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

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

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

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

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

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

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Discourse as Social Interaction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Baphomet

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

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

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

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

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

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The Experience of Freedom

August 31, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Experience of FreedomThe Experience of Freedom by Jean-Luc Nancy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the tradition of transcendental philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy tackles the experience of being existing as freedom itself. Nancy attempts to draw an ontological ground for experience by calibrating existence as its own freedom. He finds an angle through Kant, Hegel and Heidigger so as to release being from the world of ideation. He takes the split of phenomenon and unifies it as its own logical independence, citing the cut as the logical difference of being itself rather than one of ideation or sensuous apperception.

This is a rather easy cut to make. Jean-Luc Nancy runs through the gambit of freedom from a variety of standard sources and then ends with questions of morality. Since he has separated being from thought, there remains little to guide a relationship between being and thought. He ends up with this hard nugget of being that is totally independent, finishing with an experience of being that is free. Free not only of categorical imperatives but also breath-takingly free of any kind of understanding what so ever. We now have nothing to guide our decisions about being when left to being itself.

In many ways this is a very boring book, despite my interest in philosophy. Nancy ends with an ontological version of “laissez faire” where we are free for whatever. This is disgustingly relevant, obviously, to our post-industrial capitalism so that in a way Nancy didn’t even really need to write a book on this topic… as it isn’t particularly useful to anyone.

Despite his impressive range of quotations and his attempt at systematizing being and freedom — which is near impossible to be coherent about since each of these different philosophers offer different systems of their own — his distortions end up saying very little new. This is a bad kind of academic-philosophy because it re-calibrates thought in a way that leaves the familiar categories realigned without introducing any new idea whatsoever.

In that way, its an embarrassing book to read because it’s written so backwards it ends up being “so what?” So the rift of freedom, experience and being has been widely struggled with for centuries! Why don’t you say something that we don’t already know? Just because there has been a problem doesn’t mean that this problem needs to be revisited.

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Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation

August 31, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second FoundationFoundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although this book would deal with understanding human society through the indeterminacy of human quanta, the specter of psychohistory (and the second foundation) presents a Newtonian ideal by which the observer (second foundation) is able to erase its existence perfectly, “eat its own non-existence” so that we are left with perfect knowledge of the workings of humankind.

I found the journey of reading this to be exhilarating — even though that there is mathematical expression of society, knowledge, unconscious and human zeitgeist as one logical coherency to be a dubious idea. Nonetheless, this aesthetic has long been sought after. In modern times that we can start with Thomas Hobbes, as Phillip Ball does, in Critical Mass and understand that statistics was first developed to hide the inconsistencies of experimentation in physics. So we return back to the Kantian norms of finding the hidden logic of reality, one that is somehow suprasensibly suspended beyond our everyday material reality but governs those relations completely.

There is much to find interesting, despite the conservative nature of the story. Asimov is a very imaginative writer.

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Écrits: A Selection

August 31, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Écrits: A SelectionÉcrits: A Selection by Jacques Lacan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here Lacan dazzles us with his ramblings. I suppose in some way there is very little clarity he can achieve due to constraints of language. But here he highlights strongly how consciousness and mind self develop from social selection and from bodily “cuts” that interrupt and force us to find coherence in abstraction. The final formulation for the self seems to be on the plateau of logical resonance, when one is able to comprehend and endlessly defer that empty lack that sutures our sense of person and the sense of others.

What makes some of this difficult is that this selection kind of starts in the middle; there is no easy introduction here, you are assumed to know the basics. For that reason, I would have liked the very excellent last essay to be one of the first.

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Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature

August 31, 2015 / posted in agential realism, dialectics, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with NatureOrder Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature by Ilya Prigogine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The authors’ enthusiasm comes out quite strongly. Congruent with their Kantian world view, they combine disparate fields of study in order to assemble “noumena causa” by which order can be achieved regardless of expression… this is a search for the pure logic of material relations found through the a priori field of mathematics. Thus this book jumps onto the bandwagon of the 20th century in order to disassemble time in order to bring order. This order must be of a symmetrical nature since equivalence of energy-matter difference has to be held in order for the true substantive relations of the universe to be beholden. Thus, they introduce theoretical energy to preserve this symmetry and “reverse time”. Because once the orders are established as purely reflexive one way or another way, the organizing relations hold and the arrow of time, which seems arbitrary, can truly be arbitrary.

