Books and papers I’m reading recently

3/8/2025

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1965.

It should be categorized along with Foucault’s other books I have systematically read recently, which The Order of Things (1966) help me understand how the conception of men was historically constructed, till Madness and Civilisation demonstrates particularly how madness and modern psychiatry was constructed. Most significantly is the methodology of genealogy, for my project, rather than tracing the pure origin of Neurodiversity, I’d prefer to reveal how they are formed in specific power relations and contingent events and how subjects of neurodivergent are shaped, helping me to identify the real issues nestle under those superficial problems like stigmatisation or medical model in today’s context. Example of genealogy: How were the concepts we talk about today, such as ADHD, autism, and neurotypical invented? Under what social circumstances did they become “problems” or “identities”? And how the Neurodiversity discourse separates precisely such a group of people who are different from neurotypicals?

Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995.

This book is a foundational text in disability studies, it demonstrates the concpet of normalcy was historically invented, and “nolmal” is a normative standard that marginalizes anyone who does not conform, particularly people with disabilities. Davis lays the groundwork for understanding disability not as an individual problem, but as a social and political issue. And what intrigues me most is that he claims a powerful discussion on Deaf culture, the Deaf prefer call themselves as linguistic minority and earn for their own culture and politic status. As for neurodivergent, it seems also necessary to find and build new linguistic and social practice. Besides, how he uses genealogy and postsructuralist ideas is also worth learning.

*Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313. *

Technically this paper is decolonial study, Spivak claims that Colonialism, through its body of knowledge (anthropology, history, etc.), constructed colonised peoples as “others” and in the process erased traces of their own subjectivity. But I think that’s exactly what’s happening in the discourse of normalcy and neurodiversity, letting me ask: Who is writing psychology textbooks? Who is designing educational systems? Who is creating corporate HR policies? Who is portraying autism or ADHD in the media? In the vast majority of cases, it is neurotypical groups that have stronger executive functions and are better adapted to existing social structures. Thus, the “history” of neurodiversity has long been one of pathology and observation written by others, full of “case studies” and “behavioural analyses”, but lacking in their own voice and perspective. Their own voices and perspectives are missing.

Burning Constellation

1/6/2025

So the siren’s song has faded, or at least I’ve learned its treacherous key. The pages are no longer just soaked with a hidden heart; that heart now beats in the open, a raw, insistent drum against the hollow architecture of “normalcy.” And what it drums is this: the “posthumanism” I once grasped at like a drowning sailor, the grand theories I wore like borrowed, ill-fitting armor—they were pointing, always pointing, towards a truth far closer, far more intimate. Not a flight from the human, but a shattering of its fraudulent, singular effigy.

What I’m trying to say, what this unmasked heart insists upon, is that the real frontier isn’t some distant, post-apocalyptic dawn. It’s here, in the flesh, in the stutter of a nerve, the an dopamine tremor, the unchartable map of a mind that dances to rhythms alien to the metronome of capital. Neurodiversity, yes, that’s a name for a part of it. But the landscape is vaster, wilder. Why not Bodydiversity? Why not Emotiondiversity? Or must we keep fracturing ourselves, seeking asylum in ever-smaller, hyphenated kingdoms? Perhaps it’s simply Divergence, an ontology of the singular, a claim that the very grain of being is difference itself—not as a deviation from some sacred, humanist-sculpted Mean, but as the fundamental, irreducible thrum of existence. We are, each of us, a unique irruption, a never-to-be-repeated constellation.

And that word, “dis-able”—I still taste its ash. It’s not just a word; it’s a cage, a spell cast by the high priests of conformity. It presupposes their “able” god, doesn’t it? That pristine, neurotypical, self-possessed subject of the Enlightenment, still casting its long, cold shadow. This “able” is the phantom limb of a dead cosmology, yet we are all still forced to salute its ghostly authority. The true disablement isn’t in our bodies or our neurotypes; it’s in this very language, this social-linguistic straitjacket that pathologizes our dance, that attempts to medicate our revelations into silence. It’s Foucault’s panopticon rebuilt in semantics, its gaze turning difference into deficit before we even speak our name.

Some of us embrace that label, “disabled.” And I see the fire in it, the defiant re-forging of a weapon meant to wound. But is it enough to merely seize the master’s tools? Or must we not, with a kind of wild, neopragmatist ferver, invent new ones, languages that can sing the body electric in all its divergent ecstasies? Languages that don’t flinch from the tremor, the meltdown, the “unproductive” reverie, but see in them the untamed, mycelial growth of another way of knowing.

