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Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention: A Fresh Legal Approach Based on Fundamental Ethical Principles in International Law and World Religions

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

Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention: A Fresh Legal Approach Based on Fundamental Ethical Principles in International Law and World ReligionsRethinking Humanitarian Intervention: A Fresh Legal Approach Based on Fundamental Ethical Principles in International Law and World Religions by Brian D. Lepard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pretty much all wars are made in the name of peace. Either side fighting the war, generally claim they are entering the conflict with the intention of settling issues which cannot be settled in any other way.

For this reason, determining when military intervention can occur (for humanitarian reasons) is key to determining what is an act made in the name of peace and what is not.

Part of the form this determination should take, is the same form that multiculturalism and democracy have found to be the most practical…in other words, determination should be as “objective” as possible, meaning that it has to be beholden to a process. And the way processes are objective is that they are the same for everyone. Thus, for Lepard, the U.N. must adopt a formalized, unambiguous process for deciding when peacekeeping measures (in the form of military intervention, perhaps) should happen! And all nations must adhere to this.

In a way, Lepard wants to define when peace with military action is still peaceful, in order to do so for purely humanitarian reasons. He backs this up with several of the world’s most prominent religions (though Confucianism may or may not be a religion). In the process of doing so, Lepard wishes to highlight the idealized shape that most of humankind recognizes as being necessary for good living, for proper and stable society, for how people ought to get along. In essence, this other view, is often a 3rd point of view of human reasons, in the same way that Kant used religion to seal how humans, who struggle with good and evil, should live together in a state. Religion in this sense, gives us a pre-formed image of being human so that we can all be on the same page as far as boundaries are concerned. And believe me, pretty much all human interaction has to do with defining and re-defining boundaries.

Read sideways Lepard would want us to adhere to the U.N. in the guise of a religious institution… not in the sense of worship, but in the sense of allowing it have the final word on what kind of people we are to be. That’s certainly not his intention though, but at the onset, he does want the U.N. to reflect the better part of humanity’s values as individuals rather than what world leaders would want for the rest of us.

All in all, I found his book to be a bit boring as it was highly repetitive. His language is formalistic, academic and thus not the most existing thing around. Nonetheless, I found his thoughts interesting. Given that much of the U.N.’s many articles are ambiguous or at times, lacking procedure, much of his text ends up reading as a series of “he said, she said” kind of back and forth between nations trying to save face and nations pushing for certain agendas. His thought that the permanent members vetos should be reduced in authority is well taken, as much of the other nations seem to be keenly interested in introducing verbiage that limits that power.

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A Thousand Acres

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

A Thousand AcresA Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Apart from the conceit that this is a re-writing of King Lear, (because that begs us to consider this book as not being its own work), I found that Jane Smiley is an excellent author.

What seemed slow in the beginning, was really only such because we had to understand what was at stake.

Each instance of re-entering the story, of which the breaks in the narrative gave us (in terms of chapters or books) gave Smiley a chance to exploit the break in narrative to re-enter the plot in a different way. By establishing these different directions from which to view the narration (as of yet), she explored various strands in the family, in the landscape, in the town history. With each break, we sink deeper into Ginny (our narrator) to come to a different, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, angle from which to consider what was to be one continual complex totality.

Smiley is a brilliant author, although there are a few readers, if you read other comments, who did not get her work. Who wanted her to hinge on something bigger. Perhaps Iowa farmers are too cliche; oh of course they are simple townfolk, so what? Of course they are corrupt, (incestual, selfish, greedy), so what? Of course they are tied to the land; we don’t see the point of these endless descriptions.

The ending though is a good particular clue. What Smiley does, and what most stories that “speak to us” do, is that they get to the “universal humanity” by outlining traits expressed by at times, very contingent contingencies. By grounding the distinctiveness of the scene with the landscape, Smiley pulls us in, as Balzac might, with a wide angle that narrows onto very specific very particular figures against what seems like an endless parade of earth. We see their growth from the beginning to end, their attitudes and their inexplicable character differences as being both substantive and singular. Their contradiction is that they are the same, but they are also different… we can’t understand why they are different when they grew from the same stock. We can’t understand why the Father did what he did, or why one sister did this or another sister did that. We can only grasp that they did it, and look at the various artifacts Smiley narrates to us as evidence or a fingerprint that they did.

As Smiley examines each of the characters of that young adult generation of farmers, we see their individuality shine, fade and mutate into different character traits, expressed through Ginny. What lesser writers are unable to do is to explicate how their narrators can be so particular (limited in their worldview) and yet expose for us readers a richness that they seem unaware of, and Smiley at times, does suffer a little from this. Nonetheless, each character becomes only as deep as Ginny is able to connect with them, and their fading away, such as Jess or Ty, really only bespeaks of their (un)stable presence for her. In everyday life, we understand people via how we connect with them. Those aspects with which we do not connect are centers we have no access to. Literally.

So, as the book goes on, the characters and complexity of the plot rises until the action must come to a crash. Like trains on a track must go as they are defined to go, as trains are made to go forward and the track goes straight until it must turn… the complexity of the characters provides an unfolding of the plot which then unfolds the characters themselves. When faced with their reality of what they want for each other, the characters come to an apex, and must scatter. Because nothing can stay the same forever, their realizations tear their family apart as what they want for themselves is overcoded by what they want for each other.

