Premissive Philosophy

This page is the whole project in one place: what I have been working on, what it is all one question about, and where in it you might want to stand.

The Through-Line

Everything here is one question asked in different rooms. What happens to a person’s ability to see, say and do when something stands between them and the world?

Early on I asked it about discourse - about what happens to a claim when you follow it back to the person making it. That is the manuscript below, and it is the oldest part.

Lately I have been asking it about machines. What a camera does to a witness, what a file does to a decision, what a model does to a picture. It is the same question. The mediation just got harder to see, and much better funded.

Where It Started

Between 2021 and 2023 I wrote a system, at length, in public. The claim was that nothing worth saying about people can be said without pointing back at the person saying it - and that if you take this seriously it changes what counts as an argument, what counts as a correction, and what you owe the person you are talking to.

I stand by a great deal of that and by no means all of it. What has held up is the method: state your premises, publish what would refute you, and correct in the open. What has not is the confidence. It reads like a young man building armour, because it was.

It is background now rather than the front of the work. But it is the reason the rest is shaped the way it is, and it is all still here, uncut.

Where It Is Now

Four things, at different stages.

Machine vision and political life. What kind of seeing a machine does, and what happens to a public when that seeing gets involved in it. This is the long one and it is not finished.

Bureaucracy and AI as the same kind of thing. A bureau standardises what people do - rules, files, procedures, and a public face that is not the procedure. A model standardises what people see - archives, weights, and an output that looks like a picture of something. Read side by side they are one apparatus wearing two coats, and neither of them lets you look inside.

Propaganda after the image stopped being evidence. A photograph used to be a trace of a thing that happened. When an image is generated rather than recorded, the chain from the picture back to the world is cut - and a great deal of political argument was quietly resting on that chain.

Communication when there is too much of it. It has always been easier to say something than to say something true, and cheaper to flood a channel than to correct it. What that does to people who are trying, in good faith, to work out what is going on.

What I Read Toward

Not a bibliography, just the company the work keeps. Arendt and Habermas on what a public needs in order to be one. Dewey on experience and on the public as a problem rather than a given. Peirce on signs and on inquiry as something a community does rather than a person. Foucault and Weber on the apparatus. Simondon on technical objects. Barthes and Bergson on the image and on time. Hegel and Marx underneath most of it.

I read badly in public sometimes. If you catch it, tell me - it is the fastest way this changes.

Where to Walk In

Ten minutes and no more: Start Here, which gives the claim, an example, and what I am not saying.

The argument itself: the System below, Preamble only, then stop. If it doesn’t land there it won’t land later, and you will have saved yourself a great deal of time.

It in use: the videos, most of which now carry a transcript.

An argument about it: the Refutations below, and then Corrections, which is where that goes.

Something short: the Papers at the top of the Sprawl.

The Sprawl

Everything written, laid out for dissection. The named documents in each section are load-bearing; what sits under also here clarifies them, and what is folded under workshop is apparatus rather than argument.

Believe nothing written here. Only if you can practice it might you begin to believe it.