The recent devastating fire that nearly destroyed the more than 800 year-old Parisian Gothic cathedral, Notre Dame, has put something important in perspective. One could not but notice that the shock caused by this event was not restricted to Paris, or even France, which one might have expected. Understandably, Parisians have always loved this architectural […]
alienation
Posted inEnvironment, General, Health, Tech
The technology that is threatening life as we know it
We are currently witnessing a pervasive and accelerating recording, modelling and processing of data pertaining to human beings as well as other living species (and even inorganic things) on a scale that surpasses what most of us can imagine. This has been made possible by bio-technologies which seem as if they are the incipient actualisation […]
Posted inGeneral, Media
“Names Unvoiced but not Unknown”: Cleone Cull’s surrealist art
Judging by the recently opened exhibition of multimedia drawings by Eastern Cape artist Cleone Cull – who spent years teaching fine art, first at the Port Elizabeth Technikon and later at the School of Music, Art and Design of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University – art is thriving in this corner of South Africa. Cleone […]
Posted inGeneral
Validating Ian Parker’s work
The following is an excerpt (posted here with editor Grahame Hayes’ permission) from a longer review I wrote for Psychology in Society 41 of Ian Parker’s book Lacanian Psychoanalysis – Revolutions in Subjectivity (Routledge 2011). I post it on TL to give interested people an idea of Parker’s scholarship and just how scandalous Manchester Metropolitan […]
Posted inGeneral
Lennon and Laing – kindred spirits
John Lennon and RD Laing – two individuals who worked in entirely different cultural fields; the one a singer, songwriter and pop star, the other a psychiatrist (perhaps experimental psychiatrist), writer and radical thinker of the left. What they had in common, was arguably the fact that they were both utopian visionaries, and both were […]
Posted inGeneral
The bitter-sweet barrier
He is staring as if from a void, which is what catches my attention as I stand at the blackboard. His eyes are pristine, tear-less, lit from without, not within. The Chinese gentleman leans on his broom like a Gandalf, watching me attentively through the classroom window. The Chinese children here in a poor “village”, […]