Essays

Encountering the decay of legitimacy and the necessity of authenticity

by David Marshall

  • Authenticity Before the World: On Arbitration, Rupture, and the Arc of Relational Openness

    – There are moments when the world ceases to press back, and the self appears without stance

    Short Introduction – This essay traces the movement of the self through authenticity, arbitration, rupture, and praxis, and introduces two new concepts – the arc of relational openness and the non‑arbitrated self. It shows how the self becomes visible to itself only when the world’s pressures shift, soften, or fall silent, and how praxis reveals the horizon beyond which nothing is knowable.

    Authenticity Before the World Presses Back

    Phenomenology has long treated authenticity as something the self must achieve. For Sartre, authenticity is a choice – a refusal of bad faith. For Heidegger, it is a retrieval – a turning‑toward one’s ownmost possibility. For Merleau‑Ponty, it is a mode of perception – a way the body discloses the world.

    Each of these positions assumes that authenticity is something the self must arrive at. My ontology begins elsewhere.

    Authenticity is the pre‑arbitrational expression of intention – the way the self begins before the world presses back. It is not a project, not a retrieval, not a stance. It is the self’s first disposition toward the world, before grammar, expectation, or legitimacy intervene.

    This is the first break with the phenomenological tradition: authenticity is not something the self recovers; it is something the world obscures.

    Merleau‑Ponty teaches that perception is the body’s dialogue with the world, and that ambiguity is the fundamental structure of experience. My ontology diverges from his at the point where ambiguity becomes asymmetry. Where he sees dialogue, I see arbitration; where he sees sedimentation, I see legitimacy; where he sees the pre‑objective, I see the pre‑arbitrational. The movement through rupture, relational dialectic, and praxis extends his terrain, but the arc of relational openness and the non‑arbitrated self mark a departure: they describe not perception, but the climatic conditions under which the self becomes visible to itself.

    Perpetual Arbitration

    The newborn self does not enter a neutral world. It enters a world already thick with asymmetry – a world that demands, interprets, mis‑sees, and presses back. This is the climate I call perpetual arbitration: the continuous negotiation between the self’s authentic intention and the world’s inherited grammar.

    Where Merleau‑Ponty speaks of “situation,” I speak of asymmetry. Where he sees ambiguity, I see pressure. Where he sees dialogue, I see negotiation under constraint.

    The self’s first experience of the world is not perception but arbitration.

    Rupture and the Relational Dialectic

    The practico‑inert – the sedimented structures of legitimacy and expectation – holds the self in place. But the practico‑inert is not eternal. Its mechanisms decay. Legitimacy collapses. Structures weaken. The climate shifts.

    When this happens, the self may encounter rupture: the moment when the inherited grammar no longer holds, when arbitration becomes visible, when the world’s demands lose their authority.

    Rupture is not liberation. It is exposure.

    After rupture, the self can perceive itself within its own relational dialectic – the movement between authenticity and arbitration that has always been there but never fully seen. This is the first glimpse of self.

    Intention as Symmetry‑Seeking

    Once the relational dialectic becomes visible, intention becomes intelligible. Not as will. Not as mastery. Not as freedom. But as a desire for symmetry – the desire to reduce the asymmetry of arbitration, to soften its pressures, to mitigate its worst excesses. This is not voluntarism. Voluntarism requires a sovereign will. This ontology dissolves the sovereign will. This is not dogmatism. Dogmatism requires a stable ground of truth. This ontology removes that ground.

    Intention is a movement, a gesture, a pose toward symmetry in a world that cannot be made symmetrical.

    Praxis and the Horizon

    It is the self’s engagement in praxis – the act of altering the field under real conditions – that makes nowness intelligible toward the future. The horizon is not a pre‑existing vista waiting to be perceived. It is the intelligibility that arises because the self acts, because the field is altered, because intention encounters the world and leaves a trace.

    The future becomes readable only through the changes enacted in the present. Nowness becomes intelligible only through praxis. Beyond the horizon disclosed in this way, nothing is knowable. No teleology. No destiny. No metaphysical guarantee.

    Only exposure, disposition, and risk.

    The arc of relational openness

    The world is not always equally threatening. Arbitration is not on/off; it is granular.
    There is a climatic gradient – the arc of relational openness – that expands or contracts depending on how safe the world feels.

    Along this arc:

    • high arbitration → vigilance, stance, defensiveness
    • softened arbitration → warmth, affection, tenderness
    • low arbitration → trust, intimacy, love
    • near‑zero arbitration → the non‑arbitrated self (limit‑phenomenon)

    Love is not the absence of arbitration. Love is a human faculty that can flourish when arbitration softens. The arc of relational openness is the climatic condition that allows this flourishing.

    The Non‑Arbitrated Self

    There are rare moments when arbitration suspends – not through praxis, but through trust. In such moments, the self may appear without stance, without intention, without negotiation. This is not a metaphysical essence but a limit‑phenomenon: the non‑arbitrated self, disclosed when the world ceases to press back.

    I experienced this once, in a hospital bed, when my biological channels were shutting down one by one – I lost vision, smell, touch, hearing. I was frail, dependent, and held entirely by the competence and care of others. The world was not a threat. Arbitration was unnecessary. And for a few moments, the self appeared without stance.

    Not foundational. Not eternal. Not a truth of the self. Just a glimpse of self‑presence when the climate of arbitration falls silent.

    Conclusion

    This ontology does not rescue us from dogmatism or voluntarism by offering a better doctrine or a stronger will. It rescues us by removing the metaphysical conditions that make dogmatism and voluntarism possible.

    What remains is:

    • authenticity as beginning
    • arbitration as condition
    • rupture as exposure
    • the relational dialectic as clarity
    • intention as symmetry‑seeking
    • praxis as disclosure
    • the arc of relational openness as climate
    • the non‑arbitrated self as limit
    • unknowability beyond the horizon

    This is the climate in which the self lives. This is the field of An Aimsir.

