Unavoidable Pressures: 2 Thinking Under Irreversibility

Once thinking proceeds without ground, another pressure appears almost immediately.

Cuts do not simply distinguish.

They persist.

What is thought cannot be unthought. What is articulated reorganises the field in which future thinking must occur. There is no return to a pristine state, no reset to before the distinction was drawn.

Thinking, once exposed, is irreversible.

The Myth of Reversibility

Much theoretical work proceeds as though thought were reversible. Concepts are proposed, tested, revised, and withdrawn as if nothing essential were at stake. Errors are treated as provisional detours on the way to eventual clarity.

This image depends on a hidden assumption: that the world remains unchanged by our acts of thinking about it.

But this assumption no longer holds.

Every articulation enters practice.

Every concept circulates.

Every framework reorganises attention, value, and possibility.

Thought leaves traces.

Cuts That Cannot Be Undone

A distinction once drawn reshapes what can be seen.

A category once named alters what can be counted.

A theory once articulated becomes part of the environment it sought to describe.

This is not a matter of influence or misuse. It is structural. Thinking participates in the ongoing production of the world it addresses.

Irreversibility is not a failure of correction. It is the condition under which correction itself takes place.

Against the Fantasy of Neutral Experimentation

The language of experimentation often masks this condition. We speak as though ideas could be trialled without consequence, as though conceptual errors could be rolled back without residue.

But even abandoned theories leave infrastructures behind:

• research agendas,

• institutional priorities,

• habitual distinctions,

• sedimented vocabularies.

There is no clean withdrawal.

Time Enters Thought

Irreversibility introduces time into thinking in a new way.

Thought is no longer a timeless activity that merely unfolds in time. It is a temporal intervention whose effects accumulate, persist, and constrain what follows.

To think is to take up a position within an unfolding history of cuts.

This is why appeals to future correction are insufficient. They assume that time will heal what thought has done.

Time does not heal.

It compounds.

The Second Unavoidable Pressure

The second pressure follows directly from the first:

Thought must proceed knowing that it cannot undo its own cuts.

There is no guarantee that future thinking will repair present damage.

There is no innocence in provisionality.

Irreversibility does not demand paralysis. It demands care of a different kind — not care as benevolence, but care as attentiveness to consequence.

What This Forbids

Thinking under irreversibility can no longer rely on:

• casual speculation,

• endless deferral,

• or the promise that everything can be revised later.

Revision remains possible.

Undoing does not.

What follows will deepen this pressure further. If cuts persist, then thinking must confront not only their permanence, but their ownership.

The next post turns to this directly: Thinking With Cuts.