







































Education, Society and Human Studies 
ISSN 2690-3679 (Print) ISSN 2690-3687 (Online) 

Vol. 2, No. 1, 2021 
www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eshs 

14 

Original Paper 

Delivering Competent Knowing and Living in the Narrative 

Space Framed by “Inscriptive Connectivities” 
Milan Jaros1* 

1 Merz Court C521, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK 
* Milan Jaros, Merz Court C521, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK 

 

Received: November 23, 2020   Accepted: December 4, 2020   Online Published: December 14, 2020 

doi:10.22158/eshs.v2n1p14                       URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/eshs.v2n1p14 

 

Abstract 

Advancing modernity fatally weakened direct ways of intervening in the social, whether by the Divine 

Will or barricades. Nietzsche’s technique of inscription has been gradually adapted to reach the present 

as hazardous sub-brands of “digitally enhanced” inscriptive connectivity born out of an unlikely 

alliance of emergent tools of networked communication and technophobia of much of the humanities. 

Even some specialist topics enter the public space as “narratives”, no longer grounded in open 

allegiances to a system of thought or worldview. Instead authors prefer a travelogue format which 

hides intended connections. What then is the genealogy of this way of structuring narratives? In 

particular, what might serve as a tutorial door opening not only to the hidden content of such 

narratives but also to turning them into useful tools of learning and competence building free of 

top-down impositions and rota learning familiar from the curriculum delivery demanded by much of 

the educational Establishment? It will be shown how to guide the reader in an interactive, bottom up 

manner so that he or she can, gradually, and at the level of ability and resources peculiar to the case in 

hand, proceed through ascending stages of reading and engaging with the text, and systematically 

dispel the baggage of layers of loss and uncertainty preventing confident, critical approaches to 

communication, work, and citizenship.  

Keywords 

relating narratives, competence development, human-machine interfaces, understanding and inequality 

 

 

 

 

 



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1. Introduction: Actuality of the Narrative Expression 

1.1 Temporalisation and Localisation of Communicative Expression Re-inscribing Facticity 

The Cosmos of Aristotle was a purposeful unity of Gods, humans, and things. Galileo replaced God’s 

command with “measure and quantify” and broke up the unity of Cosmos. Immanuel Kant set out to 

reconcile Galileo and Newton with philosophy. To this end he divided the world into phenomena and 

noumena. We can then achieve reliable knowledge of phenomena thanks to a priori forms of perception of 

space and time. The content of Practical Reason must remain open. If one knew how to be free and moral 

then morality would belong to “reliable knowledge”, i.e., would be the object of science! Yet, although we 

do not “know” how to comprehend the moral imperative and beauty, we do comprehend their 

incomprehensibility and this informs our judgment. That makes our existence enigmatic: for when products 

of pure reason leave the closure of the lab and cloister they too fall into the realm of value judgement.  

The post-Einsteinian science and mathematics de-legitimated claims to universal validity based on the 

notions of eternal truths and absolutes of space, time, and spirit, and recast them in terms of the limits of 

their applicability. In the absence of any absolute reference point—offered by God or by Nature to the 

Kantian observer—thought is a perpetual movement of signifiers. This has far reaching consequences. 

Concept generation and negation are no longer constrained by the demands of transcendental theory; any 

thought is only “local”. Then signs do not “represent” any prior entity but derive their credibility by 

reference to other systems of signs. Thus this temporalisation and localisation of judgement re-inscribes 

facticity; i.e., the visible sign does not represent a face, a landscape or injured body as a thing out there 

recognizable by the meaning granted to it by a fixed place in a shared structure. It is made so as to put 

before us whatever brings to life a “driving engine” on the scale of a particular form of selection or 

“measurement” we have made; and it is often framed by conscious or unconscious attempts to make 

sense of any change by behaving as if there were a formula, a prescription-like arrow pointing from of 

A to B whether such a relation really exists or not.  

Although the process of confronting narrative particulars with results of science and science-inspired 

logical inquiries enlivened by artistic brilliance has long exposed the limits of assumptions on which 

the speculative reason shaped our cultural history, it does not mean that Homer’s Odyssey, Plato’s 

Republic, the Bible, Newton’s Principia and Kant’s Critiques etc. are no longer documents of great 

value. By discoveries of independent reason of the rational grounding of our past efforts we have not 

lost anything. Rather we have been gradually liberated—be it at the cost of having to learn to live with 

novel challenging finitudes of life—from the limitations that speculative schemes supposedly of 

universal validity imposed often quite ruthlessly upon mankind. Nor is it right to claim as many have 

done that the age of reason delegitimised our spiritual inheritance without putting anything in its place. 

For the pursuit of this very reason has recently provided humans with the means for recasting our 

heritage via genealogies of independent order generation and application as a function of increasing 

degrees of complexity. Without such clearing of the action space from the chaotic flow of value 



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judgments there would be no elbow room for recognising and fostering genuine creativity and 

imagination in arts and design, no protection from fraud and muddled interferences for the concept 

generation enabling directional movements of the mind. This is particularly relevant at a time when a 

Facebook executive openly calls on his company to expand its worldwide infiltration of connectivity 

even if it means that people could be harmed (e.g., Marantz, 2020)! Indeed, the techno-scientific 

development has been so fast, and has taken place on scales far exceeding those of the human body, 

that our social structures and their ownership by citizens have much to live up. The results of state of 

the art research are still emerging only in an uncoordinated, case by case manner, often cast into highly 

technical terms that the general reader—be it one among the well-educated—can rarely appreciate. Yet, 

since the limits of genealogies of order generation offered by the quantitative empirical methodologies 

of the digital age are known, they can inform our judgement; it gives us the confidence and tools to 

proceed with iterative loops of inquiries, asking at every turn what the relevant parameters and their 

limits of application are, and how to improve upon them. This is well in keeping with the notion of 

knowledge acquisition as an open process perpetually to be critically re-positioned and updated (see 

Jaros, 2019a, and refs. therein). 

