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Bob’s modules were open-ended and interactive: they could speak among themselves and perform changes back and forth on each other before their processed sound went to the final output. Albert Glinksy 'Switched On'

With smartphones and laptops everywhere these days, providing easy access to soft synths at the click of a button, it is easy to forget how revolutionary early synthesisers were and how much effort they demanded. This is brought to the fore in Albert Glinsky’s book Switched On – Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution.

Switched On is part history and part biography, intertwining between the Bob Moog and the times and technology that existed. Although clearly about Moog, the book also situates itself alongside other developments at the time, including Buchla, ARP, Roland, rather than treating Bob Moog as a lone genius. It also ties together various stories involving the various Moog synthesisers, such as The Beatles and “Here Comes the Sun,” TONTO, ELP, “Switched on Bach”, into a coherent context.

The book itself is structured as a six‑part life story that tracks Moog from “The Flushing Geek” kid tinkerer, through the boom of “Cosmic Sounds,” into repeated “Short Circuits” and financial crises, and finally to his late status as “The Grand Poobah.” Each part groups a run of short, titled chapters that read almost like self‑contained vignettes or case studies rather than dense musicology. Formally, the book moves in these six acts, but within that arc Glinsky keeps the ‘great inventor’ myth as a question. Moog is constantly on the edge, living off family loans (especially Aunt Florence), SBA loans, remortgages, and side consultancies. The revolution in sound is built on a persistently non‑viable business and an extended kin network – especially Shirleigh – that kept him afloat. For example, at the same period that Moog was drowning in debt and trying (and failing) to close a bailout deal with investors, the Small Business Administration named him “Small Businessman of the Year” for New York State.

Ironically, that same month, the New York State Small Business Administration contacted Bob to let him know he’d been named the SBA Small Businessman of the Year for New York State. The honor was awarded based on the company’s astounding growth, culminating in $526,000 in sales at the close of fiscal year 1969. When Bob accepted the framed certificate on May 26, the SBA never noticed that his operation was being propped up by its own loan—a liability he was now hard pressed to pay off.

Source: Switched On by Albert Glinksy

This had me thinking about Brian Eno’s argument that “beautiful things grow out of shit.” I was left wondering how many other Moog’s were out there who did not succeed, failures for whatever reason, the ‘shit’ lost to history, that made Moog’s creations possible?

It was interesting how the MiniMoog (or Model D) that I feel the name ‘Moog’ is best known for was not actually designed by Bob himself, but emerged from Bill Hemsath and Jim Scott tinkering with parts that were lying around the factory. The instrument grew almost accidentally, then was refined into a product Bob was initially lukewarm about. This contrasted sharply with Moog’s vision of modular systems as open‑ended networks rather than fixed, pre‑wired instruments.

Bob’s modules, though, were open-ended and interactive: they could speak among themselves and perform changes back and forth on each other before their processed sound went to the final output. In other words, each module had many potential functions. An oscillator could be a sound source, but it could also control the volume of the amplifier, replacing a human hand turning the volume up and down with a knob. An oscillator could also be used to control the panning of a sound back and forth between speakers, or to control the opening and closing of a filter. A filter could feed back on itself and act like an oscillator. An oscillator could control an amplifier that controlled a filter that controlled another oscillator, and so on. There were virtually no limits to the combinations.

Source: Switched On by Albert Glinksy

This tension between open‑ended and pre‑packaged tools echoes Brian Eno said in an interview with Ezra Klein about the DX7 and the dangers of making things too easy.[1]

Another striking thread running through the book is the persistent anxiety around the new technology: unions and traditional musicians repeatedly fear that synthesisers will replace “real” players. This is something that also came up in Dylan Jones’ Sweet Dreams.

By 1982, the synth had become so pervasive that it became the subject of a dispute initiated by the central London branch of the Musicians’ Union. When Barry Manilow toured the UK in January, he used synths to simulate the orchestral sounds of a big band, after which the union passed a motion to ban the use of synths, drum machines and any electronic devices ‘capable of recreating the sounds of conventional musical instruments’. They were particularly concerned about the possible effect on West End theatrical productions, imagining orchestra pits full of ‘technicians’ instead of musicians.

Source: Sweet Dreams by Dylan Jones

It is interesting to contrast these fears with the difficulties in working with early synthesisers. For example, I never really grasped how difficult Switched-On Bach was to make. Because the album sounds so fluid, it creates the illusion of a live keyboard performance, but in reality Carlos had to record every line separately on a monophonic Moog, in tiny snippets, often just a few seconds long, constantly stopping to retune drifting oscillators and then stacking the parts to create the illusion of an ensemble.

The book also shows what happened when Carlos tried to bring this music onstage. At a 1969 concert with the St. Louis Symphony, she could only play a single melodic line over pre‑recorded or orchestral parts. Glinsky notes that, like the Beatles after Sgt. Pepper, it was “impossible” to recreate such studio‑engineered layers live, revealing that “the instrument wasn’t a great organ after all.”

On finishing the book, I was left wondering what might be different from approaching the topic from the perspective of an assemblage. “Moog” as a part of a larger configuration of drugs, counterculture, space exploration, and military research (including Moog’s own side projects in those areas), plus his various business and marketing missteps (random hiring, failed amps, etc.) Ultimately, it was a compelling read and provided a glimpse into the man behind the myth.

Listened to Jonathan Yen’s reading of Switched On via Audible.

  1. The Yamaha DX7 (1983) was notoriously hard to program: FM synthesis plus a tiny single-line LCD. Eno reportedly spent months teaching himself to use it. When he suggested to Yamaha that they improve the interface, they replied that 80% of DX7s returned for service had never been reprogrammed—people just used the factory presets. For Eno, this is the trap of convenience: when a tool offers ready-made options, we slide into “mental laziness” instead of inventing our own sounds. ↩︎

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“According to many people who’ve spent time with Prince, he was addicted to the creative process. He was constantly looking for something that wasn’t familiar to keep him interested.” Duane Tudahl Nick Hornby ‘Dickens and Prince’

After my daughter saw Michael, the Michael Jackson biopic, she asked the inevitable question: Michael Jackson or Prince? Both artists rose to prominence simultaneously, and the media has long linked them – not just because they were Black male pop icons born in 1958, but because they represented two distinct versions of the global superstar. In Dig If You Will the Picture, Ben Greenman highlights a specific divergence in their creative instincts:

“When it comes to Prince’s failure to get his head around hip-hop, Michael Jackson furnishes an instructive contrast. He also started his solo career in the disco era and, at the height of his stardom, also created slick pop records that drew heavily on guitar heroics. (He had to hire help, but he hired the best: Eddie Van Halen, Slash, and others.) But beginning in 1991, on Dangerous, Jackson began to incorporate elements of hip-hop into his music, mostly by collaborating with established talents.”

Source: Dig If You Will the Picture by Ben Greenman

Greenman’s observation underscores a fundamental difference in approach. Jackson was a master collaborator, building his vision by hiring the best talent available to execute his ideas. In contrast, while Prince certainly used collaborators – from The Revolution and the New Power Generation to the Hornheads – the vision was always, unequivocally, his own.

That philosophy shaped their recording styles. Jackson worked as a perfectionist, often spending years refining a project until every element was polished to a sheen. Prince, conversely, was a restless, prolific auteur. He built his studio environment specifically to capture ideas the moment they struck, valuing immediate expression over meticulous post-production. It feels unfair, then, to pit them against one another. One can compare them on chart performance or personal taste, but to compare them as artists is to ignore that they were working toward entirely different goals. This is also something that comes through in Nick Hornby’s book Dickens & Prince.

