All Articles
286 published articles, grouped by discipline
Core Principles
- "A Very Pretty Home": Time, Memory, and the Continuous Transformation of Life Into Nonrecursive Traces (Series: You Are My Rock) — You are my rock 4/5.
- 21 Ways to Be Late: How Scientific Disciplines Mistake Symbolic-Material Stabilisations for Reality — What scientific disciplines study has been decided long before any discipline is established.
- A Process Ontology of Differential Temporalities (It’s Time 1/6) — A six-part series of articles exploring time and temporality.
- Discovering the Five Mesocosmic Mediations — Why the basic mediations of life remained unnamed.
- Eat, Sleep, Repeat: Living Value Theory as a Method of Comparison — A radical reformulation of what we are studying and what we are comparing. Spoiler alert: It’s not culture.
- Living Value Theory as a Discipline of Attention — "Wie ihr es immer dreht und wie ihr's immer schiebt, erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" (B. Brecht, Dreigroschenoper).
- Living Value Theory: A Newcomer’s Guide to the Corpus — A newcomer's guide to what LVT is trying to do, clearing up common misunderstandings such as that LVT is another grand theory.
- Living Value Theory: Alphabetical Glossary of the Most Frequent Concepts — A glossary of LVT key concepts with links to relevant articles in the corpus.
- Living Value Theory: Complete Article Catalogue — A full catalogue, with abstracts, of all 255 LVT articles published through 30 September 2026.
- Living Value Theory: Core Principles (August 2026 V2) — An updated summary of LVT core principles (21 August 2026).
- Living Value Theory: Core Principles (August 2026) — An updated guide to the core principles of LVT.
- Living Value Theory: Core Principles (July 2026, Revised) — An updated summary of LVT core principles.
- Living Value Theory: Core Principles (June 2026) — A quick guide to LVT (June 2026).
- Living Value Theory: Core Principles (October 2026) — A comprehensive revised statement of the core principles of Living Value Theory.
- Living Value Theory: Core Principles and Core LVT 1/4-4/4 — The Core Principles article and the four Core LVT articles combined in a single document.
- Mesocosmic and Intersymbolic Fit: A New Theory of Symbolization — Some symbols don’t fit the world they describe. Some symbols don’t fit the other symbols that describe the world.
- Mixed Time: Pastness, Futurity, and the Differential Temporalities of Living Value — Future predictability varies by recursive counterpart (nonrecursive, selfrecursive, interrrecursive). How the past can be retrace also varies by the type of recursivity. If there's mixed futurity, there is mixed pastness.
- Predicting Unpredictability: Mesocosmic Coordination, Recursive Suppression, and the Ontological Limits of Psychopharmacology — Keynote lecture for "Rejecting the Future: Affect and Mental Health," Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg
- Recursive Mediation as Continuous Discernment — Living beings continuously discern the world to see what coordinations are relevant and possible.
- Sleep in Mesocosmography — Sleeping is the most overlooked metabolic stake. This needs to change urgently.
- Sleepwalking Through Living Value Theory: An Easy Introduction — The kind of introduction that should be clear even if you’ve just woken up.
- The Anatomy of ‘Melancholy’: An LVT Working Paper on How Concepts Work — "Major depressive disorder" looks like a real entity but it’s not
- The Ground We Made, the Ground We Found: Stability and Sedimentation of the Five Mediations (Series: You Are My Rock) — You are my rock 2/5.
- The House at Night: Domestic Architecture as the Coordination of Sleep — The history of domestic architecture is a history of sleeping.
- The Trace Before the Sign: Immedial Coordination and the Silent Histories of Living Worlds (Immedia 1/3) — A three-part series of articles exploring how we coordinate through the traces left by other living beings.
- The Wonder of What Works Well: How Living Value Theory Discovers Questions — Reviewing all the work of the past two years, it turns out that the greatest wonder lies in what's right in front of us but went unnoticed.
- Three Kinds of Fit: Cosmic, Mesocosmic, and Intersymbolic — A symbol can fit the cosmos, the lived-in mesocosm, or another form of symbol.
- What Are the Five Mediations? (Core LVT 3/4) — A systematic introduction to the core principles of LVT. 3/4
- What Do Symbols Do? — A synthesis of LVT writings on multisymbolization.
- What Is a Witness? Encounter, Memory, and the Making of Past Presence (Witnesses 1/4) — What, exactly, does it mean to be a witness? An obvious concept turns out to be far from obvious.
- What Is Mesocosmography? (Core LVT 4/4) — Mesocosmography is a method of describing living worlds, past and present, anywhere.
- What Is Recursivity? (Core LVT 2/4) — A systematic introduction to the core principles of LVT. 2/4
- What Is the Mesocosm? (Core LVT 1/4) — A systematic introduction to the core principles of LVT. 1/4
- What Makes Living Value Theory Different From Anthropology? — LVT grew out of specific intersections between medical and economic anthropology into a process ontology of all living beings.
- What’s Vital? Stakes, Coordination, and the Ground of Living Value Theory — What is the ontological ground of all living-remediating? Vital stakes.
