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Well, well, well

Last time I managed to actually get into to the book, to examine Valentin Vološinov’s ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’, albeit only the first chapter or so. I could have gone on but it got a bit heavy with the tangents that came about from the asylum ignorance bit mentioned by Vološinov (13). So, […]

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Essays

Talk Idiot Talk: Trump Cards and Asylums of Ignorance

Maybe this time I get to where I’m trying to be at, examining ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’ by Valentin Vološinov. The last time I attempted to tackle this book I got sidetracked by a related matter, how language itself plays a role in how we come to make sense of the world. Perhaps […]

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Scepter of Marx | Specter of Napoleon

This may seem, erm, like Olympic level pedantry, but what can you do. I pointed out in the final bits of a previous essay that I’m not fond of using the word ‘ideology’ but I didn’t really delve into it as the essay was more on the issue I take with ‘culture’, as well as […]

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Idolatry, Orthodoxy and Heresy

This essay is motivated by feedback, no, not from you, the reader. I mean no one probably even reads this, so, as you might guess, it’s from article reviewers, my judges, if you know what I mean. It’s also somewhat relevant to what I came across recently, so I’ll see if I can mesh them […]

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Becoming-wave

Following the previous tangent, addressing the use of culture, as well as, to lesser extent, nature and ideology, it’s time for me to once again attempt to dip me feet into ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’ by Valentin Vološinov. It’s an interesting book published as it strikes me as ahead of its time, quite […]

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Essays

Tour de Detour

I was going to write an essay, a fairly long one, along the lines of 20 to 30 pages, single spaced, as I’ve done in the past, no biggie, but I quickly ended up on a seven, no, in the end, nine page tangent on culture. So, instead of covering what I was going to […]

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Showtime!

Show concessions or show concessions? Good question. Probably both. Anyway, that is the title of an article that appeared in the first issue of the first volume of ‘Discourse Studies’. It is by Charles Antaki and Margaret Wetherell. This is tied to my prior essays on pragmatics as this time I’m taking a closer look […]

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The voice of an arrangement

I may have pointed out that I used to be employed in a project that focused on news. My task was to go through both broadsheet and tabloid news outlets. I looked at both domestic (Finnish) and foreign news outlets. This essay is not on that. That said it is about news in online news […]

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Lacan’t or won’t?

So, I went through H.P. Grice’s text ‘Logic and Conversation’ in the previous essay, covering his take on pragmatics. I left it at that, not really getting into it deeper, so its shortcomings weren’t really covered. Sure, I did make note of what Grice concedes here and there, namely that people, in general, don’t actually […]

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Grice Grispies

I keep returning to Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s article ‘The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy’. I return to it not because I don’t understand it and have to keep reading it, again and again, as if it was beyond me, but because of the stuff I read, or, rather come across on […]