Hornby’s book starts from the oddness of the pairing. The spark was discovering the sheer volume of unreleased Sign o’ the Times‑era material and realising that Dickens worked that way too:

Sign o’ the Times included sixty-three songs that weren’t on the original album. Sixty-three! That’s almost four times as many as the original album, three more than Jimi Hendrix released in his lifetime, two more than the Eagles recorded in the twentieth century . . . and they were nearly all produced around the same time. (They weren’t all produced for the same record, but we’ll get to that.) The fan site PrinceVault has 102 entries in the category “Songs recorded during 1986.” And we are beginning to learn that 1986 was not an atypical year. When I read about the boxed set, I thought, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. Dickens did. Dickens worked that way.

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

From there, the book bounces between the two artists. It begins with their unstable childhoods – Dickens cast into poverty when his family entered a debtors’ prison, Prince bouncing between friends and relatives after his parents divorced.

Hornby then moves to their early years and the way they rose to prominence through a combination of relentless effort and startling genius, extending this into a discussion of how other media and popular culture fed their work.

The focus then shifts to the prime reason for pairing them: work. Dickens is shown keeping multiple serials going at once, editing magazines, writing torrents of letters, rehearsing amateur theatricals, walking obsessively, and still turning out canonical novels. Prince is his musical counterpart, recording constantly, stockpiling songs, working at a pace where “first drafts” are often good enough to release:

Whether it was best Prince or average Prince, that wasn’t the point. The point was that he had to do it. “According to many people who’ve spent time with Prince, he was addicted to the creative process,” says Duane Tudahl. “He was constantly looking for something that wasn’t familiar to keep him interested.”
“He was not a perfectionist,” said Prince’s engineer Susan Rogers. “He wouldn’t have had that output if he’d been a perfectionist . . . It just poured out of him—he couldn’t wait on perfection.”

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

Neither artist cared for the burden of perfectionism.

With this focus on work in place, Hornby turns to their frustration with the business world. Dickens railed against plagiaristic publishers and pirate dramatisations, while Prince fought bitterly over record contracts and ownership of his masters. For Hornby, this is the “trauma of the past” playing out:

When you look again at those icons who grew up in poverty, you can see that sometimes the trauma of the past and the bewildering nature of the fame catch up with you.

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

Coming from meagre beginnings, both felt chronically ripped off by the world around them.

Their final shared vulnerability is women. Clearly, there were Prince’s string of partners and two marriages, and Dickens leaving Catherine for Nelly Ternan. But women also exposed something in each: for Dickens, the way he mishandled his marital break‑up in public and how certain female characters seem to absorb his unresolved feelings; for Prince, a need to seduce not only in bed but also in the studio:

“He’d meet a girl and take her back to Paisley and record a double album with her overnight,” said former manager Randy Phillips. “It would be ready the next day. Arnold [Stiefel, co-manager] had a conversation with him and said, ‘Stop doing A&R with your dick.’ ” Lots of rock stars have managed to seduce young women without having to write a dozen songs and produce a whole album for them, so this process was very particular to him, and seems to demonstrate—as if you couldn’t have guessed from hundreds of his song titles—that sex and the creative process were very important to him. You know the sort. He couldn’t so much as look at a girl without wanting to check her levels.

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

Hornby suggests that both artists would have benefited from therapy. I suspect Sinéad O’Connor would have agreed.

Across all of this, Hornby keeps circling back to what he finally states outright near the end: the book is “about work.”

This book is about work, and nobody ever worked harder than these two, or at a higher standard, while connecting with so many people for so long. That’s why I have photos of them both on my office wall. They will stay there for as long as I need them, which will be for the rest of my life.

Source: Dickens & Prince by Nick Hornby

Both were addicted to work. For Dickens, if it wasn’t a novel, it was a play; if not a play, then letters. For Prince, there were always more recordings, more ideas, and – famously while on tour – aftershows following the official gigs. This “work” was more than a pay cheque, it was a compulsion.

Returning to beginning, to compare Prince and Jackson is to ignore that they were working toward entirely different goals. If Jackson was a perfectionist seeking to build a monument, Prince and Dickens were conduits seeking to build an oeuvre. In an episode of Rock’s Backpages, Hornby suggests that errors become a mark of creativity:

There is a thing with great artists that there mistakes become their signature.

Source: Episode 143 : Nick Hornby on Prince (& Dickens) + Boz Scaggs audio interview (Rock’s Backpages)

This fundamental difference is precisely what Nick Hornby explores in Dickens & Prince. All in all, it is a fascinating book that helps shine a different light on creativity. It was also interesting to think about this alongside Brené Brown’s work on courage and vulnerability.

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The number one piece of advice I have for you is to parent the child you have, not the child you thought you’d have. Penn and Kim Holderness ‘ADHD is Awesome’

ADHD is Awesome, by Penn and Kim Holderness (award‑winning creators, podcast hosts, and winners of Season 33 of The Amazing Race), is a funny, research‑informed (they are not doctors[1]), and deeply personal reframe of ADHD from “deficit” to difference.

The book is structured in three parts:

  • Getting to know ADHD – how ADHD is diagnosed, what’s happening in the “staccato” brain, and the huge variety of ways it shows up in real people.
  • Changing the narrative – challenging stigma, owning strengths, and treating ADHD as “an explanation, not an excuse”, and providing a new name “VAST” (variable attention stimulus trait.[2])
  • Strategies to thrive – practical routines, tools, and relationship habits to manage distraction, emotional regulation, and daily life, while leaning into creativity, hyperfocus, and humor.

Listening to the audiobook (via Libby) was useful because Penn and Kim narrate in their own voices, highlighting the contrast between the person with ADHD and the partner supporting them.

What resonated with me about this book is the deeper appreciation of the challenges associated with ADHD. Penn talks a lot about everyday distractions, from forgetting to put a mug under the coffeemaker so the coffee spills everywhere to coming home from Target with sunglasses, a DVD, and a basketball needle but no avocados he went in for. He also gives a vivid sense of the “voice of ADHD in the head”: the shame of leaving keys on top of the car again, or melting down as a kid over something as small as being asked to put shoes away, then feeling like you’re “broken” rather than someone with a legitimate brain difference. At the same time, both Penn and Kim keep stressing that ADHD shows up differently for everyone: as Kim puts it, “our experiences are just that: our experiences… One of the glories of ADHD is that its presentation is as unique as the people who have it”.

I am left thinking about Liz Wiseman’s book Multiplier and the ‘accidental diminisher’, that is where supposed good deeds can have negative consequences. For example, Wiseman talks about leaders who ‘set the pace’, go ahead and do the work, rather than distribute tasks.

As leaders, sometimes the faster we run, the slower others walk. When leaders set the pace, they are more likely to create spectators than followers.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Thinking about ADHD, it feels like there is a constant question associated with knowing when to challenge particular actions and when letting go is chronic rescuing. As they explain in the book, “ADHD is an explanation, not an excuse.” The question is whether the support building capability or just creating dependence?

In the classroom, I find a big challenge with moving boundaries associated with having neuro-divergent students and how that fits with rigid rules and structures. It is important to differentiate between patterns of behaviour hurting others, eroding trust, or blocking the learner’s own growth, compared with when the “problem” is mostly about neatness, preference, or strict conformity to rigid structures that were not built with neurodivergence in mind.