For if we are to be honest, brutally honest, who among us is truly “abled” in the face of the Übermensch, or before that gaping absence of the Nom-du-Père? Who stands complete when measured against the self-propelling, runaway machineries of our own making – this capitalism that devours worlds, this AI that mirrors our own hubris back at us with chilling precision? We are all, in this sense, Frankenstein’s glorious, “disabled” children, shot through with the lightning of being, yet forever wrestling with the terms of our creation, forever sparkling in our beautiful, terrifying incompleteness. Wait, not “sparkling,” no, that sounds too neat, too… marketable. More like, disabled and burning. Burning with the raw, unquenchable fire of being, of differing. There is no Eden to return to, no teleological shore awaiting our arrival. There is only this: the relentless, sacred pulse of differences and becomings.

And this isn’t some abstract lament. This current society behaves a gesture that still whispers of remediation, of a “problem” to be managed within the existing, unyielding frame. It doesn’t ask if the frame itself is the pathology. It doesn’t dare to imagine a structure that breathes with our rhythms, that sees our divergent paths not as detours but as vital arteries of knowing and creating. What we need is not more anaesthetic for the ill-fitting shoe, but a radical reimagining of the foot, the path, the journey itself—a structural becoming that finally honors the wild, untranslatable music of every unique heart.

REFLCTION ON UNIT 1

22/5/2025

During Unit One, my learning journey has been shaped by a gradual shift—from constructing a metaphorical “box” of uncertainty, to deconstructing the structural tendencies that shape how I relate to uncertainty itself. My initial Box of Uncertainty project began with an inverted object: a box turned inside out, where the supposed “outside world” became the real unknown, and the box’s interior housed the only meta-certainty—that uncertainty is constant. This concept not only introduced me to the fragility of boundaries, but seeded my later inquiry.

In Unit Two, my research into the Wellcome Trust’s framing of science, ethics, and human futures sparked a deeper interest in posthumanism. Beneath this interest, I came to realise, lay a discontent with existing social order—a resistance to normative systems that masquerade as rational. Yet as I began articulating these thoughts, I noticed how readily I clothed them in theoretical language. Posthumanism became an armour: a structure to speak through, but also to hide behind.

This tension pushed me toward a more uncomfortable question: not only why we turn to certain concepts, but how we speak through them. I began to interrogate my own inclination toward structure and coherence—not as mere academic tools, but as psychological defences. I looked again at the human tendency to organise chaos into pattern, to thread noise into meaning. This helped me retrospectively see the shared language of many students in their Box of Uncertainty projects—common expressions of anxiety about the future, identity, and instability. It seems we are always in search of something greater or transcendental than us to do the speaking for us.

But as students in an art school, we are not just creators—we are interventionists. How can we intervene meaningfully in the world without making space for empathy, subjectivity, and the unspeakable parts of experience?

These realisations informed my WWHWI project, which marked a shift from a fascination with posthumanist collapse to a more grounded inquiry into how structure mediates, suppresses, or enables our ability to express. I am still drawn to posthumanism—not in rejection, but in complication. I now want to understand what remains of the emotional and the subjective after theory, not instead of it.

Besides, the area I’m most drawn to include poststructuralist philosophy, psychology, ethics, and physics. Reflecting on these interests, I’ve noticed a common thread: a fascination with fluidity, becoming, and emergence. I see structures as fluid, identities as nomadic, and truths as always shifting in a state of différance.

One challenge I faced is that my imagined interventions are often too broad or meta-level—addressing paradigms such as humanism itself, or structural tendencies in language and thought. After my last tutorial, I was pointed out and kind of became interested in intervening among interventionists and activists themselves. I’m good at probing underlying motivations and questioning why people do what they do. Yet, I am tired of diving into these grand narratives, as in the reflection in the unit 1, I pray I am not a heartless human being but do empathetically care the reality of people suffering. Some unshaped thoughts but related to me, I am now—or have always want to do the study in Neurodiversity, in a perspective of Posthumanism within postdualism and différance.

Anyway, at this stage, I’m still not entirely certain if I’ll continue exactly along this path, but I have a clear awareness of my strengths and the areas I need to develop. Ultimately, this reflective awareness is precisely why I chose the MA Applied Imagination course—to refine how I apply imagination in practice, grounding philosophical interests in meaningful and achievable interventions.

Unit One has thus become for me a process of methodological self-undoing: destabilising my own concepts, tracing the architectures of the languages I use, and re-asking what kind of knowledge I want to produce—and why.

WHAT - WHY - HOW - WHAT IF

15/5/2025

A sentence appears.