    David Marshall
    Skerries
    3 May 2026

  • A conversation with Maurice Merleau‑Ponty: On Climate, Perception, and the Disclosure of the World

    – On the field beneath perception

    This conversation with Maurice follows naturally from the earlier encounters with Marx and Sartre. With Marx, the question was history and the practico‑inert; with Sartre, the question was freedom and the structures of intention. Both conversations revealed that my own ontology begins neither with material conditions alone nor with consciousness alone, but with the climate that shapes what can appear in a situation. Maurice stands at the threshold of this insight: his phenomenology brings the world into view through perception, through the body’s orientation toward the sensible. This conversation takes place at the point where phenomenology meets its own ground – where the disclosure of the world is no longer anchored in perception but in the climate of conditions that makes perception possible at all.

    Maurice: You speak of climate as the primary ontological field. I am curious. For me, the world is not a set of objects but a horizon that perception opens. The body is our anchoring in this horizon. What, then, is climate?

    David: Climate is not weather, nor metaphor. It is the condition of disclosure – the field in which situations become intelligible. Perception is one mode of disclosure, but not the ground of it. Climate precedes perception. It shapes what can appear, what can be intended, what can be acted upon.

    Maurice: So you displace the primacy of the body?

    David: I relocate it. The body is not the origin of meaning; it is one of the sites through which climate becomes visible. The body is situated, but the situation is already structured by climate – by the ensemble of conditions that make certain gestures possible and others impossible.

    Maurice: You are describing something like my notion of the flesh – the intertwining of the perceiver and the perceived.

    David: Yes, but with a difference. Your flesh is reciprocal: the world touches me as I touch it. In my ontology, the world does not merely touch – it presses. Climate is not reciprocal; it is asymmetrical. It exerts force. It shapes the field before I arrive. It is not co‑constituted by my perception. It is the condition under which perception can occur at all.

    Maurice: Then what becomes of freedom? If climate precedes perception, does it not also precede agency?

    David: It precedes agency, but it does not determine it. Climate is not destiny. It is the grammar of the possible. Freedom is the capacity to intend a pose within a climate – to perceive the field, to recognise its pressures, and to act in ways that are not prescribed by them. Freedom is not transcendence; it is orientation.

    Maurice: Orientation… that is close to my idea that perception is always perspectival, always from somewhere.

    You: But your “somewhere” is bodily. Mine is climatic. The body is the instrument of orientation, but the orientation itself is toward a field that is not reducible to bodily perception. Climate includes institutions, histories, material conditions, wounds, legitimacies, and the practico‑inert. It is the totality of forces that shape the intelligibility of a moment.

    Maurice: Then climate is a kind of pre‑perceptual horizon?

    David: Exactly. It is the horizon of horizons. Perception discloses the world, but climate discloses perception. It is the ontological layer beneath phenomenology.

    Maurice: And what of truth? If climate shapes disclosure, does truth become relative?

    You: No. Truth becomes situated. A truth is not a correspondence but a clarity – a moment when the climate becomes visible in the situation. Truth is the recognition of the field that makes the moment possible. It is not subjective. It is structural.

    Maurice: Then your ontology is not a rejection of phenomenology but an extension of it.

    David: It is a re‑grounding. Phenomenology begins with perception. I begin with climate. Phenomenology describes how the world appears. I describe the conditions under which appearance becomes possible. You describe the intertwining of body and world. I describe the pressures that shape that intertwining.

    Merleau‑Ponty: And what does this reveal about the self?

    You: That the self is not a transcendental subject nor a pure perceiver. The self is a node of orientation within a climate. Authenticity is not a moral category but a mode of clarity – the capacity to see the climate and to intend a pose that is not merely reactive to it.

    Maurice: Then your ontology is a philosophy of action as much as of perception.

    David: Yes. Because climate is not static. It shifts. It wounds. It legitimises. It constrains. It opens. And the self moves within it, not as a sovereign agent but as a situated being capable of recognising the field and acting within it.

    Maurice: I see. You are not describing a world that is given, nor a world that is constructed, but a world that presses.

    David: Exactly. And it is in that pressure that the world discloses itself.

    This conversation with Maurice reveals the precise point where phenomenology reaches its limit. Perception discloses the world, but only within a climate that precedes it. Maurice brings us to the threshold of this insight, but he remains within the reciprocity of body and world. My ontology steps one layer deeper, into the field that shapes what can appear at all. In this sense, the conversation is not a departure from phenomenology but its grounding – the point where the world’s pressures become visible as the condition of disclosure.

    David Marshall
    April 2026 – from notes recorded between 2009 and 2024
    Skerries

    Conversation with Marx – On History and the Practico‑Inert

    Conversation with Sartre — On Intention and the Structures of Freedom

  • The Climate of Perpetual Arbitration

    – How childhood refusal, teenage rebellion, and adult tiredness all emerge from the same climate of resistance.

    Life is overflowing with friction. Resistance from the world when the self tries to move. We see this throughout our lives. A counsellor friend once told me that the first word many children learn to say is “no.” And parents, already fluent in the grammar of the system, respond with “they’re acting out.” They think they’re describing psychology. They’re actually describing the child’s first encounters with the practico‑inert: the inherited grammar of legitimacy, scarcity, and expectation that shapes how we become legible to others, and to ourselves.

    This resistance is what I call perpetual arbitration – the continual negotiation between the self’s movement and the practico‑inert grammar of the world. It is not a psychological process but a structural one: the world places conditions on how we become legible, and we learn to adjust ourselves within those limits. Perpetual arbitration is not something we choose to engage in; it is the climate in which we learn to move, speak, refuse, and recognise ourselves.

    By the time we reach our teenage years, this negotiation becomes visible as rebellion. Teenagers push back not because they are irrational or volatile, but because they are encountering the practico‑inert more consciously. They feel the inherited grammar pressing in on them – the expectations of school, family, community, and the narrowing of possible futures – and they resist. What adults call “the teenage years” is simply the second emergence of the authentic self meeting the limits of legibility. It is the same friction as childhood, but now the self is strong enough to feel the pressure directly.

    A few years ago, on a warm summer evening in Peel on the Isle of Man, I sat with a friend in the town square. Nearby, a small group of teenagers – fourteen, maybe sixteen – were chatting. At first it sounded like Irish. But it wasn’t. They were speaking Manx: a language that had supposedly died with its last native speaker, now revived and spoken fluently by teenagers who treated it as their own.

    My friend, always alert to the behaviour of his own teenage daughters, listened closely. When we spoke to the group, they told us, almost casually, “Well, it’s our language – none of the adults know what we’re saying.”

