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[[there.]]

November 12, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, Theory / No Comments

ThereThere by Lance Olsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Written at the time he was in Germany, and perhaps inspired by the novels of David Markson (not sure if Olsen writes other works in the same kind of form), Olsen takes the aphorism as the implicit unit of narrative morphology.

Built from composites on his musings of history, other writers, autobiography Markson like many other post-structuralists approaches the creation of [[there.]] as a place of pure presence, neither explicable nor eminently reachable. In other words, Olsen resists naming this reference point all the while he constructs the place of it. Taken as a kind of “trash diary”/travelogue:

A week before you leave, you decide to keep a trash diary: a constellation of sense, thought, memory, observation, fast fact scraps.

Olsen insists on the event of being in Germany for a writing fellowship as the start of collecting this work together. So while the frame of the book subsists on this fellowship (much like how “there.” is doubly bracketed, the processing of placement: historic, personal and professional work off this justified event of being a travelogue, a venture into the another world.

The major trope of this work then, while often not explicitly stated (though stated often), hinges on being in another place. Olsen gives us vignettes not just his musings on Germany

A Polish saying: One German a beer, two Germans an organization, three Germans a war

Berlin feels disorienting because it is disorienting

In German, the noun gift means poison.

It shares the same Proto-Indo-European root as the English word gift–ghabh, meaning to receive–but German employs the origin meaning as a dark gesture: Gib ihm das Gift. Give him the poison.

The verb for to poison in German used to be vergeben, a word that now means to forgive.

(btw, here’s more germany)

I’ve been practicing my German for three months–ever since I received the news–in an attempt to bring it back to a semblance of life after more than 30 years in the mnemonic deepfreeze.

The block bearded graduate student with the wire-rimmed glasses who could read and speak sentences I can no longer even tangentially understand:

Who was that guy?

but also musings on travel itself

To walk is to lack a place, Michel de Certeau felt. It is the indefinite process of being absent

Traveling, I want to say, is like clicking a link on a website: a surge of disorientation followed almost immediately by a surge of reorientation.

Only in three dimensions.

Over and over again.

and

Traveling is a condition enabling recognition of the limits of human knowledge and mystery, inviting us to orient and re-orient our selves to an existence that will always exceed our grasp

It wasn’t until decades later the reason for that atomic commotion hit me: in addition to the obvious, that perfect novella is an allegory about continuous change, which is to say an allegory about travel.

Travel then, or at least being in an Other situation allows Olsen to begin to construct traveling, or the place of being in an unknown place. And I don’t mean just the situation of being in Germany, but also the situation of Other itself…not just a specific there, but a definite indeterminate [[there.]]

Olsen, however, isn’t content to let us sit still in an unknown situation. He uses this unknown situation much as he uses the aphoristic structure of his narrative, to jump anywhere.

(He didn’t know it would be his 9/11 novel. He’d been writing what he believed was a different book entirely when he looked up that glistening morning and saw the first plane explode into the World Trade Center.)

(The very next sentence he composed reconceived what he was doing and why.)

(His novel changed course in a breath of white space.)

Significant in this, is the use of the parenthetical, as if Olsen is filling in a gap, which would in some other case, may otherwise be left out. This corresponds to the metaphor of the journey, in which his trip to Germany at first alien slowly becomes familiar, blending in with what he knows until one day he isn’t there anymore, but here.

The here remains, however, an unspoken here, for one is always here. Reminiscent of traveling, one records the high points, photographs, destinations, but also the unexpected interruptions of how you get there. Travel, like life, Olsen reminds us, is the encounter of what is both familiar and unfamiliar. To sum it up quickly, Freud’s term in German is Das Unheimliche. Although most contemporary commentators would jump on unheimliche to speak of the “uncanny valley” Olsen supplies us with this critical framework for which to supply an attempt to name, to create a complete thing is to bracket it, as he unpacks unheimliche for us, thusly:

a construction that goes nowhere, teaches zip, embodies the purest form of Freud’s unheimlich: a term that contains within itself heim (home), unheim (not home), and heimlich (hidden, secret).

The unheimlich signifies what we know, yet has been made unfamiliar, a forever being-at-home that is also a never-being-at-home.

Which brings us back to the end of the opening vignette:

Being-at-home, Heidegger says, is not the primordial phenomenon. Not-being-at-home is more fundamental. To be not-at-home may mean to be AT HOTEL

the overriding travelogue nature of which, roughly takes us back to the topography of travel. More rightly speaking, both home and not home are elements of the familiar and the unfamiliar sitting together as one, on the edge of what is what we recognize.

This blending the opposites brings us to the limit of the expressible, in which what is nameable is also what isn’t nameable. Olsen in his metacritical way strikes upon the experimental in experimental literature:

The first definition of the word experimental is of a witness: having actual or personal experience of anything.

