This concept carries real firepower, and is like the ultimate end of the seemingly endless debate between the universal and the contextual. Or in these new terms: uni-contextual and multi-contextual. This links up with trends between say progress/cosmopolitanism versus conservatism/traditionalism. Yet in this new paradigm every belief system is in the existential fight to become THE uni-contextual ethic.
The fact that it is something that has been happening, and increasing over time makes better sense than most theories. I can't help but wonder if this is what fuels anxiety in so many people today. An individual would learn throughout their life through exposure the various multi-contextual normative norms. But then today, if you spend too much time on the internet they can be extremely versed in the uni-contextual norms yet not know a thing about the multi-contextual norms. So one could better understand the normative rules of posting for mass audience, while not knowing how to act at a bar or a social setting.
This concept is so big and it's generating lots of thoughts. Great episode Derek, thanks!
Thanks for the interesting concept and conversation. It's worth noting that in the social media era, the collapse of context was driven in large part by the big tech companies.
For example, when I joined Facebook in 2008, there was a setting for each friend for showing: all updates, only important updates, no updates. You could also make lists that would enable you to see only their posts and post exclusively to them. When a person I hadn't seen since the eighth grade friended me and I saw they'd gone MAGA, I'd set them to "only important updates" (maybe I liked their mother and would want to know if she died), and not include them in the list I posted to. My feed and the comments on my posts were full of educated liberals and Facebook was a harmonious place.
Both of those features were removed, leaving us at the mercy of the algorithms. I was a sociologist then and tried to use the platform to share helpful info, especially during the pandemic, but I got worn down my by the ignorance and division that filled my feed and comments.
It's a shame that Google+ never took off, as it had context (Circles) built into it from day one. I'd share some things for my sociology colleagues, others for my fellow musicians. But people preferred to play Farmville and Words With Friends on Fb, and Google+ died a slow death.
Thank you for the thought provoking discussion on so many levels. In zooming out to an ontological framework I found myself reflecting on field theories from physics and the writings of Bernardo Kastrup on Idealism (in brief that the universe is Mind and humans are dissociated alters of this mind). The questions that come up for me is if there is an underlying impulse in the very fabric of our make-up as individual minds within this universe of ‘mind stuff’ (vibrational fields of Mind) that drives the evolution of technology that further manifests this uni-contextual experience. And if this does seem to be a ‘natural’ evolutionary impulse in humanity, how do we navigate this process in a sustainable, compassionate and ethical manner.
Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, has been describing something she calls the uni-context. For most of history, people lived in many contexts, each with its own norms. The home had rules, the church had rules, the bar had rules, and you learned how to act by looking around. Now, she says, we increasingly live as if in one universal room, with one set of norms for everyone, everywhere, at all times. She traces the consequences. Negativity dominates, because evils are universal and goods are local. Identity displaces character, because identity is legible to strangers in an instant while character takes years of shared context to see. Everything enters one evaluative field, so everything is compared, and comparison without barriers homogenizes.
She ends on the deepest observation in her theory. Humans hunger for what she calls world openness. For nearly all of history we lived in closed little worlds that presented themselves as the only world. There is a drive to escape that. I am not going to do things a certain way merely because that is how we do things here, or because this is where I was born. The technologies of the last 150 years caught on, she argues, because they served that hunger.
I have been writing about the same thing for years under a different name. What she calls the uni-context, I call the question of anarchy. Similar concepts. Different vocabulary. And the translation between them is worth doing carefully, because her framework, completed, arrives at my conclusion.
Start with what we both see. There are two layers that could be made universal. Rights. And norms. Every arrangement of human society is a decision about which layer to universalize and which to localize.
My position universalizes exactly one. Rights are universal, unalienable, attached to persons as such, identical everywhere, requiring no membership, no passport, no government's permission. Norms are local, plural, and chosen. Different communities govern themselves differently, and people compare, and people move. That is the whole framework. Universalize rights. Localize norms.