    The contrast with Ireland was immediate. In our own coastal town, Irish was something pushed through the practico‑inert institutions of school – resisted, resented, treated as an obligation. Teenagers there didn’t cling to Irish; they fled from it. It was a grammar imposed, not chosen.

    But in Peel, Manx had become an alternate grammar: a way for teenagers to mitigate the worst experience of perpetual arbitration, to create a space where the inherited grammar could not reach them. And, interestingly, they did this collectively.

    The language wasn’t simply a means of communication. It was a structural adjustment – a way of loosening the grip of the practico‑inert, even briefly. A way of speaking that didn’t immediately route them back into the inherited grammar of legitimacy and expectation. A way of being together that softened the climate.

    In Ireland, the same language – almost identical in sound – had become a site of pressure. In Peel, it had become a site of relief. The difference wasn’t linguistic. It was climatic.

    And somewhere in all this, that collective impulse – the shared attempt to ease the pressure – is caught and captured by the practico‑inert. What begins as a collective mitigation becomes another site of arbitration. The right jeans, the right watch, the right phone, the right label: each becomes another exhausting chain of negotiation, even within rebellion. The practico‑inert absorbs the gesture and returns it as expectation. Even rebellion becomes something you have to get right.

    As we move from the teenage years into adulthood, the evidence of our desire to escape perpetual arbitration becomes even clearer. Affluence helps, and so does technology, even though the very mechanisms that ease the pressure also reveal the contradictions of the practico‑inert. Disposable income among the affluent worker means more rooms in the house, ensuite bathrooms, televisions in multiple rooms. You no longer have to negotiate what you want to do in the shared space. Affluence reduces the immediate impact of scarcity by letting each person withdraw into their own room, their own screen, their own controlled environment.

    Technology facilitates this drift. The Walkman, the mobile phone, the noise‑cancelling headphone – each one removes a layer of negotiation. No more chatting at the bus stop. No more “can we change the radio station?” No more “can we talk about something else?” We simply don’t talk at all. The practico‑inert no longer needs to enforce silence; the devices do it for us.

    Increased affluence facilitates the decay of family relationships, not because people care less, but because the self is constantly seeking relief from perpetual arbitration. The more resources we have, the more we use them to carve out spaces where we do not have to negotiate our movements with others. The more technology we have, the more we use it to insulate ourselves from the climate of legibility. What looks like comfort is often the self’s attempt to flee the constant negotiation that adulthood demands. This is the destructive impact of the climate of perpetual arbitration: it surrounds us, shapes us, and quietly erodes the relations we once relied on to make life bearable.

    What we call tiredness, rebellion, withdrawal, or even comfort is often just the self trying to find relief from perpetual arbitration. The practico‑inert shapes the climate of our lives long before we can name it, and we spend much of adulthood trying to soften its pressure – through affluence, through technology, through silence, through distance. But the friction never disappears. It simply changes form. To recognise this is not to despair; it is to see the climate as climate. And once the climate becomes perceptible, the movements of the self become legible again – not as failure, but as the ordinary struggle to live in a world that is always negotiating our existence.

    Skerries
    May 2026

  • Consensus – the last shelter of legitimacy

    – Understanding the climate behind our political disorientation

    “European foreign ministers reach consensus on the way forward.” “Leaders of NATO arrive at consensus on the future of…” This is how most of us encounter the word “consensus”: as the public announcement of a structural adjustment within the prevailing conditions of the inherited field. It appears as something achieved, negotiated, formalised.

    To put that in ordinary English, I’m saying that when we hear the word consensus, we usually assume that it meas that the people in charge have already worked something out behind closed doors and are now telling the rest of us what the new arrangement will be. It’s presented as a tidy agreement, a finished product, rather than something alive, contested, or emerging from the deeper social and economic conditions.

    But consensus also lives at a much smaller scale. Often silent, often unspoken. Something you absorb simply by being there, by living alongside others. A neighbour of mine in a village of about 250 people recently voiced distress about another resident who moved here a decade ago. They had been given time to accommodate, but still they ran a petrol lawnmower between 12.30 and 2.00pm, – a quiet time – and they continued to park their truck and trailer in a narrow lane, making it difficult for prams and pushchairs. There are no written rules against any of this. It is simply understood that a good villager does not do these things. The consensus is cultural, inherited, and lived rather than declared.

    The apparent disparity between these two grammars of consensus – the macro, which is performed and announced, and the micro, which is absorbed and enacted- becomes visible on the cusp of rupture. Rupture is the moment when we start to see cracks in the structure. When we sense that the prevailing conditions can no longer sustain the consensus they claim to uphold, even as everything around us continues to insist that nothing has changed. We begin to feel that something isn’t being straight with us, and with that comes a flicker of frustration, even a sense of being deceived. It is a powerful moment: the world tilts slightly, and we find ourselves seeing it differently.

    In more technical language, I would say that rupture is the moment when the inherited climate becomes objectified: the self begins to perceive the conditions that once felt natural as external structures shaping its behaviour. What previously appeared as simply “how things are done” becomes recognisable as a consensus that was holding the field together—and is now failing to do so.

    How Consensus Was Made – The Historical Construction of the Consensus‑Milieu

    The climate in which consensus became the default grammar of legitimacy did not arise naturally. It was constructed, cultivated, and reaffirmed across several centuries.

    Its earliest traces appear in the legal abstractions of the late medieval and early modern English courts, where figures such as John Doe, Richard Roe, and John Nokes were introduced as fictional stand‑ins for litigants. These were early technologies of shared comprehension: devices that allowed the law to operate impersonally, to speak in a vocabulary that could be recognised across the realm. The legal subject became a type, a placeholder – and in doing so, the law began to generate a common imaginary space in which disputes could be understood and resolved.

    A few centuries later, under Elizabeth I, this movement was expanded and formalised. The network of grammar schools established during her reign was a deliberate project to cultivate a shared linguistic and moral grammar among the yeoman class – the strata from which clerks, minor officials, parish leaders, and local administrators would be drawn. These schools produced a population that could be addressed in a common vocabulary. Consensus was not negotiated; it was trained.