With this definite-ambiguity, Olsen pulls us towards the creation of the subject from a situation.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke, David Foster Wallace advanced: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle.

Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

So it should come as no surprise that Olsen also runs alongside many different aspects of Wittgenstein. And through this frame, [[there.]] is another commentary on Wittgenstein:

How the aim of Wittgenstein’s work is to show us–by making us aware of the bottle’s presence, and thus its inherent limitations into which we are forever bumping our foreheads–the means by which to get out, no matter what we do, because the top is sealed, because we can’t think beyond language’s glass grammars, because our perceptions are meditated by what we imagine verbs, nouns, and the rest do.

How one gets out (by not getting out), not through applying a single philosophical method to all the linguistic knottinesses but by moving from topic to topic every which way in an ongoing calisthenics of inquisitiveness and alertness.

While at first graze through the first ten pages, one may wonder, where is he going with these quotes, these disparate angles, this decentralized narrative? Olsen definitely wants to say it all, force it together in a double articulation of brackets in which the second articulation is the dissolution of meaning found in the formality between the formulated white space. The latter pages of [[there.]] reflect heavily on death, suicide by authors, writers, thinkers. Death isn’t simply the ending of the text itself, where Olsen needs to find a resolution, but also a marked position within [[there.]], bracketed with the rest of life, travel, the human condition. Said simply:

[[That is here (or there).]]

So what is constructed in [[there.]]? How do we get to a point of caption to understand what Olsen has made? By breaking such oppositions such as here and there, home and un-home where has Olsen taken us?

In the end of Of Grammatology, Derrida’s placement of logocentricism on the Western tradition is mostly hinged on through the central figure of Rousseau (where Rousseau stands-in-for the Enlightenment tradition). Logocentricism isn’t simply the practice of anchoring language in writing, Derrida names the essence of logocentricism as the pure presence that speech, writing and culture refer as the penultimate mark of orientation. In this way, all discourse circumambulates pure presence as the crowned position that creates the space for endless linguistic play to work. Naming this pure presence as the supplement forced into metaphysics, Derrida writes:

[Rousseau] dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signifier to signified, representer to represented, mask to face, writing to speech. But all oppositions are irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics[…].

But what does that mean? The opposition of dream to wakefulness, is not that a representation of metaphysics as well? […] At the bottom of a page of Emile, after having once more cautioned us against books, writing, signs […] Rousseau adds a note: “…the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will say too I am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.”

This finding of ourselves in our travel, in our life, in our home-not-at-home takes us to the middle way, in which oppositions of what we recognize are also what is unrecognizable in us as we find each other and ourselves, find the collective I.

And so, Olsen notes the history of the program founded at the American Academy which was meant to foster greater understanding between Americans and Germans after the horror of our shared experience in the two World Wars.

On 4 July 1945, less than a month after entering Berlin, US Forces requisitioned Arnhold’s villa as an Officer’s Club.

Forty-nine years later, as the last American troops departed the city, German ambassador Richard Holbrooke proposed the establishment of a research and cultural institution designed to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and Germany.

[…]

In 1998 the first class of fellows walked through the Academy’s doors.

Since then, more than 300 writers, artists, musicians, and academics in literature, humanities, politics, economic, law and philosophy have worked here: a dozen each spring, a dozen each fall.

Look: there [[I]] am.

So we can now end the review on this note, that writing is collective collaboration, as travel is the meeting of the familiar in the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar in our familiar selves. Olsen’s ambitions for this trash diary are actually quite high. Despite the seemingly random vignettes he holds together a larger vision of our shared experience using the formalism of white space itself to articular the layer, a pacing of where we would expect the next token.

This is why critics write criticism, why philosophers write philosophy, why theorists write theory: every critical monograph, theoretical essay, philosophical tome is ultimately no more than no less than an act of spiritual autobiography.

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The Gargoyle

November 12, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, love, reviews, universal nothing / No Comments

The GargoyleThe Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story has two different themes which are inextricably tied together: love and redemption. That in itself is not so new or different, but the way in which Davidson goes about it is intensely interesting.

While the neutral background characters provide the context for understanding this story as a love story (their background romance is sneaky in the sense that it works well to do this), Davidson also intersplices many other background stories and inherent side chapters to do the same thing. None of these stories by itself is compelling. And while they provide the skeptical narrator interest at first, he soon drops this rhetoric in favor of oh, you get the point. In fact much of the narrator acts as a skeptic for us, so that we can further suspend our belief.

In that sense, it’s quite a good structure.

I did find much of the passionate pleas for love, for unconditional acceptance to be moving, probably because it’s so fantastic. But that is how faith is supposed to work, as Pascal’s Pensees work, Christianity is so inexplicable and unexplanable, we have no choice but to believe! And Davidson’s craft works in much the same way. If you are able to go with it, including the highly contingent and very fantastic characters that provide the fodder for disbelief–that each of these very different characters from very different worlds can connect with one another on such a common basis such as pure presence–in the form of love.