Hidden in this view are the author’s interesting mix of philosophy, art and humanity into the material reality as a function of time/entropy… we are to find our place as a logical coherency with everything else. I am not sure they achieve this, although they dance around the role of the observer. I found some of their attempts to place human beings/observers in their schema a little confusing. Their attempt to include EVERYTHING at the end as long as it seemed to address what they were saying chaotic. Their attempt to order chaos leads to chaos! In the end though, this view is again complicated by their acknowledgement that the world remains a mystery, one that is distorted by endless renewals of paradigms and experimentations… they stick with the Kant here, by supposing a suprasensible order that we cannot understand… and then claiming that human beings have a place in that order that we cannot comprehend due to our finite limitations.

Their energy is infectious, bright and idealistic. Their conclusions are suspect because I am not sure what they are. Their exploration of science and math is interesting but it took them a long time to get going. It would have been better if they were able to make a clearer statement with less than a muddled statement with more.

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The Romantic Manifesto

August 21, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Romantic ManifestoThe Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book more clearly explains Ayn Rand’s position than any other book of hers I’ve read in the past.

Rand is often hotly contested; but it’s not enough to say that something nonsensical or stupid because to truly understand something we should be able to explain what it is or why something is dismissed. Not only that but we should also be able to explain how a view is (in)valid. In a sense, Rand often fails to explain what is detestable in others, resorting to words like “evil” or “irrational” to carry an emotional weight in her argument.

(Un)surprisingly though, there is much in here that is admirable. After all, anyone who can inspire and move people like she does must say something somewhere that is correct.

What is interesting is that there is much basis for similarity between herself and other thinker’s conclusions she would dismiss as they argue from a very similar basis. As hinted before, I do believe that she is a bad reader of Kant, for example.

She is correct, that Kant is the root of what she detests in modernism, but Kant’s concept of will, reason and pragmatics leads him to very nearly the same structure that Rand poses. Kant sees reason as being a tool for will finally, because Kant dismisses “pure reason” as being inherently undecidable. Rand doesn’t see things this way. She believes will is a tool for pure reason because “a=a”; that functionality is purpose therefore a consistency in reason will work itself out if we have the will to do so. This last point of reason and will being only positive is perhaps the biggest flaw for her philosophy.

In this way Rand is actually alot like Heidigger. Both Heidigger and Rand believe that language is reasonable, and non-contradictory in-itself. Both believe that ironing out consistency in languaged reason will result in successful and fulfilling lives.

This makes them both throwbacks to early modernism, towards a kind of Cartesian truth-value. This signifies a break because it is Kant who provides the initial break in his critique of pure reason that demonstrated a gap inherent within things-in-themselves and a gap within our relationship with those things. The gap with our relationship with those things formulates a basis for science and for existentialism. Unfortunately not many understand that the split also echos within reason itself, so that reasoning through sheer consistency will undeniably lead to contradiction.

Given a post-Kantian view, of which society has progressed towards, there can be no point of view from which the world will be stable, without consistency, because the world is not consistent in a human fashion. It is this last point which Rand seems unwilling to grasp resorting instead to calling all that is thought to be rational (including Classism) as subjective and arbitrary. She is correct. All views are inherently subjective and arbitrary, including her own. What makes Kant non-arbitrary though, is that he grounds human behavior and a will to maxims in his critique of practical reason that is in the supersensible. This gives up reasoning in this world as a coherency in favor of a faith, which is what makes Kant still a christian philosopher.

Rand of course, cannot stand this. From her assumption that functionality in the world is purpose, and that making one into a functional person will result in purpose she proves remarkably consistent in her assessment of the arts throughout this small book. What makes her irritating to read however, is that she is unable to express herself beyond calling positions she dislikes evil or irrational. It is in her style to insist on a singular view that is ultimately arbitrary… without providing a neutral grounds to assess what is meaningful we cannot help but judge everything else as being arbitrary to something else. Rand does seem unable to explain herself philosophically — hence she does so artistically to give us feelings of purposefulness.

Unfortunately for her, if the adherence to will as a resolution of being in existentialism is irrational then her art/philosophy in which characters will themselves to a resolution of function and purpose must also be equally irrational.

