THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the […]

THE POSSIBLE

‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible.’ David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, 1947 Whenever I get into a deep conversation with someone, where we’re exploring what is and what isn’t in this world, as we go deeper into the subject, sooner or later we hit bedrock — the point where rational argument takes you […]

McLUHAN IN MANHATTAN

“The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” — Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). ∆ Baudrillard’s work is coolly psychedelic, giving us the same sense of dizzying replication that we love in doppelgänger stories and much science fiction. He was […]

EINSTEIN and EMPTINESS

“It seems to me that the arguments which have led up to the theory (Relativity), and the whole state of mind of most physicists with regard to it, may some day become one of the puzzles of history.” Professor P W Bridgeman (1936) ∆ Tesla was effectively sidelined by 1905, and at that moment a […]

BAUDRILLARD in BANGKOK

Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1929 Let’s try an analysis. I’ll take a subject close to home. Just up the street, in fact. Regard this beautiful woman. She is standing by the entrance to an entertainment plaza in a certain South-East Asian capital of some ten million souls. Or ten million […]