1.2 Credibility of the Narrative Space Conditioning Work, Value, and Citizenship  

When value is grounded in social labour, work becomes an onto-epistemic concept. Then, so hoped 

Karl Marx in his dreams about social emancipation, humans can transcend the commoditisation of their 

labour. For it makes it possible at least in principle to appreciate value in terms of a generic relationship 

between work and all aspects of life. Although most of current work practices are far removed from the 

capitalism of Das Kapital, it is this methodological turn that makes Marx’s legacy relevant even today 

(e.g., Harvey, 2010). A generation later, Vladimir Lenin’s project, from the opening gambit of “What is 

to be done” to “all power to the soviets” which informed his utopian vision in “State and Revolution” 

of 1914 and grounded the political power in councils elected directly in a bottom up manner by the 

local community, again rested on the assumption of open access to communicative action. However, 

the trying conditions of institutional collapse heightened by the civil war rapidly turned his vision into a 

dictatorship guilty of even cruder impositions and disenfranchisements than what he and his comrades 

so detested in the 19th century capitalism. 

Already in the cosy confines of Café Central of pre-WWI Vienna, Rudolf Hilferding argued that in 

their hateful reaction to Marx his critics lost sight of the social labour that produced most goods 

(Wasserman, 2019; Sigmund, 2017). Only by perpetually focussing on and updating the systems of 

signs and their accessibility in all processes of exchange could humans hope to improve upon social 

accomplishments. In his view, the libertarian elevation of the individual as the ultimate source of value, 

and the key object of social theory in general and economics in particular, mistook what is always a 

historically contingent variable conditioned by the prevailing system of signs for a universal one. This 

is how we ended up with sound bites like Mrs Thatcher’s infamous “there is no society, only 



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individuals”. The result was unbridled subjective valuation of even the most complex scenarios. When 

life became dominated by ever present social media and distributed production systems, any consensus 

that could tame wild fluctuation of moods of millions of actors trapped in perpetual messaging on 

media platforms could have only been ephemeral. Not to mention misuse of imported conceptualisation 

of the social. For example, the key motif on which stood the ideas of founding fathers of what we now 

call neo-liberalism, of thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Mises, was “…the state in which a 

man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others” (Sigmund, 2017, p. 207). Yet 

that was also the canonical line for Emanuel Kant and any philosopher of the Enlightenment, the 

movement blamed by Hayek and his fellow libertarians from the Mont Pelerin Society for the camps 

and gulags! Of course, the meaning of a formal statement is in the potentiality it fosters. Its actuality, 

the social content, i.e., what happens when it enters the realm of material exchanges called life, 

depends on contextualisation making its transmissivity and applicability real. Then it necessarily 

depends on who does the translation and what practices are subject to its application. For example, 

although a young person living in France or Britain today is unlikely to be subjected to any legally 

identifiable coercion, it is only because the laws that form the boundary conditions and the operational 

space of the law protecting individual liberties is such that it does not see any.  

The neo-liberal regimes reacted to the runaway rise of complexification of life in general and of the 

narrative space in particular by reducing value to price. The realms of work and value have been 

separated from those of production and communicative action driving development. Although a few 

Hayekian gamblers may have ended up with pockets full of hot dollars, instead of enjoying 

free-wheeling independence they perhaps more than anyone end up trapped in what can best be 

described as “digitally enhanced serfdom” of schizophrenic consumption for the sake of consumption 

(Jaros, 2018). 

1.3 Naming the Unnamable: Change as Movements of Matter 

Humans have always endeavoured to seek new forms of order and organisation whether in Nature or in 

the Mind. It has been something of a driving force constitutive of civilisation. With the advent of the 

Age of Reason, it rose to the forefront of social awareness as a measure of progress in human 

self-understanding. Already Adam Smith reminded us in The Wealth of Nations (1776, p. 415) that 

“…there is scarce perhaps a single moment…without any wish for alteration or improvement of any 

kind”. For without its gradient, people throw themselves upon each other and end up somewhere like 

Jean-Paul Sartre’s hell of In Camera! However, lack of systematic application of reason soon turns any 

apparent improvement into chaos by unintended outcomes. Only independent order is invariant to 

naming. Indeed, from Plato’s Republic to Michel Foucault’s Order of Things philosophers have been 

telling us how to cope with life—with what happens when the order of things turns into the order of 

signs, and words in particular! Any contextualisation of products of pure reason can only be made 

meaningful by comparison, as part of a genealogy of naming, and is therefore perpetually actualised 



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whether we acknowledge it or not by recasting its conceptualisation in relation to its past and present. 

Hence the practice of relating narratives is of key importance; it enjoyed heightened attention during 

the last decade of post-modern discourse (e.g., Cavarero, 2000, and refs. therein). 

Making meaning is to select and organise experience; and to do that one must “measure” though it is 

rarely called so! For once put that way, it forces us to identify the intended level of complexity and the 

empirical limits of the application, i.e., what exactly there is to measure, its metric, precision and error. 

It also requires explicit statements about the choice of variables, units, boundaries, and comparability 

with their predecessors in the vector of development in question (Morris, 2010; Piketty, 2014). This 

creates conceptual challenges and calls for sharp, creative thought. For when it is done without a 

credibly structured database or reduced to speculative constructs the result is a kind of lone event that 

at best disappears after its twenty-minute fame. Most interventions are and have always been 

unwittingly in the latter category—in the long run they make for “censorship by inflation”! With the 

rise of the Age of Reason, the flow of “measure and quantify” from the lab and cloister gradually 

exchanged the standards based on rituals of sacrifice and reading of religious texts for accounts of 

events expressed in terms of movements of matter—be it for most at the level of narrative. So quickly 

did it come that it left little time and social energy for finding a stable system of signs to make life with 

the runaway generation of new forms of order more liveable. That led to a crisis of modernity touching 

its very foundational principles. For actualisation of independent reason cannot maintain itself without 

perpetual renewal via spatio-temporal translations of couplings between social systems and the citizen 

on one side and emergent knowledge and its institutionalised face on the other. Since in place of 

absolutes and their ritual re-enacting there is the quantum probabilistic dynamics of material exchanges, 

the Kantian canon “to be free is to be autonomous”, i.e., only in transcending the commoditisation of 

life one can glimpse at what is and what ought to be, may now appear to some as yet another 

superstition. We also have to put up with revelling in atomised existence as a popular form of 

self-defence; it is easier to hide in the black hole of unstructured interventions (Houllebecq, 2001; 