Here are concrete ways, drawn from the book, to support someone with ADHD:

  • Learn about their experience and validate it: Say things like “Wow, that sucks” instead of “You should have…” when ADHD causes a problem, to reduce shame and increase connection.
  • Offer empathy before solutions: Make connection your first move, then problem-solve once emotions are regulated.
  • Lend a practical helping hand: Help clarify priorities, break tasks down, or quietly pitch in when they’re overwhelmed, rather than waiting for them to ask.
  • Use gentle reminders and external supports: Offer to help set up systems: lists, calendars, phone reminders, written instructions—then let them run those systems themselves (“never try to remember something if you can write it down instead”).
  • Adjust expectations and “parent/partner the person you have”: Especially with kids, distinguish ADHD symptoms from stubbornness and rethink what “success” should look like for them (“parent the child you have”).
  • Share the load and delegate, don’t martyr yourself: If you’re the main support person, get help with chores, clutter, and logistics so you do not burn out, and consciously delegate tasks instead of silently doing everything (“ADHD takes a village”).
  • Notice and praise effort and strengths: Point out what they do well and when their ADHD traits are assets (creativity, humor, loyalty, quick thinking). This reinforces “ADHD is awesome” as a lived reality, not just a slogan.
  1. “Before we get started, let’s make one thing very, very clear: I am not a doctor. I am not a doctor. I am not a doctor. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I will repeat: I am not a doctor. I do not have a medical degree—I don’t even play a doctor on TV—so the best advice I can give you about medication is to go to an actual doctor to discuss whether it will work for you. (Medication works for a lot of people! I just don’t happen to be one of them.)” Source: ADHD is Awesome ↩︎
  2. Dr. Hallowell also agrees a name change is in order. As he sees it, the current name is inaccurate. He explained, “I reject the deficit disorder model because it’s wrong, and it’s demeaning. When you use it, you get started on the wrong foot. Would you want to marry someone who was referred to as ‘boring, stupid, and ugly?’ That’s kind of what the current name is saying.”2 He’s been a longtime proponent of trying to change the name to VAST, which stands for “variable attention stimulus trait.” Source: ADHD is Awesome ↩︎
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The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Cixin Liu ‘The Dark Forest’

Where The Three-Body Problem laid the historical and theoretical groundwork for a cosmic crisis associated with alien contact, Cixin Liu’s sequel, The Dark Forest, shifts its focus entirely toward the gruelling, multi-century labor of constructing a future world. It stops being a paranoid tech-thriller and becomes an epic sociological experiment.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Wallfacer Project—and its shadow twin, the Wallbreakers—where a handful of individuals are granted near-absolute power to design opaque, private strategies, while an opposing class is tasked with exposing and sabotaging them, turning human psychology itself into the primary battlefield.

Liu does not just build a world, he maps the psychological, political, and material fractures of humanity under the weight of an impending, existential apocalypse on a number of fronts. Through the devastating collapse of the Great Ravine and the sheer shock of the Doomsday Battle, the novel grapples with a staggering central dilemma: How do we address a future that is fundamentally beyond our ability to truly imagine?

When thinking about the massive timescales (a four-century countdown) and the sheer, unfathomable expanse of the universe in The Dark Forest, we are drawn directly to philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject.

In The Ecological Thought, Morton employed the term hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium.

Source: Wikipedia

The impending Trisolaran invasion is a classic example. It is too vast, too slow, and too technologically alien for the human mind to compute as a singular event. Humanity cannot look directly at the crisis; they can only experience it through its fracturing fragments – the sudden lockdown of subatomic physics by the sophon, the environmental collapse of the Great Ravine, or the terrifying silence of deep space. From a narrative perspective, Liu tries to capture this impossibility by having characters put into hibernation and then woken at different periods capturing how the perspective on what the problem changes over time.

As we cannot mentally grasp a hyperobject, our greatest vulnerability becomes our own cognitive shortcuts. As a wise adage notes: our greatest risk is our assumptions. In the case of The Dark Forest, this mistake is played out when military generals assume a space war will play out like the 19th-century Sino-Japanese War, trying to tie agile starships to rigid planetary fortresses. We assume the future is just a larger, shinier version of the past.

The single, frictionless Droplet methodically punches through the hulls of the entire human fleet in mere minutes. It is a brilliant, terrifying exploration of the limits of knowledge. Humanity’s reliance on metaphor and artistic interpretation completely blinded them to a literal, strong-interaction kinetic weapon.

Roughly thirteen minutes passed from the moment the probe started its attack until the fleet command system arrived at the correct assessment. Given the complex and grim battlefield conditions, this was fairly quick, but the droplet was quicker. In twentieth-century naval battles, there might have been time for commanders to be summoned to the flagship for a conference once the enemy fleet appeared on the horizon. But space battles were measured in seconds, and in that thirteen-minute span, more than six hundred warships were destroyed by the probe. Only then did humanity realize that command of a space battle was beyond their reach. And due to the sophon block, it was beyond the reach of their artificial intelligence as well. Purely in terms of command, humanity might never have the capacity to engage in a space battle with Trisolaris.

Source: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

The universe is not a vibrant, welcoming network of alien cultures; it is a pitch-black forest populated by armed hunters stepping silently through the trees. Because of the vast distances of space, no two civilizations can ever establish true trust, nor can they know if the other is benevolent. Therefore, the only logical, self-preserving choice upon detecting another lifeform is to eliminate it before it has the chance to grow and eliminate you.

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”

Source: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Luo Ji’s final victory is a masterclass in cosmic irony and dark humor. He does not defeat the Trisolarans by creating a bigger, more powerful weapon. Instead, he accepts his role as a Wallfacer, steps entirely into the dark, and sets a semantic trap. By threatening to broadcast Trisolaris’s coordinates to the hidden snipers of the universe, he uses the truth of cosmic sociology as a shield.

I listened to The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen) on Audible, narrated by Daniel York Loh.

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In Plato's Timaeus, the 'soul of the world' is said to be shaped like the letter X, and this same letter, Chi in Greek. can also be used to refer to Christ. In summary, I think it is a wonderful coincidence of opposites that this symbol can stand at once for something unknown or mysterious and, at the same time, for a specific point or place of significance. Daniel John Pilikington ‘X’

In Daniel John Pilkington’s book X, he collates a series of “X”s photographed during COVID, usually used to stipulate the distance people were asked to stand from each other as a precautionary safety measure – “stand here, 1.5m apart”. This is contrasted with a poem on the facing pages, which strings together different definitions of X as verb, noun, adjective, abbreviation, symbol and icon.

On the surface, the concept seems simple. But I am not sure it is “simple” any more than John Olsen’s paintings were seen as “simple” when dismissed by critics as something a child could have done. They could not.

But important art – maybe even great art – like Olsen’s, tells us a lot about who we have been, who we are and maybe who we might be, if looked at closely enough. This is Olsen’s great bequest to this country.

Source: John Olsen, like all great artists, told us a lot about who Australians are – and who we might be by Rex Butler

There is something haunting about Pilkington’s book in that it to addresses who we have been, are and might be, leaving the reader feeling different afterwards.

Walking around Melbourne, you can still see remnants of COVID: a faded X no longer active, an errant sign about washing your hands. In practice, these actions felt obvious at the time. (For example, I remember Maciej Cegłowski’s point that in some cultures mask wearing is a routine precaution, not just a COVID measure.) Yet these gestures and marks have become imbued with much more meaning.

This had me thinking about Ian Buchanan’s discussion of the Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari’s concept of Body without Organs in “Becoming Mountain”. For Buchanan, the Body without Organs (BwO) is not a stable “thing” or inner essence, but a produced field of experience that allows certain intensities to run. Different people, in different situations, form different BwOs. A BwO is assessed by asking: why this BwO, by these means, with what consequences?

Seen that way, Pilkington’s Xs are not just traces of policy; they are part of a series of assemblages:

  • As form of content, the X is tape or paint on concrete, a printed decal, a spot on the floor framed in a photograph.
  • As form of expression, it is an instruction (“stand here”), an element of public health discourse, an icon of social distancing, sometimes a symbol of state overreach or civic solidarity.

