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Freedom Through Smoke: From Bernays’s Torches to Iran’s Burning Images

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“Torches of Freedom.” AI image Introduction On Easter Sunday in 1929, young women walked down Fifth Avenue holding lit cigarettes as if they were political banners. Nearly a century later, images circulate online of Iranian women lighting cigarettes from burning photographs of the Supreme Leader. At first glance, the two moments seem separated by history, geography, and political context. Yet both rely on the same striking gesture: a woman publicly inhaling smoke as a sign of defiance. One was a carefully scripted publicity stunt designed to sell tobacco; the other is an act of resistance against a repressive state. Placing them side by side exposes a deeper question: why does smoking, of all things, keep becoming a symbol of female freedom? Bernays and the Manufacture of Emancipation Edward L. Bernays, a pioneer of public relations and nephew of Sigmund Freud, understood that human beings do not simply respond to arguments. They respond to images that condense desire, anxiety, a...
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The Prosthetic Mind: Freud, McLuhan, and the Anxiety of AI

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Thesis Freud’s “prosthetic god” and McLuhan’s “extensions of man” describe the same structural condition from psychological and media-theoretical angles. Artificial intelligence intensifies this condition by externalizing cognition itself, provoking contemporary anxieties about authorship, creativity, and identity. Introduction Contemporary reactions to artificial intelligence often carry a peculiar intensity. Writers accuse one another of inauthenticity, artists debate the meaning of creativity, and entire professions worry about being replaced by algorithms. These reactions are rarely limited to technical concerns. They are charged with something closer to an existential unease, as if a boundary that once separated the human from the artificial were quietly dissolving. Two thinkers from the twentieth century help make sense of this disturbance. Sigmund Freud, writing in Civilization and Its Discontents , described modern humanity as a “prosthetic God.” Marshall McLuhan, in Un...
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Non-Places and Extended Minds: Augé and McLuhan in the Digital Age

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Thesis This article argues that Augé’s concept of the non-place and McLuhan’s notion of media as extensions of the human body converge on the same diagnosis: digital media create powerful prosthetic environments that intensify communication while thinning symbolic and human presence. The internet thus becomes both a non-place and an extension of the nervous system, producing a technologically mediated form of “non-human” space. Introduction When Marc Augé published Non-Places in the early 1990s, the internet had not yet become a defining structure of everyday life. His analysis focused instead on physical infrastructures—airports, highways, shopping centers—through which contemporary existence increasingly flowed. Around the same time, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory was gaining renewed attention, especially his claim that technologies function as extensions of the human nervous system. Although their conceptual vocabularies differ, both thinkers converge on a question that has ...
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Port-Royal and the Production of Meaning: How Systems Create Their Objects

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Introduction: Why Port-Royal Keeps Returning Port-Royal has an uncanny persistence in modern debates on language, knowledge, and human nature. A seventeenth-century grammatical and philosophical project, rooted in a specific historical moment, it nevertheless reappears in contexts that seem to pull it in opposite directions. Ferdinand de Saussure treats it as a distant methodological precursor, Michel Foucault situates it within a historically bounded episteme, and Noam Chomsky invokes it as an early articulation of an innate structure of mind. At first glance, this recurrence invites a familiar question: which interpretation is correct? Yet this question already assumes that Port-Royal carries a stable meaning awaiting discovery. What if the persistence of Port-Royal tells us something else, namely, that meaning does not reside in sources themselves, but emerges from the systems that mobilize them? This article argues that Port-Royal functions as a revealing case study for a bro...
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Beyond the Mirror: Baudelaire, Realism, and the Rise of Photography

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Thesis Baudelaire’s critique of photography in Le public moderne et la photographie is not a rejection of the photographic technique itself, but a critique of modern realism as an aesthetic ideology. His gesture is not programmatic; it is negative. By challenging the identification of art with truth and exact reproduction, Baudelaire delineates the space of the artistic and lays the groundwork for the subsequent transformations of both painting and photography. Introduction Charles Baudelaire’s essay Le public moderne et la photographie , published in the context of the 1859 Salon, is often read as a diatribe against the emergence of photography. This widespread interpretation portrays the poet as an opponent of modern technology and a nostalgic defender of traditional arts. Yet a careful reading reveals a far more complex and nuanced critique. Baudelaire does not reject photography as a technical procedure; rather, he challenges the aesthetic ideology that elevates it to the st...
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Internet as a Non-Place: A Late Update of Marc Augé

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Non-Place of Communication. AI image Introduction When Marc Augé published Non-Places in the mid-1990s, the internet had not yet assumed the central role it now plays in everyday life. His diagnosis of what he called surmodernity relied primarily on physical infrastructures: airports, highways, shopping malls, hotel chains. More than twenty years later, in the lecture La identidad y los derechos humanos ( Identity and Human Rights) , delivered at a Mexican university, Augé returns to his own theoretical framework and explicitly introduces a phenomenon that was only just emerging at the time of the book’s publication: the internet. Far from revising or correcting his concept, this late reconsideration extends it and confirms its continued relevance. The significance of the lecture lies precisely in this gesture. It shows that the logic of the non-place is not confined to material spaces, but can also be applied to contemporary environments of communication. The Non-Place: A Con...
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Politics as a Drug: When the Dose Matters More Than the Cure

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AI generated image A contemporary paradox In international politics, as in medicine, the strongest intervention is not always the most effective one. Sometimes the most effective treatment isn’t the one that promises an instant cure—it’s the one that delivers a poison with precision, capable of healing when the dose and timing are just right. The recent U.S. approach to Venezuela, defined by selective involvement and the decision not to enforce a full regime change, has puzzled many observers. How can a country take action decisively and yet leave much of the existing power structure in place? Several commentators have described the situation as an “intervention without rupture,” highlighting the surprise generated by the absence of a clean handover of power to the opposition. The intuitive reaction is straightforward: if you effect change, you replace; if you challenge a government’s legitimacy, you install an alternative. But political practice rarely follows moral expectations...
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