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In Plato's Timaeus, the 'soul of the world' is said to be shaped like the letter X, and this same letter, Chi in Greek. can also be used to refer to Christ. In summary, I think it is a wonderful coincidence of opposites that this symbol can stand at once for something unknown or mysterious and, at the same time, for a specific point or place of significance. Daniel John Pilikington ‘X’

In Daniel John Pilkington’s book X, he collates a series of “X”s photographed during COVID, usually used to stipulate the distance people were asked to stand from each other as a precautionary safety measure – “stand here, 1.5m apart”. This is contrasted with a poem on the facing pages, which strings together different definitions of X as verb, noun, adjective, abbreviation, symbol and icon.

On the surface, the concept seems simple. But I am not sure it is “simple” any more than John Olsen’s paintings were seen as “simple” when dismissed by critics as something a child could have done. They could not.

But important art – maybe even great art – like Olsen’s, tells us a lot about who we have been, who we are and maybe who we might be, if looked at closely enough. This is Olsen’s great bequest to this country.

Source: John Olsen, like all great artists, told us a lot about who Australians are – and who we might be by Rex Butler

There is something haunting about Pilkington’s book in that it to addresses who we have been, are and might be, leaving the reader feeling different afterwards.

Walking around Melbourne, you can still see remnants of COVID: a faded X no longer active, an errant sign about washing your hands. In practice, these actions felt obvious at the time. (For example, I remember Maciej Cegłowski’s point that in some cultures mask wearing is a routine precaution, not just a COVID measure.) Yet these gestures and marks have become imbued with much more meaning.

This had me thinking about Ian Buchanan’s discussion of the Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari’s concept of Body without Organs in “Becoming Mountain”. For Buchanan, the Body without Organs (BwO) is not a stable “thing” or inner essence, but a produced field of experience that allows certain intensities to run. Different people, in different situations, form different BwOs. A BwO is assessed by asking: why this BwO, by these means, with what consequences?

Seen that way, Pilkington’s Xs are not just traces of policy; they are part of a series of assemblages:

  • As form of content, the X is tape or paint on concrete, a printed decal, a spot on the floor framed in a photograph.
  • As form of expression, it is an instruction (“stand here”), an element of public health discourse, an icon of social distancing, sometimes a symbol of state overreach or civic solidarity.

The “meaning” of the X is not in the mark alone but in the way these material and expressive dimensions are yoked together at particular moments.

During the heart of the pandemic, the X helped compose a BwO organised around bodily spacing and fear of contagion. It territorialised space: organised who could stand where, choreographed queues, recalibrated our sense of “too close”. That same material mark could, for others, compose a very different BwO: an X as emblem of governmental control, an ironic point of resistance, or simply a piece of theatre to be ignored.

After mandates ended, the X deterritorialised from its practical role – no one lines up on it anymore – and reterritorialised as something else: a ghost of lockdown, a small jolt of unease, nostalgia, quiet anger, or blank indifference. The intensities it carries have changed, but they have not disappeared.

In that sense, there is not one X but a series of assemblages over time that let different intensities run across the same graphic form. The book itself participates in this process. By collecting and reframing the Xs, Pilkington’s project reterritorialises them again – not as directives for conduct but as objects of memory, reflection, even aesthetic appreciation. Reading Pilkington’s Xs through Buchanan’s lens makes it harder to see them as mere leftovers of a health campaign: they become points where content and expression, policy and affect, past and present, all momentarily resonate – small, mute marks that once choreographed bodies and now continue to organise memory.

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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu is the first instalment in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. It revolves around the question of what would actually happen if humanity made contact with an alien civilisation. Rather than offering a standard first-contact narrative, Liu constructs an intricate, multi-layered world anchored by historical and scientific elements. The story starts with the psychological trauma of Mao’s Cultural Revolution before moving to the isolated Red Coast Base where secret deep-space communications are first broadcast. In the modern day, this history collides with a terrifying physics crisis where renowned scientists encounter impossible experimental results. Through the eyes of nanotechnology researcher Wang Miao, the narrative uncovers a virtual reality game that simulates a chaotic world orbiting three suns, leading to the revelation of a doomed alien group, Trisolaris. To ensure human submission, the aliens deploy Sophons, which are eleven-dimensional proton supercomputers designed to disrupt human science.

Multiple sophons may be able to form a system to sense the macro world through quantum effects. For example, suppose a nucleus has two protons. The two of them will interact and follow certain patterns of motion. Take spin: Maybe the direction of spin of the two protons must be opposite from each other. When these two protons are taken out of the nucleus, no matter how far apart they are, this pattern will remain in effect. When both protons are made into sophons, they will, based on this effect, create a mutual-sensing system. More sophons can then form a mutual-sensing formation. This formation’s scale can be adjusted to any size, and can thus receive electromagnetic waves to sense the macro world at any frequency. Of course, the actual quantum effects necessary to create such a sophon formation are very complicated. My explanation is only an analogy.”

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This culminate in a brutal tactical showdown along the Panama Canal against the traitorous Earth-Trisolaris Organization.

The novel explores several themes, most notably the limits of knowledge. Liu suggests that our fundamental understanding of physics might not be a universal truth, but rather a localised chance.

When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe.
In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe.
The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

While human comprehension is presented as having hard boundaries, strictly limited by our specific placement in time and space. Alongside this cosmic humility, the book dives into the friction between the individual and the system, demonstrating how massive, systemic political movements can crush and reshape single lives. In a devastating domino effect, the ideological trauma inflicted on Ye Wenjie by the state causes her to make a catastrophic cosmic choice that dooms the entire human race.

What are they locking?
YE: They are sealing off the progress of human science. Because of the existence of these two protons, humanity will not be able to make any important scientific developments during the four and a half centuries until the arrival of the Trisolaran Fleet. Evans once said that the day of arrival of the two protons was also the day that human science died.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Ultimately, The Three-Body Problem is a novel built around many layers, with each revealing a different perspective. Although we are position to like some characters more than others, Liu has a way of empathising with everyones perspective, for they are all history:

The one-armed woman said, “There was a movie called Maple recently. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.’”

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The final impression of the book is one of profound existential dread, it definitely left me feeling incredibly small and utterly insignificant in the grand scale of the universe.

He felt like the starry sky was a magnifying glass that covered the world, and he was a tiny insect below the lens with nowhere to hide.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

It delivers a massive, thrilling intellectual challenge that leaves your head hurting in the exact same way it does after watching say Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. However, even with all the dread, there is still hope, that even if humans are bugs, bugs always still manage to find a way to survive and prosper.

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it … this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans.
The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
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Multipliers don’t tell people what to think; they tell them what to think about. Liz Wiseman ‘Multipliers’

With Multipliers, Liz Wiseman contrasts two types of leaders: multipliers, those who draw out and often double the capacity of people around them, and diminishers, those who stunt others’ growth and contribution. The book explores how this divide plays out in several dimensions, including how leaders use resources:

Multipliers don’t tell people what to think; they tell them what to think about.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they manage hierarchy:

Each time people who uphold the beliefs are rewarded, the culture is strengthened; likewise, every time diminishing behavior is overlooked, that culture is diluted.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they challenge and debate:

Once an opportunity is seeded and intellectual energy is created, Multipliers establish the challenge at hand in such a way that it creates a huge stretch for an organization.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they invest in people:

Perhaps the only thing harder than watching an A+ player leave your team is knowing that you were the one who encouraged them to move on.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

And how “accidental diminishers” unintentionally shut others down:

As leaders, sometimes the faster we run, the slower others walk. When leaders set the pace, they are more likely to create spectators than followers.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Rather than treating these as simple opposites, the book shows a spectrum of behaviours: some multipliers amplify more than others, and some diminishers have a stronger negative impact than others. It also highlights that diminishing is not always intentional. For example, leaders can withhold investment, over-direct, or dominate discussions without realising the effect they are having.

