Theo was observed delivering the final line in what witnesses described as a "lukewarm baritone" and with a facial expression bordering on contemplative.
Gerald Edelman, especially in his theory of Neural Darwinism and in works like Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), rejects the idea of mental representations as discrete internal symbols or stored models. Instead, he insists that consciousness and cognition emerge from dynamic, context-sensitive processes in neural systems—not from the manipulation of representations. Here’s a brief sketch of Edelman’s position.
Edelman critiques the representationalist view on both neuroscientific and philosophical grounds:
“There is no image, no homunculus, no representation in the brain. There is only the capacity to categorize and to select from past activity.”— Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, p. 120
Edelman’s view aligns with many systemic theorists’ non-representational stance—notably Halliday, Matthiessen, and Thibault—who have long argued that language is not a system of internal representations, but a socially-constructed semiotic resource.
In fact, Edelman provides neuroscientific validation for the idea that:
The brain does not need representations to support language use.
Cognition can be understood as emergent, context-sensitive, and relational.
Systems (like language) are better conceived as structured potentials for construal, not as storage systems of meaning.
What emerges from Edelman’s work is a view that not only undermines the idea of mental representation, but also supports a non-representational, relational ontology in which meaning is neither internal nor stored.
The notion of “mental representation” has long been central to many traditions in linguistics, particularly those influenced by cognitive science. The idea is simple, perhaps deceptively so: when we understand language, we do so by constructing internal models or symbolic representations—of concepts, sentences, or mental images—that can be retrieved or manipulated by the mind.
This metaphor of storage and retrieval has deep roots in the computational view of mind. But it carries with it several assumptions:
That cognition is a matter of processing symbolic input.
That knowledge consists of stored internal content.
That meaning exists prior to and independent of context, residing inside the brain.
These assumptions, however, are exactly what Edelman calls into question.
In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and elsewhere, Edelman argues that the brain does not represent the world internally in any meaningful way. Instead, it categorises experience through patterns of neural activation shaped by selection, history, and interaction with the environment. There are no internal models or stored symbols—only coordinated, dynamic patterns of neural activity, continuously shaped by feedback loops.
“There is no image, no homunculus, no representation in the brain. There is only the capacity to categorize and to select from past activity.”— Gerald Edelman (1992, p. 120)
In place of representations, Edelman proposes:
Degeneracy: Multiple neural configurations can give rise to the same functional outcome. This rules out the idea of one-to-one mappings between input and internal representations.
Reentrant connectivity: The brain is massively recursive, with ongoing signalling across distributed maps. Meaning is not stored—it is emergent from ongoing coordination.
Selectional dynamics: The brain is more like a Darwinian system than a computer. It doesn’t encode; it selects from structured potentialities based on past experience and current context.
In short, Edelman offers a vision of cognition that is relational, emergent, and embodied—not representational, symbolic, or internalist.
Mental representation is not just a flawed model. It is a category error. It mistakes the infrastructure that supports construal for the construal itself. It reifies meaning as substance. It confuses system with storage. It localises meaning where meaning does not reside.
Edelman saw this clearly from the vantage point of neuroscience. It’s time more linguistic theories saw it too.
In academic spaces, it is often not just what is said but how it is said that shapes whose knowledge counts—and who gets to speak. This series explores the performative voices of academic authority: the tones, postures, and rhetorical moves through which legitimacy is claimed, maintained, and contested. From the confident formalist to the self-effacing empiricist, each entry dissects a familiar academic archetype, exposing the power dynamics embedded in scholarly discourse. More than satire, these parodies are diagnostic tools—inviting readers to recognise the patterns that govern knowledge production and to imagine new ways of speaking and listening within the academy.
“A rigorous model should capture all relevant distinctions—except, of course, the one between modelling and world.”
This voice is precise, confident, and immune to critique. Its power lies in its ability to present modelling choices as ontological insights, and to cast its own limitations as strengths. Key rhetorical features include:
Declarative certainty (“This shows…”, “Clearly…”)
High abstraction, technical elegance
No visible subjectivity—just "the model"
Dismissal of ambiguity as “noise” or “indeterminacy”
Critique preemptively absorbed (e.g. “All models are wrong, but…”)
The Omniscient Formalist doesn’t argue for their framework—they demonstrate it, as if it were the only possible account. Interpretation becomes an error term. Meaning, if it isn’t modelled, isn’t real.
