All In, Mariana Rodrigues and Sinan Eden’s book on revolutionary strategy for climate organising, opens with a confession. Eden recalls how, ten years into his life as a climate activist, he watched Greta Thunberg take the stage at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York and say what he had been avoiding. The science had been clear for thirty years, she said. Everyone was still looking away, and they were failing. “I have been a climate activist for fifteen years,” Eden writes, “which is a fancy way of saying I failed.”
What Rodrigues and Eden call the moment of connection is the brief passage in which what is actually at stake stops being managed at a professional distance and becomes present. Eden already knew everything Greta said; what changed was his relation to what he knew, as the defences gave way and the reality of the situation landed. That quality of contact between a person and the actual weight of what they are working on is what the first essay in this series tried to describe in more philosophical language.
They open with a diagnostic1 question, asking why we let that moment slip and what happens to the work of confronting the crisis when we do. Their answer is uncomfortable, since it locates the cause deeper than laziness or bad faith, in what they call obscure forms of intellectualism through which even we cannot see our own denial. We look at the reality for perhaps a minute or two, then we look through it. By looking through it, the crisis becomes a picture of a crisis, something that can be addressed from a political distance without being fully present to those addressing it. What Rodrigues and Eden document, passage after passage, is that this looking-through eventually becomes the community’s ordinary relation to its own situation, the default mode through which the work is done and the purpose maintained.
The book that follows is a sustained attempt to understand why this happens structurally and what a theory of change would need to look like to address it. The first essay in this series, Power and Community: What lies beneath strategy, argued that this structural problem has philosophical roots that go deeper than organisational culture. The managed desire and engineered perception of the surrounding culture do more than distract movements from their goals. They operate at the level of what people want and what they are capable of seeing, before any explicit strategic choice has been made. The tradition running from Marsilio Ficino through Giordano Bruno to Ioan Couliano shows that the deliberate manipulation of collective imagination is an ancient practice, now deployed with a precision and scale its Renaissance theorists could not have anticipated. What Couliano called the operator works unannounced, shaping the images a community loves and thereby shaping the community, bending its longing toward managed substitutes for the things it actually needs.
Diagnosis, however precise, is preliminary to a theory of change, and in what follows I want to ask what it means in practice to cultivate the inner ground the first essay argues is indispensable, how communities form in ways that are resistant to capture rather than vulnerable to it, and how that kind of formation connects to the concrete work of building power and achieving change. The quality of desire and perception members bring to the work, prior to any question of strategy, is what determines whether any strategy produces what it promises or gradually becomes what it was built to resist.
Part One: Why communities fail
The mechanism of capture and its limits
The moment of connection is lost repeatedly, by different people and in movements with little else in common, which points past the individuals involved to the conditions they work in. The activists who let it slip are, in most cases, the same people who were most moved by it. What they encounter, as they return to the work, is the full weight of the organisational cultures and emotional habits they have brought with them, habits shaped by exactly the culture they are trying to change, often long before any explicit political commitment was made. The loss is structural, and its structure comes into view once the question shifts from what communities consciously pursue to what has already shaped the wanting itself.
The tradition running from Ficino through Bruno to Couliano answers this. In a recent essay reassessing Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Pietro Daniel Omodeo and Sascha Freyberg show that what Couliano diagnosed in the Renaissance, the shaping of a community through the images it loves, is a permanent structural possibility. It works without force or even awareness, requiring only that the images circulating within a community, the symbols of the good life it lives by and its sense of what victory looks like and what counts as realistic, are images someone else has designed for purposes other than the community’s own.
The first essay’s Calypso is one image of how this works, holding Odysseus with an offer alone, immortality and ease arranged so that the long way home stops seeming worth the trouble. Capture of this kind turns on the same offer, welcoming a desire and meeting it with a substitute close enough to quiet it before it reaches its true object, so that the world it might have changed is left untouched, while from the inside the desire feels answered. The same move now works on the bond between a parent and a child. A parent gives a child a phone to keep the child from being shut out, cut off from the games and the talk the other children already share, and the care behind this is real, the fear of exclusion well founded. To call that care simply love is to miss what makes it open to capture. A parent’s wish to protect the child runs through the child’s need to belong, and the phone answers that need, intercepting the wish before it reaches what it was really for, the child’s flourishing. Over the heads of parent and child, the loving choice and the harming one have become a single choice, so that sparing the child that exclusion hands them to the very capture the phone carries.
What arranges it is a position rather than a person, the place from which the images and the measures a community lives by are set. The advertiser and the platform occupy that position without authoring it, the one tying a longing for belonging or for meaning to whatever can be sold, the other settling what a community treats as urgent by amplifying whatever holds attention. Most of the pressure is diffuse and emergent, nearer to a sorcerer’s apprentice than to a sorcerer, and anyone who looks behind it for a single author misreads it. Together they are the visible part of something larger and harder to point at, an inherited common sense in which one arrangement, an economy that extracts and grows for its own sake and that no one in particular directs, has come to seem the plain shape of the world rather than a thing that was built.2 That no one directs it is what keeps it from being a conspiracy, and what makes it so hard to refuse. Handled this way, a community comes to want what it has been handed and to take it for the whole of what there is.
For all its explanatory reach, this tradition has a limitation Omodeo and Freyberg identify. It treats communities as essentially passive, as objects of manipulation rather than subjects of their own political life, and so, while it explains why they fail to act from what they long for, it cannot say why some manipulations succeed and others fail, or what the internal dynamics of collective desire actually are. It has no account of what the community is bringing to the encounter before the operator arrives.
Laclau’s political theory provides exactly that account. Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist who spent his career dismantling the foundational claims of orthodox Marxism while retaining its commitment to radical transformation. His central contribution is the argument that collective political subjects, the people or the working class, are constituted through political practice rather than given in advance by any underlying social reality. This constitution happens through what Laclau calls articulation, the construction of connections between different demands and grievances so that they come to form a unified whole. A feminist who is also a housing activist and a climate organiser belongs to multiple, potentially contradictory positions, and it is articulatory practice that produces a temporary unity across them.
The mechanism through which this works is what Laclau calls the chain of equivalences. Different demands become equivalent to one another because they share the property of being blocked by the same opponent, even when they have little else in common. The chain is held together by what he calls an empty signifier, a term whose specific content has been partially evacuated precisely so that it can represent the unity of the chain as a whole. “System change” and “the people” both function this way, the first holding left-coalition mobilisation under a banner whose meaning is kept open, the second working for left and right populism alike on the precise condition that no one is required to specify which people are meant. The more universally representative such a term becomes, the more its specific content must float free of any single determination, since it is that openness that allows it to hold together a coalition of unlike demands under a shared banner.
