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Of Grammatology

November 10, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Of GrammatologyOf Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Derrida blames Rousseau for logocentricism.

The figure of Rousseau stands in for logocentricism and the entire tradition, although Derrida grounds the discussion in terms of a spacial analysis. So to conclude, Derrida ends his close reading of Rousseau with

Rousseau could not think this writing, that takes place before and within speech. To the extent that he belonged to metaphysics of presence he dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signifier to signifed, representer to represented, mask to face, writing to speech. But all such oppositions are irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics. Using them, one can only operate by reversals, that is to say by confirmations. The supplement is none of these terms. It is especially not more a signifier than a signified, a representer than a presence, a writing than a speech. None of the terms of this series can, being comprehended within it, dominate the economy of differeance or supplementary. Rousseau’s dream consisted of making the supplement enter the metaphysics by force.

So while it’s difficult for me to suss out where Derrida ends and Rousseau begins at time (because I’ve never read Rousseau directly) it becomes clearer as you read the book that the figure of Grammatology is the centralized arrangement by which we create the space necessary for differance to effectively operate. Much of this text then, is Derrida’s slow etching of the spatial oppositions that create a beyond of language that is inherent to language and contingent on language. Derrida’s point is that this exteriority that exists beyond signification, this metaphysics of presence is constructed out of the natural philosophy of Rousseau. Rousseau seeks with this naturalization narrative to justify his reformulation of an inner sanctum within language. This creation of a dichotomous values of difference sets the stage for our cultural evaluation of everything else. Now that there exists a polarity Derrida shows us how to separate out the lines of value, with the implication to see these kinds of constructions exist as primarily artificial through Rousseau’s claims of naturalism.

Derrida of course, could have been more direct in saying that Rousseau can show us how our conception of what is right and just came from a division of labor, a management that is classist and elitist by dividing up sounds and words, by creating difference to elevate those in the know of such differences and alienate those who do not fit the elevation. He does, some what at the end, but this is a long and laborious effort to encapsulate the western philosophical tradition. Derrida sees what came before as a building up of logocentricism, in order to understand that philosophy within its terms, history and our discourse that creates and limits culture is seen as a literal transaction of the becoming of the episteme through the play of differance.

What’s interesting about differance is that Derrida understands it as being the key structure to the division of the poles and at the same time, less than nothing. Different from Zizek, Derrida understands this basic structure as being wholly created, not transcendentally contingent on a self mediating subjectivity. This writing then, is a fiction created within itself. There is of course, the possibility under which concepts of artifical and natural become devalued. When this occurs, should we continue to understand, as Derrida seems we should like, the artificial process by which Rousseau creates an inner limit to be false? What then becomes a way to value natural over artificial? That judgement remains beyond logocentricism itself, of which Derrida has not yet given us a line (at least not in this book): “No ontology can think its operation”. And in this sense, to step outside the outside is to reject the division of valuation of logocentricism, to make writing atonal and let us give up the thing-in-itself.

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Wise Children

November 10, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, love, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Wise ChildrenWise Children by Angela Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the guise of a vaudeville carnival, Carter tells a story of twin sisters who reduplicates their actions. Like their twin dads, the double aspect of the characters echo the reality of their situation by emphasizing not just the contingent singularity of each individual actor but also the collective milieu of how their family history doubly marks reality. Out of Shakespearean tragedy Carter takes the figure of the carnivalesque in its outlandish reality. Being actors, children of the theater, our narrator Dora comes to an appreciation of her role (and her uncle’s or father’s role) in life, an acceptance at old age that places them at the center of their story. The story of their father becomes the story of the daughters, as the father inscribes the limit upon which daughters can understand themselves

“D’you know, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along,” she said. “If he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dream wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.”

And like roles in a theater, the melodrama of a character is a willful desire for validation — their famous father pursues it–their capitalist uncle pursues it–the different aspects of Hollywood, the characters in their different roles as they try to negotiate their way to being recognized by the closest among them.

So while family is precariously anxious because absent father, absent mother, the daughters find their way through the various roles they play (burlesque dancers and singers) who are able to come of age, as wise children, always children even in their 70s, knowing more about their elders, and their role among them to an apex at which Dora can begin to see all that she is reflected in her lover-uncle at the end, where players and actors lose their roles and retain a distilled subjectivity. He “wasn’t only the one dear man, tonight, but a kaleidoscope of faces, gestures, caresses. He was not only the love of my life but all the loves of my life at once, the curtain call of my career as a lover.”

