Today, in my reading, I came across the word "cryptomnesia."
"In a much discussed 2004 article in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Maar announced his discovery that there was an earlier fictional nymphet named Lolita, who had appeared in a 1916 German short story by Heinz von Lichberg, and argued that Nabokov had probably read but subsequently forgotten the story during his years in Berlin. Thus, his later coupling of name and theme was a case of 'cryptomnesia.' With regard to Pale Fire and a particular short poem by Frost — which is not 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' — I claim neither 'cryptomnesia' nor, certainly, plagiarism, but rather a delicate but demonstrable network of inspiration and allusion. This discovery is both less surprising (every reader of Pale Fire knows that John Shade resembles Robert Frost) and more revealing, for it shows Nabokov in the act of conscious composition and similarly conscious camouflage." — "Shades of Frost: A Hidden Source for Nabokov's Pale Fire." Abraham Socher, in Liberal and Illiberal Arts: Essays (Mostly Jewish), Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022. p. 123.
I knew I'd seen this word before, but where? I searched my computer for it. Ah, there it is, in a novel I published two months ago and which I'd edited and reread several dozen times.
"Memory is 'paratactic reordering' of images, says Heriberto Yépez, 'folkloric cryptomnesia,' 'an ars combinatoria of arbitrary signs.'"
In other sections in this novel, I'd discussed plagiarism. For example:
That word was my own insertion in my reexplication of what she said. Such paraphrasing avoids plagiarism but also leads to misrepresentation.
and
A Torah scroll is a copy. It is a painstaking hand-copy of another scroll which is itself a copy of another scroll. Across this lineage, not a single serif may change. The perfection of its plagiarism is what makes it valid.
But here is how it differs from other plagiarism: Copying isn’t enough. You are supposed to study and understand it. The two words at the exact center of the Torah are “darosh darash,” thoroughly investigated. Do your research. When you research, it’s not plagiarism.
and
Truth itself depends on plagiar-cism, yes? A common philosophical definition of truth is “correspondence theory,” meaning that a statement is true if it matches the world. And what is it to match, if not to be cis? Let’s give a better name to “correspondence theory”: plagiar-cism theory.
and
I do not plagiar-cise myself, except insofar as we are all plagiar-cisms of our parents, and perhaps we are plagiar-cisms of other concealed givens and revealed expectations. Do I plagiar-cise myself? Very well, then, I plagiar-cise myself.
and
I think to myself: “Todo lo que no es autobiografía es plagio,” said Pío Baroja. Apart from autobiography, everything is a plagiarism.
My novel also discusses metafiction: fiction that deliberately draws attention to how it is constructed as fiction, i.e., its frame and its content.
A word like "cryptomnesia" is exactly the sort of word one knows but forgets that one knows until one is reminded that one used it in one's own metafictional novel. In underperforming itself in memory, then breaking out of the memory cage, the word performs its meaning.
"I see. You desire a catalog of all imaginary creatures from the dawn of time until the present day. From the ancient Greeks with their Minotaur to the Norsemen's All-Father." Dr. Flowers smiled, cherishing the absurdity of the request. "From the Fair Folk to the leprechauns. From the mermaids of the deep to the vampires of Serbia — "
— T. Baggins. Soulless. 2013.
“In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.”
— Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar. Monster Portraits. Brookline, Mass.: Rose Metal Press, 2018.
“Encyclopedias provide factual information, but they, like all texts, are authored, constructed so that subjects become captured. Things can be held under a magnifying glass one entry at a time, forever. Does that permanence give them a sort of truth that they are still existing? How, I wonder, does a writer account for the ways time is written into entries? Surely, definitions shift. Things change, and therefore so do meanings—but on the page, the words are impervious to adaptation, to learning. Maybe I can gain something from that sort of cataloguing now. After all, it was those books I went to so often back then, when I wanted to understand something.”
— Kristin Keane. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Baltimore: Barrelhouse, 2022. p. 33.
"We as a culture have been content to analyze melancholy and intellectualize depression since we had the words for either, and likely even before this walls were strewn with highbrow marks about some hunter’s lost prey. Not being above that, there is doubtless some desire to utilize academic means or the analytical part of me to understand why my brain seems to want to set itself on fire. However, knowing mere analysis will only lead to further analysis, some dimension had to present itself to disrupt that tendency. Thus, much of the work here has been rewritten, and unwritten in an atypical approach to nonfiction. I don’t think that I believe in nonfiction. Language is as subjective and impossible as depression itself, so I have not attempted to reach anything like objective truth. I've sought a means of transmission, and what remains of it in reception seems beyond my grasp. I have warped old journals and papers and rewritten them because that is depression to me, that is anxiety and addiction and the only true means I’ve found of escape is through, as the old poem goes. So through the documents, the feelings, the intellectualizing and not, the anger, the sorrow, the misery, the piss, the blood, the wasted days and weeks and months and lives in seas of ugly rotting sentiment, or sediment, the only means that seemed to make any sense was total inclusion, and abjection in turn."
— Grant Maierhofer. Peripatet. Inside the Castle, 2019. pp. 295 – 296 of PDF
"Ecologists have reoriented their field as a 'crisis discipline,' a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same."
— We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024
If these ideas interest you, you may want to know that I wrote a biography of a man with encyclopedia-writing tendencies. The book is Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.
On the unhappiness of the frustrated writer more generally
"...the part of my own book that I’m working on right now, which is about Selin in the first few years after college...
...why am I still writing about that? But my core belief is that that very avoidance is worthy of examination. I mean, so many people feel that way about their 20s—and at the earliest opportunity they escape it into the dignity of actual adulthood, a stable relationship, etc.; and then that has a way leading into parenthood (“I have way too much to think about now instead of just obsessing over my dumb self”)—and then their kids are in their 20s and then they can’t wait to not think about it anymore. So I want to think about it.