- Where Living Value Theory Came From: The Emergence of a Process Ontology of Living Coordination — The first attempt to retrace the origins of LVT.
- Word Origins as World Origins: Etymology and the Recursive History of Value and Worth — Why is LVT called a “value“ theory? A genealogy of etymology and the origins of the words “value“ and “worth”.
- You Are My Rock: An Introduction to the Series — The complete "You Are My Rock" series with an introduction.
Philosophy
- Askability: Toward a New Method for the History of Ideas — Problems Have Histories Too
- Before the Code: Recursivity, Cultural Relativism, and the Mesocosmic Grounds of Moral Life — Both Rachels and the relativists he criticises share a hidden premise: that morality is primarily a matter of codes. LVT challenges that premise by descending below the code.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence (Part 3): The Illusion of Explanatory Depth Experiment Goes Down the Toilet — When an entire research program goes down the drain.
- Clarifying the Confused Debates on AI — An essay in memory of Hubert Dreyfus.
- Converting Mitsein: Heidegger and the Disappearance of Interrecursivity — Heidegger came closer to a full understanding of interrecursivity than anyone before him, but he never got there.
- Da Sein's Da Hakt's — Heidegger gave us the forest. Living Value Theory gives us the map.
- From Continuous Mediation to Interrecursive Ethics — The recognition of interrecursivity forces a complete revision of ethics in the mesocosm.
- From Wonder to System: The Transformation of Greek Philosophy From the Presocratics to Aristotle — Philosophy is about asking questions, and these questions have a history.
- Interrecursivity Is Not a Fixed Object: A Reply to the Boghossian Report (2026) — Any compelling argument about objectivity must first keep straight what kind of object it is talking about.
- Knowing How We Know That: A New History of Science — Why is knowledge supposed to be "produced" and "circulating" like it was an industrial commodity?
- Mis-taking the Wording for the Worlding: Why Heidegger Never Understood Symbolization — A close reading of Heidegger's Identity and Difference.
- More Partial Clearings: Lebenswelt, Dasein, Mesocosm — Retracing two predecessors of the mesocosm: Husserl's Lebenswelt and Heidegger's Dasein.
- Partial Clearings: Heidegger and the Mesocosm — How Heidegger saw only some parts of the mesocosm
- Philosophy in One Mediation — How Derrida and analytic philosophy share the same unexamined binary.
- Predicting the FIFA World Cup Winners 2026, Or: Why Interrecursive Futures Are Ontologically Uncertain — Spoiler alert: Spain beats Argentina 2-1.
- The Hail Mary Test (Part 2): Philosophy — Philosophical inquiry must start in the messy, vulnerable life worlds of embodied beings
- The Myth of Redundancy in Language-based Communication: The Meaning of Words in a Multimediated World — Shannon-style information theory does not capture how communication between interrecursive beings actually works.
- The Question Concerning the Question of Technology: Process Ontology, Vital Stakes, and the Ground of a Living Value Theory of Technology — Technologies are processes of continuous remediation within mesocosms.
- The Source That Doesn’t Answer Back: A Radical Revision of Lakoff and Johnson’s Theory of Metaphors — A radical revision of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphors and image schemas.
- Une Erreur Sauvage: Lévi-Strauss's Structuralism Got Everything Wrong — There are no binaries in the mesocosm. All binaries are human symbolic impositions.
- Ver-fremdung and Ent-wendung: How Heidegger Works with German Words — Heidegger's works after the Kehre are marred by a troubling alienation and expropriation of common German words.
- Verbalising Recent Ideas on Verbs: From Recursive Compression to Symbolic Overreach — I fear that philosophers take the noun “fear” for the real thing.
- Wait, What's That Right in Front of Me? Retracing Husserl's Path to Lebenswelt — Not another definition of Husserl's lifeworld, but a recovery of what prompted its rediscovery.
- What Counts as a Scientific Paradigm Shift? “Dark Matter” as Intersymbolic Misalignment — Kuhn’s paradigm shifts are intersymbolic events across different levels of recursivity.
- What Even Is a “Comparison”? (Series: Genesis 1-2-3) — When God says “and it was good,“ what is He comparing his creation to?
- What Is Philosophy? Heidegger and Mesocosmic Fit — There are two ways of teaching philosophy, and one of them is better than the other.
- What Kind of World Allows Mathematical Description? — Doing the maths 1/4
- What, Exactly, Makes All Humans the Same? A Hidden History of Anthropological Theory — Every history of anthropological theory emphasizes that the discipline studies differences between humans. It completely forgot to ask, in any sustained way, what makes all humans the same.
- When the World Becomes a Problem to Itself: Interrecursivity and Philosophical Metareflexivity in the Mahabharata — The Mahabharata's philosophical parts are produced by a relentless pile-up of interrecursive consequences.
- Which Differences Count? Analogue and Digital as Two Logics of Symbolic Notation — Some watches are analogue, some digital. Same time measurement, different styles. Right? Wrong.
