I’ve a good friend who suffers, if that’s the right verb, occasionally at least, from a sort of paranoid set of delusions that the world is, in the last resort, controlled by a set of illuminati, a conspiracy of powerful people. I was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge in the early 1980s where …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
Corbyn 1
So Jeremy Corbyn has been elected as Labour leader. Immediately after the last general election I felt an urge to join Labour Party. I didn’t do it at the time but I sensed that some sort of moment of melting, of dissolution, had arrived and that there was something new to be built. I followed …
validating artists
Short Notes Well thank you for allowing me to take part in the workshop last week. I’m not an artist even though once in response to a question I asked an artist I was told that if I did what I was proposing that I’d have to accept I was an artist. But I never …
dishonesty
I wrote a literature review for an academic in the department on LEPs, Local Enterprise Partnerships. It is far from my field but the work was well recieved and I’ve been offered the chance to co-author an article. It’s given me a lot of pleasure to do some work which is appreciated. It’s also made …
Mecca
How much longer I wonder?
fractidying
Cleaning the house and in the kitchen I get obsessed with crumbs and dust near the cooker and sweep it up for the umpteenth time. I realise there is no end to tidying. Like investigations of social life. The political scientist in me looks at street layouts, the sociologist orders the whole house, the anthropologist …
Outsider
I always feel like an outsider except when I really am one.
Utopia
When listening to a very short extract or rather the start of a longer talk by Zizek on utopia this is what I understood: that he understands discussion of utopia to be by its very nature a discussion of something which does not take account of material conditions, the contradictions, conflicts and struggles, out of …
what i said to the true believer
In discussion with a true believer I asserted that there is no more shame associated with the Western tradition than with others. That indeed this analytical mindset was one that enables the person to understand the viewpoint of another yet maintain their sense of being within that analytical framework. Other frames, other traditions but not …
Dean and Saskia at the Allotment Shop!
Looking like they ought to look.