Anyway, for me (and Selin), the defining “problem” of those years was wanting so much to be a novelist, and having no idea how to do it. And that’s just what The Magician and Famesick are about, at least at the beginning: someone in their early 20s who desperately wants to be a writer/ artist, and can’t produce at the level of their desire, and has no clear career path or trajectory, and how bad it feels. And then there is the “relationships and sex” B-plot, which is also depressing, and becomes part of that same “unhappiness” that later they don’t take seriously.
I recently had coffee with one of my best friends from that time in my life, and she said, of our 20s, “Remember how unhappy we thought we were?” As if what we had then was only an idea of unhappiness—not actual unhappiness, which we didn’t know yet. And to an extent that is what it now feels like: like that was such an “innocent time.” But I don’t think this feeling now is more true than that feeling was then.
Recently I became aware that Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, is anti-transgender. (See his tweets.) I looked up more about him, and discovered that he'd co-authored a book with Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University of California Press, 2000).
The subtitle was more or less what I wanted to ask him: why do people say anti-transgender things?
So I bought a copy of the book. One of my takeaways is how he structured it.
Part I discusses "free speech and the nature of history." This includes chapters on "the freedom of speech that must be considered when dealing with Holocaust denial, and why we need to respond" and "the nature of history, the difference between history and pseudohistory, and ways of knowing that anything in the past happened," as well as whether it's possible to say that any statement about real-world events is more true than another.
Part II examines "the denial movement" itself, including "personalities and organizations" and "ideological and political motives and the larger social context" as well as "the flaws, fallacies, and failings in their arguments".
Part III looks specifically at "the three major foundations upon which Holocaust denial rests" while refuting those claims with "historical facts" and "show[ing] how we know that the Holocaust happened." One chapter is allocated to each of these false claims. They are "the claim that gas chambers and crematoria were used not for mass extermination but rather for delousing clothing and disposing of people who died of disease and overwork"; "the claim that the six million figure is an exaggeration by an order of magnitude"; and "the claim that there was no intention on the part of the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry and that the Holocaust was nothing more than an unfortunate by-product of the vicissitudes of war."
Part IV is a reframe. There, "we pull back to look at the bigger picture of Holocaust studies." Historians and the public do engage in "'history wars' in various fields," and these dialogues aren't the same as "what the Holocaust deniers are doing."
Hypothetically, if someone wanted to write a book about why people say anti-transgender things, this would be one way to organize it, yes? Maybe I'll do so. Or maybe you, dear reader, will do it first.
"The trans and nonbinary is the rejection of gender as an organizing apparatus for one's subjectivity. It is the refusal to be required to show up in the world on gendered grounds in order to show up in the world at all." (Dr. Marquis Bey, 19:37–19:50)
"Epistemological violence occurs when a researcher or somebody else interprets empirical results in a way that devalues, pathologizes or harms a marginalized group, even though there are equally good or better explanations for the same data. Science is always “under-determined,” a technical term that basically means there are always multiple possible ways to interpret a set of data. That’s where a lot of misinformation and oversimplification comes from, in that gap that's left. The idea of epistemological violence is that it's wrong to interpret data in a way that punches down on marginalized people. We should try to interpret the data in a way that's compatible with their inclusion and well-being, if that's an equally good interpretation. We shouldn't be cherry-picking the data to support prejudice and biased points."
— Florence Ashley, explaining the term epistemological violence to OpenMind, April 2024
Ashley continues:
"There is so much noise and misinformation that it's just hard to know even the most basic of facts. And because the problem of epistemological violence, it's not only difficult to find what the science says in terms of data, it’s difficult to interpret it on your own. We need journalists to do a better job and probe some of the basics of what people are saying. They’re legitimating a lot of anti-trans voice without really questioning the basis of their opinions, notably around claims that youth are being fast-tracked through medical transition. There's the other implied claim that if we take things slower, it's going to prevent potential regrets. We just published a review article in Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity where we find that there's no empirical or theoretical basis for that claim. The New York Times has been a particularly bad offender in that regard. For individuals, try to get information from a trans person who actually knows these issues."
Carl Jung:
“Even a scientist is a human being. So it is natural for him, like others, to hate the things he cannot explain. It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.” "Approaching the Unconscious" by Carl. G. Jung. Printed in Man and His Symbols. (ed. Jung). New York: Dell, 1964. p. 82.
On definitions:
Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure" was a talk she gave in San Francisco in 1983 and later revised to publish as an essay. "A 'closed text,'" she suggests, "is one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the 'open text,' meanwhile, all the elements of the work are maximally excited; here it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting) argument that they have taken into the dimension of the work." Whether a text has formal structure isn't the same as whether its meaning is open or closed. In fact, certain kinds of structures may help to open up the text.
Hejinian says:
"Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say. We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children. Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects—balls and rivers. Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes. They discover that words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them—a displacement producing a gap.
* * *
Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions. Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition."
Hil Malatino's Trans Care (2020): "I will never argue against the importance of articulating gender identity... But frustration persists, because whenever I articulate the spectrum, I brush up against the ineffable. ... The identities we claim, no matter how complex our list of modifiers, always seem to say both much more and much less than I'd like."
Scientists have spent decades trying to explain how on earth we understand so much when the words themselves say so little.
Sperber and Wilson put it this way: “Interpretation starts from a linguistic meaning that is fragmentary and incomplete.” We don’t hear a sentence and automatically grasp the message; rather, we hear it and our brain completes it, fills gaps, adds context, integrates our experience with the person and their non-verbal cues.