The closing chapters focus on practical strategies for becoming more of a multiplier and for handling diminishers when you are not in charge. These include defensive moves (protecting your autonomy and space to think), offensive moves (such as creating a “user guide to you” so others know how to get your best work), and ways to shift conversations and expectations so that more people can contribute at their full intelligence.

What resonated with me is going beyond the leader as genius. One of the things Wiseman talks about again and again is moving from “genius” to “genius maker”, that is leaders who leave others feeling like they are the smartest in the room. This is epitomised with the Disraeli quote:

We began this inquiry with an intriguing observation about two political leaders paraphrased by Bono, musician and global activist. He said, “It has been said that after meeting with the great British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, you left feeling he was the smartest person in the world, but after meeting with his rival Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking you were the smartest person.” The observation captures the essence and the power of a Multiplier.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

The discussion of a multiplier making you think you were the “smartest person” had me thinking about David Weinberger’s adage that, “The smartest person in the room is the room.” It also had me wondering how this idea of “genius maker” sits alongside Brian Eno’s idea of scenius:

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

Source: Scenius, or Communal Genius by Kevin Kelley

Something Austin Kleon sums this up as follows:

Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.

Source: Scenius by Austin Kleon

I wonder if a true multiplier is actually someone who creates an environment, rather than individuals. This also had me thinking about multiplicity alongside Alma Harris’ work on distributed leadership and disciplined collaboration.

Many educational initiatives often start out with a clear set of practises in mind. Disciplined Collaboration instead provides a structure for staff to enquire into student learning through the analysis of data, diagnosing teaching and learning issues that students actually face, working collaboratively to build teacher efficacy and then returning to data to measure the impact.
The model is best understood by considering it as three clear stages: collaboration, innovationand impact. Overall, it is designed with the dual role of improving student outcomes and moving professional learning away from the mere acquisition of knowledge and skills, to a more active role of construction and co-construction of professional knowledge.

Source: Disciplined Collaboration: Allowing Freedom Within Form (Finding Common Ground) by Aaron Davis

I was left challenged by the question of whether we are multiplying or diminishing? In exploring the topic of vulnerability, Brene Brown explains that we cannot say, “I don’t do vulnerability”. It is so easy to say we do not have time for play, creativity and rest, or numb emotions. But as Brown captures, this is not an option. Saying no to vulnerability is saying no to growth and improvement. For example, when we numb the “bad” (pain, shame), we also numb the “good” (joy, love). In a similar way, Liz Wiseman suggests we cannot really opt out of our impact on others’ intelligence: if we are not intentionally multiplying, we are probably diminishing by default.

Wiseman describes how “there is more intelligence inside our organisations than we are using” and contrasts leaders who “saw, used, and grew the intelligence of others” with those who “shut down the smarts of those around them”. Even when she emphasises that most of us are “Accidental Diminishers,” she still frames it as a choice of practice.

Leading like a Multiplier is a choice we encounter daily or perhaps in every moment. What choices are you making? How will these choices affect what the people around you become? Is it possible that the choice you make about how you lead can impact not just your team, or even your immediate sphere of influence, but generations to come? A single Accidental Diminisher turned Multiplier can have a profound and far-reaching impact in a world where the challenges are great and full intelligence underutilized.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

My take-away from the book is that just as there is a danger with prioritising nature over nurture when it comes to red, yellow, green and blue types of human behaviour, it can be easy to label somebody as a multiplier or diminisher. However, this risks missing the nuisance. I think what is more useful is considering what are multiplying and diminishing behaviours. In some ways, I think that this is why the discussion of the accidental diminisher is useful. It feels like it provides the most potential for growth and improvement.

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You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching. Daniel Mendelsohn ‘An Odyssey - A Father, A Son and an Epic’

Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic is a hybrid of memoir and literary criticism that intertwines different narratives together, including an undergraduate Odyssey seminar, the Mediterranean “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, Mendelsohn’s relationship with his father, Jay, and close readings of Homer’s epic poem. As Dwight Garner neatly summarises in his review:

a) It is a classroom drama, a bit like Alan Bennett’s play “The History Boys” or the movie “Dead Poets Society,” in that it recalls what happened when Jay decided to sit in on the author’s undergraduate seminar on the “Odyssey” at Bard College.
b) It is travel writing. Father and son decide to take the cruise shortly after the completion of the seminar at Bard.
c) It is a work of biographical memoir that investigates the circumstances of Jay’s life.
d) It is a work of literary criticism. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, employed the trick of the Trojan horse. Mendelsohn, similarly, smuggles his moral and textual ideas past you when you are distracted by the other things he’s doing.

Source: A Father and Son Sail Through Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Together – The New York Times by Dwight Garner

Mendelsohn ties these modes so tightly that it’s hard to say where criticism ends and family memoir begins. In some ways the various threads can be understood as repeating and refracting, like ring composition in the epic itself, where each loop back changes how we understand the present moment.

In ring composition, the narrator will start to tell a story only to pause and loop back to some earlier moment that helps explain an aspect of the story he’s telling—a bit of personal or family history, say—and afterward might even loop back to some earlier moment or object or incident that will help account for that slightly less early moment, thereafter gradually winding his way back to the present, the moment in the narrative that he left in order to provide all this background.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

In other words, stories keep circling back through earlier episodes, then returning us to the ‘now’ with a slightly altered understanding. The book itself mirrors this structure: classroom, cruise, childhood memories, and the father’s decline loop back on one another, each detour changing how we read the others. Mendelsohn himself discusses Homer’s famous ‘scar’ episode in Book 19, circling back to small details – a gesture, a comment in class – that are later revealed as wounds or scars. Mendelsohn argues that the:

great irony of Book 19, then, is that the scar that identifies Odysseus in such a memorable way, that proves who he is, is the visual symbol of a youthful act that is not typical of his adult behavior: the excessive caution, the guardedness, the willed reserve. Hence it identifies him (the scar proves that he is Odysseus, the person who went on the boar hunt and got himself wounded) while being, at the same time, a false identifier, the marker of a behavior that is no longer characteristic of him.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

However, as with Odysseus, we’re often left to wonder whether such reveals are true identifiers or false ones, and whether any stable ‘true’ identity exists at all.

As a format, it reminded me of other hybrid literary/biographical journeys, including books like Mark Richardson’s Zen and Now (shadowing Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), Tom Roston’s The Writer’s Crusade on Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five, and even Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. All are books where reading another text becomes a way of reading a life. Each uses another writer’s text as a kind of map for revisiting the self, history, and grief. Mendelsohn’s book sits comfortably among these, but its classroom setting and father – son dynamic give it a more explicitly pedagogical feel. However, as Garner notes, it resists neat didacticism:

This book does not bake its lessons up into a tidy platter of macaroons, but they are there nonetheless.

Source: A Father and Son Sail Through Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Together – The New York Times by Dwight Garner

In some respect, reading An Odyssey felt like bibliotherapy, literature as healing. Not necessarily literature that dictates to us, but rather sets up a series of questions and conditions for us to consider. Those questions – about self-sufficiency, identity, and whether we can know another person – recur in Mendelsohn’s arguments with his students and with his father, as Emily Wilson captures in her review.