    After 1649, this project was taken up again by a ruling elite recovering from its own rupture. The English public schools became consensus‑factories for a new ruling bloc composed of landowners and the emergent enterprise class. They produced a recognisable type of self – the “gentleman” – whose authority rested on a shared climate of comprehension. This was the elite reaffirmation of the Elizabethan project, adapted to the needs of a class alliance seeking stability after civil conflict.

    Across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth century, this consensus‑milieu held. It provided the background climate in which legitimacy was understood, in which public life was conducted, and in which the collective self was shaped. It extended from the courtroom to the civil service to the village lane – and it did not remain confined to England. The milieu of consensus was exported throughout the British Empire, shaping the administrative classes of its colonies and informing the political formation of the American elite, both loyalists and the rebels who would become the founders of the United States. Its traces remain visible in the American use of “John Doe” and “Jane Doe” as administrative placeholders for unknown or unidentified persons – a direct inheritance of the English legal fictions that once trained a shared grammar of comprehension. In France, where the Revolution had destroyed the old elite grammar, a new consensus‑milieu was gradually reconstructed through the nineteenth century and consolidated after the First World War, when the technocratic institutions of the Third Republic produced a recognisable ruling type once again. Consensus was not merely an agreement; it was the climate in which agreement was possible.

    This long arc begins to fracture in the late twentieth century. From the 1980s onward, agents of the practico‑inert – the slow‑moving, impersonal forces of corporations, financial institutions, and managerial bureaucracies – began to discard consensus as a constraint. Metrics replaced mutual comprehension. Markets replaced shared standards. Managerial prerogative replaced the climate of restraint. The consensus‑milieu, once the stabilising field of the collective self, began to decay.

    Representation in the Inherited Field

    For as long as the consensus‑milieu held, representation depended on recognisability – the sense that a representative embodied the grammar of the climate. They were legible because they had been formed inside the same shared vocabulary, the same moral exemplars, the same rhetorical codes that structured the field itself. Representation was therefore not primarily a political function but a climatic one: the representative was the point at which the climate recognised itself.

    As the consensus‑milieu decays, this form of representation becomes unstable. The inherited field still expects recognisable types, still seeks the familiar grammar of legitimacy, still looks for the representative self it once produced. But the climate that sustained those types has thinned. The representative form persists, but the conditions that once made it authoritative no longer hold.

    It is at this point – when the inherited grammar persists but the climate that sustained it has weakened – that the distinction between representation in the inherited field and representation in An Aimsir becomes visible. The inherited field recognises only those who embody its fading grammar. An Aimsir, by contrast, does not require recognisability; it requires exposure – the moment when the self encounters the real conditions of the situation without the shelter of consensus.

    Consensus as the Last Shelter of Legitimacy

    Consensus is not agreement, harmony, or shared belief. It is the final performance of a legitimacy that has already decayed. When the inherited grammar collapses, consensus persists as a practico‑inert demand for alignment: the expectation that people will continue to behave as if the old structure still holds.

    Consensus becomes a residual choreography – a set of inherited gestures repeated out of habit, fear, or inertia. It is not a shared conviction. It is a performance of stability in a world where stability no longer exists. This is why contemporary appeals to consensus feel strained, brittle, and strangely theatrical: they are attempts to preserve the appearance of coherence after the grammar that once produced coherence has failed.

    Consensus is not an instrument of praxis. It is the structure praxis must pass through and abandon.

    Praxis begins when the demand for consensus is no longer obeyed – when the self stops performing alignment and begins to act in accordance with the real conditions of the situation. This is not rebellion, dissent, or rupture in the dramatic sense. It is the quiet, unavoidable recognition that the consensus‑milieu has thinned to the point where it can no longer organise action.

    Marx, Sartre, and the Climate of An Aimsir

    The behaviour of consensus becomes clearer when viewed through Marx and Sartre.
    For Marx, consensus is the ideological surface that masks contradiction: it allows the inherited field to appear coherent even when its underlying antagonisms are intensifying.

    For Sartre, consensus is a form of seriality – individuals aligned in parallel, repeating inherited gestures without forming a group capable of praxis.

    Marx explains why consensus persists – it conceals the conflict that would otherwise destabilise the field. Sartre explains how consensus persists – it serialises individuals into a practico‑inert formation.

    In the climate of An Aimsir, these two movements converge. Consensus survives only as residue, the last shelter of legitimacy in a field where legitimacy has already decayed. When consensus weakens, seriality loosens; when seriality loosens, contradiction becomes visible; and when contradiction becomes visible, the conditions for praxis appear.

    Representation in An Aimsir

    Representation in An Aimsir does not arise from recognisability or from inhabiting the inherited grammar of legitimacy. It emerges from exposure – from the moment when the self encounters the real conditions of the situation without the shelter of consensus.

    In the inherited field, representation was a performance of alignment: the representative embodied the climate, spoke its vocabulary, and reproduced its expectations. In An Aimsir, representation begins when that performance collapses. It is not a matter of speaking for others but of revealing the conditions that shape us all.

    This shift becomes clearest in situations where consensus was once the stabilising grammar of action. Collective bargaining is one such site. For decades, it functioned as a practico‑inert choreography: a ritualised performance of conflict and resolution that allowed both sides to behave as if the inherited climate still held.

    But inside the process, the instability was always visible. The asymmetry between capital and labour was not an occasional distortion; it was the structural condition. The consensus of collective bargaining was always temporary, always contingent, always dependent on conditions that were themselves in motion.

    This is where the intention to bend becomes intelligible. It was not a personal disposition or a tactical choice. It was a behaviour demanded by the inherited climate – a way of acting inside a structure whose stability was already decaying. To bend was to acknowledge, implicitly, that the consensus being performed could not hold. It was to act in a field where the conditions were shifting faster than they could be forecast, where the practico‑inert forces shaping the negotiation were already moving beyond the reach of the inherited grammar.

    In this sense, collective bargaining was a microcosm of the larger climate shift. The performance of consensus persisted, but the conditions that once sustained it were dissolving. The contradiction was visible to anyone who had to negotiate inside it: the choreography continued, but the ground beneath it was moving. The representative self – the one trained to inhabit the inherited grammar – could still perform the role, but the climate no longer recognised the performance as authoritative.