* * *
There is no 1-to-1 relationship between each sound and its meaning. There are countless words with multiple meanings and meanings that can be expressed with countless words. In other words: language is a many-to-many relationship, not 1-to-1.
Human language does not transmit exact definitions: it transmits clues.
"Shaqaman carries this further: a word is not a label glued onto an object. It is a compressed world — memory, culture, feeling, and concept folded into a single sound.
Every word carries more than definition.
It carries weather.
It carries history.
It carries the weight of how a people once looked at the river and decided what to call it.
This is why translation is never neutral. To move a word across languages is to move an ecosystem. Something always changes temperature in the crossing.
Gestalt processors feel this instinctively. A phrase is not a brick; it is a doorway with many rooms behind it.
Something else I'd add to a book on transgender epistemology is why cis people feel entitled to know facts about transgender people, including whether a specific person is trans at all.
"Complete and total strangers, acquaintances, and even friends don’t have a 'right' to know if someone is trans any more than they have a 'right' to know if someone has an 'innie' bellybutton or an 'outie' bellybutton, whether they have webbed feet, or whether they’re circumcised. These are personal matters that can be shared on a need-to-know basis. Are there situations where someone probably should tell another person that they’re trans? Absolutely. I can think of several. But 'you happen to work in the same office' is not one of them."
From a cisgenderist epistemological perspective, one might jump to asking: What are those hypothetical situations in which a trans person is obligated to disclose their identity to a cis person, or in which the cis person might be harmed if they don't?
But from a trans perspective, I'd dwell a bit more on the vastly greater number of situations in which no one has a right to know if you're trans, your transness doesn't hurt them, and you don't have to tell them.
Moving toward transgender epistemology is about making that shift in perspective, framing, and emphasis.
Moreover, why cis people should consider themselves experts:
There is, Julia Serano writes, a "false impression that cissexual 'experts' (whether academic or clinical) are capable of understanding transsexuality better than transsexuals themselves — an idea that is as problematic as suggesting that male 'experts' can understand womanhood better than women, or that heterosexual 'experts' can understand homosexuality better than gays and lesbians."
(Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, "Chapter 7: Pathological Science," first published 2007, 3rd edition published 2024.)
In the following chapter (Chapter 8: Dismantling Cissexual Privilege), Serano also notes that many cis people "assume that they are infallible in their ability to assign genders to other people," and so they "develop an overactive sense of cissexual gender entitlement. This goes beyond a sense of self-ownership regarding their own gender, and broaches territory in which they consider themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of which people are allowed to call themselves women or men."
Or, as Rachel Saunders wrote: "Gender critical beliefs are predicated on the notion that gender critics get to decide who is and is not worthy of womanhood...the whole gender critical project is the dismantling of the intersectional project using the patriarchal tools available to them." — Throwing down the gauntlet to gender critics, March 5, 2025
Add systems thinking too: seeing systems rather than the individuals within the systems.
Also, speaking of how we study the historical archive:
"How do we care for these traces of past lives that haunt us in ways that are loving, insofar as they offer a balm through providing evidence of past trans flourishing and joy, and terrifying, because they testify to the conditions of intensive violence that these subjects lived within and through? How do we care for these ghosts that take such care of us?"
— Hil Malatino (Trans Care, University of Minnesota Press, 2020)
Also: "We need to address what constrains care, what marks certain bodies and subjectivities as (un)deserving of it, and call attention to the epistemologies, systems, and technologies that contribute to such unjust apportioning, even as we must navigate them in order to get (some of) our needs met." (Malatino)
Also:
"Four principles to create a life-serving economy
* * *
#1: Be clear on the changes we seek
* * *
#2: Be accountable to someone else
* * *
#3: Find your people (human and otherwise)
* * *
#4: Move towards the light"
— from a March 22, 2024 email sent by B. Lorraine Smith
In that essay, she recommends B. George and Stacey Goguen's paper "Hermeneutical Backlash: Trans Youth Panics as Epistemic Injustice."
On what trans feminist philosophy can do, Ding says:
"to critique how we organize society and relate to each other"
"to imagine a better possibility of how we can live and flourish together"
"to articulate a way to get us there, and along the ride"
"to illuminate, affirm, and uplift lived trans and queer lives on our own terms, against political and social forces that seek to eradicate every last trace of our being."
For this formulation, Ding credits the work of Talia Mae Bettcher, Alison Jaggar, and Iris Marion Young.
"A surprise of being around police is how much they touch you. * * * The purpose of touching by police is to make persons touchable." — Mark Greif, "Seeing Through Police: The donut is equivocal," n+1, Issue 22 : Conviction, Spring 2015
Similarly, the purpose of debating trans people is to make trans people debatable.
On racism and epistemology
Charles Mills's 1997 "The Racial Contract" coins the term "epistemology of ignorance" to describe the way white supremacy structures (white, classically liberal) epistemology
"And not just the op-ed writers, but also regular [New York] Times reporters and even its investigative journalists who are usually held to a higher standard also struggled with the facts... As journalism, this was shocking for its ignorance. Not factual ignorance, where a reporter doesn't know something, or even object ignorance, where they were misinformed about it. It was what scholar Charles Mills (speaking of racism) termed epistemic ignorance: a deliberate not-knowing of freely available facts because to recognize them was politically inconvenient." — Riki Wilchins, Burn the Binary!, Vol 2
'Perpetual self-interrogation'
"Transition and detransition both present a kind of epistemic crisis. We accrete ideas of ourselves: of who we are, of how we exist in relation to the world, of the manners in which we behave, of the social groups within which we belong. To begin to question your gender (either assigned or asserted) is to feel the solid ground beneath you turn itself into quicksand, frantically scrambling for anything against which you can reorient and restabilize yourself. Internal transition is essentially a process of perpetual self-interrogation, as your psyche learns to metabolize the structures it’s been forced into adopting and develop a new self from the wreckage."
