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Blonde

September 23, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

BlondeBlonde by Joyce Carol Oates
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had no idea what I was in for when I went to read this. Yes fictionalized.

The license Oates has given herself is less the woman who was Norma Jean Baker but more the image of Marilyn Monroe as an icon of the sexualized infant-girl-woman: a figure who is innocent (even in sex), needs love, protection…daddy… and the challenge inherent in humanizing such an image into a flesh and blood woman. Here we have the highest and most abstract of reversals, a woman with feelings trying to be her image, not be her image, and yet in her sometime attempts to escape it and her sometime attempts to fulfill that role, in both vectors she can’t escape. Marilyn only manages to fulfill that role even more completely. The rumors, the insinuations, the mask that she was hidden in — these are the spaces that Joyce attempts to write through, to fill the gap between an actual person and the blind eye society turned to her as a person, and instead forced upon her. At times, I thought this worked out well, but given the lengthiness of the novel and the relative consistency of writing (which I suppose is a display of Oates’s magnificent talent more than anything else) I eventually tired of it…if anything as the story progressed into deeper complexity, if anything, the language itself (I feel) should have reflected that greater depth…if only to build tension in what was already complex tension. I did appreciate, after some thought, that the space between the woman and the image was psychobabble, a void of unwriteable depth, given one’s inability to structure that space coherently…and that space was mainly where Oates meant to dwell the longest. As a result of that impossible stay, much of the other “plot” writing she did do had to rely on structural description of who various characters were, often standing slightly outside Marilyn’s awareness, and yet informing her awareness all the same. If anything, this is a narrator that is not omnipresent but a kind of hoovering Oort cloud that provides the context for the reader to understand what’s going on, while also designating the limit to Marilyn’s psychic space.

Ironically, the designation of this inner space surrounding the unknown core of Marilyn’s actual personal mental space takes the place of Marilyn’s actual mental space as Oates can never really designate an internal limit, as far as where the narration can go…although you can see that having designated an internal limit of real Norma Jean, which is untouchable, that limit shrinks by itself to a position of being outside the narration completely. Thus, Marilyn in this book ends up as a completely neurotic, unstable woman completely haunted by the external factors that govern her image, even while the personal forces that govern her past (outside of Hollywood) only served as an unstable and insufficient bulwark for her to cling to in the construction of a personal identity. Thus, Marilyn’s life spirals out of control as her Hollywood image provides her with limitless validation, an image that accumulates lust, jealousy, anger and spite, but never translates into any actual personal validation in the form of security, money or stable personal relationships. Perhaps that’s about as good an analysis as one can get.

When I read this book I didn’t know anything about Marilyn Monroe. But the paradox of being what other people want while trying to be yourself is most definitely a tenuous position… and Oates manages to capture the complex, painful whirlwind of being caught up in a patriarchal machine that wants one for a very limited surface area all the while discarding any other depth that desired formation unique to an individual subjectivity.

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The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s

September 19, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840sThe Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s by Immanuel Wallerstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Once again, Wallerstein looks at great detail into a topic as complex as world systems analysis. This time, he focuses on a big question: What was the French Revolution and what did it do?

His analysis is largely historical, and from, as always, an impressive number of sources. When reading this book though, while the first chapter is devoted to further developing and answering the question, I think this book is a little weaker than its previous two. In part, because Wallerstein answers his question in the first chapter: The French Revolution did not spark capitalism, but was a continuation of it — and essentially did not provide a break in the logic of the world system, only a further point of it… so consequently the rest of the book examines how this time period developed and then exceeded the Napoleonic wars without much interruption. For sure, the French Revolution was a major event. It did give pause to all the actors who then perhaps, changed policy or strategy in order to account for it. But the world was already run by economic consideration, so really, business as usual.

Wallerstein instead locates the French Revolution as the last spasm of the French in their fight against the developing British Hegemony. As always, Wallerstein looks at economic basis and reads how policy responds to attempt to capitalize on this material basis, and whether or not these policies had its intended effect.

