« Posts under dialectics

The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition

June 18, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental TraditionThe Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition by David Carr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Carr presents us with an interesting puzzle, that speaks about the role of self in the transcendental tradition. In some sense, it’s not a puzzle at all. Kantian scholars often look to the point of “subjectivity” as central to Kant’s critique in inquiry. This is not so. If you read Critique of Pure Reason closely, you will see that Kants main critique is about reason itself; the way in which reason works to supplement understanding, often extending understanding beyond the bounds of what is “reasonable” for reason to speculate on.

Carr shows us at first, the bumbling that rises from the transcendental tradition. He starts off with Heidegger in order to critique him, going through Husserl and then ending later on with Kant. About halfway through we get a glimpse that the two “selves” empirical and transcendental have in fact no bearing within the tradition as a kind of truth. Rather these two points are bracketed speculations. Towards the end then, Carr, goes against the tradition of scholars that wish to push Husserl and Kant into “metaphysical” speculation, tentatively stating that

Both philosophers recognized, I think, that their transcendental procedure did not authorize the transition to metaphysical claims

And this is so! The paradox is rightly present because the scholars that follow misread and wished to pursue their own agenda of subjectivity. In this sense, this already short book, could be even shorter, as the paradox lies wholly within trying to make a round hole squared. For what Carr sets out to do, he does it quite well. Not an easy book to read, because of its heavy terminology, but it is in fact still an introductory book, although it serves as an introduction to a very complex topic.

View all my reviews

Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

June 18, 2015 / posted in agential realism, dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of ConsciousnessTime and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness by Henri Bergson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Once again, Bergson takes us in another direction. He excels at pulling out the underlying relations that structure methodology. He exposes how we construct regular notions such as time, space, self and so on — showing us that such terms are actually heterogeneous. That we assume that the formality of language and conception is what things are; ignoring the uncertainty and difference that characterizes how we consider ourselves in a constant becoming all of our own.

At the heart of this essay, Bergson takes us towards free will, understanding that our conception of selfhood as a social manifestation (so we live outside ourselves) or as an “external projection of the other” which is reached by “deep introspection” but not given to “states” that are “amenable to measure”. This suspension of our sense of being between these two regimes disallows us our freedom since we are rarely grasping ourselves and instead dealing with how we are meant to consider ourselves. This is akin to unraveling how we know ourselves; we consider who we are by slowly replacing ourselves with our own map of ourselves, and then forgetting that the map is a map, and considering the map as who we are. This insightful proposition sounds oddly postmodern but it originates for Bergson as the understanding that we are not a static field of temporal absolutes. Rather, we are a process of integration — non-repeatable and consistently in flux. It is Bergson’s criticism of philosophy and science that we ought to know ourselves by the invariance that we come to misrecognize what we are as we always eliminating contingency and difference only to assuming the inadequacy of our ideas as being static and non-changing despite the inconsistency of our lived experience… as we use our social identity (as an unchangeable reference) to anchor our physical invariance. This is also why Bergson finds fault with causality; because all points on the manifold are localizations. Extensions of localizations will never attain stability with identity.

This amounts to saying that the more we strengthen the principle of causality, the more we emphasize the difference between a physical series and a psychical one.

It is for this reason; this difference between our psychical inconsistency that is immeasurable and our “physical series” anchored in social identity that we find ourselves with free will. In essence, because we are constantly becoming- through our own sense of process and not one that is grounded on the mechanized clocks of human coordination. Bergson questions social time as being time; instead he seeks to highlight how we generate ourselves and constantly make ourselves through the immediacy of our lived contexts. Confusing this with our ordered institutions and our prized laws of equivalence and mathematical measurement would be to further alienate who we are by mistaking our tools for what we really are.

I have read quite a few of Bergson’s books by this point. I had no idea this was his doctoral thesis until I was nearly done with the book. (I tend not to read covers or jackets). In this we see the promise of Bergson’s originality; his ability to suss out difference in approach and concentrate on how the acceptance of formal invariance in method creates a context by which centralized content often doesn’t match centralized content. In many ways, this is why different disciplines cannot speak to one another; because they assume too much and do not recognize their own assumptive principles. Because, to question such principles would be, often, to destroy the very discipline those methods generate. In this, Bergson is refreshing!

View all my reviews

The Ecology of Others

May 23, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Ecology of OthersThe Ecology of Others by Philippe Descola
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although a tiny book, this hits hard.

Through the field of anthropology, Descola notes the duality of nature and culture in ecology, anthropology and biology. Hard anthropology was to establish the unity of humankind. Social anthropology is meant to explain the variation within unity. This invariant cut aligns these sciences by pre-supposing an etic paradigm reflexive of a continuum of mind-body duality.

Thus, cultural is either natured by material geography or material geography is natured by culture. Either way, nature becomes a container for the limits of the study of cultural variation, either as the generator or as the mirror.