Now look at what the modern order actually did. It inverted both layers. It universalized norms, one moralism applicable to every situation, enforced by everyone against everyone. Callard describes this precisely. The uni-context, she says, is a super judgey place. And it localized rights. The nation-state makes your rights a function of where you were born, which documents you hold, which side of a line your mother stood on when you arrived. The layer that should be universal was fenced into jurisdictions. The layer that should be plural was flattened into one.
Callard's uni-context is the first inversion. My rejection of the nation-state is a rejection of the second. They are the same disease in its two symptoms.
Her own theory contains the cure, and it is the place where her framework stops one step short. The hunger for world openness has two possible satisfactions. One is merger. Demolish the walls until there is a single room. That is the uni-context, and notice what it destroys. The person who escapes a closed village for a city of a hundred subcultures has gained world openness. The person whose village, city, church, and bar have all been flattened into one feed has lost it, because there is nowhere left to go. The one room is the most closed world in history. It merely closes from the inside.
The other satisfaction is exit. Many rooms, real differences, unlocked doors. You are not trapped in the world you were born into, not because all worlds became one, but because the doors were opened and the worlds were allowed to remain different. Her school-district example already says this. Comparison homogenizes, she notes, only when communities are forbidden to maintain their own normative barriers. Openness through exit preserves exactly what openness through merger consumes. It preserves the plurality that makes leaving worth anything.
This position has an old name, and the name deserves to be used accurately. Anarchy. The word means no ruler. It has never meant no rules. My framework keeps more rules than the state system does. It keeps the universal ones absolutely, as unalienable rights rather than revocable grants. It keeps the local ones consensually, as norms chosen by communities whose members can leave. What it removes is one thing only. The ruler. The territorial monopolist that performs both inversions at once, fencing rights inside its borders while imposing its norms on everyone within them. Remove that entity and the layers snap to their correct positions. Rights universalize, because nothing remains with the power to condition them. Norms localize, because nothing remains with the power to impose them.
The ruler is where the rules stop. Every constitutional failure I have documented is that one fact in a different costume. Wars without declarations. A government that sues itself and settles. Powers expanded by implication with no amendment and no one granted standing to object. The state is not the guarantor of the rule of law. It is the exception to it. Anarchy, read correctly, is not the absence of law. It is the rule of law completed. Rules all the way up, binding every actor, with no privileged exception.
Martin Luther King held the first layer of this position exactly. Judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Skin is identity, the hat never taken off, legible to strangers in an instant. Character is conduct across contexts, knowable only through time. King demanded judgment by the slow thing, and his warrant was the universal layer, the promissory note, rights held by all persons prior to any government's recognition. Both political camps have since inverted him, one restoring identity as the primary category of judgment, the other making rights contingent on membership. He had both layers right.
And one working institution has both layers right today. Bitcoin does not know who you are. It cannot. There is no identity layer. The rules apply identically to every participant on earth, no membership required, no border consulted. It universalizes verification and property and nothing else. It imposes no norms, no values, no moralism. It is the thin universal, implemented rather than argued, running at planetary scale with no administrator, no override, and no sovereign exception to its rules. Rules without a ruler. It is the existence proof.
Callard says she is not ready to judge the uni-context, because we are its products and cannot stand outside it. She is right that no one judges from outside humanity. But no one needs to. Institutions are judged by comparing them to other institutions, real against real. Universal norms, or universal rights. Merger or exit. The uni-context, or anarchy.
She has described where we are. The remaining question is where the doors are.
My comment on why the uni-context tends to focus on the bad is this: In a "normal" context, people expect good and use the context to correct bad behavior. The uni-context is no different, people are trying correct bad behavior, just in a larger context. They are not just complaining for the sake of it.
Thanks Derek, I especially love when you have guests like this who attempt to philosophize explanations for our current state of being in the world. Very insightful. I would love to hear a conversation between you and Paul Anleitner, who has a new book on story and meaning in the lives of modern people and how that presents in our media and art environments; movies, TV, books etc. absolutely up your alley.
The uni-context feels a bit like a genie, you can't put it back in the bottle. Once you have been exposed, you are perpetually living with it's mindset. Putting my phone away at dinner feels like an escape, but it is again selecting an optimal path based on the arguments I have read on the nebulous internet.