What I found really interesting was how freedom and ideology were instead utilized as a narrative to rally an unhappy people — especially in the Americas in part with the British colonies (most of which did not join the American Revolution) and also with the Spanish colonies, whose racial complexity (300 years of interbreeding gave rise to a mixed race that was part of the economic and social fabric) told a completely different story, giving rise to a different response. In part, the liberation of the Americas as political and economic units reflected the level of their economic development and inherent quasi-independence as individual actors in the world economy. Independence then, comes politically because it the opportunity presents itself as Europe goes through the Napoleonic war to reshuffle her political structure to “catch up” with its economic reality. What I would have liked Wallerstein to write more on, was how the rise of nationalism in Europe, something which happened with the French reshuffling, could be accounted for when people identify with their body-politic as an economic realization. Do people become nationalistic because they realize they need to be politically responsible for their economic wealth? I think this is the answer he would give. Reading between the lines it seems so, but if he had said it directly, then that would have been nice.

On the other hand, political instability follows a shifting of economic basis, as with the case of West Africa, China, India, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Now Russia went voluntarily, with that intention, it seems, so that’s a little different but with each other, their inclusions into the world economy were first marked by a destablization of their economic power base, a reshuffling of economic power into a new rising class, and then the dissolution of their major political unity as this new rising class pursued their own agendas rather than keeping social stability. India was particularly interesting as the British eventually tried to keep the country together in order to ensure profitable trade… this did not prove fruitful for them, as the cost was too great, except in keeping India under their control as a route to China which was more profitable.

Within all this, I see the rise of the bourgeois class, with their identity and social ambitions… their taste for exotic foods, goods, and status helped enslave entire foreign populations, and restructured the entire world to learn to acquire the same taste for luxury items… Wallerstein doesn’t look to this as a driving force, at least he doesn’t really mention this in this book. Instead, he concentrates on the economic exploit and the changing political landscape as an attempt to solidify lines of trade, political dominance and military exercise in the name of the former two. If anything, over the last three books of his, he has been convincing me that economics — access to resources — remains the primary motive for individuals and populations. That our political well being and agendas are not due to ideology (it can be for individuals) but it is due in greater part, for our desire to secure wealth for ourselves (or with the masses, at least enough to maintain an accustomed lifestyle).

Seen in this way, the French Revolution like many other revolutions, as Wallerstein points out, was mainly the very poor rising up, caught in the ideology and stirrings of a merchant class that is unhappy with how the ruling class has managed their interests… and then the merchant class taking command of the rising masses (only because they want to direct its growth to secure their own stability, rather than seeing their own place in society like-wise overturned) and then a finally, the installation of conservative governance, or at least a government somewhat conservative, to maintain at least enough of the power structure so as to secure some economic status quo so that resource and ownership are not taken away from the wealth that be. It is in this way that many Latin-America countries have their “revolutions” (that those that benefit most from the existing order would see a revolution that continues to benefit their order), revolutions where the existing economic infrastructure remains the same.

I hang back from giving him 5 stars mainly because I would have liked to see some examination of ideology in this view… something touched upon but not fully developed… if anything a strong view of ideology from an economic position would be to claim that all ideology is propaganda, meant to direct the masses either to overthrowing the ruling class or maintaining some economic basis for those who already have economic power… a weak view of ideology is that it does reflect some new ideas about the role of people, to legitimatize the freedoms that people can gain through mass political action. While this is not Wallersteins thesis in this book, his introduction to his world systems analysis promises a deeper view of world capitalist systems in order to also account for ideology… something which is largely takes a backseat in this book to the actual moves of economic realities… that is to say, save for questioning the role of the French Revolution in the rise of capitalism.

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Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods

September 19, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Dusty!: Queen of the PostmodsDusty!: Queen of the Postmods by Annie J. Randall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not a biography, this book is both about Dusty Springfield the singer, the business woman as much as it is an examination of what other people thought of her. In fact, as Randall points out, it’s impossible to discern who Dusty Springfield is because even interviewing people about her reveals that the interviewees were also influenced by the discourse surrounding her.