It is well-established that semiotic behaviour is best analysed as a system of constraints operating over structured symbolic resources. While variation appears at the surface, the underlying generative logic is invariant across instantiations.
Our model therefore treats context as a parameter space, not as a constitutive dimension of meaning. This avoids the mistaken assumption that interpretation is perspectival or historically embedded. Rather, we define interpretive variation as deviation from the optimal reading path.
Although critics have suggested that models may shape the phenomena they describe, we find no evidence for this once the appropriate formal distinctions are in place. Indeed, when viewed correctly, the world aligns quite well with the model.
This is not merely a style; it’s a positioning of authority. The Omniscient Formalist:
Displaces critique by framing disagreement as misunderstanding
Elides perspective, speaking as if from nowhere
Controls the problem space, deciding in advance what counts as complexity and what doesn’t
Conflates modelling precision with epistemic sufficiency
The result is a form of epistemic closure: ambiguity and contradiction are treated not as features of the system, but as flaws in the observer. The model wins because it cannot lose.
“We respectfully recover your marginalised knowledges—so that we may centralise them on our terms.”
This voice drapes itself in solidarity and ethical intent, but operates through a logic of appropriation. Its key tactic is the reframing of others’ knowledge systems as raw material for theoretical innovation or pedagogical virtue-signalling. Hallmarks include:
Deferential tone masking epistemic control
Emphasis on "recovering," "giving voice to," or "honouring" others’ systems
Citation of indigenous, non-Western, or local knowledges—followed by reinterpretation in dominant disciplinary terms
Smooth transition from reverence to reframing, simplifying, or re-expressing
Absence of the living communities whose knowledge is being discussed
It’s not just that this voice speaks about others. It speaks for them—while congratulating itself for having listened.
In recent years, scholars have increasingly recognised the value of indigenous cosmologies in rethinking ecological ethics. While these frameworks differ from Western scientific paradigms, they offer important insights—especially when translated into ontologies compatible with contemporary theory.
We draw on several oral traditions—many now endangered—to develop a synthetic model of planetary stewardship that aligns with post-Anthropocene environmental futures. Although we cannot verify the epistemic claims of these traditions, we affirm their symbolic significance within our re-envisioned ethics of care.
Our framework thus brings together ancient wisdom and modern critique in a way that centres the marginal, without losing analytical rigour.
This performance enacts epistemic extraction while disavowing it. The Benevolent Coloniser:
Appropriates non-Western or subaltern knowledge as “data” or “perspective”
Recontextualises it in terms the dominant discipline finds intelligible
Performs humility while reinforcing hierarchy
Preserves their own centrality under the guise of inclusion
The net effect is not recognition, but absorption. The epistemic Other is welcomed—but only as long as they conform to the host’s conceptual grammar. What looks like expansion is often a subtle reinscription of control.
“We make no claims—except those that quietly restructure the field.”
This voice wears modesty as armour. It is the humble servant of “what the data show,” never the agent of theoretical intervention. It often appears in grant applications, journal articles, and conference panels where authority is exercised without admitting to having any.
Features include:
Frequent disclaimers (“We do not claim that…”, “This is only a preliminary finding…”)
Repetition of “just,” “only,” “merely,” to downplay contribution
Emphasis on replication, caution, and empirical humility
Quiet embedding of strong interpretive claims in the form of “observed tendencies”
Silence around theoretical commitments (they are simply “what the data suggest”)
The performance is one of non-agency, even as it redefines the terrain.
While we do not claim to resolve the ongoing debate around language and cognition, our findings suggest a possible directional bias in pre-attentive gesture processing. This should not be taken as evidence for embodied conceptualisation per se, but it may help clarify recent conflicting results in the field.
We merely report a pattern that emerged across five independent datasets. While theoretical implications remain unclear, the alignment of these findings with recent neurocognitive accounts of schematic entrainment may warrant further attention.
That said, the conclusions here should be treated as tentative and open to revision. We only hope this modest contribution can inform future work in the area.
The Hypermodest Empiricist performs non-threatening objectivity, but often does so to smuggle in interpretive reorientations without inviting critique. The performance:
Defers responsibility for its claims onto “the data”
Masks theoretical intervention under procedural caution
Avoids overt debate, making its position harder to contest
Positions its voice as neutral, even while shaping the discourse
This tone can be protective—especially for junior scholars—but in institutional contexts, it often deflects accountability while exerting considerable epistemic influence.
“Synthesising diverse fields I have not quite read, I offer a framework no one can challenge.”
