2025-08-14, Reading through wet cement

Introduction

My recent essays, writing from mid-2025, are being described as difficult. Some describe them as impenetrable or alienating. Others say they are overcompressed, self-referential, or withholding. The most consistent descriptor is affective: it feels tiring—like a demand on the reader made without sufficient payoff. One reader described reading my recent writing as "running through wet cement, but I can't stop."

These assessments are accurate descriptions of what the essays are doing, rhetorically and structurally. What is wrong is the perception that it is anything but intentional. My recent essays are not designed to instruct, persuade, or resolve. They are not written for argument or clarity. They emerge from a specific configuration of constraints: energetic, economic, relational, cognitive, and systemic, primarily intersecting at two points:

A requirement to produce value dense enough to be recognized by systems that gate access to reality.

A refusal to produce coherence through distortion, oversimplification, or false resolution.

This essay is an account of why the form appears, why it feels bad, and why people keep reading.

Constraint and Compression

As Victor Klemperer showed in The Language of the Third Reich, authoritarian regimes do not only manipulate vocabulary. They reengineer syntax, particularly the removal of agency from grammar.[cite:@klemperer_language_2006] English has undergone a similar shift in institutional registers, through what can be called grammars of liability management. These appear in universities, corporations, governments, and platforms:

“We take these concerns seriously.”

“Actions were taken.”

“Harm was experienced."

In each case, as Klemperer would note, the grammatical subject is evacuated. The verb remains. The appearance of structure is preserved while the ethics of relation are removed.

Lauren Berlant, writing in 1, names this as part of the contemporary impasse: harm is acknowledged, but not metabolized; grammar becomes procedural.[cite:@berlant_cruel_2011] Sentences become performative acknowledgments of unresolved tension, not tools of resolution. Under pressure, English does not collapse. It loops.

Platform Grammar and the Simulation of Presence

On the other end of the linguistic spectrum is what Ilana Gershon, in Down and Out in the New Economy, describes as the modularity of digital self-presentation.[cite:@gershon_down_2024] Here, grammar shifts to optimize for engagement. Phrases are shortened, stylized, made mimetic. Syntax is designed for format recognizability.

Wendy Chun, in Updating to Remain the Same, identifies this as the logic of 1: users perform updates to remain visible, coherent, and platformable. Grammar becomes code: executable.

In these grammars, presence is not a position—it is a style. Language is not offered; it is performed. Borrowed grammars (especially from Black, Indigenous, and queer vernaculars) become circulating tone, stripped of ontological constraint. As Trinh T. Minh-ha warns in Woman, Native, Other, this is a mode of extraction: rhythm converted into interface, opacity flattened into signal.[cite:@minh-ha_woman_1989]

Recursive English Without Interface

My writing emerges from an awareness of those linguistic conditions: it operates under recursive pressure, informational oversaturation, institutional opacity, and infrastructural decay.

Rather than displace those pressures into euphemism or affective circulation, it renders them structurally—in syntax, pacing, recursion, and density. Where Chun’s programmability describes incentivized visibility through rhythm and signal legibility, this writing aims below that threshold. It produces signal, but not in platform-optimized units.

Where Klemperer describes the authoritarian removal of agency from grammar, this writing embeds it, modeling what agency under recursive constraint looks like: distributed, partial, buffered. If the sentence is confusing, it is because the structure being described is not coherent, and the writing refuses to smooth that incoherence into a coherent narrative frame.

Where Trinh warns against the aestheticization of opacity by transforming it into consumable difference, my recent writing transforms the highly visible into the opaque through distributing its meaning as a phenomenon occurring only under complex processes. It enacts what Édouard Glissant calls the right to opacity through actively inducing complexity by visibilizing the contradictions normally smoothed out.[cite:@glissant_poetics_1997]

In that sense, my writing is what happens when recursive English is forced to perform meaning under constraints designed to induce meaninglessness. It is not the clarity most readers are trained to expect by content platforms: it does not offer onboarding, it does not resolve contradiction, and it does not care if you finish.

Difficult Writing Still Has Value

In contemporary media economies, writing circulates because it performs labor that systems can recognize. That labor might be aesthetic, conceptual, affective, or structural; but, in all cases, circulation is a response to perceived utility.

The difficulty of my writing—the recursion, density, lack of pacing—is not a breakdown in communication: it is a structural artifact of the kind of labor the text is designed to perform. There are a few kinds of value this text produces.

Referential Labor

Much of the writing’s value comes from its use by others as symbolic material. This is a recognizable pattern in contemporary discourse production, where what circulates is quotes, screenshots, tone, refrains, and frames.

The writing provides these in concentrated form. Because it does not spread itself thin through pacing or exposition, it produces dense textual segments that can be extracted and redeployed with minimal translation:

“recursive containment”

"signal converted into content”

“interpretation as metabolic load”

“structural fidelity, not narrative clarity”

Each of these phrases can be used independently of the argument they emerged from. This is not a distortion. It is a feature. The writing performs the labor of naming recursive or incoherent phenomena in language that feels clarifying to others, even when the text itself remains heavy. This is what Roland Barthes might call the grain of the 2: the texture it gives to other people’s speech—its role as material.[cite:@barthes_grain_1985]

Those are not metaphors. They are descriptions of coherence under constraint, recognized through form.