You have expanded my mind once again. I will add uni-context to my list of words and phrases that comfort me, like critical ignoring and phantom obligation. Thank you!
Callard offers a genuinely important and insightful concept. The uni-context gives a single mechanism for a lot of things that usually get explained separately, negativity bias, identity politics, the attention economy, market logic creeping everywhere. (Habermas’ system colonization of life worlds comes to mind, though I’d argue it’s a lattice of lifeworlds all the way up and all the way down, colonizing each other.)
A few places where the idea of the uni-context might go further.
The character-versus-identity distinction is one of the sharpest parts of the piece. But I think it rests on a division that doesn’t hold up once you look at how identification actually happens in my view. Identity, in lived experience, isn’t separate from character. It’s built through the same process. Someone starts as a social typification, a rough template category applied on first contact. That typification only becomes an identity in the fuller sense once someone starts interpreting the actual stream of a person’s doing and undergoing, watching what they do when tested. Out of that comes identity as character of the other in relation to me (or a local us) specifically, generating expectations I (we) hold them to, and the whole thing only becomes real once it’s enacted in conduct toward the other and toward oneself. Character isn’t a rival category to identity. It’s content that identification is made of through relationship rather than assertion. What the piece calls identity is the category before the work of interpretation, expectation, and enactment has been done. It travels well because it’s just a linguistic category. Identification built through an actual relationship, can’t be transmitted that fast because it isn’t a label, it’s a history. So the uni-context isn’t choosing identity over character. It’s rewarding the shallow end of one continuous process and mistaking the shallow end for a separate thing.
I think the theory also flattens something in the mechanism itself. It talks about a single evaluative field as though a category or expectation moves outward from wherever it starts and lands everywhere unchanged. What I’ve been calling ‘polycentric echoing’ may be closer to what actually happens. A category or expectation forms in some specific place, carrying, as Ricoeur would put it, a surplus of meaning beyond whatever it gets used for on first contact. It travels outward to other places, through the trade caravans of everyday living, but at each place it lands, it gets reworked against whatever is already there. Some of that reworking pushes back along the same channel and reshapes the version at the place it came from. Ultimately, the process isn’t centered anywhere, and it isn’t one-directional. It’s recursive. That matters for the uni-context claim, because it means the end state isn’t really uni anything. It’s a lot of places continuously echoing variants of a formation back and forth, with local reworking happening at every stop, not a single flattened space where a category means the same thing everywhere it lands. The “hat you never take off” feeling is real, but it’s an effect of how fast and how far a category can travel now, not evidence that travel leaves it unchanged. The identity categories that seem to arrive intact are the ones where the surplus of meaning is thin enough that the local reworking is hard to notice. Character, and the fuller identifications built through relationship, carry a much thicker surplus, so the reworking at each place is more visible, which is probably part of why they read as more “local” even though the same recursive process is operating on them too. The uni-context and the polycentric-echo picture aren’t opposed exactly, but the latter may account better for persistent local difference even at maximum reach, where the former predicts convergence.
The rejection of pure techno-determinism is right, but I’d sharpen it with Innis rather than just gesture at an impulse. Harold Innis’s point was that communication technologies aren’t neutral pipes, they have a bias built into their physical properties. Some are durable but hard to move, favoring continuity within a community over time. Others are easy to move but don’t last, favoring reach across distance at the cost of depth. That reframes the “why these technologies and why now” question usefully. It’s not just that people had an impulse and technology happened to satisfy it. It’s that the technologies which won were the maximally space-biased ones, and a space-biased technology is structurally suited to producing something like a uni-context, because its whole design advantage is working the same way regardless of where you receive it (a great tool for establishing and sustaining control over others). A time-biased technology, a monument, an oral tradition tied to a specific place, can’t do that even if people wanted it to. So the impulse explanation and the technology explanation aren’t actually competing the way the piece sets them up. The impulse picked out space-biased media because only space-biased media could effectively extend aspects of a single context to many others.