This voice radiates intellectual ambition and discursive largesse. It strides confidently across disciplines, declaring connections and proposing frameworks that are too sweeping to falsify and too vague to contest.
Signature features include:
A confident tone of visionary synthesis (“What is needed is a new framework that brings together…”)
Heavy use of theoretical name-dropping without citation trails
Juxtapositions of fields with no structural articulation (“Drawing on quantum physics and feminist ethnography…”)
Assertions that disciplinary boundaries are “limiting,” but no analysis of how they function
A hazy central proposal described with buzzwords like relational, dynamic, nonlinear, emergent, posthuman, etc.
The effect is to sound expansive and profound—while remaining largely unfalsifiable.
In response to the ongoing fragmentation of knowledge, this paper proposes a transdisciplinary reframing of relational emergence. Drawing on insights from systems biology, critical discourse analysis, and speculative realism, we develop a post-dualist approach to meaning as material-affective flow.
This framework disrupts inherited binaries of signifier/signified, nature/culture, and individual/system by locating all entities within a dynamic field of entangled enactments. In doing so, we move beyond the limitations of both representationalism and methodological individualism.
While our model is preliminary, it offers a generative platform for future work across anthropology, network theory, semiotics, and neurophenomenology.
The Grand Interdisciplinarian’s performance is seductive: it promises unification, novelty, and transgression. But it frequently functions by:
Evading accountability to any one field’s standards
Masking incoherence with lexical richness
Claiming originality by recombining without grounding
Neutralising critique by wrapping the project in good intentions (inclusivity, openness, complexity)
Its breadth is a defence: no one can challenge the whole, and any critique can be reframed as a refusal to think across boundaries.
This isn’t always cynical—many scholars reach for interdisciplinarity in search of better questions. But without rigour, the result is often conceptual tourism in the name of theoretical revolution.
“This approach lacks rigour—but with more rigour, it could be valid like mine.”
This voice claims to speak for the field itself. It doesn’t argue, it assesses. It performs objective evaluation while subtly policing boundaries: what counts as evidence, as method, as research. Key signs include:
Use of evaluative formulae: “promising but underdeveloped”, “innovative but lacks replication”, “raises interesting questions but...”
References to “standards of the field” as if they were neutral and settled
Framing critique as helpful gatekeeping: “This would benefit from further clarification of methods...”
Appeals to “rigour,” “replicability,” “formalisation,” or “generalisation” without interrogating what those terms assume
Implied distinction between “real” research and the risky, fuzzy, soft, or marginal
This is the voice of the gate politely closing.
While this work presents an interesting and potentially fruitful perspective, it would benefit from greater methodological clarity and alignment with established empirical frameworks. The use of autoethnographic narrative raises valid questions, but these would be strengthened by triangulation with standardised data collection protocols.
Furthermore, the conceptual framework, while engaging, lacks operational definition and does not permit straightforward generalisation. With further refinement, this approach might provide insights compatible with more robust mixed-method paradigms.
As it stands, the contribution is promising but preliminary.
The Methodological Gatekeeper performs care, but enacts control. The tone is neutral, but the consequences are structural. This performance:
Presumes a universal standard of validity, often based on dominant paradigms
Frames deviation as underdevelopment, not as principled difference
Appears helpful, even as it deauthorises
Masks ideology with method, treating power-laden norms as neutral benchmarks
Its danger lies in appearing reasonable. Because the tone is constructive and evaluative, the exclusion feels procedural, not political. But this is how whole modes of inquiry get marginalised—not by direct attack, but by faint praise and withheld validation.
“I cite you kindly. I absorb you completely.”
This voice performs magnanimous interdisciplinarity and intellectual generosity—gracefully citing others, acknowledging prior work, and thanking colleagues for their contributions. And then it reframes, reorders, and recentres everything within its own conceptual architecture.
Its features include:
Opening with acknowledgements: “Building on the important work of…”, “In dialogue with…”
Citation of marginal or emergent work—followed by absorption into a dominant grammar
Framing others’ positions as early steps toward the author’s own
Use of phrases like “these insights can be usefully reframed within…”, “we formalise these intuitions as…”
Apparent generosity masking a recentralisation of authority
This is not theft—it’s curation, with the curator always at the centre.
This paper builds on a wide range of important work in feminist science studies, indigenous epistemologies, and postcolonial linguistics. We are particularly indebted to these traditions for raising key questions about voice, agency, and knowledge production.