— Sam Barrett, Detrans Solidarity, or: Why The Damage Must Be Irreversible, eerie undertow, 07 Feb 2025
Standpoints may not be the most important consideration, but they do matter
"the entire culture around the bar, academia and the inherent design of the judiciary," says Vapor Wayve, shows that what we call the justice system, aka the injustice system, is "foundationally flawed/invalid".
People shouldn't go into jobs because they want to be rich and powerful.
Like if you've invented a job that most people who want it want on the basis that they want to be rich and powerful, you've invented a job that doesn't work even before you get into how judges are epistemological atrocities
I'm sorry but the rich do not actually have the suite of lived experience to possibly achieve a deontological outcome in the question of “should these poor people go into the slavery-and-tacitly-sanctioned-retributionary-rape box?” by consulting their case law and playing a solid game of word Tetris
I don't usually hold standpoint epistemology as a principle above all
But judges definitionally have the *worst* possible standpoints with which to be making decisions as judges, *if* we assume the intended output from this system is purely deontological outcomes
Garrett Graff, who wrote a book on Watergate, says (Sep 23, 2025): "We are watching a Watergate-level presidential scandal unfold basically every day — and they’re happening so quickly and so blatantly it’s nearly impossible to process. ... Watergate is best thought of not as an “event” but as a mindset, a criminal and conspiratorial posture ... I’ve often thought that the best way to think about Trump is similar, less events and more mindset — the core scandal of his administration is not any single action, it’s the mindset he brings to everything..."
January 2025: Government deleting science from government sites is epistemicide. Talia Bhatt, Bluesky
Another meaning of epistemicide is that trans people don't get a chance to talk to other trans people or learn from them at an early stage of coming out.
"We read sentences in a single flow of information, like a song played on a wind instrument, but life is layered, like a symphony. A faithful textual simulation of existence would require at least ten synchronous columns of scrolling text—one for emotions, one or two for conscious and subconscious thoughts, five for the main senses, and so on. When we convert experiences into words, we omit most of life, jumping between the parallel columns."
— Tao Lin, Substack note, Feb 19, 2025
Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract describes "an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made." There is widespread "white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race." The Racial Contract "requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity."
"...we could even minimize the distinction between word and object. Classical Hebrew makes no distinction between object, name, and idea. For example, the term for ‘word’ (dabar) can mean, at the same time, word, thing, matter, affair, action, deed, event, and so on. ... If there is no difference between the physical body of a dog, the word ‘dog’, and our mental image of a dog, the way we use the word ‘dog’ will necessarily have a huge impact on what a dog is." (Matt Fujimoto, A Rose By Any Other Name, Medium, Feb 16, 2025)
"Scientific consensus" is a "model." It has a "shared foundation," so it "exists for a reason." Yet we don't let it "harden into orthodoxy." We "doubt," and "it evolves." (Anna Dorn, Medium newsletter, April 24, 2025)
"A preschooler was placed in a room with a marshmallow and given a choice: eat it now, or wait a few minutes and receive two marshmallows instead...A child’s willingness to wait turned out to have less to do with innate self-control and more to do with trust. Kids who believed adults would keep their promises were more likely to wait. Kids from less stable backgrounds often took what they could while it was available. Choosing the marshmallow wasn’t a failure of character. It was a rational response to uncertainty shaped by experience...people are better able to summon self-control when they feel a sense of autonomy, interest, or purpose. Rather than a fixed trait or a limited resource, self-control may work more like a dynamic feedback system, helping us navigate shifting priorities and mental energy...What if self-control came less from trying harder, and more from designing lives that work with our natural drives?" — Anna Dorn, Medium Newsletter, May 1, 2025
Blake Shapiro uses Gatsby to talk about "a question about how reality and media work...the effect of over-saturation on our relationship to reality...our society is so inundated with representations that we can now only relate to the idea of things, rather than to the things themselves...even the most violent representations lose their force." This "goes back at least as far as Jacques Lacan — who, in Écrits, writes about the imago: that we relate to the idea of something, not the thing itself." [People who've never met a trans person relate to their idea of a trans person, not an actual trans person, and that is why they're anxious about trans kids, because they don't know one.] Also, consider "what Jacques Derrida calls ‘iterability’ — essentially a sophisticated version of the idea that, once a person says something, their words can be taken out of context." ["Trans women are women," perhaps.] "the ‘idea’ of Gatsby calcifies, and it becomes harder and harder not to butt up against it when we try to connect to the novel...this happens, to some extent, with all ‘classics’ — but Gatsby is the ur-case. The result of this distance between us and the text, is that the accepted meaning of Gatsby becomes vaguer and vaguer — approaching what is sometimes termed an ‘empty signifier.’" ['Trans' becomes an ur-case of a word that means whatever you want it to mean.] It's "the potential fate of any and every concept...The easier it becomes to hang concepts like ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ in a gallery of machine-generated memes, the harder it becomes to have a rigorous and genuine engagement with them." [When you who are not trans and do not know a trans person are meming about 'trans', the very act of your meming will make it harder to have a rigorous engagement.] ‘The Great Gatsby’ turns 100: How old is our mass-cultural crisis? Blake Shapiro, Medium, May 3, 2025
"... to have a mental model (or ‘schema’) of a person in our minds we have to know them. ... If we don’t know the person at all, it [what fills the blank in our knowledge] is probably all stereotype, which is unlikely to be particularly useful.
* * *
But let’s take a breath and think about precisely what it is they’re objecting to: They are objecting to a lens by which another group of human beings can be perceived as human beings. Bigotry, including transphobia, is characterised by the intransigent belief that people’s lived reality is subordinate to the bigot’s assumptions about them."