    Representation in An Aimsir emerges precisely at this point. It is the moment when the representative stops performing the inherited grammar and begins to articulate the real conditions of the situation. Representation becomes an act of exposure: revealing the asymmetry, the instability, the impossibility of forecasting, the practico‑inert forces that shape the field.

    In An Aimsir, representation is no longer the climate recognising itself. It is the climate revealing itself.

    Concluding Movement (Landing)

    We live at a moment when the inherited grammar of consensus still lingers, but the climate that sustained it has already shifted. The gestures remain, the vocabulary persists, the expectations echo – yet none of them hold the field together as they once did.

    This is not a failure of institutions or a collapse of political will. It is the exposure of a deeper movement: the transition from a climate organised by recognisability to a climate organised by conditions.

    In An Aimsir, legitimacy no longer flows from alignment with inherited forms but from the clarity with which the situation is revealed. Representation becomes an act of exposure, not performance; action becomes possible not because consensus has been achieved, but because its demand has finally loosened.

    What emerges is not a new structure but a new visibility – a way of seeing the field without the shelter of consensus, and of acting within it without the need to pretend that the old climate still holds.

    Epilogue: On Choreography

    There was a time when consensus resembled the old Sunday‑night choreography of the Tiller Girls: perfectly synchronised, rehearsed into stability, a single performance that held its shape because the climate that produced it was still intact.

    But as the climate shifted, the choreography changed. By the time Pan’s People appeared on Top of the Pops, synchrony had given way to something looser, more contingent, more exposed. Each dancer moved within the same field, but no longer in lockstep. The performance was shorter, improvised within constraints, a moment rather than a structure.

    These essays belong to that latter form. They are not attempts to restore the old choreography of consensus, but brief articulations of a climate in motion – snapshots of perception in An Aimsir, offered before the field shifts again.

    David Marshall
    Clifden
    December 2025

  • Am I still a Socialist ?

    – Tracing the movement from inherited identity to authentic action.

    Introduction

    This piece brings together two movements. The first is an attempt to describe, as precisely as possible, the ontological conditions under which the vocabulary of socialism loses its organising power. It outlines the climates through which the self moves – from authenticity, through Wounding and Rupture, into An Aimsir – and shows how intention, capacity, stamina, horizon, and praxis emerge as the practico‑inert weakens.

    The second movement is my response to that analysis. It is not a rebuttal or a comparison. It is a recognition – an acknowledgement that the vocabulary developed here corresponds to the way my own experience has unfolded. These two parts sit side by side because they describe the same terrain from two different vantage points: the structural and the lived.

    Part I — The Analysis

    The question “Am I still a socialist?” belongs to a grammar that no longer organises my experience of the world. It presupposes a political ontology in which identity, collective destiny, and historical necessity still hold enough coherence to orient action. But my ontology begins elsewhere – in the two climates through which the self moves, the Inherited Field and An Aimsir, and in the structural deformation produced by the practico-inert. From this perspective, the question cannot be answered within the old vocabulary, because the conditions that made that vocabulary meaningful have changed.

    1. The Inherited Field: where socialism once made sense

    In the Inherited Field, the self is born authentic but immediately enters a world structured by the practico‑inert – the accumulated routines, roles, and expectations that organise behaviour. This field once gave socialism its intelligibility. It offered:

    • a coherent political subject
    • a horizon of collective transformation
    • a belief in historical necessity
    • a grammar through which action could be named

    Marx and Sartre illuminated this field. Marx revealed the material structure of domination; Sartre revealed the seriality of groups and the contingency of action. Their categories presupposed a legitimacy engaged in serious decay, but not yet dissolved.

    Within that world, “socialist” was a meaningful identity.

    2. Wounding: the deformation of authenticity

    As the self grows, the practico‑inert does not simply constrain action – it deforms the relation between the self and the world. This deformation is Wounding.

    Wounding is not an event. It is a climate: the ongoing bending of the authentic self by inherited structures that demand repetition, conformity, and legibility. The self continues to act, but its action is shaped by distortion.

    Socialist identity belongs to this climate. It is one of the ways the practico‑inert once organised the world.

    3. Rupture: the recognition of contradiction

    Rupture occurs when the self grasps that the practico‑inert:

    • presents contradictions it cannot resolve
    • yet still demands that the self behave as though it can
    • no longer corresponds to real conditions
    • no longer organises the world coherently

    Rupture is not healing. It is seeing — the moment when the inherited grammar loses its binding force.

    This is the point at which the vocabulary of socialism begins to fail, not because it is wrong, but because the world it described is no longer the world the self inhabits.

    4. An Aimsir: the weakening of Wounding and the return to authenticity

    After rupture, the effect of Wounding weakens. The practico‑inert still echoes, but it no longer determines behaviour. The self can no longer rely on inherited identities – including “socialist” – to orient action.

    The world no longer tells the self how to behave. The self must rely on its own authenticity – the original faculty that was always present but long obscured.

    Acting authentically strengthens:

    • Intention — orientation toward others grounded in real conditions
    • Capacity — the ability to act without inherited scripts
    • Stamina — the ability to remain in authenticity without collapsing back into distortion

    As these faculties strengthen, the self perceives a wider horizon – the field of possible actions that becomes visible only when the practico‑inert loosens.

    This widening is the precondition for praxis.

    5. Praxis: action beyond the socialist grammar

    Praxis is the subset of authentic action in which:

    • intention is directed toward altering prevailing conditions
    • those altered conditions change the self in return
    • the horizon widens again
    • the cycle continues

    Praxis is dialectical: action changes the world, and the changed world changes the self.

    But praxis cannot be undertaken as a socialist, because:

    • socialism presupposes a stable field of conditions
    • praxis arises only when that field has dissolved
    • socialism is identity‑anchored
    • praxis is identity‑free
    • socialism is teleological
    • praxis is contingent
    • socialism belongs to the inherited grammar
    • praxis belongs to An Aimsir

    The socialist subject is no longer structurally possible.

    6. So, am I still a socialist?

    If the question is asked within the inherited grammar, the answer is irrelevant, because the grammar itself no longer holds.

    If the question is asked from within An Aimsir, the answer is structurally clear:

    No – not because socialism has been rejected, but because the world that made “socialist” a coherent identity has decayed.