In that way, this book works like a multicultural manifesto, in which people from all walks of life must seek a connection to the unnamed anchor that acts as an absolute reference beyond both life and death. At this point both hero and heroine make their way through all their reincarnated lives in an effort to be redeemed. Not just through their heart, but to give up their heart through each other into the hands of a loving God.

It’s definitely a nice tale that strikes at a complete world view appropriate to the readership of probably mostly northern European/American audiences with a small smattering of Other in the form of polite Japanese discourse. And that’s cool, I guess.

One could always just read Pascal and get the same point. But then you wouldn’t get some of Davidson’s lovely lines.

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Wise Children

November 10, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, love, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Wise ChildrenWise Children by Angela Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the guise of a vaudeville carnival, Carter tells a story of twin sisters who reduplicates their actions. Like their twin dads, the double aspect of the characters echo the reality of their situation by emphasizing not just the contingent singularity of each individual actor but also the collective milieu of how their family history doubly marks reality. Out of Shakespearean tragedy Carter takes the figure of the carnivalesque in its outlandish reality. Being actors, children of the theater, our narrator Dora comes to an appreciation of her role (and her uncle’s or father’s role) in life, an acceptance at old age that places them at the center of their story. The story of their father becomes the story of the daughters, as the father inscribes the limit upon which daughters can understand themselves

“D’you know, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along,” she said. “If he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dream wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.”

And like roles in a theater, the melodrama of a character is a willful desire for validation — their famous father pursues it–their capitalist uncle pursues it–the different aspects of Hollywood, the characters in their different roles as they try to negotiate their way to being recognized by the closest among them.

So while family is precariously anxious because absent father, absent mother, the daughters find their way through the various roles they play (burlesque dancers and singers) who are able to come of age, as wise children, always children even in their 70s, knowing more about their elders, and their role among them to an apex at which Dora can begin to see all that she is reflected in her lover-uncle at the end, where players and actors lose their roles and retain a distilled subjectivity. He “wasn’t only the one dear man, tonight, but a kaleidoscope of faces, gestures, caresses. He was not only the love of my life but all the loves of my life at once, the curtain call of my career as a lover.”

Carter teases out one of the truths of personal history. Through the filter of Shakespheare and drama entering the high capitalism of the mid to late 20th century, she shows us how we learn from our closest relations, parents, our place in the world as how we are to relate to others, how we are to relate at all even if the continuity is next to or even less than nothing.

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Neuter

October 28, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

NeuterNeuter by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neuter is a difficult book to read, because Cixous starts where she starts, slightly outside the context of your storied-expectations. Through a series of opening ephigraphs, and outlines of meditations on readings and texts, Cixous draws you deeper into the cramp inner space of story, subjectivity and analyst. Both psychoanalytical and philosophical, Cixous draws the thin null space, the non-existent middle, by which we see the internal dynamic structures that sustain the situation of subjectivity.

This is another way of saying that Cixous desexualizes subjectivity, by further castrating the subject. Rather than posing the master discourse of the universal All-Father, Cixous chooses instead the mother-son relationship, in order to show how a desexualized subject, one that is reversed in their “phallic-essence” is in fact one that is null. From there, she highlights the stakes of the story itself, and the relative positions of analyst and subject.

It all seems pretty mystical though (or musical, if you like), because Cixous walks the line using metaphors and literal meanings of words. Of course words are both literal and figurative at the same time, so she plays heavily with that ambiguity. As part of the writing, the text approaches self awareness, describing its own audience as it creates its own bridges and metaphors. It questions its own page turning, layering for us an introduction that takes us out of the context and turns us back around so that we can leave behind what we are supposed to experience and begin to experience what is there, outside the context of familiarity. This heavy introduction is the chanting part of the text: dive deeper-deeper! as she drops into the very inner void, and places us in the place for a master-text within the master-text, showing us bare subjectivity and bare story as the elements of the narrative are actors in the narrative itself.

Neuter then, is Cixous’s way of castrating the story, taking out the contingencies of names, place and time, by which we read universal “common” experience through each sideline of particularity. Cixous allows us to experience the arbitrary relationships of a story, and she does this masterfully, by turning all its elements inside-out, defamiliarizing the story itself by castrating it of its essential contingencies. In a sense, she makes the story a pataphysical experience of what was previously universal. Neuter is the smallest null space one can get. Neuter is the barest outline of the essential arc. Neuter is the null subjectivity, the zero degree point of view. Truly a difficult and masterful piece of writing, controlled, deliberate and evocative.