— Catriona Faolain, Trans People are Hard to Understand: What’s this empathy thing all about?, Medium, August 2, 2025
Anita Naidu asks:
"Who frames the narrative?
Who gets trusted to define the crisis?
And whose knowledge is seen as explanatory—not just illustrative?
"...Eagleton looks at both micro and macro issues of criticism. The first chapter looks at opening lines, paragraphs, scenes on the micro-level: ambiguities of language, sounds, syntax, word choice, etc. After this introduction, he zooms out to the macro level spending a chapter each on Character, Narrative, Interpretation and Value." — a review of How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton
When I read the recent Star article about researchers “decoding autism” with “artificial intelligence,” I was struck by the weight of its language: the framing of autism as an enigma to solve, a mystery to decode. The article celebrated technology’s supposed ability to catalogue and interpret autistic behaviours as though it were a grand discovery.
* * *
The parallels between Kirk’s lexicon and the modern quest to “decode” autism are glaring. Both efforts stem from a position of power—outsiders observing a community they do not belong to, misunderstanding it, and flattening it into terms that fit their worldview. ... labelled as “deficits” or “aberrations,” their richness and complexity erased by algorithms that fail to capture the depth of what they seek to “decode.”
Both efforts share a reductive, colonial logic: the belief that outsiders are best positioned to interpret and define the lives of those they observe. Whether it’s the language of a people or the behaviours of a neurodivergent community, these projects strip away context, autonomy, and nuance, replacing them with frameworks that serve the outsider’s agenda. The result is not understanding, but appropriation—a theft of meaning that elevates the observer at the expense of those being observed.
how quickly the frameworks I was reading—borderlands, nepantla, mestiza consciousness—began to illuminate a different struggle unfolding much closer to home: the current backlash against Gestalt Language Processing and Natural Language Acquisition.
That backlash is often framed as a technical dispute. A disagreement over evidence. A methodological quarrel. A question of “rigour.” This framing is neat, familiar, and profoundly misleading. What is happening is not a neutral scientific debate about best practice. It is a conflict over who gets to define language, whose coherence counts, and which ways of knowing are allowed to exist without translation into institutional norms. In other words, it is epistemic.
One option: We may quit trying to define "good" in the abstract, thus dropping the question of moral epistemology, and just focus on improving human life.
The good, perhaps, is something we do.
What is the extraordinary?
"What’s your extraordinary? Have you invited them in? Whose behaviours can you copy to be more welcoming to this extraordinary?" — How To Do Extraordinary Things: A quick briefing for ordinary folks like us, B. Lorraine Smith, December 20, 2024
The extraordinary, perhaps, is something we welcome in.
Who gets to decide?
"...as feminist philosopher Carol Hay put it in a 2019 New York Times column: “Any attempt to catalog the commonalities among women… has the inescapable result that there is some correct way to be a woman”. The scary question then becomes: who gets to decide what that is?"
— Emily Herring, Trans People Deserve Better: "Gender critical" feminism doesn't help women but it does help the far right, Well-Read Herring, November 17, 2025
Podcast episode, Chet'la Sebree on the Slowdown: "It's human nature to want to know for oneself, not only to trust in the knowledge of others. It’s human nature to want to make decisions for oneself, not only to trust in the decisions of others. It’s human nature to want to see for oneself, firsthand, not mediated by others."
“Write what you know about what you don't know.” — playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly)
"And yes, it is easier to not have been a musician in the room, which allows me, now, to still be deeply moved by hearing the first few bars of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” played tens of times, repeatedly, while Wilson shouts out random take numbers and bursts of encouragement or gentle but firm direction (“Hal! Hal! HERE’S how I want to do it!”) but I remain moved because it is a portrait of a person, in a room of musicians, saying I care about this. I want to make something beautiful. I need you to believe in me. I need you to follow me to a place, and I don’t even know what that place is yet.
It is a document of a person not apologizing for how they hear the world, or not demanding that everyone in their presence hear the world in the same way that they do, but asking how, through close and nuanced attention, the gap can be closed between our collective differences in hearing. Piece by piece. By drum, by bass, by clarinet. Each instrument gets the generosity of attention in needs to find a place to land, a place to live.
By this I mean to say that to press your ear to the world and hear sounds that you cannot articulate to others as clearly or definitively as you would like is, yes, a kind of torture. To be at least partially untranslatable to the people around you is a kind of torture. And to overcome that torture and to extract, from it, an immense beauty, doesn’t necessarily offer a relief. To hone in on Wilson’s life as this heavily torturous path doesn’t, for me, tell the full story of what it is to feel lonely, to feel misunderstood. To have an incredible gift that others do not understand but still want to access, or take from you to enrich themselves."
See this, which may help in understanding the trans question. As I see it: There is potential for feminism if women participate in discourse on the woman question. There is potential for trans empowerment, liberation, and dignity if trans people are participating in the trans question.
Erin Maglaque [interviewed by Chandler Fritz]: The exclusion of radical religious writing from the feminist canon is also an issue of genre. When intellectual historians look for a developing feminist consciousness in premodern writing, they often turn to a genre known as the querelle des femmes: texts by both women and men engaged in a debate about the nature of women, their capabilities, whether it was right to educate them. Writers in this genre (like Christine de Pizan, for example, who is sometimes regarded as one of the first feminist authors) often attacked the misogynistic tropes common in the literature of their own time.