What Randall teases out is that Dusty Springfield enters into the music industry in the 60s as her own person, against the patriarchial system of white males writing about music (that even if you weren’t white male writing about music, the point of view of the industry still takes those values to be neutral values to have). Dusty’s ability to do this muscially, breaking genre boundaries, is also mirrored in her persona onstage and “behind the scenes” in the music industry. As much as she wanted to be private about her private life, this absence of personal data spun the rumor mill, exaggerating the data that was already there, to create an onstage persona that was both larger than life and allowed people to connect to her through her music and performances. In creating a “camp” identity for herself both with soul music and adopted operatic melodrama gestures, Dusty figures, in a big way, as the first postmodern performer, taking cliches from other areas and embodying them as her own just as gay men may “do dusty” to dress as her and sing as her. I thought Randall’s teasing out of this kind formed object of identity in discourse was particularly interesting, although she didn’t need to split this last point until the end.

I am not as familiar with Dusty Springfield as some others might be; she could have opened with a chapter on Dusty’s life. All in all, I think Randall hits her mark in examining the discourse of Dusty through this book… even though I think she could have introduced some more theory background, which was only grazed lightly (such as Judith Butler’s idea of sexuality as performance, something apparent to Randall, as Dusty did much preforming.)… but if Randall wanted to hit a larger audience, (which may be why she went lighter on some theory aspects) I think she could have presented a strong biography, with a narrative hook.

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After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

September 17, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of ContingencyAfter Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I haven’t read any clearer reading of the philosophical tradition in a while, and that’s saying quite a bit. While Meillassoux is mostly interested in the philosophical tradition, and its constraints (extending it somewhat to religion and science) he is able to dance within that tight framework and come up with a clear summation of the larger picture.

Many thinkers tend to fight in the nitty-gritty, and that’s most likely because in the process of spending so much time learning what the “greats” have said, they become invested themselves. And because academia encourages people to disagree with one another. How else could they jockey for position?

I agree with most of the comments around; that Meillassoux has managed to say something different. And how he says is intensely fascinating. He sums up the aesthetic goals of so many familiar names: Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Leibniz in so many terms. He brings us around to Badiou and demonstrates in slightly different terms, Badiou’s genius and how that enables us to begin to formulate a new beginning, one that does not rely on Being or totalization in order to guarantee meaning. He leaves us then with a new project, one in which to find a new totem to anchor as the absolute reference, one that isn’t Kant’s old hat.

While I find his book and direction exhilarating, and agree with his reading (especially how he puts many terms) I do believe that there are other ways to put the pieces.

Here is another conception of philosophy: Philosophy isn’t so much about truth as it is about managing complexity. Much of the time you do need to have some way of organizing discourse so as to be able to relate to one another. This much is certainly how people interact with one another or how discourses are able to connect. Meillassoux ultimately wants us to find an anchor as to how to arrange understanding… the anchor he finds for us is to match whatever mathematics does, which in itself is very intriguing. I suppose math is a safer bet for legitimacy than any of the traditional absolutes to which philosophy has in the past adhered. The last pages of his book is basically an outline of a non-metaphysical but speculative absolute based off facticity should look like. I’d like to find out how this kind of speculation works too. But I think Meillassoux goes a little too far in his search for Truth and tosses some of the baby out with the bathwater because in a way, he takes too much for granted even though in another way, he takes nothing for granted.

I don’t believe that consciousness or causation or non-contradiction are necessary even if I find that the connection of the parts is what is most interesting as to what meaning is. In a way, perhaps that still makes me a correlationist in Meillassoux’s book… because I don’t adhere to the absoluteness as being external to our experience…that Meillassoux so wishes to determine. Yet if any axiometric is available — as Meillassoux admits — then why facticity? Why science? Certainly not the form of science! Science will not permit the asking of questions it cannot answer, because that is bad science. So he must be talking about the content science produces and in what way this kind of dia-chronicity should be found to be meaningful or not…perhaps as meaningfulness can be modifications of how we understand ourselves today, rather than as positions to be justified by where we are now, that reversal of a reversal he calls the counter-revolution of Ptolemy’s revenge. It sounds good to speak by naming “where we are” in this way, but then again, I am not so sure we even yet know where we are now. In this way then, I think I don’t really even show up on his radar because he takes the productivity of meaning in its mechanics to be beyond question, at least in this inquiry.

Meillassoux also didn’t talk about certain other positions contemporary philosophers have taken either. I’d be interested in hearing him on that regard.

