Rather strange this thing we are after does not have a name. In the old days it was called structuralism, which had to do with the patterns that become discernible as you move further and further away from an object; remember that photograph taken from some rocket or other?

In the hands of such able rocketeers as Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan (ah, Toronto!) the trip was fruitfully disturbing some of the time: 'I never thought of putting this beside that, of seeing this as that' we said, brandishing another cubist insight.

But they weren't in-sights, they were out-sights, even oversights: and the price we paid for such zippy authority was a loss of foreground, pace McLuhan a loss of touch, a loss, in the end, of ground. By pursuing the illusion of an abstract cosmic objectivity, we were losing the subject, man's image and his cry.

Which was, after all, the point (of both the structuralism and the rocketry). The cool elegance of that photograph of Mother Earth shows only geology, no human mess. It suggests that Armageddon may not be a significant problem.

Since then (ah, the 1960s!) strictly downhill. After the slightly post-human brilliance of Foucault and Lévi-Strauss came the despairing Frog lefties and their Angloid clones, imploding with non-negotiable rage and seeking to cauterize their vestigal human desires by abolishing the imaginative use of shapes and sounds, art no less, all that can recall us ...