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The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914

September 20, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 by Immanuel Wallerstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this latest installment of his amazing series, Wallerstein shows us how various contemporary institutions arose as a response to the sudden awareness the French Revolution engendered: that people could self rule.

From this point, the elites took over, commandeered the economic and political machinery and proceeded to institute laws in the name of equality. These laws/policies split populations into groups to divide them for state/technocractic management. We can thus understand the development of the modern state as the development of various fragmented knowledges (of technological/social institutional agency) in the name of the social body.

Wallerstein does not talk too much about technological development — in fact this period of world history is THICK. He sticks mainly to institutional development as the development of the state ideology — which it is his argument that this multifaceted approach to ideological interpellation has largely succeeded by this point. The elites rule the world. It is the triumph of the centrist liberal state to co-opt two other ideologies, progressivism and conservatism as arms pushing forth its own agenda for further globalization.

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Dance Dance Dance

September 20, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Dance Dance Dance (The Rat, #4)Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had thought I was done with Murakami’s books. But this one in particular got to me. Despite the fact that Murakami often seems as though he’s picking nouns from a GQ mad lib, by about 2/3 he had me hooked. Somehow Murakami is able to dig through the specifics of being you, being his character, and touch upon some sublime connection where each human can see. The nameless narrator, weird in his mannerisms, his thoughts and his tastes (and yet standard for Murakami), ends up speaking to the human condition by speaking to other characters.

There’s really nothing to recommend the character as a moral paragon, or as an ideal of any sort. And the other characters? They are foils for each other, to prop one another up, so that the main character can be faced with recognizing a unique situation.

I think the turn happens for me when we realize that there are a set number of characters surrounding the main character who are going to die. This changes how he behaves, as in a Heidigger kind of way, when facing death, he becomes resolute. Perhaps this is due to his social isolation; his recovery from when his wife left him. In any case, the point at which he becomes most complete as a character is the point at which he is able to really care about others again. Murakami’s craft as a writer is when he is able to leave us off at the maximal point of suspense, that when we would find the answer for life is when we would miss it the most.

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The Taming Of Chance

September 20, 2015 / posted in life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews / No Comments

The Taming Of Chance (Ideas in Context)The Taming Of Chance by Ian Hacking
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this amazing work, Ian Hacking shows us the development of statistics. At first, statistics was used to find the “laws” of society. The patterns that were discovered were then utilized to as both prediction and explanation, to calibrate both the past and the future. Out of this use, the figure of the “normal” took over. This reinforced a position by which society then sought to calibrate itself in mediocrity. The present was thus always in decay, as normal slipped away due to change. At the same time, normal was understood as a purified state, one that people needed to attain to be “healthy.” The resolution that these statistical laws were explanation and prediction thus reproduces itself in the field as ideology.

Both past and future are colonized by our imagined laws, explained by nothing yet colonizing everything.

Hacking here presents the theoretical mechanism, the heirs of Newtonism, as developing the formula for state policy and social control. From the end of the French Revolution to the development of the centrist liberal state, we have a consistent march towards state intervention through the technicalities of a healthier, managed people.

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The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

September 20, 2015 / posted in rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological CivilizationThe Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization by William Barrett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Those book started off very strongly with a focus on mathematics and logic. It drifted into a discussion of ontology (Being) and then ended with a cold war vision of two possibilities for technology, USSR and USA. Unfortunately for Barrett, this amazing book is marred by an economic invisibility. He is on the right track, but the weakest part of the book is its second part, which affects the last part. Barrett seemed to want the second and first parts to coalesce into a third view so that we can critique the first view again. Being (through Heidigger and William James) was meant to define for us freedom — and with this freedom we were meant to critique the rationality of technique.

What Barrett wanted was to find another point of view on human existence with which to critique the techno-rationality that the first section was meant to be exemplify. Unfortunately he was able to do this because transcendental philosophy is the basis from which this techno-rationality historically arose. He couldn’t use it to critique itself. Marxism might have been able to provide a basis to inflect a different point of view with a different set of values than techno-rationality except for the fact that Marxism arose as a response to the same state apparatus that helped centralize techno-rationality in the first place.

What Barrett realized was that mathematics and logic have the same aesthetics used to form social control (as with Behavioralism) but he was able to connect their formulation with transcendental philosophy, ontology and the economic rise of the state.

I do like his direction, although his research is incomplete. What this book eventually suffers from is a lack of energy in which the last section is woefully truncated due to his lack of connection. In a major way, Barrett needs to show us how we are chained before he is able to point the way we are free. Without an analysis that would involve corporations, economics, consumerism and present day politics, his last section lacks the punch needed to explicate freedom.

Only when Barrett is able to define freedom will he be able to show us how technique is an illusion.

I believe his attempt solidify human existence on the basis on ontology in order to debunk techno-rationality was the primary failure of his book… you really can’t use ontology that way because ontology is the grandfather for this rationality.

If anything this book of its time (1978) shows a philosopher who tried to do philosophy with respect to his tradition, but failed. The tools at his disposal are weak; dated. If anything this work shows us that at 1978 if philosophy were to have an impact it would need to reinvent its toolbox, which it is still in the process of doing so.