All the same this is a highly charged book. It requires a familiarity with the tradition, and a willingness to consider thoughts from another angle, a difficulty many of us have if we are not able to distill this vast amount of information into its more fundamental terms.

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The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

September 17, 2014 / posted in rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews / No Comments

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational WorldThe Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like this kind of book. It provides much to think about, and much of it is interesting. One thing that is a problem with any kind of modeling though, is that you have to draw borders around whatever you’re talking about. You have to decide at what point you’ll stop looking. Any easy example: Harford claims that the industrial revolution was, in a sense, started by James II’s greed. In a way, yes, you can draw that line. But you could also claim it was the greed of the rich merchant parlimentary class. Or it was the greed of William of Orange. See, it’s all rational.

But what’s rational depends on maximizing utility, and while money is the only objective way to measure that, you ultimately have to translate everything into money in order to weigh it. How much is love worth? Well, given a context, (all other things being equal), and given a large enough group you can measure it how much people value it, in terms of dollars and cents. So in an abstract, non-applied economic theory what we are really looking at is how much people value their values, whatever those values happen to be.

But going back to the first paragraph, you can always draw a line in narrative between events and claim causal connections. I suppose I could talk more about William of Orange’s upbringing perhaps, or James II’s upbringing, or the conditions for merchants to get wealthy enough for governments to borrow from them. In a way, you can make life rational if you narrow the constituent claims enough for only certain relationships to be highlighted. Drawing straight lines, as it were, in a narrative (all events chained through time are basically narratives) so in that sense, you might want to consider some of this with a grain of salt. Or you can suspend some disbelief and be blown away by these studies.

I rather found his research and his terse concise writing to make a pretty entertaining read. We do believe things happen for a reason because we clear the board of much of the possible nonsense (that NYC has many single women because most of those women have a certain undesirable haircolor, or that the % of people with a Brooklyn accent tend to be single) and in that way, leave only a few recognizeable pieces. From there, we see things happening, and so we believe that if things change there has to be a material change in their condition for things to change, otherwise things would stay the same.

The same here, is the thought that you wouldn’t have any narration at all. But of course we have events, having events happen is a matter of what happens! So you have to pose a question, but pose it in a way that is answerable with the pieces on the board.

But that’s systems thinking, and that’s what science does. We notice a pattern and apply a pattern and if it fits we think we have understanding. We can’t deal with the complete chaotic reality, so we have to narrow it down. In the process of narrowing it down we have to end up with pieces, so we already dropped quite a few of the data bits out. (Can we measure how much neighbors trust each other in terms of race? Can we do so with house values? Maybe, or maybe not.)

In a way this book is really about how our modeling as humans (how we evaluate the world) seems to make sense to us, but proves to be inadequate to the task (see purple workers) because we have incomplete information. So economics in this way is about how our modeling as humans is inadequate because we have incomplete information as individuals…but then economics itself is nothing but modeling under a specific constraint. Now doubt some of what he says seems to really apply, such as bosses or group bills at the dinner table, but maybe that’s because this kind of thing is what economics was designed to do, and that’s how people make decisions when there are clear markers — because they model them in terms of money (we all know how much a dollar is worth to us). But applying it to things outside of money? Is chopping wood during pre-historic times worth a dollar amount? I have no idea if what he says is correct or not. Most likely, it’s somewhat or mostly correct, but then again, I, like everyone else, have incomplete information. No one has the total picture… probably because that picture is impossible to have.

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Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity

September 11, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human IdentityMeeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity by Tom Crompton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although quite short, this book tackles the effectiveness of basic environmental issues from a psychology perspective. The idea is simply stated in the title. How people construct their extended intersubjective selves determines their attitudes towards the environment. Further on, calling awareness to their coping mechanisms best allows activists to determine approaches that won’t scare people away, or cause them to invoke their defense mechanisms, leading to further pursuit of pleasure which will degrade the environment.

I thought this book was clearly written. Considering the depth of this topic and the brevity of the book, it was a joy to read. The clinical experiments cited were appropriate, although I would have liked more data on alternate approaches and their effectiveness.