Carter teases out one of the truths of personal history. Through the filter of Shakespheare and drama entering the high capitalism of the mid to late 20th century, she shows us how we learn from our closest relations, parents, our place in the world as how we are to relate to others, how we are to relate at all even if the continuity is next to or even less than nothing.

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Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

November 2, 2014 / posted in rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Fold: Leibniz and the BaroqueFold: Leibniz and the Baroque by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this difficult book, Gilles Deleuze takes the figure of Leibniz as a starting point to reach a determinate position of differentiation. Another way to say this is that Deleuze abstracts/extracts conceptions of change and inflection from infinitesimal nuances. Building upon the figure of the monad as indecipherable but also holographic, Deleuze forces us from the position of understanding ontology as a passive substance and active concept. From here, we need first to select a context and then abstract from that context the mode of change that operates throughout it. Deleuze would have us absorb melody from pure harmony, building concepts and trends from the multitude of monads which would pose a mass of singularities.

Another way to put this? Deleuze outlines a project by which we can choose the scale at which we are to determine what we are looking at. This free-for-all view, lacking any selected distance from its object is different from the philosophic tradition which centers itself on subjectivity as the primordial figure. By zooming in on the monad and then zooming out, Deleuze gives us two vectors (two floors as he calls it) by which we can start to carve out difference between them. This makes all determination a matter of scale, which is another way of saying that it’s a matter of categorization. Which set of monads should we take to be primary? Which collection expresses the trends we wish? If not on the level of monad, then on the level of concept. What Deleuze poses for us is a radical de-substantialization of thought. Thought was often taken as a reference to something, or as a pure given form for something. Thought, in philosophy, is conceived as a reference point for purity of form. Rather than taking a metaphysics of presence as the primary scene, he deontologizes thought by collapsing it into its constituent particles, called monads. From there, we can build the scene of determination rather than skipping ahead to universals that are simply given.

What makes Deleuze radical in this regard, is how he debunks the classical categories which philosophy has sought to make necessary for its condition of philosophy. He pulls the monad from difference itself, as Leibniz did, and then reconstitutes concepts from it. The concepts are nonetheless pure concepts, as they ride on harmonies between monads, of the monads but never determined by monads. In fact, towards the end of the book, Deleuze shows us that monads can subsume other monads. From here we get the change of scale, that the figure of the monad as a compete singularity can also bind other monads. In this way, we can see how Deleuze’s monads run against a stricter line of Badiou’s set theory in which sets can be constituted in any desired size to be the primary set, the limit cardinal. This puts Deleuze closer to math than you might imagine, as this book is written in poetic language. Yet this poetry is essential in the sense that Deleuze wishes for us to saddle the inflection point between the two floors, before monads disappear from view and Being is revealed, or before Being is dissolved into a mass of monads that have yet to organize into coherency as a concept.

As always, Deleuze doesn’t go easy on us. He forces us to the edge of conception and leaves us there to sit and watch. Unfortunately, most of us probably won’t know what we are looking at. In the absence of our familiar points of reference I suspect much of this would appear to be senseless and unusable to most of us, even though in our daily lives, we go through the process of (re)constitution all the time.

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Neuter

October 28, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

NeuterNeuter by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neuter is a difficult book to read, because Cixous starts where she starts, slightly outside the context of your storied-expectations. Through a series of opening ephigraphs, and outlines of meditations on readings and texts, Cixous draws you deeper into the cramp inner space of story, subjectivity and analyst. Both psychoanalytical and philosophical, Cixous draws the thin null space, the non-existent middle, by which we see the internal dynamic structures that sustain the situation of subjectivity.

This is another way of saying that Cixous desexualizes subjectivity, by further castrating the subject. Rather than posing the master discourse of the universal All-Father, Cixous chooses instead the mother-son relationship, in order to show how a desexualized subject, one that is reversed in their “phallic-essence” is in fact one that is null. From there, she highlights the stakes of the story itself, and the relative positions of analyst and subject.

