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Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing

September 9, 2014 / posted in art, images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life WritingHélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps it was a mistake for me to read this book first, without reading much of Cixous first. The interview, while long, provided for me much interest as to what Cixous was trying to do. I didn’t much appreciate the sectioning of the conversation, but I did like the free flow. In a way, it was about what writing is for her, what she does with it and how she exceeds herself through writing.

The interview revolves around what writing is, what it does, where it arises and ultimately what it means for others, for the self, what we find in it, and how we come to be… for Cixous, writing seems to be about touching herself and others in ways that were perhaps unsaid by language… for there is much language can say but does not find voice in social reality, or reality at all… and that exploration makes writing a kind of love, to love the other in the self too. If anything, the interview’s length attests to the ground it uncovers as it runs through all the gambit of the traditional meanings and attitudes surrounding writing to uncover at its root, love and the other.

As Cixous notes, we often cannot be tempted to love, running from it more often than pursuing it…

Perhaps I should return to this after reading more of Cixous’s work, instead of just snippets, for much of this read a little too abstractly for me. I guess at my basic nature, I’m a structuralist in many ways, which is why this was so hard for me to read.

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Vegan Vampire Vaginas

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

Vegan Vampire VaginasVegan Vampire Vaginas by Wol-vriey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Books normally start off with a displacement. Not always a problem, but a displacement that is in fact something out of the normal.

This is interesting because in the bizarro genre, the idea of normalcy is what’s at stake here. Characters sometimes seem normal; that is they get freaked out by things we would get freaked out by. But other times, they seem okay with things we wouldn’t be okay with; that is they don’t get freaked out. So you can understand that for bizarro fiction, what’s at stake is often the sense of normalacy which itself isn’t normal. As readers, we bring to bizarro fiction, the normalcy which then needs to be reiterated in the book after the contradictions that are created by the displacement get resolved… the ending of course, is a non-normalacy which “feels” normal.

Wol-vriey ups the ante here by writing about the bizarro world in the bizarro genre. That is to say, this book doubles almost everything. There are levels within levels here: the bizarro world in the bizarro dimension, but also bizarro Boston vs the normal Boston. What we have is a recursion of being inherent in the bizzaro dimension, where the “platonic forms” of bizarro world appear themselves “up there” in the bizarro dimension. One way to say that the bizarro Boston is an inherently unstable world, needing explanation. So the explanation is located in the bizarro world that is intruding onto bizarro America… that like a machinic assemblage, weaves “bizarro-ness” onto bizarro America… as this bizarro world is self justifying, “without sufficient reason” so it acts as the original site of displacement for the bizarro world.

This doesn’t seem to cut the cake, though, as the ticket into this world isn’t grounded on simply being bizarro. The main character Tom, doesn’t find himself into this world without meaning… he enters this world through the use of raunchy sex and suicide… and that marks the entrance into bizarro. For bizarro is grounded on debauchery, of the sexual and the organistic. Both go together, for cannibalism, sexuality and death are wrapped in an endless cycle thanatos, “death drive”: a proposition made by late Freud to match “eros”. Libido is often thought of the capacity for human subjects to enjoy themselves sexually… but Freud exceeded his libido theory when he found thanatos as the true form of human enjoyment. Thanatos isn’t a will to death, but it is a will to endless enjoyment, often an enjoyment which imbalances the subject… that is, this drive doesn’t kill people, but it does exceed the life capacity of the organism. So that enjoyment marked in excess is results in the bizarro dimension, endless sex and the endless bloodshed, the two of which are enjoyed liberally by all in the bizarro dimension… but it doesn’t explain what bizarro is in itself.

Or does it?

Bizarro is founded on the bizarre… the freakiness that exceeds normality… such that this freakiness can define normality itself: that is, as bizarro shows us as a genre, as Wol-viery shows us, what’s most bizarre about bizarro worlds is that anything can be normal. The defamiliarization of normality is what bizarro gives back to us. Bizarro shows us how normal itself isn’t normal, that what exceeds freakiness is how normality makes what is freaky normal… it helps us recognize that the hyperreal world we live in wasn’t always normal.