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Venn Diagrams

September 9, 2014 / posted in dialectics, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Wrote an article on Venn Diagrams.

Published here: http://entropymag.org/venn-diagrams/

The modernist project extends itself from Descartes’ aesthetic, to build from Truths, necessary and universal. But what is a universal? Being themselves, universals must necessarily also be a priori. For something that is a priori is a predicate that is its own subject. Such a relationship is by definition necessary because subtracting the predicate dissolves the subject. Such a relationship is also universal because no matter what you add to a universal, the universal is still primarily itself, in-itself. What is also a feature of universality is that such a subject will always give rise to itself. Like reason, universals form their own reason, their own ground, and their own existence…

Difference and Repetition

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Difference and RepetitionDifference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book. I think the first time, I found the first two chapters mind blowing, but the rest of the book mostly escaped me.

This time around, the other chapters seem even more amazing then the first two.

What’s difficult about reading this kind of Deleuze is that he really does expect you to be familiar with the other philosophers he would throw at you. And yet we all understand that many of these philosophers wrote and thought within certain, perhaps imcompossible aesthetics. Deleuze pulls out these aesthetics and combines them together to show how they line up and how they differentiate. This makes his writing difficult because while he is writing philosophy he is also writing philosophy about philosophy. The amount of complexity that arises quickly can get out of hand.

What Deleuze wants to do, and what makes this book so great, is that he tackles the implicit aesthetic of the philosophical tradition itself. He is highly critical as to how we understand the particular reference points of philosophy as they are presented. As so many have said yes, Deleuze turns Plato on his head here. Deleuze is taking the concept of identity as not being the primary mode of philosophy but instead takes difference itself. One way to get to this is to understand a tri-part system of difference, where we first have difference which may not even exist, we have differentiation which is what Badiou calls being-as-countable and we have differenciation which is best understood as Being, or at least the unitary wrapping of Oneness itself.

This concept of the one, that for Deleuze there is many and there is sometimes One, is best exemplified by the eternal return. The form of what returns is always One but it is the same one even if it is different… this is to take chaos itself as affirmation.

Which really is the main push here. Deleuze wants to get away from the boring dialectic identity that envelops any kind of dialectical analysis using Not. He wants to get away from the boring hypostasis of representationalism; that deferral of meaning implicit in more traditional forms of thought that create structure but only to wrap its meaning making “structureness” within the exteriority of ontology metaphysics of presence. Deleuze does this by looking at the various contingencies themselves, localized as difference and building from the formality of difference so that we can begin to get at how the force of ideas carry through, how the creation of the content expressed in the general idea can arise from contingency itself… so that we don’t always have to appeal to some kind of fictitious absoluteness to ground identity or make ground an expression of the identity of One. We can understand each difference on its own, as its own originary process. This loses for us the possibility of totality itself, but not necessarily… Deleuze seems to go so far as to want to explain everything in terms of itself but he stops short in the asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible. We don’t need to define a noumenomenal world of Not to buffer our own universality. In this sense, Deleuze is fine with contradiction and over-coding. We see here in this post-structuralism the loss of the absolute in order to have a world… that the most concise referent in discourse isn’t the absolute One, which makes it a boring discourse of enforcing the one everywhere — rather the most concise referent is the world itself, which not only includes the possible but also the impossible.

This advances Deleuze to the point of pure contemplation. He over turns the aesthetic controls on philosophy so as to free thought up for its own interplay rather than using it as a point of control of what we are allowed to think or not think. I repeat. The lack of explication and wrapping of thought (as what makes it asymmetrical) is a force on its own, its own formalism. And though he appeals to other discourses, such as math and science to exemplify these structures, their appearance is seemingly uncorrelated. How can he justify this? The normal aesthetic of philosophy, as we are so familiar with it, would be of comfort as it repeats what we already understand. It makes sense through its repetition of formality. But this new point: the argument can only be its own justification. Determination is its own difference. For that reason, there are points at which Deleuze approaches nonsense. For in talking about the creation of meaning, we can only appeal to mechanisms that are foreign to meaning. Said again, Deleuze opens the door, to let us think the impossible. It is this very edge of sense that Deleuze would have us stand, at the font of the thinkable itself.

