In The Prison-House of Language (Princeton University Press, 1972) Fredric Jameson opens the Preface with the following thought-provoking remark (p. v): The history of thought is the history of its models. Classical mechanics, the organism, natural selection, the atomic nucleus or electronic field, the computer: such are some of the objects or systems which, first […]
Media
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‘Searching for an Electric Peanut (part II)’: Jonathan Silverman’s liminal art
Liminality is a strange phenomenon: The Encarta dictionary online defines it as ‘belonging to the point of conscious awareness below which something cannot be experienced or felt’, which is only one of the ways the term is used, but nevertheless gives a good idea of what is involved when you call something ‘liminal’. The point […]
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Sleepwalking into a geophysical storm?
In a recent article titled ‘The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat’, by Richard Fisher, he makes the following sober (and sobering) remark about the people — our children and grandchildren — who are likely to be alive when the iconic year, 2100, dawns: All the decisions we make, for better and worse, will be […]
Posted inGender violence, General, Media, News/Politics, Tech
‘Dark technology’ and human ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’?
In the later 19th century there was a protracted debate among thinkers of various stripes about the question, what ultimately determines human actions — ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ — a debate that is still going on today. But while it was then influenced by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, on the one hand, and empiricist […]
Posted inEquality, General, Media, Tech
People are not as free as they think they are
Some (older) people may recall the 1983 Warner Brothers mockumentary, Zelig, written by, and starring Woody Allen, together with Mia Farrow as the psychiatrist who treats him for his strange disorder. Lately I have been thinking a lot about this classic portrayal of conformism on the part of a man who manifested his adaptation to […]
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How (virtual) ‘speed’ has changed our way of life
Paul Virilio is a very important, if unusual, thinker. An architect and philosopher, his work has transformed the way people think about the relationship between speed (or acceleration), visuality (or visual culture), technology, the military, and the distinctive mode of existence of people in the early 21st century. This is how Virilio expresses the links […]
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Sense8 – The full spectrum of life and love
Although I have done work on the astonishing Netflix television series, Sense8 (a play on ‘sensate’) before, it was restricted to the first season. Since then, I have viewed the Christmas Special, the second season, as well as the two-and-a-half hour conclusion-substitute for a third season (which was ‘inexplicably’ cancelled by Netflix), Love Conquers All, […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health, Media, News/Politics
The American fascist, the Canadian activist and the French poststructuralist
In the Preface to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s major work, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. xii) Michel Foucault — another formidable post-structuralist thinker — makes the following observation in his brilliant characterisation of the book, where he lists the hostile forces targeted by Deleuze and Guattari: Last but not […]
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Don’t call me “kaffir”
Don’t call me “kaffir” I’m not your prison Bitch Don’t blame me for the sociopathology I’m not the architect of this wrongful state You rant and rave like a lunatic Yet you claim to be fighting for the oppressed Your presentation and demeanour tells us for whom you work That tells us you’re not independent […]
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Minara
Recently, in Johannesburg, I caught up with Shaheen Hoosen, from the Minara Chamber of Commerce, and was pleasantly surprised to find a chamber of commerce guided by Islamic principles for the Muslim community, involved with both business development and trade development. Intrigued by the idea of such a specialised chamber of commerce, I prodded the […]
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Poetry and diversity
Usually, when the term, ‘diversity’ is mentioned anywhere in South Africa, it denotes racial and/or cultural diversity, and it carries strong overtones of obligatory political correctness. This is also true elsewhere, if ‘diversity’ is a reference to multiculturalism, one of the most powerful ideologies of the current era (as demonstrated and critiqued by Slavoj Žižek […]
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‘Beyond Humanism’ in Wroclaw, Poland
We are in the beautiful and ancient city of Wroclaw, Poland (the former Breslau, in German), at the 10th International ‘Beyond Humanism’ conference, where theorists of post- and transhumanism come together (in a different country) every year. It is the third of these inter- and multidisciplinary conferences that we have attended, and as before, the […]