Categories
Philosophy

Speaking of Active Matter: The Thing-ness of Things

The only (or at least most) comprehensive way to account for emergent behaviour is to grant some ontic reality to the abstract relational patterns, symmetries, and phase dynamics that bind and sustain it. A collection of things is, in other words, also a thing. That is not especially surprising at one intuitive level, but it […]

Categories
Philosophy

Peace Plan

It is a strange and quietly dangerous habit of our age to treat peace, language, and meaning as though they arrive fully formed at the end of history, fixed as semiotic anchors to be engineered, stabilised, and installed, rather than as fragile continuities that persist only because the relations that give them form are never […]

Categories
cybernetics

Unfinished Systems

Large systems of power, regulation, ideology, and identity do not stabilise by winning or resolving the problems they address. They stabilise by remaining unfinished. Political institutions, security apparatuses, markets, cultural movements, and ideological projects sustain themselves by managing problems they cannot conclusively solve: inequality, threat, disorder, legitimacy, desire, dissent. Total control would terminate their function. […]

Categories
cybernetics

The Structure of Absence: How What Is Missing Holds Systems Together

When people speak of nothing, they usually mean emptiness: no matter, no signal, no information. Yet absence is never encountered in isolation. Something is absent only in relation to an organisation for which it could have made a difference. Absence is not an object or an empty region waiting to be filled. It is the […]