So to achieve that non-normality, bizarro often positions most things, in “opposite”. The king is a child. A woman can have a dick. Eaters think eating people is normal. There’s enough in here to make you wonder. And yet, the (in)consistency of what is odd is part of what makes it normal enough… kings must be obeyed. The police are there to help you (but are often scummy because they enjoy their job too much). Penises go in vaginas (sometimes). And of course, in real life, people constrain themselves. They don’t just do what they want, or have endless fucking, or endless murder… they hold some semblance of order… so there’s a little bit of that.

But the actual plot is that the main character enjoys himself too much. He steals the economy’s enjoyment (gold) and aligns it with the excesses of bizarro (hiding it up there). If that isn’t a shame, he also has a cousin who enjoys herself in a most unorthodox way; she avoids sex in a world that is predicated on sex. It is in fact, her doubling herself (but not her cunt, as that is what ties the double to her) that allowed the main character to enter our normal world, forgetting his real bizarro nature one of excess enjoyment (sex, thievery, murder…). Her displaced cunt then, separated from her body, fought between herself and her double, but positioned in her cousin’s hand, forms the link of “excess” enjoyment, enjoyment for him (to be both man and woman) but also enjoyment of the cunt itself (beyond whatever he may want) and enjoyment of the cousin to learn her magics without sex interfering. That cunt “for-itself in-itself” holds the key to the truths of this world, as its excess enjoyment of disembodied orgasming speaks the truth of this world. Like religious sacrifice, when people give up something they value in this world to the Sacred Other to get truths, when this cunt “for-itself in-itself” is pleasured, its enjoyment of the other’s offering allows it to speak the truth of this world for the fucker…. that is to say cunts in this book, are the small other that hold the key for your own desire… but like the end, this disembodied cunt takes its place as the Big Other, the Sacred Other, after it swallows its limit, and is thus rightly worshiped as such.

I don’t want to get into too much here, as there’s plenty, but the construction of this world is constantly the embodiment of the Other, such as the menschs, the vavs, the eaters… each position constitutes a set of values for us in the real world. Gods as idols, celebrity women as needing our lifeblood to constitute their dumb continuance, humans who want to live the good life and are unapologetic in their consumerism such that they literally eat other humans…

So what is this book about? It’s about the raising of the Other, that the natural order of things in bizarro, is in terms of its excessiveness, the primary point being a disembodied cunt has the key to all the mysteries of pleasure in-itself… such that human beings have no place in this world, as we are simply “food”, as others can enjoy us more than we can them.

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Disgrace

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, universal nothing / No Comments

DisgraceDisgrace by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a well written and enchanting book. Coetzee tells a tale of the falling of the old guard. A professor in an ivory tower, one who has all he needs in his old age, materially, status-wise, and so on… Thrown out of routine when he gets too close to his familiar prostitute, he pursues a student too young, too innocent for him, and this opens an opportunity for him to take a stance, to be someone meaningful again.

Given that he has everything to lose, he does so, even though the university, going through the motions to save face, implicitly offers an unofficial protection of him, so he could keep what he has. But instead of doing what his peers expect him to he throws everything away rather than merely saying the politically correct lines.

This seems like it should be enough for him, but it isn’t. In the middle third of the story, he stays with his daughter who is robbed, raped but refuses to go to the police. Instead she stubbornly stays on her farm. He thinks this is a lesson to him, “what men do to women” but she refuses no. It’s not. She, like him, takes a stance to risk everything, including her life and public dignity, eventually agreeing to be another man’s third wife, a man who only wants her farm, a man who she does not love… just so she could keep living in her house. He thinks this too is a lesson; he wants to rush in and save his daughter but she refuses him, refuses to recognize his authority, refuses to let him meddle in her life…

The last third of the book revisits the first two parts, as if the first time we went there was not enough. He apologizes to the dad of the student he molested. He revisists his home to see it vandalized. He revists his daughter to see her stubbornly refuse to leave, now pregnant with the child of the rapist… he throws away the last of his money to settle in a town he doesn’t care about and take a job he does not like.

