Well before my dad died, he nearly died. Having been diagnosed with inoperable and in all other ways untreatable lung cancer, the highly paid specialist gave his treatment options as "have a family reunion, preferably within the next 3 months." (Gotta love specialists, they earn all those taxpayer dollars.) But he didn't die. Not then anyway, not until more than a decade and a half later. And not from cancer. What saved his life was meditation. Now I know just saying that might send the one or two readers who occasionally end up here by accident scurrying for another web page. But be assured, my dad at that time would have done exactly the same thing. He wasn't a hocus pocus man, he was a man who loved his science and engineering and traditional medicine. But given an apparent imminent demise he decided to give the Gawler approach a try, because what did he have to lose etc. This isn't about Gawler's own approach, although it's worth noting he was himself...
A cancerous cell, going about its metastasising ways... Cancer. Even saying the word can make you gulp. Its one of the great killers, and for decades we've seen a desperate search for a cure. Treatment has always been a type of warfare - cut it out, blast it with chemicals and radiation. Cancer has fascinated me for years now, because it struck me that the assumptions we take into understanding anything, or more generally how we frame our understandings, is pivotal to how far we go with this understanding. So the assumption we've normally used with cancer is that it's like some foreign agent in our bodies, that needs to be found and killed. That assumption has spread into everyday usage in other areas too, we talk about corruption as a 'cancer' in our society, for example. Unfortunately the chemicals and radiation which are our weapons of choice tend to kill healthy cells in our bodies too, and lots of people who get this treatment end up dying as a result of it, no...
Introducing Bruno Latour. Over the past 20+ years Latour has been carefully and thrillingly re-designing the entire landscape of our lives, and increasingly people are noticing what he's been up to. It really is no exaggeration to say that the world as Latour sees it is remarkable, and very little of the ways we commonly understand things survives unscathed. Not that he in any way imposes a new order on things, or concocts vast fantastic scifi-type fantasies. And he doesn't have a critical bone in his body, so he's not out there debunking things either - he sees critique as a tired, misguided activity. On the contrary his genius (and this is probably what defines all genius) is to show us what we're already doing but don't even notice. Rather than attempt some encyclopaedic biography and bibliography, I'll first list probably his most fundamental changes to the way we think about things, and then use one example to show a bit of the flavour of his work. As back...
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