The fault-lines mapped in the disagreements of father and son correspond to some of the most fascinating interpretative questions of The Odyssey itself, such as whether people ever can or should be self-sufficient, whether you have a single “true” identity and whether you can ever really know another person. The book also explores how stories and shared memories help people to form deep connections with one another across time.

Source: An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn Review – A Father, a Son and Homer’s Epic by Emily Wilson

For me, that is what made it feel like bibliotherapy: the book does not solve the riddles of family and marriage, but it provides a space for bad ideas (and good ones too) to be voiced, tested, and revised without having to be ‘right’ on first utterance, and general questions to live with. I feel that the genre‑bending nature of the book allows Mendelsohn to explore ideas that might not find a place in more academic texts.

All in all, Mendelsohn has a way of making us feel as if we are sitting at the back of his seminar room, watching the poem, the class, and his father all slowly change shape in front of us – sometimes in ways he only understands in retrospect. As Mendelsohn later reflects,

You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

I came to An Odyssey via a conversation on the Art of Manliness podcast, then listened to the audiobook (read by Bronson Pinchot) on Spotify.

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You ask me my name. I’ll tell it to you; and in return give me the gift you promised me. My name is Nobody. That is what I am called by my mother and father and by all my friends. Homer ‘Odyssey’

My daughter has recently been playing Epic, the musical adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, on repeat.

Epic: The Musical (stylized as EPIC) is a nine-part series of album musicals (referred to as “sagas”) written and produced in their entirety by Puerto Rican actor and singer-songwriter Jorge Rivera-Herrans. This musical project, released between 2022 and 2024, is a sung-through adaptation of the Ancient Greek epic poem Odyssey by Homer and takes inspiration from different musical genres as well as modern musical theater, anime and video games. It recounts the story of Odysseus as he tries to return from Troy to his island kingdom of Ithaca after the conclusion of the decade-long Trojan War. Along the years-long journey, he encounters multiple gods and monsters who either help or hinder him in his quest to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.

Source: Wikipedia

It occurred to me that I had never actually read Homer’s poem. This led me to listen to George Blagden’s reading via Libby.

The Odyssey is an oral epic poem attributed to Homer. It contains 24 books, often grouped into five parts: the Telemachy, the Departure from Calypso, the Great Wanderings, the Return to Ithaca, and the Revenge. As a narrative, it has many threads, often jumping back in time to recount various events. There is Odysseus’ journey home from Troy. There is Telemachus’ coming of age. There is Penelope, with her hands tied regarding the new suitors. Throughout, the narrative blends the supernatural gods and monsters—such as the Cyclops, Circe, and Athena—with everyday heroes. It bridges the human and the divine.

Although The Odyssey is credited to “Homer,” it is often considered an amalgam of poems handed down over the years. It tells us as much about 8th‑century BC Greece as it does about the Mycenaean world, with various stories best understood as commentary on Homer’s present as much as on the past brought to life.

In an interview on The Art of Manliness podcast, Daniel Mendelsohn discusses the significance of The Odyssey and what it can teach us today. He explains that it can be understood as laying the groundwork for a number of genres, including adventure, homecoming, science fiction/fantasy, and comedy as reunion. In terms of themes, The Odyssey explores adulthood and family, sons looking for fathers, and how little we understand our parents’ marriages. This is something that Mendelsohn also explored in his memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.

Bringing The Odyssey into the present, I am left thinking about the “supernatural” stories as a means of making sense of human nature – myths to live by. The gods and monsters that Odysseus meets – Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Poseidon, Athena – do not just decorate the plot, rather they provide a way of dramatising – transferring – fear, desire, rage, temptation, loyalty, and hope. In these encounters, invisible inner conflicts are made visible.

As a narrative, The Odyssey suggests that life is not a single, simple journey but a weaving together of all its facets: home and exile, youth and age, fidelity and betrayal, duty and pleasure, fate and choice. The fantastic episodes give shape to experiences we still recognize: feeling lost at sea, trapped by routines that turn us into something less than fully human, deaf to good advice, or guided by a wisdom we barely understand.

Read this way, the poem becomes less a distant heroic legend about a lost world and more a map of the inner life. From here, I find myself wondering if this might be the right entry point into James Joyce’s Ulysses. I also wonder what a fully modern revisioning of Odyssey might look like today?

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Desire in its free state has the potential to be destructive, to carry us away or drop us in a black hole, so we need to interrupt it, capture it, manage it and put it to work. Ian Buchanan ‘Assemblage Theory and Method’

Ian Buchanan’s Assemblage Theory and Method sets out to define what an assemblage is (and is not), as well as make the case for why assemblage theory is useful and necessary.

The book begins with an introduction to the concept of ‘assemblages’. He pushes beyond the idea of an assemblage as ‘a random heap of fragments’, aiming to restore its ‘conceptual vitality’. It remains an incomplete project in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: a concept that invites us to complete and apply it ourselves.

With this in mind, Buchanan calls for a return to the original text to reclaim the concept. Rather than Paul Patton and Paul Foss’ translation of ‘agencement’ as assemblage, he argues that it could just as easily be interpreted as ‘arrangement’.

Assemblage is Paul Patton and Paul Foss’s choice of translation for agencement which Brian Massumi picked up and used in his translation of A Thousand Plateaus. It has since become more or less the default translation, despite the fact that – as several people have pointed out – it has its problems. In my view, however, these problems are not resolved by altering the translation and using a different word, but rather by problematizing it and opening it up to a more complicated reading, one that is more consciously attentive to Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I would add that I think there is probably a strong case to be made for leaving it untranslated, as is increasingly the case with translations of critical theory concepts today, though that itself carries the risk of hypostatizing the term in a different way. Agencement derives from agencer, which according to Le Roberts Collins means ‘to arrange, to lay out, or to piece together’, whereas assemblage means ‘to join, to gather, to assemble’.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan argues that agencement effectively reworks the role of the psychoanalytic “complex” (Komplex): what was once a psychic configuration becomes, in their hands, a socio‑material arrangement.

Agencement is Deleuze and Guattari’s own translation, or perhaps rearrangement would be a better word, of the German word Komplex (as in the ‘Oedipal complex’ or the ‘castration complex’).

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, assemblage is more than just a question about ‘what’. It is as much a question about how, where and when.

In the remaining chapters, Buchanan develops this reclaimed concept of assemblage through discussions of strata, desire, territory, expressive materialism, and contemporary control.

The first chapter unpacks strata and the production of nature and history.

Strata are the product of the manifold processes that have over time constructed and produced the thing we call nature, whether by that we mean human nature or nature as wilderness. We have to be careful not to reverse this historicizing process by overemphasizing the apparent ‘naturalness’ of strata, that is, by forgetting that ‘strata’ refers to a concept that enables us to see and think about a certain type of process, the production of nature, not the thing itself.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

There are three types of strata: geological, biological and techno‑semiological (the linguistic / socio‑technical stratum). Each of these is formed differently. Each stratum is made up of two dimensions: content and expression, where there is always remainder, something escapes. These two bind the strata together to resonate. With this, strata are never inert.

Buchanan outlines four first principles that explain how strata and stratification work:

  1. There is a chaotic flux of material and immaterial particles (including desire) that flows freely. The three kinds of strata are different, non‑analogical ways of capturing and organising this flux. However, they do not all relate things in the same way.
  2. Stratification is the process that gives form to matters by imprisoning intensities, simultaneously organizing material processes and capturing desire. It separates the world into distinct layers (strata), each with its own unity and logic of composition, and with beginnings and ends, allowing for variations both between and within strata. It needs to be noted that with these differences and variations, the schema of one stratum cannot be straightforwardly used to explain another, since each operates with different modes of organisation.
  3. Stratification is a process of capture which works by means of selecting and coding, as well as stabilising and territorialisation.
  4. Each assemblage contains a single abstract machine, a diagram enveloped by the stratum that constitutes its unity. It can be glossed with the question, “Whatever could have happened for things to come to this?” Conversely, the abstract machine also marks what cannot be done within an assemblage.

