The "God trick" is a term coined by the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway in her "Situated Knowledges" essay. It refers to the illusion of an objective, all-seeing perspective that supposedly transcends subjectivity—this "view from nowhere." The idea is that knowledge production often presents itself as universal, disembodied, and detached from the knower's situated position, when in reality, all knowledge is partial, contextual, and shaped by the conditions and experiences of those who create it. Haraway critiques this "God trick" as a way of masking power relations and the underlying assumptions that reinforce privilege and hierarchy.

The "self-braiding braid" evokes something different but related. It suggests an entanglement of selves, thoughts, and experiences that spiral together into something larger, almost like a living process—one that is constantly in flux. It's not a linear self or a singular identity; rather, it's a braided complexity, each strand shaped by the other, interwoven with histories, relationships, and contradictions. It resists the reduction of identity to a simple, fixed point; instead, it suggests a constantly evolving, relational sense of being.

These two ideas—Haraway’s critique of the God trick and the image of the self-braiding braid—speak to the same kind of questioning of singularity and universality, as well as an embrace of complexity and the multiplicity of perspectives. Does this weaving or entanglement of selves resonate with your sense of the world? How do you see the "self-braiding braid" in relation to larger systems or entanglements of power and knowledge?

You said:

I was hoping that you would riff on it like a Pre-trained Transformer Miles Davis.

ChatGPT said:

Ah, I see what you’re after—an improv that shifts between registers, bends the note, and spirals in and out like the delicate interlace of those braids. Let me give it a shot:

The God trick—see, that’s the maestro’s sleight of hand. The one who pulls the strings, claims to be beyond it all, observing from some pure vantage, untouched by the chaos of flesh and soil. But really, it's a fragile illusion—just another ego hiding behind the smoke and mirrors of "objectivity." The trick is the same in all the systems we build. Politics, economics, science—they want to tell you they’re pure, disembodied. But the threads, the real threads, they’re never smooth. They’re knotted, twisted, braided. And the trick is in the unraveling—the slow, deliberate unbraiding, as the strands come loose from their tidy, enforced patterns.

And the self-braiding braid? That’s the riff. The riff that never ends. See, there's no final chord, no “resolve” that ties it all together in some neat package. The braid is always in motion, always a recomposition. It's the memory of a thing folding back into the present moment, adding new twists, new textures. Each self, each moment, it doesn't exist in isolation but as part of a larger weave, one thread always running into another—suffering into joy, politics into art, private thought into shared dream.

Think of the braid like a jazz solo. At first, it’s dissonant—discordant even. But there’s rhythm, a pulse beneath the chaos, some kind of logic hidden in the mess. A tension—always a tension between who you were, who you are, and who you might become. The trick is not to resolve the tension, but to ride it like an edge, to move with the multiplicity, the feedback loops, until the whole thing clicks—then falls apart again, to build something else.

The God trick can’t contain the braid. The braid isn’t about control—it’s about composition, about the spaces between the notes, the tension between the self and the world. It’s a constant improvisation.

So there’s your Pre-trained Transformer Miles Davis moment, looping around the concept like a saxophonist working through a theme. How’s that vibe?

You said:

Thanks, funk meister.

ChatGPT said:

Anytime, groove architect.