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Discourse as Social Interaction

September 20, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Discourse as Social InteractionDiscourse as Social Interaction by Teun A. van Dijk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a fairly standard introductory text. Here we see a Foucaultean influenced approach to rhetoric in which the positions and interruptions, cuts and corrections of a text reproduce the power structures and people’s places in them. Knowledge is presented as active positioning within a time index. This is managed through a variety of different contexts, each chapter meant to highlight a cut of institutional rhetoric, whether this is between sexes, as politicians, in a community, between races and so on. All the differentials are made available when we take a specific view — with our knowledge of how those institutions work. Is this a manner of finding the information we want in the text? Or are we super imposing only one view? There is only one view available at a time, otherwise how can we tell if someone is behaving in this or that manner due to their positions in a transaction (store owner, customer) or race, or age or any other difference?

This is where discourse studies breaks down, because we can’t isolate those interactions solely though one context at a time except in our study. In real life these contexts cross over each other and depattern one another.

In many ways this was a good refresher as to the many approaches and methods, although these different views only work because we assume an identity as a more basic substrate to the participants identity — one founded on the unquestionable equality of subjectivity. It is only with this unquestionable “0 level equality” that we are able to understand that there is a difference in power between participants. This difference must then be attributed to the institution and their relative agency in their roles, because without it, how could we under that there is any differential at all (so therefore, they must be equal).

This normalization of equalization has often been the role of universities in order to insist that knowledge based approaches is a way to elitist enforced equality… that the advanced studies of rationalization (mostly only available to the wealthy) is the way for one to signify that one is more deserving to be equal and not fooled by the power differential of institutions used to create inequality.

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Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels

September 20, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Portrait of an Eye: Three NovelsPortrait of an Eye: Three Novels by Kathy Acker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an author finding her voice. There are brief moments of insight, tantalizing bits of sublime work, but mostly repetitious, meandering cut ups and pastes of various sorts. As Acker says in an interview (and so Zizek and Lacan would agree) the erotica is not erotica! If the text speaks of something else, it’s obviously sexual, but if it’s sexual then it’s obviously something else. So you can read this as a tear-down of power relations, of the attempt to break out of family-oedipal narratives, of the whole rigmarole. Does she succeed? Is she able to find a new space? It doesn’t seem so with these texts.

Definitely for the die hard Acker fan.

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perm Competition And The Evolution Of Animal Mating Systems

September 20, 2015 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Sperm Competition And The Evolution Of Animal Mating SystemsSperm Competition And The Evolution Of Animal Mating Systems by Robert L. Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fairly dry text, what you’d expect. Shows you how adaption as design is presented as a calibration to game theory among others that would compete with the species in question.

The most interesting essays were the ones that were inconclusive because they were unable to decide what specifics as to calibrate the statistics to, species or individual?

When it comes to reproduction, it seems, that anything goes. Individuals account for very little as everything is a mediocre “play by numbers”.

Fairly good text though, in terms of research. The authors sure took their time to study.

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Heretics of Dune

September 8, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Heretics of Dune (Dune Chronicles, #5)Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although Dune was meant to be a trilogy originally, Frank Herbert has masterfully been able to extend the series. The way he does this is that both book 4 and 5 recalibrate the entire series.

On the one hand, this book lacks the energy from the previous novels. Yet it is able to clarify what’s at stake for the other books. At first I had thought this was about utopia — in fact the first three books seemed so. But then the 4th book showed us that utopia isn’t it since Leto II had already presented us the picture of what it meant to have it; again it was politics and power as usual.

Here, Herbert shows us what is at stake. Raising human consciousness. Not just physically but the correct adaptability. He shows us also, corruption, incredible corruption that comes with humans trying to achieve the sublime so that the world becomes degraded into nothing but struggles for novel sensations.

Much of the book seemed to wander though, and while there was the understandable politics that comes with Dune, this seemed beside the point; tiresome. Unlike the first few books where we cared more about the characters in this, we start to get a glimpse of what it means to build a world… it means that we define new subjectivities. It means we have to outline the process by which this comes around. And although there is no perfect way, the destruction of Rakis as the release of humankind from a concentration of power was what Leto II was after; this is the truth of being human. Rather than the technology and power view of what a perfect world is, Herbert shows us the way for us is to choose freedom, to let others grow and develop, so we too shall grow and develop.

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The Baphomet

September 8, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

The BaphometThe Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Klossowski writes beyond our sense of realism, to bring about meditations on life, death, morality and so on, from the depths of gnostic heresy. The mix of breaths reveals the hallucinatory experience wherein hermeneutic literalness exceeds our sense of self. This is the gap inherent within language and the gap inherent within ourselves brought to page.

It’s difficult to write about this book, since it defies any sense of genre. Obviously people would say this is experimental. But it succeeds in convincing us that this view — of the intermix of personal, interpersonal, political, social, and so on — that reality is interconnected with knowledge and morality. How we live and exist among others is not an actual reality the way most of us believe, but an intermix within the gap inherent between us and others, within us and within others. We navigate this interstice often with blind faith. When we start to question the fundamentals of an ideology, or when we expect that within a view the truth will be apparent, that is where we become more lost than ever.

Although this book is a fiction it shows us something of how we are by showing us how we illicitly exist within the gaps of our knowledge by extending everything at once and contradicting itself in the point of the other.

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I, Claudius

September 8, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, love, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)I, Claudius by Robert Graves
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a great book. Here, Graves takes some liberties with history, obviously, as no one knew what did or did not happen. But we do see the corruption of individuals within families interwrapped with such a complete power as to be a heady frightful mess.

While I saw the BBC tv show in serial as a teenager, this helped me appreciate history in a way that I did not for a long time. The interrelation of life, family, power, money and all the things that make us human is what elevates this story to a point of the human sublime.

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