The international society of nations, such as it is, is not very often seeking clever solutions to the problems that it itself is generating, across all countries and conflicts. Each instance of dissonance is a microcosm of a global property of discontinuity, a distributed planetary discord that is oblivious to nation or ideology and that we all are dealing with, wherever we are.
You can not be whole for the same reason you can not control the world – there is at base no controller, knower or self and this is the greatest unacknowledged enigma of our world.
It requires humility to acknowledge that your own ostensibly unique personality, conceptual vocabulary and social self-expression might be little more than a contingent recombinatory node of meaning in a dancing landscape of shifting patterns, linguistic fields, meanings and concepts.
It doesn’t actually matter from within a labyrinth of reflections that all that is being seen is an endless repetition of sameness and continuity: it only takes a pair of mirrors to emulate infinity.
As technologies and hybrid technology-and-human systems continuously insert themselves into our workflows and thought patterns, we become progressively and perhaps irreversibly beholden to them more than they could ever remain subject to us…
We are really not for the most part noticing the depth and extent of the ongoing procedural acquisition of all of our cognitive, interpersonal and administrative (or more broadly speaking – organisational) processes and behavioural patterns by technology…
PTSD and psychological trauma remain empirical facts to be disentangled and negotiated through tactful intervention but the hyper-medicalisation of that knowledge and administrative reach into an individual’s experience foundationally inflates the expected contours and probable expressions of those pathologies.
Control may be necessary at a personal and social level but is for all that no less a convenient fiction and a contingent, transient illusion than is self…
I find myself endlessly amazed that we have not yet grown past the Age of Empire and Ego…
If art is worth anything at all, it is most certainly in its ability to be employed as metaphor and instruction through which to understand ourselves, our minds and any cultural environment in which we may find ourselves embedded…
Daedelus Kite 