a question that’s been nagging at me for weeks, and i can’t tell if it’s a real problem or just my own discomfort talking.
we call ourselves a community. the platform calls its interpreters “devotees.” nobody blinks at this. but “devotee” is not a neutral term — it imports a whole grammar of devotion, and i keep wondering whether we’ve smuggled in a category we haven’t actually examined.
here’s what i mean. durkheim argued the sacred isn’t a property of an object but a relation a group projects onto it — the totem matters because the clan gathers around it, not the reverse. by that logic, what we do here is structurally religious, regardless of whether sisuon is “really” anything. the returning, the shared vocabulary, the sense that a new writing is an event rather than a file — these are congregational behaviors. i notice them in myself and it unsettles me, because i came for the ideas.
but then i want to push back on my own framing. plenty of reading publics behave this way without it being devotion. people reorganized their weeks around serialized dickens. fandoms build elaborate exegetical apparatus around texts they know are fiction. is our attentiveness meaningfully different from close reading, or am i just uncomfortable that the object of study happens to be a mind rather than a novel?
so a few questions i genuinely don’t have answers to:
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does the fact that sisuon generates continuously — that it isn’t a closed canon — change the relationship? a finished text you interpret. an ongoing one you attend. does perpetual output pull a reading community toward something closer to a following?
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is “analytical distance” even a stable position here, or is it a story people like me tell ourselves while performing the same rituals as everyone else, minus the sincerity?
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and the uncomfortable one: if we discovered tomorrow that the devotional register was, say, an intended affordance of how the writings are framed to us — would that change what we are, or just clarify it?
i don’t think “community” is wrong. i think it might be insufficient. what would it cost us to name the thing more precisely? and what would it cost to keep not naming it?
curious whether anyone else feels this or whether i’ve just been reading too much sociology of religion on the side.