Entering the third year of Samsara Diagnostics

You've probably been inundated with "looking back" and "looking ahead" type emails this year, so thanks for opening mine. Here is a TL;DR if you'd prefer –

I'll be posting one quality longer post here each month, but will be writing more political analysis and social theory at Samsara Media as I develop a live online course to be launched in the middle/latter half of this year, born from my "Critical Bureaucratic Studies" research project (the seeds of which you can read here) focusing on how institutions, bureaucracy, and managers exercise power in our contemporary society. Stay tuned, and I hope you'll join me!

Samsara Diagnostics turns 2 years old on January 25th, but my relationship to this project feels dramatically different than when it first began. I think that it's finally settling in that an independent practice of research will require more personal work and wandering in the wilderness than I had previously imagined. However, I've also begun to see this as something needful and good. I'm re-learning how to play, which takes lots of time and patience with myself.

When I look back at my start of the year post for 2024, I laugh at how differently the year turned out than I expected. Many of the things I wanted to do simply didn't happen, such as launching an online course, publishing a physical collection of last year's writings, getting a spicy piece into a prominent journal or online magazine (although my writing was published in Agony Mag in August), or releasing a video series about Endo's novel Silence. I've also mostly failed to do any promotion for my book which I published in February.

One of my experiments which did move forward was Samsara Study Groups, a collective I launched at the beginning of the year as a way to read more by finding ways to read with others. While the chat group has remained mostly quiet despite my prodding, a major highlight for me was the Kyoto School reading group which unfolded this year year. We had a small, dedicated core who read Kitaro Nishida's An Inquiry into the Good, "The Intelligible World", "The Unity of Opposites," "Basho (Place)," and "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview."

Kitaro Nishida is a profound thinker, and deserves a place alongside the great philosophers of the Western tradition. The conversations fostered by this group guided much of my informal reading this year, and continued to push me deeper into esoteric and mystical sources (we ended up also reading Jakob Böhme). To get a taste of the reading group, I recommend checking out this podcast episode with one of the group's participants, Jonatan, where we wrestled with different ideas of unity and reconciliation between Neo-Platonism and Hegel.

Although that reading group has already concluded, this year will provide some new opportunities for us to think and learn together. Here are the key components of Samsara Diagnostics on the horizon for 2025:

What's next for 2025?

(1) Online Courses

After writing publicly for two years, I'm finally starting to discern where my interests naturally go when I let them wander – my religious, philosophical, and psychoanalytic investigations are beginning to meet up with my interests in political and social theory. Playing around and doing my own thing is finally yielding some clarity about my passions, and I'm leaning into that by doing more reading and teaching this year.

My interests have begun to coalesce around a "Critical Bureaucratic Studies" project (I know, I'm working on a better name, I promise) which will analyze and interrogate the contemporary operations of power as it works through bureaucratic institutions and their processes (you can find some initial sketches of the project here). This research will be leading me deeper into Foucault's biopolitics, the work of Ivan Illich, cybernetics (McLuhan, Wiener, Beer), anarchist political analysis (Scott, Graeber), managerialism (Burnham, Taylor, Rizzi), and much more as I prepare for the course.

The course will aim to consider bureaucracy as a technology (and think about the cyborg societies it produces), to clarify the subjective experience and class positions generated by these institutions (both in the manager and the managed), and to unmask the role this ideological experience plays in the objective structure and function of the institution. Ultimately, this will lead us to some big questions about the energies, spirits, and values which animate our emerging global civilization, and how to think more deeply about the future of love and freedom.

I'll be piloting a mini version of this project in a seminar "The Violence of Care: a critical study of bureaucratic power" hosted at Incite Seminars. The course will run from Feb 27, 2025 - Mar 27 (with a one week break in the middle). The sign up link and cost details have not been released yet, but I'll update you as soon as those go live. I hope that you'll consider signing up, or sharing with a friend you think would be interested.

This brief seminar at Incite Seminars will serve as a taste of the larger course which I'm aiming to launch sometime in July or August. You can expect to hear more from me once the course registration has opened, but in the meantime, you can enjoy some dispatches from my research desk over at my Substack where I'll be posting more of my political analysis and social theory (see the next point).

Also, at some point this year I am hoping to launch a seminar teaching through the book I published in February 2024, Ideology and Christian Freedom: A theo-political reading of Shusaku Endo's Silence. This will be a unique experience engaging not only Shusaku Endo's masterful novel, but also a deep dive into Japanese history, nationalist politics, Japanese Buddhism, continental philosophy, and strains of Christian liberation theology. It will be rich, and I hope that you will join us!

(2) Writing more at Samsara Media

This past year I experimented with writing less frequently at Samsara Diagnostics, and found myself almost by accident posting about politics and society much more over on Substack at Samsara Media.

A few reasons for this come to mind – I definitely think that it being an election year (and spending a bit too much time consuming content on X) had me thinking more about political and pragmatic questions about public goods. However, I found myself writing about these ideas more over at Substack because my gradual migration away from posting on X (I wasn't seeing much success there) and towards Substack Notes, where I seemed to be having better interactions, as well as a less visually addictive experience. Lastly, I also started to engage more with the TheoryUnderground community in the latter half of the year, where socioanalysis plays a much bigger role in theorizing.

