I have been quiet lately. There is too much noise, and I have little desire to add to it right now (surely this won’t last). But also, because I am in catch-up mode. I will be sharing a new zine very soon and will no doubt make a noise about that when the time comes. In the meantime, here is a brief note about what’s keeping me busy elsewhere.
Three years ago or so, my MA tutor, Daniel Rubinstein, recommended I read Wittgenstein when I told him that language was the thing I was most interested in. I baulked at the idea, since as far as I was concerned, Wittgenstein was all logic and some foreign thing called analytic philosophy…not at all for me. Or so I thought. Alongside his books [edit: his book, singular, and other writing] and books about him, I am using an LLM to guide me through the basics, and it turns out I rather like the grumpy guy. I said this was going to be short, and it will be… I am still not entirely confident to talk about what I am finding useful but, in the meantime, while scooting about the internet looking for lectures, I came across Jane Taylor’s (UCTV, 2020) talk: On Uncertainty: Wittgenstein: Habits of Thought and Thoughts of Habit, where she considers ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein’s paper, On Certainty, in which the philosopher engages with the taken-for-granted in everyday thought. In our contemporary context of the precarious, on one hand, and the political vehemence of conviction, on the other, it seems timely to pay attention to the faltering and tentative mode of regard and thought of one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic thinkers.’
And here is the related paper.
I am very sorry not to have discovered Jane Taylor before she died in 2023. She’s so worth listening to and reading.
Earlier this year, before finding the wonderful Taylor, I posted something on IG about being OK with not knowing, where I cited New Yorker journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus (2026) for saying the same. I find the absolute conviction that everyone speaks with, the ease with which so many resort to critique rather than listening and contemplation, difficult. Everyone today is a critic. Of course, it is not merely or only down to social media. Writing in 1935, Walter Benjamin (2015) suggests that human contact mediated via or interrupted by an apparatus (the camera in his day; in ours, the smartphone or desktop computer) makes us resort first and foremost to critique. He states, ‘… the film actor […] does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed’ (my italics). And arguably, or perhaps apparently, not at all conducive to listening or empathy.
Since I am sharing stuff, here is another link, a podcast which I had sent to a friend who told me how valuable she found it; Joan Williams: How the left lost the working class. Williams asks for empathy to be extended beyond one’s own tribe.
I will be back with more on Wittgenstein, no doubt soon, in which I hope to say more than ‘What a guy!’ (So sorry, Günther Anders! (1956)) Although probably not before a new lexicon post on pattern. Till then.
Anders, G. (1956). The obsolescence of man, vol I, part 2: The world as phantom and as matrix: philosophical considerations on radio and television – Günther Anders | libcom.org. Translated by J.M. Pérez. Available at: https://libcom.org/article/obsolescence-man-vol-i-part-2-world-phantom-and-matrix-philosophical-considerations-radio (Accessed: 25 June 2025).
Benjamin, W. (2015). Illuminations. Edited by H. Arendt. Translated by H. Zorn. London: The Bodley Head Ltd.
Lewis-Kraus, G. (2026) ‘What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either’, The New Yorker, 9 February. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude-anthropic-doesnt-know-either (Accessed: 26 May 2026).
Joan Williams: How the Left Lost the Working Class (2025). Available at: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/joan-williams-how-left-lost-working-class (Accessed: 26 May 2026).
University of California Television (UCTV) (2020) On Uncertainty: Wittgenstein: Habits of Thought and Thoughts of Habit. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXONvpL2S40 (Accessed: 26 May 2026).