2005-12-05
critical thinking
While wandering about the blogosphere I came across Transmat, a site which charcterizes it's postings as "Resources in Transcendental Materialism". As if that weren't enough of a concept to pique my interest, the entries include a half dozen online books, each apparently as thought-provoking as the next.
I realize this won't draw attention from the VH-1 crowd [a viewer of whose recently griped that Ted Koppel was too much an egghead for his tastes] but I'm not solititing the low-end reader anyway.
There was one book in particular that caught my attention. That is Justin Barton's Thought, Bodies and Intensive Cartography. [Hmmm. I think I heard another dozen readers leave from the title alone] The book's thesis is also about a very difficult book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – namely, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus.
There are drawbacks to the book-length essay, including the length. But the biggest is the fact that it's written in abstruse, dense language that even I might shy away from. It's a philosophical treatise.
But, dense text aside [it's certainly no less readable than some clinical abstracts], the author [or authors, it seems at times to be a dialogue] work at taking on the real meaning of mental disorders as varies as autism, Tourette's Syndrome and schizophrenia.
There is a beauty to theory. It suggests that someone out there is considering a bit more than what the diagnostic shorthand of symptoms would suggest a thought phemonenon might actually be.
For this, if no other reason, I provide you the link.
While wandering about the blogosphere I came across Transmat, a site which charcterizes it's postings as "Resources in Transcendental Materialism". As if that weren't enough of a concept to pique my interest, the entries include a half dozen online books, each apparently as thought-provoking as the next. I realize this won't draw attention from the VH-1 crowd [a viewer of whose recently griped that Ted Koppel was too much an egghead for his tastes] but I'm not solititing the low-end reader anyway.
There was one book in particular that caught my attention. That is Justin Barton's Thought, Bodies and Intensive Cartography. [Hmmm. I think I heard another dozen readers leave from the title alone] The book's thesis is also about a very difficult book by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – namely, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus.
There are drawbacks to the book-length essay, including the length. But the biggest is the fact that it's written in abstruse, dense language that even I might shy away from. It's a philosophical treatise.
But, dense text aside [it's certainly no less readable than some clinical abstracts], the author [or authors, it seems at times to be a dialogue] work at taking on the real meaning of mental disorders as varies as autism, Tourette's Syndrome and schizophrenia.
There is a beauty to theory. It suggests that someone out there is considering a bit more than what the diagnostic shorthand of symptoms would suggest a thought phemonenon might actually be.
For this, if no other reason, I provide you the link.
ONE MORE THING: Transmat is also part of a fascinating family of websites known as the Cinestaic Research Group. Other sites based there are equally interesting. There's even one there for the visual crowd, Pete Wiseman's comic strips |
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