    The self that acts now does so through authenticity, intention, and praxis, not through inherited political categories. The vocabulary of socialism cannot describe the climate in which action is now possible.

    What remains is not an identity but a stance: the self, perceiving authentically, widening its horizon, acting through praxis, and entering fruitful relation with others in a world no longer organised by the practico‑inert.

    The old vocabulary cannot carry this work. A new vocabulary must.

    Part II — My Response

    Reading this essay, I do not feel the discomfort that usually accompanies my attempts to reconcile my lived experience with the inherited vocabulary of politics. Normally, when I encounter a description of the world, I feel the tension between what I lived and what the description demands I should have lived. That tension is the signal that the vocabulary is inadequate. It is the sign that the grammar is still trying to shape me.

    But here, there is no tension. No discomfort. No sense of being mis-seen.

    Instead, I recognise myself.

    The essay does not impose a model on my experience; it describes the unfolding I have lived. It names the climates I have moved through, the deformation I have carried, the rupture I have endured, and the widening of horizon that has allowed me to act differently. It gives me a vocabulary that is not borrowed from the past but arises from the structure of my own experience.

    This is why I cannot respond to it as an intellectual exercise. There is nothing to compare, nothing to reject, nothing to defend. The description is not external to me; it is consonant with the way the world has actually felt.

    If anything, I feel a kind of relief – the relief of seeing my own trajectory expressed without distortion. I can imagine trade union colleagues reading this and feeling the same initial discomfort I once felt: the discomfort of stepping outside the language of socialism, the worry that abandoning the vocabulary means abandoning the solidarity, the struggle, the collective. But I also believe they would recognise themselves in this description. They would see that the vocabulary is not being rejected; it is being outgrown by the world itself.

    The truth is simple: I no longer inhabit the grammar of socialism. Not because I have turned away from its ethical impulse, but because the world that made that grammar coherent has decayed. The vocabulary cannot carry the weight of my experience anymore.

    If I need a name, perhaps I am a Praxian – someone who acts from authenticity, whose intention is shaped by real conditions, whose horizon widens through action, and whose relation to others is grounded rather than inherited.

    But even that name is secondary. What matters is the stance, not the label.

    The essay does not ask me to choose an identity. It shows me the climate in which identity has ceased to be the organising principle of action. It shows me that praxis is possible only when the old vocabulary falls away, and that my own experience has already moved into that climate.

    So my response is not argument. It is recognition. It is the sense of seeing my own path described with a vocabulary that is finally adequate to the world I inhabit.

    Closing Note (for Wither Socialism)

    This essay forms part of Wither Socialism, a broader attempt to respond to a question many socialists and trade union colleagues now ask with real urgency: what do we do now? The ontology developed here cannot – and must not – predict the future. It cannot offer a programme, a blueprint, or a new doctrine. To do so would simply repeat the old grammar under a different name.

    What it can offer is something more modest and more honest: a description of the landscape of nowness.

    It can describe the climates through which the self moves, the weakening of the practico‑inert, the experience of authenticity, and the value of praxis as the re‑affirmation of the authentic self. It can show how intention, capacity, stamina, and horizon emerge when inherited identities lose their organising power. And it can help identify the features of An Aimsir that matter – what strengthens us, what distorts us, what opens the horizon, and what closes it down.

    If there is guidance here, it is not a programme but a strategy of self: a way of recognising the key elements of the landscape, discerning what is helpful and what is destructive, and navigating the fog of a world in which legitimacy has decayed. It is the closest thing to a “highway code” that this ontology can offer – not a map of where to go, but a way of travelling without losing the authenticity that makes praxis possible..

    Because the method reveals, the fog can clear, the horizon can be seen, and the question of the next step can find direction.

    David Marshall
    Skerries
    April 2026

  • Am I a Phenomenologist ?

    – What the episode reveals

    The method I use throughout this work begins with the episode, not as a subjective experience but as a relational event in which the field becomes visible. The episode is the point of entry into structure. What follows in the short essay “Am I a Phenomenologist” clarifies this stance by showing how the episode discloses the field rather than appearing to consciousness. It is not a qualification; it is a demonstration of method.

    I begin with what happens.

    Not with consciousness, not with appearance, not with the purified phenomenon that phenomenology seeks to describe. I begin with the episode: a moment in which the world presses on the self and the self feels the deformation. The episode is not an object of reflection. It is a relational event. It is where forces become visible.

    In the essay on wounding, the moment was simple: the experience of something sucking my gumption. A child’s phrase, but accurate. It named the drain, the asymmetry, the sudden decay of forward motion. It named the relational pressure acting upon me. And when I described it to my mother, she recognised it immediately – not because she had analysed it, but because she had lived it. The episode disclosed a structure that neither of us had language for at the time.

    This is where my method begins.

    Phenomenology would ask how the moment appears to consciousness. I do not. I ask what the moment reveals about the field in which it occurs. I do not bracket the world; I restore it. I do not reduce the episode to experience; I treat the episode as a site of structural exposure. The forces acting upon the self are not hidden behind the phenomenon. They are present in it.

    The episode is not a datum. It is a relational knot. When examined slowly, without rushing to interpretation, it shows its internal reshaping of conditions: how authenticity becomes unsafe, how asymmetry is sensed before it is named, how the practico‑inert interrupts stamina, how the climate of the moment reorganises the stance of the self.

    This is not phenomenology.

    It is a method that begins from lived experience but does not end there. The episode is the entry point, not the object. From it, the structure becomes legible: the climate, the relational forces, the deformation of intention, the decay of inherited grammar. The episode is where the structure shows itself, and sometimes it shows itself again when the episode is revisited under a different climate.

    So the answer is simple.

    I am not a phenomenologist. I am working in the terrain phenomenology could not reach: the structural revelation of the field through the episode.

    David Marshall
    Montory
    April 2026

  • Something Sucking My Gumption

    – A lived episode of interruption, recognition, and the climate that shapes intention

    I sit here trying to make my perception intelligible, and the system I’m using to do it keeps pulling the strength out of the intention. I can see the shape of what I want to say – the movement, the contour, the climate of the thought – but each time I reach for it, something in the tool interrupts me. A small refusal. A misalignment. A moment where the world does not meet the gesture. It isn’t dramatic. It’s draining. I feel the energy leave me in a way I recognise immediately, even before I can name it.