Eshun, 2004). Not to speak of Henry Kissinger’s laments that the balance in world order cannot be 

maintained or even conceived when the most powerful of social and political functions are hidden from 

view in the cyberspace with no international standards of conduct (Kissinger, 2016). It is of course 

much worse. Already the interior ministry of Louis XVI in the decades before the revolution believed 

that who controls the past controls the future and acted upon it; they secretly employed a group of 

monks to frustrate the power of what they perceived as their adversaries (Baker, 1990)! At least they 

owned what they wanted: the Big Data and algorithmic chaos when left alone merely promotes the 

growth of Big Data and chaos! Furthermore, today all messaging flows via coding which functions as a 

contingent mediator, wittingly or unwittingly—but always because of some movement of matter in the 

shape of “data” or performance—re-making the rules of the game whatever that might be. Some even 

delegate the management of the flow of objectified matter to the machine by plugging it in as if it were 



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a fancy version of a telephone land line. That only makes the coming of a crash more likely as we now 

know only too well!  

The widespread fascinations about complexification with a life of its own also lead to highly 

speculative extrapolations; e.g., Ray Kurtzweil’s Omega Point and his “universe with a purpose”, not to 

mention non-material labour, luxury communism, and many others (e.g., Mirowski, 2013, and refs. 

therein). Fortunately, there are also brilliant Omega antidotes (DeLillo, 2010)!  

1.4 The Archetypal Role of Loss in Western Culture and its Meta-Modern Other 

Genealogies of cultural development are punctuated by ever present be it perpetually changing 

narrative expressions of irredeemable loss (see e.g., Dollimore, 2001). Doctrines of the Fall, breakup of 

the unity of Cosmos, the divided self of the post-Freudian mind, the enforced shift in the inquiring 

mind from Aristotle’s Why and Galileo’s How to post—Einsteinian What—all that made it look as if 

humans have been losing their starry position at the center of Universe that had been gifted to them by 

Providence, and then step by step taken away by advancing rationality. 

The unity of Cosmos also meant unity of virtue, truth, and perfection. Without such bonds, advances in 

making and shaping not only heightened a sense of loss and insecurity but also of some generic 

“ruinnessness” of the human condition. When we say that the chief function of narratology is to make 

our human condition liveable, dispelling the myth of loss and opening access to liberating moves of 

independent reason freed of imposing layers of illusory certainties must be what it is about. What a 

formidable challenge! Centuries of religious as well as secular speculative thought claiming universal 

validity built up layers of illusions of stability exploiting the power of constitutive value of loss framing 

human existence and expectations. When people believed that God created matter, it looked as if he 

must have endowed it with a purpose of its own, so that it cannot be merely a container for something 

else. Yet rational moderns cannot see any purpose in nature, for otherwise it could not serve as a neutral 

referent which is one of the pillars on which stands independent reason in general and Galilean science 

in particular. This condition alone makes our alienation from nature and the sense of loss it brings 

explicit. Since humans identified themselves in time and space by marking the earth, loss is a fault in 

the fabric of being they ought to own, poised between form and formlessness where it now stands 

separated from the context of production which brought it to light. No wonder that already in the 

Hebrew tradition prohibition of idolatry was not just about protection of monotheism but a way to 

address what it saw as limitation of the status of objects. “You shall not make unto the any graven 

image or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above or that in the earth beneath or that in the 

water under the earth” (Exodus, 20:3-4, p. 24). For a thing as an embodiment of finitude is less then 

suitable for conveying the divine content of the absolute. Since form cannot express everything a thing 

is either, any representation must appear as a kind of violence which fixes the object in the finitude of 

its making. Matter formed into meaningful shapes ultimately breaks up and opens space for new 

structures to be made. It is through such acts of recognition, what Greeks called anagnorisis, that we 



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pass from ignorance to knowledge. It makes for a world of what would appear to be generically 

damaged goods, of a world as if constituted by a new class of ruin-ness with action micro-spaces 

separated by ephemeral gaps and voids. Time, extension, and materiality on which stood the Cartesian 

ontology appear to be “out of joint” in a space whose metric is unexplainably fluid. The command of 

language depends on competence to “own” its functioning and meaning making. Hence, we must ask 

what new ways of knowing and being has this development brought about and what are the key 

manifestations of their actuality in narrative accounts of the human condition. 

It is essential and urgent to make the process of perpetual translations and metamorphosis of products 

of the human mind and hand transmissible (Jaros, 2019b). We must free materia poetica and concept 

generation it fosters from any chaos by fostering independent means for taxonomy of novelty and its 

separation from imitation, trivia of opportunism, and from commoditisation of life at large. Not to 

reduce life to layers of silicon “bits” but to protect it from them by making actualisation of reason 

recognisable and retrievable—narratable (Jaros, 2020a)! 

 

2. Demise of Traditional Story Telling 

Humans can only remain human if they possess competent command of language. The necessary 

condition for this to materialise is to keep translating human experience of life so as to maintain 

quasi-continuity of meaning making. That in turn depends on the degree of recognition and directional 

pursuit of disparate forms of independent order and its genealogy. Only then is personal independence 

and social emancipation achievable, and only then can the human-machine interfaces remain within the 

bounds set by the human design no matter how robotic is their functioning. The fear of what would 

happen if human delegated too much of the action space to machines is no more or less than the fear of 

losing competence in recognition of and engagement with novel forms of—to use the Foucauldian term 

again—the order of things. Although new methods of modelling fostered by quantitative empirical 

methods and tools make it possible perpetually to upgrade the level of our accomplishments and cast 

them into genealogical sequences based on transparent parametrisation and limits open to public 

scrutiny, their application remains confined to case by case studies and cast in highly technical terms 

challenging even the well-informed audiences. The task of narrators is—as it has always been, be it 

now with an upgrade to what might be called “digitally-enhanced challenge”—to make the flux of 

order generation and structuring into signs capable of enchanting living places.  