Fluent—too fluent.

Not a voice, but a structure.

Posthumanism? Elegant enough to make think that’s my own bone.

In art education, language seems to perform more than it communicates. A grammar of access. A choreography of legitimacy. What appears expressive is often procedural (Rule and Levine, 2012).

To speak is to comply. To feel is to translate. Pain becomes affect, desire becomes framework. We learn this fluency. We reproduce it. Eventually, something disappears—and we forget it was ever there. Yet we are means, not ends. We are becomings, denyings of structured destination (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

This project does not seek to restore authenticity. It begins in suspicion: that language in postgraduate art education—particularly at institutions like CSM—has ceased to serve expression, and now curates it. Not because emotion is absent, but because it no longer passes through the gate.

How can creators in postgraduate art education reclaim forms of expression where emotional presence and theoretical language are not in conflict, but coexist?

Stakeholders are multiple: MA/MFA students shaped by assessment norms; tutors negotiating between rigour and resonance; institutions that legitimise fluency, structure, abstraction. These systems don’t silence—they redirect. They don’t forbid feeling—they overwrite it (Smith and Ulus, 2020).

The theoretical lineage of this project spans multiple disciplines, but converges on a single claim: human cognition organises chaos by building internal structures. From Kant’s a priori categories of perception (1781) to Lévi-Strauss’s “deep grammar” of myth (1958), from area of cognitive neuroscience where modular brain networks create order (Spoms, Betzel, R. F, 2016) to the predictive models of Karl Friston (2005), the subject is seen not as one who perceives, but as one who assembles meaning from patterned compression. The mind anticipates. It filters. It edits the world into coherence.

But structure is never innocent. It defines the visible and the sayable. And when institutionalised—through MFA critique models, International Art English (Smith and Ulus, 2020), and theoretical assessment frameworks—it performs a secondary operation: it evacuates affect. It confers legitimacy in exchange for distance. In trauma studies, this is intellectualisation (Freud, 1936): a defense mechanism wherein thought replaces feeling. In pedagogy, it becomes a feedback loop in which emotional resonance is bracketed as “underdeveloped thinking”—a tendency that reflects what Miller (2005) describes as the epistemic disqualification of feeling in academic culture, where emotion is treated not as knowledge, but as noise.

This is not merely abstract.

Through interviews and surveys with postgraduate students across art and design programmes, I collected recurring expressions of tension—between felt experience and acceptable articulation. “If I say it simply, it sounds wrong.” “I remove anything too emotional unless I justify it theoretically.” And nearly three-quarters had difficulty expressing themselves when asked why do you do this. These statements suggest a shared ambivalence about voice, authorship, and institutional fluency.

In parallel, I conducted a textual analysis of over 20 public-facing student descriptions from CSM’s graduate showcases. The language shows patterned density: theoretical anchoring precedes experiential reference; first-person disappears; meaning is often suspended in abstraction. What emerges is a performative template—one that rewards citation and coherence over discomfort or uncertainty.

These two layers—spoken and published—map a hidden curriculum of expression. One that favours fluency over feeling, grammar over grain.

There is a tentative gesture toward a workshop—Before Language—but it remains embryonic. The aim is not resolution, but interventional disturbance: to surface what articulation has quietly repressed. What institutions allow to be said, and what they structurally forget. The final output will not conclude. It may take the form of an essay, or something essay-adjacent—a residue of speech and its fractures.

If this project succeeds, it will not be because it proposes a better language. It will be because it pauses long enough to hear what the current one keeps leaving out. Because in the end it’s not just about what we say. It’s about whether we’re really saying what we mean—and whether anyone still hears it.

References

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Freud, A., 1936. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. London: Hogarth Press.

Friston, K., 2005. A theory of cortical responses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 360(1456), pp.815–836.

Kant, I., 1781. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. Kemp Smith, 1929. London: Macmillan.

Lévi-Strauss, C., 1958. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Miller, J., 2005. Sounds of Silence Breaking: Women, Autobiography, Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang.

Rule, A. and Levine, D., 2012. International Art English. Triple Canopy. Available at: https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_englishhttps://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english Accessed 19 May 2025.

Smith, C. and Ulus, E., 2020. Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualize through macro-discourses. Organization, 27(6), pp.946–957.