Stratification is important as assemblages are not defined by their components, but rather by what they produce, and these productions are complex. It is useful at explaining the way in which everyday life is experienced in a multi-layered way, without necessarily being interconnected. It helps capture the discontinuous, uneven character of historical change. It also helps theorise a process capable of producing subjects and subjectivity.
In the end, Buchanan explains that stratification is key to any understanding of ‘I’ or ‘We’.

Without stratification there would be no ‘we’. Without stratification there would be no ‘I’. Without stratification we could not communicate with one another, nor even live together in anything like a society.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

With this, he warns that there is a danger of destratification and simply opting out of a situation, without a clear path.

Deleuze and Guattari are not voluntarists; they don’t think one can simply opt out of a difficult situation. Rather, for them, it is always a matter of engineering escapes, of finding the means to build and execute the assemblages one needs to destratify, just a little, and make one’s getaway. But we cannot escape everything, all at once, because that too is a kind of death. So we must choose our lines of flight carefully. Whatever we retain after we have made our getaway is our strata: it is the bedrock of our existence.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

If Chapter 1 shows how assemblages are stratified in nature and history, Chapter 2 turns to what animates them from within: desire. Buchanan explains the importance of the concept.

Desire is primary; it is desire that selects materials and gives them the properties that they have in the assemblage. This is because desire itself is productive.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

With regards to this, he explains how what it produces is itself actual, whatever the material it is in. In relation to the assemblages, these are an actual composition of desire.

The second part of the chapter explores the relationship between desire and bodies without organs.

Desire desires on the body without organs. One cannot speak of desire in Deleuze and Guattari in the absence of their concept of the body without organs just as one cannot speak of the body without organs without taking into account their concept of desire.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Bodies without organs are desire at degree zero, they are not in fact bodily but a surface on which desire flows.

If someone says their heart is broken, one does not imagine that they are in need of a cardiologist; one knows that it is not that heart that is the problem. The heart the broken-hearted speak of exists on a different plane to the physical body. It is real, to be sure, and its effects are real too, and its effects may even be felt in the visceral body, but it is not the same heart as the muscular organ that circulates our blood. Fixing this heart requires love, poetry, solitude, companionship, soulful healing and many other things besides, which may or may not pass through the body but are not necessarily bodily. Kind words can heal a broken heart but a heart transplant cannot.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

For Buchanan, this all serves to remind us that, although desire is always potentially assembling, we must not assume that every configuration of things is already an assemblage. Some things really are just ‘heaps of fragments’.

Having established desire as the machinic heart of assemblages, Chapter 3 turns to how desire composes “liveable orders”: territories. As Buchanan touches on in regards to stratification, territorialisation is the conversion of flux into liveable order. It is the most immediate, local form of the assemblage, the way desire first composes a liveable order out of chaos.

We territorialize because we need to and we need to territorialize because we have to confront chaos, both in its originary form and in the form of black holes. The territory transforms not only the elements constituting it but its inhabitant as well (as both the territory’s creator and primary beneficiary).

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Unlike strata which is somewhat more stable, territory (reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation) occurs at a more local level, a part of the process of becoming. To explain this, Buchanan refers to F.Scott Fitzgerald’s discussions of cracks and the constant threat of chaos in our life.

Everything we do (insofar as it is an action of desire) carries this risk of plunging us into a black hole. In this sense then territory should be understood as a defensive concept because it describes our means of getting out of the black holes we sometimes find ourselves in either because we chose to go down a dark path or somehow our actions inadvertently lead us there. Deleuze and Guattari borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion of the ‘crack’ from his short autobiographical piece The Crack-up to illustrate this idea. In life, according to Fitzgerald, there are three ways of cracking-up, that is, three ways the black hole can make itself felt in our daily lives. First, there are the big blows that hit you from the outside, that often present themselves in terms of choices – if only I hadn’t drunk so much, if only I’d kept my mouth shut and so on. The changes that ensue, loss of love, loss of employment, loss of respect and so on, stay with you forever but also feel strangely alien because one feels that if one had made different choices things wouldn’t be the way they are. Then there are the micro-cracks that occur when things seem to be going well – one might not even notice them at first. It is the corrosion that happens in one’s soul when a thousand slights resonate together and ramify. The first time someone calls you ‘fat’ or ‘loser’ you might not even notice the hurt it caused, but the damage is done, and every repetition of that slight causes the hurt to magnify as it resonates within. Last, there are ‘clean breaks’; these are the breaks you cannot come back from because it destroys all connection to the past. This is what people mean when they say about a former relationship that there is no ‘us’ anymore, there is nothing to go back to, the past has been volatized. We can also see that these are the types of situation that could drown us if we didn’t have some kind of lifeline: territory is that lifeline.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan explains that there are three ways of leaving a territory, or deterritorialisation:

  • Negative deterritorialisation is one that is overlaid by reterritorialisation.
  • Relative deterritorialisation overcomes the inertia of reterritorialisation
  • Absolute deterritorialisation where it succeeds in creating a new earth, a new beginning, one that does not lead back to old territories

Extending this discussion of deterritorialisation and chaos, Buchanan brings in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of fascism to show how a line of flight out of an unbearable territory can itself become a suicidal black hole.

As with ‘bodies without organs’ not being about literal bodies, Buchanan explains that it is more useful to consider territories as subjective states in a psychological sense.

Territory is an act, a passage, not a space. It is the composition of one’s own world.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

These worlds are composed of elements borrowed and stolen from the environments we are in. (Footnote: Buchanan explains that “Deleuze and Guattari are often portrayed as theorists of the body, they were actually more interested in the way the non-bodily, that is, words, can transform the body, without ever penetrating beneath the surface.”) This organising of environments also encompasses distance between bodies. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “critical distance,” Buchanan shows how territory regulates how close we can come to others of the same species and still coexist. Territory is thus the subjective spacing between interiors, the way a shared space is partitioned so that my “home” and your “home” can coexist without collapsing into chaos.

Buchanan then extends the conversation into language, or as Deleuze and Guattari described it, the “collective assemblage of enunciation”.

Expressed of an expression is not its meaning; it is the transformation of the world the expression instantiates.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan ends the chapter with a discussion of the association between territory and style. He uses the example of film characters and genre to demonstrate this, with repeated traits (the action hero’s walk, clothing, gestures) serving as “directional” signs, but their peculiar mannerisms form a style, which is “dimensional” and territorial.

Style is, in this sense, an exercise in redundancy – the more distinctive it is, the greater its power of redundancy, meaning the more we are able to internalize it and know its inner rhythms.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

The fourth chapter makes the case for Deleuze and Guattari as expressive materialists: neither reducing everything to ideas (idealism) nor treating all matter as equally “vibrant”. Every assemblage has an inseparable material side (form of content) and expressive side (form of expression). To explain this, Buchanan pushes back on Jane Bennett’s misconception of assemblages as ad hoc groupings, instead explaining why the actual collection of things matter or else you just have a “growing heap of fragments.”