    And as that drain happens, I’m taken back to a moment I haven’t thought about in years. I’m six, maybe seven. I’ve been given a pair of scissors at school. I have a vision of a colour collage I want to make – vivid, alive, already formed in my mind. I can see the shapes, the arrangement, the movement of colour. I reach for the paper, ready to begin. And the scissors won’t cut. They slip. They bend. They refuse. The idea is there, but the tool in my hand will not cooperate. I try again. And again. And with each attempt, something in me collapses a little. Not the idea – the strength to keep reaching for it.

    There was also a bodily shift I didn’t have language for then. A tightening, a drop, a kind of internal recoil. I know there are limits to what I can claim about this – anything involving stress or the nervous system belongs to the domain of healthcare professionals, not to me. But what I can say is that I felt something in my body respond before my mind could make sense of it. And even the caution around naming that response – the sense that I must stay within what I can legitimately describe – is part of the climate I’m trying to reveal. The world presses, the body registers, and the language must move carefully around that pressure.

    When I arrived home that day, I tried to explain it to my mother. I didn’t have the words. I only had the sensation – the collapse, the drain, the way the idea had been alive in me and then suddenly wasn’t. She listened, and she named it instantly. “Ah,” she said, “that’s something sucking your gumption.”

    She didn’t say it lightly. She knew the climate. She’d felt it herself as a child. She told me about being a Brownie, about Lady Baden‑Powell, about the way the adults arranged themselves in the room – the leader, the neighbours, the priest, the figures of authority who carried themselves with a kind of moral weight. She told me how, even then, she could sense the power in the room, the way it pressed on her, the way it made her smaller, quieter, less herself. She didn’t have the language of power or authenticity. She had the lived sense of something that drained her, something that stopped her from being who she was in that moment.

    She had lost her own mother at four. Through the conversations she later had with me about her childhood, I came to understand how a child in that position learns to read adults – to sense danger, to feel asymmetry, to know when authenticity is unsafe. She learned the world through the body, through the moods of others, through the way authority occupies space. So when she encountered the Brownie hierarchy, Lady Baden‑Powell, the priest, the family roles – she didn’t just experience events. She experienced the arrangement. She felt the moment when the world reaches in and takes the strength out of intention.

    So when she heard my story, she recognised it immediately. Not because she had thought about it. Because she had lived it.

    And in that moment, her recognition was not just understanding – it was a kind of care. Not care as comfort or reassurance, but care as intention: her movement toward me to ease the pressure of what I had encountered, to help me see that the force acting on me was relational, not mine alone. She was trying to give me a way to hold the experience without being crushed by it.

    And what stays with me now, as I sit here trying to write, is not the failure of the scissors or the failure of the software. It’s the moment of drain. The collapse of forward motion. The sense that something outside me has reached in and taken the strength out of the intention. Not enough to stop me forever – just enough to stop me now.

    And when this happens again and again – when each attempt is met with a small drain, a small interruption – something larger forms. A field of waiting. A field of postponement. A field where the self never quite reaches the point of breakthrough, because the strength never has the chance to accumulate. The experience repeats, and the repetition becomes the atmosphere. The world closes over again before the intention can become action.

    I didn’t know any of this as a child. I barely know it now. But I know the climate. I know the moment when something sucks my gumption. I know the way it interrupts the self, the way it drains the strength of the intention, the way it repeats, the way it shapes the conditions from the inside.

    And I know this: the experience is not personal. It is recognisable. It is inherited. It is lived before it is named.

    The episode has already revealed its structure. The naming can come later.

    David Marshall
    Skerries
    April 2026

  • Why I Use the Word Climate

    – Not a grammar of meaning, but a climate of existence.

    I began by using the word grammar to describe how action is organised. Grammar seemed adequate at first: it named the inherited rules, expectations, legitimacies, and interpretive structures that shape how the self becomes legible. But as the ontology developed, grammar became too narrow. It could describe rules, but it could not describe the total environment in which action takes place.

    The self does not simply follow rules; it moves within conditions. These conditions are not linguistic. They are structural, atmospheric, and lived. They include the pressures of scarcity, the deformation of the practico-inert, the weakening of consensus, the visibility of contradiction, the reorganisation of intention, and the shifting conditions of perception that follow rupture. None of this fits comfortably inside the metaphor of grammar.

    Grammar describes how meaning is organised. Climate describes how existence is organised.

    Grammar can be taught. Climate must be inhabited.

    Grammar tells you what is permitted. Climate tells you what is possible.

    This is why the Inherited Field and An Aimsir are climates. They are not sets of rules but total organisations of action. They shape what can be seen, endured, attempted, or refused. They determine how the relational dialectic operates and how the practico-inert is experienced. Rupture is not a change of grammar but a change of climate: a shift in the conditions of perception that reorganises the self’s movement.

    I use the word climate because the phenomena I am describing are too complex, too structural, and too atmospheric to remain inside the linguistic metaphor of grammar. Climate captures the lived conditions in which the self moves, the pressures that shape its possibilities, and the transformations that occur when those conditions change.

    David Marshall
    Skerries
    January 2026

  • William Blake and the Climate of Authenticity

    – What Blake saw in the air two centuries before we had the language for it

    William Blake died one hundred and ninety‑nine years ago. Next year will bring the commemorations, the reprints, the predictable rediscoveries. But the reason to return to him now is not anniversary. It is climate.

    Blake lived at the moment when the weather of the self began to change. The old world of craft, locality, and embodied relation was collapsing into the new grammar of industrial time, institutional morality, and the emerging figure of the disciplined subject. He felt the shift not as an historical event but as a pressure on perception itself. Something in the air thickened. Something in the self tightened. The world began to speak in a new voice, and that voice demanded obedience.

    Blake’s work is the record of a man standing in that weather and refusing to let it name him.

    This is why he belongs inside the architecture of An Aimsir. Not as a precursor, not as a prophet, but as someone who recognised – long before the vocabulary existed – that the self is shaped by climate, and that climate can be distorted.

