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After paying, we will send an immediate confirmation and email your ebook file within 24 hours. PDF ISBN: 978-1-917251-13-6
version: bookmarked pdf (pdf text cannot be edited, printed or copied - email us if you need this capability.) Imprint: Triarchy Press
List Price: £12.50 Publication: 31st March 2026 Format: Paperback ~ 64pp. Size: 13 x 21.6 cm ISBN: 978-1-917251-12-9 Tags: Systems Thinking, gaps, generalities, specificity, nothingness, quantum vacuum, anomalies, apocalypticism, occult mystery, ghosts and spirits, fictioning, hyper‑empiricism, coincidence, philosophy, social and political philosophy, cultural theory, critical theory, metaphysics, epistemology, radical thought, essays, , neoliberalism, surveillance capitalism, individualism, gap politics, climate and collapse, colonialism, Donald Crowhurst, Teignmouth Electron, Nineteen Eighty‑Four, democracy and authoritarianism About the Author |
"In Mind the Gaps, Phil Smith describes our world as one whose grand narratives are increasingly failing, and proposes that we attend instead to the gaps in ‘the disturbed edges of culture, ecology and everyday life’ to imagine a different way of thinking and being. This essay, and its partner Mind the Fields, invite their readers to ‘attend to absences, to find places of change in bubbling vacuums and to experiment with living differently in the leaks and loopholes of existence’.
... I find Phil Smith’s two essays are characteristically playful: like so much of his writing, these evoke a sense of invitation into forms of play – with words, concepts, intuitions, play which is both enjoyable and invigorating inasmuch as it opens up new ways of experiencing. " John Davies, Notes from a Small Vicar "One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about Phil Smith’s writing is the element of ‘the trickster’ that is ingrained into his work. There is an archness that is quite intoxicating. Indeed this is addressed obliquely in the final chapter which states, ‘It would be a sad irony if you were to take seriously the overarching argument in the text about specificities and Generalities.’
That isn’t to say the book isn’t serious, more that as part of the process of reading, you are forced to make choices and – good Lord! – have ideas of your own. It’s not a book that you can read passively. It’s a book you have to act on... What is utterly delicious about this book is the lack of definites. There are suggestions, skirting around a subject and engaging with the minutiae of thresholds and gaps and yet is as coherent and complete as it needs to be and a completely satisfying read... " Will Vigar - Read the full review "From the unusual and fructive mind of Phil Smith Comes this bite-sized treatise on life the universe and everything. It's a pamphlet, a chapbook, reminiscent of more innocent times before philosophy and science lost touch with each other, the latter into a mycelial network of endlessly bifurcating branches and sub-branches.
Phil is an everything guy, a mythogeographer, heir to the French philosopher and film maker, Guy Debord. Not for nothing is he called ‘the crab’. His fictions and commentaries pillage the bricolage of signifiers that constitute lived experience, finding new patterns and significances, eschewing the fictions and polarities adopted by mass culture to explain the world – ‘beautiful’, ‘ugly’, ‘urban’, ‘rural’ and, of culture, ‘popular’, ‘serious’. Smith’s insight is that we are defined by what is not as much as by what is. A post-Aristotelian Dixon of Dock Green, he explores the spaces between ideas rather than moving to a neat conclusion and a cheery ‘evening all’. One senses that he is anarchist, temperamentally, but a tricksy one; resorting to surrealism to break down metaphors that imprison our minds. Is it possible to ‘understand’ everything? Hell no. The post-quantum universe is a molecular circus of matter and dark matter, as malleable as bread dough. As we try to grasp it, it bends and crumbles in our fingers. In this booklet, he demonstrates the brave ambition of a natural philosopher of the 18th century. Personally, I would hazard a guess that only an external creative mind could have set in motion the amazing set of dependencies underlying our universe. Smith wouldn't agree. He's no Deist. His work defies neat boundaries such as fiction, philosophy or agitprop. In the middle of a riot, Smith would be bending down to admire the weeds growing between the cobbles. Admitting that he has a predilection for lingering in quarries and on ugly shorelines, Smith delivers not a walk through but a walk sideways. He devotes an entire section to amateur Dorset yachtsman, Donald Crowhurst, who tricked out his vessel, Electron, with the unconnected wires of conceptual computer and jumped into the sea into the Atlantic, realising that he wouldn’t complete the race. Delivered with the same magnificent panache, Smith’s philosopho-literary tract is a boundary-shifting discourse that is more familiar to the French than the English. It has a whiff of the boulevards, like the tang of CS gas after an afternoon of rioting. They should give him his own telly series. William Hatchett on amazon Mind the Gaps
What if the universe is stitched together with absences? What if our deepest realities – personal, political, cosmic – are not shaped by grand ideas or all-encompassing ‘explanations’, but by the tiny, unremarked
gaps between them? In this kaleidoscopic essay, Phil Smith covers some unlikely terrain: from the quantum unevenness of the cosmos to the haunted ruins of mines and the fragile misadventures of lost mariners. He rejects the siren call of big, smooth answers and plunges into the turbulent space where anomalies, coincidences and disturbances matter. Phil gathers stories, observations and practices from the disturbed edges of culture, ecology and everyday life –inviting us to attend to absences, to find hope in the vacuum and to experiment with living differently in the leaks and loopholes of existence. “My big mistake was to assume that it was the generalities,
the big structures, the overarching concepts and monster categories that have the important meaning, that are where the power lies, that are the tipping points and the places of leverage. No, it is the gaps.” Readership:This is a book for anyone who is growing disillusioned with grand theories and great ideals, who is growing weary of completism and is ready to see ‘meaningful meaninglessness’ as a possibility.
It’s a book for dreamers and dissidents, walkers and fictioners, lovers of little things and wild mysteries. Let it pry open the space between certainties and show the rich, unpredictable life that emerges there.
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