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In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture

January 10, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, Theory / No Comments

In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of CultureIn My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture by Kwame Anthony Appiah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kwame Anthony Appiah successfully describes the difficults involved in relating lived experience in Africa with the globalized agency of Africa as a group. Without hammering the post-colonial apparatus too heavily, Appiah navigates the difficult area of defining what makes Africa Africa from as many points of view simultaneously. For Appaih the post-colonial condition is characterized by a variety of competing identities, groupifications from tribal, regional, racial, national, ethnocentric, religious, eurocentric and otherwise. All of these necessitate that the individual successfully navigate as many areas as possible in order to figure out who they are. Identity is destablized because after we reject nationalism as a modernist aesthetic derived from european identity of the 18th+ centuries, what have we got to replace it with? In post-colonial countries, there is a harsh identity that the educated elites begin to have problems with creating — as their uneducated peers do not have access to the same historic basis to define themselves. Yet having a historic basis means losing the very centeredness of those “good ole days” when we were young, and life seemed very clear and stable.

We experience some of this daily, in non-colonized countries as well, but our sense of legitimacy is different. The problem of post-colonialism is that all groupings of identity are competing and yet equally legitimate, in some sense. One can’t deal with the world and completely ignore how the world sees one. The problem is complicated by the fact that many Africa groups do not identify with one another, coming from incompatible worlds, speaking a variety of incompatible languages with incompatible customs. The epilogue Appiah provides detailing his father’s identity and how his father’s death presented a complicated problem dealing with different competing sensibilities of how to honor the man and yet submit to the variety of powers that be.

All in all, a good read, one which suggests that the solution is of yet an unnamed composite identity that only time can seal. Appiah is aspecially adept at navigating the different areas of art, capitalistation, globalisation and identities that characterize a contemporary Africa, a final global limit of capitalist hegemony that is constructed from the top down, leaving the middle confused as to the desired orientation. It’s not a matter of having too many choices, it’s a matter of not even knowing what the proper choice can be, as the competing value systems require constant renegotiation, differentiation and redifferentiation depending on the the multivalience of the identities of the actors on the ground.

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Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

January 5, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, utility / No Comments

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to AnotherCritical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this very interesting book, Philip Ball takes us around through various formalizations of physics, as a method of describing how matter (or energy) is actuated in order to highlight a possible formulation for how society is actuated. Curiously, he starts with Hobbes and then walks through the various material relations. Along the way he notes various new ideas as they describe matter and energy, showing in clear lucid language how this may or may not apply with society.

He does come up with some striking similarities for the models, but ultimately this is less a new sociology that is an extension of physics (a new physics) and more of a “look what I found, isn’t this weird?” kind of text. I would recommend this as a very interesting read, but unlike physics, there isn’t an easy correlation of model to actual particulates, in part because while we can see some analogous lines (especially with his prisoner’s dilemma or and game theory) he does lack an object of study. Society is too vague, and human agency is not discussed at all. Ball is more interested in how mobs of people have “emergent properties” but he does not discuss the role of agency or how these properties might emerge. In this way, despite the thickness of the book, this is more about finding interesting descriptions than it is about creating a working theory with an episteme from which we can build a system of human society. This forms the fatal flaw in the book, if there is one.

Thus, if you find this kind of topic interesting, it’s well worth the read. It will give you food for thought. Ball writes very clearly, concisely. You get a glimpse at the very interesting but also very diverse fields of study which you may not be aware of. But if you’re looking for a manifesto or an outline for how society should work, or how to even approach understanding human groupings as a system, you’re bound to be disappointed. Ball seems to find such discussion to be fruitless for himself to contemplate even as he engages the thoughts of others who have attempted such conjecture before.

Nonetheless, his revolving around the topic of critical mass or supercritical fluids before phase shifts as a way of describing social relations was of great abstract interest for me. Unfortunately, computer models do not translate well into human interaction in the sense that we have no solid metrics from which to gauge how people vary from one to another.

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A Treatise of Human Nature

January 2, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

A Treatise of Human NatureA Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Much simpler shorter and less expansive than An Enquiry into Human Understanding but all the same, intensely interesting.