One of my interests is in mapping feminism before the canon existed, in looking outside of the genres, like the querelle des femmes, that have typically been associated with feminist or proto-feminist writing. Does feminism have to cohere into a literary canon or an organized political program to exist? The work of Anne Wentworth, one of these radical women, is an important source for thinking about feminism before modernity. In her autobiographical Vindication (1677), she argued that marriage was blinding; her society valued marriage so highly that her neighbors didn’t bother to try to understand what was happening behind one another’s closed doors. Most afternoons I take my son to the playground after school, and when I talk with other mothers, I sometimes hear an echo of Wentworth’s complaint about the silencing effects of marriage.
In her book The Right to Sex, the feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes that feminism asks us: “What would it be to end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women?” You do not need the guardrails of genre to ask and answer that question (though it can help, of course). That is the question that Wentworth asked about her own abusive marriage—and marriage as an institution. It is the question I hear asked of marriage in my own conversations with women, and it places us all within a long, genre-defying history of feminist critique.
— Interview in the New York Review of Books, emailed to subscribers, March 21, 2026
"Most trans fiction is apocalyptic fiction. Even my little slice of life book, Reverse Tomboy, is apocalyptic fiction. You probably didn’t realize it, but it is. There are two types of apocalyptic fiction. One is about the lead up to and potential survival of an apocalypse. The other is about living after an apocalypse has taken place, in the afterwards, in ruins. Sometimes the story is hopeful: what new world can be born from the ashes of the old? Other times, the story is about surviving for as long as you can in a dead world. It is often unclear to the protagonists which of these two latter options they are in. Sometimes it depends not on the viability of the world, but on the capacity of the protagonist to adjust to it. Sometimes a new world is being born, but it is one where the protagonist decides they’ve no place. Other times the world is dying, but for the first time ever the protagonist has found a place where they can fit in, among the ashes. All of these can be trans narratives. The best trans authors know this. Maybe the best apocalyptic ones do too, though I doubt it. Last year Torrey Peters told me that she was watching The Leftovers as inspiration. A few years before that, we briefly discussed our mutual love of Let The Right One In. Both are apocalyptic tales, although one much more obviously so. You see, all trans narratives are apocalyptic, and all apocalyptic stories can be trans allegories." Unstuck In Gender: The Experience of Trans Apocalypse: On experiencing transition as apocalypse, Auto_Anon, May 11, 2026
"In 2018, medical researchers announced the discovery of a new organ. Not buried deep in some inaccessible corner of the body, but everywhere — a vast network of fluid-filled connective tissue cushioning every organ, threading through every muscle, present in every human being who has ever lived. It is called the interstitium.
As is the case with most “discoveries”, the interstititum was nothing new – it had been there all along. The reason it had never been seen was that the technique used to prepare tissue for the microscope — fixing, slicing, staining — drained the fluid, making it invisible. Ironically, the very act of trying to make the tissue visible destroyed the thing that needed to be seen.
We think narrative infrastructure has a similar problem.
* * *
Carnival is all-encompassing. Trinidad’s carnival belongs to everyone. It spills into the street, the neighborhoods, and practically every sector of society. It is, in the truest sense, immersive — an unavoidable, multi-layered experience that touches social relationships, identity, and the very rhythm of daily life.
* * *
And of course, carnival does not just happen. Behind the spectacle lies an infrastructure — the bands, the schools, the costume workshops, the sound systems, the traditions passed across generations, the institutional knowledge held in communities, and much more. Without that infrastructure, there is no carnival. The music does not move, the costumes do not get made, the streets do not fill.
Narrative infrastructure works the same way. It is what makes the immersion possible. It is what allows a new story, once created, to travel — to be amplified, reappropriated, and ultimately absorbed into the common sense of a society.
"Seneca believed...arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the mind's weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style."
Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, Vintage Books, 2000. p 92.
"The magic of words still remains for me. I prefer them to ideas."
Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht, quoted by Ron Powers, in The Beast, the Eunuch, and the Glass-Eyed Child. New York: Anchor Books, 1990. p xvii.
"Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in the types and images. It (the world) will not receive it in any other fashion."
Gospel of Philip
"I realized that only in music could I find the answer I was seeking to the questions of the previous evening. Argument I could follow, it weighed with me, yet I could decide nothing from it. "
Fred Hoyle. October the First is Too Late. Connecticut: Fawcett, 1966, 1968. p 156.
"Walking is the clearest way for me to participate in life, I think, and that’s the best I can do."
Lizzy Stewart, Walking Distance, Avery Publishing, 2019. Excerpted as
An Ode to Women Who Walk,
From Virginia Woolf to Greta Gerwig on LitHub, November 21, 2019.
"But I think everyone should have a little philosophy, Thomas said. It helps, a little. It helps. It is good. It is about half as good as music."
Donald Barthelme. The Dead Father. New York: Pocket Books, 1975. p 76.
"The process is hidden, but the input and output are very clear, and as AI will say “I’m only here for you” – aww, very cute! Very esoteric! But also very political… These you can find in the black box. Nadim Samman speaks about these black boxes, but also black sites and holes in Poetics of Encryption. I cannot dare to imagine a black site, which is a physical space but hidden, inaccessible infrastructures, where some CERN ritual kind of occult event lives, as a giant portal of energy. Because we already know tech people like Blake Lemoine and Ilya Sutskever are into cybermagick – “Feel the AGI!” – full-blown silicon demon vibes. I like that little idea of mine, call it occult dreaming – signs, intuition, or just happy crisis conspiracy mass-psychotic thinking because the world is burning, prices are burning, towns are burning, people are burning, living hell, as a medieval kind of tech where witchcraft equals hell breaking loose (dansk: lig med bål og brand), literally lig (corpse) bål og brand (bonfire/fire), as Helena Blavatsky will say “Error runs down an inclined plane, while Truth has to laboriously climb its way up hill.” And for the black hole, the total Lovecraftian epistemic collapsed. Not the revolutionary collapse I’ve had in mind…"
If you'd like to learn more about my work, read my books.