Thanks for sharing this wonderful interview with Professor Callard. The ideas resonated strongly with my own project.
Great discussion, and an important concept. I appreciate the historical anchoring in radio - so much of our discourse leans on the internet as a stand-alone ill instead of an iteration on a longer arc of communication consolidation. The broader exposure of minds to an abstract monoculture certainly puts a lot into context!
Alternative hypothesis for “what is money?” It is the key performance indicator of replicability. Whether in a “market” sense or another, it is the endorsement of “what is working right now and might be able to work forever.”
Normative context wasn’t a term I was familiar with, but I love it already. It feels like “normativity,” but with a three-dimensional element.
I also love the metaphor of finding new rooms. There are many different motivations for looking for new rooms, but there is a universal human instinct to look. And ultimately, previous and even prehistoric humans had little access to the other rooms.
So they had a normative context thrust on them - the church, the fields, the war, whatever it was. But they also all had a room that they couldn’t see and they couldn’t know which was - what’s on the other side of that hill? Maybe it’s the best thing ever! Maybe it’s full of vampires or monsters who want to kill is! Maybe there’s free sugar! Maybe there are people who eat too much sugar!
But regardless, there was something unknown. There was some context out there and the only limit was the individual’s imagination.
Part of the oppressive nature of the uni-context is that there is an implication that nothing is unknown. We are all, in a room, and the only thing that’s unknown is “what’s that person thinking?” And it becomes completely disembodying because we outsource completely the question of “what do I think?” Constant comparison, constant simulation. The reward for introspection? There are no monetary rewards. (There are tons of personal rewards, of course, you just don’t meet your KPI goal of earning more money.)
Could a new Shakespeare emerge today? My personal guess is that there are probably many, but no one ever reads or sees their work. I’d also just say that Virginia Woolf said a writer needs “a room of one’s own.” Isn’t that the metaphorical expression of whatever the opposite of the uni-context would be called? Ta-Nehisi Coates describes that “anti-uni-context” in “The Message” as “that absurd place beyond the walls of “civilization’” where African Americans created their culture.
Creativity exists in these absurd spaces - outside the walls of civilization; inside the walls of our mind. That absurd space is where we dream about what’s around the corner, what’s over the next hill; how will I survive tomorrow?
And that absurd space eventually produces an idea, which will likely perish within that individual, outside the walls of civilization, lost to the world but still meaningful to that individual.
And when ideas can go out of the room, over the walls, into the world - it will either prove to be replicable and become part of the uni-context, or it won’t.
But at some point the size of the uni-context becomes so big, the rewards of improving that context become greater than the risk of trying to change. Of course that’s a subjective opinion usually determined by the people with the most capital,
But that leaves us where I believe we are today: all in that great room, desperately trying to influence others so we can have some idea of what they were thinking. Because the only way to be replicated is to get attention. And attention is demonstrated by the acquisition of money.
My vote for the beginning of the current iteration of the uni-context is the death of Thomas Young, “the last man to know everything.” Obviously at that point no one called him that, but it was the point at which “knowing everything” became impossible.
So to continue with the house metaphor, the motivation to look for new rooms started declining (though many, many new rooms were found), but that the most replicable way to solve the “material question” (ie, meeting basic human needs) was to join everyone in the big room.
The value of looking for new things was replaced by the value of controlling that room. Controlling that room means being able to replicate for as many people as possible in that room.
Today we are barely looking for new rooms and just fighting about the norms of the big room that will be the most effective. 1945-2001, that was Liberal Democracy. We still haven’t decided what will be next.
I feel like you anticipate and articulate all notions I have. Of course, I never put them through the rigorous test of writing for publication as you do, so they are more like inklings—the weak, amorphous blobs Remy’s rat-brother has in Ratatouille when he tastes the cheese. More evidence for the uni-context!
This concept carries real firepower, and is like the ultimate end of the seemingly endless debate between the universal and the contextual. Or in these new terms: uni-contextual and multi-contextual. This links up with trends between say progress/cosmopolitanism versus conservatism/traditionalism. Yet in this new paradigm every belief system is in the existential fight to become THE uni-contextual ethic.