Laclau draws on Freud’s analysis of group psychology to explain why this structure can be personally embodied in a leader. For Freud, collective identity involves a libidinal bond, in which group members are linked through shared desire as well as shared ideas, specifically by the erotic investment each member makes in the figure who occupies the position of ideal. For Laclau, this insight explains why empty signifiers can be given a human face and why that embodiment is so politically potent. The leader is produced by the coalition rather than imposed on it from outside, occupying the convergence point of an already-forming chain of equivalences. This is why leaders of similar charisma and rhetorical skill can meet with such different fortunes, and it is the correction to Couliano that Omodeo and Freyberg rightly insist on.
But Laclau’s account contains a gap that is equally significant. He brackets the question of what the libidinal bond is actually oriented toward. Whether the group’s shared desire is aimed at its true object or at a managed substitute finds no place in his framework, since what constitutes the group is the bond itself, regardless of its object. His treatment of the internal dynamics of collective desire is entirely discursive, concerned with how demands are linked through rhetoric rather than with the quality of the desire being articulated, so that nothing in it prevents a chain of equivalences from being built out of longings the operator has already redirected.
This bracketing is what the first essay’s account of eros refuses. Eros is a movement as well as a bond, and the direction of that movement determines whether it leads toward community and political action or toward their simulation. A community whose shared desire is oriented toward a managed substitute for what it needs will mobilise and potentially achieve impressive results while gradually becoming what it was built to resist, since the desire driving it was never aimed at the transformation it claimed to seek. This is the philosophical account of what All In documents politically, and it is the gap the eidetic theory of change occupies.
Antonio Gramsci, who wrote decades before Laclau and supplied the concept of hegemony Laclau would build on, had already seen part of what Laclau’s account leaves out. For Gramsci, the dominant class maintains power primarily through the organisation of consent, through the shaping of common sense and the construction of a worldview in which existing arrangements appear natural and inevitable. Counter-hegemony requires a long process of cultural and intellectual work, and it requires what Gramsci called the organic intellectual, the figure who helps a community understand and articulate its own experience rather than importing an external framework. This is closer to the eidetic account than Laclau’s discursive analysis, since it preserves the question of whether the articulation is grounded in an understanding of the community’s actual situation. But Gramsci’s account remains at the level of ideology and class consciousness, short of the eros and perception the first essay argues precede any articulation.
Each of these three thinkers illuminates a different dimension of the problem. Couliano shows the mechanism of external capture and Laclau the internal constitution of collective subjects, while Gramsci adds the requirement that counter-hegemonic work be grounded in the community’s actual situation. None of them asks what it would mean for the longing being articulated to be genuinely oriented rather than managed, or what conditions make that possible at the level of direct human encounter. That is the question this essay tries to answer.
How the inner ground is colonised
The operator works from outside. The mechanisms by which communities lose their genuine orientation operate largely from within, and they are, if anything, more difficult to address because they feel like commitment rather than failure.
Rodrigues and Eden identify six dynamics in All In, drawn from direct political experience rather than theory. The positive ground is taking responsibility, the insistence that each person in a movement stop delegating the task of system change to an imagined ideal actor, whether a perfect party or the organised working class, and accept it as their own. The other five are specific ways of evading that acceptance. Together they form a portrait of how communities lose the full weight of what they set out to do, rather than a taxonomy of organisational problems. To understand why these evasions are so persistent, why they reproduce themselves even in communities explicitly trying to resist them, requires seeing them as specific forms of misdirected eros rather than merely as organisational habits.
The first evasion is faking responsibility, the substitution of activity for genuine accountability to results. Organisations produce campaign reports and strategic plans, and treat them as the answer. Without any honest measure of actual contribution to system change, however, this delivers evidence of effort, never evidence of impact. The shift is almost always unconscious rather than cynical, driven by the real psychological need to feel that one is contributing, and once the deflection is in place, the question of whether the community is achieving what it claims becomes hard to ask, since the honest answer threatens the sense of purpose that has been keeping the community going.
The second evasion is faking deeper, and it is the most insidious of the five since it operates at the level of theory rather than practice. Some widely used schemes, of which Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan is the authors’ main example, appear to address the problem of strategic incoherence by assigning every type of actor a legitimate role in a shared movement ecosystem. The authors argue these schemes are counterproductive on four counts. They invite pro-system actors into the movement on equal terms, changing its ideological basis. They allocate different groups to different phases and encourage each to wait its turn, which institutional actors use as cover for deliberately withholding resources from revolts in progress. They discourage strategic coordination by treating every group’s contribution as inherently complementary. And they train activists to think in single-issue, incremental terms. Even an organisation that begins on an anti-capitalist basis will find, over time, that the tool has domesticated its political goals to fit reformist assumptions, through the cumulative logic of its use rather than through any deliberate compromise.
The third evasion is transference, the unconscious projection onto the present situation of strategies and organisational cultures formed in a different historical moment. Rodrigues and Eden give two examples. The traditional left was built on the assumption that revolution would arrive if the masses were organised and patience held. It never developed the capacity to work under deadlines, and its relationship to its own failures is to deny they exist. The new left emerged in the 1990s in a defensive posture, its core slogan “another world is possible” already a concession, arguing for the existence of alternatives rather than defending one. Both reproduce patterns designed for conditions that have passed. This is eros in its most understandable form, reaching for the familiar shape of an earlier moment when the work mattered, while the present asks something else of them.
The fourth evasion is distraction, which the authors identify in two distinct forms. The first is self-isolation through privilege discourse. Activists construct an idealised image of the oppressed subject and use their own relative privilege as a reason to defer action, effectively removing themselves from accountability while appearing to act on principle. The second is strategic distraction through alignment with the political centre against the far right. The authors argue this is a trap. The extreme right is itself a product of the conditions producing the crisis, and seeking consensus with moderate forces creates a political vacuum that reinforces the logic the alliance claims to oppose, ensuring climate collapse while believing it is preventing fascism. Both forms of distraction share the same structure, in which a genuine concern absorbs the energy that should go toward the primary task in a way that feels like political seriousness but functions as its avoidance.
The fifth evasion is conformism, which the authors treat as inseparable from a distorted relationship to failure. Over time, the ambition of political work shrinks toward what the surrounding culture regards as realistic. Each step feels like a tactical adjustment, but cumulatively the demand for system change becomes a demand for policy reform, which becomes a demand for a seat at the table, which becomes a demand to be consulted. The authors argue this happens because movements use a win/lose mindset borrowed from sport, which makes failure terrifying and risk-avoidance rational. Their response is failing forward, treating failure as an intentional and attentive part of transformative struggle. Their most striking formulation is that the true opposite of failure is not success but conformism and alienation, since the refusal to honestly reckon with failure is precisely what keeps communities locked in habits no longer adequate to what they face. This is what Plato’s Diotima would recognise as eros arrested into possession, the soul that has settled for an approximation of the good and been persuaded it has arrived.