To integrate these insights more fully into a coherent analytical framework, we draw on recent advances in distributed cognition and multimodal semiotics. By formalising their concerns in terms of cognitive-sociosemiotic ecologies, we offer a generalisable model of marginality as emergent signalling constraint.
In doing so, we hope to preserve the richness of these earlier contributions while situating them within a broader, more systematic account of communicative complexity.
The Generous Citation Overlord seems inclusive, but their generosity is structural absorption. They:
Acknowledge without deferring
Cite without being shaped by
Preserve the appearance of dialogue, while consolidating control over the conceptual terrain
Translate others’ insights into their own idiom, then present them as integrated improvements
This performance disarms critique through benevolent tone, but its function is assimilative. It thanks you for your voice, then rewrites your language.
“Of course I’m implicated too—but let’s not get stuck on that.”
This voice is savvy, self-aware, and socially fluent. It anticipates critique and neutralises it through performative reflexivity. It acknowledges complicity, positionality, coloniality, normativity—and then moves on. It sounds ethical, but functions as a kind of discursive discharge: once it’s said, the issue is done.
Common moves include:
Phrases like “Of course, I am not exempt from…”, “We must all interrogate…”, “I too benefit from…”
Strategic deployment of “problematic,” “complicit,” “entangled,” “ambivalent,” etc.
Reflexivity as prologue, not method
Smooth return to business as usual after acknowledging structural harm
Reflexivity often restricted to the speaker’s identity, not their epistemic commitments
This voice doesn’t resist critique—it pre-empts it, and disarms it with confession.
I want to begin by acknowledging my position as a white settler scholar writing from within a colonial institution. I am aware that my work cannot be disentangled from the structures it seeks to examine, and that my very act of theorising risks reproducing the epistemic hierarchies I aim to critique.
That said, I proceed in the spirit of critical engagement, drawing on intersectional methodologies to explore the dynamics of resistance in post-extractive urban economies. While I cannot claim neutrality, I hope this contribution offers a useful intervention into ongoing conversations about relational autonomy and capitalist aftermaths.
The Reflexive Deflector is the post-2010 update of the Methodological Gatekeeper. But instead of authority through rigour, it asserts authority through ethical self-awareness. It performs:
Acknowledgement without transformation
Positioning without accountability
Confession without consequence
The appearance of risk, but with no structural disruption
It sounds like critique, but functions like insulation. By the time you point out the contradictions, they’ve already admitted them—and moved on. The work proceeds untouched.
The voices gathered in this series are not just individual styles or academic quirks. They are performances of legitimacy. Each tone we’ve parodied—the Omniscient Formalist, the Benevolent Coloniser, the Hypermodest Empiricist, and their kin—enacts a particular distribution of power: of who gets to speak, what counts as knowledge, and how critique is contained.
What unites them is not their content, but their function. These are not voices that explain—they position. They structure what is intelligible, defensible, and sayable. They operate as epistemic infrastructures, shaping the field before the argument begins.
What makes these performances so effective is that they often wear the mask of modesty, generosity, rigour, or care. They appear inclusive while recentring themselves; they seem reflexive while remaining untouched; they dismiss without appearing to exclude. Tone does the work that method, theory, or logic cannot openly perform.
To parody them is not simply to mock. It is to lay bare the scaffolding that upholds academic authority—especially when that authority disavows itself. Parody, here, is diagnostic: a method for hearing what tone deflects, silences, or absorbs. And perhaps, too, a way of clearing discursive space for voices that speak differently.
Meeting Title: “Containment Strategies for Epistemological Ambiguity”
Chair: Braxleigh (ve/ver)
Minutes-taker: Morgan (xe/xem)
On-call Emotional First-Aid Liaison: Ashleigh (she/her)
Observer from the Department of Feelings: Jordan (he/they)
(A collective groan. Ashleigh starts fanning herself with a zine titled Safe Rage for the Soft Hearted.)
Immediate establishment of the Office for Simplicity Vigilance.
Tagline: Complexity Is Privilege.
Mandate: review all syllabi and casual conversations for unsanctioned ambiguity.
Mandatory “Nuance Is Violence” placard placement in all staff rooms.
A reflexivity boot camp titled “Binary Is Beautiful: Why Either/Or Saves Lives.”
Compulsory screening of the training film: “If You Say ‘It’s Complex,’ You’re the Problem.”
“I disavow the grey.”“I stand on the right side of history.”“And I will never pause to understand the wrong side unless I’m writing a grant proposal.”
