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Showing posts from January, 2017

Civilisation

Getting on for ten years ago my friend Barry recommended I read The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. Another left-brain right-brain tract I presumed and thought it would hold little worth beyond the usual character insights – perhaps there would be some of Jung’s personality types thrown in. How wrong I was. This book addresses, with its specific thesis, the problem addressed by any recent critical theorist of note – namely the distortion caused by systematic or mechanistic modes of thinking. Most of these theorists eventually have to break free of the mechanistic mode and end up writing something like poetry – Deleuze, Derrida, de Bord, Adorno even Foucault to an extent. That McGilchrist doesn’t do this is perhaps why his book is so lasting and resonant. It’s tough going but if you stick with it the evidence marches forward like the massed ranks of one of the civilisations he reveals to be self-destructing. The reason for this self-destruction is that systemised or left