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Recent Developments In Autism Research

October 1, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Recent Developments In Autism ResearchRecent Developments In Autism Research by Manuel F. Casanova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting collection of essays detailing the state of austism research. This book was published in 2005. I’m not a scientist or a researcher, but I did notice a few interesting things. Because austism is defined by phenomenon, it is difficult to define biologically, as there are many complex effects (through nuture or nature) that create the conditions for austist’s inability to process information like neurotypicals. This book goes a long way in attempting to figure out what the etiology is… I won’t repeat much of the biology talk, but I did find some interesting correlations in how austism is defined and how the various essays speculate on particular abnormalities in neuron or minicolumn or cerebral structures behave (as scanned in EEG or various other ways). Basically because austism is defined through in ability to extend particular behavior into generalities of context, what is known as weak coherency (or the maintenance of social context) researches speculate that weak neurological processes or abnormally formed structures contribute to a lack of larger functioning within the brain. This is to say that while parts of the brain can work well separately, in many austists, these same parts can’t work together as well as a neurotypical’s can.

Now, I have read some speculative literature however, that argues that austists have a more general functioning and it is the neurotypicals reliance on certain hardwired protocols that limit their ability to generalize contexts, but once one takes out a basis for how to measure deviance, one loses the ability to speak of coherency whatsoever. Being social creatures, we need to form group coherency, and while different social groups form coherency differently, the inability to form a strong coherency whatsoever between individuals does make for problems in social behavior. This is defined as austism.

What makes austism studies so interesting is that its abnormalities in functioning reveal to us outlier examples of how our own mind/brains work. What is missing in this austism research book, I thought, was further examples of how the diagnosises defined and cohered what austism is. Certainly the definition has changed over time, and such definitions would impact the study. After all, all this scientific research is an attempt to find a way to determine how it some humans cannot cohere neurotypical social and cognitive extensions… it would be interesting, although perhaps beyond this work to discuss what normal actually is.

Anyway, an interesting read as scientists and researches attempt to find patterns in one area (social behavior and discourse coherency) and correlate it to patterns in another (in this case, brain functioning) or genotypical expression.

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Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity

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

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

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

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

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The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Spiral Dynamics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Way of All Flesh

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

The Way of All FleshThe Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Butler may not have adhered to any school of thought but I found in this a strange quasi-mixture of both existentialist and naturalist thinking. The damnest thing that Butler has done is to trace lineal history, as some kind of psychoanalytic background, in order to create a mesh that would explain the particularity of the main character Ernest’s upbringing.

In fact, the climax of the work, if there is indeed one, comes in pretty late when Ernest is forced into prison and nearly dies because he is forced to face the complex contradictory impulses of those around him. Ernest learns that he has to lead his life rather than relying on the life-narrative of others who would seek to justify him as being this way or that. That is to say, for Butler, coming onto his own is synonymous with being self defining.

Butler fiddles with some vague notions of evolutionarism, to explain lineage, in this case, a kind of genealogy of discourse, but really, for Butler, Ernest is able to come onto his own as an enlightened figure when he steps out of the discourse of church and state; to see political domination as the goal of the very power structure claiming to be enlightened. This seems to be enough for Butler to claim that Ernest has a kind of null point of view now; one that allows him both to see through the BS of his family and the BS of the institutions and culture that surround him in Victorian England.

What’s really kind of stupid about this is that of course Butler has it in for store that Ernest should become wealthy and independent. Without this kind of independence he could never come onto his own. He could never truly stand validated to write books that are reviled by critics but acclaimed by a public… that Truth is always visible to the masses even if individuals cannot see it; that social validation through publication must also equate with economic validation (the freedom to travel and be truly an international citizen, unbeholden to any kind of culture or wage-slavery)… the ending is too easy. A real critique of Ernest’s new ideas would be for him to have to live in a kind of hellish double-vision, seeing the fraud of his Victorian Era but still needing to make a living in it. Butler avoids this complicated ending though, because he wants to establish Ernest as seeing the way out (of his personal and cultural history) but not ever challenging Ernest to really live up to a particular content.

Because, it may be too hard to say, that for Butler just getting by was important enough… validation, once it was thrown out, was no longer needed by Ernest. He could then be rich without ever getting tied up in the validation game that others enslaved him with, all his life. So

Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance different but little from the indifferentism from which Mr. Hawke had arosed him

This brings us to the font of nihilism; that ghost of existentialism which lay us bare to one another. In this, perhaps survival was enough, depending on however you wanted it. Perhaps this was too easy an ending; but then Butler didn’t seem to want to set out an answer to the query; he just wanted to point out the critique of there ever being a standard answer to the question in the first place.

Over all, this is a very materialist book, but one in which we can get no answer from, other than, gee, how nice is is to be rich and not care about anything…and in that sense, Butler can be seen to be far more conservative than he already is as he sees political domination to be a separate issue from economic privilege.

After all, it’s very easy to criticize everything if you can be independent of it all.

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