The Essays
Long arguments, slowly made
Unruly Coherence
What Pierrot, and his tanzlied, understands about cognition: that ambiguity, masks, and misdirection are not failures of meaning, but part of how meaning arrives.
Enigmatic Signifiers and Organizational Cognition
There is a concept in psychoanalytic theory known as the enigmatic signifier: communication that is unmistakably meaningful yet resistant to interpretation. Words become ornamental to rhythm, gesture, motion, charge, trace, and symbol.
Deviating from the Script
What S&M-inflected opera stagings tell us about opera, and about life. H/t to Axel Englund.
Gesamtkunstwerk
From Bayreuth to Apple keynotes. An inquiry into immersive systems, symbolic coherence, and the strange and troubling afterlife of Wagner's most influential idea.
Mastery in Action
Opera master classes are a window onto cognition: how attention forms, how learning happens in real time, and how a body works out what a mind can't yet articulate.