Today even topical interventions in physical and social sciences enter the public space as “narratives”. 

However, they are almost as a rule no longer grounded in open allegiances to a system of thought, what 

is often labelled as ideology or world view, style or social system, and brought to perfection by the 

great novelists and commentators of the 19th and 20th century from Victor Hugo and Fyodor 

Dostoyevsky to John Galsworthy and Don DeLillo. With the decline of collective consensus and its 

home the modern Common, even allegory lost its effectiveness. For when something like an ephemeral 



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“crypt” is supplied—alas, now by the very allegorist—its impact in the chaotic cyberspace is almost 

certain to lead to unintended outcomes. Instead authors prefer going on a “trip” (e.g., Sebald, 2000). 

There they pick “cases of interest” they deem fit for being “translated” into tools in the service of a 

chosen anchor concept or agenda—or so the reader must hope for today their identity is often 

unintelligible. In performing these “translations”, “customers” are led to acquiring a particular way of 

looking at and connecting things that then informs any of their future encounters. They all have one 

thing in common; the constraint of depending for the work’s readability on at least a rudimentary 

knowledge of a structured reference system of thought, and of having to be ready to defend its 

assumptions—not to speak of the charge of being liveried servants of some unpleasant comrade of the 

establishment—can be set aside. The “issue” is only limited by author’s imagination and linguistic 

skills—and “funding”! What then is the genealogy of such a way of building up and delivering 

narratives? How can its tools be brought into the open? In particular, what are the layers of different 

ways of meaning making created in the course of their development? And, above all, what might serve 

as a tutorial door opening not only to the content of such narratives but also, if possible, to turning them 

into useful tools of learning and competence building free of top down impositions practiced by the 

neo-liberal educational Establishment?  

 

3. Being as Wayfaring in Search of a Lifestory 

We have lost the aura and authority of traditions in a world that is dominated by mediation via 

networked structures of disparate character and purpose; what is more, we now depend on them for our 

wellbeing without ever fully mastering their functioning. Our response is governed in the main not by 

direct seeing, hearing, and touching of static objects out there whose meaning is “fixed”. Instead we 

depend on pseudo-algorithmic rhythms of neo-liberal social practices. They lend contingent meanings 

to direct encounters. The flow of objectified material exchanges and its assemblage-like machinic 

character incorporates the human body, and this body in turn incorporates the images of other objects to 

the point of being dominated by them (Rabinow, 1992)! The living in an unstable human environment 

is then a kind of wayfaring, of making moves that keep re-constituting and re-engaging one’s identity 

and a sense of purpose. Under the description of the actual travel path, there is a promise of a deeper 

motive and a story to tell. A walk, “travel” happens via bodily movements, more generally via an object 

and it is therefore an obvious means of self-recognition in the material condition of humans. The 

apparent reason for the journey invariably hides an onto-epistemic content under wholesale 

aesthetisation of life (e.g., Steyer, 2017, and refs. therein). It constitutes the self by its journey and that 

in turn constitutes the journey as a living, experiential space-time. It amounts to punctuated 

experimentation and depends for its initial conditions on involuntary memory of the world of action, 

and for its being on access to rails along which thoughts can travel and collide. It raises the status of 

facilitating this access—to education in particular—to the level of importance normally reserved for 



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health and wealth! What then constitutes the actuality of meaning making in the narrative space framed 

by novel means of human expression peculiar to the dynamics of neo-liberal decades?  

 

4. Birth of the Art of Inscription 

The dominant mode of human expression in the course of the long 19th century, in many ways well into the 

1980ties, was steeped in the increasingly furious discourse of ideologies. In spite of the warring conditions, 

it remained in the main fueled by beliefs in this or that version of “universal history” and progress in human 

self-understanding, with all its socio-cultural consequences. However, already in the mid-19th century some 

of the most perceptive minds grasped the significance of coming of a generic change in the position of 

humans in relation to nature and to themselves. Leaving aside the veil of linguistic acrobatics his work has 

been surrounded with, Friedrich Nietzsche’s project can be seen as one of the most insightful responses to 

this change—be it also most lethal and open to gross misuse. Nietzsche anticipated dissolution of the 

traditional philosophy and human powers of representation it has fostered. In his Anti-Christ, section 14, he 

opens with “…Our knowledge of man today is real knowledge precisely to the extent that it is knowledge 

of him as a machine…free will…may no longer be understood as faculty…(it) no longer ‘moves’ 

anything…” For the Galilean science accredited with rationality without any limits internal to itself the 

human object and its social being will be there to be dissected again and again and the result available for 

perpetual processing in the quest for knowledge and power. However, since “a tool cannot criticize itself”, 

in Nietzsche’s judgment the human as a social being had no chance of engaging this potentially runaway 

freedom so as to impose sustainable humanizing limits and directionality upon it. The object-event could 

no longer be seen for what it really was by direct means, by immediately visible appearances—the 

individual had to be “guided” via a concept in order to grasp it! 

Nietzsche exploited the methodological opportunity presented by this novel, emergent condition of 

humans by launching a “subliminal” method of individualized genealogies of judiciously chosen 

object-events. Waiting behind the narrative appearances was a new agenda thriving on runaway generation 

of “local” concepts enforcing de-territorialisation of experience and its records. There he implants into the 

reader’s mind a vector of sensitivity to recognition of a selected class of encounters, de-contextualised and 

arranged into brilliant patchworks of linguistic provocations, floating on a promise of “self-deliverance”. It 

was programmed by an intentionally concealed, aesthetic-in-extremis, individualized dimension of life 

whose philosophical grounding and directionality remains “unreadable” to the uninitiated majority. In 

Geoff Waite’s words, Nietzsche was the first truly effective “revolutionary programmer of late 

fascoid-neoliberal techno-culture”. His texts are “immunopathological” in that they are “producing 

antibodies against the auto-immune community it has established within itself” (Waite, 1996). 