As I have reiterated throughout, it has a material dimension (form of content, machinic assemblage etc.) and an expressive dimension (form of expression, collective assemblages of enunication etc.), a principle of unity (abstract machine), and it rests upon a condition of possibility (BwO, plane of immanence, plane of consistency etc.) which is criss-crossed by lines of flight (lines of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation). As we have seen above in my examination of Bennett’s version of the assemblage, it is not sufficient to simply enumerate an assemblage’s material components because these do not by themselves disclose the assemblage’s constitution, much less its purpose or function. One must also ask how these material components are captured by the expressive dimension and inquire too about its principle of unity and its conditions of possibility.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Assemblages permit wide internal variation, but not every variation is possible: their abstract machines impose a form of relative invariance.

In contrast to Bennett’s interpretation, Buchanan discusses Tess Lea’s work on indigenous housing policy in Australia. Lea’s analysis shows how the material arrangements of housing, funding streams, bureaucratic offices (form of content) are bound to a discourse of “policy” and “progress” (form of expression) that organises what can and cannot be done or even seen.

To conceive of policy as an assemblage means seeing it in terms of the kinds of arrangements and orderings it makes possible and even more importantly the complex and not always fully disclosed set of expectations it entails. To see it this way we need to separate ‘policy’ as a conceptual entity from its myriad iterations as this or that policy, for example, infrastructure policy, health policy, transport policy and so on, but also from all sense of outcomes and outputs. We also have to see so-called policy decisions as components of the policy assemblage and not as some kind of climactic moment in the life of a policy. Policy decisions are part of the form of expression of the policy assemblage, not the content. By questioning the very idea of policy Lea has enabled us to see it in its properly rhizomatic light. As Lea shows, policymaking takes place ‘in the middle of things’ but always pretends otherwise because it is locked into an image of itself as a special type of agency that defines and measures ‘progress’.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

He also discusses Löic Wacquant’s work on imprisonment in US. Wacquant likewise maps how the institutional complex of prisons, police, welfare retrenchment (form of content) is articulated with a discourse of “crime”, “delinquency” and neoliberal responsibility (form of expression), revealing imprisonment as a political technology rather than a neutral response to crime.

Wacquant argues that we cannot understand the prison system by focusing solely on enclosed world of prisons and prisoners, we need to pull back and look at the stratum as a whole (not his choice of words, obviously), which in this instance means factoring in what is happening more broadly at the level of the state. At this level it is immediately clear that neither drugs nor criminality nor even poverty were ever the main problem as far as the state is concerned. The real issue was elsewhere. Wacquant identifies the ascendency of neoliberalism as the main culprit because it placed the state in the strange position of having to give up all its roles and responsibilities except its right to exercise and control violence.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, what both of these examples provide is a way of not describing, but rather a way of analysing.

this is what the assemblage does. We have to stop thinking of the concept of the assemblage as a way of describing a thing or situation and instead see it for what it was always intended to be, a way of analysing a thing or situation. Faced with any apparent assemblage we should ask, what holds it together? What are its limits (internal and external) and what function does it fulfil?

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

For Buchanan, using assemblage theory therefore means rigorously tracking these doublings—content/expression, material/expressive—rather than simply naming any complex situation an “assemblage”.

The fifth and final chapter revisits Deleuze’s essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’. This essay was written in 1990 at the end of the Cold War and as a “postscript” to the work of Michel Foucault:

Written at a time when the Cold War was ending, computers were becoming more common, and the internet was beginning to connect institutions, the essay describes the emergence of a new kind of society – one not ruled by a single stern voice but by the soft hum of networks.
Postscript was written as an update to the work of Deleuze’s contemporary Michel Foucault, who had died in 1984. Deleuze called it a “postscript” not just because of its brevity (it’s only around 2,300 words in English translation) but to highlight he wasn’t refuting Foucault, just building on his work.

Source: Computers tracking us, an ‘electronic collar’: Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 Postscript on the Societies of Control was eerily prescient by Cameron Shackell

Buchanan’s purpose in returning to this brief text is twofold: to show how pertinent Deleuze remains to “our contemporary situation”, and to foreground the largely overlooked role of the assemblage in the essay’s analysis of control.

For Deleuze, the panopticon that Foucault feared so much has been trumped by the rise in digital technology. With this, we have moved from individuals to dividuals:

Today surveillance is focused on controlling dividuals (not individuals), restricting their movement, limiting their access to credit and capital, determining where and how they can spend their money, and not, as was the case with disciplinary society, in shaping and forming them as particular social types (soldiers, doctors, teachers and so on).

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In a world of surveillance and restrictions, we are controlled by nudges and modulations.

In contrast to the old duality of management and trade unions today’s businesses ‘are constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself’. Competition for its own sake lives and thrives on the intermittent highs of transitory victories (e.g. heart surgeon of the month), and never concerns itself with whether or not these victories add up to something meaningful like competency or a vocation. Not even education is immune from this trend, Deleuze laments. Schooling has been replaced ‘by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment’. To which he adds, showing uncanny prescience: ‘It’s the surest way of turning education into a business.’

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

To understand the machines of our times, such as cybernetic machines and computer networks, Buchanan argues that we need to appreciate the expressive dimension of desire. To do this, we need analyse the assemblage that the machine is a part of.

[Naomi] Klein argues that the mobilization of the logo enabled the dematerialization of businesses like Nike, but what she does not explain is the changes in desire that enabled this investment of desire in the logo. One might say then that she focuses on the machines of capitalism at the expense of its expressive dimension. ‘One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine – with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies.’ But, he adds, the ‘machines don’t explain anything’ by themselves; ‘you have to analyse the collective apparatuses [i.e. assemblages] of which the machines are just one component.’

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, Buchanan’s reading of “Postscript” reinforces the book’s central claim: that machines, institutions and technologies never speak for themselves. They become intelligible only when we map the assemblages that bind them together.

Assemblage Theory and Method is not an explicit guide. If anything, it is a book that left me with as many questions as answers. For Buchanan, the most important question that we must consider is: “What does the concept of the assemblage enable us to see that we couldn’t see before?” The book seeks to provide suggestions on how to use assemblage theory in as clear a manner as possible. However, it is no easy feat. As with so much of Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage theory is not a simple, straightforward process.

Buchanan’s book is best read as a sherpa: it carries conceptual supplies and points out paths, but we still have to climb the mountain ourselves. With this in mind, assemblage theory is more than a new name for complexity, and is better considered as a method for analysing how forms of control are composed – and, therefore, how they might be recomposed.

Thinking about this, I could not help thinking about Cory Doctorow’s work on enshittification, especially when Buchanan talks about the balance between flow of capital and flow of stupidity in the final chapter on technology and control.

Now content has been volatized by the new digital formats and ‘set free’ (to use the jargon of the techno-utopians) and made free to obtain, making it almost impossible to capture and control. This is why, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus, the flow of capital is always balanced by an equivalent flow of stupidity, which stifles both technical innovation and social and economic revolution.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

As a quick thought‑experiment in this mode of analysis, I found myself thinking about a platform like Spotify and what assemblage theory would enable us to see that we could not see before. On the content side we have servers, catalogues, licensing contracts, recommendation algorithms, mobile apps, headphones, playlists, financial flows between labels, artists and venture capital. On the expressive side we have discourses of “discovery”, “mood”, “productivity”, “chill”; metrics, moods and genres as classificatory systems.

Thinking this way turns Spotify from a platform with features into a control‑society assemblage that captures listening, partitions time and attention, and organises the circulation of musical labour and value. Where Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine – The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist tracks Spotify’s cultural and economic effects, assemblage theory pushes us to ask how its very architecture of moods, metrics and recommendation functions as a territorialisation of listening – a way of capturing and modulating desire under contemporary conditions of control.

