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Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

January 5, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, utility / No Comments

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to AnotherCritical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this very interesting book, Philip Ball takes us around through various formalizations of physics, as a method of describing how matter (or energy) is actuated in order to highlight a possible formulation for how society is actuated. Curiously, he starts with Hobbes and then walks through the various material relations. Along the way he notes various new ideas as they describe matter and energy, showing in clear lucid language how this may or may not apply with society.

He does come up with some striking similarities for the models, but ultimately this is less a new sociology that is an extension of physics (a new physics) and more of a “look what I found, isn’t this weird?” kind of text. I would recommend this as a very interesting read, but unlike physics, there isn’t an easy correlation of model to actual particulates, in part because while we can see some analogous lines (especially with his prisoner’s dilemma or and game theory) he does lack an object of study. Society is too vague, and human agency is not discussed at all. Ball is more interested in how mobs of people have “emergent properties” but he does not discuss the role of agency or how these properties might emerge. In this way, despite the thickness of the book, this is more about finding interesting descriptions than it is about creating a working theory with an episteme from which we can build a system of human society. This forms the fatal flaw in the book, if there is one.

Thus, if you find this kind of topic interesting, it’s well worth the read. It will give you food for thought. Ball writes very clearly, concisely. You get a glimpse at the very interesting but also very diverse fields of study which you may not be aware of. But if you’re looking for a manifesto or an outline for how society should work, or how to even approach understanding human groupings as a system, you’re bound to be disappointed. Ball seems to find such discussion to be fruitless for himself to contemplate even as he engages the thoughts of others who have attempted such conjecture before.

Nonetheless, his revolving around the topic of critical mass or supercritical fluids before phase shifts as a way of describing social relations was of great abstract interest for me. Unfortunately, computer models do not translate well into human interaction in the sense that we have no solid metrics from which to gauge how people vary from one to another.

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Toward the Postmodern

January 5, 2015 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Toward the PostmodernToward the Postmodern by Jean-François Lyotard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this collection of essays you get to experience the intellectual prowess of one Jean-Francois Lyotard. I’ve only read one of his other works; but here you get to see him as he varies his approaches from the literal, transfigural to the metaphorical. Although, all relations are possible, as he shows us. He is able to connect disparate parts together and get a larger shape of how we compile sense making. No wonder he was the one to mark our epoch as the post-modern, he kind of sits outside common sense already, and thus can reflect on what we are up to.

I’m not sure why the sections are partitioned in the way they are, perhaps this is not a good introductory text of his works. In a way, reading him was like riding a bucking bronco, I wasn’t sure what he was going to say or connect with next. I would urge patience in reading this book, it’s not one to skim lightly through.

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A Treatise of Human Nature

January 2, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

A Treatise of Human NatureA Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Much simpler shorter and less expansive than An Enquiry into Human Understanding but all the same, intensely interesting.

Karatani is correct, for Hume all knowledge is synthesis save for math, and counting, which Hume doesn’t seem to be able to account for at all — so he claims such a thing is innate. Indeed, we can grasp that such an ability (counting) and spacial-motoral skills seem to be bred into us, as innate mental structures. Still, Kant in this one area is more radical than Hume, claiming that math is also synthetic knowledge.

What I found startling was a passage here, in which Hume posits in paragraph section 122, that the nature of modern enquirers understand that qualities are separate than the objects themselves. Here he lays groundwork for a phenomenal and noumenal distinction, something Kant later picks up, through the transcendental framework if abstraction… that the ideas we have are innate to us, as such ideas require material expression which we get from senses and feelings. Kant also takes serious the conjoined nature of two objects; where Hume takes sufficient reason to task, Kant understands this as an ex post facto (retroactive) synthesis, one that later on Bergson utilizes to tie together disparate fields despite their different culturally determined signifying functions.

Hume is pretty fantastic.

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Dune

December 31, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am not sure what science fiction had in terms in motifs before Dune, but with reading Dune, it becomes apparent that Frank Herbert expresses a great many motifs that later on become cliches, including, neo-religiousity, a female infant whose perspicacity is beyond comprehension, space age warfare that includes the most brutal of hand to hand combat, and so on. In a way, this book’s setting is the only thing that makes it sci-fi. Technology becomes invisible to the reader so that we reach the forefront of human exploration: social interaction. In a way, this kind of science fiction isn’t done anymore today, as Ursula Le Guin points out. Most sci-fi is centered around the awesomeness of technology, repetitious explosions, repetition of crowd pleasing effects (such as how the new Star Wars/Star Trek movies serve to repeat what the crowd likes), and other phenomenon based on past understandings.

