Jul 29
Of the vaporization and centralization of the Ego. Everything depends on that. – Charles Baudelaire Modern man is not the man who goes o to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. – Michel Foucault A 1992 paper by James Mark Shields called Foucault’s Dandy: Constructive Selfhood …
May 17
An interesting little piece called: Do thoughts have a language of their own? The language of thought hypothesis. It seems to me inner speech is clearly a private language, at least in some of its utterances. This language is so rooted in the unique self that an eavesdropper, could there be one, would not fully …
Apr 09
Popular stand-up philosopher, Slavoj Žižek has an interesting little essay on Corporate Rule of Cyberspace. My favourite part: There are two tell-tale words here: abstraction and control. In order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, a system which is by definition hidden from the end-user. The paradox is thus …
Dec 22
I’ve put some hours in and made an illustrated, tumblr version of Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. You can find the first post here. When you finish reading it, simply hit NEWER and it’ll bring you to the next paragraph. Some of you are probably familiar with the book. Others of …
Jan 20
“The redemption of objects is impossible except by virtue of becoming an object. As the work of art must destroy and alienate itself to become an absolute commodity, so the dandy-artist must become a living corpse, constantly tending toward another, a creature essentially nonhuman and antihuman.” –Giorgio Agamben
Jul 29
“Last, but not least, the man who probably better than anyone else understands the psychology of the Attentäter is M. Hamon, the author of the brilliant work Une Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel, who has arrived at these suggestive conclusions: “The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of …
May 22
“Media stars are spectacular representations of human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles. Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life – the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversification of productive activity. Celebrities figure …
Apr 21
Honour is obsolete. The culprit, as usual, is the modern era and its devices. A better word than obsolete might be endangered. Due to habitat loss. It has always been a difficult value to uphold. It’s one of duty as opposed to pleasure. The honourable choice is very rarely the easy one. When we think …
Apr 16
There are few things in life as rare and beautiful as a no hitter. In the whole history of Blue Jays baseball, only one has been thrown by a Blue Jay. It’s not something you see everyday. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen one. It’s a magical moment. The only fellow who ever …
"This ultra-sharp, darkly satiric, hyper-speed novel is set in a world where multi-level mega malls serves as city states and everything on the outside lies in ruin. On the lower red levels, gang violence and media saturation and bio-tech designer drugs rule. During the weekend, slummers from the green levels leave their safe lives of jobs and families to partake in risky, sometimes deadly, fun on the red levels. And on every level, TV and advertisements literally penetrate the mind. Death is easy and life cheap, until that life is your own or your beloveds. Extreme stylization, great characters, and a high-level of intensity is maintained throughout. This is a whip-smart, truly violent novel that has at its core a still very human pulsing heart."