In this way, the very study of anthropology imposes a search for an invariant ontology within all cultures. For the former (cultural materialism) we look for a master generator of material reality on a soft cultural milieu. On the latter (like the idealism of Claude Levi-Strauss) we seek a master grammar of cultural semiology. Descola points out that this structuration imposes a transcendental cut that acts as a transducer. We eliminate the internal agency of the cultures that are examined, even if the ethnography is emic in search of an invariant generator that would match the hard anthropological unity that limits the study of cultural anthropology.

As a result, this duality misses the deeper implication that all cultural ageis is expressive of a human agency that operates internal to a culture, one that serves only to reproduce itself as humans reproduce ourselves. Our desire to standardize all studies is also a desire to impose our form of agency (power) on others. His suggestion then, is to study these fields as separate cuts on their own, without looking for a hard biology/material/geography or a hard idealism to calibrate variance to. In this way, he suggests we look for rules within each culture to as determining their own values and topography. In essence, he seeks the fragmentation of the field further, to find the character of each, risking our inability to speak to one another, but at the same time, discarding the value judgement we make when we attempt to normalize the difference of the other, through generative theory.

In some ways, this is expressive of a schizoanalysis (from Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), to make a hetergeneology of anthropology rather than following a structuralist superstructure-account. While Descola does not go on this bend, or connect explicitly with these thinkers, his suggestion is very much to quantize anthropology, to atomize according to agency, rather than atomizing to qualities based on a supra-transcendental field of a virtual cultural generator. I do look forward to reading more of his work.

View all my reviews

Critique of Pure Reason

May 19, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Critique of Pure ReasonCritique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So much has been written about Kant. Yes, he’s hard. He’s rammbly. He’s overbearing. But this is due in part to the fact that written in 1781, Kant did not have anyone to talk with. He lacked the ability to find other minds and interface. So in those ten years of silence he talked to himself. And he’s a bit disorganized.

So lets not quibble with the details. Instead let me cut to the heart of what he is saying, in a way that goes beyond any reading of him that I’ve come across yet.

The one aesthetic Kant is after, that allows him to hit a home run, is simply this: All concepts are regulatory.

What Kant is after is to understand the limits of what our regulatory reason can do. This can’t be a function to decide truth. This can’t be a function to decide reality. This isn’t an effort at wisdom. We can use reason to figure out the contours of contingency, of what is given to us. But we cannot use it alone to do anything.

Kant attempts to show us the value of reason in melding together different functions (be it imaginary or understanding or reason) and in this way seeks to highlight the vehicle by which we can come to grips with phenomenon. So weaknesses?

Yes, Alan Badiou is partially correct: Kant’s system requires that he created a negated structure, the noumenal upon which to hang his phenomenon. But Badiou is also partially incorrect. Kant was the first to recognize, through the figure of the transcendental, the necessity of having an apparatus of measurement upon which to solidify a phenomenal field. That is to say, phenomenon cannot interface at a consistent level unless there was a larger field to unify them as equivalent. Hence, this transcendental. Kant laid out the form for us, to quantize, to organize whatever we apperceptive. Historically, this is how Heidigger is able to note that Kant is Modernism Part II. Descartes introduces the need the for a transcendental field (in the form of the mental realm) but Kant completes his thought. Hegel is the application for this field to surject unto Absolute Knowledge.

So we miss the point when we quibble with his mathematics or his bad physics, or how he didn’t understand quantum mechanics. None of his examples matter in their detail. What matters is the principle behind this critique, one which reveals that concepts are regulatory.

And while it’s true, as Kristeva points out, Kant did not “discover” negation (leave this to Hegel as a way for him to bind according to the dialectical-synthesis process) Kant does reach negativity. Negativity is necessary as the limits for a given concept. And if you look at towards the end of this masterful work, and ignore his annoying repetition, you come to understand the antinomies are but examples of the limits of conceptualization itself.

Yes, Dedekind’s cut of real numbers or Badiou’s theory of points belie the same “cut” as Kant’s antinomies. By injecting reason in at various arbitrary positions, we can cut a dichotomy into a mass to differentiate positions. Such positions then become expressive of the cut, which we use as an absolute reference. This reference allows us to orient ourselves. So yes, when only we do not “extend reason beyond the bounds of experience” can we avoid these antinomies, Kant highlights these antinomies as way of showing how reason provides the extension of any given cut, which are always contingent by arbitrary parameters, be they a sensuous apperception or some inherited folly of the imagination. This section following The Ideal of Pure Reason all the way to the end of the work, gives us the apex of Kant’s reach. He was articulated much, but never brought it back around to exploding the limits of concepts themselves. He could only fumble and say, well, they are regulatory.