In this way, Dune with its harshness and its strange world is different — you are confronted with society different than your own, but is seemingly non-arbitrary while being immersive. In many ways, the plot isn’t all that surprising. From the get go you realize what is going on, what needs to be done and how the book has to end. But at the same time, you realize at the end, that it’s not really about who you thought it was. The journey, while questionable before you get into it, isn’t at all questionable once you are in it, because it’s well worth the attempt to read it.

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Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

December 31, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related DatesWelcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Of course, here is Zizek again. Second time reading this book. This is a light book for him, as the chapters are short and the theory isn’t thick. Nonetheless, as always, with his dialectical switching, Zizek is interesting and insightful. One of the primary problems with those equating philosophy with truth is that it needs to be true all the way through.

Yes, okay so much of what Zizek says is sometimes conjecture. But the point is taken, and if it’s not then it doesn’t stick and it’s not useful.

What Zizek is doing here is presented 9/11 as an event in which we have a choice about the kind of world we want to live in. Nonetheless, 9/11 allowed for a further refinement in division as separate entities, like the American government, went ahead to define the field for itself (we are the victims), rather than melding the field. That conservative move to hole up created a differential in logic which of course, creates the antagonisms that we face today. This is perhaps the underlying motif that Zizek wishes to highlight through the figure of homo sacer, that much of our laws and understandings of class are determined through the difference of who is left out and how that leaving out is expressed beyond whatever political justifications may be given.

All in all entertaining to read, but simple in his point. The complexity involved is how he builds his simple point through the mediation of abstract universal figures. After all, only through mediated complexity can one arrive at a more abstract point of reference. Without that mediation, a given simple object is only itself, without extension.

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Awesome Camera

December 31, 2014 / posted in lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Awesome CameraAwesome Camera by Laura Goldstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Laura Goldstein offers a brief but powerful set of poems to explicate the relational field of subjectivisation through the steady state of the camera. That is, the camera through its awesome nature melds difference within a topography and presents explicit atoms in relation. The camera, in Alain Badiou’s terms, creates the envelope by which existence is determine and presented.

In this, we get a situation created by the subjectivisation that unifies a field as one. The various attendants in that field then are displayed as a unitary set world. In this set, Goldstein presents the figure of the camera as a mode of knowing, one that explicates as much as it leaves out.

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Social Behavior Of Female Vertebrates

December 30, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Social Behavior Of Female VertebratesSocial Behavior Of Female Vertebrates by Samuel Wasser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The preface in this book notes that sexism within human culture is reflected in animal behavior studies by casting males and females within human roles. This favors males of a species as having more agency than females of a species. This collection of essays seeks to demonstrate that females have, at times, greater agency in competing with each other and determining which mates they should choose.

While many of these essays are not about humans, they all note that resource allocation and wealth division plays a role in organizing the nature of sexual interaction (monogamy, polygamy, and so on) between all individuals. This goes on, even between birds, to demonstrate that some level of trust is required between individuals, even when child rearing is mostly limited to sitting on eggs.

It would be of great interest to analyze and then test an economic hypothesis of animal behavior. While animals do not use money, so money cannot be a metric to determine value, we can see that valuation is passed between individuals as a way of evaluating the desirability of mates and what mates can offer. For instance, in courtship rituals, male birds often demonstrate their ability to hold onto territory. I would have liked this book to be larger, with more variety of essays, but considering the amount of work it takes, I suppose this is a rare sampling to begin with.

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From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest

December 30, 2014 / posted in lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

From the Place in the Valley Deep in the ForestFrom the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest by Mitch Cullin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty good short story collection. I do like Mitch Cullin’s work. In each story Cullin centers around his character’s experience of a void. We get a glimpse of a life, and then, in the face of a larger apparatus, be it an event like Vietnam, or communist totalitarianism, sexual awakening, the devastation and lies surrounding Chernobyl, or a friendship of native american boys who find themselves involved in a senseless beating… we end up facing the meaningless contingency of life. In life we do things, often without understanding consequences, or even understanding it. And then life changes around us in some imperceptible way but we are left holding the bag; our loss, or our missed opportunity… even in the mist of a suburban paradise — where housewives can be left to gossip, get drunk, play with their friends and face a non-lack of abundance — Cullins shows that we are able to reach our limit, and the limit is ourselves and the situation that creates us as we create it.