More recent versions of the method of inscribed meanings have assumed novel significance since the 

ascent of neo-liberal doctrines and their cultural echoes, and have been inventively adopted almost 

anywhere, from academic interventions to the crudest twitting of “false news”. It always amounts to 



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calculated integration of human life into larger than human structures through which life is, under an 

“attractive narrative cover”, manipulated into assimilating the patterns of a particular behavioral framework. 

This is how a fenced off action space is manufactured ready made for selected elites who can take 

advantage of their privileged position to read or misread with great social impact the texts and images so 

presented; and their returns are made as if of the transcendental subject! Alas! The only “Will” that matters 

here has no regard for reality other than one’s self-assertion—even at the cost of one’s life not to speak of 

that of others. Such a life is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon; the world is a solitary “work of art” 

produced by and unique to the mind of its creator. Since it does not represent anything other than itself, it 

lives and dies with the fleeting illusion of its bearer! 

 

5. The Archaeological Method of the Arcades Project  

Since in this way of approaching Nietzsche’s intervention it is seen as a result of the shift in the material 

condition of humans rather than a freak result of a twist of sickly personal brilliance, the emergence of new 

technicity of the human condition is a problem for his followers just as for any other tribe then and now. 

Indeed, much of methodological effort in the last hundred years or so has been devoted to rising to this 

challenge and hoping to move beyond the blind alley of destructive individualism without falling back on 

the manner of grand speculations of the 19th century. In particular, by mid 1930s it was clear to many that 

not only Nature but also politics and culture at large are neither linear nor continuous, and that the 

legacy of Kantian autonomy, Hegelian history, Newton’s mechanical and reversible universe, as well as 

their numerous successful off-springs, were no more or less than outstanding simplifications. 

Furthermore, access to reality by direct experimentation—observing falling stones, taking photographs 

or making linguistic signs of proof and poetry—no longer seemed an unproblematic route to the 

Cartesian “clear and distinct” as it did to Galileo and Kant. It was also the time when Walter Benjamin 

(Benjamin, 1999) launched his last, alas unfinished research project. In a truly creative move, he set out 

to account for the crisis of the Subject in terms of the dynamics of the shift in the material condition of 

humanity brought about by advancing capitalist modernity. However, instead of launching yet another 

exercise in top-down theorising, he grounded his project in object-based, concrete (visual, material) 

representations of reality, cutting across the boundaries of domains of being traditionally thought to be 

autonomous, and one in which empirical documentation leads to and ultimately recovers and makes 

visible the philosophical concepts underlying them. Hence the Arcades Project became a material 

counterpoint not only to abstract projects like Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s but also to dated versions of 

historical materialism and positivism.  

Although “literal reading” of Nietzsche’s texts is open to almost any interpretation, only a fool unaware 

of the rigid programmatic conceptual structure developed throughout Nietzsche’s research project 

would fall into this trap. Benjamin’s method is inscriptive in exactly the opposite sense. The inscription 

here is in the form of an assemblage of concrete visual and textual material constituting in the broadest 



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possible way seeds of the empirical content of the theme in question. It invites a projection upon the 

conceptual structures that have occupied the best minds of our civilisation. The aim is to instil a bottom 

up method of successive approximations, a tool that may prove particularly useful in today’s society of 

high complexity, dubious news and data.  

Benjamin chose the 19th century Paris as the empirical domain in which to develop his method 

resembling that of an archaeologist uncovering a buried city, layer by layer, patiently connecting found 

objects across adjacent temporal and spatial domains. He found artefacts coexisting as fragments—as if 

scattered by a giant explosion across the sacred Parisian ground. He took as his starting point the 

ruthless, systematic destruction of traditional bonds and narratives grounding the intuitive notion of 

order by the runaway capital accumulation. Benjamin’s montage, allegory, quotations etc., are 

consistent with the organisation of his Arcades Project as a whole; it is to reflect the new structural 

principle of his day: to erect large constructions out of smallest (architectural) units that have been 

“sharply and cuttingly” manufactured (stone blocks, columns, beams, bricks, iron and glass products), 

to discover the “crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small particular moments…” 

(Buck-Morss, 1989, chapter 3). The price he must pay for this novelty is that the traditional criteria for 

internal consistency of philosophical systems must be sacrificed on the altar of liberated access to the 

flow of material exchanges constituting the social. The genesis of onto-epistemic concepts can at best 

be quasi-continuous, dynamic, born and growing up as it were on the road, in moments when dialectics 

is “brought to a standstill”! 

However, Benjamin’s was not a vision of capitalism leading humans into a void of runaway 

consumerism. He did not anticipate the unleashing by technology of body-invasive, self-organizing, 

and on and off super-profitable bio-matter witnessed by recent decades. Nor was he after Heideggerian 

debunking of techno-science or promoting Nietzschean individualist vitalism. He wanted to recover 

under the fragmentary appearance of reality a material trace of Ur-history, of “originary” history of 

signs and bonds. He believed that all this slaughter of traditions, Karl Marx’s melting of all that is solid 

into air by steel constructions and machinery, would liberate workers, and return them to a utopia of 

some primeval freedom from alienation and slave-wage. In his vision, the new urban space would be 

re-enchanted by the flood of new signs and wish symbols inspired by technology; for him inscribed 

under the surface mask of history is the trickster of theology animating socio-technological 

development! The conceptual back-bone of his Arcades Project was chosen to represent Jungian-like 

archetypes of the 19th century capitalism; the gambler and the flaneur personify the empty time of 

bourgeois modernity, the whore signifies the commodity form of femininity a la Baudelaire’s 

mother-prostitute, the decorative mirrors and interiors consumer subjectivism, mechanical dolls are 

emblematic of worker’s existence, the store cashier is an allegory of the cashbox… They stand there 

supported by concrete documentary material of citations and images etc. waiting to be projected step by 

step upon the established models of the world. They represent novel means for developing a personal, 



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experiential ownership of a route into knowledge acquisition such that the mind is equipped critically 

to stand up to top down impositions. From this point of view, whether the site of such intervention is 

Baudelaire, Eiffel tower, or anything else that can be so documented becomes secondary if not 

irrelevant! 