Not only are they regulatory but they are necessary for the organization, the quantization into phenomenon, inasmuch as the sensuous, as he calls it, is necessary for logic to take a stance. We need contingency to make a mark somewhere, otherwise we get nothing but pure logical presentation without any place for differentiation into a real context. It is this dual refractory nature that presents us with agential cuts to determine the nature of what is real, a mixture of contingent sensuousness and transcendental formalism. This mixture however, isn’t stable, it belies on the context of previous cuts, usually derived from our human need to have agency in limited domains.

This is the start of post-modern fragmentation of knowledge, as each domain acquires its own organizing cut.

But this is also well beyond the context of where Kant was going.

So if you keep in mind the “regulatory” nature of conceptualization, you’ll come to a fruitation that is far more radical than any reading of Kant that I’ve ever come across. I think you’ll find as well, that this radical negativity, necessary to cut concepts out of the larger folds, is why Deleuze found himself returning to Kant towards the end of his career. In this way Kant is still more radical than most anyone gives him credit for… and in this sense, his admiration for David Hume speaks volumes about where he’s going with this critique. In fact, he exceeds Hume in this way, by abstracting Hume’s explanation of human behavior as conventional habit into the modality of regulatory concepts. Kant finds the limit of reason but in doing so he is able to demonstrate how reason is utilized to supplement understanding beyond the bounds of experience. His four antinomies are but possibilities for unfounded regulations, many of which Hume would simply call “conventions”.

To wrap. I for one, am glad to have Kant as a guide. As staunch and “joyless” as he is, there is a core of clear direction within his thought that allows him to calibrate his awareness to a finely tuned point regardless of content. Kant turns rationality in on itself and is able to note the different vectors within rationality as a manifold, a field of its own connectivity. Kant adds these various example, these vectors together, rotates rationality as a vehicle of deployment and is able to find a navel limit within rationality, negativity on the one hand, sensuous apperception on the other, and the chimera of the transcendental dialectic on the third. This groundwork of pure formalism is the striking aesthetic consistency that belies German philosophy post-Kant, while marking the groundwork for the very abstract structural formalism that is to follow in mathematics and science in the 19th century and beyond. Without having the ability to negate all that does not logically follow, or being able to create limited phenomenon within a transcendental domain, we would not have any technological or mathematical achievements today.

This isn’t to say that Kant should be given credit for this because he “invented” this. Rather, he was simply the first to stake out the parameters for the nature of these kinds of endeavors, endeavors which continue to structure human experience and behavior today. No doubt, if Kant did not do this, then someone else would have formalized this exercise, eventually. Still, to one lonely man in Königsberg, thank you.

View all my reviews

Children of Dune

May 4, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Children of Dune (Dune Chronicles, #3)Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book wraps up the trilogy, by critiquing the themes of the previous two Dune books. It does the expected thing of bringing all the characters together, while wrapping up the ending tightly. There is a bit of ridiculousness in Leto’s ability towards the end, and that seems like a deus ex machina, but that’s the only complaint. The ideas were at full force.

In a way, trilogies have to follow the initial good step, the mistaken second step, and the correction of the final step. The system of three follows why we get three lives in video games, why tripods have three legs for stability and why Hegel’s dialectic can be read as a three step process (although its really four steps, with three steps happening twice, overlaid on each other). Leto remarked on the calibration perfectly. We looking inward, at the end of the second book was Paul’s mistake, so the empire rotted. Looking outward, in the first book, with no sense of direction the empire expanded but the individual had no guidance. Paul walked into a self made trap through his error. I am not certain Leto does better, but with his twin sister perhaps that works.

Thus, we have the Preacher’s inward guidance with no external ability. We have Alia’s external ability but a rotten internal force. This bad reflection is corrected by the twin’s movement.

Typical of Herbert as well, he is able to guide self knowing mysticism as a genetic/spirit reality with the muster of political implication. The characters in their technological empires are less technicians of execution than they are forces requiring self knowledge. In a technological age when we have mastered all the materials (of space, food, shelter, &c) all technology becomes transparent to the core of our inner essence. Since our inner beings guide what technology does, and technology as a tool of the empire is the pure execution of a dictator, so must the elite come to know themselves if they are to be effective rulers. The people around them have less need to know themselves as they are focused outwardly, as technicians and policy implementers. Focused on outward action, this becomes an area where they covet power above them rather than focusing on knowing who they are.

I think this line of reasoning works well for at the top of the technological empire. In this sense, however, this book is less a book about the dune empire than it is for as a guide for inner peace.

Having read this book, the conclusion seems inevitable, although when I started it, it seemed completely without guidance, as in, what could the third book possibly be about? This is a sign of mastery, that Herbert wraps up the potentiality of the text beyond what at least I can see.

View all my reviews

Descartes; Spinoza (Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 31)

April 14, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 31 - Descartes; Spinoza)Great Books of the Western World by René Descartes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Descartes is the father of modern philosophy. Descartes is the father of modern math. What do they have in common?