Karatani is correct, for Hume all knowledge is synthesis save for math, and counting, which Hume doesn’t seem to be able to account for at all — so he claims such a thing is innate. Indeed, we can grasp that such an ability (counting) and spacial-motoral skills seem to be bred into us, as innate mental structures. Still, Kant in this one area is more radical than Hume, claiming that math is also synthetic knowledge.

What I found startling was a passage here, in which Hume posits in paragraph section 122, that the nature of modern enquirers understand that qualities are separate than the objects themselves. Here he lays groundwork for a phenomenal and noumenal distinction, something Kant later picks up, through the transcendental framework if abstraction… that the ideas we have are innate to us, as such ideas require material expression which we get from senses and feelings. Kant also takes serious the conjoined nature of two objects; where Hume takes sufficient reason to task, Kant understands this as an ex post facto (retroactive) synthesis, one that later on Bergson utilizes to tie together disparate fields despite their different culturally determined signifying functions.

Hume is pretty fantastic.

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Dune

December 31, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am not sure what science fiction had in terms in motifs before Dune, but with reading Dune, it becomes apparent that Frank Herbert expresses a great many motifs that later on become cliches, including, neo-religiousity, a female infant whose perspicacity is beyond comprehension, space age warfare that includes the most brutal of hand to hand combat, and so on. In a way, this book’s setting is the only thing that makes it sci-fi. Technology becomes invisible to the reader so that we reach the forefront of human exploration: social interaction. In a way, this kind of science fiction isn’t done anymore today, as Ursula Le Guin points out. Most sci-fi is centered around the awesomeness of technology, repetitious explosions, repetition of crowd pleasing effects (such as how the new Star Wars/Star Trek movies serve to repeat what the crowd likes), and other phenomenon based on past understandings.

In this way, Dune with its harshness and its strange world is different — you are confronted with society different than your own, but is seemingly non-arbitrary while being immersive. In many ways, the plot isn’t all that surprising. From the get go you realize what is going on, what needs to be done and how the book has to end. But at the same time, you realize at the end, that it’s not really about who you thought it was. The journey, while questionable before you get into it, isn’t at all questionable once you are in it, because it’s well worth the attempt to read it.

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On the New

December 14, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

On the NewOn the New by Boris Groys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Groys is a formalist. He recasts the dialectic of subject and object in terms of valorized-profane in order to talk about the production of culture. Through the figure of art (and then conceptual theory), Groys notes the production of new as necessary to stablize the meta-position of culture. He makes these positions independent of specific content and that makes him not only a formalist but also an idealist.

One of the issues with this, is that this ideation remain ungrounded in material practices, that valorization and the profane are “indistinguishable”. Perhaps this makes him a lazy philosopher, but it’s unwelcome since the very ability for one to distinguish the two is the entire point of valorization. A stronger critique of this thought would be to say that all that we can recognize is already included in culture, and that what isn’t in culture is only recognizable through the filter of culture, so it is “not yet itself”, which begs the question of schema.

At first glance I thought he was going to outline a scheme of becoming. Umberto Eco did so in order to talk about how new information can create new categories for the new, but Groys avoided doing this difficult task. Instead he retreated into the familiar dialectical play of cultural difference to pull the new from the auspices of the void… this puts him strictly within the history of formalization as outlined in Foucault’s The Order of Things, wherein the question today becomes how can one pull content from form alone? The appeal to the void (or the Other of thought) or the attempt to think the unthinkable isn’t a new attempt. Groys puts forth a well researched and tightly knit but conservative book. In this sense, he is pretty easy to read, and serves more as a text for a sophomore for an aesthetic reading of familiar forms instead of as an earth shaking opus.

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The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

December 10, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human SciencesThe Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this impressive book, Foucault takes on the basic organizational episteme of our current epoch. He highlights the contemporary modality of our post-modern world by tracing the development of our episteme from the 16th century to the present day.

While this may seem to be a simple tale of historical causation Foucault says explicitly on several occasions that he cannot account for the break between the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century. What he is referring to has several possible angles to it, which strongly emphasizes that in our current era we have not processed this break fully, that we are still within this logic and therefore unable to account for it.

One way to speak of this break is to note that in the Classical era, knowledge was mediated through a reference to the infinite. This had the happy consequence of making language transparent. If there was a limit to our knowledge it lay in the fact that human beings were finite and unable to extend to the fullest reaches of knowing, which would otherwise be available. When one contrasts this with the current epoch, we have the condition of knowing being mediated by man. As Zizek might say, a subject-hood is self-realized selfhood, that all conditions of knowing pass through the self.