The fact that it is something that has been happening, and increasing over time makes better sense than most theories. I can't help but wonder if this is what fuels anxiety in so many people today. An individual would learn throughout their life through exposure the various multi-contextual normative norms. But then today, if you spend too much time on the internet they can be extremely versed in the uni-contextual norms yet not know a thing about the multi-contextual norms. So one could better understand the normative rules of posting for mass audience, while not knowing how to act at a bar or a social setting.
This concept is so big and it's generating lots of thoughts. Great episode Derek, thanks!
Typo: deferential not differential.
Thanks for the interesting concept and conversation. It's worth noting that in the social media era, the collapse of context was driven in large part by the big tech companies.
For example, when I joined Facebook in 2008, there was a setting for each friend for showing: all updates, only important updates, no updates. You could also make lists that would enable you to see only their posts and post exclusively to them. When a person I hadn't seen since the eighth grade friended me and I saw they'd gone MAGA, I'd set them to "only important updates" (maybe I liked their mother and would want to know if she died), and not include them in the list I posted to. My feed and the comments on my posts were full of educated liberals and Facebook was a harmonious place.
Both of those features were removed, leaving us at the mercy of the algorithms. I was a sociologist then and tried to use the platform to share helpful info, especially during the pandemic, but I got worn down my by the ignorance and division that filled my feed and comments.
It's a shame that Google+ never took off, as it had context (Circles) built into it from day one. I'd share some things for my sociology colleagues, others for my fellow musicians. But people preferred to play Farmville and Words With Friends on Fb, and Google+ died a slow death.
Thank you for the thought provoking discussion on so many levels. In zooming out to an ontological framework I found myself reflecting on field theories from physics and the writings of Bernardo Kastrup on Idealism (in brief that the universe is Mind and humans are dissociated alters of this mind). The questions that come up for me is if there is an underlying impulse in the very fabric of our make-up as individual minds within this universe of ‘mind stuff’ (vibrational fields of Mind) that drives the evolution of technology that further manifests this uni-contextual experience. And if this does seem to be a ‘natural’ evolutionary impulse in humanity, how do we navigate this process in a sustainable, compassionate and ethical manner.
Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, has been describing something she calls the uni-context. For most of history, people lived in many contexts, each with its own norms. The home had rules, the church had rules, the bar had rules, and you learned how to act by looking around. Now, she says, we increasingly live as if in one universal room, with one set of norms for everyone, everywhere, at all times. She traces the consequences. Negativity dominates, because evils are universal and goods are local. Identity displaces character, because identity is legible to strangers in an instant while character takes years of shared context to see. Everything enters one evaluative field, so everything is compared, and comparison without barriers homogenizes.
She ends on the deepest observation in her theory. Humans hunger for what she calls world openness. For nearly all of history we lived in closed little worlds that presented themselves as the only world. There is a drive to escape that. I am not going to do things a certain way merely because that is how we do things here, or because this is where I was born. The technologies of the last 150 years caught on, she argues, because they served that hunger.
I have been writing about the same thing for years under a different name. What she calls the uni-context, I call the question of anarchy. Similar concepts. Different vocabulary. And the translation between them is worth doing carefully, because her framework, completed, arrives at my conclusion.
Start with what we both see. There are two layers that could be made universal. Rights. And norms. Every arrangement of human society is a decision about which layer to universalize and which to localize.
My position universalizes exactly one. Rights are universal, unalienable, attached to persons as such, identical everywhere, requiring no membership, no passport, no government's permission. Norms are local, plural, and chosen. Different communities govern themselves differently, and people compare, and people move. That is the whole framework. Universalize rights. Localize norms.
Now look at what the modern order actually did. It inverted both layers. It universalized norms, one moralism applicable to every situation, enforced by everyone against everyone. Callard describes this precisely. The uni-context, she says, is a super judgey place. And it localized rights. The nation-state makes your rights a function of where you were born, which documents you hold, which side of a line your mother stood on when you arrived. The layer that should be universal was fenced into jurisdictions. The layer that should be plural was flattened into one.