Calling something philosophy or rational doesn’t make it rational if you cannot provide a cogent basis from which to assess everything else including your own work. After all, if continual self insistence is adequate than it should be equally adequate for anything and everything else as well…and given a modernist aesthetic in which there can only be one truth and language can only mean one thing this last “equally adequation” would be inherently unacceptable!

But I doubt that Rand has the ability to express why language should be a seamless and complete consistency (a=a) with reality other than “it is”

Still, despite my disagreement and all the holes I’ve just poked at her work, I do admire the clarity with which this book is written. After all, without this clarity I would have had a harder time finding the conflicts inherent in her own writing.

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On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

August 21, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient ReasonOn the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason by Arthur Schopenhauer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Schopenhauer finds it necessary to rescue noumena causa from Kant by calibrating our human experience to these four grounds of causation. These four grounds for Schopenhauer arise naturally due to different cuts in reasoning’s consistency. Admittedly these grounds are somewhat arbitrary, but he is unable to find much connection between these grounds except for their ability to highlight concepts. In this Schopenhauer is very much a follower of Kant.

I, too, do sometimes find Kant to be too airy. But that conceptual distant is necessary to highlight principle “noumenonal” connection between disparate phenomenon. Schopenhauer can be thought of as being a half step so as to try and bring Kant back. In the process Schopenhauer seems to find the most objectional point being Kant’s misuse of the term “ground”. Ground here is another way of denoting various cuts, “levels” of rationality for Schopenhauer, so by no means is four the only way to arrange these levels, as we can provide a multitude of differing reasons, each of which Kant would most likely state as being chimeral and undecidable in isolation.

What is of interest though, is that like Kant, Schopenhauer calibrates human action to will (desire). Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer seems to find that will is more radically aligned to create objects as well, not just through the platitudes of a noumenon as a morality but also existentially. Schopenhauer seems to find that the actual physical world is created through repetition of various consistencies like a wheelbarrow traveling the same ground in the same way as to make a rut… this dissolving of the phenomenal eliminates the thing-in-itself from view as an independence of human will. As a result, Schopenhauer requires another ground (having eliminated Kant’s ground) thus, Schopenhauer finds everything as emerging from reason as a geometry of which causation is but a mode of extension.

In some ways, Schopenhauer is like Descartes in seeing everything as a consistency constituted through a rational mentality. This is an interesting move which eventually finds its full expression with Husserl (perhaps independently of Schopenhauer) but the move to remap all in terms of rationality is perhaps too much, and allows Schopenhauer far too much freedom to disregard the world as excessive chimera, when in fact it becomes more likely that Schopenhauer falls prey to chimera himself. How else can he claim that his fourfold root is the actual calibration of that is an optimization of understanding?

He can’t. He can only show us how this view is possible, not that it is all encompassing above all other views, in part because he can’t really evaluate other views except through a neutral term, which he then goes forth and questions, as there can be no real ground as any one thing requires another thing.

In this Schopenhauer is correct, all is connected through conception and rationalization — but rather than end up with a Liebnizian monad or a Deleuzian rhizome, he reverts to a loose Kantian model of mid-modernism reasoning that cannot recognize that radical groundlessness that Schopenhauer is courting except to insist on it in terms of zero (void) or infinity (all).

What would help Schopenhauer in this, to find a quantized view of all through all else, is for him to give up the very instrument he cannot give up; to grasp that unlike Kant’s insistence on a faculty of pure reason there are in fact an indeterminate number of reason(ing)s… that reason may be sufficient but it is not the only One.

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Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

August 21, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of LifeDarwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dennett starts this book, careful to align the specific context of Darwin’s ideas from a material biology context to one of functionalism.

With this alignment, Darwin seeks to atomize all complexity into functional processes so that the material moves within a complexity are atomized into building blocks that allow for a supervenience of complexity to material atoms.

For instance, he applies this maneuver from biological evolution to behavior, psychology, culture and ultimately consciousness. What Dennett notes as being skyhooks constitutes a logical break, such as the jump from ordinal numbers to the smallest limit cardinal numbers. What Dennett calls cranes are moves that constitute supervenience.

This mapping is accomplished by Dennett mainly through a series of analogies and then, through a series of quotes that directly address each complexity through a dialectical structure that aligns various quotations that attempt to get at the root of contrary positions. These contrary positions are then atomized in terms of Dennett’s algorithmic supervenience in order to be better incorporated into his algorithmic supervenience. If there is one thing I have noticed, it’s that the presence of a dialectical structure necessarily supports an ideological position.

