Discovery-self – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

A circle of expansion which contains those relationships unique to discovery. This is often trapped into an academic endogroup.

Expanded explanation

One of the six circles, and the relationships in it are relationships to what a person finds out. Adolescence brings a hormonal imperative pushing expansion into a wider discovery and creation self, which places this circle after the nation-self in the usual sequence, though nothing is left behind on the way. The trap named in the definition is the academic endogroup, and the mechanism is the same one that captures every circle. Where the nation-self is captured by a state and the creation-self by a career, the discovery-self is captured by a discipline, with scientific and media department heads occupying the endo-ideal position at that level. What capture does is not to stop discovery but to redirect it, since exosocial expansion inside an endogroup is diverted into a force towards transcendence, which is why credentialing, priority disputes and gatekeeping crowd out finding things out. The endoself version substitutes possession for experience here as everywhere, seeking credentials and postable experiences instead of discovering anything. Marsh also identifies the characteristic failure. Crises of endogroup loss lead to regression to the last real or imagined circle of self, and failure at the discovery-self may lead to xenophobia in an attempt to recreate the nation-self, which reads a familiar political reaction as a person falling back to a circle where they still feel they belong.

In Heather Marsh’s words

Marsh reads a specific political reaction as regression from a blocked circle to an earlier one.

“Failure at the discovery-self may lead to xenophobia”
The Creation of Me, Them and Us

Examples

The academic endogroup: A discipline captures the circle the way a career captures the creation-self, with department heads as its endo-ideals.
Credentials in place of discovery: The endoself collects qualifications and postable experiences rather than finding anything out, which is the substitution repeated at every circle.
Regression to the nation-self: Blocked expansion at this circle can send a person back to an earlier one, which is how Marsh reads xenophobia following thwarted discovery.

How others use it

Curiosity is studied in psychology as a trait and a drive, with Daniel Berlyne's work on exploratory behaviour and later research on information-seeking and epistemic curiosity, and self-determination theory treats the need to explore as intrinsic. Sociology of science examines how disciplines police their boundaries, following Thomas Gieryn on boundary work and Pierre Bourdieu on the scientific field as a competition for credibility. None of these treats the relationship to discovery as a level of the self that can be reached or blocked. Marsh's addition is developmental and diagnostic, since making discovery a circle of expansion lets her ask what happens to a person when it closes, and gives an account of the regression that follows.