Sporns, O. and Betzel, R. F. (2016). Modular Brain Networks. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, pp.613–640.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

28/4/2025

At the beginning of this project, I was captivated by that obscure, perplexing word—posthumanism. I loathed the filth and cruelty of humankind: steel gears grinding down the blue of the sky, the dust of war falling on the eyelids of infants. This species—who tasted the forbidden fruit and stole divine fire—has endlessly and shamelessly created and tortured its own Frankensteins, replaying the witch-hunt frenzy without end. So I couldn’t help but imagine a post-apocalyptic world: vines climbing up the ruins of skyscrapers, beasts roaming freely across streets and plazas once claimed by humans. That world—the one that had once made me weep, ache, yearn—finally departed after the collapse of order. And I felt ecstasy. As if, at last, we could create without restraint—our philosophies, our art sprouting like mycelium from the ashes of nuclear winter, tangled, thriving, untamed.

But none of this came to pass. Instead, a suffocating blackness loomed over me, disorienting me completely. I was like a captain enchanted by the sirens’ song, letting my mind sever from the emotions that brought me pain, lulled by a beautiful illusion, nearly surrendering to it—until a sudden cry from the sailor jolted me awake:

“What are you even talking about?”

I turned sharply, realizing in horror what I had been saying—what I had been fleeing. Even when people around me, people who cared, kept asking, “Why are you doing this?”—it was only now that I truly awoke. Looking around, I found I was not alone. Everyone else, too, seemed immersed in the sirens’ enchanting but false melody.

To that melody I wrote my first word: posthumanism. Then I wrote: the collapse of anthropocentrism, the face on the beach, relational co-existence, the becoming-subject of the nonhuman… I believed in it—no, I had to believe in it: that posthumanism was an inevitable paradigmatic shift, a ritual farewell to the old gods, an opening toward the other. But gradually, I noticed the pages I wrote on were soaking through with something—something bleeding from underneath. With trembling hands, I turned the paper—and found, to my shock, that it was my own heart.

Only then did I realize: everything I had spoken of had never truly touched me. It was all veiled beneath a song—beautiful, seductive, but false—sung endlessly by those around me, and by myself.

I froze, like a crow lost in Borges’ infinite library—clutching a fragment of Deleuze’s spine, a link from Lacan’s chain of signifiers, a cog from Foucault’s power apparatus. So sharp, so noble—I almost thought they were my own bones. I was thrilled, obsessed, as if decoding a lover’s sleep talk, but I never once asked: were these really my words? Or were they the echo of a larger structure, speaking through me?

I wrote project proposals, artist statements, created works—like performing a refined ritual. But the center of the ritual was hollow. I should’ve spoken from within, but instead I built walls from bibliography. I wrote so many things—but I never spoke myself.

This doubt wasn’t mine alone. In tutorials, I kept hearing our tutors ask, “Why are you doing this? What does this have to do with you?” And we students—including myself—often realize hard to answer. We took the stage with polished jargon, theorized references, carefully constructed works—yet fell silent before the simplest of questions. That silence wasn’t ignorance. It was a rupture: We knew how to build a conceptual system, but no longer knew why we were speaking, or why we were making.

We all spoke of grand things, but no one dared admit: our feelings, our motives, our wounds—had already been processed, sterilized, and discarded by theoretical language. Like deleted footnotes. Like a speech dampened by tears, pretending it had never cried. We compulsively wrapped ourselves in this massive structural machinery, building a defense mechanism so elegant and hollow. We used it to shield our fragile creative impulse, and also to conceal the wounds we hadn’t yet found words for.

So we spoke of the nonhuman—but not of ourselves. We constructed a de-centered structure—but forgot to ask who is writing it. We hid the beneath the armor of theory—not because the was unimportant, but because it was too soft, too painful, too weak to bear the burden of a concept called “the work.”

Until I realized: this wasn’t personal. It was a form of collective aphasia within the context of contemporary art. We have all been disciplined into a structural way of speaking—one that demands we forever maintain a “critical distance.” It is elegant, intelligent, legible, transmissible—but it rarely permits us to cry, rage, break, or go silent. In art school, we’re taught how to express, but no one teaches us how to connect. We’re given a full theoretical toolkit, but stripped of the right to feel our own experience directly. Theory became our way of protecting ourselves—and our way of losing ourselves.

That was the sailor’s question to me:

What are you talking about?

I want to see that moment—the heart soaking through the page. Imperfect. Incomplete. But red, and real. We are not merely thinking beings. We are wounded. We are crying. We are the ones who must say, “This is who I am”— even if that sentence always begins in silence.