Similarly, as a set of questions an assemblage analysis might pose to a cultural figure, I am left thinking about
my current deep dive into the world of Prince. What would it mean to treat “Prince” as an assemblage rather than a singular genius or a linear artistic evolution? Form of content might include instruments, studios, collaborators, production techniques, contracts and formats. While form of expression might encompass genre labels, press narratives, iconography, gender and sexuality discourse, fan practices. The key questions would become: what abstract machine gives “Prince” his relative invariance across wildly different configurations, and what external historical limits shape him (format shifts, MTV, streaming, post‑9/11 politics, digital control societies)?

This approach would work against the easy story of linear “evolution” from early funk to late spirituality, instead mapping discontinuous reconfigurations of desire, territory and media strata. In Buchanan’s terms, the question would be less “Who is the real Prince?” and more “What arrangements make ‘Prince’ possible across such different historical and media conditions?” The obvious caveat is empirical, for at some point the available material may not support a robust mapping of the assemblage, and what began as analysis risks becoming conjecture.

Assemblage theory, on this view, supplies a set of questions and distinctions to guide research, but it still depends on the available archive, that is, the concrete mapping of form of content, form of expression, abstract machines and lines of flight has to rest on empirical traces or it risks becoming purely speculative. That dependence sets limits on method: some assemblages are poorly documented, evidence is always selective, choices of temporal and spatial scale shape what relations can even appear, and the work of linking material and expressive dimensions always involves judgement.

I feel like I have always dabbled with Deleuze. Initially dipping in during my university degree. I was also pulled back in via the work of Ben Williamson, Greg Thompson and Ian Guest. Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus have always sat on my bookshelf seemingly taunting me, calling me to return, sitting next to Claire Colebrook’s Understanding Deleuze. I actually downloaded Buchanan’s papers on ‘Assemblage theory and schizoanalysis’ and ‘Becoming Mountain’, along with some others that I found, with the intent on doing further reading on the topic. However, somewhere along the way I got distracted and it became another loose end left untied. I actually stumbled on Assemblage Theory and Method by chance while looking for secondary material on Fredric Jameson, while reading Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

What I find interesting is that although I feel I have only ever touched the surface on the concept of ‘assemblage’ I still regularly used the term in my writing (see this post for example), usually to capture the general interrelated nature of things. I must admit my understanding was vague. (Buchanan talks about how it has become a ‘received idea’.)

Ironically, having a clearer grasp of the basic concepts has mostly sharpened my sense of how partial my understanding still is. That, in a way, is Buchanan’s point, that “assemblage” is not a label to apply but a way of asking better questions. If the book has left me with a richer sense of what the concept can do and where my own reading remains unfinished, then perhaps Buchanan’s assemblage has already done its work on me.

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It is very rare to see a five-paragraph essay in the wild; one finds them only in the captivity of the classroom. John Warner ‘Why They Can't Write’

John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities is a critique of how we fail to properly teach writing in the modern era, with a particular focus on the college system in the US. While it’s easy to point the finger at the “five-paragraph essay” as the primary villain, Warner argues that this rigid structure can be seen as a canary in the coal mine. The true issue lies in a systemic obsession with testing, surveillance, and “efficiency” that has effectively hollowed out the act of writing, leaving behind only an imitation.

One of the ways Warner makes sense of the problem is by making the comparison between modern writing instruction to an acting school where students only learn impressions of other actors, rather than how to build a performance from the ground up.

Imagine an acting school where rather than helping students develop the individual skills of building a performance, students are instead required to learn a series of impressions of genuine actors performing a role.

Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

In classrooms, students are not asked to write, instead they are asked to create artefacts that look like writing but lack the spark of human choice.

To write is to make choices, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Writers choose what they want to write about, whom they want to write to, and why they’re writing.

Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

When these choices are replaced with a template, students are not taught a skill, rather they are being trained for compliance. The five-paragraph essay is the “ab belt” of the classroom – a shortcut that promises results without the “sit-ups” of actual thought.

If writing is like exercise, the five-paragraph essay is like one of those ab belt doohickeys that claim to electroshock your core into a six-pack, so you can avoid doing all those annoying sit-ups.

Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

In response to this, Warner proposes moving away from “competency-based” assessments toward a model of practice. He defines a writer’s practice through four dimensions:

  • Knowledge: Understanding what writers know about the world and their craft.
  • Skills: The technical ability to conceive, draft, revise, and edit.
  • Habits of Mind: How a writer thinks—curiosity, empathy, and audience awareness.
  • Attitudes: Believing that writing is a difficult, iterative process of discovery.

In this situation, the goal is not a perfect final product, but the “noble failure” of trying to say something meaningful and falling just short, only to get back into the arena and try again.

As long as students are writing, and writing with purpose, their writing will improve.

Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

The focus here for the educator is to support students with the metacognitive reflections required to see the links between different writing-related tasks. Associated with this, there is a call to end the tyranny of grades.

These should be our goals: We seek to increase educational challenges while simultaneously decreasing student stress and anxiety related to writing. We seek to change the orientation of school from only preparing students (poorly, as it turns out) for the indefinite future to also living and learning in the present. We seek to provide experiences designed around learning and growth, rather than giving assignments and testing for competencies. We will end the tyranny of grades and replace them with self-assessment and reflection. We will give teachers sufficient time, freedom, and resources to teach effectively. In return, they will be required to embrace the same ethos of self-assessment and reflection expected of students.

Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

I remember starting this book a few years ago, but never got around to finishing it. It was interesting to return to this with the changes brought about by the explosion of Large Language Models. Written before their explosion, Warner’s highlights are somewhat prophetic. If writing in school has become a “simulacrum” or “pseudo-academic BS” designed to trigger an algorithm, then AI is the ultimate fulfilment of that broken system. The answer is not better AI detectors, rather it is about doubling down on what AI cannot replicate, that is the agency of solving problems for a particular purpose.

We should not ask students to write anything that will not be read.

Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

Writing instruction must shift toward the “potholes”. The problem is that if it is “frictionless” (as AI makes it), no learning occurs. We need the “heat” that comes from the friction of a student struggling to find their own words.

Technological solutions to the problems of learning value a “frictionless” experience, but we shouldn’t forget that friction makes heat and heat is energy. As Bernard Fryshman, a professor of physics with fifty years of experience, says, one of faculties’ most important roles is to “jostle students into active learning.”

Source: Why They Can’t Write by John Warner

This has me thinking again about Seymour Papert’s idea of hard fun.

It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don’t let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.

Source: Hard Fun by Seymour Papert

The question I am left with is what this means in the early years and the move towards direct instruction?

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We're all still walking, aren't we? We're still persisting, still keeping on, still sleeping, waking, still crouching on cans, still crouching in cars, still driving, driving, driving, still taking it, still eating it, still home-improving and twelve-stepping it, still waiting, still standing in line, still scrabbling in bags for a handful of keys. Martin Amis ‘Night Train’

Night Train by Martin Amis is a noir detective novel told from the perspective of Detective Mike Hoolihan, a female detective who is charged with the task of finding the motivation for Jennifer Rockwell’s suicide.

Structurally, it continually sabotages its own mechanics and constructs. While a traditional detective novel usually puts the pieces together until every motive and movement is accounted for, Amis instead creates a space where each new piece of information breaks things open until we get to a point where it seems everything is up for debate other than the basic facts that someone has died.

The thing that stood out to me was the continual battle for meaning and understanding. With this in mind, I was left thinking about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari‘s discussion of re-territorialisation vs. deterritorialisation. With this in mind, the detective is the agent of re-territorialisation. They take the chaotic “lines of flight” (the murder, the missing clues) and pull them back into a rigid structure revolving around the case, the motive, and the conviction. In Night Train, Hoolihan attempts this. However, Jennifer Rockwell’s suicide acts as a pure deterritorialisation. Jennifer had “everything”- beauty, intelligence, love, and professional success. By removing the “why,” her death refuses to be captured by the detective’s logic. The more Mike investigates, the more the structures break down.