- Who Am I? A Living Value Theory of Narrating the Self — Both philosophies of the self and narrative theory have mistaken one possible recursive position as the totality of selfhood.
Art
- "Fuck It, Let's Go Bowling": Renewal of Worlds and Narrative Stakes in the Big Lebowski — A new theory of why we only return to narrative worlds that we actually want to inhabit.
- “The Question Is How One Should Live”: Recursive Remediation in Wenders’ Der Himmel Über Berlin (It’s Time 6/6) — A six-part series of articles exploring time and temporality.
- A Mesocosmography of the Arnolfini Bed — Panofsky built his entire reading of the Arnolfini Portrait on the unquestioned assumption that we are looking at a bedroom. Turns out, it's not a bedroom.
- A Very Un-Dude Question: Why Is the Big Lebowski so Funny? — I ... did not know that. Actually, I still don't know that.
- Anno Aetatis Suae: The Invention of the Temporal Signature (It’s Time 4/6) — A six-part series of articles exploring time and temporality.
- Being-With the Night: Mesocosmic Dreaming in Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood — "Only YOUR eyes are unclosed"
- Detecting Modernity: The Redistribution of Legibility, Transactive Dualism, and the Structural Logic of Detective Fiction — Why the detective genre emerged in the second half of the 19th century.
- Estranged Loops: Horror as Failure of Recursive Discernment — Redefining horror from the abject to the zombie.
- Holding the World Together: Reading Homer's Odyssey as an Ontology of World-Building — The Odyssey is not so much about Odysseus's return than about the sustained presence of absent others.
- How Horror Works: Felt Misalignment and the Limits of Symbolic Interpretation — If dogs get scared of horror movies, purely symbolic interpretations cannot hold.
- Jan Van Eyck Was Here: Inhabitability and the Arnolfini Portrait — The dog can just be a dog, the oranges can just be oranges, the chandelier can just be a chandelier. Not needing transcendence is the affluence depicted.
- Mesocosmic Music: An Essay on Khayal as Multimediated Resonance — Classical Hindustani music might be the most mesocosmic aesthetic form, as it even folds multiversal dwelling into its practice.
- Painting as World-Making: The Mesocosmic and Intersymbolic Work of Artworks — Art builds worlds in two ways: mesocosmically or intersymbolically.
- Polytropos: Homer’s Odyssee as a Mesocosmology of Interrecursivity — Odysseus survives by understanding what matters to other living beings better than they understand it themselves.
- Predicting the Critical Responses to Nolan's Odyssey: "Culture Industry" in the Age of Social Media — Why were people so confident in passing verdicts on Nolan's Odyssey long before they had ever even seen the movie?
- Re-valuation as World-Making: Reading Ingeborg Bachmann's Poem "Böhmen Liegt Am Meer" — Poetry can enact the conditions under which a different world becomes livable
- Reading Didi-Huberman’s Fra Angelico Through Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait — Fra Angelico (1395-1455) and van Eyck (1390-1441) lived at the same time but inhabited opposite worlds.
- Recursive Discernment as the Driver of Narrative — Why "I am your father!" ties together six Star Wars movies.
- Recursive Resonance: How Music Catches Us, and Why It Lets Go — For one magical year of their young lives, my two children became obsessed with Mozart’s Magic Flute. It came and went. What happened?
- Shanu-di — Memories of Shanu Lahiri (1928-2013)
- Stone, Stakes, and the Heavenly Jerusalem — A living value theory of why building massive cathedrals seemed like a good idea at that particular time.
- Storytime: Why We Enjoy Sharing Narratives so Much — Why it's pointless to skim read a novel or skip to the end as if what matters is the conclusion.
- That's What She Said: A New Theory of What's Funny — A most serious effort to define what's funny.
- The Living Sources of Plot: A Process Ontology of Narrative Generation (Witnesses 3/4) — A first attempt to ground a theory of narrative plot in an ontology of living-valuing.
- The Moment When Time Became Moments: The Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Northern Renaissance Painting — The greatest innovation of Northern Renaissance painting may not have been perspective, but the invention of the past as a series of discrete moments.
- The World Is the Hero: A Mesocosmic Theory of Narrative Through Homer's Odyssey — 2,500 years of theory believed that narratives are about protagonists. But the real hero of any narrative is the world in which it is set.
- Tidying up Tagore: How Not to Use Tagore for Pedagogy, Psychotherapy, and Counselling Studies — Living words, dead systems, and the epistemic violence of systematization
- Unsettling the Accounts: The Origins of the Money Economy in the Arnolfini Portrait — How northern Renaissance painting intensified audience engagement.
- What Does Art Theory Do? — Art theory articulates the mesocosmic and intersymbolic fit of artistic artefacts.
- What Makes Kafka Kafkaesque?: Towards an Ontology of Recursive Destabilisation — Each of Kafka’s worlds becomes unstable in one of three types of recursivity.
- What the Narrator Knows and Why: Recursivity Levels, Five Mediations, and Three Domains as the Architecture of Narrative Position — Narrators evolved not to describe worlds, but to make recursively relevant what no longer, or never did, exist in the shared field of perception.