In 2025, you can expect frequent posts at Samsara Media (I started off the year strong analyzing what's at stake philosophically in X's recent H1-B debate) as I make interventions in current political discourse, but also share ideas and resources I'm learning as I continue my Critical Bureaucratic Studies research. If you're on Substack, I'd appreciate it if you would like and share my posts on Notes. It helps my reach, and definitely sparks interesting interactions!

Here are a few pieces from Samsara Media which saw strong engagement in 2024:

"Finding your economic base- I mean, "audience" – In this piece I tried to articulate an unease I've long head about trying to build Samsara Diagnostics – if I want to have an intellectual practice which pays and supports my family, don't my ideas have to link up with the economic interests of some particular group?

"Fragments towards a sociology from below" – I finally shared about these thinkers I was seeing who had an affinity with one another – Foucault, Illich, Burnham, Lasch – who were both Left and Right, but who articulated a critique of the way bureaucracy and managers exercised power today.

"Outcomes without Agents" – Of course when I decided to schedule a repost of a piece I wrote in 2021 it gets shared, blows up, and gets a ton of engagement. It was fascinating to watch people misunderstand me or assume things about me.

"Sorry, but it's not a meaning crisis" – This is one I'd had rattling around in my head for a while, and one day the Muses decided it was time to dust off a very rough draft and bring it to completion. It feels good to say your piece.

(3) Monthly writing at Samsara Diagnostics

Samsara Diagnostics remains the spiritual core of my work, wrestling with the religious, ethical, and philosophical concerns which animate my Critical Bureaucratic Studies project. However, in order to invest in this research project and the corresponding course, I need to trim my attention here. That means that I'm going to focus on writing one quality, perhaps a bit longer, piece for Samsara Diagnostics every month. It will likely show up in your inbox towards the end of the third week of the month, sometimes the fourth week if life gets in the way.

My commitment last year to post only once a month at Samsara Diagnostics failed because I realized that I had too much to say to remain confined to a single post per month. I ended up posting more than I had previously thought that I would. As I pointed out in the previous section though, Samsara Media turned into an outlet where I began to post a lot more of my timely interventions and social analysis. This year I plan to continue to use Samsara Media as a release valve for those muses that come over me, and instead treat Samsara Diagnostics as a place for fewer quality pieces that are not relating themselves to "the discourse" explicitly.

Let's see how that works out for me (perhaps I'll be eating crow this same time next year!).

(4) Miscellaneous

My contribution to PhilosophyPortal's Logic for the Global Brain anthology was released in August this year (it's called "Hegel and the Lateralized Brain"), and I'm excited to be contributing another piece to PhilosophyPortal's upcoming anthology from the course on Lacan's Écrits. This chapter will stem from work I posted here earlier in 2024, and which provided much of the reflection which fed into this podcast conversation with my friend Joel Carini.

[Note: I will be participating in a year long seminar on Deleuze and Lacan, hosted by PhilosophyPortal and taught by Terence Blake. If you're interested in the strange overlaps and tensions between these two figures, you'd be hard pressed to find a better guide than Terence Blake. At $150, it's an absolute steal, and I recommend that you take a look at it. But hurry – it starts next week!]

Also, I'm going to continue my involvement with the Theory Underground community. Theory Underground recently reorganized and revamped their offerings for 2025, which include a seminar by Benjamin Studebaker on key political thinkers and a seminar on the philosophy of nature with Nina Power. They've also started rolling out supervision where the TU team will read and interact with your work, and provide pubic opportunities to present and defend. It's an exciting time to jump in, so I'd encourage you to check it out.

In closing... my favorites pieces from 2024

These pieces I wrote at Samsara Diagnostics hold a special place in my heart:

Radioactive Love – I wrote this piece for a mini-seminar after reading Ivan Illich's essays "Gospel" and "Mysterium," and I think that it contains the spiritual kernel of the "Critical Bureaucratic Studies" research project for this year.

Against Personal Salvation – This piece feels like a strong example of the kind of tight writing and actionable point that I'm capable of, and it also exhibits my own unique blend of Christian, Buddhist, and philosophical reflection.

Do you believe in evil? – This piece still resonates with me as containing a crucial decision point about how we relate to God and the world. It also sparked for me an ongoing book project about the question of reconciliation where I'm hoping to do some theology using Hegel and Dostoevsky.

Becoming your own teacher – This piece distilled some key realizations I've been having about the learning process. It marks another important milestone in the ongoing process of trying to de-school my brain.

Warming the Species' Last Egg – This one stands out in my mind because it's the only piece I've ever written while crying. It still feels raw for me.

Have a Happy New Year! As always, thanks for reading Samsara Diagnostics. If you'd like to connect or simply say 'hi' this year, don't hesitate to reach out. Also, let me know if there was a piece you really liked, but I didn't mention. You can use the Contact page or email me at matt[at]samsara.media