This essay builds on a previous essay that focused on Jan Kolen’s article ‘Landscapes move – and challenge borders’. What makes his article special is how he builds on Denis Cosgrove’s understanding of landscape as a way of seeing the world that is presented in ‘Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea’ and, […]
I think I was looking for something that had to do with how Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari differentiate neurosis and psychosis in their book ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. I ended up landing on this article, ‘Living the intensive order: Common sense and schizophrenia in Deleuze and Guattari’, written by Julie Van der […]
People tend to think that landscapes are these neatly delineated entities. Plus, it’s not just that people speak of this and/or that landscape, whatever it may be, like in reference to what they see in front of them. That’s fair enough. That’s how a language like English works. We segment what’s otherwise a continuum. It’s […]
In the past I’ve mentioned the observer’s paradox, as introduced by William Labov. The gist of it is that awareness of being observed affects people’s behavior, as explained by him in his book ‘Sociolinguistic Patterns’. This is typically the case when someone is physically present to observe you. It can, however, also occur when some […]
There’s this short book, like under 80 pages written by French philosopher François Jullien. It carries a provocative title, ‘There is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity’, but it is arguably more timely than it is provocative. It is such a short book that it makes little sense to go through it. You can read […]
I ended up writing this essay following a series of encounters earlier this year. It was a particularly rainy day in the spring, which prompted me to stay longer at the university. I hadn’t prepared for that. Finally it stopped raining and I could head home. After stopping to do some groceries, I was at […]
In ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Friedrich Nietzsche (58-74) lists a number of ‘Epigrams and entr’actes’. In this essay, I will focus on a couple of them, largely for the reason that unlike many scientists and scholars, I have had the privilege of teaching people. I appreciate how he gets to the point immediately. It’s just […]
I am surprised … by how I haven’t addressed chronotope in my essays, like at all. So, what is chronotope? Well, it’s one of concepts used by Mikhail Bakhtin in the context of novels. If you’ve ever studied literature, like seriously, not just a couple of beginner or intermediate level courses, you know what it […]
I have this article manuscript that I’ve been working on for a couple of years. It’s on the backburner, because it would need work to make things fit. It is basically too all over the place, not necessarily for my taste, but for other people’s tastes. In any case, the angle that I started with, […]
Ever since I read Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ and watched Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’, I’ve thought of writing an article on that addressed faciality on social media, which is what Burnham does, in his own way, during the segment on ‘A White Woman’s Instagram’. Then came the summer of […]