He gives us his rules for the mind, his meditation on first philosophy — that is, the very method by which he seeks to find for us the truth. This method, described in part by Irme Lakatos as analysis-synthesis brings to us the very foundation of both math and philosophy. In fact, together, math and science form the same pair bond for analysis-synthesis paralleling each other’s formulation as each provides inflection points to form the other. Descartes’ method is no longer in vogue however, as it relies too much on a hidden conjecture to get to first philosophy but his methodology and its grounding assumptions still stand.

That is to say, with Descartes we get the calibration of a cut. If you read his philosophy or how he formulates his analytic geometry, one piece is used to measure the other. The model is calibrated to itself. The split predicate of “i think” therefore “i am” work in the same way that he uses lines through euclidean angles in order to measure parabolas in order to calibrate them to each other. The description of parabolas through their roots is a way in which we define the “zeros” of the coordinates in a domain. In a way, although Descartes was looking for some absolute referent (in philosophy) he found also in math, the arbitrary referent becomes the absolute referent! This missing link isn’t provided as any given cut can work, if treated with the proper methodology, but rather is raised to a metaphysical level as being an expression of the model of the cut to be made. If you read between the lines in Descartes treatment of the matter, especially in describing his methodology you’ll see how he breaks down the process into a series of chunks (cuts) and then those chunks inform us how to synthesize them back together, so as to be sure that this is in fact the only way to do so. I owe this analysis in part to Irme Lakatos. The analysis gives you the synthesis in part, and that assured nature that is self reflexive is a powerful aphrodisiac. I am sure Descartes sees his eternal truths quite well after experiencing how magically the pieces he made fit back together again.

I did not read Spinoza’s Ethics also contained in his book, as I aim to read Spinozas’ work in a different book.

Still, we owe Descartes much. Reading him verifies the basic root of his method, so that we can then use his thoughts as fodder for calibration of modern thought to itself. With these cuts, we can begin to see the unsupported cut as being arbitrary but also as being absolute, when we continually cut with consistency so that the entire situation comes to be constructed in terms of that arbitration. This is a way for us to recognize the constructed nature of our knowledge, as it has been continually refined, to the point at which knowledge becomes fragmented because each discipline interjects their own cut, following their own scientific truths as each attempst to reify each respective field as an absolute domain of self sufficient a priori presentation.

View all my reviews

The Universal Exception

March 23, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

The Universal ExceptionThe Universal Exception by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having read Zizek for over a decade, this work speaks out much more to me than it would had this been Zizek’s latest book. Here we see many figures of reason, a display of logic some of which did not make it to later works. Others of which show us how some tendencies may be further developed. The heady nature of this subject, an application of the theory of exception to politics can be summarized as the universal exception which must be removed before knowledge is generated.

This applies directly to politics as politics is nothing if not knowledge of others. Our ability to get along with them, to know them, to be able to understand (contain) large masses of people, trends and response to them with the understanding of policies and edicts that will effectively shape how we understand and get along with one another. In a way, Zizek is saying that we can understand our context but we cannot understand ourselves. Or we understand ourselves but not our context. The point of view needs a basis of comparison, even if it is about the point of view itself. This basis becomes invisible, absolute and profound as it is literally understood as its own shadow.

In a way, since this null point is still being shaped; the less interesting parts of this book are the parts where he lapses into his familiar terms, you get a sense that this exception is still new to him, a fragile point of hypnosis which captivates his full attention. As he gets into parallax gap, and then less than nothing, Zizek comes to understand that point has having any and every content possible. Never mind that he generally prefers the same hero worship. This worship, as silly as it may be can only be understood as a repetition of the difference he highlights. It works as both justification for the difference (it has appeared twice, as a repeat) but also as a tool of refinement in which Zizek can calibrate the theory, in this case to itself. A proper dialectical motion would follow in which Zizek insisted that Hegel was the first mistake, a random, chance, pure genius, whereas his repetition was a recognition of pure genius, the first true calibration point, in which a theory can be explicated and the point of split; the cut can be highlighted.

It would follow then, that our third effort, would be the chance to break free of the constraints of that cut, the chance to realize it as more than a singularity but a world logic. This would be the finding of a new transcendental model but only because its reflection requires that we jump back one step to justify Hegel, leaving the Byzantine ramblings of Kant. And from there, we can abstract to the method of Descartes and the ancient Greeks themselves, recognizing that the bridge between Descartes unnamed transcendental which affords only differences that self-evident and Kant’s Transcendental logic in which the functioning of that self evidence is made possible by the interstice view of the excess of various faculties’s interactions as these interactions are only visible outside of all these spheres of localized logics. Of course there is Understanding, which is self evident, Reason which extends itself into paradox, and Imagination which is spontaneous to be unpredictable. Each of these paradoxes wraps up the same faculties within their own immanence as to merely describe various anti-nomies themselves. These facial “black holes” that looking into another’s eyes or the unknown orifices in logic always present different realms of incoherence from the point of view of the outside looking in. We never get a full sense of our own arbitrariness without eliminating the possibility of there being strict rules. All topographies are distinguished by their handling of zeros. At first structure, then to texture. The procedure is logical but can be expressed via its own displacement, of which its kind of regularity is its logic. This then, becomes the genius of Descartes, as the first leap into dimensional mapping. To further this trend, we need to proceed into pure multiples.