- When Salvation Became Background: Representations of Redemption in Northern Renaissance Paintings, 1434-1445 — In 1434, Christian salvation seemed safe enough to become home decor.
- When the Past Won’t Close: Comparing the Interrecursive Topologies of the Odyssey and the Mahabharata — What’s the deepest driver of narrative in the Odyssey and the Mahabharata?
- Why Concert Halls Have Roofs — A Mesopoesis of Music & Architecture
- Witnessing as a Generator of Narrative Plot (Witnesses 2/4) — What do The Martian, the Before trilogy, and When Harry Met Sally have in common?
Health
- "AI Psychosis" Studies Don't Measure What They Think They Measure — What Nicholls et al. couldn't see, and how AI systems should actually be trained.
- Algorithmic Affects: How Digital Health Tech Manufactures Unease — How digital health apps can make us feel unwell.
- Beyond Enclosure: Transactive Dualism, Multimediation, and Health in Mexico City — A commentary on Elizabeth Roberts' ethnography of toxicity and living value in working-class Mexico City.
- Bones Rock: Why Humans Can’t Help Seeing Bodies as Dwelling (Series: You Are My Rock) — You are my rock 1/5.
- Can Spiritually Transformative Experiences Be Studied by Counselling Studies, and If So, What For? — Current research on spiritually transformative experiences mistakes a basic ethical obligation for a training gap.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence, Part 2: The Disastrous Applications of Bandura’s “Self-efficacy” in Health Research — Fifty years of work on "self-efficacy" collapses like a house of cards.
- Disentangling the “Entanglement” Jargon (Series: SWIPEs 5/5) — A five-part genealogy of split worlds with incommensurably paired epistemologies (nature/culture, illness/disease, mind/body).
- Health Across Five Dimensions — How medical technologies mediate health across five dimensions of living.
- Health Value Is What Makes Life Better (Even If You Cannot Measure It) — Two keynotes at UiT The Arctic University of Norway
- Helping the Narrator to Tell a New Story: A Living Value Theory of Narrative-based Therapies — A living value model of why narrative-based therapies work.
- How Can I Have a Good Night’s Sleep, and Why Your Advice Rarely Works for Me — We can build the conditions for sleep. We cannot make sleep obey.
- Not Just the Body Keeps the Score: Childhood Developmental Trauma and Recursive-Mediational Fluidity — Trauma doesn't store the past. It forecloses the future.
- Notinteractionism: Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviours and the Limits of Goffman’s Stigma — Goffman is famous for his close attention to face-to-face interactions. Turns out, most of what matters is what people do to avoid face-to-face interactions.
- Recursive Fluidity Is Mental Health: Why Subjective Experience Cannot Be “Included” at Scale — Reading the Wellcome-funded SUN RISE 2026
- Sexual Trauma in Perinatal Mental Health: A Multimediated Model for Care — Sexual trauma lives as patterned vulnerability across five dimensions. The perinatal period intensifies all five.
- Sitting Together: The First Twelve Thousand Years — Sometimes people enjoy sitting together, for no reason, without goal or purpose. Unbelievable, right?
- Sleep Medicine: A Living Value History — Modern sleep medicine tried to do to sleep what it did with all other problems: classify and quantify. Sleep disorders allow classification but not quantification.
- Split Worlds with Incommensurably Paired Epistemologies: Defining SWIPEs (Series: SWIPEs 1/5) — A five-part genealogy of split worlds with incommensurably paired epistemologies (nature/culture, illness/disease, mind/body).
- The Disease/Illness Distinction: Where We Went Wrong and How to Move on (Series: SWIPEs 3/5) — A five-part genealogy of split worlds with incommensurably paired epistemologies (nature/culture, illness/disease, mind/body).
- The Mind/Body Split: “Cartesian Dualism” as Pseudo Problem (Series: SWIPEs 4/5) — A five-part genealogy of split worlds with incommensurably paired epistemologies (nature/culture, illness/disease, mind/body).
- The Problem of ‘Recognition’ in Medicine: Reflecting on Bridget Bradley’s Biosolidarity and Emily Mendenhall’s Invisible Illness — Why fighting over diagnoses is fighting over the right to suffer visibly
- The Recursive and the Nonrecursive — Why Kleinman's medical anthropology and DSM-III were founded on the same mistake.
- Two Thresholds: Recursive Descent and the Biomedical Reorganization of the Mesocosm — Biomedical diagnosis deeply reorganizes what people feel, fear, and recognize
- What WHO Can't Capture: The Selective Absorption of Traditional Medicine Into Global Health — Global Health cannot absorb anything from traditional healing that cannot be reformatted into biomedicine.
- When the Best Prescription Is Deprescription — New approaches to managing chronic pain in primary care
- When the Nature/Culture Split Kills Lives — A commentary on the UK's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic
- When, Exactly, Did Nature Split From Culture? (Series: SWIPEs 2/5) — A five-part genealogy of split worlds with incommensurably paired epistemologies (nature/culture, illness/disease, mind/body).