What connects these five evasions, beneath their considerable differences, is a single underlying movement, namely desire redirected from the actual situation onto something more manageable. They are expressions of the same perceptual and erotic failure, the loss of genuine orientation toward what the community is actually trying to achieve. This means they cannot be addressed separately at the organisational level, through better accountability systems or stricter prioritisation, though both have their place. They require a community practice that actively cultivates the capacity to see clearly what is actually present and to want genuinely what is worth wanting. That practice is the substance of what follows.
Part Two: What genuine formation looks like
The formation problem
Every community doing political work faces what might be called the formation problem. The question is not only how to recruit people and organise their activity but how to become a community capable of genuine collective action that does not gradually deform into something other than what it set out to be. What it names is a question most theories of change address only partially, since they address only one of its two inseparable dimensions.
The outer dimension is the question of solidarity, of what holds the community together and makes coordinated action possible. The inner dimension is the question of orientation, of what quality of desire and perception members bring to the work, and whether that desire is genuinely aimed at the good the community is trying to achieve or has been redirected onto a manageable substitute for it.
Laclau’s account is directed entirely at the outer dimension. A community is constituted through the construction of a chain of equivalences that links different demands under a shared empty signifier and positions them against a common antagonist. This is correct as far as it goes, and the rhetorical work of articulation is genuinely political work. But it addresses the inner dimension not at all. A chain of equivalences is built from whatever desires happen to be circulating in a given political moment, and the theory has no basis for distinguishing between a chain built from desires that are genuinely oriented and a chain built from desires the operator has already shaped. The solidarity Laclau describes is real but fragile, since it depends entirely on the maintenance of the narrative holding it together, and that narrative is always already contested on the terrain where the operator is most skilled.
All In addresses both dimensions but unevenly. Its analysis of models of transformation, grand strategies, and movement capabilities is primarily an account of the outer dimension. But Rodrigues and Eden know, and their book shows it in its most honest passages, that something more is required. Their concept of the moment of connection, and their diagnosis of the mechanisms by which it is lost, is an acknowledgement that the inner dimension is real and that no outer structure can substitute for it. What they lack is an account of what the inner dimension actually consists of, why it is so consistently lost, and what conditions would allow it to be cultivated rather than merely declared. The eidetic community is the answer this essay proposes to both dimensions at once.
The eidetic community
An eidetic community cultivates shared genuine perception as a deliberate and ongoing practice, and understands that practice as a specifically political act rather than a therapeutic or spiritual one. Where other political communities might be defined by the rightness of their analysis or the depth of their members’ commitment, this one is defined by what it sees together.
What does this mean in practice? The first essay drew on both the Husserlian method of bracketing inherited assumptions and Jacob Klein’s recovery of the ancient Greek attentiveness to living relational wholes. In the context of political community, these philosophical practices translate into a specific discipline of attention. Before the group moves to strategy or action planning, it spends real time with the actual situation as it is, not as inherited assumptions have prepared it to appear. What do people in this room actually want, as distinct from what they have been trained to want by the cultures and organisations they have come from? Behind that question lie others, harder to formulate, about what is at stake here, the actual quality of the relationships in and around the community, and what familiarity has long since stopped letting them see.
It is a disciplined epistemic practice rather than a request for vulnerability or emotional processing, even if honesty about experience can be part of it. The practice is one of looking at what is actually given before judgment and expectation have organised it into familiar categories. It is difficult because the mechanisms of failure described above are always already at work, always already directing attention away from what is present toward what is more manageable. Many organisers will recognise this practice from their best moments, in the conversations after the meeting when something real was briefly said, in the moments of connection that Rodrigues and Eden identify as the problem’s starting point. The eidetic community is one that has decided to make those moments the centre of its practice.
Let me name a risk in the account itself. A community that defines itself as eidetic, that takes “we are the ones who see clearly” as its identity, has already begun to reproduce the structure it is trying to resist. The self-image of clear-sightedness is itself a managed image, and a particularly seductive one, since it arrives equipped with the language of its own critique. Every sustained attempt to keep a living practice of inquiry alive has eventually faced this. No example in the Western tradition makes the transformation more precisely visible than the fate of Socratic inquiry.
Socrates lived at a threshold in how thought was organised, where oral and mystical traditions were gradually being displaced by literate ones, and with literacy came new modes of reasoning and abstraction. Socrates never wrote. He left no text and no method, only the practice of inquiry itself enacted in conversation. Plato’s response was both a tribute and a transformation. He created a deliberate rhetorical image of his teacher while embedding the practice itself in the dialogues, in their aporia and refusal to arrive, for any reader willing to look past the portrait. The dialogues are built on aporia, the productive not-knowing that keeps questioning alive, and the most fully realised of them tend to end in irresolution. What Socrates models through Plato’s writing is a perpetual recommitment to inquiry under conditions of irreducible uncertainty, including uncertainty about whether the inquiry itself is being conducted honestly, rather than a method to be mastered and passed on.
But the act of writing was already a concession to the shift Socrates had refused. Plato protected what he could and at the same time hastened the transformation that made the practice harder to recover.3
The structural insight for eidetic communities is that the practice has to be applied reflexively, to itself. Such a community keeps bringing eidetic attention to its own capacity for eidetic attention, asking honestly whether what it is doing is the practice or the image of the practice. Far from a counsel of paralysis, this is the impermanence the practice has to live with. The capacity for genuine perception is always in the process of being either renewed or lost, and the willingness to live with it, rather than resolving it into a stable identity or a transmissible method, is the condition of the practice. An eidetic community lives by returning to the problem of managed desire, including the problem of its own investment in the practice, instead of imagining it has solved it. There is no test internal to the community that can settle whether its perception is genuine or managed, since any such test could itself be performed, and the practice is a wager that the difference between them is real and can be approached, rather than a method that guarantees access to it.
What eidetic communities positively accomplish is, in an important sense, not for this essay to prescribe. Each community will discover through its own practice what genuine shared perception requires of it, and that discovery cannot be anticipated by any external framework, which is part of the argument. But some structural features of what the practice tends to produce can be described.