The “meaning” of the X is not in the mark alone but in the way these material and expressive dimensions are yoked together at particular moments.

During the heart of the pandemic, the X helped compose a BwO organised around bodily spacing and fear of contagion. It territorialised space: organised who could stand where, choreographed queues, recalibrated our sense of “too close”. That same material mark could, for others, compose a very different BwO: an X as emblem of governmental control, an ironic point of resistance, or simply a piece of theatre to be ignored.

After mandates ended, the X deterritorialised from its practical role – no one lines up on it anymore – and reterritorialised as something else: a ghost of lockdown, a small jolt of unease, nostalgia, quiet anger, or blank indifference. The intensities it carries have changed, but they have not disappeared.

In that sense, there is not one X but a series of assemblages over time that let different intensities run across the same graphic form. The book itself participates in this process. By collecting and reframing the Xs, Pilkington’s project reterritorialises them again – not as directives for conduct but as objects of memory, reflection, even aesthetic appreciation. Reading Pilkington’s Xs through Buchanan’s lens makes it harder to see them as mere leftovers of a health campaign: they become points where content and expression, policy and affect, past and present, all momentarily resonate – small, mute marks that once choreographed bodies and now continue to organise memory.

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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu is the first instalment in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. It revolves around the question of what would actually happen if humanity made contact with an alien civilisation. Rather than offering a standard first-contact narrative, Liu constructs an intricate, multi-layered world anchored by historical and scientific elements. The story starts with the psychological trauma of Mao’s Cultural Revolution before moving to the isolated Red Coast Base where secret deep-space communications are first broadcast. In the modern day, this history collides with a terrifying physics crisis where renowned scientists encounter impossible experimental results. Through the eyes of nanotechnology researcher Wang Miao, the narrative uncovers a virtual reality game that simulates a chaotic world orbiting three suns, leading to the revelation of a doomed alien group, Trisolaris. To ensure human submission, the aliens deploy Sophons, which are eleven-dimensional proton supercomputers designed to disrupt human science.

Multiple sophons may be able to form a system to sense the macro world through quantum effects. For example, suppose a nucleus has two protons. The two of them will interact and follow certain patterns of motion. Take spin: Maybe the direction of spin of the two protons must be opposite from each other. When these two protons are taken out of the nucleus, no matter how far apart they are, this pattern will remain in effect. When both protons are made into sophons, they will, based on this effect, create a mutual-sensing system. More sophons can then form a mutual-sensing formation. This formation’s scale can be adjusted to any size, and can thus receive electromagnetic waves to sense the macro world at any frequency. Of course, the actual quantum effects necessary to create such a sophon formation are very complicated. My explanation is only an analogy.”

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This culminate in a brutal tactical showdown along the Panama Canal against the traitorous Earth-Trisolaris Organization.

The novel explores several themes, most notably the limits of knowledge. Liu suggests that our fundamental understanding of physics might not be a universal truth, but rather a localised chance.

When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe.
In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe.
The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

While human comprehension is presented as having hard boundaries, strictly limited by our specific placement in time and space. Alongside this cosmic humility, the book dives into the friction between the individual and the system, demonstrating how massive, systemic political movements can crush and reshape single lives. In a devastating domino effect, the ideological trauma inflicted on Ye Wenjie by the state causes her to make a catastrophic cosmic choice that dooms the entire human race.

What are they locking?
YE: They are sealing off the progress of human science. Because of the existence of these two protons, humanity will not be able to make any important scientific developments during the four and a half centuries until the arrival of the Trisolaran Fleet. Evans once said that the day of arrival of the two protons was also the day that human science died.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Ultimately, The Three-Body Problem is a novel built around many layers, with each revealing a different perspective. Although we are position to like some characters more than others, Liu has a way of empathising with everyones perspective, for they are all history:

The one-armed woman said, “There was a movie called Maple recently. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.’”

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The final impression of the book is one of profound existential dread, it definitely left me feeling incredibly small and utterly insignificant in the grand scale of the universe.

He felt like the starry sky was a magnifying glass that covered the world, and he was a tiny insect below the lens with nowhere to hide.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

It delivers a massive, thrilling intellectual challenge that leaves your head hurting in the exact same way it does after watching say Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. However, even with all the dread, there is still hope, that even if humans are bugs, bugs always still manage to find a way to survive and prosper.

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a flyswatter under it … this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. They still proudly live between the heavens and the earth, and their numbers have not diminished from the time before the appearance of the humans.
The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

Source: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
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Multipliers don’t tell people what to think; they tell them what to think about. Liz Wiseman ‘Multipliers’

With Multipliers, Liz Wiseman contrasts two types of leaders: multipliers, those who draw out and often double the capacity of people around them, and diminishers, those who stunt others’ growth and contribution. The book explores how this divide plays out in several dimensions, including how leaders use resources:

Multipliers don’t tell people what to think; they tell them what to think about.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they manage hierarchy:

Each time people who uphold the beliefs are rewarded, the culture is strengthened; likewise, every time diminishing behavior is overlooked, that culture is diluted.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they challenge and debate:

Once an opportunity is seeded and intellectual energy is created, Multipliers establish the challenge at hand in such a way that it creates a huge stretch for an organization.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

How they invest in people:

Perhaps the only thing harder than watching an A+ player leave your team is knowing that you were the one who encouraged them to move on.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

And how “accidental diminishers” unintentionally shut others down:

As leaders, sometimes the faster we run, the slower others walk. When leaders set the pace, they are more likely to create spectators than followers.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

Rather than treating these as simple opposites, the book shows a spectrum of behaviours: some multipliers amplify more than others, and some diminishers have a stronger negative impact than others. It also highlights that diminishing is not always intentional. For example, leaders can withhold investment, over-direct, or dominate discussions without realising the effect they are having.

The closing chapters focus on practical strategies for becoming more of a multiplier and for handling diminishers when you are not in charge. These include defensive moves (protecting your autonomy and space to think), offensive moves (such as creating a “user guide to you” so others know how to get your best work), and ways to shift conversations and expectations so that more people can contribute at their full intelligence.

What resonated with me is going beyond the leader as genius. One of the things Wiseman talks about again and again is moving from “genius” to “genius maker”, that is leaders who leave others feeling like they are the smartest in the room. This is epitomised with the Disraeli quote:

We began this inquiry with an intriguing observation about two political leaders paraphrased by Bono, musician and global activist. He said, “It has been said that after meeting with the great British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, you left feeling he was the smartest person in the world, but after meeting with his rival Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking you were the smartest person.” The observation captures the essence and the power of a Multiplier.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

The discussion of a multiplier making you think you were the “smartest person” had me thinking about David Weinberger’s adage that, “The smartest person in the room is the room.” It also had me wondering how this idea of “genius maker” sits alongside Brian Eno’s idea of scenius:

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

Source: Scenius, or Communal Genius by Kevin Kelley

Something Austin Kleon sums this up as follows:

Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.

Source: Scenius by Austin Kleon

I wonder if a true multiplier is actually someone who creates an environment, rather than individuals. This also had me thinking about multiplicity alongside Alma Harris’ work on distributed leadership and disciplined collaboration.

Many educational initiatives often start out with a clear set of practises in mind. Disciplined Collaboration instead provides a structure for staff to enquire into student learning through the analysis of data, diagnosing teaching and learning issues that students actually face, working collaboratively to build teacher efficacy and then returning to data to measure the impact.
The model is best understood by considering it as three clear stages: collaboration, innovationand impact. Overall, it is designed with the dual role of improving student outcomes and moving professional learning away from the mere acquisition of knowledge and skills, to a more active role of construction and co-construction of professional knowledge.