The investigation of a death also reminded me of Gayatri Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, in which she discusses the suicide of Bhuvaneswari, who waited to be menstruating before killing herself to prove her act was not motivated by an illicit pregnancy. Despite this, her motive was still lost to history, displaced by the dominant narratives of the time.

In a some way, Jennifer Rockwell performs a similar, act. Although she is the “elite” rather than the subaltern, she chooses a death that is particularly silent. Hoolihan acts as the “intellectual” in Spivak’s framework, attempting to represent or explain Jennifer’s “why.” By trying to find a motive (a “reterritorialisation”), Hoolihan is essentially trying to force the silent to speak.

Another way in which meaning breaks down is with the metaphor of the “Night Train” that reappears throughout the book. Each recurrence provides a different twist, from background noise, to cheap-blues soundtrack, to a cosmological-suicidal vehicle, then finally to Mike’s own, half-chosen ride into the dark. In the end, it becomes something of a dead metaphor, capturing everything and nothing at the same time.

I vaguely remember studying Martin Amis’ Night Train at university. In the middle of my honours thesis, I felt I did not really give it the time of day so want to return to it. It definitely leaves you seeing things in a new light, something I touched on after watching The Beekeeper. It was also interesting to think about it alongside Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, another novel that seemingly subverts its own structure and meaning. As well as Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and the way in which meaning is continually made while also seemingly being deconstructed.

I listened to a reading by Linda Hamilton’s via Spotify.

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I’m a fan of listening to albums, and in full. That’s what the artist intended – a collection of songs, in a particular order. Even if there’s one or two you don’t like, it’s an entire package. To pick out individual songs seems like a silly thing to do. Tony Cohen ‘Half Deaf, Completely Mad’

Reading a memoir released after its subject has passed is always a haunting experience. With Half Deaf, Completely Mad, the sensation is even more acute. Tony Cohen began the project in 2012, but it was John Olson – who had been brought in to help with the project – who finalised the manuscript following Cohen’s death in 2017.

I [John Olsen] interviewed Tony and his colleagues from May 2013 to July 2016 and the manuscript has been completed as envisaged, in Tony’s own voice.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

The result is a book written entirely in Cohen’s own voice: a conversational and irreverent tone that makes it feel as though he is sitting across from you. As Mark Mordue commented in his review:

You leave this book wishing he was still talking. But the tape runs out and it’s over.

Source: Saturday Review

I imagine that some readers might approach this book looking for technical secrets. While there are “clues” (like recording in cupboards or toilets), the real takeaway is Cohen’s devotion to experiential learning. As Cohen attests:

I’ve got a strange, scrambled way of working. I know how to use most pieces of equipment, but I don’t necessarily know what they do, or why they do it. That works for me, but I’m not recommending it. Find your own way of working. Be unique, you’ll hear if what you’re doing sounds good.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Cohen did not attend an audio school. Rather he learnt by doing. He dropped out of school when he was fifteen and managed to get work Armstrong Studios.

There was no such thing as audio schools, no one really knew this job existed. It was the other side of the glass, where all people did was fiddle a few knobs … I learnt from the best: Roger Savage, Ernie Rose, Graham Owens, Ian MacKenzie and Ross Cockle.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

He learned by “fiddling with knobs” and embracing trial and error.

Every new thing you do gives you more experience and knowledge that you can use in later work.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

His philosophy was a mix of “gut-level instinct” and the “secret” doctrine he learned from Molly Meldrum: exaggeration.

I listened to everything, working hard to understand his doctrine. And Molly’s secret? Exaggeration. If you listen to the White Album now on good speakers you’ll hear exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no flat bits, everything in the mix jumps out and grabs your attention. It hits you in the bloody face. When mixing, people get too sensitive, they fiddle about listening on studio monitors and get the balance sounding even. Don’t. Be dynamic. Keep the action up and push the extremes. Turn things up louder than is considered tasteful. It might sound like you should pull it back, but resist that temptation. Turn it up a bit more! You’ll find that when the song makes it to another medium, into people’s cars and homes, there’s a presence. The mix is moving, it’s alive.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Cohen lived for the moving, alive quality of a mix, rather than clinical perfection.

You can hit the odd fucking foul note as long as you give a fantastic performance.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

For Cohen, the studio was a playground for inventiveness.

With all the tales, there is an undeniable “apocryphal” energy to the book. Cohen is, in many ways, an unreliable narrator. We are asked to accept an ironic sense of clarity in his recounts of driving down the Hume Highway while tripping on magic mushrooms:

I ran out of money driving back and found that eating the mushrooms destroyed my appetite so, as a result, was tripping the whole time. I know, I’m lucky to be alive, but Minis are like dodgem cars: you can hop out of the way of trouble, as long as your reflexes are working.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Or tripping around the Royal Botanic Gardens:

A friend of The Ferrets sent over an envelope of ‘brown barrels’ from London. We were sitting around having breakfast when they arrived. ‘I’ll try one!’ I said. Oh boy, that was an intense couple of days. I can understand why some people think tripping is a religious experience. I wandered around the Royal Botanic Gardens and it was spectacular. The hills turned to liquid, rainbows shot into the air – just like The Beatles’ animated film, Yellow Submarine. When someone asked me where the duck pond was all I can remember is them running away in fear. God knows what I said. Maybe it was my eyes, big black holes staring back at them. I shouldn’t harp on about it. Don’t do drugs, kids, they’re very bad for you.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Like Bobby Gillespie’s recount of tripping in his memoir Tenement Kid, I found myself questioning how someone could remember such vivid details through such a chemical haze? Yet, as a reader, you want it all to be true. Whether he is “scoffing” Split Enz’s champagne or dealing with the “leather man” Bono, the stories are told with a rueful laughter that makes the “gist” feel pure, even if the details are sometimes a bit blurry.

While some biographies of the era sanitise the lifestyle, Cohen places it front and center. His life was one of indulgence, and eventually, the bill came due. The book captures the stark contrast between the high-flying world of record executives and the reality of Cohen’s later years: living in a caravan, battling hepatitis, diabetes, and pancreatitis.

As the producer I was supposed to get royalties for The Cruel Sea, but somehow it didn’t happen. I received $1000 once – big deal. The only band that has consistently paid me producer royalties is Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Mick Harvey always kept an eye on things. He was interested in the music business and it’s just as well because they could have been ripped off as much as every other band.
So it’s due to Mick I receive royalties. There was never an agreement with the band’s label, Mute Records, but he made sure I got included. I can’t thank him enough.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Yet, Cohen does not present himself as a tragic figure or seek pity. He emerges as a figure of boyish mischief. Even as his health failed, the book suggests he was equally a victim of technological change. The shift from the “creative misuse” of analog tape to the “prissy” glitches and endless choices of digital recording signalled the end of the era Cohen helped build.

When digital recording first appeared I was keen, but I never took to it. I found it prissy. Misusing equipment was part of the creativity of recording. With analogue you could thrash the meters and natural tape compression would make the sound better. I miss that. Dare to slam a digital meter into the red and see what you get? It doesn’t distort, it glitches. Digital took away things that I enjoyed, but it did make recording cheaper and easier for artists.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Interestingly, this is something that Susan Rogers captures in her own work, contrasting the warmth of analogue music, compared the abstract coolness of digital processes.