He gives his daughter up to her deed, convinced that she is a fool, but also convinced that he cannot save her, he is not her father anymore.

What he does not see is that he is just like her. And as it turns out, he is just like his students. He thought his teaching wasted on them…he thought his wasted teaching taught him humility but it does not. “The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”

This line in context refers to how teaching humiliates him, how his lofty ideas are wasted on those who just want a passing grade. In fact, this is quite the opposite; it teaches him that he can say anything, and get away with it. But then he doesn’t get away with anything in the book, even though he thinks everything is fine.

In the end, he ends with a dead end job, euthanizing dogs that no one wants… he feels their pain, can’t stand the horror. But does so, in the end even euthanizing the dog he likes best. This is the rarest irony here, that life wastes its lofty ideas on him, giving him a “graceful” way out of each situation — yet he continually chooses the wrong situation — he chooses to be himself, to stand not for values but simply for his own will and desire, whatever that may be. This is how he could not fathom his daughter’s will, as she gave away her image, she chose not to live as a proper white woman (in holland or anywhere else) but instead, chose living among angry South Africans, in a hostile rural area. Likewise, he too gave away his image of being a dignified college professor, and then being a powerful father, impotent in the rage of the post-colonized.

All tragedies only work as tragedies because the singular one stands before the universal, to take in all of its fury… and falls short of mastering it… and are conquered by it, and eventually learn to embrace it, giving everything up to chaos and loss. In essence, this professor chooses to learn the keenest of lessons himself, he chooses to learn nothing… the very nothing that he is.

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Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

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

Flash Boys: A Wall Street RevoltFlash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When you start this book, you’re given a vague impression that the “bad guys” are the high frequency traders (HFT) because they are exploiting the market, or cheating people, or what not. In fact, we get that because most of the book is written from the point of view of who we think are the good guys who oppose HFT… we know this because these guys have names and histories. We identify with them. Not with the anonymous HFT firms.

What started off as a scandalous book about brokers and traders who take people’s money and give them less bang for their buck, even willfully doing the opposite of what their clients want, soon takes an unexpected turn, however.

As the story develops deeper and deeper, things seem worse and worse. Constantly, it’s a detective novel. Small changes, small anomalies in their consistency reveal larger patterns that need explaining. The men in this story are as much brilliant as they are idealistic. For if nothing else, than ideas of fairness and free trade are but excuses for a system built on air. After all, money is nothing else but idea. Sure, it moves material, transforms it into anything we like. But its basis is a shared idea. As we dive deeper, the idea seems to become more corrupt and more controlled. But then, an interesting turn happens.

We consider things from the HFT’s point of view: “I think most of them have just rationalized that the market is creating the inefficiencies and they are just capitalizing on them.” Are they not supposed to? What makes it cheating is that they are utilizing a gap in technology to effectively find out orders in one exchange to execute them on another. The lag in the decentralized stock market allows HFT’s orders to travel through time. The way to see it as cheating is to recognize that true market inefficiencies can be corrected by the market. True profit, defined economically, is only available for a short time when the innovation is new and unheard of. But once the market knows about it, the market can adjust. Technological gaps on the structure of executing trades are not something markets can easily account for… at least not of this kind. But it will adjust. New exchanges (such as IEX) will arise and compensate for such HFT advantage, or laws will be passed to counter them.

This last paragraph seems to detract from the scandal of the story. But as Ron Popeil said, “But wait, there’s more.” We see things from the banker’s point of view. With their dark pools. We see things from the trader’s point of view. We see them from the technologists’s point of view. In the end, no one is really behaving badly; or rather they are behaving badly against the client’s wishes… but also, they are also behaving rationally. Maximizing utility. Using what they have to preserve their own position.

Lewis stops short of jumping off this deep end, and that’s okay. He’s not out to critique capitalism itself, although there are a few of these: “It’s rational for a broker to behave badly.” Of course, a true critique would entail a discussion of homo economicus, and to note that the model for this behavior, defined as rationality, isn’t complete because it fails to grasp many actual intangibles that humans do value and gain utility from.