Source: Disciplined Collaboration: Allowing Freedom Within Form (Finding Common Ground) by Aaron Davis

I was left challenged by the question of whether we are multiplying or diminishing? In exploring the topic of vulnerability, Brene Brown explains that we cannot say, “I don’t do vulnerability”. It is so easy to say we do not have time for play, creativity and rest, or numb emotions. But as Brown captures, this is not an option. Saying no to vulnerability is saying no to growth and improvement. For example, when we numb the “bad” (pain, shame), we also numb the “good” (joy, love). In a similar way, Liz Wiseman suggests we cannot really opt out of our impact on others’ intelligence: if we are not intentionally multiplying, we are probably diminishing by default.

Wiseman describes how “there is more intelligence inside our organisations than we are using” and contrasts leaders who “saw, used, and grew the intelligence of others” with those who “shut down the smarts of those around them”. Even when she emphasises that most of us are “Accidental Diminishers,” she still frames it as a choice of practice.

Leading like a Multiplier is a choice we encounter daily or perhaps in every moment. What choices are you making? How will these choices affect what the people around you become? Is it possible that the choice you make about how you lead can impact not just your team, or even your immediate sphere of influence, but generations to come? A single Accidental Diminisher turned Multiplier can have a profound and far-reaching impact in a world where the challenges are great and full intelligence underutilized.

Source: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman

My take-away from the book is that just as there is a danger with prioritising nature over nurture when it comes to red, yellow, green and blue types of human behaviour, it can be easy to label somebody as a multiplier or diminisher. However, this risks missing the nuisance. I think what is more useful is considering what are multiplying and diminishing behaviours. In some ways, I think that this is why the discussion of the accidental diminisher is useful. It feels like it provides the most potential for growth and improvement.

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You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching. Daniel Mendelsohn ‘An Odyssey - A Father, A Son and an Epic’

Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic is a hybrid of memoir and literary criticism that intertwines different narratives together, including an undergraduate Odyssey seminar, the Mediterranean “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, Mendelsohn’s relationship with his father, Jay, and close readings of Homer’s epic poem. As Dwight Garner neatly summarises in his review:

a) It is a classroom drama, a bit like Alan Bennett’s play “The History Boys” or the movie “Dead Poets Society,” in that it recalls what happened when Jay decided to sit in on the author’s undergraduate seminar on the “Odyssey” at Bard College.
b) It is travel writing. Father and son decide to take the cruise shortly after the completion of the seminar at Bard.
c) It is a work of biographical memoir that investigates the circumstances of Jay’s life.
d) It is a work of literary criticism. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, employed the trick of the Trojan horse. Mendelsohn, similarly, smuggles his moral and textual ideas past you when you are distracted by the other things he’s doing.

Source: A Father and Son Sail Through Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Together – The New York Times by Dwight Garner

Mendelsohn ties these modes so tightly that it’s hard to say where criticism ends and family memoir begins. In some ways the various threads can be understood as repeating and refracting, like ring composition in the epic itself, where each loop back changes how we understand the present moment.

In ring composition, the narrator will start to tell a story only to pause and loop back to some earlier moment that helps explain an aspect of the story he’s telling—a bit of personal or family history, say—and afterward might even loop back to some earlier moment or object or incident that will help account for that slightly less early moment, thereafter gradually winding his way back to the present, the moment in the narrative that he left in order to provide all this background.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

In other words, stories keep circling back through earlier episodes, then returning us to the ‘now’ with a slightly altered understanding. The book itself mirrors this structure: classroom, cruise, childhood memories, and the father’s decline loop back on one another, each detour changing how we read the others. Mendelsohn himself discusses Homer’s famous ‘scar’ episode in Book 19, circling back to small details – a gesture, a comment in class – that are later revealed as wounds or scars. Mendelsohn argues that the:

great irony of Book 19, then, is that the scar that identifies Odysseus in such a memorable way, that proves who he is, is the visual symbol of a youthful act that is not typical of his adult behavior: the excessive caution, the guardedness, the willed reserve. Hence it identifies him (the scar proves that he is Odysseus, the person who went on the boar hunt and got himself wounded) while being, at the same time, a false identifier, the marker of a behavior that is no longer characteristic of him.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

However, as with Odysseus, we’re often left to wonder whether such reveals are true identifiers or false ones, and whether any stable ‘true’ identity exists at all.

As a format, it reminded me of other hybrid literary/biographical journeys, including books like Mark Richardson’s Zen and Now (shadowing Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), Tom Roston’s The Writer’s Crusade on Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five, and even Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. All are books where reading another text becomes a way of reading a life. Each uses another writer’s text as a kind of map for revisiting the self, history, and grief. Mendelsohn’s book sits comfortably among these, but its classroom setting and father – son dynamic give it a more explicitly pedagogical feel. However, as Garner notes, it resists neat didacticism:

This book does not bake its lessons up into a tidy platter of macaroons, but they are there nonetheless.

Source: A Father and Son Sail Through Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Together – The New York Times by Dwight Garner

In some respect, reading An Odyssey felt like bibliotherapy, literature as healing. Not necessarily literature that dictates to us, but rather sets up a series of questions and conditions for us to consider. Those questions – about self-sufficiency, identity, and whether we can know another person – recur in Mendelsohn’s arguments with his students and with his father, as Emily Wilson captures in her review.

The fault-lines mapped in the disagreements of father and son correspond to some of the most fascinating interpretative questions of The Odyssey itself, such as whether people ever can or should be self-sufficient, whether you have a single “true” identity and whether you can ever really know another person. The book also explores how stories and shared memories help people to form deep connections with one another across time.

Source: An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn Review – A Father, a Son and Homer’s Epic by Emily Wilson

For me, that is what made it feel like bibliotherapy: the book does not solve the riddles of family and marriage, but it provides a space for bad ideas (and good ones too) to be voiced, tested, and revised without having to be ‘right’ on first utterance, and general questions to live with. I feel that the genre‑bending nature of the book allows Mendelsohn to explore ideas that might not find a place in more academic texts.

All in all, Mendelsohn has a way of making us feel as if we are sitting at the back of his seminar room, watching the poem, the class, and his father all slowly change shape in front of us – sometimes in ways he only understands in retrospect. As Mendelsohn later reflects,

You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.

Source: An Odyssey – A Father, A Son and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

I came to An Odyssey via a conversation on the Art of Manliness podcast, then listened to the audiobook (read by Bronson Pinchot) on Spotify.

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You ask me my name. I’ll tell it to you; and in return give me the gift you promised me. My name is Nobody. That is what I am called by my mother and father and by all my friends. Homer ‘Odyssey’

My daughter has recently been playing Epic, the musical adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, on repeat.

Epic: The Musical (stylized as EPIC) is a nine-part series of album musicals (referred to as “sagas”) written and produced in their entirety by Puerto Rican actor and singer-songwriter Jorge Rivera-Herrans. This musical project, released between 2022 and 2024, is a sung-through adaptation of the Ancient Greek epic poem Odyssey by Homer and takes inspiration from different musical genres as well as modern musical theater, anime and video games. It recounts the story of Odysseus as he tries to return from Troy to his island kingdom of Ithaca after the conclusion of the decade-long Trojan War. Along the years-long journey, he encounters multiple gods and monsters who either help or hinder him in his quest to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus.

Source: Wikipedia

It occurred to me that I had never actually read Homer’s poem. This led me to listen to George Blagden’s reading via Libby.

The Odyssey is an oral epic poem attributed to Homer. It contains 24 books, often grouped into five parts: the Telemachy, the Departure from Calypso, the Great Wanderings, the Return to Ithaca, and the Revenge. As a narrative, it has many threads, often jumping back in time to recount various events. There is Odysseus’ journey home from Troy. There is Telemachus’ coming of age. There is Penelope, with her hands tied regarding the new suitors. Throughout, the narrative blends the supernatural gods and monsters—such as the Cyclops, Circe, and Athena—with everyday heroes. It bridges the human and the divine.

