The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
Category: Philosophy
Language Divides Us Against Ourselves
There are senses in which the act of definition and assertion of epistemological necessity or structure upon any context, evidence or experience is already (in a limited sense) an act of violence, of difference and disassembly. Our taxonomies and lexicons are in many ways not of the world so much as they are forced upon […]
Meaning is just a game we play with words; a mere symbolic manipulation of the intrinsic curvature and self-inflected logical spaces of language, information and complexity that we inhabit and that – equally, if not more so – inhabit us. If we were for even a moment able to cast aside the base psychological narcissism […]
Strange Games of Self Knowledge
It is a strange game we all play with ourselves where we hide those truths that possess us and in their place assert shallow caricatures of ego and two-dimensional superficiality and by the bonfire of all these vanities we shelter as though the flames and chaos were not really harming us all in profound and […]
Experience and Meaning
Meaning is really just a game we play with words in language and there is no ultimate value or meaning beyond an experience of living and life that always and already transcends the limited clockwork constraints and limits or axioms and grammars of language. Language may be the limit of our worlds but it does […]
Difference, Information, Discontinuity
Those referendums, surveys, elections, measurements and points of difference by and through which we generate information-as-difference are also the reflexive anchors of aspirational certainty and ordered taxonomies of Self upon which we have anchored an entire civilisation. The binary or ontological difference, distance and inevitable dissociation we need to self-define is the source of all […]
There is always a choice. No matter what we do, there is always a choice. It is in general a wonderful thing to be able to choose and even when we do not necessarily possess (or need) any control over the spectrum and menu of choices available, it remains a fact that we would rather […]
Success: The Game Plays You
What we all generally fail to realise is that even while it is true that any one of us can never hope to achieve anything without sustained effort, the extent to which each and every one of us is subject to the blind and unknowing clockwork patterns and algorithmic necessities of mathematical probability and (an […]
Broken Symmetry
In our endless fascination with symmetry we mistake its instances for a generalised property of value and in attributing significance this way we tend to totally miss the point. More important than this or that symmetry group or identifiable pattern of encoded mathematical relationship and patterned ratio was always the mischievously-binding fact (and counter-intuitively asymmetrical […]
History: In the widening gyre…
This (image above) is how I feel watching history unfold around me. Our Global systems of governance, organisation and power are in essence defined (but hardly well-designed) to compel and incentivise the ascendancy of those ideas and individuals who do not – counter-intuitively – actually represent the best-interests of that world as a whole or […]
The Elusive Beauty of Making Friends
Beauty is a consequence, a visceral inhabitation (sic.) of the semantic, the experience and uncertainty of a numinal, a transcendental that always hovers – bootstrapped – above the ever growing rational and quantitative cartography of blind, clockwork and digital (soon – quantum) self-replication. That experience lies just outside of a logic that can not quite […]
A Clockwork Heart?
The clockwork mechanisms of a heart… and what if that is all that this neuroanatomical and hormonal confusion of emotional experience actually is… just so much blind or mechanical rule-following and biochemical algorithms upon which we are not so much the conductors as the passengers, not necessary but contingent, not the main character of a […]