One reason to stop at this point is to avoid becoming mired in academic jargon. The other point is that people may want to read about Wall Street corruption, but it’s unlikely they will want to throw everything out because of “a few bad apples”. For many of us who can read this book, and do so, are living nicely, with freedom and wouldn’t wish to destroy a system which supports us in our leisure (among many other things). Still, it is a myth to think we can simply carve out a group of people get rid of all the corruption that human greed can entail. Because greed isn’t found just on Wall Street or any other capitalist exchange. We are greedy creatures, because the future is uncertain. A system founded on greed is one we hold dear to much of our nature, but it’s also a lopsided system as it only rewards part of how we are. Those of us who are fuller, rounder and more generous as human aren’t often praised by a system that only focuses on a narrow sliver of being human.

So even while I’ve undid the entire premise of the book here… the book is well written. Clear, and deals with fairly complex stock trading information in an easy to understand, distilled form. I rather enjoyed reading it. I kept not wanting to put it down.

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William McKinley

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

William McKinley (The American Presidents, #25)William McKinley by Kevin Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book because somewhere I read that Karl Rove found MicKinley’s political machine to be of great value, in basing the George W Bush campaign of 2000 against Al Gore… Instead of finding a president who I thought kowtowed to East coast bankers and industry leaders, I found an extremely idealistic man who lived well. He was respectful of others, and let them run their energies against him, rather than carrying a big stick. His policies showed that he fought for the common worker, and that he utilized government for middle class values, values of freedom and liberation rather than corporate or governing dominance.

I did appreciate his analysis of how Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency built off of McKinley’s and how McKinley was able to win against William Jennings Bryan while ducking the leadership of the Republican party and the corporate NorthEasterners who might otherwise have politically hampered his ability to act on his ideals.

Likewise McKinley was shown to be a soft spoken but cautious politician who was able to carve a path for the important role the US was to play in the 20th century. I would have liked to know more about his personal life, but I guess because he didn’t keep notes or letters, that might have been difficult.

Phillip’s writing is clear. He presents political analysis with an eye on past trends and future events in a way that seems unencumbered. I enjoyed reading it. I think what Phillips is best able to do is understand the different points of view of different social bodies, and show how they saw what they saw based on what their interests were. That’s about as objective as anyone can get.

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Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone

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

Religion within the Limits of Reason AloneReligion within the Limits of Reason Alone by Immanuel Kant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In his late age, Kant presents a final last word on religion, as seen from his phenomenonal system. It’s kind of amazing that even though he was an old man when he wrote this, the church didn’t try and kill him after he wrote it.

Despite his many pleas that he isn’t writing about scripture, that this is best left to the experts in church, and he only uses this as an example for philosophy, Kant ends up writing a very damning view indeed on how religion fits in with everything else he’s already written about; ethics, subjectivity to name two subject areas.

Kant basically proposes that reason itself is insufficient to account for religion. That God and ethics are beyond reason, although reason itself plays an important part in constituting the right path to religion. While he can’t find any real natural state of man internally that is the root of good or evil, because man has free will, Kant does admittedly find that man can be evil if he chooses to be swayed by the opinions of others, to follow a sensuous path, to satisfy his own animal desires, or if he chooses to have dominion over others. In fact, Kant basically finds all forms of contingency to be evil; all ways of man to limit his focus to things in the here and now, the earthly pleasures, to be sure, but also in terms of religious rituals, in what he calls “historical faith”… that time tested ways of being faithful can be ways in which the very hierarchy of a religion can be antithetical to what ethics and morality is about.

When Kant talks about the role of the state, he means that we need an overarching state (of Being) in order to unify us, so we can be good neighbors. This seems right and fair. This primarily second point of view on us, the small other, is a way in which we can get along with one another. And yet this is not enough. He introduces a 3rd point of view, that is, religion, because we need universal principles that can objectively tell us where the boundaries of our relationship with our neighbors lie. That is to say, it’s not enough for people to negotiate the boundaries of their own social interaction, people need a third position, one that supercedes the second point of view (but does not limit it or replace it) in order to have a true ethics. This point of view is religion itself.