While it may be tempting to digress into philosophical contemplation with this idealist twist, Foucault is quick to add that this subjectivity is only made possible because the inherent formalization of various fields have fragmented into their own logic (for him, biology, economics and philology are the ones he looks at, but by no means are these positions foundational). What I mean by immanent logic is that the formalization, which is expressed as the adoptation of mathesis as a neutral symbology by which to express immanent logic, forces each of these fields to define the conditions of their knowledge by an appeal to a central agency that is both immanent to the field and conditioned beyond it. What ends up happening is that we chase our own shadow. Human beings created these fields of knowledge to solve specific tasks relating to how we valuate our situation. We want to know certain things and value knowing those things in the way that we do; thus these fields come to reflect our basis premises as to who we are and how we are.

To say this in another way, these different fragmented sciences are created from and simultaneously inform the cultural biases which outlines these various fields of study. In these areas (biology, economics, language and so on) ultimately reflect back how we create knowing, so that when we attempt to know these fields completely we end up chasing our own reflection. Foucault uses the Diego’s painting Las Meninas as the metaphor for this knowing. The various figures in the field become stabilized in our attempt to see what is going on, and in that moment we catch a faint glimpse of our own reflection in the distance. For this reason, man and subjecthood, as Foucault notes, are in fact recent authorizations which did not exist previous to this break.

You can find many ideas that he skims here as echoing positions by other thinkers, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Meillasoux, Baudrillard… they all arrange our situation differently but their arrangement of our situation isn’t a genuine stepping out of it. In much the same way, writers like Kafka and Beckett are only made possible because of the epoch; they are already expressing the confusion of the order which refers back to us, they are not creating the order nor are they recording its transition.

One of the most telling features that Foucault writes about, telling in the sense that this is an Event, is how he recasts time as a matter of epistemological entrapment. Our inability to decide for ourselves an origin for consciousness is a sign that consciousness exists outside our ability to know because it is the condition of how we know. This strongly matches Badious writing on the Event, signaling that our criteria for knowing remains invisible to us. Consciousness like the figure of Man remains the limit to our knowledge because we are the figure by which we can come to know everything else around us.

Foucault would like to realize the historical causality in the rising of this event but he can’t explain it. There can be no causality because our methods of understanding will not be able to account for itself. In fact, I am expressing this episteme right now, as the current trace of philosophy and knowledge today (sciences included) wish to think the unthinking, to bring about consciousness to the real conditions of knowing. This of course is a problem because if our human parameters for what matters isn’t objective enough for us, and in fact can only bring about the cultural biases which are expressed in how we decide what is, worthy of knowing and how we should know something (what terms are relevant) then what should be the basis for the creation of a new knowledge?

Foucault offers Nietzche’s superman as a possible condition of the new. The Eternal Return marks a horrifically new epoch for which we can have new conditions. (The Nazi trauma as it were, was not it, because it was not enough to mark a difference– that false event was too conditioned already by recent and ancient histories, its baggage signaled an allegiance to the current epoch in much the same way Mao or Stalinism did the same.) Of course, a new condition also means a new history, also means the end of philosophy… but I digress.

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The Sickness unto Death

December 7, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Sickness unto DeathThe Sickness unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’d like to give this 3.5 stars, but I guess since that’s not possible, let’s go with 3 stars, since the ending fell flat.

Kierkegaard follows the Hegelian dialectic through the realization of spirit from self. Different from other readings, but not incompatible, Kierkegaard notes that it is through God as man as the mediator that self is realized as spirit, that like Hegel, Jesus is the bridge for the insurmountable gap between man and God. What’s particularly compelling about this work is that Kierkegaard defines despair and sin as conditions of separation from God. For Kierkegaard there can be no other understanding than a relation grounded in God since God is all there is, from start to finish. We may question what it means to stand before God and accept God but with this reading, there can only be faith in acceptance since any other posturing is deceptive and a sin — since such deployments would seek to separate us from God.

So in this sense, all separation and struggle is immanent to the self, as the self is the only other position for which there can be any deception or posturing. On the one hand, this seems incredibly boring since it’s a basic dialectic form. But Kierkegaard is able to walk through a Christian conceptualization based on the work by an already very Christian philosopher.

