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 […]
Tag: self
There is absolutely and irrevocably nothing more likely to raise the hackles and turn a good conversation bad than to willingly or unwittingly call into question another person’s core belief system. Beyond this, and far outside (or is that inside?) the problematic orbits of political ideology, cultural convention and personal interpretations of the rich smorgasbord […]
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 […]
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Selfish Blind-Spot
What to say when the central factor obscuring self-knowledge and all aspirations towards peace, unity, equitable prosperity and a long-term, sustainable global civilisation is standing right there in plain sight? The psychological blind-spot in our collective vision is our Self.
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Fire Fighting: Extinguishing Self
This world of inflated, tangled emptiness is the world we have together made and together we will watch as it actively disassembles itself. The mysterious and unknowable vacuum beyond knowledge is essentially the same logical entity as is the foundational void within it. Epistemological certainty and self-identity or self-knowledge are limited by the same essential […]
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Free Fire: Nonexistence of Self
You do not exist. Not, at least beyond that very limited aggregate of abstractions, words, images, ideas and narrative (or cultural) conventions within which you find yourself embedded and as a transient expression of. It is a little-known fact that from within any non-trivially sophisticated system of ordered symbols, logic and (inevitably, also) psychology and […]
There is a well-known meme which features a photograph of a notoriously unintelligent celebrity – take your pick, there are certainly plenty to choose from – with the accompanying text: “stop making stupid people famous.” The thing is – stupid people might actually be the perfect candidates for celebrity. These lucky (or – if we […]
Observe how the image in the mirror of all of our aspirational self-definitions is the machine, logic, the structured and ordered grammar of a game, a recurring pattern and design or, most overtly in our globally interdependent information and communications networks: an algorithmic sequence. The fantasy of truth, of certainty (beyond that which can be […]
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You are not your own…
You are not your self, your own possession and private labyrinth of interior significance and reflective surfaces. Neither are you in any sense, shape or form “owned” or prescriptively and unambiguously defined by any external realm or anchor of reflexive cultural necessity. You, and I, and the whole world are not the endpoints or causal […]
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The Temptation of Anonymity
The temptation of anonymity (in an age of relentlessly depersonalising self-expression) is to not commit a record of one’s own living trajectory into the biosphere and information networks of our era. It is of course a fallacy and rank impossibility – there is no identity camouflage or stealth technology. Self-identity was always a matter of […]
It is often simpler to love the unknown and the unknowable; a perfect enigma and unsolved mystery represents the endless seduction of a treasure that hovers playfully, eternally just out of reach and in pursuit of which we might build a whole personality, culture and civilisation. How often do we choose a distant fantasy over […]
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Non-sense
Just what would you think if it came to pass that everything that you thought was you was not and everything else was inside out? Like that light that strikes the back of your eye, doubly inverted before it renders a representation and (dis)simulation of reality inside the effervescent neuroelectrical enigma of you – that […]
Daedelus Kite 