Although The Odyssey is credited to “Homer,” it is often considered an amalgam of poems handed down over the years. It tells us as much about 8th‑century BC Greece as it does about the Mycenaean world, with various stories best understood as commentary on Homer’s present as much as on the past brought to life.

In an interview on The Art of Manliness podcast, Daniel Mendelsohn discusses the significance of The Odyssey and what it can teach us today. He explains that it can be understood as laying the groundwork for a number of genres, including adventure, homecoming, science fiction/fantasy, and comedy as reunion. In terms of themes, The Odyssey explores adulthood and family, sons looking for fathers, and how little we understand our parents’ marriages. This is something that Mendelsohn also explored in his memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.

Bringing The Odyssey into the present, I am left thinking about the “supernatural” stories as a means of making sense of human nature – myths to live by. The gods and monsters that Odysseus meets – Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Poseidon, Athena – do not just decorate the plot, rather they provide a way of dramatising – transferring – fear, desire, rage, temptation, loyalty, and hope. In these encounters, invisible inner conflicts are made visible.

As a narrative, The Odyssey suggests that life is not a single, simple journey but a weaving together of all its facets: home and exile, youth and age, fidelity and betrayal, duty and pleasure, fate and choice. The fantastic episodes give shape to experiences we still recognize: feeling lost at sea, trapped by routines that turn us into something less than fully human, deaf to good advice, or guided by a wisdom we barely understand.

Read this way, the poem becomes less a distant heroic legend about a lost world and more a map of the inner life. From here, I find myself wondering if this might be the right entry point into James Joyce’s Ulysses. I also wonder what a fully modern revisioning of Odyssey might look like today?

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Desire in its free state has the potential to be destructive, to carry us away or drop us in a black hole, so we need to interrupt it, capture it, manage it and put it to work. Ian Buchanan ‘Assemblage Theory and Method’

Ian Buchanan’s Assemblage Theory and Method sets out to define what an assemblage is (and is not), as well as make the case for why assemblage theory is useful and necessary.

The book begins with an introduction to the concept of ‘assemblages’. He pushes beyond the idea of an assemblage as ‘a random heap of fragments’, aiming to restore its ‘conceptual vitality’. It remains an incomplete project in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: a concept that invites us to complete and apply it ourselves.

With this in mind, Buchanan calls for a return to the original text to reclaim the concept. Rather than Paul Patton and Paul Foss’ translation of ‘agencement’ as assemblage, he argues that it could just as easily be interpreted as ‘arrangement’.

Assemblage is Paul Patton and Paul Foss’s choice of translation for agencement which Brian Massumi picked up and used in his translation of A Thousand Plateaus. It has since become more or less the default translation, despite the fact that – as several people have pointed out – it has its problems. In my view, however, these problems are not resolved by altering the translation and using a different word, but rather by problematizing it and opening it up to a more complicated reading, one that is more consciously attentive to Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I would add that I think there is probably a strong case to be made for leaving it untranslated, as is increasingly the case with translations of critical theory concepts today, though that itself carries the risk of hypostatizing the term in a different way. Agencement derives from agencer, which according to Le Roberts Collins means ‘to arrange, to lay out, or to piece together’, whereas assemblage means ‘to join, to gather, to assemble’.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan argues that agencement effectively reworks the role of the psychoanalytic “complex” (Komplex): what was once a psychic configuration becomes, in their hands, a socio‑material arrangement.

Agencement is Deleuze and Guattari’s own translation, or perhaps rearrangement would be a better word, of the German word Komplex (as in the ‘Oedipal complex’ or the ‘castration complex’).

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, assemblage is more than just a question about ‘what’. It is as much a question about how, where and when.

In the remaining chapters, Buchanan develops this reclaimed concept of assemblage through discussions of strata, desire, territory, expressive materialism, and contemporary control.

The first chapter unpacks strata and the production of nature and history.

Strata are the product of the manifold processes that have over time constructed and produced the thing we call nature, whether by that we mean human nature or nature as wilderness. We have to be careful not to reverse this historicizing process by overemphasizing the apparent ‘naturalness’ of strata, that is, by forgetting that ‘strata’ refers to a concept that enables us to see and think about a certain type of process, the production of nature, not the thing itself.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

There are three types of strata: geological, biological and techno‑semiological (the linguistic / socio‑technical stratum). Each of these is formed differently. Each stratum is made up of two dimensions: content and expression, where there is always remainder, something escapes. These two bind the strata together to resonate. With this, strata are never inert.

Buchanan outlines four first principles that explain how strata and stratification work:

  1. There is a chaotic flux of material and immaterial particles (including desire) that flows freely. The three kinds of strata are different, non‑analogical ways of capturing and organising this flux. However, they do not all relate things in the same way.
  2. Stratification is the process that gives form to matters by imprisoning intensities, simultaneously organizing material processes and capturing desire. It separates the world into distinct layers (strata), each with its own unity and logic of composition, and with beginnings and ends, allowing for variations both between and within strata. It needs to be noted that with these differences and variations, the schema of one stratum cannot be straightforwardly used to explain another, since each operates with different modes of organisation.
  3. Stratification is a process of capture which works by means of selecting and coding, as well as stabilising and territorialisation.
  4. Each assemblage contains a single abstract machine, a diagram enveloped by the stratum that constitutes its unity. It can be glossed with the question, “Whatever could have happened for things to come to this?” Conversely, the abstract machine also marks what cannot be done within an assemblage.

Stratification is important as assemblages are not defined by their components, but rather by what they produce, and these productions are complex. It is useful at explaining the way in which everyday life is experienced in a multi-layered way, without necessarily being interconnected. It helps capture the discontinuous, uneven character of historical change. It also helps theorise a process capable of producing subjects and subjectivity.
In the end, Buchanan explains that stratification is key to any understanding of ‘I’ or ‘We’.

Without stratification there would be no ‘we’. Without stratification there would be no ‘I’. Without stratification we could not communicate with one another, nor even live together in anything like a society.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

With this, he warns that there is a danger of destratification and simply opting out of a situation, without a clear path.

Deleuze and Guattari are not voluntarists; they don’t think one can simply opt out of a difficult situation. Rather, for them, it is always a matter of engineering escapes, of finding the means to build and execute the assemblages one needs to destratify, just a little, and make one’s getaway. But we cannot escape everything, all at once, because that too is a kind of death. So we must choose our lines of flight carefully. Whatever we retain after we have made our getaway is our strata: it is the bedrock of our existence.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

If Chapter 1 shows how assemblages are stratified in nature and history, Chapter 2 turns to what animates them from within: desire. Buchanan explains the importance of the concept.

Desire is primary; it is desire that selects materials and gives them the properties that they have in the assemblage. This is because desire itself is productive.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

With regards to this, he explains how what it produces is itself actual, whatever the material it is in. In relation to the assemblages, these are an actual composition of desire.

The second part of the chapter explores the relationship between desire and bodies without organs.

Desire desires on the body without organs. One cannot speak of desire in Deleuze and Guattari in the absence of their concept of the body without organs just as one cannot speak of the body without organs without taking into account their concept of desire.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Bodies without organs are desire at degree zero, they are not in fact bodily but a surface on which desire flows.