A community whose members have cultivated the capacity to see what is actually present may find, over time, that presence is larger than their shared political project. The non-human world is part of what is actually there. The living systems within which any human community is always already embedded form a dimension of the situation that eidetic attention makes harder to bracket, more than a backdrop to political work. The widening happens in perception, not in ideology. The practice tends, over time, to widen what counts as present, to include the health of the soil under the city, the condition of the water, the lives of the species the community shares its territory with, the longer timeframes in which human political action is merely one movement among many. Eidetic attention is, in this sense, a form of calibration with one’s surroundings, and calibration reaches beyond the boundary of the human. This is a tendency the practice has rather than a guarantee, since a community could in principle attend closely to its own situation and remain entirely human-focused, and nothing in the account forbids it. That the widening is worth cultivating is a commitment this account brings, rather than a verdict perception delivers on its own.
What is actually present also includes dissonance, conflict, change, and death. In living systems, what looks like failure is often the condition of flourishing, since without change there is no adaptation and without death no succession. A community that can hold these realities without flinching, because its solidarity is grounded in shared perception rather than in a narrative of progress that must exclude entropy, may be better able to do the political work the actual situation requires than one committed to a vision that suppresses what it cannot accommodate. What the eidetic community offers is the capacity to remain present to what is, including what is difficult, rather than a promise of resolution, and that presence is the only ground on which anything genuine can be built.
The solidarity this builds is different in kind from the solidarity produced by shared narrative. It is grounded in the shared experience of looking at the situation together, rather than in agreement about what the situation means, and that foundation holds when interpretation fractures. When the narrative breaks down, when the empty signifier is challenged, when circumstances change in ways the existing account did not anticipate, a community grounded in shared eidetic attention can reorient together, since its unity does not depend on the maintenance of a particular interpretation. It can see that the situation has changed and ask again what it actually requires. A community grounded in shared narrative has to renegotiate the narrative instead, which is the point of maximum internal conflict and the highest vulnerability to operator capture.
This is also part of what can make such a community more resistant to the five evasions. Faking responsibility is difficult to sustain in a community that regularly returns together to the question of what is actually happening and what it actually requires. Transference becomes visible when the community practises looking at its present situation rather than through the lens of inherited categories. Distraction can be named as such when there is a shared capacity to distinguish between what is genuinely present and what is filling the space where it should be. And conformism, the slow shrinkage of ambition toward what appears realistic, is resisted by the ongoing practice of seeing clearly what is actually at stake, which keeps the current situation’s demands legible rather than allowing them to recede into the background of normalised emergency.
The philosophical grounding of this practice matters for a reason that is not merely academic. Without it, the practice is liable to become another technique, another item in the toolkit of regenerative culture that can be incorporated without changing anything fundamental. The eidetic account insists that what is being cultivated is an orientation rather than a skill in the instrumental sense, and that orientation is what eros and nous together name in the first essay. The community is learning to want to look truly more than it wants confirmation of what it already believes, which is the form of desire that makes genuine perception possible.
Logos and mythos as political practice
A community that has cultivated shared eidetic attention will, over time, speak differently. The first essay distinguished between logos as disclosure, speech that brings something seen into shared presence, and logos as managed persuasion, speech ordered to the wanting of an audience and indifferent to what is there to be seen. A scene in Thucydides, the Athenian who in the fifth century BCE wrote the history of his city’s long war with Sparta, stages the two and then complicates them, since the speech that saves a city is also the one that shows how nearly inseparable disclosure and management can become. The episode is remembered as the Mytilene Debate.
Mytilene, a city subject to Athens, has revolted, and the Athenian assembly, where the citizens decided such matters by their own vote, meets a second time to reconsider the decree of the day before, that the city’s whole male population be killed and the rest enslaved. Cleon, who after the death of Pericles, the leader of Athens through the war’s first years, had become its most influential politician and a persistent advocate of imperial severity, argues that the sentence be carried out. His case forecloses the ground on which a counter-argument might stand, since he frames the question wholly as one of deterrence, in which a revolt left unpunished invites the next, and what falls outside that frame is the prior question of what kind of city Athens is and what kind it can sustain. He does not falsify the situation but selects what will count as it, concealing the selection by presenting what remains as simply the way things are. Stranger still, in the same speech he sees the failure of his audience exactly, charging the Athenians with chasing a reality other than the one in front of them and sitting before their speakers like the audience at a performance rather than men deliberating about a city’s fate. That he sees the failure clearly and still serves it shows how little clear perception guarantees on its own.
Diodotus, an otherwise unknown citizen, answers him by setting pity and justice aside from the start, telling the assembly that they are weighing the interest of Athens and not sitting in judgment on what Mytilene deserves. He appears to disclose something Cleon’s frame had buried, that the common people in the subject cities are not the authors of revolt and are, for the moment, Athens’s natural friends, so that a policy of massacre would destroy the one loyalty on which the empire rests. Whether this is perception or convenient construction the speech does not let us settle, since Thucydides’ own account of the revolt is murky enough that the claim about the demos may be true or may be the most useful thing to say.
And Diodotus unsettles it further, in the move that has drawn the closest attention from his readers. He tells the assembly that in their city, so quick to suspect every clever speaker, good counsel can be believed only if it deceives, and he does not exempt himself from this.4 By his own rule the man with the better case gains a hearing by lying, which leaves the Athenians, and us, no way to fix what he really thinks. What that admission does is open a gap between what he says and what he might mean into which each part of a divided assembly reads the view it already holds, so that those who want only advantage hear advantage, those who want justice hear justice slipped past Cleon, and those who pity Mytilene hear mercy in disguise. With no settled character to consult and no clear facts to check him against, the Athenians fall back on the one thing they are sure of, their own image of themselves as a people too humane for the decree. The speech that saves the city works less by showing them the situation than by touching an opinion already in them. His logos is neither pure disclosure nor mere manipulation but a knot of the two, the disclosure and the management grown into each other past any separating, which not even its hearers could undo. This is why he is a warning before he is a model.
The vote bears this out, for the motion carries by a show of hands so close that Thucydides records the count as almost even, and a second ship is then sent to overtake the one already carrying the order of execution, reaching Mytilene as the decree is about to be read out. Even then the reprieve is partial, since the men Paches had shipped to Athens as the most responsible, somewhat more than a thousand, are put to death on Cleon’s separate motion regardless, so that the city is spared and the thousand are not. What Thucydides records is not the triumph of clear sight but a narrow turn of feeling on ground that would not hold, as the very next episode shows, the revolution at Corcyra, where the words men use to name the good and the bad come loose from their meanings under the pressure of civil war.
This is the limit of what Thucydides can offer, and the limit is also his achievement, since no one has anatomised political speech more clearly. In his telling the assembly is moved by framing and by the standing of the speaker, and the most honest counsel cannot be told from the most calculated. What is truly at stake is disclosed by one voice only, the historian’s own, standing outside the debate, the same voice that elsewhere tells the reader the real cause of the war that none of the men who waged it would admit aloud. Political speech, on this picture, answers to the audience the whole way down. What Thucydides does not imagine is a speech inside the assembly that answers instead to the situation.
