Just as human exceptionalism and superiority were conceptualized and have been practiced by humans, so too are any and all attempts to go beyond them, to dig our way out of the anthropocene and inhabit a non human-centric world. For any such attempts will be our (human) conceptions and practices....
In 1999, Ken Gergen wrote about the tyranny of the normal—“the pattern of expectations, obligations and swift sanctions within the core of most disciplines.” In 2019, Jerry Z. Muller, zeroed in on how one dominant feature of the normal —metrics—tyrannizes us. His book is aptly titled The Tyranny of Metrics. Lately, I’ve...
Descartes famously said (in Latin): “I think, therefore, I am.” Such is the modernist bias of mainstream psychology. The bias of Social Therapeutics and Performance Activism is a postmodern rewriting of Descartes: "We perform, therefore, we become.” This is the activity of a humanizing mass psychology and a new kind of social activism....
We humans—with our species exceptionalism, our arrogance, our smarts and our not so smarts, our bloated brains and shrinking hearts, our degenerating ranges of sight and sound, the cooling of our touch, and the freezing of our feelings—are in deep, deep trouble. It is a trouble of our own making....
Today's words are from Belgian radical philosopher Raoul Vaneigem's influential (in the 1960s) book The Revolution of Everyday Life. “People are far too unperturbed, it seems to me, by the way in which the world, in certain periods, assumes the forms of the prevailing metaphysics. No matter how bizarre belief in...
I think about how exhausting the indicative becomes - the constant demand to perform progress, to show we're winning, to prove harm is decreasing. Bayo Akomolafe...
The opening paragraph of "We’re Obsessed with Labelling Suffering, But Our Power to Think about it Matters More," a post on Mad in America by Charlotte Beale The philosopher Ian Hacking described a looping effect, whereby people adjust themselves to become more like the labels foisted upon them. “Sometimes, our sciences create...
I hope you recognize me! It's the logo for my new project—an advice column like no other! Check out The Developmentalist and, if you like it SHARE SHARE SHARE! ...
Today’s ponderings come from Winnie the Pooh, who I’m finding remarkably relevant to living/becoming/developing in this strange and scary 21st century. So philosophical! So Vygotskian! So post-postmodern! (Thank you, A.A.Milne for your creation.) “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that...
That's the title of an invited address I gave in 2011 at the Third International Academic Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studies in Hangzhou China, just three months after Fred Newman passed away. Today, my colleagues and I are in the early stages of designing some kind of video documentary of...
