Thread by @deontologistics

So, I've gained ~500 followers since New Year, and I'm glad so many of you have decided to join me on this journey exploring the limits of Twitter as a philosophical medium. I didn't really realise what I was doing when I came back here, and it's evolving in ways I didn't expect.

What started as a way to just get myself thinking again as I regained functionality after a long convalescence has unexpectedly turned into something strange and worth pursuing in a more systematic and rigorously experimental fashion. I've got ideas, but I'll air them in time.

For now it's worth admitting that I'm accidentally writing a small book on Laruelle in response to a twitter poll and that I should probably approach it as such. I still don't know quite what it will be, as I only let myself think about it in short bursts, but I'm excited to see.

When I say I didn't want to do this, I'm being completely sincere. This is the option I didn't want, because in my head it was the one that required the most work. If you haven't noticed I write in a very defensive way, which carefully circles a topic (at length) before pouncing.

This defensiveness is one of the things that has made it hard for me to generate publications. Though I can be extremely productive under the right circumstances, this involves a conversational orientation that I find impossible when writing for anonymous peer reviewers.

I'm optimised for dialogue, and I can simulate it monologically, but not when I don't have a mental model of the adversarial filter I need to get past. I've talked about this at some length and my related problems with mental health elsewhere (deontologistics.wordpress.com/2017/12/22/tra…).

Twitter fits the shape of my brain, because it's dialogue all the way down, even when it's largely dialogue with myself. People might wonder why my threads go on for so long, or why they loop back on themselves in such maddening ways, and the answer is it's for me, not for you.

I'm absolutely delighted that people can follow some of the twisty process whereby I interactively unravel the integrated philosophical system I've been building in my mind for the last decade, but I know it can be a bit much, and I really don't expect everyone to keep track.

For me, this is a writing machine, that gets the thoughts out of my brain in a really pleasantly structured fashion, but the outputs will be sifted, compiled, refactored, and revised eventually and outputted in other ways. This is philosophy in process, not in product.

The interactive nature of this process is important to me, but it's also important that I do it in a way that doesn't overload people or otherwise inconvenience them. If you've got suggestions for how I can do this better, or just need to tune me out now and again, that's fine.

You guys are an important part of the process, and I take that quite seriously, because I'm using you to discover what I think about different topics, how these thoughts hang together, and to experimentally compress them into tighter and tighter expressive outbursts.

Anyway, if you're wondering what's going on with the Laruelle thread, there's a meta-thread pinned to my account that functions as a 'contents page' that I'm updating as the object-thread expands. There are two new sections that haven't been added yet, but they'll be up soon.

I know have a bit of a rough idea of the whole thing, where it's going, and what it needs to encompass, but I'm really trying to plan it out as little as possible, because the disinhibition involved in picking up where I left off and rolling on is very useful for me.

So, it'll be done when it's done, which will take as long as it takes, but I'll let you know when it's finished, and then maybe it'll get reformatted and refactored into another form? @charloselsenor2's valiant attempt to read the thread over on instagram has given me some ideas.

There'll be time to talk about those later. For now, just know that I keep getting sucked into the Twitterscape because I'm having an inordinate amount of fun, and I really just want you guys to have fun too. If I ever fuck up that dynamic, let me know, and I'll try to unfuck it.

Till then: 🖖 to you all.