I’ve written a post for Provokotive Magazine touching on Michel Foucault and the shift in power that the use of mobile phones and other highly portable video recorders has made in the protests this year. The all-seeing ‘panopticon’ has been inverted and state surveillance has almost been overtaken by the people providing their own view of […]
I made the mistake of confusing Tim Ferriss with Timothy Ferriss, so I was surprised to be disappointed with an article on Wired, “Timothy Ferriss: The World of the Intellectual vs. The World of the Engineer”. I often read Tim’s blog, I’m fascinated by his approach to self-experimentation. So the over-simplification and scientism of the article surprised […]
Read the previous ‘Metanarratives’ posts: 1, 2. In my first post on metanarratives, I said that one of the defining features of postmodernity was the suspicion of metanarratives. What I never wrote about was why the postmodern is outright hostile to the giant stories. In a historical sense, it could be that postmodern philosophy was born from the […]
Read the previous ‘Metanarratives’ posts: 1, 2, 3 Previously I said that though postmoderns reject metanarratives (in favour of smaller, local narratives) on account of their violent totalizing, my view of scripture is that it does not have to be read as presenting that kind of metanarrative. Here’s why. We can discern two metanarratives woven […]
In my last post, I mentioned the story of Redemptive Violence as one of the dominant metanarratives that the media feed to us. I am sure you will recognise it when I describe it – it is the basis for every action movie ever! Whether the story takes place in history, in space, or in some […]
Some of my friends joke that I can get the word ‘metanarrative’ into any conversation. Probably true. Warning: this series of posts may have an overdose of the word ‘metanarrative’! This first post in my metanarrative series will try to define what I’m talking about for those who don’t try to slot it in to […]