Callard's uni-context is the first inversion. My rejection of the nation-state is a rejection of the second. They are the same disease in its two symptoms.
Her own theory contains the cure, and it is the place where her framework stops one step short. The hunger for world openness has two possible satisfactions. One is merger. Demolish the walls until there is a single room. That is the uni-context, and notice what it destroys. The person who escapes a closed village for a city of a hundred subcultures has gained world openness. The person whose village, city, church, and bar have all been flattened into one feed has lost it, because there is nowhere left to go. The one room is the most closed world in history. It merely closes from the inside.
The other satisfaction is exit. Many rooms, real differences, unlocked doors. You are not trapped in the world you were born into, not because all worlds became one, but because the doors were opened and the worlds were allowed to remain different. Her school-district example already says this. Comparison homogenizes, she notes, only when communities are forbidden to maintain their own normative barriers. Openness through exit preserves exactly what openness through merger consumes. It preserves the plurality that makes leaving worth anything.
This position has an old name, and the name deserves to be used accurately. Anarchy. The word means no ruler. It has never meant no rules. My framework keeps more rules than the state system does. It keeps the universal ones absolutely, as unalienable rights rather than revocable grants. It keeps the local ones consensually, as norms chosen by communities whose members can leave. What it removes is one thing only. The ruler. The territorial monopolist that performs both inversions at once, fencing rights inside its borders while imposing its norms on everyone within them. Remove that entity and the layers snap to their correct positions. Rights universalize, because nothing remains with the power to condition them. Norms localize, because nothing remains with the power to impose them.
The ruler is where the rules stop. Every constitutional failure I have documented is that one fact in a different costume. Wars without declarations. A government that sues itself and settles. Powers expanded by implication with no amendment and no one granted standing to object. The state is not the guarantor of the rule of law. It is the exception to it. Anarchy, read correctly, is not the absence of law. It is the rule of law completed. Rules all the way up, binding every actor, with no privileged exception.
Martin Luther King held the first layer of this position exactly. Judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Skin is identity, the hat never taken off, legible to strangers in an instant. Character is conduct across contexts, knowable only through time. King demanded judgment by the slow thing, and his warrant was the universal layer, the promissory note, rights held by all persons prior to any government's recognition. Both political camps have since inverted him, one restoring identity as the primary category of judgment, the other making rights contingent on membership. He had both layers right.
And one working institution has both layers right today. Bitcoin does not know who you are. It cannot. There is no identity layer. The rules apply identically to every participant on earth, no membership required, no border consulted. It universalizes verification and property and nothing else. It imposes no norms, no values, no moralism. It is the thin universal, implemented rather than argued, running at planetary scale with no administrator, no override, and no sovereign exception to its rules. Rules without a ruler. It is the existence proof.
Callard says she is not ready to judge the uni-context, because we are its products and cannot stand outside it. She is right that no one judges from outside humanity. But no one needs to. Institutions are judged by comparing them to other institutions, real against real. Universal norms, or universal rights. Merger or exit. The uni-context, or anarchy.
She has described where we are. The remaining question is where the doors are.
My comment on why the uni-context tends to focus on the bad is this: In a "normal" context, people expect good and use the context to correct bad behavior. The uni-context is no different, people are trying correct bad behavior, just in a larger context. They are not just complaining for the sake of it.
Another aspect of inequality: it takes money to avoid the uni-context and create your own "little world."
"Is there something good for all New Yorkers all the time, irrespective of their age, wherever they are, and at whatever time of day it is?"
I get the point but we just had the closest thing to this happen. Knicks in 5.
Very real...but alas, ephemeral.
Thrilled this came together! I loved hearing you two discuss. It exceeded even my high expectations!
Thanks Derek, I especially love when you have guests like this who attempt to philosophize explanations for our current state of being in the world. Very insightful. I would love to hear a conversation between you and Paul Anleitner, who has a new book on story and meaning in the lives of modern people and how that presents in our media and art environments; movies, TV, books etc. absolutely up your alley.
https://a.co/d/0bx1tiEV
The uni-context feels a bit like a genie, you can't put it back in the bottle. Once you have been exposed, you are perpetually living with it's mindset. Putting my phone away at dinner feels like an escape, but it is again selecting an optimal path based on the arguments I have read on the nebulous internet.