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Time and Narrative, Volume 1

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Time and Narrative, Volume 1Time and Narrative, Volume 1 by Paul Ricoeur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While a brilliant work, I found the layout of his work troubling. Ricoeur is definitely able to tease out minute difference between ideas, explicate authors who may not speak directly to one another, and relate them to the larger thesis as a whole. But I found his structure to be troubling as the work is split into two sections, which seem only related via the concepts of time and narrative… (even if this is a multiple volume work, he should outline a better road map.)

Really, these two concepts do not coexist at the same level. When he first starts, Ricoeur seems to be willing to just talk about time and narrative as general ideas. His use of Aristotle and Augustine were quite inspired. Like a radio, he tuned to the concept of narrative so as to highlight how time was used as an excuse to connect disparate things. His citing of narrative and metaphor as methods to justify understanding (the function of connecting two different things) was remarkable. From that point on, he could have spoke at length about anything he liked; after all what analysis, discursive or philosophy was not made to achieve understanding? But then, he turned to history as narrative.

History was an interesting maneuver as that field encompasses both time and narrative. Like his examination in the first part, he is able to use narrative as a high level organizational filter to scrub history so as to show how history is less about time than it is about narrative organization. I actually don’t have much to add, except that chapter 5 felt like the weakest part of the book. At all times Ricoeur’s analytical ability, and the range of his study was astounding and a little overwhelming. Still, at parts, he seems to meander, seems draw conclusions that feel a unclear as far as where he wants to go. This could be an issue with how he draws his analysis…often what he says and who he is quoting feels muddled. I am not complaining that I wanted less material. I don’t mind that he rag picks among different thinkers to support what he wants to say or that he mixes them together. I would have liked a little more structure to highlight what he wants us to take away.

As it is, the conclusion of second part didn’t add back to the first. He really only talks about history and time at the end of his conclusion, instead of wrapping back to Augustine and Aristotle. Perhaps this conclusion was meant to only be a conclusion for second part, not for the entire work.

At all points though, Ricoeur is eager to show us how narrative (and history) are forms of creating knowledge. We use time as an excuse to order objects of narrative (be it cultural, historical, social or otherwise). These different objects of narratives are fields of discourse that we use to ordain a master order to achieve unity in a concept, for example, the history of the Mediterranean or the history of Victorian England. The construction of these high level unities require the meshing of first and second order objects, which attain a dual status; their gap between what we see them and how they belonged to a time and place we have no access to, except through indirect semiotic objects. Their connection and quasi-status as objects was weaved through what Ricoeur calls historic intentionality… this intentionality not only doubles the objects in study they also create the supra-object of study, a unity whose grasp we take to be synonymous with understanding.

I think Ricoeur’s greater thesis seeks to explicate the what human understanding is, and so an analysis of history as narrative still lacks some higher level grasp on what history is as a totality as he also in the first part, is mired in the mechanics of emplotment and how the concept of time is the ground we use to bind temporal objects as greater unities (like narrative that we call justice). Beyond the immanent mechanisms of how these parts are ordered, how they work aesthetically, Ricoeur does not speak too much about the power of narrative or understanding… for example the role of history in greater society. We see that history is one kind of narrative that links other narratives through causal singular imputation rather than generic law (as with physics), but are there other orders that are not narrative? Is all understanding narrative? I think Ricoeur says yes. But he doesn’t go in this direction yet; he’s still talking about the narrative immanence, using the concept of narrative to demonstrate its essentiality in constructing temporal unity. Perhaps he will cover this along with other kinds of narratives in his second volume.

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The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral MindThe Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What’s particularly hard to swallow about this book is that Jaynes goes far to argue for undermining not only how we know ourselves but also how we are to account for what we are doing. One of the basic rubrics of science and philosophy is our concept of consciousness, as a container for our individuality and our ability to comprehend/experience. To question consciousness itself in the form that we believe it comes in, in the method by which we determine ourselves is to question the very possible ordering of how we coexist today. This isn’t to say that our conception of ourselves isn’t natural, or that consciousness itself isn’t natural, but that is to say that we don’t have to live as we do or be how we are.