Plato is the first to try to imagine that other speech. Where Thucydides leaves disclosure to the observer, Plato attempts to seat it inside speech itself, refounding logos on something other than the wanting of an audience. Dialectic at its best is speech between people who are trying to see the same thing, ordered to what is there and accountable to it. What Plato calls anamnesis, read not as the recollection of doctrines learned before birth but as the soul’s recovery of its orientation toward what is, names the condition under which such speech becomes possible, since a soul so turned can let its words be corrected by the thing they are about. The contrast is one Plato marks in the Phaedrus, when his Socrates praises the kind of speech that reminds us of what we know over the kind that works on what we already believe, and it falls along the very seam between anamnesis and what Diodotus does. Diodotus works on belief, and anamnesis is the turn toward what is known.
Here the distinction between disclosure and persuasion finds whatever ground it has, and the ground is a wager more than a proof. The two cannot be told apart by which of them we are glad to see prevail, which would make Diodotus a discloser only because the city survived. The surer measure is what the speech answers to, what is known or what is merely believed, the situation or the audience, though even this asks us first to judge what the situation is, which is the very thing in question. The wager is that the judgment, never certain, is still real and can be approached. On that measure Diodotus, for all his insight, works the side of opinion, while what Plato reaches for stands on the side of knowledge, as an aspiration political life seldom affords.
The same refounding reaches mythos, which matters for political work because such work moves through images of the world it is trying to bring about. Here too the decisive break is Plato’s. The myth that closes his Republic, the vision of Er returning from death to report how souls choose their next lives, is offered not to move a crowd but to show what argument cannot reach directly, the weight of a life’s formation on what it later becomes able to choose. Mythos in this sense discloses, where the assembly’s myths, the stories a movement tells to mobilise itself, are kept in service of an effect. A story can begin as the first kind and decay into the second once the perception that animated it has gone, reproduced for what it can still make people do after it has stopped showing them anything. This is the shape the operator’s work takes inside a movement’s own telling, in Couliano’s sense, and it is why a community has to keep asking of its central stories whether they still disclose the situation or have become images of the situation it would prefer to inhabit.
The contemporary form of this closure is easy to find, and its workings are better documented than the ancient one. The case for the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003 was assembled so that a conclusion already reached would appear as the only responsible reading of the evidence, with the intelligence selected to fit it and the gravest uncertainties about what the war would produce kept outside the frame. It is too easy, afterward, to say the truth was plain to anyone willing to look, since intelligent people looked and disagreed in good faith, and much of the disaster came from choices made after the invasion and not from the decision alone. What can be said is narrower and harder, that speech which tried to reopen the foreclosed question was not absent but defeated, ruled out before the debate began by conditions that read caution as weakness and the admission of uncertainty as a failure of nerve. Mytilene at least granted a second hearing, on terms a Diodotus could turn. This terrain granted none, and not even the Diodotean minimum, a disclosure able to prevail only by working on what the audience already believed, could find a footing. The mechanism is the one Thucydides records, and it works within movements as readily as within empires.
The capacity this asks of a community is what the first essay calls nous, though not as a faculty that vaults over reasoning to a truth reasoning cannot reach. Telling disclosure from the management of opinion is no flash that dispenses with thought, since Diodotus could be met only by thinking through what his speech was doing. Nous is the perception that orients such thinking, anchoring it in the situation as it is before a frame has fixed the premises or a feeling has chosen the end. A community whose practice has trained that perception will tend toward the speech that answers to what is, and will know Cleon’s framing and Diodotus’s knot for what they are, not because its members are better people but because they have learned to look before they are moved. None of this lifts them clear of the mechanism they study, since the perception that sees through one frame can harden into a frame of its own, which is why the practice has to be turned back on itself and held open, never settled into a possession.
Part Three: From formation to action
The practical framework enriched
What this essay proposes leaves the practical analytical framework that All In offers in place, and identifies what each element needs to function as promised rather than as a simulation of itself.
Rodrigues and Eden identify three grand strategies available to ruptural movements, spontaneous uprising, mass agitation, and ideological mobilisation, alongside three primary capabilities a movement needs to develop, narrative, disruptive, and institutional, the latter a typology they adapt, critically, from the sociologist Zeynep Tüfekçi. Spontaneous uprising builds toward and responds to moments of social and political fracture. Mass agitation works through a vanguard element to deepen the political consciousness and coordination of a broader movement. Ideological mobilisation recruits and forms committed members around a clear political vision and builds movement capability through their activity. Narrative capability tells the story of the situation in ways that shift what is thinkable. Disruptive capability interrupts the normal reproduction of the system. Institutional capability consolidates victories into durable forms that change the distribution of power.
Each strategy and capability has an inner condition of effectiveness their account acknowledges but cannot theorise from within itself.
Narrative capability without eidetic grounding becomes managed persuasion, indistinguishable in mechanism from the operator’s work. It may be persuasion in service of better ends, but it operates by the same logic, shaping what the audience desires and perceives before any explicit argument is made. The eidetically grounded community develops a different kind of narrative capability. It tells stories that disclose what is genuinely seen in the shared situation, in ways that allow others to recognise what they have also, however dimly, perceived. A story that recruits people to a pre-existing image depends on the continued maintenance of that image. A story that names something they already know but have not yet been able to say is oriented by something real. The second kind is more durable under pressure and more resistant to counter-narrative, since what it discloses cannot simply be re-described away.
Disruptive capability without genuine eros risks what Rodrigues and Eden call inconsequential explosions, actions that generate spectacle but build cynicism rather than power in the communities they claim to represent. The difference between disruption that ruptures the conditions of forgetting and disruption that merely disturbs the surface is motivational and perceptual rather than primarily tactical. It depends on whether the people taking the action are doing so from genuine seeing of what the situation requires, and whether the communities they are acting within experience the disruption as an expression of something they recognise, or as an imposition from a political culture they do not share. An eidetically grounded community is capable of the first kind of disruption precisely because its actions arise from shared perception of what the situation requires rather than from the reproduction of established activist habits.
Institutional capability without shared perception of what is genuinely real consolidates the wrong victories into durable wrong structures. The history of the labour movement provides the clearest examples. Real victories in wages and conditions were institutionalised in forms that also consolidated the exclusion of women, racialised workers, and informal labourers from the protections being won. The failure here was one of eidetic attention rather than of political will or analysis. The movement saw what its dominant categories had prepared it to see, and missed what the actual situation of the working class was. An eidetically grounded community consolidates differently, because its institutional work is oriented by ongoing perception of what is actually present rather than by the picture of the community and its interests that older categories have supplied.
