to us, explicitly.
Regarding "You are not your thoughts," and “Who, what are you if not your thoughts?”: Yes, thoughts such as “you are not your thoughts” have become commodities, or virtue currencies in purchasing the perceived status of a false transcendence of thinking (which rejects thinking, rather than truly transcending it).
However, thought itself is a commodity, shrink-wrapped to fit a pre-packaged language. Something more than these pre-assigned meanings moves the blocks of language into shapes of idiosyncratic thought. No thought ends up meaning quite what is true. Because thought tends towards conclusion, which puts an end to learning, rejecting further thinking. So, whatever moves these blocks of thought and language is not identical with the thoughts that form.
So, it’s reasonable to suggest that thought and language are merely proxies or metaphors for a for a far more nuanced and unnamable source. And any conflation of identity with particular thoughts (or with any linguistic bundle too neatly tied) is commodification. Any literal depiction of “who we are” undermines our capacity for shape-shifting, for not being entirely conflated with the forms we take (the shape of the thoughts we momentarily inhabit). If we make this conscious distinction between thought and being, we are able to move in and out of the shapes imposed on perception by thought and language. Then we begin to relate to thought and language AS metaphors or proxies (and not merely “think” of them as such), which allows us to remain somewhat aloof, but vividly engaged with language and thought.
And when we’re no longer identical with thinking, we obtain enough freedom to avoid the tarpits of dogma, or the self-consuming fires of a staked position; and who we are never becomes commodified too literally as firm knowledge. Then the question, “who or what are we if we’re not our thoughts?” ceases to be a sarcastic question and becomes an eye-opening “event” that has no commodified answer, but lures us into deeper considerations; because whatever we are, we’re not found in passing thoughts. They are merely the traces of our passing.
I appreciate the usefulness of the term "phantom objectivity," and I admire the distinction between mechanized and organic language use. I'm a little unclear what to DO with this post. It offers a critical lens, which is of some help. Maybe it stiffens my resistance to the commodification of interaction. But if I'm a rising professional (I'm not, personally) in a world increasingly saturate with AI, how do I push back against the reification, say, at work? Insist on more organic conversations? Refuse to use agentic AI?