I: "Language is inscriptive of reality."
He: "I would make you right if the world was a coin or trophy."
I: "Our world is just this. 'Our' is which is missing in Lawson, but not in Žižek."
He: "Lawson's closure applies to his own closure of how to make sense of the world."
I: "Yes, it's too easy to make 'sense' in this way. And a lie is by convention,
not by reality; reality is not a standard, but something for inscription."
Hilary Lawson (with Slavoj Žižek, publ. The Institute of Art and Ideas, Mar 17, 2026, YouTube, link): "Instead of thinking of the world as being already divided and differentiated into bits and things, we have to give up that idea, and stop thinking that what language and our thought is doing is somehow naming the bits as if there's a correct answer, if that's the point of philosophy; the point of science is just to get the correct answer. Instead, we should see it as a space of potential. I call it the openness of the world. And we can't describe that stuff. We can't break through, as it were, and say what the openness of the world is. But what we can do is hold it in certain ways. And we hold it through what I call closures, which are the creation of identities. And we create identities in all sort of different ways. I would just want to identify three key characteristics of closure, which are embedded in all our sorts of thought and of thought of language. And the first of which is it's unlimited. You can take any bit of the world, and you can close it in an indefinite number of ways. There's no correct way of doing it. There's an indefinite number of ways of closing the world. Linguistically, we close it into individual things. Oh, glass. It's a weapon. It's a series of silicon atoms. It's an example in a conversation. There's no limit to the way that you close any one bit of the world. There's an indefinite number of ways of closing it. There are lots of different perspectives in the world... The second is that every closure fails. It's not the same thing as the stuff out there. It's a different sort of thing. We can't go looking for the glass as if we find it in the world. It fails. Do we thing that each of the atoms has a little label on it which says 'glass'? And you can't identify what is it that makes it glass. And there's one last characteristic, which is closures need to be stable. That is we can only hold one of them at any one time. So you all know those pictures you can see two ways: as a duck or a rabbit. You can't see them at the same time as a duck and a rabbit. We make choices about which closures we want to operate with."