The question of scale
The hardest objection to the eidetic theory of change is also the most obvious. If eidetic community practice is the inner ground of genuine political formation, what happens at scale? A room of twenty people in a local movement is one thing; the global coordination Rodrigues and Eden rightly identify as the necessary scale of transformative political action is another.
This objection, however understandable, rests on a misreading of how eidetic communities actually grow and how they connect to the broader movement. The operator scales by multiplying images across large populations simultaneously, and the strength of that mechanism is its speed and reach. Eidetic community scales by a different mechanism and at a different tempo, exemplifying a quality of political life together that others recognise as something they genuinely want and have not found elsewhere. What follows reaches to how such a network grows and stays hard to capture, and no further for now, since it says nothing about what happens when force is brought against it directly, a limit this essay returns to at its close and the third essay has to take up.
The structural analogy is mycelial rather than organisational. Mycelial networks, the filamentous systems through which fungi grow and feed, have been solving the problem of distributed life at scale for hundreds of millions of years, mostly beneath the surface and invisible to what moves above ground. Each growing tip is small enough to be in genuine contact with its immediate environment, responding to the chemistry and moisture of the soil it inhabits and to the other organisms present in it, at a resolution no single overseeing structure could match.
What the network achieves it achieves through the multiplication of such tips, not through a centre that directs them. Its resilience is of the same kind. Coherence is distributed rather than held at any single point, so that severing one connection does not threaten the whole, and the network grows around the break.
The largest known organism on earth by area is a single connected fungal body in Oregon covering nearly ten square kilometres, whose individual filaments are invisible to the naked eye. Mycelial systems also do the work of breaking down dead matter and returning it to the soil from which new growth becomes possible, and what they offer the analogy is a form that is at once minutely local and genuinely distributed rather than a picture of harmony. The claims sometimes made for these networks as conscious, cooperative superorganisms are contested in the science, and the analogy can do without them. It rests on a single structural point, that a form can be everywhere small and locally attentive and still hold together at scale without a centre.
Genuine relational knowing, the kind that grounds shared eidetic attention, has a cognitive ceiling somewhere in the low tens at the level of close acquaintance. Beyond that, relationships thin into something more formal and more instrumental. This small size is the design principle that makes scale possible, not a limitation on it, for the same reason that mycelial networks are not small systems. An eidetic community network grows by forming new nodes that share the same practice and participate in the same network of mutual support and coordinated attention, rather than by making each node larger. What passes between the nodes is a quality of presence and a way of working together rather than a doctrine or a message, recognisable to others as genuine because it is oriented by something they also, however dimly, perceive. The network is held together by shared orientation rather than by centralised direction, a stronger bond under conditions of pressure and change, since it does not depend on the maintenance of any single narrative or the authority of any single node.
This has direct implications for coalition, which All In rightly identifies as central to the movement-as-party model. Eidetically grounded communities are better equipped to form genuine coalitions than rhetorically grounded ones, since their solidarity is grounded in shared perception of structural reality rather than in shared adherence to a narrative that requires constant maintenance. When two such communities meet across differences of context, culture, or political tradition, they have a common practice, the practice of returning together to what is actually given in the shared situation, that allows them to recognise genuine convergence without requiring that their differences be papered over by an empty signifier. This is a more durable basis for coalition than the chains of equivalences Laclau describes, since it does not depend on the maintenance of the chain when circumstances change.
The eidetic in the movement’s DNA
A persistent assumption holds that attention to inner ground and the demand for urgent political action are in tension, as if taking the quality of perception and desire seriously required a more contemplative pace than the climate crisis allows. The assumption mistakes a difference in quality for a difference in speed.
The eidetic account prescribes no particular tempo. It asks what needs to be present, however quickly the work has to move, for it to remain what it claims to be. A community that has embedded eidetic practice in the DNA of how it works will bring that quality of attention to the sustained long-term work of community building and to the rapid, high-stakes decisions of urgent tactical action alike. The relevant distinction is between action that arises from genuine shared seeing and action that arises from inherited habit, from the desire to feel purposeful, or from the managed images the surrounding culture has supplied, not between slow and fast or between contemplative and activist.
When eidetic practice is embedded in a community’s way of working rather than reserved for particular moments of reflection, it changes the texture of everything the community does without requiring that everything slow down. A meeting that begins by asking what those present actually want, as distinct from what they have been trained to want, even briefly, will make different decisions than one that begins from where the previous meeting left off. An action planned by people who have genuinely looked at what the situation requires will differ from one planned by people reproducing an established repertoire.
The inner core of such a community is never static and never fully organised in the classical sense. This fluidity is healthy rather than a weakness, a consequence of what eidetic community requires. The people who are actively cultivating and maintaining the shared practice of genuine perception will shift over time as individuals move through different phases of engagement, face different personal constraints, or find their attention drawn to different aspects of the work. What needs to persist is the practice itself, not a fixed group of individuals, embedded in the habits and relational patterns of the community deeply enough that new members encounter it as the community’s ordinary way of being together rather than as a special technique.
This is also what allows the movement to accommodate the porous dynamism any living community requires. People participate in political movements at different levels of intensity and commitment. This is a reality to be designed for rather than a problem to be solved. The activist who can give twenty hours a week and the neighbour who can give two, the person drawn to direct action and the person whose contribution is best made through careful institutional work, all of these can be connected to the same movement’s orientation if that orientation is embedded in how the community works, rather than in a level of commitment only some can sustain. What they share is participation in the same quality of attention and care, which is what makes the movement coherent across its diversity.
Far from counselling patience against the demand for urgency, the eidetic account insists that urgency without genuine orientation is the absence of preparedness rather than its presence. The Athenian pathos for the Sicilian Expedition was nothing if not urgent. The city moved fast, with enormous energy and impressive coordination, toward catastrophe. Rodrigues and Eden are right that the climate crisis requires a declaration of emergency within activist organisations, a radical reorientation of every activity toward the primary task. The eidetic account adds that this reorientation must itself be genuinely seen and not merely proclaimed, since a declaration of emergency that reproduces the mechanisms of failure at higher intensity is the simulation of an emergency response rather than a response to one.
From formation to transformation
Here the argument is open to a natural objection, that it describes, at length, what communities need to be before they can change the world, but says remarkably little about how being that thing actually changes it. If the argument stops at inner conditions, it becomes a theory of readiness rather than a theory of change. The mechanism of transition from communities cultivating genuine perception to political and social transformation needs to be made explicit.