- Why No One Is Lunatic Anymore (And No One Even Noticed): Demediating the Moon From Psychiatry, Law, and Science — No psychiatrist in 2026 checks a lunar calendar before prescribing antipsychotics.
Life Sciences
- “Die Liebe fällt, wohin sie will”: An Anthropology of Sexual Partner Choice — Humans are exceptionally interrecursive beings. This makes all the difference to sexual partner choice among humans, too.
- "There's No Such Thing as a Gruffalo" — How a picture book reveals the ontology of language, learning, and mind.
- A Deep History of Hanging Out: Relaxed Availability, Recursive Fluidity, and the Ordinary Achievement of Co-presence — The behavioural and social sciences have such a deep bias towards recordable events and exchanges that they systematically overlooked living beings hanging out.
- A Living Value Theory of Developmental Psychology — Children do not gradually acquire intelligence, they progressively learn to discern what kind of world they are in.
- A Living Value Theory of Intelligence — The history of intelligence testing is the history of mistaking what can be measured for everything that is intelligent.
- A Living Value Theory of Play: Fun, Frames, and the Worlds That Players Make (Playtime 1/3) — How is playing similar and different to vital stakes in real life?
- A Living Value Theory of Sleep — LVT has a good night's sleep.
- Bathe Him in the Dew From Lethe’s Stream: A Living Value Theory of Dreaming — We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
- Being with Others Doesn't Mean Having to Think About Others: Interrecursivity in Humans and Other Animals — Why hanging out with friends feels slightly less exhausting than anticipating an enemy's next strike.
- Beyond “Cognition”: Reading N. Katherine Hayles’s Bacteria to AI Through Living Value Theory — Hayles (2025) comes extremely close to LVT but remains stuck in human-centric concepts like cognition, agency, and information.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence: How Psychology Misconstructs "Reading" and "Writing" — All current claims about younger people losing their ability to read or write longer texts because of social media and generative AI are methodologically flawed.
- Easy Does It: A Living Value Theory of Cognitive Evolution — The question "Do other animals have the same kinds of intelligence as humans?" is pretty stupid.
- From Fig Leaves to Spacesuits: The Deep History of Clothing (Made Things 3/7) — A series of articles exploring multimaterialities (Made Things 3/7).
- From Secretions to Silicon Chips: The Evolutionary Emergence of Multimateriality (Made Things 1/7) — A series of articles exploring multimaterialties (Made Things 1/7).
- How Narrative Remembers: Oral Form, Distributed Memory, and the Mediational Architecture of Transmission — What were all the mechanisms necessary to memorise enormous amounts of narrative content before writing?
- If an Alien Could Speak, We Couldn't Understand Him: Why Xenolinguistics Cannot Succeed — Why decoding an alien signal would not constitute understanding — and what xenolinguistics has systematically failed to ask.
- Metabolic Recognition as the Ground of All Understanding — "You'll have had your tea."
- Mobile Remediations: The Multimaterial Evolution of Medication (Made Things 2/7) — A series of articles exploring multimaterialities (Made Things 2/7).
- Of Hamsters, Dogs, and Peccaries: Recursive Mediational Attributions to Animals — Reading Philippe Descola through LVT.
- Pygmalion in the Classroom: Another Case of Psychology Making Misleading Claims — Another case study in the unearned confidence of psychological measurements.
- Revisiting the Beyond Therapy Report a Quarter of a Century Later: Bioethics, Pharmacological Hype, and the Lost Authority of Expert Culture — Mid drugs. Maxed-out moral panic. Total cringe.
- Strong Microbes, Weak Ontology: Mesocosmic Reach, Recursive Relevance, and the Limits of Latour's Symmetry — Latour spent his entire career circling around the nature/culture binary as the key problem, when actually it was whether an entity mattered to the human mesocosm all along.
- The Birth of the Notation: Why Symbolic Innovation Precedes Experimentation — In modern science, notation comes before experimentation, and these systems of notation have a history independent of the fields using them.
- The Embodied Limits of Peircean Semiotics — Why Peirce's semiotic framework cannot ground a universal theory of meaning in living systems.
- The Genesis of the Five Mediations: A Deep Evolutionary Account of the Human Mesocosm — An essay in honour of Alan Barnard.
- The Mesocosm in the Cosmos: Living as Metabolic Discernment — What exactly is the difference between LVT and astrophysics?
- The Worlds Children Build: Play, Stakes, and the Developing Mesocosm (Playtime 2/3) — How do children learn to play and how do they play to learn?
- Things Carry Us Because They Don’t Talk Back: How Actor-Network Theory Got Multimateriality, Mediation, and Recursivity Backwards (Series: You Are My Rock) — You are my rock 3/5.
- Unearned Confidence: Why Psychology Mass-produces Compelling but Misleading Claims — Psychology will continue to mass-produce pseudoscientific claims as long as it doesn't understand the basic ontology of what it is trying to study.
- What Is Relevant About Being a Bat? Living Value Theory After Thomas Nagel — Thomas Nagel's argument that it's impossible for a human to experience the world like a bat is a largely irrelevant comparison.
