Categories
cybernetics

Cybernetics and the Fiction of Objectivity

Objectivity is a strange beast. The language and corollary cognition with which we engage complexity is itself the constitutive invocation of a necessarily partial model of the systems we seek to define, articulate and/or usefully shape. The definition of a “system” being quite clearly the manifest as epistemological reality of that artefact, entity or logical […]

Categories
Philosophy Psychology

Freudian Slip

What we as often fail to acknowledge is that not only are these kinds of sub-surface energies, entities and artefacts of cognition and consciousness percolating up at all times and requiring control, suppression and endless maintenance to allow us to be able to even function or participate in a social context – there is also […]

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culture

On Moral Machines and Embodied Biases

Context: The Appearance of Robots Affects Our Perception of the Morality of Their Decisions Curious: “People consider moral decisions made by humanoid robots to be less ethically sound than when another human or traditional-looking robot makes the same decision.” The uncanny valley rides again. This is a particular instance of a general principle. The apperception […]

Categories
Philosophy

Psychoanalysis as a “talking cure”?

Is it we who seek balance through conversation, through language and an endless aspiration towards resolutions that seem to forever fade away into uncertainty and unknowing? Or is it in some profoundly unacknowledged, unacknowledgable way a language and the autonomously self-propagating patterns of cognition and communication or culture that we inhabit that are actually seeking […]

Categories
Philosophy

An Unbalanced “I”

We all live in half-mirrored labyrinths through which we view this world as a kaleidoscopic, reflective collage of our own dreams, hopes and desires. It is a necessary function of individuality (or ego) to be structured this way – as though “from an inside looking out” – but the difference and differentiation between inner and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Instagrammatical Narcissism

Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]

Categories
Philosophy

Is Authoritarianism a form of Mental Illness?

Context: Oakland, Portland sue over use of federal agents at protests A generally irreducible property of pathological ideologies, context and partisan-agnostic – in as much as any assertion can ever now be, is that they work industriously (and just as often unconsciously) towards the recreation of the circumstances that validate their insecurity and the actions […]

Categories
Philosophy

Psychoanalysis is incomplete…

Psychoanalysis can be compelling but it is not necessarily or entirely true. Nothing interesting is ever completely true and this is what makes things more useful (and interesting) than they would otherwise be. Specifically, there will always exist unprovable truths and this itself (!) has been logically proven (Gödel, 1931). It is precisely in our […]

Categories
culture

Femme Fatale

The “femme fatale”, a dangerous, panther-like beauty in which all of man’s desires and fears are realised in one gorgeous, dark and explosive bundle of alluring seduction and imminent volcano-like fury. This is the fantasy of woman upon which an unwitting, gullible and endlessly-amorous male identity anchors itself – in language, image, technology, culture and […]

Categories
Psychology

The Paradoxical Haunting of Selfhood

What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]

Categories
art

The Dissociative Art of Leonardo Vargas

The art of Leonardo Vargas invokes the ghost of Francis Bacon’s disturbing vision but arguably finds itself arriving in an altogether different aesthetic solution to a representation of human identity and the psychological dissonance of individuation.

Categories
culture

Artefactual

Simple images are under analysis rarely ever actually simple, even where the psychic symmetries are liminal and much less hidden than is normative or conventional…