Identity is not a fixed entity but represents a shifting construct and constellation of relationally-networked facts, orbiting in some sense around an inherent emptiness—an enigmatic absence that defines rather than diminishes. In this space, identity and meaning emerge as relational, shaped by the dynamic interplay between self and other. Language, too, becomes part of this […]
A thing being as equally and oppositely defined by that which it is not as much as by what it provably is (or consensually appears to be), the absence of its opposite is the simultaneous presence of its psychological, cultural and technologically-mediated self. Facilitated by conveniences of Gestalt illusion, familiar enough to student artists but […]
Self-identity is almost always if not exclusively at some level performative and theatrical. We most assert ourselves in the world as some kind of reflexive emulation of what we would like others to see us as. In this way, we come to know self as always and already being some kind of stranger and internally-worn […]
There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]
There is, perhaps, as much to be said for an acquired art and experience of “self-surveillance” as there is of the orchestrated ubiquity of surveillance in information and (communications) technology that Orwell predicted. The longer arc and trajectory of human history has been one in which the inflating internal, interior spaces of memory and perception […]
You might think it’s about being loved for how you look. But what you truly need is to be loved for who you are—beneath the image, before the performance, outside the frame. Only one of these forms of love endures. And only you can sense which one matters. This isn’t something you understand by reading […]
If other people must always and to some extent only ever be ideas to any of us, how can those ideas ever love us back without the whole thing devolving into intricate games of haunted, hollow and narcissistic self-deception? What, in essence, is the meta-ethical solution here? Is there one? I suspect there is, but […]
This, from the book above: (…)art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.” Staging Nothing: The Figure of Das Ding in Poe’s “The Raven”, Sean J. Kelly, in Psychology in Edgar Allan Poe, Logos Verlag Berlin, 2019, p. 69 Replace “void” with “subjectivity” and you have a […]
It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]
It’s a curious thing, this life. So many chance meetings and threaded destinies as a sophisticated tapestry of interdependent artefacts, entities and systems – all seeking self-expression and sustainable continuity while at same time and for the most part deeply, profoundly and reflexively afraid or wilfully unreceptive to the fact that none of us are […]
We have all and for so very long defined ourselves by a conceptual difference and distance we now accept as necessary that we fail to see that the loneliness and isolation this exclusion brings has become the one thing that unites us all. It is as though we seek to experience and know the world […]
I am as though that myth that as soon as you stop believing in me, I cease to exist. The beliefs we hold are very much like this but it is (also) we who stop existing when they vanish. For this reason, but perhaps not only for this reason, we all find ourselves committing to […]
Daedelus Kite 