- What Is the Difference Between Life and Death? — Following tardigrades to space and back.
- Who or What Is a “Witness”? Why STS Needs to Redefine One of Its Most Productive Concepts (Witnesses 4/4) — The “witness” (male, modest, machine, etc.) has been a central figure in STS theory since the 1990s. No one ever defined what a “witness” is, and what it is not.
- Why Culture Exists: Metabolic Stakes and the Multimediated Stabilization of Interrecursivity — An evolutionary answer to the question why humans have "culture" at all.
- Why Do Bees Not Turn Into Ghosts? For a New Anthropology of Human-Animal Relationships — Humans and other animals share almost everything, including vital stakes in living coordinations.
- Why We Narrate: Metabolic Stakes, Interrecursive Complexity, and the Consequential Past — Narrative is the only way that humans can make sense of complex interrecursive events in the past.
- Zoetic and Poietic Mediations and the Evolutionary Threshold of Homo Sapiens — How do mediations of all life forms relate to human-only forms?
Social Theory
- "Resonance" Without Recursivity: An LVT Reading of Hartmut Rosa — Why Hartmut Rosa's resonance does not fully vibe with LVT
- A Living Value Theory of My Ex-Partner: Interrecursive Discernment From Henry VIII to Johnny Depp — Why we keep thinking about some previous relationships for many years after the breakup.
- An Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: Why Social Anthropology No Longer Knows What It Studies — Social anthropology has been moving into Borgesian encyclopedia territory.
- Being-With and Time: The Temporality of Interrecursivity (It’s Time 2/6) — A six-part series of articles exploring time and temporality.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence, Part 1: Bandura's "Self-Efficacy" as Interrecursive Commitment — LVT has no confidence in individualistic approaches.
- Case Studies in Unearned Confidence: A Critique of Gilbert's Region-Beta Paradox — When psychologists make claims about years of life from a 5-minute experiment, it's never going to be good.
- Concept Work in the Social Sciences: An LVT Perspective — Interrecursive processes are never stable entities.
- Culture and Comparison — Malinowski’s “native’s point of view” has been systematically misunderstood for over a century.
- Culture Is Not a Text: Everything Wrong with Anthropology's Most Famous Metaphor — “Culture is a text” is easily the most misleading claim in the history of anthropological theory.
- Dwelling in the Mesocosm: Retracing Ingold's Path — Where paths are crossing and separating.
- From Meaning to Stakes: Recovering Anthropology's True Task — Anthropology was so caught up exploring meaning that it forgot to ask about vital stakes.
- Hartmut Rosa's Situation Und Konstellation in Light of Living Value Theory — LVT watches the FIFA World Cup 2026 with Hartmut Rosa
- How Old Are You? The Living Discernment of Age (It’s Time 3/6) — A six-part series of articles exploring time and temporality.
- How Theories Travel: Recursive Careers, Mesocosmic Reach, and the Lesson of Oppenheimer — Most scientific theories never leave science. The few that do have a very specific profile.
- Immutable Immobiles and Other Stuff: Expanding Actor-Network Theory (Made Things 4/7) — A series of articles exploring multimaterialities (Made Things 4/7).
- Interrecursivity: Social Theory’s Missing Concept — Nonrecursive domains, selfrecursivity, interrecursivity in living coordinations.
- Lead the Pig-Lamb-Calf Around the Field: A Deep History of the Word "Culture" — The Romans' understanding of "culture" was far better than the Enlightenment redefinition.
- Lucy in the Sky Without Diamonds — Harari's books are overshared fiction.
- Neither in nor Dividual: Beyond Marilyn Strathern’s Relational Anthropology — Trying to overcome notions of the bounded individual by introducing relations and dividuality just inverted a false binary.
- Niklas Luhmann's the Traffic of Society, Or: Why I Can't Drive a Car in Kolkata — LVT recovers a lost manuscript on how traffic traffics.
- No Such Thing as Raw Data — All research methods in the social sciences capture only traces
- Notes and Queries in Mesocosmography: Eating and Sleeping — Eating and sleeping are two of the irreducible metabolic stakes of any human mesocosm. A practical manual for how to study them comparatively.
- Nothing Special Had to Happen: The Architecture of Relaxed Availability at Gobekli Tepe — Archaeology and anthropology tend to default to myth, ritual, and religion even when relaxed hanging out is more plausible.
- On the Origins of Writing: Notation Systems as Recoverable Invariance (Series: You Are My Rock) — You are my rock 5/5.
- Rethinking Habit and Habitography — Revisiting previous works on habit and habitography through LVT.
- Sleeping as Mesocosmography: Fieldwork Notes From West Bengal — Anthropology holds that good fieldwork is about “being there”. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of sleeping.
- The Fatal Substitution: How Anthropology Mistook Institutions for Vital Stakes — Malinowski almost got it right when he put "needs" at the centre of social anthropology. Then it all went wrong.