The key move is to recognise that the eidetic community is already building the world it wants. The practice of shared genuine perception, of relational contact with the living world and with one another, of cooperation grounded in what is actually present, is the first enactment of the vision rather than the precondition for it, partial and provisional, under conditions that make it difficult. This is the mechanism by which larger change becomes possible rather than a consolation for its absence. Genuine social reality, lived and embodied by communities over time, shifts the horizon of what others believe to be possible by example rather than by argument. What others see in such communities is something they have always, however dimly, known they wanted.
This recognition is qualitatively different from political recruitment, and the difference matters for how the movement understands its own growth. Recruitment through managed narrative works by the operator’s logic. It constructs compelling images of the movement’s vision and distributes them across audiences, activating desires that have been shaped in advance to respond to those images. The growth this produces is real but fragile, since it depends on the continued maintenance of the images. Recognition works differently, since when a community is genuinely living the practice, the contact it makes with those outside it tends to name something those people already know but have not been able to say. This is the political form of what Rodrigues and Eden identify as the moment of connection, the brief passage in which what is actually at stake stops being managed at a distance. Communities that reliably produce that moment draw people toward something real rather than recruiting them to a managed image, and the network grows because people move toward what is genuine with the same gravity that they move away from what they sense is managed.
At sufficient density, a mycelial network of communities living this way is at once a living alternative and a political force. As a living alternative, it is a distributed network of communities in genuine relational contact with their surroundings and the non-human world they are embedded in. They constitute a better world in the specific places and relationships they inhabit, rather than a model of one. The political force comes from the structure itself. A network not held together by managed narrative or centralised direction is exceptionally difficult to capture or discredit. Its coherence is distributed and its resilience is structural. And because its members can see clearly what is actually present, including what is present in the political situation at any given moment, it is capable of strategic action when conditions demand it.
The connection to All In‘s account of rupture and readiness is direct here. Rodrigues and Eden are right that transformative change requires moments of rupture, crises and fractures at which the usual arrangements become suddenly and visibly inadequate. Every movement faces, in such moments, the question of whether it will be ready to act with the clarity and coherence the opening requires. Organisational readiness matters, in members, resources, coordination, and prior experience working under pressure. Perceptual readiness matters at least as much, and is far less often discussed. A community cultivating shared eidetic attention is better placed to see what a rupture actually offers and what it actually requires, rather than receiving it through categories designed for a different moment. It is less likely to paper over the opening with the first available managed narrative. It can ask, together and quickly, what is actually here and what it actually needs from us.
This is also where the sharpest form of the scale objection has to be met, the worry that recognition cannot be shown to spread fast enough for the climate timeline. The honest reply is that it cannot be shown to, and that no mechanism of genuine formation can be guaranteed a rate in advance. What the eidetic account claims is that communities formed this way are the ones able to act when the crisis itself forces the openings, at the very moments when networks held together by managed narrative tend to fracture, rather than that recognition will outrun the crisis by steady growth. The rate at which ruptures arrive is not in the movement’s gift, but the quality of what meets them is what this whole argument is about.
The Myth of Er, which the first essay invokes in a different context, says something that bears directly on this. Political ruptures are, among other things, moments of collective choice, and the quality of the community facing that choice determines whether the opening is seized for genuine transformation or for another managed substitute. The souls in Plato’s myth who choose badly do so because their eros has been formed by a life of managed substitutes; they cannot see clearly what the available lives actually are. A movement that has been living the practice of genuine perception, that has been cultivating the capacity to want truly rather than what it has been trained to want, meets the moment of rupture with a different quality of readiness. The path from formation to transformation runs through cultivating such communities. Resources and strategy matter, but they do not produce that capacity on their own.
The vision the movement is working toward, which the community itself will continue to develop and revise through its own practice, can therefore be understood in two registers at once. At the level of political aspiration it points toward forms of social organisation that are ecocentric and cooperative, capable of holding the dissonance and death intrinsic to living systems without suppressing them into a narrative of progress. At the level of present practice it is already being enacted, imperfectly and provisionally, in every community that takes the cultivation of genuine shared perception seriously as a political act. The distance between these two registers is the space the movement is trying to close gradually, through sustained practice rather than any decisive action, by being together what it is working toward.
Conclusion: What this essay claims and what it does not
I came to the work described in this essay, as the first essay’s personal note explains, through philosophy rather than through organising. That trajectory carries both gifts and liabilities. The gift is the philosophical scaffolding that gives the analysis whatever depth it has. The liability is the permanent temptation to substitute a compelling argument for genuine engagement with the actual situation, to produce a persuasive surface over an absence rather than a disclosure of something genuinely seen. The honest measure of whether this essay has done its work is whether it has helped someone see something more clearly, not whether it has persuaded anyone.
What the essay proposes can be stated simply. Movements fail because the desire driving the work has been redirected, before any strategic choice is made, toward substitutes that feel like the real thing without being oriented toward it. Genuine change therefore requires communities that cultivate shared eidetic attention, the deliberate and recurring practice of looking together at what is actually present, as a specifically political act. Communities that do this seriously are already building the world they want, partially and provisionally, in every encounter they sustain with one another, and with the living world and the actual situation they face. This is the mechanism of transition, the way genuine social reality, lived and embodied over time in small communities, shifts the horizon of what others believe to be possible by example rather than by argument. It spreads through making contact others recognise as something they have always, however dimly, known they wanted. As the network grows, it becomes a living alternative and a political force at once, a distributed and resilient form that is hard to capture and able to act when the ruptures of transformative change open the space for it.
There is a limit to this claim that I want to name rather than leave for the reader to find. Being hard to capture is not the same as being able to prevail against a resourced and organised adversary that has decided to crush you. The mycelial image describes resistance to internal capture and to dispersal well, and it describes almost nothing about what a community does when force is brought against it directly.
I can point to living traditions that move toward the fusion this essay describes, though I want to be careful about how much I claim for them, since I know several of them from reading and report rather than from having lived inside them. On the perceptual side there is the Goethean “delicate activism” of Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff, whose practice treats a disciplined way of seeing as itself the change it seeks. Beside it stands the Plum Village tradition of Thích Nhất Hạnh, where a rigorous training of attention is inseparable from the building of community, the Sangha he called the form the next Buddha may take, and whose engaged Buddhism sent thousands into relief work under fire during the Vietnam War and drew King’s nomination of him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. Closer to a method than to a community is Nora Bateson’s “warm data,” an attention trained on the relations between things rather than on the things in isolation, which is close to what I have been calling shared eidetic attention. Further toward the political, Paulo Freire’s conscientização treats the growth of a people’s capacity to perceive their own situation as the first act of their liberation, so that a disciplined seeing is already a form of organising, and the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil has made that pedagogy the daily formation of a mass community that has occupied and held land against the owners and the state. Most of these cultivate perception more readily than power, and even in the MST, where the two come closest, holding ground against the full force of the state remains unresolved.