If Liebniz understood that a curve was where any arbitrary measurement that was much like any other arbitrary measurement it follows that we’d have to reverse our way back out to get back to full points of content, back to ‘pataphysics and immanence. This is a move that Badiou and Deleuze do, but which I think we will find Zizek going to, but only if he is willing to give up the hero worshiping imposition of making a theoretical cut that includes too much of itself. The only point that creates this particular world as being what it is, as a limit to its maximal value (with no limit on its minimal) is the universal exception, the bulwark which we push off from, in order to jumpstart our content.

View all my reviews

Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology

March 18, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and EpistemologyPhilosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology by Imre Lakatos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lakatos stands at the edge of a vast tradition, and in his conservative way, decries those who would draw demarcation lines along those of community or traditional ideas of how discovery, math and science should be drawn as they always were. In seeking truth that is independent of human observation or valuation, Lakatos would fall along the same issue that Zizek would bring to many others — the lack of a transcendence. This much is so; Lakatos is as much a former Hegelian as much as it is a decrier of non-useful knowledges (like vulgar Marxists). What I admire most about Lakatos is that he isn’t afraid to approach the former basis of the formulation of math and science — in philosophy, and tackle the Cartesian synthesis as a modality of providing the basis for its own verification. This ties together the many aspects of Lakatos’ careful research work, his scholarly devotion to what others have said, and how they said it, and how they were (un)able to understand and respond to one another.

In other to be able to understand where Lakatos comes from we need to be able to understand that (ir)rationally he would have to disavow himself of those who he was most like in order to be distinguished from them, essentializing them by a singular disavow he found distasteful (or superfluous, thus discarding them as being superfluous). In this manner, his rejection of Marxism appears to be because of the implicit use of their historiographical techniques in order to highlight the logical difference their ideology makes, a technique he often uses to highlight competing and often contemporaneous schools of science. By revealing the shifting of sense making demonstrated by the cuts of history, we will always be able to detect minor unaccountable differences in understanding that question any possible aesthetic validity to the foundation that the use of human reason can be independent of superstition and wholly reliant on the strictest of causation.

Lakatos notes this is the unanswerable question of Hume: Can there be causation that is not mere induction? This is a question whose answer is to show its own impossibility, that human laws seem wholly immanent on itself rather than on principles that are consistent and surjective to the universe itself.

In fact, this lack of assurance is the very project Lakatos wishes to show, marking him as a philosopher of science, an inability to know what real in the naive classical sense is (should we encounter it). Many of his longer essays are devoted to this subject matter — the instability of the acceptedness of a theory despite or even because of its foibles and its refutations as understood from various points from its inception.

One of Lakato’s favorite mentions is that new theories are always immediately refuted before they are accepted. In other words, there is a lag between when a theory is too new to be validated or even understood before it is accepted as unequivocally true. There is a lack of resolution in this issue because we have no real way of measuring what was accepted only what at least a few individuals were saying at various times. So the question becomes even more precarious because what we know of a theory and what we know of a theory differ from each other depending on context. The unaccountableness of this change is where Lakatos organizes his conception of truth and epistemology in response to other’s certainties. In fact, where he is alike with Popper and structuralists, is that Lakatos is formulate an immanent critique of various logics, such as Newtonian, or mathematics, or Quine or Tarski or Toulmin in order to lead us to grasping what is excessive in their ideologies, as the overriding weight/basis for a judgement on verisimilitude. This requires a more rhetorical formalistic reading on Lakato’s part, in order to understand a curve in reason as being local to itself rather than to the material at hand; given the possibility at various points of inflection to determine opposite alternate possibilities. This is perhaps his greatest lesson from (and disagreement with) Karl Popper — that falsification of science can happen alone at a plateau detached from any concordance with induction. (Lakatos wanted at least weak induction, Popper thought that induction was not necessary).

If we were to believe that progress was in fact measurable, it would be the in theory detectable since there would be a steady retreat of the amount of uncertainty of the nature of nature as time progressed. We might expect that with the retreat of uncertainty we would find more concordance — but this has been shown to be untrue as the very nature of the universe is still to be questioned, as to what we can expect of it or how we should understand the nature of time or space itself (not to mention quantum mechanics and so on). In a way, Lakatos should have written a book, as his ideas criss-cross in a variety of manners, showing an immanence of understanding and relevance that this nest of ideas’ connectedness is nearly sustaining (Although no one essay really encapsulates the entire range).