- The Hail Mary Test (Part 1): Social Theory — No existing social theory survives the Hail Mary Test
- The Hail Mary Test (Part 4): Four-Field American Anthropology — The nature/culture binary could never be resolved
- The Impossible Object: Beyond Social Theory — Why social theory inherited a broken object from the Enlightenment, and why it cannot be repaired from within.
- The Space of Difference: Nature, Culture, and the Hidden Architecture of Anthropological Comparison — Deconstructing how anthropology established what is worth comparing without ever spelling out why.
- Two Native Points of View: Representation and Stakes — Malinowski's founding charter contained two inseparable demands. Anthropology heard one and left the other waiting.
- Were Social Theories Ever Really Rivals? Explanatory Non-Overlap, Pseudo-Problems, and the Possibility of a Cumulative Social Ontology — We were always taught that social theories offer competing accounts of the same phenomena. Turns out, they are not competing, most of the time.
- What Catches Our Attention, and What Does Not: An Introductory Lecture to Anthropology — There seems to be “an anthropology of” pretty much any topic. And yet vast swathes of human life have never been studied. Why?
- What Doesn’t Answer Back: Nonrecursive Counterparts in Erving Goffman’s Interactionism — Why Goffman couldn’t see that his most important observations were not about interrecursive humans but about nonrecursive nonhumans.
- What Is a Social Institution? — Conceptualizing social institutions with all the mediations and all recursivity left in.
- What Is Anthropology, Today? — Anthropologists think they study human cultures and societies through ethnographic fieldwork. Think again.
- What We Notice, What We Don’t: A First Introduction to Social Anthropology — A short introduction to social anthropology as a discipline of noticing and wondering.
- What’s Your Opinion? Let Me Know in the Comments — What exactly is an “opinion” in opinion polls?
- Wondering What Others Wonder About: A New History of Anthropological Theory, Methodology, and Pedagogy — A radically new theory of what anthropology as a discipline actually does.
Power
- "Friction" and the Cost of Partial Ontologies: Clausewitz, Tsing, and the Mesocosm — Clausewitz's friction is more multi-mediated than Tsing's because war leaves no room for incomplete ontologies.
- "He's a Nice Guy!": Workplace Bullying as Asymmetrical Interlegibility — Why can the "nice guy" commit the worst workplace bullying?
- A Mesocosmology of the Next Pandemic — Four clocks, five mediations.
- Beyond the Panopticon: Architecture as the Multimaterial Mediation of Recursivity — Foucault's take on power and architectural form misses how buildings restructure recursivity.
- Conceptual Justice: A New Framework for Qualitative Research Ethics — Almost all the harm done by qualitative researchers occurs at the stage of conceptualization and publication, not during data collection.
- Da Hakt's: A New Framework for Understanding Recursive Effects — A new framework for analysing coordination failures.
- Die implizite Werttheorie des deutschen Grundgesetzes — Rekursive Mediation oder: warum im deutschen Recht Flüsse niemals Rechtspersönlichkeiten werden können
- From Policing Surfaces to Assessing Competence: Why Universities Are Getting AI Wrong and What They Should Do Instead — Assessment rules have lost touch with students' lived experience.
- How India Came to "Lack History" — LVT takes the liberty to historicize John Stuart Mill's works on India
- How Life Became Another Statistic: Symbolic Sedimentation and the Ontology of Population Statistics — Doing the maths 2/4
- Immediating the Past: British WWII Reenactments as Immedial Experience (Immedia 3/3) — A three-part series of articles exploring how we coordinate through traces of former coordinations.
- Only Recursive Tasks Count: An Ontology of AI Delegation — A new framework for how to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate uses of AI in research, teaching, and learning.
- Ontologically Grounded Theory: How to Study Interrecursive Pasts and Events That Never Happened — Introducing a new research methodology for interrecursive pasts and events that never happened.
- Predicting Unpredictability: Three Modes of Future Intelligence in Rocky IV — Why the Cold War was won by prediction, not anticipation, and why Rocky IV cannot say so.
- Sleep Disruption as Violence: Terror, Discipline, and the Destruction of Recursive Unavailability — Re-reading Sofsky and Foucault on power, discipline, and terror under the aspect of sleep.
- Symbolic Succession: How Legal Philosophy Misrecognized the Grudge Informer Case — How law remakes the past to constitute its own authority in the present.
- Symbols Matter Least: British WWII Reenactments as Materially Mediated Embodiment and Being-With — The core literature on cultural memory emphasises symbolic transmission. But in contemporary WWII reenactments, symbols matter least.
- Technologies of Power: Mesocosmic Expansion, Incorporation, and Predation — Technology is both about maintaining what is here and expanding into what is over there.
- The Health Card That Could Not Be Eaten: India's RSBY and the Collapse of "Social Capital" — Why Putnam's 'social capital' makes no sense on the ground.
- The Law School That Failed Its Own Midterm Exam — Berkeley Law School's new AI rules revive Lombroso's criminal physiognomy.
- The Lives of Others’ Traces: Immedial Coordination in the Lives of Others (Immedia 2/3) — A three-part series of articles exploring how we coordinate through the traces left by other living beings.