Actual cathedrals of learning
“Oxford made me,” Jan Morris says in her memoir Conundrum, speaking of her first boarding school, her undergraduate years, and adult home. She is speaking of transcendent purpose embodied in a physical place. “I know its fault too well,” she admits, but “it remains for me nevertheless, in its frayed and battered integrity, an image of what I admire most in the world: a presence so old and true that it absorbs time and change like light into a prism, only enriching itself by the process, and finding nothing alien except intolerance.” She adds: “For near the heart of the Oxford ethos lies the grand and comforting truth that there is no norm. We are all different; none of us is entirely wrong; to understand is to forgive.”
She was brought as a child to “the cathedral of Christ Church, Oxford.” She says:
“Every day for five years, holidays apart, I went to service there, and its combination of architecture, music, pageantry, literature, suggestion, association, and sanctity powerfully affected my introspections. I knew that building almost as I knew my own home…An ancient holy building is conducive to secrets, and my secret became so intermingled with the shapes, sounds, and patterns of the cathedral that to this day, when I go back there to evensong, I feel an air of complicity.”
Similarly, Judith Shulevitz:
"He [Paul de Man] and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the critics of the Yale School (Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hills Miller, Harold Bloom) had revealed the volatile core of instability and indeterminacy lurking underneath every philosophical assertion, every scientific method, every work of literature. Nothing we’d learned (we learned) meant what it claimed to mean. All texts were allegories of their own blindness. They glossed over the unthinkable. Our job was to think it for them. We would turn rhetoric against literature and literature against everything else, and come up with something cold and pure and undeluded.
All this gave me an unusually palpable sense of purpose. I was a mole burrowing under the foundations of the tottering edifice of Knowledge. I hung out in the underground undergraduate library, so much uglier and friendlier than the classics library, all bright lights and stale air and soft-cushioned sectional sofas, and read the authors of the new canon: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rousseau, Freud, Baudelaire."
"Universities have a fondness for these structures, which sometimes, as with the University of London's Senate House, impractically and overheatingly house libraries. Berkeley's Sather Tower, a campanile whose carillon still plays regularly, houses fossils of animals retrieved from the tar pits of California, as though to figure the transformation of life into stone and then stone into the second life of knowing. When I first visited the University of Pittsburgh I thought the name 'Cathedral of Learning' given to the 160-metre (535-ft) structure that dominates the campus must be an affectionate joke. But that indeed has been its official name since the first class was held in it in 1931. It is in fact only the fourth tallest educational building in the world, after the main building of the Moscow State University, the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower in Tokyo (so named because its curved shape, resembling a bud, seed or pair of praying hands, suggests a nurturing structure for those it contains) and the helical Mode Gakuen Spiral Towers in Nagoya."
Differentiating "women's knowledge" from the default knowledge that men have
A comment by Ursula LeGuin.
"So I began to think: If I’m a woman, why am I writing books in which men are at the center and primary, and women are marginal and secondary — as if I were a man?
Because editors expect me to, reviewers expect me to.
* * *
I didn’t know how. It took me a while to learn. And it was other women who taught me. The feminist writers of the sixties and seventies. The women authors of older generations, who’d been buried by the masculinist literary establishment and were rediscovered, celebrated, reborn in books like The Norton Anthology of Women Writers. And my fellow fiction writers, mostly younger than I, women writing as women, about women, in defiance of the literary old guard and the genre old guard too. I learned courage from them.
But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior — women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light.
But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
* * *
We’ve lived long enough in the dark. We have an equal right to daylight, an equal right to learn and teach reason, science, art, and all the rest."
Edward Said wrote in Orientalism: "Flaubert felt in the Orient, first, that ‘the more you concentrate on it [in detail] the less you grasp the whole,’ and then, second, that ‘the pieces fall into place of themselves.’ …this was an epistemological difficulty for which, of course, the discipline of Orientalism existed."
Reification
Saskia Vogel:
A book as an object seems so absolute, so fixed, hallowed and concrete. I’ve come to think of this as a sort of intrusive thought. I acknowledge it, and hope the thought will leave me alone. I prefer to think of a text as a transmission and a book as something that pulps in water.
The idea of the hallowed book has its origin in my early education and perhaps in my early years as a reader, in awe of books and what they hold. Perhaps also in my writing ambitions: how does a person write a book good enough for it to be published? For a long time, these questions ran alongside ideas of 'perfection.' But nothing is perfect. And the more I think about literature, the less I need it to meet any sort of ideal or expectation. I’m most interested in how a book will spring to life inside a reader, how they will carry it with them and pass it on. The life the book lives without me."
"The female fig wasp burrows into the male fig, called the caprifig, and the process, in turn, is called caprification, when she lays eggs and those eggs hatch. The hatchlings are blind, flightless males and young females. They have incestuous sex. The now pregnant female wasps, the ones Aristotle and Theophrastus call psenes, burst out of the skin of the caprifig and go off to burrow anew into other figs. Both erroneously thought this was a kind of spontaneous wasp generation, but to be fair the actual mechanism is hard to discern such that the biology of it is still a topic now.
The female fig needs to be pollinated to fruit. Bees can’t do this, nor wind, because the inverted flower is sealed up inside itself. So sometimes a female wasp doesn’t crawl into a male fig, where she can lay eggs. Sometimes she crawls into a female fig, where she starves and dies, but in the process pollinates the inverted flower, which can then fruit. The body of the wasp is absorbed by the growing flesh of the fig. You do eat it, in a sense, but you wouldn’t know if I hadn’t told you.