She wants to stand alive and intact before the splintered creations of men. In the quiet of the cellar, her only deep fear is that nothing will happen–and, truth be known, she is not alone in this regard

In a great way, this is what Cullins is able to show us. What makes his characters ordinary is that we relate to them. Despite being in extraordinarily contingent; specific situations full of history and personal experience most of us may not be able to relate to, Cullins pulls from these situations a larger experience that is out of the characters control, an aspect of being-there that solidifies for us, through these tiny sketches, a brief moment that transcends the larger situation. You know this when he ends the story, for that brief moment, the added weight of social, economic and power relations that trap the characters and define their situation are added together as one unity that exceeds being this or that way, to be, and be free, released beyond the finality of his own writing. Like a magician, Cullin builds us up to show us what something is, and then show us that it’s actually something else he has in his hand, the moment when a white dove flies off.

It is for this reason that Cullins must start from the place in the valley, deep in the forest. Without that added resolution, we wouldn’t have the ability to be set free.

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The Rule of Metaphor

December 14, 2014 / posted in lyrical-narratives, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Rule of MetaphorThe Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve decided that Ricoeur is more of a meta-rhetorician, a philosopher of rhetoric in the sense that unlike many other rhetoricians and semioticians, he doesn’t do any hard low level analysis himself. He may analyze terms, other’s uses of terms, and with encyclopedic mastery, run the gambit of tearing through collected works of so many others to pull the threads he needs to weave a larger discourse, but he almost never takes you through line by line synthesis and application. Stranger too, he never presents you a diagramatic appraisal of the field. He presents you choice snippets and then at the end provides you his tact conclusion. Ever so polite, his writing generally doesn’t explode off the page either.

In this book, he tackles metaphor. Tries to find a place for it, and in the end results in universalizing it. While he goes through the figure of metaphor across many discourses relating to metaphor (poetics, tropes, semantics of word and discourse, and finally reference and philosophy) Ricoeur is able to construct a place for metaphor such that metaphor is a kind of column, a null point from which each of these fields can be organized and made coherent. His conclusions is that the zero sum signifier of the copula (to be) is only a nullified designator of which metaphor is the rule — not the exception. Copula’s nullification is only made possible because of the height of its position within semantic conception — metaphors serve more as the general binder for various arrangements. In this way, Ricoeur flips the relation of metaphor and positivist discourse on its head; metaphor is the general mode of presentation.

While this seems to presents a kind of detachment of language from the field of designation (or reality is composed only of language) it would be a mistake to jump to this relativist position, as Ricoeur makes clear, words need to be of something in order for there to be the stability of difference, even if expression can always be overcoded through metaphorization.

What Ricoeur wants to talk about rather, is the possibility of discourse. Rhetoric doesn’t decide what is said it only describes what it is possible to say, and how we can connect one part to another, to get to One or many ones, although for Ricoer there is no One, although as he notes Heidigger and many others are looking still for the magical word, the One that will designate One upon which justification is self-justified without appeal to semantic slippage.

All in all, I found this book to be a good read, although I was less interested in what others have said than what he says. Ricoeur still remains worth while to read, though he is less flashy and in that way more down to earth as one who goes through the widely ignored field of rhetoric to find the stabilizing struts of discourse itself, at a tactical level, rather than the starry-eyed strategies of ones like Deleuze, Foucault or Zizek.

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On the New

December 14, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

On the NewOn the New by Boris Groys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Groys is a formalist. He recasts the dialectic of subject and object in terms of valorized-profane in order to talk about the production of culture. Through the figure of art (and then conceptual theory), Groys notes the production of new as necessary to stablize the meta-position of culture. He makes these positions independent of specific content and that makes him not only a formalist but also an idealist.

One of the issues with this, is that this ideation remain ungrounded in material practices, that valorization and the profane are “indistinguishable”. Perhaps this makes him a lazy philosopher, but it’s unwelcome since the very ability for one to distinguish the two is the entire point of valorization. A stronger critique of this thought would be to say that all that we can recognize is already included in culture, and that what isn’t in culture is only recognizable through the filter of culture, so it is “not yet itself”, which begs the question of schema.

At first glance I thought he was going to outline a scheme of becoming. Umberto Eco did so in order to talk about how new information can create new categories for the new, but Groys avoided doing this difficult task. Instead he retreated into the familiar dialectical play of cultural difference to pull the new from the auspices of the void… this puts him strictly within the history of formalization as outlined in Foucault’s The Order of Things, wherein the question today becomes how can one pull content from form alone? The appeal to the void (or the Other of thought) or the attempt to think the unthinkable isn’t a new attempt. Groys puts forth a well researched and tightly knit but conservative book. In this sense, he is pretty easy to read, and serves more as a text for a sophomore for an aesthetic reading of familiar forms instead of as an earth shaking opus.

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