The dynamism and flexibility of language is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. This is a corollary of the abstract/logical and concrete/material extensibility that haunts technology as cyber (in)security but is by no means limited there. It is an irreducibly discontinuous symmetry of uncertainty that plagues all organisations and institutional contexts. The incessant invention of […]
There are senses in which the act of definition and assertion of epistemological necessity or structure upon any context, evidence or experience is already (in a limited sense) an act of violence, of difference and disassembly. Our taxonomies and lexicons are in many ways not of the world so much as they are forced upon […]
Curiouser and curiouser: observe how an aspiration to coordinate or construct and administratively or diplomatically assert peace becomes itself yet another game and grammar of difference, of competition, of jockeying words, behavioural idioms, contested concepts and roles; exclusive and self-sustaining as a professional career or community of experts which, while the endeavour is nominally admirable, […]
Meaning is just a game we play with words; a mere symbolic manipulation of the intrinsic curvature and self-inflected logical spaces of language, information and complexity that we inhabit and that – equally, if not more so – inhabit us. If we were for even a moment able to cast aside the base psychological narcissism […]
Those complicated labyrinths of formal vocabulary, taxonomy and tribalised genuflection to conventional thinking or institutional self-validitation that inflate knowledge (and science) with possibility are simultaneously the dragging anchor that binds us (all) to an incomplete and necessarily partial or flawed vision of the world. Art by Agnes Denes.
I am engaged in an unrelenting death-match of Greco-Roman wrestling with mobile device spell checkers. I have had some very near-misses on social media. The spell checker on my phone recently tried to insert Gestapo instead of gestalt and circumcision instead of circumlocution; needless to say – this would have dramatically re-framed the intended meaning […]
This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]
The curiousity of narrative is precisely the (very) many degrees of freedom available to the hyper-inflating interior spaces of language and an associated conceptual eloquence of psychologically-resonant teleology implicit to story-telling. The resonance derives from the ways that language and narrative reflexively shape experience, perception, culture and cognition. The degrees of freedom highlight the logical […]
Words are those windows and apertures upon the world that in naming and framing facts themselves become things, entities, artefacts in the endlessly oscillating hyper-inflation of logical and referential, representational space. It is as though the glass pane of abstraction through which we see becomes opaque with the carried meanings (and burdens) of its own […]
It is the strangest thing. Words are sounds, symbols and patterns of electrical energy inside brains. They are abstractions, generated from the shared world of our experience but not fundamentally dependent upon it. The words we use invoke the thoughts and concepts or images with which we think and understand the world we share. The […]
Words are the atoms of our minds; their meanings are like those mirrors that in discovering that their reflected superficial image was always an enigmatic uncertainty and impossible recombinatory constellation of borrowed energy, endlessly fade into some kind of dusty emptiness or purposeless entropy and vacuum. Our minds, also… and letting go is never easy.
In every sentence, every voiced utterance and subtle nuance or aspiration towards meaning and purpose, we are that through which the world comes to know itself. These patterns and vibrant tapestry of mixed, living concept and blind, unknowing information are doing little more than that which the world is bound by necessity to do. It […]
Daedelus Kite 