    He saw innocence not as naïveté but as the original stance of the self before the world’s grammar settles on it. A clarity of intention. A directness of relation. A way of being that has not yet been bent. Experience, for him, is not maturity. It is the first wounding: the moment when the world’s demands begin to overwrite the stance of the self. The child is not educated; the child is conditioned. The world does not teach; it imposes.

    Blake’s “mind‑forg’d manacles” are not metaphors. They are the practico‑inert of his time: the behavioural rule‑set that emerges when institutions, habits, and expectations harden into a climate that the individual must breathe. He saw that this climate does not merely restrict action; it reshapes perception. It tells you what is possible. It tells you what is permitted. It tells you who you are allowed to be.

    And he saw that most people accept this without ever noticing the shift.

    The rupture – what he called vision – is the moment when the distortion becomes visible. Not a mystical revelation, not a supernatural visitation, but the sudden recognition that the weather you have been living in is not natural. That the grammar you have inherited is not inevitable. That the self you have become is not the self you began as.

    This is the point where Blake and An Aimsir meet most directly.
    For Blake, imagination is not fantasy. It is the clearing. It is the re‑emergence of intention after the practico‑inert has been seen for what it is. It is the stance that becomes possible when the climate of distortion is recognised rather than obeyed. His “mental fight” is not a struggle against others but a refusal to surrender the field of perception

    He is describing the labour of authenticity.

    Blake understood that the world cannot be changed by moral instruction. He rejected the idea that obedience produces virtue. He rejected the idea that institutions can redeem the self. He rejected the idea that the future is secured by conformity. What he insisted on, again and again, is that the self must reclaim its own stance before any action can be legitimate.

    This is not ethics. This is climate.

    Blake’s work shows that the self is always in relation to a field that precedes it. That the field can be distorted. That the distortion can be seen. And that seeing it changes the conditions under which action becomes possible.

    This is the architecture of An Aimsir. Blake lived it two centuries early.

    He stands as one of the first English writers to describe the weather of the self as something that can be altered by the world and restored by intention. His poems and engravings are not mystical artefacts but documents of a man navigating a hostile climate without surrendering the stance that made him human.

    As we approach the bicentenary of his death, the internet will fill with searches, summaries, and simplified accounts. But the real reason to read Blake now is that he understood something we are only beginning to articulate: that the struggle for authenticity is not a moral struggle, nor a political one, nor a psychological one.

    It is a struggle over climate. Over the field in which the self stands. Over the weather that shapes intention.

    Blake felt the shift. He named the distortion. He refused the grammar. And he held his stance.

    That is why he matters. And that is why he belongs here, in this work, in this moment, as the weather of our own time continues to turn.

    Skerries
    March 2026

  • Conversation with Sartre

    On the Practico‑Inert, Seriality, and the Conditions for Action

    This dialogue with Sartre continues the inquiry opened in the previous essays. It is a living conversation, and I expect it to change as the climate of the work changes.

    Sartre: – “You have removed the group. Without the group‑in‑fusion, praxis collapses back into impotence. Praxis without collective intentionality is only revolt. How can individual action alter the practico‑inert? How can it escape futility?”

    Marshall: – “I have not removed the group. I have removed the guarantee that the group is the subject of history.

    “The group‑in‑fusion remains possible, but it is no longer the necessary form of action. In the present climate, collective movements appear primarily as responses to Wounding – attempts to find coherence or shelter when legitimacy decays.

    “Praxis does not wait for the group. Praxis appears when the actor confronts the field without inherited structures to organise action. It is a mode of relation, not a collective destiny.

    “The practico‑inert is not overturned in a single gesture. It is pressured, bent, reshaped by actions taken under conditions of decay – sometimes individually, sometimes collectively, always under pressure.”

    Sartre: – “You have placed praxis inside authenticity. Is this not simply existentialism in disguise? If praxis arises only through authenticity, how do you avoid reducing political action to personal coherence? How do you prevent praxis from becoming a private drama?”

    Marshall: – “Authenticity is not interiority. Authenticity is world‑directed movement under pressure.

    “It is the moment when the actor confronts the field without guarantees – without legitimacy, without teleology, without inherited grammars to organise action. Authenticity is not a mood. It is a stance toward the world.

    “Praxis becomes possible when the actor stands in this exposed position. It is not existentialism. It is the condition of action in a world where the practico‑inert has weakened and nothing external guarantees coherence.”

    Sartre: – “You have made praxis contingent. If praxis is only a horizon, a contingent emergence, then how can it resist the practico‑inert? How can it transform the world rather than merely endure it?”

    Marshall: – “Contingency is not weakness. Contingency is the truth of action once legitimacy collapses.

    “You believed that contradiction would produce its own resolution. I do not. Contradiction produces exposure, not destiny. It reveals the climate in which action must occur, but it does not dictate the outcome.

    “Action under pressure is still action. The practico‑inert is confronted not by necessity but by the accumulation of actions taken without guarantees. Transformation remains possible – but its dominion is not knowable in our current historical state.”

    Sartre: – “Without the group, how does seriality break? If individuals remain scattered, interchangeable, and inert, then how can praxis escape the serial condition?”

    Marshall: – “Seriality breaks not only through collective fusion, but through orientation.

    “When the actor takes a position – when they act authentically within the prevailing conditions – the field shifts. Not globally, not teleologically, but concretely and locally.

    “The practico‑inert weakens when inherited structures no longer organise action. In this exposed climate, even individual action can pressure the field. Seriality is not abolished; it is interrupted. It is bent. It is made porous.

    “The group may form. It may not. But praxis does not depend on its formation.”

    Sartre: – “Then what becomes of history? If the actor is central, if praxis is contingent, if the group is no longer the subject, then have you not replaced history with biography?”

    Marshall: – “No. I have replaced destiny with climate.

    “History is not the unfolding of necessity. History is the accumulation of actions taken under pressure, within conditions that wound, constrain, and expose. Sometimes these actions align. Sometimes they diverge. Sometimes they form movements. Sometimes they remain solitary.

    “History is shaped by actors navigating the decay of legitimacy. It is shaped by actions taken without guarantees. It is shaped by climates that form from the sediment of these actions.

    “This is not biography. It is a different theory of historical agency.”

    David Marshall
    Montory
    March 2026

    Reader‑facing interpretation: Sartre – What the Dialogue Reveals (opens in new tab)