There are several reasons why I have found building this website frustrating. Some come from self-imposed rules (e.g. no images) that I hoped would allow my ideas room to breathe, but might just be a useless straitjacket. I also have less capacity than I did. But most of the difficulties arise from the project’s scale and complexity, and how my mind works. So far, the result is a little more than series of posts with opaque connections and meaning.
I’ve spent some time using ChatGPT to develop a new system to make the material easier to understand and navigate. That should be complete in a few weeks. But the process has been interesting in another way, because it has required me to think about how I think.
As it tried to re-categorise and tag my posts, ChatGPT made assumptions based on how academic writing normally progresses. For example, it thought my reading notes were a literature review, but they are quite different. And this website does not present a linear argument, still less a complete one. It is a gathering of elements – fragments of thought, experience and reading that I’m laying out to see what sense I can make of them. Most of that work, I do at my desk, but a little I share here, mainly as another discipline on my thinking and writing.
It’s like exploring an archipelago, a group of territories – islands – that together form my preoccupations, ideas and understanding. Some are central, some peripheral, some large, some barely more than rocks. Some are very familiar, others I have visited more or less often. Some I’m reaching for the first time. Some are shrouded in mist, beyond the water. And, since I don’t yet know the limits of these lands, there might be more, out of sight, beyond the horizon.
These territories have different shapes, profiles and characters. They are inhabited by people who speak different languages and have their own customs. When I gave it some of y reading notes, ChatGPT told me they include ‘political philosophy, Buddhism, sociology, psychology, art, anthropology, medicine, history, complexity, education, activism and literature’ (which didn’t take much working out since they’re organised by subject).
Size and importance have no relation to position in the archipelago. A small territory might be central, a large one at the edge. The archipelago looks different from every direction from which it is approached, and by sea or air.
What matters is that these islands are connected, by sea and air. Some lanes are broad and well used, others, much less regular and frequented. But the connections are there, and mapping both the territories and how they intersect is the task of this project.
There is an argument in A Selfless Art, one I can set out in a short paragraph. and that I’m sure an eventual reader will see, but it will not be constructed like a railway track. Instead, it will be assembled, like the arch of an old bridge, from the materials that come to hand. And then, I hope, it will create a new connection from one territory to another.
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