I am endlessly astounded by the way so many essentially unique and fundamentally different individuals lash themselves to hollow systems of belief, ideology and narcissistic self-gratification for nothing more than a deep and unrelenting tribal urge to copy other people, to self-validate and affirm identity through the distributed and prefabricated grammatical and behavioural prescriptions of […]
Tag: identity
The question is surely as to a definition of meaning. As Russell remarked in “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions – ergo and by way of endemic circularity there is no anchor or Archimedes Point upon which to hang notions of a “most meaningful” life. All meaning is […]
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Empty Vessels
Perhaps it is not words that are our vessels and messengers so much as it is we who are in fact the empty vessels through which words and patterned symmetries of endless entropy-as-information flows, it is not our intentions that are written upon this world so much as it is this world that writes itself […]
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On Kindness, Social Media and Self-identity
Our own natural cognitive or creative emotional flow and adaptive self-expression can be catastrophically inhibited by a hyper-awareness of what we think that other people might think of us. That is the enigma of social media platforms – in particular Instagram – for which a distributed cultural and individuated channel of self-representational identity construction can […]
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Unity is Emptiness
We do not wear these mercurial masks anywhere near so much as they wear us, we do not inhabit these digital cultures anywhere near so much as they inhabit us, and we do not lose anything by casting aside our reflexive aspirations to ordered patterns of control so much as ordered patterns of control lose […]
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Copy
We are all swept away by the normative idioms of our era. It is only really ever true that in retrospect the particular peculiarities of cultural identity and material self-expression become apparent. This (our) moment in time is not marked by any unique idiom or stylistic trait so much as the aggregate and accelerating dissolution, […]
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The Selfie Slaves
The extent to which we manifest or express individual self-determination in a virtualised, distributed public display of visual social-media identity-construction is simultaneously the measure of our imprisonment by that dragging anchor and inconstant vessel of Self. Self-definition is (a) freedom but it is simultaneously the persistent dragging anchor and burden of an external world, internalised […]
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Enigma: Cartography of Self
The more that our inner worlds become outer artefacts, the more that our personal lives (now – thoughts) becomes commercial or surveillance data points, the more that the porous boundaries of psychological and material subjectivity disassemble and dissolve. A history, a culture, a civilisation predicated upon the ascendance of individuality (and it’s logical complement of […]
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Worthless Chemistry and Orchid Dust
Fashion wears us more than we could ever be said to wear it; we only have these experiences and ideas in direct and reflexive proportion to the extent that they, in fact, have us. We do not search for meaning – it searches for us and there, finding us as so many yawning vacuums and […]
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The Gospel of Emptiness
Our images, our Self- or Other-portraits and all of our representational fantasies are always subtle dissimulations of a projected, doubly-inflected Self that we only ever feel that we need to cultivate – (in ourselves as much as in others), to construct, because it is precisely what is expected of us, what everyone else “does” (or […]
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On Writing
All writing is experimentation. Hemingway suggested that there is no good (first draft) writing, that all the quality emerges from rewriting and while I do not doubt that there is wisdom in this – I find that words flow most smoothly as though of their own accord; the essence of an idea, a concept, an […]
There is a certain childish wish-fulfilment in many ideological, economic and political descriptions (and their associated, self-inflected, experience) of reality. This is a simplicity sought in an order and a taxonomy or categorical differentiation, difference and the abstract “distance” of Other(ing) which seeks to impose structure where there rarely is any. Or at least there […]
Daedelus Kite 