It all seems pretty mystical though (or musical, if you like), because Cixous walks the line using metaphors and literal meanings of words. Of course words are both literal and figurative at the same time, so she plays heavily with that ambiguity. As part of the writing, the text approaches self awareness, describing its own audience as it creates its own bridges and metaphors. It questions its own page turning, layering for us an introduction that takes us out of the context and turns us back around so that we can leave behind what we are supposed to experience and begin to experience what is there, outside the context of familiarity. This heavy introduction is the chanting part of the text: dive deeper-deeper! as she drops into the very inner void, and places us in the place for a master-text within the master-text, showing us bare subjectivity and bare story as the elements of the narrative are actors in the narrative itself.

Neuter then, is Cixous’s way of castrating the story, taking out the contingencies of names, place and time, by which we read universal “common” experience through each sideline of particularity. Cixous allows us to experience the arbitrary relationships of a story, and she does this masterfully, by turning all its elements inside-out, defamiliarizing the story itself by castrating it of its essential contingencies. In a sense, she makes the story a pataphysical experience of what was previously universal. Neuter is the smallest null space one can get. Neuter is the barest outline of the essential arc. Neuter is the null subjectivity, the zero degree point of view. Truly a difficult and masterful piece of writing, controlled, deliberate and evocative.

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Being and Event

October 18, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Being and EventBeing and Event by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Alain Badiou does something particularly difficult. He provides a nexus of interplay between formal mathematics (in set theory) and ontology as presented in the philosophical tradition. It’s often an understood but unacknowledged fact that explanations don’t really “explain” in so far as they translate between discourses. For this book, that is most definitely true. The intrusion of formalism into philosophy and the intrusion of nominalism into what was before a formalism that cannot name anything because it cannot decide anything on its own. The axiom of choice is “illegal” because it cannot discern nor can it choose anything at all.

In writing this review, I am a little torn between two implicit choices in how to proceed. On the one hand, I want to point out that Badiou allows us to get to the root of discursive meaning itself — in this case the axiom of foundation. In having the ability to choose what stage we enter, even if the choice is “made for us” by us, anonymously, we can extend a generic knowledge about a situation through the act of forcing a choice in which one empty term matches another, thereby in extension, naming a situation. This is a pretty delightful bit of connection here, because it allows us to then, if we want to, absent cardinals left and right. We can take this choice and begin to dissolve various limit cardinals into successor operations, in a sense, assaulting the legitimacy of ontology. On the other hand, we could as Badiou suggested, utilize the formalism of these various mathesis and recapitulate philosophy as we knew it, trace back various events and allow formalism to become a bulwark upon which we encapsulate various points of tension, defraction and inflection within the tradition. The first thought outlined above is akin to being a kind of philosophical assassin, as Deleuze called Wittgenstein. The second thought is akin to being the boring kind of conservative academic who doesn’t at all create but only hangs his hat on work by others. As Badiou said

I have to say that philosophy does not generate any truths either, however painful this admission may be. At best, philosophy is conditioned by the faithful procedures of its times (340).

I don’t find this to be damning but Badiou resolves to make the best of it:

A philosophy worthy of the name–the name which began with Paramenides–is in any case antinomical to the serivce of goods, inasmuch as it endeavors to be at the service of truths; one can always endeavor to be at the service of art, science and of politics. That it is capable of being at the service of love is more doubtful (on the other hand, art, a mixed procedure, supports truths of love). In any case, there is no commercial philosophy (341).

And that, I very much doubt, although this short quote really only betrays Badiou’s own allegiance to a very tradition topography!

I suspect some readers who are desirous to quickly get to the point may feel that this book is unnecessarily lengthy, obtuse and just plain long winded. I found with each turn, such amazement with Badiou’s terse language, his tightly compacted sentences and the immediate grasp with which he had with so many familiar thinkers, but aligned in new ways. One may find his application of set theory to be illegal, or at least not enlightening, but it is a mistake to read this book in solely in terms of set theory or solely in terms of ontology. Badiou wishes to say something about both, as One, and thus it’s difficult to separate the two from each other within imposing the traditional academic borders from which they came. Nonetheless people do so, even though people may insist that this particular set Badiou creates is non-constructible. The only way this can be done is to regulate the set to a position of being undecidable, which is another way of saying that it’s nonsense or at the very weakest, inapplicable because its terms do not align with anything that can be summarily named.