 

6. Vertigos of the Post-Conceptual Wayfarer 

On the back cover of Sebald’s Vertigo, the publisher tells the reader that this is “Part fiction, part 

travelogue,…succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself…What would possibly 

connect Stendhal’s unrequited love, the artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine 

organisation, a missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake, the 

Great fire of London, a story by Kafka about doomed huntsman and a closed down pizzeria in 

Verona?…” 

Sebald appears to have constructed his text as if out of brief, often only several sentences long blocks, 

each carefully crafted so as to look almost self-contained. Their solidity is enhanced by the economy 

with which the sentence is composed. It invariably contains seemingly factual information—such as 

that 50 000 horses and men were killed at Waterloo—even though the story has nothing to do with the 

battle. Still less is it necessary to provide details about its death toll. Here he makes it clear that 

understanding details is a key to grasping the turn of events; it is not there to inform as such but as a 

methodological tool; “tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything”. He employs great precision 

to embellish the passage or building block of text with concrete names of archaeological-genealogical 

importance. He inserts photos—of intentionally poor quality—of tickets, buildings, dresses, schematic 

drawings, with dates, numbers and brand marks clearly visible though the photos are of poor quality 

again to indicate they are a tool, not data. He refers to measurable physical properties such as material 

composition, colour and sound, light reflection, to acts of performance, even though judgements 

themselves often openly deny any possibility of uniqueness or indeed reality of what is being described. 

By frequent references by name to churches, railway stations, streets, gardens, the reader is led to 

developing high level of confidence in the narrator. Yet there is not quite the sense of completeness 

familiar from traditional novels. Even Franz Kafka, with whom Sebald as it turns out wants to be 

compared, settles his characters into their cloths and chairs and makes sure we know they are “there”. 

His depends on recognition of what people do. There is none of Sebald’s “abstract selectivity” and none 

of the generous supply of would be data, names, etc. arranged into sequential moves as if following a 

logical argument. However, by choosing to refer to one of his heroes as K., the author wants to initiate 

a chain reaction inviting parallels with the misfortunes of the famous Kafka’s hero. The reader familiar 

with the Trial (and the Castle!) can engage in a sophisticated game of parallel pastiche readings. But no 

Casey “place” (Casey, 1998) for his story! The uncertain origin and metric of the space in which 

Sebald’s narrative fragments move create a sense of vulnerability, of gentle traumatic openness to 



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misadventure. He wants the reader to know that his is a kind of pseudo-probabilistic outlook (Merrell, 

1998). In his words, “…the more images I gathered from the past…the more unlikely it seemed to me 

that the past had actually happened in this or that way”. 

The reader whose education resembles that of Sebald’s—i.e., someone who had been taught about the 

importance of visiting Italy and seeing its treasures a la Goethe’s Italian Journeys (Goethe, 1980) and 

Hegelian Kulturgeschichte—will recognise and identify with at a very different level of appreciation, 

e.g., the twenty pages of accurate geographical and art historical tour from p.69 of Vertigo of Verona, 

Milan, and Venice, and again Verona—only to end up with a reminder of Franz Werfel’s gift to dying 

Kafka. Hence Sebald’s text offers several different levels of reading, each with hints at its peculiar class 

of inscription in which the concrete material artefacts forming the backbone of the text and the virtual 

strings connecting them may invoke different metrics.  

This structuring disregarding the usual literary practices spiced with top-down patronising invite a 

comparison with Benjamin. Indeed, another common aspect is the atmosphere of spectacle, of 

hyper-reality, be it of travel, city architecture or human thoughts and encounters. There are also places 

in the Arcades Project and, say, in Sebald’s Austerlitz (Sebald, 2001) where lives of techno-scientific 

models become visible. They manifest themselves through mirror reflection, photography, systems of 

lighting, sparks and rays, transitional character of colour and shapes. Austerlitz the adult specialises in 

monumental architecture of capitalism. His interest in grand railway stations and fortifications is highly 

technical as is Benjamin’s interest in the Eiffel tower, applications of iron and glass, atriums and street 

lighting. Both Benjamin and Sebald dwell at length not only on the qualities of materials and structures 

but particularly on the process of using them in arts and literature. In Austerlitz there are again maps 

and descriptions exceeding in detail and scope many a tourist or technical guidebook. Even the account 

of torture in the Terezin concentration camp appears as if factual. Yet neither Benjamin’s nor Sebald’s 

work can be compared with that of authors who use scientific experiment or documentary argument to 

inform and to educate or simply to hold reader’s attention. The reference to mathematical or physical 

models or effects only appears indirectly via their manifestations; they stand as it were in the 

background and yet in the text, as inscriptions to be felt behind the lines. They create an atmosphere of 

possibility of order, of an unfulfilled promise of organisation far exceeding in importance the visible 

object and its features. For example, Austerlitz “…was obeying an impulse which he himself, to this 

day, did not really understand, but which was somehow linked to his early fascination with the idea of 

hardware network such as that of the entire railway system…”, and a little later, “he…found himself in 

the grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotion in the Parisian railway stations 

which he said he regarded as places marked by both blissful happiness and profound misfortune”. Just 

as the Arcades Project is a patchwork of disparate fragments arranged into collector’s boxes, so is 

Sebald’s novel. It makes the resulting openness even more both promising and traumatic. 

This reduction of systems to their “local” manifestations breaks down the authority of speculative 



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models of the world—as well as of those originating in the closure characteristic of the Newtonian 

mechanical universe and of the scientific models it has inspired—without excluding any possible 

benefit they might bring to any of us. It scatters their fragments across the boundaries of science and 

technology and into aesthetic and social domains. When Benjamin writes about colour, he is informed 

by Goethe, not Maxwell or Einstein. Like Goethe, he can only “marvel at the knowledge of colours 

displayed by scientists”. Sebald’s Austerlitz, an orphaned child of WWII, is keen on artefacts, but his 

interest is almost entirely consumed by monumental architecture of late capitalism such as the colossal 

Central Railway Stations of Antwerp and Brussel; also, this fascination appears to end at about 1900! 

