With this note, I would like to thank and welcome new readers, and provide an update on what I am exploring through this Substack. By training, I am a scholar of politics and international relations, and hold positions at universities in Australia and Japan, the former my country of origin, the latter my country of residence. Unfortunately, academics too often choose and love our cages, collectively we accept the structures that push us towards narrow and increasingly irrelevant and banal cul-de-sacs. There is an enduring core of meaning within universities, this should not be too easily dismissed or forgotten. Nonetheless, we need to be more active in demonstrating this.
We have entered a time that might be better explained by myth and legend, gods and demons. Game theory and rational actor models might work fine in a relatively stable and constant environment, they feel profoundly insufficient for reckoning with the amorphous situation we now find ourselves in. It is in this sense, that a more artistic form of analysis might be more appropriate, as it gestures to what lies beyond, what is present but cannot be fully name or identified. These notes seek to fuse analysis with art, offered as an invitation for further thought, to look beyond. Much as the person viewing a painting can complete the work by finding meaning or inspiration in it, perhaps ideas or allusions presented here can be a prompt for the reader to see parts of the world anew.
The aim of these notes is to share in the process of trying to make sense of a complex and changing world, the wager is that it is worthwhile to do so incrementally and publicly. I hope to publish every 1-2 weeks, but to avoid the content model that demands an ever-ready supply of new posts. I’ll publish when I can and when there is a logic to doing so. For now, the greatest support you can provide is simply subscribing, reading and, if you think worthwhile, sharing and recommending these notes. In a radically splintered ecosystem, dominated by power laws, platforms and algorithms, much of the challenge lies in being discovered and heard. Anything that can be done to tilt these scales in my favour is greatly appreciated.
Incentives push towards quick takes and confident assertions, which are valuable but insufficient. There also needs to be room for what Nietzsche termed ‘untimely meditations’, which was alternatively translated as ‘unfashionable observations’ or ‘thoughts out of season’. It feels like the best translation is a combination of all three, suggesting the possibility of insight through dissonance. With this, one can admire the bravery of Nietzsche’s thought, while wanting to avoid his ending.
These notes are poised between Adorno’s suggestion that, ‘open thinking points beyond itself’, and Arendt’s recognition that, ‘great thoughts always turn in circles’. The process of thinking ceaselessly continues, advancing in a circular motion, without ever closing the loop. A valuable idea is provided somewhere in Iain McGilchrist’s appropriately near never-ending work, The Matter with Things, that of the spiral, which captures both circularity and movement. Turning around on themes and ideas, but never from quite the same position. Endlessly ascending a spiralling staircase; possessed with a general sense of where one is going, while always looking around the corner.
And so, perhaps that is what these notes are about, trying to see where we are headed, hopefully not getting too dizzy. Fragmentary knowledge for a fragmenting world.