When one argues for the dissolution of such a basic structural artifact, it becomes terribly difficult for people to follow in how to evaluate that argument. Many of the comments around this book reflect both how clear and powerful Jaynes is in setting up his argument, but also many of the comments display a complete lack of trust in his argument because they do not see a deeper underlying appraisal of how to evaluate what he says.

Its true that in a big way, his ideas are unfalsifiable. We can’t disprove them. We can’t do EEG readings on people that were alive many generations ago. We only have textual analysises. And we can’t reproduce the results of the past either because it’s unethical or we have become so tainted with our own evaluations of consciousness that such “experimentation” would be impossible to reproduce in a pure clinical environment. In this sense, what Jayne is doing isn’t science, even if he is coming from a scientific background. What he is doing is doxa, or opinion. And science really only likes questions that it can readily answer… meaning that it only poses questions it can answer, in general, questions that do not shake things up too badly so that we lose our ability to even know if a question has or has not been answered.

What I like especially about this book is that Jayne takes us to a far away place. He throws his thesis out there, marks it as a point for us to follow. In doing so, he begs us to loosen our sense of what we take to be knowledge and consider the reality that our given ideas of ourselves limit how we even frame the things we are desirous to study. The objects of knowledge are objects created by what we think we know. But what is the proper basis for authority?

This is one of the most frightening implications of what he says. There is no proper basis. All authority is self referential. The most rigid of us (or unimaginative) would consider that he makes no sense, because sense making requires certain correlations in our thinking that are made unavailable if we are to consider what he says as being actual. His chapter in hypnosis is most telling. If we consider what he says to be true: that different hypnotic experiments parrot the ideas of what the hypnotized subjects thought was hypnosis then it frighteningly follows that our own ideas of what is true inexorably alters what we believe can be true… which means a rejection of everything which cannot follow the ideas we have to be given.

I don’t want to make a review of this book too long. I do want to point out that consciousness and language today can be studied under the rubric of cognitive linguistics. And the idea that metaphors are the basic mode of understanding does follow many contemporaneous thinkers today, even if it was less compellingly so when he wrote this book. So we seem to be catching up to him, although we will wonder about the possibility of an awareness that isn’t as discrete and individualized as the consciousness he describes being so in past humankind. Matching his idea to the contours of what we know to be history (as a series of events) isn’t proof of truth, but it does add his reasoning among everything else… including the question as to what is the proper authority of how we should know things.

For me, the key to what seems to be confusion in reading Jaynes’ work comes from the position of understanding as metaphor. As anything can be metaphorized, so can any position be created as a justified reality. This goes against science’s desire for rigor, that to know the universe means its mathematical formulation… even though mathematicians themselves may disagree as to what are ultimately valid constructs by which understanding can extend, and those extensions may be incomplete in the sense that they cannot be translatable to the daily experiential lived positions we take for granted. For example, the birth of life explained by biology does not follow our lived experience of life among the living… not only to say that while someone who maybe an interbehaviorial psychologist or a physicist may claim that their field can explain reality, it can never justify why one twin may become a psychologist and the other a strict mormon or any other ridiculously constrained situation… for such “explanations” always require endless deferral into other regimes which can then mirror the movement as an originary “cause”. We can talk about this as a discursive form of Hume’s take down of causation.

In other words, formal understanding explained without content can never justify particular contents and particular understandings even as understanding exploded into such a general paradigm may lead to any number of contingencies that we may find to be without cause. The confusion has to do with description or prescription. Is science (or any collection of relations that constitute a system) only to describe or is it to prescribe?

For Jayne, science rests wholly on the former, and for that I applaud his efforts. We may not like what we read, but if we find that we cannot take sense of it, then the failure is wholly on our part. What is so objectionable that how we conceive of ourselves today is wholly contingent on a very basic conception of how we fit in with one another? Are we so into our set ideas of social groups that we cannot accept what we call as madness as a more general position of what we call sanity as it insists on itself for-itself?

In the end though, how one reader, you or I, apprehend this work, or any other work, is a very personal question. But I find his intensity and clarity to be rare among thinkers. At the end of the day though, who knows? We might as well look into it. And if he inspires it, so all the better it must be.

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