I find, counter to Badiou, I think, in this book a much deeper, darker implication. This implication mainly being that there is no real legitimacy within thought, that our ability to make sense relies solely on our ability to apply categories, to tease out, to decide what the indiscernable is by naming tentatively and then engendering a generic situation fully by extension. What about shows us however isn’t simply that discourse itself is an arbitrary set of conditions that have been formed by the inclusion of itself as an empty signifier–but that understanding itself is the acknowledgement of its own absurd axiom but through the act of repetition… that the only real tool we have for determining the truth of any discourse is the weak form of testing its consistency. Only that which remains most consistent (and applicable) remain what is to be best determined as truth, though to be sure, a truth which mostly depends on what a subject can recognize in the void.

Now, perhaps counter to some postmodernists (I hesitate to suggest that Badiou is a post-structuralist as this is the only book of his that I have read, but being a constructivist does align him with post-structuralism), Badiou does admit to there being some truth, sometimes. To be sure much of various other writers have hit upon this form of truth as contingency too, many characters whose names are probably well known to you, Zizek and Meillasoux to name two. I won’t go over their differences here, but it is suffice to say that we have come around upon a zeitgeist of sorts, wherein we cannot find any outside legitimacy so we start to assume that it comes from thin air. But this is another way of highlighting that we do have a choice in the matter. This decision is understood and made by so many already, that their version of the truth is what ought to be best for us all, if not said in words, than in action. This feels very weak to me, and it’s not where I would like to end. Badiou ends on a note of utopic joy for philosophy. Good for him. He’s started a school, perhaps. But in service of truth, he’s hammered in a procedure that suspends us in a being-in-situation that separates us from the void. If you take Badiou to his supreme conclusion, I think we end up floating in a null space, one in which we end up simply doing what we do because there’s no reason not to.

In that sense, he is right, he has not created any truth at all. He has only shown his the emptiness of nominalism as philosophy, in a way, highlighting how all is axiom of choice, made all the more jarring as it is layered upon the formalism that is set theory.

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The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson

October 18, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (American Presidency)The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson by Vaughn Davis Bornet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While Lyndon Johnson was only president for 5 years he did a great many things–using his experience as a senator to pass more legislation than one might have thought would be possible.

Bornet paint a picture of Johnson as being an aggressive, ambitious determined man whose idealism drove him as president to use the government as a tool for social change…furthermore Kennedy’s death and Johnson’s desire to uphold the legacy of Kennedy (along with his landslide reelection as president) most likely contributed to his desire to effect change immediately. His heavy-handed policies, “Gun and Butter” which focused on internal problems like poverty and civil rights and healthcare and his external problems like Vietnam strained the US economy and social fabric. While the 60s were already set up to be a tumultuous time, Johnson’s radical widesweeping changes eventually backfired on him, as the US wasn’t ready for such change. As Bornet points out, much of the white middle class felt left behind and threatened (their interests ignored) as Johnson concentrated on the poor and non-whites. This head to two things, 1) the election of Nixon and a changing of the administration and legislation from Democrat to Republican and 2) economic problems in the 70s as government spending reeled out of control to fund these new programs (without increased taxation).

So while Johnson did great things because of his experience and skill, he failed on many fronts. The first was that he didn’t communicate to the American public that Vietnam was going to be a long and hard fight. He relied too much on historic precedents where American soldiers in foreign lands win wars (even though there is often a military presence for much longer after the fighting). So in that sense, he set himself up for problems when the reality of Vietnam popped up. The second failure it seems, is that Johnson didn’t understand the national scene. He defunded the Democratic leadership and shuffled unwanted people from the White House and government into positions within the party, leaving a void in funding and planning. This presented much last minute scrambling come the election of 1968.

In some ways, this book, in its current edition, is already outdated, as recently news of Nixon’s backhanded dealings in Vietnam as a candidate for presidency messed up Johnson’s negotiations for peace has become public. Johnson also seems to have bumbled Humphrey’s candidacy at times, which seemed like an incomplete picture which Bornet didn’t really explain too well. He kind of didn’t really talk about the vice-presidency much either.