What’s interesting about this book is that Kant is speaking about something beyond the boundaries of what he can speak about. The limits of reason on religion is that reason itself can only service religion, it cannot define it. Instead, Kant uses this tool of reason to demonstrate (conclusively or not, up to you) how corrupt our faith can get, how “beside the point” everything can be. If God and religion are beyond us, and that’s something that seems obvious, then we can only adhere to the strictest purest point of worship, to follow the guidance of religion for its own sake. He says this pretty clearly… and it may as well be from the Bhagavad Gita: 1) do your duty (with no thought of the fruits of labor) and 2) love everyone else as your self…

With this, he lists false conclusions that corrupt these two principles. For instance, while reason is instrumental to sorting out sensuous (visible) distractions, reason itself cannot run the show, for it cannot replace the binding that religion and God can afford us, to each of us individually, and to all of us collectively.

In this sense, this book is built on the same principles of intangible, inexpressibles such as his Critiques are; understanding which cannot be expressed but through the sensuous, for example. Or the legislative law of desire, which also cannot be expressed but through the sensuous. In each, but especially here, Kant seems to say that the way to have a taste of the completeness of Being lies solely in reasoning that directs us towards a sublime. Like as in Critique of Judgement, we turn our attention outwards, towards a position in the suprasensible that cannot be felt through ecclesiastical faith, unlimited and non-contingent (unlike historical doctrine).

If anything this makes Kant a kind of neo-Plato.

Overall I thought the book was well written (or at least also, well translated). In particular, Kant writes these long sentences because he’s being very particular. He needs to outline what that particularity is, so he asks that we keep one thought in our head, while he detours it with examples, and asides. Then, we can return to the idea that has transgressed itself, and continue on (Hegel does this in extreme). So if you can get used to his unadorned language, his lengthy sentences and his complex but very specific thought, you’ll find that this book isn’t so hard to read. Kant is thorough too. He has a slight sense of humor but its always in service of this dogmatic reason, getting to the edge of what can be thought. This time, to bring us to the font of religion itself, right on God’s doorstep.

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Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

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

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual WritingAgainst Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing by Craig Dworkin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What writing isn’t conceptual? All writing starts from a seed, or even a series of seeds, the synthesis of which is at its root, an idea…and the demand of writing be that it be coherent, consistent and end by wrapping up the displacement that started it, resolving aesthetically as pure balance. All the accounts equalled, and that’s the bonus of being complete. The simplest of such balances, of course, is morality.

Nonetheless, this writing is conceptual in the sense that other, more traditional forms of writing, are not. Kenneth Goldsmith offers an interesting essay at the start, comparing photography and painting with the internet and writing. The internet, with its textual basis (but also mixed media) releases writing from its traditional prison of realism — of trying to be a representation of the world just as photography released painting from its post-renaissance vanishing point perspective prison…and since the internet is laid over the real world, writing as a whole, with its books and non-specific ties to the planet becomes dated.

So in this sense, the title could have been called as much “against expression” just as the Abstract Expressionist painters were expressing much. The difference, of course, is that in this impressive volume, the writing is centered on writing as a concept, rather than writing as an invisible craft to create coherency, realism and so on as a deferral to another dimension.

In this sense, while much of the writing in this volume seems unanchored from the real world, at its root is always an angular concept that ties it back to how this writing is generated, as the writing itself is the item of interest.

What’s interesting is that even without the intention of creating immersive worlds, automatic writing, writing that highlights only “foot prints” of other forces in the real world, such as word choice, events like 9/11, or various other assorted, curated arrangements, we the reader still persist in creating worlds in which we meander. Traditional immersive writing ecologies, such as narrative-time-space are eshewed for the inner voices of language, the collective roar of a non-singular plurality that does not intend as much as it unconsciously desires…and in that desire creates great social distortion — of facts, relationships, defiguring much of what we do as humans on a daily basis. Much of the writing here, while unreadable, acts as a record of our own distortion… sometimes playful, sometimes sad, sometimes anything you want, this text, devoid of much intent of narrative or morality allows us a partial 3rd point of view on ourselves, so that we can see in our shadow most of all, what we are obsessed in seeing.