What we see here, is the most nihilistic of philosophers, one whose field is technology itself — knowledge which is useful, and we get that not even from the point of view of knowledge can knowledge maintain consistency with itself. Lakatos gets that science is impacted from the outside, as all knowledege is, and because of this, insists that science be accountable to society even though science itself is amoral.

In a strange way, Lakatos nearly refutes himself, as his search for validity on the order of its own logic (and impossibility) becomes negative as he understands the aesthetics of the search to be about more than some academic scholarly immanence. Rather, our understandings become an allegory of itself, tainted with the atmosphere of its origins. In this strange way, we might understand this as a formalism of knowledge, if that expression is Hegelian or otherwise centered on its own difference. Lakatos can never find his own answers to his own questions by looking within just like he can never fully justify the lemmas of hard research programmes that came to be completely acceptable and then suddenly out of favor. Marred with this in-transience between different fields, Lakatos may be ranked with many post-structuralists as being trapped outside or inside a tradition, for if they speak from the outside it is because they, in the mystifications of Lacan, are “Cogito ergo sum,” ubi cogito, ibi sum. I am not, there where I am the plaything of my thought: I think of what I am where I do not think to think. In this same way Fichte was right to point to Antoss as the cogito’s inability to think where it is, but by pointing it out, Zizek demonstrates that Fichte too was not where he could think to think, meaning Antoss was but petit object a. In this same manner, Lakatos finds himself settled in “the third way” in the interstice of what can be nameable, in the (in)articulated depths of Wittgenstein’s language games where its successful performance is autonomous, detached and wholly invaluable/invalidable because they are strict reference points to absolutely itself.

Lakatos then, if we were to fling him from his comfort-zone, would be speaking of various inarticulable truths that appeared as marked events throughout history. Each zone is distinguishable only by itself, and wholly uncapturable by each other. We see zones of interference and resistance, characterized by contingency itself, when it reaches the highest levels of verification only by being repetitious enough to become a thing, a difference unto itself.

We end up with territories of language genres, a truth that perhaps Lakatos wouldn’t have wanted to acknowledge as being the strong version of science’s fallibility, that its champions, its expert-elite should get the acknowledgement they want, for their being individuals rather than for some autonomous process that could be drawn in the sand when in fact, that rockstar elitism can only insist on a community’s shared immanent ideology, a pack of thieves among any other pack of thieves, a distribution system that sustains itself, only this time with the indebtedness of verisimilitude. Lakatos was rather that we were impersonal, cut throat and yet responsible to more than just science when we be a philosopher and a defender of science from its own communal excesses.

View all my reviews

Logics of Worlds: Being and Event

February 22, 2015 / posted in dialectics, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the onset, Badiou’s materialist dialectic seems fairly obscure. But while he doesn’t speak much about it throughout his book, it becomes clear that his materialist dialectic is predicated on the same kind of formalization that has swept up modernist thought: the creation of formalism in order to express relations in thought.

While you can tell that Badiou doesn’t want to dismiss his previous work, Being and Event in this one he seeks to engage with the non-philosophical more. On this end, while the previous was on ontology this book it seems far more about presentation, or existence. Having sublimated the formalisms of mathematics into philosophical though, Badiou would introduce to us a more specific (and thus generalized) logic on which to understand the various collections and connections we witness in our everyday lives.

This formalism can be understood as the result of the Cartesian method of synthesis. One breaks down a situation into constituent atoms and then patches those atoms back together to come up with a composite world. The various different situations provide little input as to the method of the formalization, although the success of the formalization requires a method of atomization — “chunking”. How we decide to decompose a situation into unchunks will in reverse allow us to assemble them back together.

Part of Badiou’s genius, especially with this previous book to this, the first Being and Event relied on his insight that mathematics at its root was conceptual, not formal (despite how we in post-industrial education are introduced to mathematics, as pure formalism). By grasping the concepts, we can then also understand that mathematics is philosophical in its nature, although it is of a different kind. Math follows the inductive “analytical” side of the method. The missing piece is the synthesis. Much of philosophy post-ancient Greece, had to do with the presentation of the synthesis side. As Irme Lakatos notes, Descates realized their methods, and speculates that their “secrets” had to do with the method of analysis. The synthesis portion was given publicly and that’s why the Euclidean method is nothing but synthesis. We get the conclusions of their philosophy, but not their analysis. The end result of their analysis however, are their axoims. And so that’s what is missing in their method. This is also, incidentally, why mathematics and physics meld together so well. Two dissolve a situation via a formalism and then to patch it back together allows one to continually create new models, new methods of dissolution and then synthesis. The main impetus that arises from this the cherishes “occult hypothesis” by which one is able to grasp the missing “influx” that arranges the atoms and then sets the stage for how these atoms are to be stitched back together. For Newtonians, this occult hypothesis is gravity. The various other “conclusions” that theorists and scientists can come up with are varying but they consist of the “excluded middle”. Slavoj Zizek for example, in Less than Nothing has the occult hypothesis of less than nothing, the theory of two vacuums.