Over all, this book is concise and well written. At times I wasn’t sure where Bornet was going, but history is often less a coherency than it is a list of events that are chained together through some arbitrary time period or effective event. Bornet paints a picture of Johnson as a man really who stepped up to the plate when Kennedy was unexpectedly assassinated. Johnson did the best he could and was quick to capitalize on change. There were some evident character flaws, but Bornet sides with Johnson as an idealizing hard working man, one who didn’t run for a second term for health reasons but nonetheless sought to leave the country a better place than he left it.

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Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

October 1, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other LanguagesThrough the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting and easy to read (clear book) with lots of examples. Deutscher definitely loves language.

He asks the question, how does language relate to experience? Though specific examples, like color, deixis and gender, he attempts to eek out an answer. While historically we’ve assumed language, or at least well formed language, accurately reflects experience, the conclusion of Deutscher’s book shows us somewhat reservedly, that language in fact shapes our experience in very subtle ways. He isn’t saying that language closes off the door for us to abstract concepts, but he does say that language through its internal syntax, or connotations does force us to reveal specific information and suggest certain meanings to us before hand.

This book isn’t too deep, but I did enjoy its anecdotes, well researched information and clear writing. What Deutscher is basically saying however, is that language creates its own reality, as a subtle, filter that then can be used to create whatever concepts we wish to express. He is correct in pointing out, through the example of Orwell’s 1984, that the absence of certain words doesn’t mean a lack of one’s ability to conceive them. Although with the example of British researchers on color and the Guugu Yimithirr about English speakers regarding directions, that speakers generally attribute a lack of word conception as absolutely correlative of another speaker’s inability to convey the same information. An abstraction of this, Deutscher does write can be aptly summed:

According to the dominant view among linguists and cognitive scientists today, the influence of language on thought can be considered significant only if it bears on genuine reasoning–if, for instance, one language can be shown to prevent its speakers from solving a logical problem that is easily solved by speakers of another language. Since no evidence for such constraining influence on logical reasoning has ever been presented, this necessarily means–or so the argument goes–that any remaining effects of language are insignificant and that fundamentally we all think in the same way.

But it is too easy to exaggerate the importance of logical reasoning in our lives. Such an overestimation may be natural enough for those reared on a diet of analytical philosophy, where thought is practically equated with logic and any other mental processes are considered beneath notice. But this view does not correspond with the rather modest role of logical thinking in our actual experience of life. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of abstract deductive reasoning, compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse, or practical skill? How often have you spent your day solving logical conundrums, compared with wondering where you left your socks? Or trying to remember where your car is in a multilevel parking lot? How many commercials try to appeal to us through logical syllogisms, compared with those that play on colors, associations, allusions? And finally how many wars have been fought over disagreements in set theory?

The influence of the mother tongue that has been demonstrated empirically is felt in areas of thought such as memory, perception, and associations or in practical skills such as orientation. And in our actual experience of life, such areas are no less important than the capacity for abstract reasoning, probably more so.

With this Deutscher comes to the point of the book, and its exploration. While he is simply reciting other examples, theories, other people’s studies, he provides the connective tissue to preform what is essentially a philosophical argument, one that is predicated on a higher sophistication in how we should all deal with one another in our daily lives. This argument isn’t completely overpowering in his book, as the meat of his book is also very interesting. But it is nonetheless a good reason to have written (or to read) it.

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Recent Developments In Autism Research

October 1, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Recent Developments In Autism ResearchRecent Developments In Autism Research by Manuel F. Casanova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting collection of essays detailing the state of austism research. This book was published in 2005. I’m not a scientist or a researcher, but I did notice a few interesting things. Because austism is defined by phenomenon, it is difficult to define biologically, as there are many complex effects (through nuture or nature) that create the conditions for austist’s inability to process information like neurotypicals. This book goes a long way in attempting to figure out what the etiology is… I won’t repeat much of the biology talk, but I did find some interesting correlations in how austism is defined and how the various essays speculate on particular abnormalities in neuron or minicolumn or cerebral structures behave (as scanned in EEG or various other ways). Basically because austism is defined through in ability to extend particular behavior into generalities of context, what is known as weak coherency (or the maintenance of social context) researches speculate that weak neurological processes or abnormally formed structures contribute to a lack of larger functioning within the brain. This is to say that while parts of the brain can work well separately, in many austists, these same parts can’t work together as well as a neurotypical’s can.