This is called commensalism, a form of parasitism in which the parasite doesn’t actively harm the host. More properly, it’s even a mutualism, dead wasps and male fig husks aside, because the fig and the wasp need each other to reproduce." (pp. 5–6)
It goes on:
"Criticism is a mutualism as parasites like me go, or at least a commensalism, pollinating novels to make more novels; Winckelmann’s halls of beautiful young men in Greek sculpture making the hot breath of living beautiful young men into bildungsroman, which in turn end up in marble of their own. The critical gaze is tearing apart, clawing into the soft central flesh of the tree bud. (p. 7)
It’s a sexual reproductive process, yet “somehow queer. Criticism, too, is queer in this way, generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge." (p. 7)
To reveal the reason why I'm referencing this metaphor here, I must show this comment too:
"You don’t become a fig wasp on the flanks of the neoclassical tradition without having inhabited it, parasitized it yourself first as practice. This is an education. You tell yourself you are Achilles (or sometimes, Patroclus), you rationalize your world with these models, themselves parasitic on a tradition that you did not yourself make. You learn to be by being them, by pushing into them and unfolding your wet wings." (p. 8)
Otherwise, you might find yourself not the parasite, but the host:
"This is what happens when you get too close to art, undiluted, when criticism isn’t there. It lays its eggs in you. It breeds. It becomes your first kiss, your first lover, your first experience of everything before you even open your eyes. It is there, coursing along in your blood like a pleasing contaminate you can’t ever filter out. ... You contemplate, at some point, if you are merely somebody else’s, a dead author’s perhaps, a psen, laid in the fig of a book." (p. 12)
The Outside Folds In
Erik Davis in High Weirdness:
...psychogenic networks stage the 'production of interiorities,' and they do so precisely by crossing inside and outside. In his account of indigenous spiritual beings, Latour declares that such entities 'are no longer representations, imaginings, phantasms projected from the inside toward the outside; they unquestionably come from elsewhere, they impose themselves.' Here the 'inside' of subjectivity appear as an uncanny fold of the outside, a site where the exteriority of signs and of a-signifying forces impress themselves within.
Lacan coined a marvelous term for this fold: extimacy (extimité), a portmanteau of exterior and intimacy. Extimacy is the intimate other, the unconscious that intrudes from the outside.
Omnology
One might want to study everything broadly. Howard Bloom calls it "'omnology,' a field dedicated to the most zoomed-out cross-disciplinary search for knowledge." For most people, however, this is generally not a reasonable or useful goal. You can't build a beautiful cathedral out of Anything and Everything.
Megalogue
Veering in another direction, one might have a hyperfocused interest in just one subject and hope that everyone else wants to discuss the same thing. Amitai Etzioni calls this a "megalogue." Among "moral megalogues," as he wrote in 2009, "Recent issues have included the legitimacy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and whether gay couples can legally marry. In earlier decades, women's rights and minority rights were topics of such discussions. Megalogues involve millions of members of a society exchanging views with one another at workplaces, during family gatherings, in the media, and at public events. They are often contentious and passionate, and, while they have no clear beginning or endpoint, they tend to lead to changes in a society's culture and its members' behavior." James M. Gustafson said that "participation in a serious moral dialogue moving toward consensus is more important than the consensus itself...[because] participation in moral discourse deepens, broadens, and extends [people's] capacity to make responsible moral judgments."
Data bank
A more modern idea is that a giant data trove of beliefs and thoughts could be used to reconstruct a human personality and give it life inside a robot. This is a bit different from the idea of a cathedral, because, while a building designed for worship pays homage to a larger tradition, a personality data bank pays homage only to oneself.
Architecture as attitude
"...I tell people what they don’t want to hear with a hood punk doll aesthetic. When I think about my aesthetic, I think about architecture. In some ways, when it comes to my personal style, architecture inspires me almost as much as music does. When I think about what I want to communicate through my style, I think about open concept spaces. I think expansive, liberated, present and I’m drawn to wear things that make me feel big, expanded, and beyond societal expectations that fit within a container to make people most comfortable." — Bunny McKensie Mack, quoted in "Everything And More: On the Makings of Bunny McKensie Mack," by Tempestt Hazel, May 18, 2022, Sixty Inches From Center
Another association with 'cathedral'
"Longtime readers will be familiar with Curtis Yarvin, who blogged for years as Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin founded neoreactionism AKA the Dark Enlightenment, a political movement popular among certain tech circles. Neoreactionism calls for the fall of democracies and a return to monarchy and aristocracy. Shockingly, neoreactionaries believe that new aristocracy should come from tech and business. Yarvin's writing fixates on the power of the so-called 'Cathedrals': media, academia, and government institutions which he and his followers believe shape public opinion and rule America. (It's worth noting that Yarvin's parents were government civil servants.)"
— Vance-Thiel-Yarvin 2024: The Neoreactionary Dream Team. From JD Vance to Project 2025, how Peter Thiel and a guy who wants the US to be a monarchy (really!) are driving Trump’s MAGA agenda. Melissa Ryan. July 21, 2024.
A. V. Marraccini. We The Parasites. Seattle, Wash.: Sublunary Editions, 2023.
Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019. 2.3.0: Experiments.
"Grand Inquisitor" by Nando Pelusi, on the work of Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. Psychology Today, January/February 2008, p. 41.
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
"Get Rich Now." Amitai Etzioni. Excerpted from The New Republic (June 17, 2009). Reprinted in UTNE Reader (Jan-Feb 2010), p. 41.
James M. Gustafson. "The Church: A Community of Moral Discourse." in The Church as Moral Decision-Maker (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1970), pp. 83-95. Quoted in James Calvin Davis. In Defense of Civility: How Religion Can Unite America on Seven Moral Issues that Divide Us. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. pp. 168-169.