On the political side there are the autonomous experiments that have actually governed territory, the Zapatista communities of Chiapas with their roots in indigenous cosmology most of all, and the Rojava project. These built and defended real political form, and Rojava in particular has lately met exactly the kind of force the mycelial image cannot account for, when through 2025 and into 2026 the Syrian state, with Turkey behind it and American protection withdrawn, took most of the territory the administration held and folded its institutions into the state under a forced integration. Whether that ends the project is not something I can settle honestly from outside a struggle still under way, and its own voices speak of resistance rather than defeat.
Both have also generated their own bodies of thought about knowledge and perception that move toward what this essay calls eidetic practice, though I meet it mostly in the work of sympathetic interpreters rather than in the communities’ own voice. The field divides, in other words, more or less along the seam this essay is trying to close, with the practices richest in genuine perception the thinnest in organised power, and the experiments strongest in organised power the hardest for me to read honestly on the question of perception. The relation between eidetic community and organised force is the unfinished problem this account leaves open, and it is the question the third essay has to answer rather than this one.
The argument also names the choice that faces every community doing political work over time. Rodrigues and Eden’s claim that the opposite of failure is not success but conformism and alienation is a description rather than a consolation. The choice is between maintaining orientation through difficulty, which makes honest learning from failure possible, and losing that orientation in order to avoid the discomfort of honest assessment, rather than between winning and losing. A community that has cultivated shared eidetic attention is, when it fails, better able to make an honest collective assessment of what happened and why, since it has the perceptual habits assessment requires. This is the inner condition of what Rodrigues and Eden call action learning, the capacity to build on experience across time in ways that make the movement genuinely more capable. Without it, failures produce cynicism, while with it they produce the accumulated wisdom every serious revolutionary movement has needed and few have managed to preserve across generations.
What the essay claims is specific and foundational. It claims that the conditions under which any theory of change produces what it promises, rather than its own gradual domestication, are the conditions the first essay described, namely eros genuinely oriented, perception cultivated through shared practice, and speech oriented by clear seeing, not managed persuasion. It claims that the mechanisms by which communities lose those conditions are perceptual and erotic more than they are strategic or organisational, rooted in the same structure of managed desire the first essay analysed in the broader culture. And it claims that the practice of shared eidetic attention in communities of direct human encounter is a genuine political act in itself, one of the most urgent and most consistently deferred tasks of the movement, rather than something preparatory to the real work.
What the essay does not claim is that this is sufficient. It does not tell any specific community which grand strategy to invest in, how to build coordination capability at the movement level, or how to connect the formation of eidetically grounded local communities to the global coordination Rodrigues and Eden rightly identify as the necessary scale of transformative action. Nor does it name the specific practices through which eidetic community is actually cultivated in concrete life together. That work belongs to the third essay. The inner practice requires specific forms of gathering, attention, and relation that sustain genuine shared perception over time, and those forms are as much the substance of the movement’s work as any outward-facing political project. What those practices are, alongside whatever strategic framework the next essay settles on and the specific vision and mission of the community these essays are written for, is the substance of the third essay.
The three essays together constitute a single argument from ground to practice. The first establishes the philosophical foundations, asking what eros and eidetic perception are and how they have been and continue to be systematically captured by the culture we are trying to change. The second, this essay, establishes what lies beneath a theory of change, asking how genuine political communities are formed, how they fail, and what the inner ground looks like that makes them capable of sustained action rather than its simulation. The third will establish the strategy, asking what this means concretely for a community with a specific vision and a specific set of decisions to make about how to act.
The inner ground is prior to the strategic question in the sense that without it the strategic question cannot be answered well, since the people answering it cannot see clearly enough what they are actually trying to do. It is not prior in the sense of replacing it.
What we are looking for is already here. The question is whether we will cultivate the conditions under which it can be found.
• • •
This is the long version of Part II in the series Power and Community. A condensed reading edition is available here. Part I, What lies beneath strategy, establishes the philosophical foundations the argument here builds on. Part III, on practice and strategy, will follow.
Notes
1. The word carries more than its clinical sense. Diagnosis descends from the Greek diagnōsis, a distinguishing or a discerning, built on the verb gignōskein, to know or to perceive, together with the prefix dia, which carries at once the sense of through and of apart. To diagnose in this older sense is to know something through and through and so to tell it apart from what it merely resembles, a discernment of what is actually present rather than a reading of symptoms, which is close to the perception this essay is trying to describe.
2. The bluntest contemporary name for this is Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, the sense that the present order has become the horizon of the thinkable. Fisher popularised a slogan, usually credited to Fredric Jameson, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The thought is older, and this essay reaches it through Gramsci, but Fisher gave it its sharpest edge.
3. The Academy Plato founded is the clearest local instance of this shift, the moment a living practice acquired institutional form. As John Dillon shows in The Heirs of Plato (2003), the decisive turn came not with Plato but with his immediate successors, the scholarchs who inherited the school. With Speusippus and then Xenocrates the open inquiry of the dialogues was consolidated into a transmissible system, and it is Xenocrates above all who is remembered for hardening Platonism into an orthodoxy, fixing even the standard division of philosophy that later teaching would simply assume. What began as the enactment of a particular quality of inquiry gradually became the transmission of a doctrine, reproducing the very habits of thought Socrates would have most relentlessly questioned.
4. The reading of Diodotus’ speech offered here, that its open admission of deceit leaves a gap into which a divided audience projects its own opinions, follows Paula Debnar, Diodotus’ Paradox and the Mytilene Debate, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 143 (2000), 161–178, who also sets the speech against the Phaedrus on speech that reminds us of what we know. It is one reading among several. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, in The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972), and Donald Kagan, in The Archidamian War (1974), take Diodotus more nearly at his word, as a sincere argument from Athenian advantage. Others read him as arguing justice under cover of expediency, most influentially Clifford Orwin, The Just and the Advantageous in Thucydides, American Political Science Review 78 (1984), 485–494, and recently Otto Linderborg, Immanent Critique in Thucydides’ Mytilenean Debate and Melian Dialogue, Critical Horizons 23 (2022), who reads the speech as a moral critique of expediency mounted from within it. That reading presses hardest against my own, on which he is a warning more than a model. On the speaker himself, Martin Ostwald, Diodotus, Son of Eucrates, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 20 (1979), 5–13, argues that so obscure a figure can nonetheless be historically identified. The paradox is at Thucydides 3.42–43, and the coming apart of the words for good and bad at Corcyra is at 3.82 to 3.83.