In fashion shop interiors, I often see objects that suggest a certain environment, assemblages that seem to be taken from a different setting altogether. For example, very old sewing machines to suggest craftsmanship (even as the clothes are made in China with the latest equipment). Or piles of old books, sometimes surprisingly carefully selected (who picks […]
Recently, I’ve become more and more aware of the limitations of conscious thought and formal models of entities and systems. We don’t understand how political systems make decisions, how world events occur, or even how we choose what to wear on any particular day. Cause and effect doesn’t exist in the form it is commonly […]
Countries like Japan thrive on barriers to information flow. It is hard to overstate how deep and wide the rift caused by linguistic differences between Japanese and Indo-European languages is. The number of people who speak both very good English/German/French etc and very good Japanese is small and unlikely to grow dramatically. Yet there is […]
I’ve recently seen the film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, based on John le Carré’s novel with the same name. In the 1970’s a TV series based on the same novel, with Alec Guinness as George Smiley, was very popular in Britain. This film, with Gary Oldman as the protagonist, is supposed to be something like […]
In 2012, so far, I’ve finished two very evocative books. One is Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. The other is Manuel De Landa’s 1000 Years of Nonlinear History. Deleuze’s Nietzsche is the author’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought. This is perhaps one of the most coherent interpretations of Nietzsche I’ve read. It succeeds in turning Nietzsche’s notoriously […]