What is perhaps wonderful about Badiou’s approach, as well, is that he sidesteps the traditional jargon that Zizek has to deal with. Badiou can talk about past philosophers, and but Zizek, in order to make his point, MUST. This injection of mathematics is perhaps Badiou’s greatest contribution. It is a great strength as well, for he is able to introduce new relations on their own, rather than having to continually modify language we are already familiar with.

What is weak about Badiou however, is that he adds little content to a situation. His formalism is a tool that can be used to recompose existing worlds and relate them to one another. While he dismisses Kant in this book, he misses Kant’s greater understanding. As stated in his Critique of Pure Reason: mathematics is another synthesis. While math can be used analytically, and often is, its incompleteness in its axoims results from the fact that as a methodological field, math is stitched together through a variety of methods connected by sheer formalism. There is no one conception that rules mathematics in the same way that there is a singular conception that may rule Lacan or Descartes. So while formalism can be method to note new connections, it cannot replace the intuition of thought itself. In fact this is not an explanation what so ever.

Two additional weaknesses to Badiou

1. He critiques Deleuze heavily in claiming that his fourfold thesis is a reversal of Deleuze’s. This misses the point as both he and Deleuze understand that negation is not a rebuke of a logic but rather the emphasis of a missing totality. Badiou’s own method of formalising a transcendental envelope is predicated on the minimum gesture of negation of a missing piece. In fact, Badiou ends his book by noting that the presence of a body (or a grouping of conceptions as a topological family) is wholly subsisted on the missing of a minimum. His other critique — that Deleuze reduces everything into a monotonous elan vital, similiar to Spinoza’s lack of a transcendental distinction of substances and subjectivity is well taken, however.

2. His main value in the conversation is his ability to provide surjection between the domains of math and philosophy. This theory of points (book IV) is a pretty good aesthetic, only missing Dedekind’s cut of real numbers. While his analysis of what points provides to the conversation could have been (and should have been) interjected into his first book for the purpose of clarification, he misses out on providing an internal definition of knowledge even in this following book. One creates knowledge only when one can mark it, that is, surjectively translate it into a point. In fact, Weierstrass’s genius at the end of the 19th century relied on solifying what Descartes started: the overlay of points onto numbers in the form of analytic geometry. This move by 19th century mathematicians following Weierstrass’s reluctant but compelling argument for what eventually comes modern day set theory thus taken as being unequivocally true by Badiou and absorbed into his approach. Now, having explained the value of this formalistic surjection, Badiou misses the fact that the immanence of his theory is useless in itself.

Of course, he realizes this implicitly, but he does not seem to understand, as Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant did, that navigating the interstice is what brings a formalism its value. Kant’s genius lay in realizing the synthetic nature of phenomenon. His transcendental dialectic surpassed the different singular (“logically independent worlds” qua) faculties to give us a method of relating phenomenon together, stitching together a world through the continuance of their parts. Likewise, Marx explains exchange value through the various different use values of products. That the connected use values of these products is what creates value for money, and that different kinds of money are in a way, different kinds of sublimated use values. In his approach here, Badiou continues to wrap different worlds as increasingly complex localizations that appear to one another, but in the process of doing so always presents it within an absolute envelope (m) that is routely defined as the mode by which these different atoms can interrelate and be associated with one another. And while he states early on that there is no Being that covers all being, like there is no Body that can cover all, I do not think he realizes that by sublimating presentation as a formalization within these sets, he at all is able to step outside of the pure multiples themselves and wrap all of being as only that which appears under immanent logic. At the end of this book, he laments the dismissal of concepts, quoting Descartes that mathematics is eternal. And yet, hasn’t he contradicted himself? He defines early on that there is no Being — that it there is no way one envelope can wrap all of the different worlds, and then he defines it through sheer nominalization (m) and then acts as though this nominalization surpasses the physical presentation of the logics of worlds, stating that there are worlds in which we cannot have access to because their presentation is too baroquely different from our own.

This is the same entrapment that thinkers that the great Roger Penrose, or even Richard Dawkins falls into. Their sublime ability to create complex and yet fantasically concise occult hypothesis allows them the decompose and recompose with such sheer mastery that they have forgotten the reality of their own methods. They are hypnotized by their own defined immanence, forgetting that even in this present world there are points that lie outside of the rigor of their own presentations. Badiou follows this routine, coming to the conclusion to speak of the totality of Idea as an absolute shield. Nevermind the fact that such methodology did not exist for all time, and that the formalism of our own knowledge is a fragmentary creation of the conditions of what we accept to be knowledge. If our knowledge is fragmentary it is because we reject the interstices which gives each world of knowledge value, value which exists wholly outside of each field but is understood as immanent to that fields own internal non-sense.