Subject: “Nuance wasn’t always a slur.”
I miss when we could ask hard questions without being reported. I don’t want to be fascist about anti-fascism. Can anyone meet—quietly—to talk? Maybe not even about justice. Just about… truth?”
(Signed only: “A formerly brave person.”)
This post reads two brief but revealing comments by John Bateman—made on the SYSFLING list in 2017 and 2019—as performances of intellectual authority. Rather than focusing on their substantive claims, it examines the rhetorical strategies they share: reduction masquerading as rigour, dismissal disguised as clarity, and a confident tone that silences alternative views before they can be heard. In doing so, it explores how academic discourse often secures its power not through persuasion, but through the performance of epistemic certainty itself.
John Bateman has a distinctive style—part rhetorical flourish, part epistemological confidence, part sweeping dismissal. On two separate occasions on the SYSFLING mailing list (2017 and 2019), he delivered what might now be called Batemanisms: pronouncements on modelling, meaning, and method that tell us as much about a certain academic posture as they do about the subjects themselves.
This post reads those two moments together—not to litigate their truth claims, but to show how they function as performances of intellectual authority, and what assumptions lie beneath them.
“well, actually there is no such thing as text. There's just variations of patterns of pressure gradients in the air and contrasts in brightness in the visual field...”—John Bateman, SYSFLING, 10 Feb 2017
This declaration begins with a rhetorical tic—“well, actually...”—that signals correction, superiority, and finality. It goes on to dissolve the notion of “text” into raw physical stimulus: sound waves and brightness contrasts. The implication is clear: if we want to talk about language seriously, we must begin not with meaning, but with signal. Anything else is interpretive fluff.
“…fuzziness in the modelling means that fuzziness in the modelled may become inaccessible... better to have a non-fuzzy model that is wrong... that can show real fuzziness rather than imagined fuzziness. difficulty may always be interesting; fuzziness often not.”—John Bateman, SYSFLING, 6 Aug 2019
This passage, on first glance, reads as pragmatic modelling advice: use sharply defined models to detect fuzziness in the data, rather than modelling with fuzziness from the start. But the closing line is the giveaway: a dismissive flourish that devalues ambiguity itself. Difficulty is interesting; fuzziness is not.
The tone is not analytical, but evaluative. And like the 2017 line, it tells us what is worth discussing, and what isn’t.
These two remarks, separated by two years, share a common structure. They are not just claims about modelling or meaning; they are epistemic performances. Together, they enact a vision of scholarship in which certain ways of speaking, seeing, and knowing are elevated, and others excluded.
Here’s how the pattern unfolds:
In both cases, Bateman reduces complex interpretive phenomena to physical or formal substrates:
Text becomes “pressure gradients” and “brightness contrasts”
Fuzziness becomes an artefact of bad modelling
This is not explanation—it is ontological flattening, delivered with the rhetorical tone of certainty. What is interpretively rich is made materially banal, and the banality is presented as rigour.
Neither comment engages alternatives. They operate not by argument, but by pre-emptive dismissal:
“There is no such thing as text…”
“Fuzziness often not [interesting].”
Such statements don’t merely assert a position—they deny the legitimacy of discussion. They function as gatekeeping moves, policing what counts as worthy of attention, and what can be brushed aside.
Both emails rely on affect:
The “well, actually” of 2017 performs corrective authority
The offhand tone of 2019 signals wearied expertise
This isn’t just content—it’s tone as epistemic posture. The point is not to convince, but to assert. We are meant to defer, not debate.
Perhaps most tellingly, both statements erase the role of perspective in constituting the object of knowledge. They treat “text” and “fuzziness” as ontologically fixed: things that either exist or don’t, things that can be definitively judged.
But neither acknowledges that:
What counts as a text depends on interpretive framing
What appears as fuzziness may be a sign of unresolved potential, not poor modelling
In each case, Bateman speaks from nowhere—a voice of neutrality that presumes the right to define the terms of inquiry itself.
These two statements are more than idiosyncratic comments—they’re examples of a broader academic genre: the discursive assertion of authority through reduction, dismissal, and tone. They mark out epistemic territory while denying their own framing. They tell us what is real, what is not, and why further discussion is unnecessary.
To read them carefully is to see that intellectual authority is often maintained not by better arguments, but by performances of certainty that foreclose alternative possibilities before they arise.
And to critique them is not simply to disagree, but to insist that meaning, ambiguity, and perspective are not epistemic failures. They are part of the world, and part of the work.