It’s hard to moralize ideological positions of this complexity because of its range, but Dennett wishes to highlight the rational consistency possible in atomizing our most difficult endeavors (ethics, culture, subjectivity). This sounds well and good, but until you understand the larger context it is difficult to address how Dennett’s book is an expression of an ideologue.

One of the debates in biology is a dispute about how to calibrate survival. Richard Dawkins and Dennett both wish to calibrate adaptation to the level of the gene. Some biologists would calibrate survival to the species, others to ecology. Some to the individual. Each of these optimizations of utility provide a basis for the creation of different terminologies, some of which are impossible given a radically different calibration. For instance, Stephen Jay Gould, who comes from a paleontologist background would calibrate survival to the species and thus has arrived at varyingly different concepts, some of which are nonsensical to someone like Dennett who only sees atomized genes as being the root basis for adaptive difference.

When John Maynard Keynes in the 70s introduced game theory to biology he provided a tool for biologists to compare the utility of different survival adaptations. This revolutionized the field but it forced biologists to try and come to a different basis for how to compare adaptations. I recently read an essay exploring the utility of allowing non-queen workers to breed. Wasps and bees do have non-queen workers that can breed, and it has been shown that the queen may kill these offspring but at other times, may allow them to live so that the workers compete with each other. The question in this essay remained unanswerable because the authors of the essay were unable to provide a basis to decide what level to calibrate their comparison to. Since all the workers in a colony were related, should the adaptation be addressed in terms of the individual? Or the colony? Economics often does not have this problem (individual vs society) because the healthiness of each is hidden by the maximal utility of specific groups. Economists are often political simply because they will hide the (dis)favoring of a group by calibrating utility to the society, or to specific individuals in isolation.

By NOT addressing his heady position to this basic difference, by explaining the mechanisms of his attempt at a supervenience view of adaptation, Dennett dismisses the veracity of other views by distorting them into failed forms of supervenience.

The ideologue that Dennett wishes to superimpose is that of a consistency from the point of genetics.

What makes this position obviously an ideologue is the arbitrariness of Dennett’s stopgap. Dennett himself provides this analogy when he explains the problem of “levels”. He utilizes the example of a computer in order to highlight this issue. When attempting to explain the processes inherent in a Word processing program, Dennett states that trying to understand the program in terms of electrical mechanics, or even at the quantum mechanics level is too much! We shouldn’t try and understand the processor in terms of machine language or even at low level code, we should understand it in terms of the operating system environment and the APIs that the word processor utilizes (as well as the user context needs) in order to best understand how a word processor forms. The “baggage” of quantum mechanics or electrical engineering would be too detailed and merely mechanical from the point of view of the appropriate level, because what makes a word processor isn’t the mechanical moves of its basic units but the functional consistency of its end result.

As is Dennetts style, this analogy is very clear, but when we apply this analogy to Dennett’s own arguments (should we not understand consciousness in terms of the needs of the individual? In terms of the need for society) does this not go against a genetic view for why consciousness needed to happen? Does not the view that genetics is the key to EVERYTHING, even religion including too much baggage? After all, might not a colony of conscious robots not having genes but needing the same economic, political coordination also form a religion?

Dennett does consider that culture goes far in changing the context of what survival and adaptation means, but he seems to find the “limit cardinal” to be at the level of the gene, rather than providing a multiple level of calibration — mainly due to this insistence on supervenience being the model we should take. If this is so, however, should he have not started this book talking about Darwinist “survival” of quantum sub-atomic laws persisting in the face of disorder?

Dennett is a brilliant man and more impressively a very clear writer of very difficult ideas. But in his haste to push forward a world-philosophy-science view calibrated to that of the gene, he ends up falling prey to the same problem he would accuse others of, that genetics is a “skyhook” given the properties of chemical biology from which genetic properties can be derived. In the end, the rationality he sees as being factual is in fact, to a large degree an arbitrary choice until he is able to demonstrate that other calibrations to other levels, on their own terms, cannot provide enough consistency and explanatory power as this one. Yet even this point is arbitrary, after all, why cannot all of these different calibrations occur simultaneously in competition with one another?

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