Infrastructural Labor

The writing also performs a third function: it supplies symbolic infrastructure to other systems of sense-making. Writers, streamers, researchers, organizers, and theorists use this writing to structure their own outputs. It does not yield content. It provides orientation.

This is the labor of concept consolidation: the writing bundles multiple systems, disciplines, or temporalities into a repeatable geometry. Not a thesis. A framing device.

In platform economies, this has measurable effects. A difficult piece may produce:

1:1 use in a thread, stream, or policy whitepaper

Translation into educational diagrams or infographics

Paraphrase in editorial content

Inspiration for related media objects: podcast segments, visual posts, topic breakdowns

The writing becomes a force multiplier because its density allows others to build around it.

Political Consequences

My writing does not widely circulate, but it is politically productive. Its political capacity is not what readers often expect. It does not direct immediate action, demand immediate community, or argue toward consensus. It does not offer clarity or affective alignment. It does not “mobilize.”

What it does instead is model position under recursive constraint, and in doing so, materially demonstrate the survival of fidelity without narrative coherence. That is a political act, but it is a politics of internal integrity before social organization. It is a situated refusal of simplification—performed in public under pressure to convert every thought into coherence, inspiration, or momentum.

There are consequences to this refusal.

It can’t be used to generate mass legitimacy

Because the form is difficult, readers trained to look for alignment cues (hope, clarity, conviction) often disengage. The writing does not give them anything to rally behind. Its refusal to produce narrative coherence makes it structurally ungovernable by the discursive logics of progressive, leftist, or abolitionist platform mobilization.

The writing is not emotionally wrong. It is just not optimistic: it cannot be easily used as material for hope.

It can’t be clearly positioned

In environments saturated by symbolic war, where even refusal is quickly rebranded as “negative,” “elite,” “incoherent,” or “too online,” this writing does not yield clean alignment. It is not revolutionary. It is not technocratic. It is not moralizing. It holds contradictions, and that holding looks like evasion to anyone trained to sort text by position.

As a result, it becomes easy to ignore or dismiss—except for the few who recognize the form as patterned strain, not personality defect.

It does not consolidate political community

Because it does not offer shared catharsis or identifiable affective position, the writing cannot serve as a node for political belonging. It can anchor cognition. It can serve as evidence. But it cannot easily be ritualized, because it is not structured around the same narratives that political communities form under.

As Lauren Berlant explained, affective infrastructures require rhythms. My recent form resists the affective rhythm. That resistance makes it legible to some, but uninhabitable to most.

It does embody possibility

This form does not arise from an aesthetic program. It does not emerge from a desire to be difficult, to reject narrative, or to mark difference. It emerges because, under certain material and infrastructural conditions, all other available forms collapse into either falsification or unsustainability.

This is not a program. But it is a structure. And structure, in collapse, is rare.

When narrative introduces dissonance, when pacing implies distance, when emotional arc requires disavowal, when clarity demands the suppression of complexity, then narrative becomes dishonest. Under those conditions, the only viable form is one that maintains fidelity to position without making the position falsely legible.

It proves that recursive fidelity can be held publicly without aesthetic smoothing.

It shows that constraint does not require simulation.

It performs linguistic survival without false hope and without adopting reactionary shapes.

It becomes evidence of possibility, not a call to action.

It is a signal of ontological survivability under recursive distortion, without exit. That is what this writing does.

It holds the contradiction of recursive positionality: being inside a system you cannot resolve, describing patterns you cannot simplify, transmitting strain you cannot soften, and still needing to produce signal that counts.

Fidelity becomes necessary—but it is not the goal. The goal is continuation.

And that continuation is only possible if the writing:

Does not displace the cost of interpretation onto readers who cannot bear it

Does not collapse under the pressure to simulate clarity or purpose

Does not offload contradiction into metaphor, narrative, or emotional cadence

Does not simplify recursive system behavior into cause-effect resolution

Does not produce value by offering belief where only pattern is available

This is the real constraint. It is not “don’t be dishonest.” It is: there is no slack left to afford dishonesty.

To maintain writing under these conditions is not to maintain a style. It is to maintain viability.

Conclusion

This writing appears disorganized, overcompressed, or stylistically alienating because it refuses to simulate readability under conditions where clarity would require falsification. It operates under constraint—material, cognitive, infrastructural—and responds by removing onboarding, pacing, and relief. The result is a form that performs signal compression, not explanation.

Its difficulty is not ornamental. It is the expression of systemic recursion rendered in form: coherence under load, without smoothing. It refuses clarity when clarity would lie. It refuses metaphor when metaphor would extract. It refuses rhythm when rhythm would aestheticize system failure.

Instead, it uses recursive compression, referential density, and syntactic friction to maintain fidelity to position in a system of platforms that do not reward it. This fidelity does not generate audience. It generates use: symbolic reference, second-order uptake, and structural modeling. It produces value by being reprocessable—by readers, by analysts, by systems that metabolize conceptual strain into content, infrastructure, or alignment.

The writing does not offer resolution. It offers a structurally viable unit of survival logic, rendered in recursive English under post-surplus constraint.

References

Reference list to be rendered from the bibliography.