Now, I have read some speculative literature however, that argues that austists have a more general functioning and it is the neurotypicals reliance on certain hardwired protocols that limit their ability to generalize contexts, but once one takes out a basis for how to measure deviance, one loses the ability to speak of coherency whatsoever. Being social creatures, we need to form group coherency, and while different social groups form coherency differently, the inability to form a strong coherency whatsoever between individuals does make for problems in social behavior. This is defined as austism.

What makes austism studies so interesting is that its abnormalities in functioning reveal to us outlier examples of how our own mind/brains work. What is missing in this austism research book, I thought, was further examples of how the diagnosises defined and cohered what austism is. Certainly the definition has changed over time, and such definitions would impact the study. After all, all this scientific research is an attempt to find a way to determine how it some humans cannot cohere neurotypical social and cognitive extensions… it would be interesting, although perhaps beyond this work to discuss what normal actually is.

Anyway, an interesting read as scientists and researches attempt to find patterns in one area (social behavior and discourse coherency) and correlate it to patterns in another (in this case, brain functioning) or genotypical expression.

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Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition

September 29, 2014 / posted in reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and CognitionKant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Umberto Eco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Umberto Eco starts off in the first chapter with asking why is there something instead of nothing? Although he references much philosophy in this first go around, this is just a way for him to get to a more interesting question (he says that the fact that we can ask this question isn’t to question Being itself, but to question common sense… that Being is the initial condition for common sense). So let’s get to what he really wants to ask. Eco is really asking, how can we know that something is what it is and not something else.

As a semiotician, he is interesting in understanding why we get what we do, and how we come to learn about new things. This is not an easy task at all. While he strings together the disparate discourses of philosophy, piecean semiotics, linguistics, psychology and cognition in a complex and fascinating way, he eventually comes to hinge his articulation on the figure of the sign as a mediating device. He distinguishes between internal and shared external meanings, and then extended intensive “expert” modeling. What makes Eco so impressive isn’t the vast range at which he runs, he also writes clearly and cleverly, demonstrating that a specific formulation of how to get from A to B can have a multitude of pathways, some of them contradictory but all consistent in their own logic.

This can wrap around itself however, as the articulation of new knowledge itself requires the continual deferral of old knowledge in the place of new knowledge. But knowledge isn’t all that he is after; because knowledge is only the expression of an internal understanding. This is to say that he also creates new understanding in order to supply understanding to understanding itself! So in a very reductive way, he can’t fully explain understanding except so much as to describe a possible path. If we accept it internally, then we can say that we understand it. If we reject it, we would claim it nonsensical or that we can’t understand it. While I am getting a little astray from Eco’s formulation, it is safe to say that Eco is best interested in trying to gasp the steps in formulation to get at any difference in deployment of any aspect of formulation.

In a way, I wish Eco had come up with a better conclusion. He did say what he wanted to say, but the crux of his discussion comes to us when we understand that the act of naming a difference is the creation of that spectrum. Between two differences, or between many discourses that may not connect (that he connects) if we are able to articulate a difference between them, then that difference appears. The difference between them is negligible, shrinking to nothing. If we however, do detect a difference then we can speak of it sideways, and that itself is a metaphor.

I think Eco should have encountered the work of Paul Ricoeur. It would have been interesting to see a conjunction between the two of them. Ricoeur is interested in the same things; although as a philosopher of language, a rhetorician, he approaches the formulation from a position of narrative… the root of which is metaphor. The connection of two unlike things is what metaphor is; and that generic connection can be what creates narrative, though the excuse of temporal displacement in which multiple events are strung together as one long “thing”, a string of causation that is complete only if it has all its parts.

But that may be a sideline. Eco eventually ends up in the position of generic objects, which gives us back to semiotics and signs. From there, he utilizes generic objects to set up identity and knowledge. For this, he could connect to Alain Badiou’s work in set theory, with the formulation of “naked” signs that are generic events… with their indiscernible aspect that allow them to be applied multiple times, anywhere without losing their connection to Truth. Once we get to this point, though we are only talking about icons, which are representations in themselves, without actuality. Their difference, their next step “down” is the hypoicon, which names the immediate first object, without representation but only the sensory form itself, which leaves us in limbo.

