The sparkle as bright, the drawing as powerful, limitations of space and time again exploded, each cartoon making its point as sharply as ever. Yet: Does the book carry the same rapid-fire penetration as the earlier collections? This time, pursuit of a theme brings predictability; turning a page does not always produce the unexpected insight… read more »
HYPERSCEPTICISM Sir, I wonder if you realise that your extension of systematic ideology to the business of everyday living [1] – the ideologies surrounding a flying brick – marries up with hyperscepticism when it is applied to existence itself? In hyperscepticism the viewer does not accept any proposition as ultimately true. Resonance: NIAT. There is… read more »
Click to enlarge. Click to enlarge. from Ideological Commentary 52, Summer 1991.
Rousseau and Montaigne used primitive man to make a point about their own society, castigating the features of which they disapproved. Noting that our ‘thinkers’ of today follow the same practice, and with no greater attention to fact or balanced judgement, Nigel Barley reports on an exhibition of Red Indian work: A wooden canoe was… read more »
Kitaro Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good has been re-issued in a new translation. [1] Reviewing this, [2] Hide Ishiguro remarks that it does not contain the two concepts, of absolute nothingness and the self-identity of the absolutely contradictory, which account for its author’s fame as a Zen philosopher. Kitaro Nishida has doubtless earned his glory;… read more »
ON THE DEFINITION OF IDEOLOGY Sir: I would like to suggest an amendment to the s.i. definition. Ideology is false consciousness. Quoting Engels: “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would… read more »
FAITH AND EVIDENCE Sir: [Nobody has yet begun a letter to IC with “Sir,” but one needs some standardised way of starting it off as a letter]. Sir: On the back page, of IC43, I wonder whether you are not being unfair to the SS Prod committee in asking them to produce evidence showing something… read more »
Over the past months the golden aura of success around the Thatcher government has turned into a grey mist of depression, and Labour has made headway in the opinion polls. At the next election it will have been up to fifteen years since the last Labour government; many voters will have no very clear recollection… read more »
Under this title, Freedom Press has issued a new collection of Donald Rooum’s cartoons. Anarchist journals set out to be provocative and FREEDOM succeeds with the best of them, but even there the arrows that plunge deep into the bull’s-eye, month after month, come from Donald Rooum and his hair-trigger feline. Everybody who has been… read more »
IC50 (entertaining as ever) speaks of “Ideology – that set of assumptions, beliefs, conclusions, doctrines, dogmas, ideas, inclinations, opinions, principles, theories and thoughts, values and a large etcetera.” This suggests that it is artificial to limit ideology to political/economic attitudes. We should also consider other aspects of culture. Most people prefer the foods they know,… read more »