This tact understanding is also Deleuze’s greatest insight which I think exceeds Badiou. Deleuze’s own language: the conceptions of territoriality, plateaus and the like, consist of Deleuze and Guattari’s genius at producing traces (rhizomes) by which different machinic assemblages influence one another. (Un)fortunately, Deleuzean language either leads people to reject it outright as being non-knowledge, as there is no “point” by which one can make heads or tails of it, books which review Deleuze and only write about a few of his concepts as though this is the great aspect that is to be gleamed, or books which abandon Deleuze but are “about” Deleuze and seek to create their own immanence. Badiou’s method does allow for some greater control in adjusting and decomposing with greater control, but I think that Badiou himself misses the larger aesthetic of Deleuze by pursuing too recklessly the desire for validation. On the one hand, Badiou understands that his philosophy only has value if he is able to connect it to real life situations (thus his talking about life and death) but on the other hand, he wishes for the most obscure concepts in order to be recognized with his heros, as a philosopher).

Having gone this far in the review, I do wish to pull back a little and return to the material dialectic. This insight is profound on its own, but Badiou misses stating it explicitly in his text because he is too enamored of his mathematical rigor: this point is simply that all creation of knowledge (analysis and the synthesis) is predicated on procedure. The truth of mathematics as a rigorous activity and the formation of knowledge as points wholly subsists on the exteriority of various groups that are able to formulate their knowledge as a logical consistency of their profession/activity. That is to say, the pure immanence of a specific approach requires the route nullification of external connections in-itself. Worlds become whole when they eschew other worlds, and nullify the influence of exterior factors. This pure modeling becomes all the more valuable when it is connected to a process which then is able to modify one another. Professions like attorneys and architects are gatekeepers to officiated activity, activity which is inflated because of the formalism of capitalism… but that in itself, is to encroach on an entirely different subject.

I gave this book 5 stars because it’s a tight piece of world. It’s flawed for the reasons I point out, but it’s still wellworth the read.

View all my reviews

The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967

February 8, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967 by John Kenneth Galbraith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am definitely a fan of Galbraith…and I don’t say that about many authors. While not a complete collection of his writing, this is definitely a good selection of what he was about as an economist.

What I find fascinating is that The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State come from an American economist (or Canadian if you like) and yet support many of Marx’s conclusions about merchant ideology. The sense that merchant capital extended to producers and consumers alike (producers since the Dutch in the 1600s and then, to consumers after WW2, as state backed consumerism) guarantees the use value that makes production monetarily sound (completing the material dialectic of merchant capital) ex post facto is astounding. That Galbraith extends this idea by recognizing that technology is the key to capitalism, in terms of production and social disruption, something not yet recognized by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo or Marx is will worth the read. If communist minded individuals and Marxists alike read more of Marx and actually kept their minds open instead of being reactionary we might have a deeper understanding of our state backed capitalism.

While Galbriath does not advocate revolution, he definitely insists that we need to change our values if we want to survive in a degrading environment and do more with our lives than make the anonymous bureaucrats wealthy (technocrats of our technostructure as he calls them).

Despite this insistence that humanity use its powers for more than making wealth and endless production and increased poverty and degradation, Galbraith adds with this thought a heavy analysis of the inner workings of state and industry as a unity that transcends the explicated boundaries of American politics. He understands that we are not really free anymore; that our freedom is limited to our consumerist subjectivity. While this analysis does miss some of Marx’s social understandings (that a change in material relations means a change in societal arrangement) Galbraith does add a refreshing view of how economics and infact higher education is complacent in arguing for the status quo. For why should they bite the hand that feeds them?

Furthermore, as we specialize deeper and deeper into fields of study, we lose the ability to connect the more general dots. Our world becomes fragmented across many areas. Specialists cannot see where they are going, much like those economists who eschew math appear less rigorous. People doing specific tasks will more likely see their world through the filter of that task, and be unable to comprehend outside of it. As our complexity in our world rises with each year, it becomes less and less likely that there is anyone driving the wheel. This is how we can see the technostructure, as an faith that promotes itself so that we become less and less able to break from it as time goes on, as our specific interests (employment, leisure, study) becomes less and less able to identify the nature of our cage — as an over arching planning structure. Much like how the planning system in the Soviet state was run by anonymous bureaucrats in a state apparatus, our planning system is run by anonymous technocrats in various corporate chains backed by a state system.

I won’t continue on about how this is reflective in our worldview of modernism — our production of epistemes — but there is a direct link here, between how our knowledge is formed and our value system is driven by philosophical, educational and economic concerns for no other reason than to develop itself further, for us to be more completely mired in its logic and its mindless production of demand desires and status on various corporate and civil chains of our own unthinkable making.

We live on this Earth, and fulfill the needs of the very game we create in order to live together on this Earth without ever really looking up and acknowledging that we have created extreme wealth and extreme suffering with no end in sight… if only so that one can be satisfied at the expense of another, and for what? So we can die together and leave the world a slightly more ugly place?

View all my reviews

« Older PostsNewer Posts »