A Funeral for the Center

12/4/2025

If humanity insists on measuring the world by its own image, then what place can there be—within this order of meaning—for those forms of existence that escape human definition? Whether they be heterogeneous others, voiceless animals, ecosystems, technologies, or algorithms, how are they to find a foothold? Why do we so effortlessly assume that “the human” is entitled to be the centre of the universe? And why is everything that lies beyond our borders so readily consigned to the “non-self”, to the realm of the valueless?

Traditional humanism, grounded in Enlightenment rationality, has constructed a paradigm of “the human”: white, male, Western, heterosexual, able-bodied, autonomous. On the surface, this model appears to uphold dignity and universal values; yet beneath lies a structural mechanism of constant exclusion. All who deviate from this model—from gender and race to culture and disability, and further still to nonhuman animals, ecosystems, and artificial intelligences—are systematically marginalised. Through its language of reason, humanism casts them into the realm of “the other”, forcing them to endure the violence of “the human” in silence.

This assumption of the “central human” constructs not only internal hierarchies within the category of the human but also draws a concealed line between human and nonhuman, all under the guise of neutrality. Technology becomes tool, animal becomes resource, nature becomes backdrop. The rationalised human image of the West is like a mirror that reflects nothing but its own idealised construction—it sees not the real face of the world. It cannot reflect those deemed non-conforming, and yet they are not anomalies. They are, in fact, intrinsic to the world itself, none greater than the rest. Once this is recognised, the humanist order begins to falter.

From classical rationalism to da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, this paradigm once conferred grandeur upon humanity, but also produced a deep solitude—the kind born of being misunderstood by the world and forced to uphold meaning through reason alone. Yet in truth, “Cogito” has never existed apart from the entanglement of flesh, technology, and the other; and the fact that “I am” need not be premised on the domination of what is not-I. Humanity is no island, but a node embedded within a dense mesh of life, matter, and meaning. As Donna Haraway reminds us: “We have never been purely human.”

Thus, a shift in paradigm is not merely desirable—it is necessary. And this is not the replacement of one centre with another, but a centrifugal movement: away from human-centric narratives, towards a networked, decentered, post-dualistic perspective. This is the gesture of posthumanism. It does not seek to erase the human, but to awaken it from its illusion—to remind it that it has never held an exclusive position, that its value was never self-evident. In fact, the “human”, as an empirical-transcendental hybrid, is a provisional construct, born of the nineteenth-century episteme. As Foucault wrote: “Man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” And perhaps our very meaning lies in those nonhuman things we can never fully comprehend—those that force us to confront the limits of knowledge, the fractures of feeling, the edges of being.

Rather than an act of violence, this is a form of mourning—a farewell to the anthropocentric paradigm, long since fractured but still haunting the world. Humanity built its stairway to heaven from the flesh of others—and of itself; it lit flames where the gods had died, and erected thrones from the echoes of repentance. But the throne is false, and the king seated upon it is but a phantom. He must be dismissed—and posthuman will see to his burial. With the architect of paradise gone, we realise at last that Eden was never real.

Posthumanism is not built upon a hierarchy. In constructing a posthuman standpoint, there are no gradations of alterity—no better, no lesser forms of being. The differences among nonhumans and among humans alike hold equal ontological weight. Difference no longer needs to be subsumed or disciplined. It carries its own right to exist, its own ontological density.

So, if I am asked what this change truly is, I can only say: it appears not as redemption after symbolic patricide, but as a generative shift. We need not slay the gods who made us, nor kneel in the shadow of new ones seeking forgiveness. This is not Nietzsche’s death of God, nor Foucault’s death of Man. It is not about how humans might better construct paradise, but whether we can learn to co-exist—with humility—while listening to the whispers of machines, plants, animals, stones, and ruins. Technology, nonhuman life, and the human subject are no longer isolated ontological entities, but dynamically interwoven processes—continuously generating and recursively shaping one another.

In the end, the true greatness of the human lies not in how much of the world it has conquered, but in its final recognition that it was never alone. We have never existed apart from the world, but have always been tangled within a meshwork—woven from the threads of technology, the echoes of ecology, the murmurings of matter, and the gaze of the other. We act, breathe, imagine within this web—and the futures we imagine are already imagining us.

There is no separation between “us” and “the world”, no binary between subject and object. We are the makers of the posthuman condition, as we are its product; We are Frankenstein, as we are his monster. Between reality and fiction, power and vulnerability, obsession with the human and its transcendence, we walk a tightrope suspended over a vanishing point from which there is no return. This is not Promethean betrayal, but a gentle interrogation of the human myth itself:

If “the human” is merely the ghost of an epoch—when that ghost finally vanishes, will we still be capable of loving a world no longer named in our image?