It’s funny that often the introduction to the piece grounds the conceptual writing as being meaningful only because it is linked in reference to an hereto unseen axis outside writing. Nonetheless, I still find problematic the title; is this expression or is it against expression? What is expressed; writing always has with it, a pre-linguistic figural meaning that is included in the act of registering language.

All in all, an inspiring collection.

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Timaeus/Critias

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

Timaeus/CritiasTimaeus/Critias by Plato
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These two works together were meant to be a trilogy about Athens, Greeks and their place in the world. Unfortunately, the 3rd book was lost, or never written, and the 2nd book, Critias only survives as a fragment. Still, interesting. The three men, speak to Socartes about the nature of everything, highlighting the Other of the Greeks, the Egyptians, as being part of the primary source needed to complete the story.

The first book, Timaeus is interesting because he speaks of how the universe started before man was made… how man was made rationally with intention, and all that. With Timaeus you see how Plato tries to ground everything, the 4 elements for example, into Being, with ideas being the root… (as the 4 elements are basically tiny shapes, and what’s more pure as an idea than a shape?) From this, you get the idea that once everything is built up from Truth, we should then, with the history of Atlantis in Critias, and the lost 3rd book, come to a systematic understanding of the way in which Athens has developed and should develop… with an eye on purity and rightness.

The idea is simple. If there was a way we were made, a reason for us being the way we are, then there too is a way for us to be, an intented way for us to live, and a right way for us to not go against our nature.

Only in a democracy like Athens can someone like Plato have existed… Plato who feared the nihilism of the Sophists, in which their collectively disordered wisdom threatened to destroy the inherent meaning and values that made Athens what it is. He of course, wrote his entire life, to try and find coherence; find Being which could bind those disorderly ideas, and bring them up from negating each other, so that we can have values, so that we can have orderly society. So that we can be a people with a moral and ethical content we could be proud of and exhibit.

At least, that’s how I see this book within the larger scheme of what Plato was doing.

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Spiral Dynamics

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Spiral DynamicsSpiral Dynamics by Don Edward Beck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book because it offered an easy structure of how to classify ego growth. Plus it was from psychologists. But unlike psychology (or perhaps like psychology), this book is a mirror: it takes what is supposed to be a science of describing development and treats it as a prescriptive model for how things are supposed to be.

Having gone through the gambit now, there are a couple features I find to be puzzling. What is the swing between self and group as the focus important? And the expansion of the ego self — while expressible as a kind of hegelian dialectic (and synthesis) — why should we expect a self to follow this kind of progression? For those of you reading this review and not sure of what I am talking about, it’s simple. Hegelian synthesis happens when two unlike phenomenon, perhaps subject and object, find themselves at first in opposition, but then later coming to terms with how the boundaries between them are mentally constructed, find themselves in unity, absorbed into common ground. What Hegel is saying about our classification is simply that the process of learning also involves the process of reclassifying things so as to make greater abstractions of what difference lies between them. So to go back to why we should expect the self to follow this kind of progression: why should ego develop follow along the parameters set by the authors of this book? Why should rule based grounding qua self be between self qua domination vs self qua acceptance?

What gives the authors a bit of a cop out here is to also say that ego development in a particular spectrum can happen anytime regardless of environment. This makes sense too; that ego development has to do with how the ego sees things, or how the ego creates the world. But it is with this lesson that we step away from spiral dynamics as a science and enter the field of metaphysics. Without a determinable metric from which to gain a vantage point, we find ourselves immersed in dogmatic fields from which we cannot find any kind of orientation.

But that’s also part of the problem of the book too… that when talking about ego development, different egos reading the book will find themselves seeing the different ego positions differently. So to say it another way; depending on who you are, the book you are reading will change. This much is said in the first chapter. So how do we understand what book we are reading in the first place?

