When Systems Echo Without Meaning

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

When systems fail, they don’t always stop. Often, they continue—unchanged, unfeeling, echoing protocols long after belief has eroded. This episode explores what it means to remain inside those echoes. Not as a form of resignation, but as a method of listening. Of paying attention to what persists, flickers, distorts. It traces how meaning behaves when its infrastructure collapses, and how rhythm—not resolution—might be what remains.

As Maurice Blanchot writes, disaster is not the event of breaking—but the continuation that follows. Byung-Chul Han calls it an era of transparent burnout. In this episode, systems glitch, but don’t stop. Interfaces work. Schedules run. But something is missing. And inside that absence, a new form of attention takes shape.

Drawing on the hauntological thinking of Mark Fisher, the recursive performativity of Judith Butler, and the plasticity described by Catherine Malabou, this episode is not about fixing what’s broken. It’s about learning to hear what the breakdown reveals. It’s about dwelling in fragments, returning to motifs that no longer resolve, and understanding the glitch not as failure, but as form.

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Further Reading

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Bibliography

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.