You have expanded my mind once again. I will add uni-context to my list of words and phrases that comfort me, like critical ignoring and phantom obligation. Thank you!
Callard offers a genuinely important and insightful concept. The uni-context gives a single mechanism for a lot of things that usually get explained separately, negativity bias, identity politics, the attention economy, market logic creeping everywhere. (Habermas’ system colonization of life worlds comes to mind, though I’d argue it’s a lattice of lifeworlds all the way up and all the way down, colonizing each other.)
A few places where the idea of the uni-context might go further.
The character-versus-identity distinction is one of the sharpest parts of the piece. But I think it rests on a division that doesn’t hold up once you look at how identification actually happens in my view. Identity, in lived experience, isn’t separate from character. It’s built through the same process. Someone starts as a social typification, a rough template category applied on first contact. That typification only becomes an identity in the fuller sense once someone starts interpreting the actual stream of a person’s doing and undergoing, watching what they do when tested. Out of that comes identity as character of the other in relation to me (or a local us) specifically, generating expectations I (we) hold them to, and the whole thing only becomes real once it’s enacted in conduct toward the other and toward oneself. Character isn’t a rival category to identity. It’s content that identification is made of through relationship rather than assertion. What the piece calls identity is the category before the work of interpretation, expectation, and enactment has been done. It travels well because it’s just a linguistic category. Identification built through an actual relationship, can’t be transmitted that fast because it isn’t a label, it’s a history. So the uni-context isn’t choosing identity over character. It’s rewarding the shallow end of one continuous process and mistaking the shallow end for a separate thing.
I think the theory also flattens something in the mechanism itself. It talks about a single evaluative field as though a category or expectation moves outward from wherever it starts and lands everywhere unchanged. What I’ve been calling ‘polycentric echoing’ may be closer to what actually happens. A category or expectation forms in some specific place, carrying, as Ricoeur would put it, a surplus of meaning beyond whatever it gets used for on first contact. It travels outward to other places, through the trade caravans of everyday living, but at each place it lands, it gets reworked against whatever is already there. Some of that reworking pushes back along the same channel and reshapes the version at the place it came from. Ultimately, the process isn’t centered anywhere, and it isn’t one-directional. It’s recursive. That matters for the uni-context claim, because it means the end state isn’t really uni anything. It’s a lot of places continuously echoing variants of a formation back and forth, with local reworking happening at every stop, not a single flattened space where a category means the same thing everywhere it lands. The “hat you never take off” feeling is real, but it’s an effect of how fast and how far a category can travel now, not evidence that travel leaves it unchanged. The identity categories that seem to arrive intact are the ones where the surplus of meaning is thin enough that the local reworking is hard to notice. Character, and the fuller identifications built through relationship, carry a much thicker surplus, so the reworking at each place is more visible, which is probably part of why they read as more “local” even though the same recursive process is operating on them too. The uni-context and the polycentric-echo picture aren’t opposed exactly, but the latter may account better for persistent local difference even at maximum reach, where the former predicts convergence.
The rejection of pure techno-determinism is right, but I’d sharpen it with Innis rather than just gesture at an impulse. Harold Innis’s point was that communication technologies aren’t neutral pipes, they have a bias built into their physical properties. Some are durable but hard to move, favoring continuity within a community over time. Others are easy to move but don’t last, favoring reach across distance at the cost of depth. That reframes the “why these technologies and why now” question usefully. It’s not just that people had an impulse and technology happened to satisfy it. It’s that the technologies which won were the maximally space-biased ones, and a space-biased technology is structurally suited to producing something like a uni-context, because its whole design advantage is working the same way regardless of where you receive it (a great tool for establishing and sustaining control over others). A time-biased technology, a monument, an oral tradition tied to a specific place, can’t do that even if people wanted it to. So the impulse explanation and the technology explanation aren’t actually competing the way the piece sets them up. The impulse picked out space-biased media because only space-biased media could effectively extend aspects of a single context to many others.