If someone says their heart is broken, one does not imagine that they are in need of a cardiologist; one knows that it is not that heart that is the problem. The heart the broken-hearted speak of exists on a different plane to the physical body. It is real, to be sure, and its effects are real too, and its effects may even be felt in the visceral body, but it is not the same heart as the muscular organ that circulates our blood. Fixing this heart requires love, poetry, solitude, companionship, soulful healing and many other things besides, which may or may not pass through the body but are not necessarily bodily. Kind words can heal a broken heart but a heart transplant cannot.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

For Buchanan, this all serves to remind us that, although desire is always potentially assembling, we must not assume that every configuration of things is already an assemblage. Some things really are just ‘heaps of fragments’.

Having established desire as the machinic heart of assemblages, Chapter 3 turns to how desire composes “liveable orders”: territories. As Buchanan touches on in regards to stratification, territorialisation is the conversion of flux into liveable order. It is the most immediate, local form of the assemblage, the way desire first composes a liveable order out of chaos.

We territorialize because we need to and we need to territorialize because we have to confront chaos, both in its originary form and in the form of black holes. The territory transforms not only the elements constituting it but its inhabitant as well (as both the territory’s creator and primary beneficiary).

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Unlike strata which is somewhat more stable, territory (reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation) occurs at a more local level, a part of the process of becoming. To explain this, Buchanan refers to F.Scott Fitzgerald’s discussions of cracks and the constant threat of chaos in our life.

Everything we do (insofar as it is an action of desire) carries this risk of plunging us into a black hole. In this sense then territory should be understood as a defensive concept because it describes our means of getting out of the black holes we sometimes find ourselves in either because we chose to go down a dark path or somehow our actions inadvertently lead us there. Deleuze and Guattari borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion of the ‘crack’ from his short autobiographical piece The Crack-up to illustrate this idea. In life, according to Fitzgerald, there are three ways of cracking-up, that is, three ways the black hole can make itself felt in our daily lives. First, there are the big blows that hit you from the outside, that often present themselves in terms of choices – if only I hadn’t drunk so much, if only I’d kept my mouth shut and so on. The changes that ensue, loss of love, loss of employment, loss of respect and so on, stay with you forever but also feel strangely alien because one feels that if one had made different choices things wouldn’t be the way they are. Then there are the micro-cracks that occur when things seem to be going well – one might not even notice them at first. It is the corrosion that happens in one’s soul when a thousand slights resonate together and ramify. The first time someone calls you ‘fat’ or ‘loser’ you might not even notice the hurt it caused, but the damage is done, and every repetition of that slight causes the hurt to magnify as it resonates within. Last, there are ‘clean breaks’; these are the breaks you cannot come back from because it destroys all connection to the past. This is what people mean when they say about a former relationship that there is no ‘us’ anymore, there is nothing to go back to, the past has been volatized. We can also see that these are the types of situation that could drown us if we didn’t have some kind of lifeline: territory is that lifeline.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan explains that there are three ways of leaving a territory, or deterritorialisation:

  • Negative deterritorialisation is one that is overlaid by reterritorialisation.
  • Relative deterritorialisation overcomes the inertia of reterritorialisation
  • Absolute deterritorialisation where it succeeds in creating a new earth, a new beginning, one that does not lead back to old territories

Extending this discussion of deterritorialisation and chaos, Buchanan brings in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of fascism to show how a line of flight out of an unbearable territory can itself become a suicidal black hole.

As with ‘bodies without organs’ not being about literal bodies, Buchanan explains that it is more useful to consider territories as subjective states in a psychological sense.

Territory is an act, a passage, not a space. It is the composition of one’s own world.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

These worlds are composed of elements borrowed and stolen from the environments we are in. (Footnote: Buchanan explains that “Deleuze and Guattari are often portrayed as theorists of the body, they were actually more interested in the way the non-bodily, that is, words, can transform the body, without ever penetrating beneath the surface.”) This organising of environments also encompasses distance between bodies. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “critical distance,” Buchanan shows how territory regulates how close we can come to others of the same species and still coexist. Territory is thus the subjective spacing between interiors, the way a shared space is partitioned so that my “home” and your “home” can coexist without collapsing into chaos.

Buchanan then extends the conversation into language, or as Deleuze and Guattari described it, the “collective assemblage of enunciation”.

Expressed of an expression is not its meaning; it is the transformation of the world the expression instantiates.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan ends the chapter with a discussion of the association between territory and style. He uses the example of film characters and genre to demonstrate this, with repeated traits (the action hero’s walk, clothing, gestures) serving as “directional” signs, but their peculiar mannerisms form a style, which is “dimensional” and territorial.

Style is, in this sense, an exercise in redundancy – the more distinctive it is, the greater its power of redundancy, meaning the more we are able to internalize it and know its inner rhythms.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

The fourth chapter makes the case for Deleuze and Guattari as expressive materialists: neither reducing everything to ideas (idealism) nor treating all matter as equally “vibrant”. Every assemblage has an inseparable material side (form of content) and expressive side (form of expression). To explain this, Buchanan pushes back on Jane Bennett’s misconception of assemblages as ad hoc groupings, instead explaining why the actual collection of things matter or else you just have a “growing heap of fragments.”

As I have reiterated throughout, it has a material dimension (form of content, machinic assemblage etc.) and an expressive dimension (form of expression, collective assemblages of enunication etc.), a principle of unity (abstract machine), and it rests upon a condition of possibility (BwO, plane of immanence, plane of consistency etc.) which is criss-crossed by lines of flight (lines of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation). As we have seen above in my examination of Bennett’s version of the assemblage, it is not sufficient to simply enumerate an assemblage’s material components because these do not by themselves disclose the assemblage’s constitution, much less its purpose or function. One must also ask how these material components are captured by the expressive dimension and inquire too about its principle of unity and its conditions of possibility.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

Assemblages permit wide internal variation, but not every variation is possible: their abstract machines impose a form of relative invariance.

In contrast to Bennett’s interpretation, Buchanan discusses Tess Lea’s work on indigenous housing policy in Australia. Lea’s analysis shows how the material arrangements of housing, funding streams, bureaucratic offices (form of content) are bound to a discourse of “policy” and “progress” (form of expression) that organises what can and cannot be done or even seen.

To conceive of policy as an assemblage means seeing it in terms of the kinds of arrangements and orderings it makes possible and even more importantly the complex and not always fully disclosed set of expectations it entails. To see it this way we need to separate ‘policy’ as a conceptual entity from its myriad iterations as this or that policy, for example, infrastructure policy, health policy, transport policy and so on, but also from all sense of outcomes and outputs. We also have to see so-called policy decisions as components of the policy assemblage and not as some kind of climactic moment in the life of a policy. Policy decisions are part of the form of expression of the policy assemblage, not the content. By questioning the very idea of policy Lea has enabled us to see it in its properly rhizomatic light. As Lea shows, policymaking takes place ‘in the middle of things’ but always pretends otherwise because it is locked into an image of itself as a special type of agency that defines and measures ‘progress’.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

He also discusses Löic Wacquant’s work on imprisonment in US. Wacquant likewise maps how the institutional complex of prisons, police, welfare retrenchment (form of content) is articulated with a discourse of “crime”, “delinquency” and neoliberal responsibility (form of expression), revealing imprisonment as a political technology rather than a neutral response to crime.

Wacquant argues that we cannot understand the prison system by focusing solely on enclosed world of prisons and prisoners, we need to pull back and look at the stratum as a whole (not his choice of words, obviously), which in this instance means factoring in what is happening more broadly at the level of the state. At this level it is immediately clear that neither drugs nor criminality nor even poverty were ever the main problem as far as the state is concerned. The real issue was elsewhere. Wacquant identifies the ascendency of neoliberalism as the main culprit because it placed the state in the strange position of having to give up all its roles and responsibilities except its right to exercise and control violence.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, what both of these examples provide is a way of not describing, but rather a way of analysing.

this is what the assemblage does. We have to stop thinking of the concept of the assemblage as a way of describing a thing or situation and instead see it for what it was always intended to be, a way of analysing a thing or situation. Faced with any apparent assemblage we should ask, what holds it together? What are its limits (internal and external) and what function does it fulfil?

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

For Buchanan, using assemblage theory therefore means rigorously tracking these doublings—content/expression, material/expressive—rather than simply naming any complex situation an “assemblage”.

The fifth and final chapter revisits Deleuze’s essay ‘Postscript on Control Societies’. This essay was written in 1990 at the end of the Cold War and as a “postscript” to the work of Michel Foucault:

Written at a time when the Cold War was ending, computers were becoming more common, and the internet was beginning to connect institutions, the essay describes the emergence of a new kind of society – one not ruled by a single stern voice but by the soft hum of networks.
Postscript was written as an update to the work of Deleuze’s contemporary Michel Foucault, who had died in 1984. Deleuze called it a “postscript” not just because of its brevity (it’s only around 2,300 words in English translation) but to highlight he wasn’t refuting Foucault, just building on his work.

Source: Computers tracking us, an ‘electronic collar’: Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 Postscript on the Societies of Control was eerily prescient by Cameron Shackell

Buchanan’s purpose in returning to this brief text is twofold: to show how pertinent Deleuze remains to “our contemporary situation”, and to foreground the largely overlooked role of the assemblage in the essay’s analysis of control.

For Deleuze, the panopticon that Foucault feared so much has been trumped by the rise in digital technology. With this, we have moved from individuals to dividuals:

Today surveillance is focused on controlling dividuals (not individuals), restricting their movement, limiting their access to credit and capital, determining where and how they can spend their money, and not, as was the case with disciplinary society, in shaping and forming them as particular social types (soldiers, doctors, teachers and so on).

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In a world of surveillance and restrictions, we are controlled by nudges and modulations.

In contrast to the old duality of management and trade unions today’s businesses ‘are constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself’. Competition for its own sake lives and thrives on the intermittent highs of transitory victories (e.g. heart surgeon of the month), and never concerns itself with whether or not these victories add up to something meaningful like competency or a vocation. Not even education is immune from this trend, Deleuze laments. Schooling has been replaced ‘by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment’. To which he adds, showing uncanny prescience: ‘It’s the surest way of turning education into a business.’

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

To understand the machines of our times, such as cybernetic machines and computer networks, Buchanan argues that we need to appreciate the expressive dimension of desire. To do this, we need analyse the assemblage that the machine is a part of.

[Naomi] Klein argues that the mobilization of the logo enabled the dematerialization of businesses like Nike, but what she does not explain is the changes in desire that enabled this investment of desire in the logo. One might say then that she focuses on the machines of capitalism at the expense of its expressive dimension. ‘One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine – with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies.’ But, he adds, the ‘machines don’t explain anything’ by themselves; ‘you have to analyse the collective apparatuses [i.e. assemblages] of which the machines are just one component.’

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

In the end, Buchanan’s reading of “Postscript” reinforces the book’s central claim: that machines, institutions and technologies never speak for themselves. They become intelligible only when we map the assemblages that bind them together.

Assemblage Theory and Method is not an explicit guide. If anything, it is a book that left me with as many questions as answers. For Buchanan, the most important question that we must consider is: “What does the concept of the assemblage enable us to see that we couldn’t see before?” The book seeks to provide suggestions on how to use assemblage theory in as clear a manner as possible. However, it is no easy feat. As with so much of Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage theory is not a simple, straightforward process.

Buchanan’s book is best read as a sherpa: it carries conceptual supplies and points out paths, but we still have to climb the mountain ourselves. With this in mind, assemblage theory is more than a new name for complexity, and is better considered as a method for analysing how forms of control are composed – and, therefore, how they might be recomposed.

Thinking about this, I could not help thinking about Cory Doctorow’s work on enshittification, especially when Buchanan talks about the balance between flow of capital and flow of stupidity in the final chapter on technology and control.

Now content has been volatized by the new digital formats and ‘set free’ (to use the jargon of the techno-utopians) and made free to obtain, making it almost impossible to capture and control. This is why, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus, the flow of capital is always balanced by an equivalent flow of stupidity, which stifles both technical innovation and social and economic revolution.

Source: Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan

As a quick thought‑experiment in this mode of analysis, I found myself thinking about a platform like Spotify and what assemblage theory would enable us to see that we could not see before. On the content side we have servers, catalogues, licensing contracts, recommendation algorithms, mobile apps, headphones, playlists, financial flows between labels, artists and venture capital. On the expressive side we have discourses of “discovery”, “mood”, “productivity”, “chill”; metrics, moods and genres as classificatory systems.

Thinking this way turns Spotify from a platform with features into a control‑society assemblage that captures listening, partitions time and attention, and organises the circulation of musical labour and value. Where Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine – The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist tracks Spotify’s cultural and economic effects, assemblage theory pushes us to ask how its very architecture of moods, metrics and recommendation functions as a territorialisation of listening – a way of capturing and modulating desire under contemporary conditions of control.

Similarly, as a set of questions an assemblage analysis might pose to a cultural figure, I am left thinking about
my current deep dive into the world of Prince. What would it mean to treat “Prince” as an assemblage rather than a singular genius or a linear artistic evolution? Form of content might include instruments, studios, collaborators, production techniques, contracts and formats. While form of expression might encompass genre labels, press narratives, iconography, gender and sexuality discourse, fan practices. The key questions would become: what abstract machine gives “Prince” his relative invariance across wildly different configurations, and what external historical limits shape him (format shifts, MTV, streaming, post‑9/11 politics, digital control societies)?

This approach would work against the easy story of linear “evolution” from early funk to late spirituality, instead mapping discontinuous reconfigurations of desire, territory and media strata. In Buchanan’s terms, the question would be less “Who is the real Prince?” and more “What arrangements make ‘Prince’ possible across such different historical and media conditions?” The obvious caveat is empirical, for at some point the available material may not support a robust mapping of the assemblage, and what began as analysis risks becoming conjecture.

Assemblage theory, on this view, supplies a set of questions and distinctions to guide research, but it still depends on the available archive, that is, the concrete mapping of form of content, form of expression, abstract machines and lines of flight has to rest on empirical traces or it risks becoming purely speculative. That dependence sets limits on method: some assemblages are poorly documented, evidence is always selective, choices of temporal and spatial scale shape what relations can even appear, and the work of linking material and expressive dimensions always involves judgement.

I feel like I have always dabbled with Deleuze. Initially dipping in during my university degree. I was also pulled back in via the work of Ben Williamson, Greg Thompson and Ian Guest. Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus have always sat on my bookshelf seemingly taunting me, calling me to return, sitting next to Claire Colebrook’s Understanding Deleuze. I actually downloaded Buchanan’s papers on ‘Assemblage theory and schizoanalysis’ and ‘Becoming Mountain’, along with some others that I found, with the intent on doing further reading on the topic. However, somewhere along the way I got distracted and it became another loose end left untied. I actually stumbled on Assemblage Theory and Method by chance while looking for secondary material on Fredric Jameson, while reading Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

What I find interesting is that although I feel I have only ever touched the surface on the concept of ‘assemblage’ I still regularly used the term in my writing (see this post for example), usually to capture the general interrelated nature of things. I must admit my understanding was vague. (Buchanan talks about how it has become a ‘received idea’.)

Ironically, having a clearer grasp of the basic concepts has mostly sharpened my sense of how partial my understanding still is. That, in a way, is Buchanan’s point, that “assemblage” is not a label to apply but a way of asking better questions. If the book has left me with a richer sense of what the concept can do and where my own reading remains unfinished, then perhaps Buchanan’s assemblage has already done its work on me.