- The Suppression of Depression as Multimediation: Psychiatric Diagnoses Under Myanmar's Military Dictatorship — In Myanmar, depression doesn't get diagnosed because it is interpreted as political protest against the dictatorship.
- Toward a Living Value Theory of Law — What are legal professionals actually doing in a mesocosm that works best without any explicit articulation?
- We Don't Even Know Where Alesia Is: Metabolic Predation and Post-Colonial Silence in Caesar's Gallic War — Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield vs Agamben's Homo Sacer
- What Exactly Are We Decolonizing? — A response to the JRAI dialogues on decolonizing anthropology.
- What Is a Person? The Anthropology of Personhood and the Problem of Comparison — I’ve been teaching the anthropology of personhood for many years but only now do I understand what’s been wrong with the topic all along.
- Why Law Can’t See Sleep — Sleeping is a vital need and yet law codes can only recognize it after it has been translated into something else. Why?
- Zero Shades of Grey: How Platforms Compress the Passage From Feeling to Verdict — Why do millions of people who have no personal insight on ambiguous events feel so ready to pass judgement on social media?
Economics
- A Sinkhole with Bunting and Brass Band: The Collapse of Putnam's "Social Capital" — The Dude abides. The concept of social capital does not.
- AI, Exhaustion, and the Productivity Myth — Current models of productivity no longer account for work.
- Before Demand: LVT as a Method for Startup Incubation — A systematic guide to discovering markets before they become articulated.
- Beneath Real Utopias: Erik Olin Wright and the Question of What Makes Institutions Livable — LVT or Wright? Comparing Wright's critique of capitalism to LVT's approach to economics.
- Class: What Critical Theory Thinks It Is, and What It Actually Is — Class is less about competition than about reading others (and letting oneself be read).
- Clothing the World Economy: A Global History of Silk, Fur, Wool, Cotton and Oil (Made Things 6/7) — A series of articles exploring multimaterialities (Made Things 6/7).
- Counting What Counts: DALYs as Ontological Project — Doing the maths 4/4
- Die Wolfsburg-Krise: Strukturanalyse und strategische Maßnahmen — A critical friend's return visit
- From Lived Worlds to Portable Classifications: Malinowski’s Argonauts and the Problem of Comparative Relevance — A close reading of Malinowski’s seminal book shows why detailed ethnography is rarely captured by the abstractions that make it comparable.
- From Shellmounds to Microplastics: Multimaterial Afterlives (Made Things 7/7) — A series of articles exploring multimaterialities (Made Things 7/7).
- From the Cave to the Algorithm — Any technology is best understood through the stakes that they answered.
- Never Enough: How Modern Institutions Destroy the Possibility of Being Done — LVT runs past Hartmut Rosa because nothing was accelerating
- Never Getting Back From Its Head to Its Feet: How Marxist Theory Remained Trapped by Enlightenment Thought — The Enlightenment handed Marx a hopelessly truncated mesocosm, and he never noticed.
- Nickel to Nasdaq: How Financial Markets Relate to the Things They Trade (Made Things 5/7) — A series of articles exploring multimaterialities (Made Things 5/7).
- Of Garage Sales and Free Pianos — How Mauss's gift/commodity binary misled anthropology for a century.
- Platforms, Legibility, and the Quiet Reorganisation of the Mesocosm — Platforms do not extract from users. Attention is not a scarce resource. Platforms monetise mesocosmic recoordination.
- Robert Shiller’s Narrative Economics as Ontological Failure — Why narratives come last, not first.
- Section 28 Scottish Family Law: A Snag Analysis — When a law to redress economic disadvantage from cohabitation becomes an engine for catastrophic economic damage.
- Sleep Debt: The First Sixty-Three Years — Graeber retraced the first 5,000 years of debt. "Sleep debt" is a lot more recent, and a lot more uncertain.
- The Book of Life, Double-entry Edition: Accounting, Mesocosmic Fit, and the Limits of Quantification — Doing the maths 3/4
- The Hail Mary Test for Economics — Scarcity, survival, and the collapse of transaction
- The Mathematical Selection of Life: Macroeconomics and Public Health as Forms of Governing — The deepest bias in both macroeconomics and public health is that they can only see processes that allow mathematical symbolisation.
- The Overburdened Category: Why Class No Longer Explains Enough — Why class began as a narrow macroeconomic taxonomy and became one of the most mediationally overloaded concepts in social thought.
- Two Thousand Years in the Same Place: The Oechs Family and the Village Cluster of the Offenburg Rhine Plain — Two thousand years against all odds
- Value Is What Makes Life Better (Even If You Cannot Measure It) — Does every life have equal value, as the Gates Foundation says? How do they measure that?
- Value Without Trace: Recursivity, the Mesocosm, and the Limits of Symbolization — Rethinking branding, work, and value.
- Why Football Refuses to Be Predicted: The Limits of Forecasting the 2026 FIFA World Cup — Nach der Theorie ist vor der Theorie.
- Zweitausend Jahre Mitsamkeit: Die Familie Oechs in der Offenburger Rheinebene — Zweitausend Jahre gegen alle Widrigkeiten