I suppose in a way, he is detailing out his own situation in abstract, outlining for others, what he finds to be vanities of humanity. We would like to be seen a certain way, understood a certain way, and often this even before us in the eyes of God, a posture we would like to hold to be genuine, never realizing that our own wishes for a particular understanding belie our unacknowledged desires for self acknowledgement and self acceptance. In that sense, complete acknowledgement and truthfulness about who we are is only possible in the face of an all knowing, all seeing deity who is witness to even the dark depths of our soul. I suppose this is perhaps, a great function of bringing God into our lives, that we cannot lie to ourselves and must come to realize our own imperfections so that we can be better people.

This last part may not be in Kierkegaards book. I am not Christian though, nor do I seek to be Christian, but Kierkegaard makes no promises about what sickness unto death can lead us to; the absolute defiance of not-believing in God despite the option being there constantly. Instead, he leaves this off, not mentioning what comes after, perhaps because he is not there either, although for him, such despair is an all consuming struggle from which the only reprieve can be to leave it be and move on to better things.

I think if you are struggling in your life and need to find a resolve, this book could work for you in the sense that you may come to some kind peace, knowing your despair is not alone and that it is, in a very universe sense, a mode, a choice that you made for yourself. Although the solution in this book may not be one you find useful, as I did not, you may not want to read it as it kind of doesn’t really speak to you. But you wouldn’t know if it did or not though, unless you read it.

So it’s probably worth reading if you are depressed or need some guidance at least for a while. All in all, it’s not a thick book, so why not?

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Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

November 30, 2014 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and MeaningMeeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Barad presents an account of reality she calls agential realism. While intuitively we understand this in pop explanations as “point of view” she radicalizes this account by extending it into the formal fields of post-structural philosophy and quantum physics.

Taking the writings of the great physicist Neil Bohr, Barad dehumanizes his writing by removing what Meillasoux calls “Ptolomey’s Revenge” in which the sciences (and philosophy) take the human account of things to be the end point of justification. In other words, we take our familiar human account as the basis for determining what is out there. This repetition of a human account out there forms the discursive struggle between wave-particle accounts in quantum mechanics. Barad is very quick to emphasize that discursive practice isn’t a linguistic concept, a concept in words but rather material process that determines what is to be measured and how to measure it. In her words, the agential cut has to do with distinguishing between the material affects of the apparatus of measurement in creating phenomenon.

She doesn’t take phenomenon to be as opposed to noumenon in the Kantian sense but opposed to objects in the subject-object distinction. While she puts scare quotes around “subject” and “object” distinction, these scare quotes are meant to present such terms in their generic specificity rather than their philosophical baggage. Objects don’t exist out there. Rather than material construction of the discursive practice in formulating an apparatus of measurement determines what exists out there. While science is suspect to conception (theories), Barad want show that what’s at stake in agential realism is that our conception of the entire situation doesn’t simply highlight the terms of the concept but it also highlights the condition upon which we presume truth to be available.

While she makes the easy connection between material process and Judith Butler’s performativity theories, she avoids the distinction that such agential realism requires a human consciousness to perceive such distinctions. A human consciousness can provide an apparatus of measurement but the larger reality as a whole provides conditions for knowing itself. The impossibility of being able to objectively account for everything is the problem that in the universe one part of it needs to be “lost” (or in Zizek’s terms, less than nothing) for the other part of the universe to be analyzed.

This is in many accounts a difficult book to read, but Barad walks us through the trickly lines of thought. She doesn’t adhere to an (inter)subjective account of reality but rather mentions that the marks of an apparatus of measurement makes on existing bodies serves as the objective mark, one that is often itself registered in terms of the agencies of observation. In this way, agential realism is a way of noting how the universe meets itself half way, to constantly create the conditions for which unit-hood is registered and made distinct.

While a thick book, Barad has outlined an approach that is sure to provide a new framework for understanding why the experience of reality is different for so many, as our material practice is the conceptual condition by which discursive practices actualize… not as representations of a transcendentalism but through the conditions of materiality itself, entangled in itself. (As Deleuze would say, differentiation isn’t what happens to cytoplasm, rather cytoplasm contains all the differentials which create a given differentiation.)

There is so much more I can add, but I think this sums up what the book does and is about, enough for anyone who wants to read about this kind of stuff to pick it up.

