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 […]
Tag: Psychology
Zen is to utterly deconstruct, disassemble and reconceptualise Self and Mind. It is difficult medicine but the mischievous enigma at the core of all of our problems is our Self. Decentralised psychological subjectivity and cultural presence is one in which adversarial competition is dissolved as there is no foundational differentiation between persons, property or places. […]
What is the aggregate consequence of so (very) many people spending most of their lives in concrete and glass labyrinths, bound. Where (almost) all stimulus and perception is normalised, by regularity, uniformity, aspiration to control through linear precedent, by axiomatic illumination of certainty (such as it is) and knowledge, there is little room for the […]
An unremitting curiosity of human psychology and culture is that, from about the time – perhaps of the Industrial Revolution (?) – when we acquired a degree of distributed and self-conscious awareness of the extent and consequence of our own procedural and developmental technological progress, each significant iteration has been regarded as the end of […]
When the recombinatory convergence of once-distant or disparate symbols no longer shocks us, it is probably not merely because the world (and it’s inhabitants) have moved on and desensitised to the essential information entropy of difference. It is because these once dissonant symbols share some deeper (and logical) bond. The cultural and psychological self-representation of […]
…as a general observation: All of this (shared) online aspiration to reflexively self-validating identity-construction and participatory meaning-generation masks a howling vacuum of dissimulated subjectivity. We seek self-expression but no such endpoint exists, no epistemogical closure or certainty and (certainly) nothing even vaguely approximating to that monster-image of projected, illusory control that stares back at us […]
All of this online communication really feels a bit like trying to talk (or shout) underwater; no one can hear us and no one is really listening or paying attention anyway. The greatest misdirection and deception of this is that while we are (all) here pouring our hearts and minds out into this digital information […]
A Cultural Vacuum of Self
The strangest thing about personal identity and subjective psychological experience is that, at core, it consists solely of internalised references to an external world of images, ideas, idioms, languages and conventions. This “external” world is only ever the substantive collection and dynamic aggregate of all of those other individual nodes, similarly empty, and swimming in […]
Notice how the primary cultural differentiation of generational identity is always a commercially-mediated product, idiom or artefact. Can anyone ever truly own their expression of identity, of cultural self when it is always already so much someone else’s possession? Does commercial self-interest (even unwittingly) cultivate a possibility for the emergence of self-identity and t h […]
The image in the mirror of psychological self-reflexivity is the machine, the rational, the explicable and the logic which has through so many, many iterations become what we now recognise as information and communications technology. An aspirational aptitude towards anticipatory self-explanation is always, perhaps, only ever going to appear or manifest as the percolated surface […]
It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat – to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition – carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material, […]
Utopian aspirations are inevitably three parts marketing and one part plausibility. While communication (as much as communications platforms or technologies) is necessarily a matter of endlessly effervescent linguistic or logical self-inflection, the implicit openness of our contemporary context and the cognitive hyper-extension of technological complexity represents cost and burden as much as it does utility. […]