Thanks for sharing this wonderful interview with Professor Callard. The ideas resonated strongly with my own project.
Great discussion, and an important concept. I appreciate the historical anchoring in radio - so much of our discourse leans on the internet as a stand-alone ill instead of an iteration on a longer arc of communication consolidation. The broader exposure of minds to an abstract monoculture certainly puts a lot into context!
This is my favorite episode of “Plain English” to date, which is saying a lot.
I’m going to over-respond in comments, so apologies in advance.
Alternative hypothesis for “what is money?” It is the key performance indicator of replicability. Whether in a “market” sense or another, it is the endorsement of “what is working right now and might be able to work forever.”
Normative context wasn’t a term I was familiar with, but I love it already. It feels like “normativity,” but with a three-dimensional element.
I also love the metaphor of finding new rooms. There are many different motivations for looking for new rooms, but there is a universal human instinct to look. And ultimately, previous and even prehistoric humans had little access to the other rooms.
So they had a normative context thrust on them - the church, the fields, the war, whatever it was. But they also all had a room that they couldn’t see and they couldn’t know which was - what’s on the other side of that hill? Maybe it’s the best thing ever! Maybe it’s full of vampires or monsters who want to kill is! Maybe there’s free sugar! Maybe there are people who eat too much sugar!
But regardless, there was something unknown. There was some context out there and the only limit was the individual’s imagination.
Part of the oppressive nature of the uni-context is that there is an implication that nothing is unknown. We are all, in a room, and the only thing that’s unknown is “what’s that person thinking?” And it becomes completely disembodying because we outsource completely the question of “what do I think?” Constant comparison, constant simulation. The reward for introspection? There are no monetary rewards. (There are tons of personal rewards, of course, you just don’t meet your KPI goal of earning more money.)
Could a new Shakespeare emerge today? My personal guess is that there are probably many, but no one ever reads or sees their work. I’d also just say that Virginia Woolf said a writer needs “a room of one’s own.” Isn’t that the metaphorical expression of whatever the opposite of the uni-context would be called? Ta-Nehisi Coates describes that “anti-uni-context” in “The Message” as “that absurd place beyond the walls of “civilization’” where African Americans created their culture.
Creativity exists in these absurd spaces - outside the walls of civilization; inside the walls of our mind. That absurd space is where we dream about what’s around the corner, what’s over the next hill; how will I survive tomorrow?
And that absurd space eventually produces an idea, which will likely perish within that individual, outside the walls of civilization, lost to the world but still meaningful to that individual.
And when ideas can go out of the room, over the walls, into the world - it will either prove to be replicable and become part of the uni-context, or it won’t.
But at some point the size of the uni-context becomes so big, the rewards of improving that context become greater than the risk of trying to change. Of course that’s a subjective opinion usually determined by the people with the most capital,
But that leaves us where I believe we are today: all in that great room, desperately trying to influence others so we can have some idea of what they were thinking. Because the only way to be replicated is to get attention. And attention is demonstrated by the acquisition of money.
My vote for the beginning of the current iteration of the uni-context is the death of Thomas Young, “the last man to know everything.” Obviously at that point no one called him that, but it was the point at which “knowing everything” became impossible.
So to continue with the house metaphor, the motivation to look for new rooms started declining (though many, many new rooms were found), but that the most replicable way to solve the “material question” (ie, meeting basic human needs) was to join everyone in the big room.
The value of looking for new things was replaced by the value of controlling that room. Controlling that room means being able to replicate for as many people as possible in that room.
Today we are barely looking for new rooms and just fighting about the norms of the big room that will be the most effective. 1945-2001, that was Liberal Democracy. We still haven’t decided what will be next.
I feel like you anticipate and articulate all notions I have. Of course, I never put them through the rigorous test of writing for publication as you do, so they are more like inklings—the weak, amorphous blobs Remy’s rat-brother has in Ratatouille when he tastes the cheese. More evidence for the uni-context!