Indeed, many a Sebald traveller had been educated very much like Benjamin, or better likes to think he 

had been educated that way, e.g., to want to follow the example of great men of Western culture like 

Johann W. Goethe, in order to instil in the mind the spirit of Renaissance as a measure of the 

enlightened way of living whose meaning is universal. That is why when a hero of Vertigo goes to 

Verona he does follow in footsteps of Goethe to enter Verona the “right way”—that is from the railway 

station to Giardino Giusti! But when it actually happens, Sebald’s hero does not gaze studiously at the 

architecture and paintings as a romantic wayfarer would have done any time between 1600 and 1900, 

may be even in 1950. It is as if the treasured buildings and paintings were a mere background, often 

only assumed to be known. What makes his journey worth the effort, apart from the idea of reliving a 

grand narrative, are the bits of food, of the bodies and dresses of lovely people, the tickets and other 

marks of life everywhere, anecdotal details that can be extracted during visits of a house or cemetery 

here and there, only to move on to another such encounter. There is no explicit mention of great stories 

of cultural history or models of the world, something a University Professor like Sebald must have 

been saturated with in the course of his career. Yet without the gymnastic of historicism and philosophy, 

he manages to hint effectively that there is more to this than meets the eye! But if there is in it a way of 

reaching treasures of the past, it is via the steps reminiscent of Benjamin’s ideas informing his Arcades 

Project! 

Any similarity between Benjamin and Sebald has interesting limits quite telling about the gap 

separating their respective generations. Unlike Benjamin, Sebald does not write about utopias. He does 

not show any signs of an active worldview or strong ideas about how to change this world. His 

Austerlitz, though a child of victims of Nazi camps, lives a life of an abstract intellectual and even after 

his “awakening” behaves like a recluse; he retires in order to find out about the fate of his parents but 

again purely as a personal obsession. He is not an engaged citizen with rights and responsibility. Things 

happen and that is that. Even any distant echoes of the Kafkaesque are broken into fragments loosely 

held along the lines of forces whose direction and energy supply come only virtually, via habitual 

expectation of rational manifestations of order via repetition, dissipation, symmetry, (de)composition 

and shocks, i.e., not via Nietzschean Will to Power, Benjaminian Rabbi Marxism, or Kafka’s 

“unfinished” still as if with a hope to free themselves from the clutches of the impenetrable System—as 



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if, since according to Kafka there is hope but it is not for us…! Here then is another example of a text 

free of systemic impositions of esteemed views about life offering to an interesting inquirer several 

levels of reading of ascending sophistication—a welcome gift of tutorial material; for in skilled hands, 

it can serve—and has already done so on many an occasion (Jaros, 2014a, 2014b)—as an excellent 

educational tool for initiating and developing further a bottom up, unassuming, personalised way of 

acquiring a method of learning about the world much better suited to the needs of citizens of the 21st 

century. The methodical, gradual un-concealing of layers of meaning potentially contained and hinted 

at in such texts illustrated on a few samples from Benjamin’s and Sebald’s works may open the door to 

what is now an increasingly popular way of building up narratives in just about any context; even for 

the spokesman of the anti-extinction movement mark 2020 the declared objective is to move from data 

to story-telling!  

This shift in narratology now also includes topics that have traditionally justified the format of a 

specialist monograph. Like Walter Benjamin in his Konvolutes of the Arcades Project and Max Sebald 

in his travelogues, Suzanne Stewart the Poet Laureate and Ivy League Professor chooses what she 

considers to be iconic nodes marking the territory of interest—in this case Italian or rather Roman 

ruins—and builds up their being out of material, constructional, and architectural-social qualities 

constitutive of their appearance and location (Stewart, 2020); Aristotle with his four cause canon would 

have applauded—not to speak of the visibility of archaeological-genealogical instincts in the 

Benjaminian mode! But there is no dream of reaching Ur-history, no Nietzschean zest to beat Evolution 

by the Will to Power, nor any mention of systems of thought, styles or Zeitgeist! And we are told 

“There is a homology between the reification of monumental forms and the unquestioning acceptance 

of ideology”. How does one read that if not as hinting, in a “meta-Nietzschean” move, that there is an 

ideology but it is not for telling? For surely a Princeton poet publishing a generously produced in-depth 

study of Roman Ruins with the Chicago University Press places the most monumental of 

monuments—those of the Roman Empire—on the pedestal for all to worship? 

The grounding line informing the approach to the Lessons—as well as to the Arcades Project and 

Vertigo—is that appearances of the past and present depend on never ending processes of translation 

between the past and the present. More than that, in Stewart’s words “…It is only in the continual 

transmission of our values, in the life of thought, language, and critical consideration, that we can find 

any permanence”. Yes, adds Robyn Creswell in his insightful review of The Ruins Lesson, but which 

texts and which values shall we transmit to find any “permanence”? And who is we (Creswell, 2020)? 

What is or should be the transmission path along which making and naming takes place, and how can it 

be made transparently definable and retrievable? These are not just the customary academic jibes. 

There is a long way from paragraph fruit pickings, whose authority in such a rendering rests chiefly on 

the notoriety of names like Piranesi, Winckelmann or Goethe, to the conceptual foundations of their 

oeuvre and its position in the historical, philosophical, and linguistic idioms. Only then might, say, 



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Winckelmann’s claims about the nobility of Greek profiles or Goethe’s reasons for elevating to the 

status of Divinity certain Italian artefacts and landscapes, change the colouring of their aura born out of 

such splendid textual isolation, and reveal some of the vectors lost in this format, e.g., those famously 

leading to pro-slavery engravings of the reputed development from apes to Africans or to the notion of 

people without art and Aryan aggrandisement! 