There are commonalities in the language, but we are talking about the relationships between points that makes the difference. So this book really only works by grounding itself as an objective field, using common language. But that really forces us out of understanding and into a list-view… that is to say, this book reduces people into stages without giving any kind of justification or deeper understanding as to what ego development is all about.

Perhaps I miss the point of the book. Perhaps all this is meant to do is provide some kind of application rather than a theory to understand why we are the way we are or why we should change from position to position. Again, Hegel can provide us answers to how synthesis works, and needs to work, as we reach the limits of each stage… but that’s crow-barring a theory which doesn’t distinguish what specific limitations of each stage carry… and in fact, there isn’t any explanation as to why each of the features in the spiral should be arranged the way they are, expect that one gets more and more abstract with each stage.

All in all, not a book that is terribly interesting intellectually, but it is useful if only as a quick and easy guideline.

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Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective StoryWhy Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I share Holt’s enthusiasm for his subject matter, and admire how far he was willing to go to answer the question. What I found increasingly frustrating about this book, though, was his lack of explanation as to why something did or did not make sense. For example, he gave 5 pages (I think) to talking about Hegel, half of which was atmospheric. The last page and a half were simply to dismiss it as being nonsensical without explaining why. I can appreciate quoting philosophers and other thinkers to buffer one’s argument or give a different (sometimes radical) perspective on issues, but assuming that something makes sense or doesn’t make sense doesn’t explain what sense or non-sense is… nor does it justify dismissing anything.

Holt is definitely more in the analytic tradition of philosophy than he is in any other — and while he appreciates the content area of philosophy — he falls short of really examining why or how the assumptions of language itself impacts the kind of answer he is willing to accept. This is of course, very common to analytic philosophy. So, one assumption that is simply to question is why is logic outside of reality? The proof he gives relies very much on the consistency of terms entailed by logic.

So rather than to go on, I’ll simply state that I found his questioning to be willfully based mostly (as his initial questions) on a feeling he has about nothing vs something… so it remains then, that his own feelings on things that determine what answers are acceptable or not.

If Holt went about his question by examining how the various formalizations inherent within his or any other philosopher’s discourse constructed arguments, I believe he would have found the ways in which meaning are made, and why philosophers who often try and tackle [nothing vs something] often run into the problem of spouting nonsense to support sense. How one discourse creates the limitations of its own inherent reality is simultaneously how that discourse grounds itself as reality and maintains its consistency and coherency. Another way of putting this objection I have is to say that Holt gives too much attention to the content of the words others use and not enough attention to how context deploys those words… additionally while he contemplates many different positions, he ends up rejecting most of them for reasons he does not explain… which makes it frustrating to read because whenever he fails to explain why he rejected a position, Holt will resort to a story or a narrative to invoke feelings… As if the horror of one philosopher is the same horror of another… and that’s how we equate them. So if one set of words doesn’t jive with him, then he seems to assume it won’t jive with us either.

I suppose though that it makes sense that he starts his journey with a feeling and he ends it also on another feeling… in the end, philosophy for him may be a way of coping (as it can be argued that all things are ways of coping) but the real weight of his argument lies in whatever gives him the (feeling of) satisfaction he is looking for… though I suspect that this satisfaction is based on some hidden assumptions as to what kinds of moves are allowed rather than radically being a philosopher and allowing all any kind of move, and eliminating those that self cancel. Truth may be another way of saying what feels warm like home, but that’s still based off the naive idea that in the end, words mean the same thing to different people and that language can be used with precision lacking ambiguity… which is an obviously willful denial that analytical philosophy (along with many philosopher-scientists) have adopted in their pursuit of making meaning for everyone… when really they at most only make meaning for themselves instead of describing it for everyone (for everyone else, this productivity is a kind of prescribing because of how they assume language is a stable mediator).

In this sense, this book is less of a book of philosophy than a book about philosophy. Still, he put much effort to go to these places, and meet all these people I haven’t read before and that’s impressive.

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