Perhaps this is why Eco did not write a conclusion. He had none. He could only leave us to our imagination as to how to connect the two. With the visual pun “Mexican on a bicycle” he leaves us to ponder the ambiguity of experience; that contextual changes or hypoiconic changes although different in type leads us with completely different understandings. While he wants to connect semiotics to philosophy (as an anterior buffering) and semiotics to cognition (as an internal marker of order, to relate sense datum to signs) he only at best manages a description. Never can we understand that connection without first naming it. And never can we name it without forcing it to become something other than what it might be otherwise, a way of plugging parts together. Not an easy task by any means for anyone to write about, and Eco does a great job of hammering through what could have been far much denser text.

I suppose this is what we get for being creatures of language. Language lets us model, but it only lets us model generics. When we subtract particularities from the object we get the generic, but adding those particularities back gets us identities, singletons which are unique and yet a different object. Mysterious that we can extract type from tokens and then speak only in types when talking about tokens. I forget where he says it, but we speak in generics even if we mean individual singletons. This is very much a root of racism, or an issue with categorization of how we can know anything, and the limits of what we know can be. And yet, often without really knowing, we are still able to speak and negotiate and navigate to come to new understandings, often without having to completely reconstruct the language we use at all.

This ability is very much a kind of miracle. I suppose then it is best that we can’t find that missing piece that lets us connect the old to new, or create new from old. Lest if we did find it, and examine it, we would end up losing our very ability to create new narratives, formulate new metaphors and ultimately give rise to new words. We would in fact, lose the ability to create new history.

This is very much the wonder I wish to look at, and Eco gives us a great if somewhat long (yet relatively simply written) narrative for which to guide us about pondering this miracle. 5 stars!

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Sexuality & Space

September 23, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Sexuality & SpaceSexuality & Space by Jennifer Bloomer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pretty good collection of essays, even if it was a bit odd. Any title that puts space and sexuality together though, has got to be a little far reaching. Ultimately the themes come out pretty clearly, that space and our ability to create spaces (architectural, inside/outside, domestic) reflect our inhabited notions of sexual identity and sexuality together… This is pretty true. In our postwar American lifestyle that past may be somewhat muted, but it certainly was(is) a consideration still in how we designate what people are for and how we functionally inhabit different positions without a larger social hierarchy… whose mobilization is a narrative of gender roles and displaced positions.

There is nothing more than these positions; the displacement is the position. There is no higher order. And while this level of abstraction is difficult to explain at times, since explanation is often reductive to the next level down, there is no deferral to any other level, as this is the base level. In this sense, many of these essays resort to naming or connecting novel tropes together, creating quasi-figures that haunt the edges of our comprehension of social order… in order words, the authors are often forced into metaphoric language in order to better express the connections that are brought together in their analysis. When this happens, as with examinations of post-modern urban landscapes or musicology, there runs a risk that the reader may encounter a sublime object in the examination of such a diverse heterology. What I mean is that often such an examination runs the risk of collapsing into a trope to stand-in for the argument. Because this is a collection of essays however, and none of the essayists collaborated to share a theoretical angle or system, we don’t often have that collapse. But what is spectacular about these essays is that they run very close to that edge, standing at a position very close at times, to nonsense, all the while creating perfect sense out of that contortion.

Many of these essays are very good. I don’t want to reduce this review into a description of these essays, but in the connection of sexuality and space, we see at times, the introduction of gaze and looking as a figure that denominates both sexuality as an appraisal and distance — both as a mode of determination and control. We also see how viewing itself, through television, windows, and textual synthesis of video and images of architecture differentiate the contours of inside/outside, to define space as it were. We also have the social expression of space, be it an aesthetics of households or aesthetics of architecture, or art and photography as expressive of cityspaces or identity. Either way, this is an inspiring collection of essays all of which really deal with the two themes of the title. Since this is a collection of essays though, I’ll stop. But it would have been fun if somehow a centralized connection was to be made, a concrete metaphor to stand in for both sexuality and space could have been formed. But I suppose if that’s the case, you would need a monumentous figure like Luce Irigaray to do it.

Just the same though, a good read.

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