Creswell laments about lack of structure and misses the logic of sequential reasoning normally 

expected from research monographs authored by Ivy League academics. Citations too are chosen with 

unorthodox selectivity—be it with great generosity! What comes to light by dint of careful observation 

and scholarship is composed so as to express what is and what its value is by skilfully employing 

prestigious value judgements lifted, as much as possible without spoiling their brilliance, from 

imposing frameworks of high-minded critics, so as to inscribe connectivity and meaning without 

having to declare allegiance to any particular style or system of thought—not to speak of offering a 

new one. It is, as we are reminded here and there, to find an alternative to the hated paths filling the 

Cyberland by “reducing everything to bits”. Yet while the structure or rather its absence in the usual 

sense of the term in this genre certainly does serve the declared objective, it would be very difficult to 

benefit from so ambitious an account of, say, composition of materials used in craft and architecture 

many centuries ago, unless one can make good use of internet-assisted access to the relevant sources 

without which it is just a piece of trumpery—or one has a seat in the senior common room next to the 

right Professor! The same goes for unlocking the rich content hinted at every now and then and hidden 

behind dates and locations mapping the author’s personal patchwork of favoured pieces of development 

and decay, not only of ruins and ruin-ness of artefacts but also of all those people who inhabit 

collapsing physical and social structures wittily described in The Ruins Lesson as “lost in place”. Alas! 

The loss-ness never touched on in this book but lurking behind just about every little item on the huge 

agenda, and one more formidable than any of its precursors afforded so generous a treatment there, has 

been given novel actuality by taking the inscriptive design of narration into the digital age. The 

loss-ness that emanates from every screen which—apart from a few quixotic characters—must be 

indispensable for everyone’s thoughtful if not critical readings of such texts! For when in an unguarded 

moment we lift our tired eye from the shiny flat surface before us and begin to think about what it has 

brought to our attention, the trauma of facing the abys presented by the open system on whose 

interrogation the success of our effort depends but one that we can never fully control or critically 

assess, is bound to overwhelm us. 

 

7. Conclusions 

Today even topical interventions in physical and social sciences enter the public space as “narratives”. 

They are almost as a rule no longer grounded in open allegiances to systems of thought or worldviews 

brought to perfection by the great novelists and commentators of the 19th and 20th century. Nietzsche’s 



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technique of inscription re-emerged as a source of major social challenges when it was adopted in 

recent decades as a mainstream narrative practice grounded in “inscriptive connectivities” and 

cemented by the unlikely alliance of emergent tools of networked communication and technophobia of 

the large section of the humanities. “Inscribed” into even some of the most common of messages, the 

intended connectivity is hidden behind a pseudo-travelogue of a manipulative tale. Its signature is 

invariably an atmosphere of open-ended “punctuated equilibrium”, full of pointers to spicy novelty; it 

is as if it were to lead to salvation—without ever delivering it. Its aims are achieved by tangential hints, 

witticisms, and arrows to would-be desired objects, events, and meanings apparently outside the text. 

They are bound to create misleading impressions; no wonder if they turn the bewildered reader to 

seeking help in the overkill of messages offered at the click of a mouse by the Cyberspace—its ease 

only amplifying the sense of personal insecurity! For the regime of “anything goes” in public 

communication fatally weakened credibility of direct intervention in the social even when beefed up 

with allegory unhinged by ephemeral crypts. Anything from pata-physics of development and 

conspiracy theories to “deep fakes” has been polluting the public space and undermining the 

confidence in rational access to causal forces already diminished by the neo-liberal division of labour 

and wealth. 

However, in spite of or rather because of this way of structuring and its programmatic detachment from 

explicit allegiances to top-down systemic impositions, there emerged a sub-class of narratives that may 

serve as a welcome pragmatic platform for delivering competences fit for informing judgement in the 

challenging narrative spaces of today. Even texts steeped in scholarly accounts of cultural traditions 

like The Ruins Lesson, unfolded in the manner demonstrated here on examples from Benjamin’s and 

Sebald’s oeuvre, may be instrumental in lifting from under the veil of cryptic pointers a fresh route to 

meaning making, and to taking the level of ambition to new heights. The chief aim here is not turning 

people into walking encyclopaedias but to instil an attitude fostering habitual deferrals of hasty 

conclusions in favour of iterative loops of meaning making, gradually clarifying the relevant 

assumptions, causes, variables, and limits of applicability—surely the only sane way of countering the 

colossal misuses of emergent technologies and of the social structures that promoted them or were 

created in their wake. Without developing effective means for delivering personal confidence in 

making sense of the narrative space, leading to a credible form of emancipated citizenship, it is unlikely 

that the current challenges resolve themselves in consensual making of a just society. The 

state-of-the-art studies (Piketty, 2020) do support this outlook. In particular, it is argued that although 

economy is inseparable from governance and citizenship at large, inequality is neither economic nor 

technological but first and foremost a product of the ideological and political, grounded in educational 

structures. History seen in the light of empirical, quantitative results “…shows that economic 

development and human progress depend on education and not on the sacralisation of inequality and 

property” (Piketty, 2020, p. 1007). Though evidence, the “facts”, can only be transmitted in a system of 



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signs whose form reflects the social norms as they are held at the site of action, and the quantitative 

data are always subject to inherent methodological limitations, so long as their finitudes are known they 

can inform our judgment about specific contextual meanings. 

It is for the tutorial skill to position the learner so that he or she can, at the rate and depth matching 

their ability and resources, acquire an attitude equipping the mind with confidence and tools fit to take 

it through ascending stages of critical reading. When the routine delivery of the factual content of the 

curriculum is left to interactive software, it will release tutorial time for personalised engagement with 

the content of the programme (Jaros, 2014a, 2014b, 2020b). Recent experience shows that no amount 

of good will, revolutionary fervour, or top-down directives can replace the power of personal 

ownership of work and value, and of the social content of products of creativity and sweat. Also, the 

competence in critical un-concealing of meaning making in disparate forms of narrative production 

dominating the public space is the necessary condition for bringing it home to citizens that the personal 

independence making it possible for them to do what they are good at, in a shared public space, is the 

ultimate measure of value. Only then can people consensually choose and bring about structural social 

reforms that have a chance to stick. The mass disenfranchisement heightened by distortions of access to 

rational meaning is recognised as a major source of instability of contemporary democracies. It was 

also the disenfranchisement of individuals in all walks of life that accounts for the depth of the collapse 

of the post-war “East European socialism”; it failed to deliver personal ownership of meaning making 

and work in spite of giving everyone free education, health service, and the right to work—and making 

us school children memorise comrade Lenin’s advice “learn, learn, learn”! 

 

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