Half Deaf, Completely Mad offers a fascinating peek behind the curtain of the music industry. From the bizarre reality of “live but not live” performances:

I often wondered how people like Madonna managed to sing while dancing and leaping about the stage like a maniac. Lip-syncing, that’s how they do it. Ernie was alarmed to find that Madonna had eighty tracks of vocals prerecorded for the show. When she’d get puffed out, the front-of-house mixer would turn up the required vocal.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

To a discussion as to how ARIAs are decided.

I was told record company representatives would meet and say, ‘Well you had last year, we want this year’, then decide which one of their acts were going to win.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen

Cohen demystifies the glamour.

Ultimately, the book does not pretend to have a deeper psychological meaning or a coherent artistic “arc.” It is simply the story of a man who worked on instinct, lived on the edge, and left the world of music sounding a lot more interesting than he found it.

I’ve always worked on instinct. It’s not a boast, I just never had a clear idea what I was doing. I would follow what the artist led me toward, and if not I’d make something up. Perhaps from memory.

Source: Half Deaf, Completely Mad by Tony Cohen
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It seemed to Dr Max positively unpatriotic to know so little about the origins and forging of your nation. And yet, therein lay the immediate paradox: that patriotism’s most eager bedfellow was ignorance, not knowledge. Julian Barnes ‘England, England’

England England is a story about the creation of an England theme park on the ‘empty’ Isle of Wight. Terra nullius anyone? This park is a curated conglomeration of culture and history put back together over time, whether it be Robin Hood to the planes of D-Day, all flattened.

FROM HER OFFICE Martha could experience the whole Island. She could watch the feeding of the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, check throughput at Haworth Parsonage, eavesdrop on snug-bar camaraderie between straw-chewing yokel and Pacific Rim sophisticate. She could track the Battle of Britain, the Last Night of the Proms, the Trial of Oscar Wilde, and the Execution of Charles I. On one screen King Harold would glance fatally towards the sky; on another posh ladies in Sissinghurst hats pricked out seedlings and counted the varieties of butterfly perching on the buddleia; on a third hackers were pock-marking the fairway of the Alfred, Lord Tennyson Golf Course. There were sights on the Island Martha knew so intimately from a hundred camera angles that she could no longer remember whether or not she had ever seen them in reality.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

These aspects are stripped of their context and turned into commodities. This occurs at the same time as a demise of the real, where England is returned to the past of Anglia / Albion of towns.

This creation of a hyperreal touches on the work of Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, the hyperreal is a state where the map (the simulation) precedes the territory (the reality). He suggested that we have reached a point where the “fake” is more satisfying than the “real” because it is designed to meet our expectations.

‘What is real? This is sometimes how I put the question to myself. Are you real, for instance – you and you?’ Sir Jack gestured with mock courtesy to the room’s other occupants, but did not turn his head away from his thought. ‘You are real to yourselves, of course, but that is not how these things are judged at the highest level. My answer would be No. Regrettably. And you will forgive me for my candour, but I could have you replaced with substitutes, with … simulacra, more quickly than I could sell my beloved Brancusi. Is money real? It is, in a sense, more real than you. Is God real? That is a question I prefer to postpone until the day I meet my Maker.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

What we are looking at is almost always a replica, if that is the locally fashionable term, of something earlier. There is no prime moment.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

Talking about history, Barnes (and Baudrillard) argue that we have cannibalised and commodified the past through ignorance.

It seemed to Dr Max positively unpatriotic to know so little about the origins and forging of your nation. And yet, therein lay the immediate paradox: that patriotism’s most eager bedfellow was ignorance, not knowledge.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

Baudrillard argued that we turn the past into a museum, a theme park or a film because we are unable to face the complexity of the present.

Today, the history that is “given back” to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a “historical real” than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fun damentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation.

Source: ‘History – A Retro Scenario’ in Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

In Barnes’ novel, the Isle of Wight is the ultimate Simulacrum: a copy with no original. What is interesting is the way that the flattened history always has a means of breaking free, with reality pushing back, becoming strange and uncanny.

The Island had been his idea and his success. The Peasants’ Revolt of Paul and Martha had proved a forgettable interlude, long written out of history. Sir Jack had also dealt swiftly with the subversive tendency of certain employees to over-identify with the characters they were engaged to represent. The new Robin Hood and his new Merrie Men had brought respectability back to outlawry. The King had been given a firm reminder about family values. Dr Johnson had been transferred to Dieppe Hospital, where both therapy and advanced psychotropic drugs had failed to alleviate his personality disorder. Deep sedation was prescribed to control his self-mutilating tendencies.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

I guess the only way of maintaining the simulacrum is by continually consuming the uncanny. As Sir Jack states, “You do it by doing it”.

“Jacky, you ask of me how you do it. My answer is this: You do it by doing it”

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terms, each new narrative tweak is a re‑territorialisation that keeps the system from collapsing.

I initially read the demise of England as a commentary on Brexit, especially the turn to Anglia / Albion.

New political leaders proclaimed a new self-sufficiency. They extracted the country from the European Union, negotiating with such obstinate irrationality that they were eventually paid to depart; declared a trade barrier against the rest of the world; forbade foreign ownership of either land or chattels within the territory; and disbanded the military. Emigration was permitted, immigration only in rare circumstances. Diehard jingoists claimed that these measures were designed to reduce a great trading nation to nut-eating isolationism, but modernizing patriots felt that it was the last realistic option for a nation fatigued by its own history. Old England banned all tourism except for groups numbering two or less, and introduced a Byzantine visa system. The old administrative division into counties was terminated, and new provinces were created, based upon the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. Finally, the country declared its separateness from the rest of the globe and from the Third Millennium by changing its name to Anglia.The world began to forget that ‘England’ had ever meant anything except England, England, a false memory which the Island worked to reinforce; while those who remained in Anglia began to forget about the world beyond.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

However, its 1998 publication date and further reading revealed it was actually a reaction to ‘Cool Britannia’. Barnes was writing at the height of the ‘New Labour’ push to rebrand Britain as a creative powerhouse (the 1997 Demos report), while the actual economy was pivoting toward what Robert Hewison called the ‘Heritage Industry’. The novel mocks this split-brain identity: trying to be a modern brand while selling a sanitised, ‘stone-cottage’ version of history to the world. Barnes saw the irony: by trying to “sell” a nation’s soul, you eventually lose the actual country. I guess it feels like a Brexit book because it captures something of this crisis too?

Stylistically, the tone reminded me in part of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, the everyday nature of Martha Cochrane and her ability as a omniscient narrator to dip in and out. I was also left thinking about Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with the way it reimagines the past. However, where Barnes differs is that he is always detached. He does not celebrate the mess (like Smith) or the myth (like Rushdie), rather he can be understood as pulling back the curtain and shining a light on the emptiness behind the myth. I think it is this approach that leaves the novel lingering afterwards.

What I enjoyed the most is the fine line Barnes follows in sitting within the in-between. He never quite falls into polemics. Although you feel he has an opinion, it is always left off the page as far as possible. Instead, he allows the absurdity of his characters speak. (Interestingly, this reminds me of TISM who seemingly critique everyone in equal parts, nothing ever seems sacred.) In England, England, it feels like nothing is spared. Not the high-brow intellectuals, not the greedy corporations, and not the nostalgic peasants of Anglia / Albion. No group is granted moral purity. I guess, by refusing to take a side, Barnes (and TISM) forces the reader to acknowledge that everyone is part of the performance.

‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Mullin. ‘You see, I thought you were one of us.’

‘Perhaps I’ve known too many us-es in my lifetime,’ said Martha

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes