I’m not ashamed to admit that I am an enthusiastic reader of the London Review of Books. (It’s one of the last refuges of real, thoughtful long-form writing in our ablated Anglophone cultural world, man!) Today I want to offer you an extended meditation on the mode of associational thinking that seems to be so commonplace today. By way of very limited example, I’m going to use two reviews that appeared months apart in two separate issues of the LRB. Please consider that these examples are meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive, and I encourage you to think about examples of associational thinking in your own lives.* In the January 23, 2025 issue, Susan Pedersen reviewed Tehila Sasson’s The Solidarity Economy: Non-profits and the making of neoliberalism after empire; framing the prevalence of the “the making of” titling convention in this type of academic book, she writes: “A reader scanning bookshop shelves understands that such titles are just a way of saying that a particular person, place, process or thing is more important than you thought, and you’d best buy the book to learn about it. Whether the link can bear much causal weight is another question.” Almost exactly five months later, in the May 22, 2025 edition, David Runciman reviewed Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: The neoliberal roots of the populist right. Runciman’s description of the book as “overdetermined and undertheorized” reminded me of Pedersen’s criticism of Sasson’s. Hayek’s Bastards, according to Runciman, “... suppl[ies] a litany of links from then to now,” which “isn’t the same as making sense of it all.” He continues: “This kind of history feels very much of its moment. It is perhaps a little too easy these days to track the connections across an endless array of online sources, following each idea into whichever murky chamber it might lead… everything connects if you look long and hard enough, which means that mere connection isn’t enough to sustain the argument.”
The appearance of these two observations, in two temporally distant reviews in the same publication, suggests that I’m not alone in noticing the intellectual work that we’re all trying to make a gossamer of associations do. Everywhere I look, I seem to see a cobweb of superficial connections holding up a bowling ball like “the making of neoliberalism after empire.” This seems to account for the millennial-graying of nonfiction writing, a pronounced drift towards a minimalist economy of style, a mid-market baseline of concepts and ideas in play, and the primacy of bullet-point “argument” in five or six one-sentence paragraphs, gray carpet and gray paint now permeating our psychic as well as our interior spaces – something readers will understand. Readers who increasingly can’t read, or think, in any way except the associational headline-consumption fashion corresponding to the doomscroll. Of course I have wondered, as so many have, what exactly in the incentive structure of the Platform Economy encourages this bare associative style of reasoning. I’m sure I could find some sophisticated examples of the associative mode of reasoning looking into exactly this question – did you know that the predecessors of today’s computing technologies were made by weirdos and creeps receiving military money? But I think it’s more interesting, taking a page from Frederic Jameson, to consider the predominance of a mode of reasoning or a mode of intellectual discourse in terms of what it represents in processual/dialectical terms. Let me explain.
Jameson called postmodernism (I’m condensing a fantastically dense 500-page tome into its subtitle here) “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” He focused, obviously, on cultural and aesthetic production; for him, what puts the late in late capitalism is the integration of aesthetic production into commodity production. The postmodern condition is characterized by the loss of the individual modern subject and, consequently, the “increasing unavailability of personal style.” The aesthetic mode thus engendered is pastiche, the imitation of various idiosyncratic or unique personal styles (Jameson goes on a delightful digression about the William Hurt vehicle Body Heat (1981) as a sort of Southern gothic art deco pastiche) but without any of the motivation, or humor, of parody. Pastiche is a symptom of our collective struggle, on the level of culture, to “fashion representations of our own current experience.” Might we identify a homologous process in the realm of knowledge production, academic work, or popular writing of an intellectual bent? Is there such a thing as the… shall we say the epistemological orientation of late capitalism? My tentative thesis here is that indeed we might, and indeed there is; that we might consider the deadening prevalence of associational (or “machine-readable”) reasoning to be the same sort of postmodern logic at work in the epistemological sphere. We struggle to fashion representations of the totality of our real world not just through art, but through the privileged tools and techniques of science, too. I would know! Our intellectual pronouncements represent a struggle with the same kind of frustrating impossibility of representation as, say, the Westin Bonaventure.
It seems fairly certain that there has been a pronounced loss of the subject in knowledge production. Last year I lectured in a friend’s class, borrowing heavily from Kurt Danziger, about the double loss of the subject in psychological research: both as a researcher, and as a research object. The transition from the inquiry into phenomenological mental states of individual patients to the statistical analysis of aggregated study populations permitted the effacement of both the subjective inner experience of the individual and the supposedly subjective biases of the researchers. Quantitative research of the predominant type is statistical, and therefore associational – statistical analysis only allows for inference of association (correlation is not causation). Qualitative research doesn’t escape, though; even qualitative data have to be systematized in some way, and systematization, in rendering qualitatively different objects uniform enough to be comparable, is a cousin of mathematization. Consider, for example, the commonplace qualitative research activity of assigning and coding free-form survey responses to specific themes. In these studies, whether formally quantitative or qualitative, the associative relation between systematized units is the only bearer and arbiter of meaning, at the expense of richer and more narrative causal explanation.
Causal meaning is not explored or developed; causal argument is not constructed. Instead, causal relationships are merely implied by the simple juxtaposition of two or more bits of information in some kind of loose temporal or conceptual sense. Every time a notification dings, a postmodern subject has an insight, or at least a reasonable simulacrum of one. (Simulacrum, in the postmodern lexicon: the perfect representation of a non-existent reality.) This is an epistemological mode adapted, as David Runciman suggested, to “Web 3,” where information is infinite but attention is not. Information proliferates as intellectual, conceptual, and attentional resources for organizing or processing it are increasingly scarce. I really do feel like we can see this in Intellectual Work, broadly construed, from academic output to public-facing thinkpieces: a practice of bureaucratic/citational pastiche that is supposed to bear the phantom weight of an actual thesis or argument. The examples I am most familiar with come from academic writing. Most of the work of producing a scientific research article consists of painstakingly developing, through the collaging of references to other people’s previous work and general received wisdom of the field, so-called gaps in the literature that can be filled with rote, low-impact research. This is just the way it is done. Low-impact research counts, in a bibliometric sense, just as much as high-impact research. Consider the average number of citations – usually between 50-60 – for an average epidemiology article saying absolutely nothing new (e.g., smokers have shorter life spans) versus Leo Szilárd’s justifiably famous paper on the Maxwell’s Demon thought experiment, containing just two citations but a whole lot of original thinking. This puts me in mind not only of the wisdom we have lost in information, but what kind of struggle is indicated by this type of attempt to think and represent the world system in real, true terms.
I’ll suggest, just gently and tentatively, that we haven’t fully exited or broken with the postmodern condition just yet. We are struggling to fashion representations of our experience not only in architectural space or in visual art but in the very epistemological structures and practices we use in terms of real phenomena, often with terrifying, world-crushing stakes (e.g., climate change). I think that there’s a risk of overstating the discontinuity with the past that newer technologies, particularly algorithmic and “big data” technologies, herald. For Jameson, the “alienated power” of “dead human labor stored up in our machinery… seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for gasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capitalism itself.” (And it sucks, because we need this representational shorthand – machine-readable thought – to disseminate things through the technological attention-farming networks that we use to communicate!) Associative reasoning is, famously, also a hallmark of conspiracy theory, and I’ll quote Jameson again on conspiracy theorizing as a “degraded attempt – through the figuration of advanced technology – to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.” This will be where I pick up next time, with some reflections on patterns of thought, presence, and especially absence in different modes of reasoning.