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Contents of Thought

November 23, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Contents Of ThoughtContents Of Thought by Robert H. Grimm
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m not well versed in analytic philosophy. But here’s a book of 5 analytic philosophy essays, seeking to verify the, you guessed it, “contents of thought”

There is an anesthetic in analytic philosophy that is to be concise, precise and to have real world impact. The idea is that whatever thought experiment is said, should also have application in the real world. That is, it shouldn’t necessarily debunk our every day understanding but it should add to it, if possible. That being said, there appears to be two main veins that run through these essays. The first is the content approach, which assumes that there is real stuff, be this an interior content that is separate, or a belief that has a role in the chain of causation. The second approach is a formalism, a syntax only approach, which assumes that the relationships of various things constitute what a thing is, rather than there being any original content. The two are at odds. It’s perhaps impossible to verify one over the other, since from the second approach we wouldn’t admit to there being any content even if we ran across it because how would we know that it is what it is without it being hooked in the way that it naturally is? From the first approach, we can simply retool the same situation and explain behavior without appeal to any particular content — and that is sufficient to show that content is not necessary.

What these two approaches seem to me to highlight is what Karen Barad calls “the apparatus of measurement” which is to say what aesthetic tool we use to determine what is being questioned will emphasize or conclude a different aspect of the thought experiment. It’s beyond the scope of this review to really go into too much detail, but it’s suffices to say that the last essay in which Robert Stalnaker shows how the role of context changes meaning to impact belief and syntax appears to me to really highlight what is missing. All thought experiments pose a specific kind of inquiry, and in doing so, given the set up of the situation, beg the question. Changing the context will always inevitably change the meaning, or even destroy meaning itself. Lynne Rudder Baker’s essay does this quite well, wrapping our consideration within the context of what we would consider as being meaningful.

This split between formal approaches and content approaches however, is nothing new. Formalism as a whole is a modernist approach to development of theories. This kind of approach does have its limits, as we are seeing. What we are now at the edge of doing, across many different disciplines it seems, is to try and develop content itself as it arises from formalism. Something that, from a formalism only stand point or a content only stand point would appear to be near impossible.

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Multitude

November 22, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of EmpireMultitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The basic foundation in this book comes from Marx, that is to say, the form of labor — forces of production — shape subjectivity. Unlike Marx however, Hardt and Negri take the position that labor has already attained subjectivity. They dub this collective subjectivity as the multitude, not as a unity but as a collective resistance against the control of production that upper classes utilize. So while you can draw an analogy between communism as utopia, espoused by Marx and how Hardt and Negri take radical democracy of the multitude as utopic, the main difference from Marx isn’t democracy vs communism, it’s the concept that subjectivity is also produced by the mode of labor.

So to reconnect the dots, Hardt and Negri take a post-Marxist position that is analogous to Marx. Using the figure of the double articulation as a way of deploying meaning, the first articulation is the mode of labor to constitute subjectivity. The second articulation for Hardt and Negri is the state apparatus, the nest of multinational corporations that over grids national boundaries while defining the class relations within those national boundaries. Hardt and Negri envision a second articulation that follows the first articulation closely, in order to divide resource allocation more evenly.

They don’t pretend to know how to do this, this book is only meant to define the problem further.

So to follow their form, they do fall under the rubric of post-modernism as an accelerated form of modernism, because they take the populous multitude as having coherency within each separate identity, even if there is no coherency within a larger collection because such coherency creates a bottle neck that would centralize control, disrupting most positions within the multitude by “representing” them.

In this sense, their deploy is anti-representation, yet it also uses the political-social episteme as a model for itself. One assumes that we will not encounter Baudillaridian simulacra at the point, for Hardt and Negri like Marx assume that the subjectivities of the multitude are authentic and not a reflexive back-flow informed by the second articulation but wholly originary merely at the first level in-itself for-itself.

They don’t address this last point. Coached in the terms I just put it, their assumption becomes problematic and unstable, for as they point out, peace in the center requires expansive control of the territory directly outside. This seed is how they point out Empires start. And isn’t in this example, a singularity that would rule the multitude? They also don’t address this in the book; how a multitude could live with itself. I suppose their reach is to get away from abstract philosophy, but considering that their assumptions are centered from philosophy, it feels like a bit of a blind spot.

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