I wonder what it is about an image that fools the mind so swiftly, so sweetly and so completely. The suspension of disbelief in the essential illusion with which we are presented is so natural and so subtle as to be all but invisible to us. It is perhaps precisely in this invisibility that they […]
We rarely attain to moments of clarity (or maturity) sufficient to acknowledge the extent to which all of our identities are really and at base quite thoroughly and irredeemably fictional. All definitions of identity are made (and justified) by and in reference to other definitions and those themselves rest similarly upon yet more definitions in […]
It is a tesseract. Every action, thought, word, gesture, sentence, idiom, emoticon and (yes, every) blog post – it’s all part of the hyper-inflating information space(s) we inhabit. Posting introspectively back into this maelstrom is perfectly, eminently sensible and is a reflex we all acquire as certainly and surely as breathing. The thing I think […]
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
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 […]
A different perspective: we are not the actors here – the performers, the customers, the managers or the investors and participants in a system of business and profit extraction or desire and thinly-masked self-gratification. We are the transmission medium for patterns of socioeconomy, communication and identity – the shimmering, rippling, effervescent and sparkling complexity which […]
I do wonder if we perhaps miss the forest for the trees, here. The primary function and operational practice of any cognitive or cultural communications system is that of encoding self-replication as sustainable continuity. Where we are all quite intimately bound to and fascinated by these technologically-mediated interpersonal spaces, in an implicit near-narcotic and narcissistic […]
Some moments are so simple and unproblematically perfect that it is entirely understandable how Ancient peoples may have perceived a world so deeply infused and alive with mystery, magic and meaning. For all our progress and the hyper-extended cognition of complex technology, we have not really come all that far since then and while to […]
…and by that measure, love is the absence of hateful artefacts or experiences, peace is the absence of belligerent acts and associated technologies of violence. Where, though, is self? Can self be negatively defined in quite the same way and, if not, then what is it that is being happy, loving or peaceful but the […]
Meaning is an associative property. We define terms in reference to other terms and then those definitions tend by a trick of the (circularly recursive or holographic) light to assume standalone substance and significance but at the base there is nothing, no foundation or ontological anchor upon which to secure our languages, our selves and […]
All life is really just so much fiction, so much groundless or uncertain probability and where those fictions meet and reinforce like patterned swells and crests or passing cadence of ocean waves, we call them reality. We construct a whole world from meanings and definitions that are in themselves nothing and there in blind unknowing, […]
Daedelus Kite 