In the very end, Smiley implodes the characters as a series of Ginny’s own admirations, aspects of different attributes. She knows herself through the people around her, just like she doesn’t know herself by the diners (and therefore she doesn’t know herself when she is in the diner). Smiley exploits this connection at the end, highlighting through the disconnect of each character, aspects of Ginny as she dismantles Ginny by dismantling the family. Self knowledge for our brave narrator is knowledge of how she is connected, and what she is as she destroys each aspect of those connections, removes, them, examines them, and sees in herself how she is very much like the Father she opposes, that she cannot run from, what she and her sister can only have, despite losing everything else; that the last part of themselves is beyond the understanding of others, that last singularity of will that even in the darkness of eradicating everything she is, she comes to grasp as the inexpressible hypostasis of being best only expressed by the horrific inexplicable action that goes against the grain of everything nice and acceptable about a respectable, dignified man, a pillar of the community in a small town of farmers. By wrapping the last inexplicable point of abjection, Smiley lets us come back around to totalize the entire episode.

This is a rare high point in any novel. Arguably, Smiley does it in her own way (of course that is her own genius), but she does it nonetheless, as a highlight of what is the same even after everything else is lost, ripped apart, and disintegrated. This is a novel of being.

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Simulacra and Simulation

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

Simulacra and SimulationSimulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is not an easy book to read, in part because Baudrillard starts off with his ideas in full development and then talks around them, to explain them. He will start off with an example, develop the idea within the example, and then end by wrapping the example around itself, rather than ending on continual applications of the idea. In any case, he doesn’t do the historicity thing by telling you the past, where the idea may have come from, and then develop the series of thoughts that outline the form of the idea. Instead, Baudrillard plops you in the middle and makes you flounder. And unlike other thinkers, he doesn’t quote too many philosophers; in fact, nearly none at all. Instead of giving you guide posts along the way, he’d rather you sink or swim. Get it or not.

Baudrillard’s basic idea is that we don’t live in reality—that is, in the common sense use of the word, there is no thing-in-itself. He doesn’t even talk that way, as though the thing-in-itself is unnecessary. Following Quentin Meillasoux, Baudrillard is an absolute correlationist: the relationship we have with language is what also determinates any outside of language. Thus, for Baudrillard, we live in a world of simulacra. That’s easy so far. But there’s a catch. For Baudrillard, reality has already been exceeded because the processes that we buy into. These processes are unthinking, mechanical means that produce the simulacra which we then take for the actual thing. The easy examples of postmodern malls in America come to mind, or Disneyland.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation (12 – 13).

But such simulations only act to hide the fact that we can’t get back to reality because we’ve lost it. So this explains why Baudrillard drops us into the mix. He can’t explain why this happened. Once we’ve gotten sucked into hyperreality we’re here. It’s a traumatic event. The sheer force of hyperreality obscures any possibility of a central signifier. There is no metaphysics of presence; in fact he doesn’t even mention such a concept because it’s not important. Instead, he talks of what remains when the model has exhausted itself. “When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothings remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder (144, original italics).” One of the key sections, philosophy-wise, in this book has to do with the remainder, which is another way of talking about emptiness as a thing. The remainder is the excessive real, “in a strict sense, it cannot be defined except as the remainder of the remainder (143)”—that is, left over after processes have stopped. You might say hey, wait, isn’t everything real? And yes, that’s how language is, but the model for what is real and what is hyperreal have become the same. For instance, in talking of diplomas, their ubiquity and the ease at which they can be acquired— for whoever goes through the process gets one—signifies nothing but their meaninglessness. What makes diplomas meaningless is that it’s not about knowledge; it’s about process. Diplomas connect in a system of simulacra that only point to other simulacra. Similar to Derrida, with Baudrillard, we end with a passed reference that is always missed. What’s left over is the reality we deal with, the remainder that we must recycle back into a process for it to be what we think it is, which is a problem we have today with things that are “meta,” that the meaning of a thing today is often exactly what it is, a simulation, a context that determines our locus, not what it should be for us. For example, if we go to say, Paris, that trip will be like “a family trip,” with all the clichés and potholes of a family trip, which might as well be a sitcom simulating a family trip. The process of going through replaces the reality of a family trip, so that really, you’re just “doing” the “family trip.” You can’t otherwise because we are trapped in hyperreality. This is like how fake internet money in a game treated like real money in an economy becomes real money. The caveat is that real money then is just as fake as fake money because it’s just another simulation due to a formal process. Baudrillard notes that, like the Borges story, the territory itself decays when the map of the territory replaces the territory by being the territory itself. The simulacra of simulation, the pattern itself, the hyperreality has taken over reality by replacing reality. In hyperreality, the map meant to represent reality becomes a simulacra of reality itself so that we don’t get real, we get the map qua real qua map.

The fact that he is able to note the lack of a lack, as Zizek would say: the anti-philosophy at the heart of philosophy, so to speak, places Baudrillard with all the other philosophical greats of our time. He notices the void that persists throughout simulation: that which organizes simulacra and leaves only sense making in its wake.

Meaning, truth, the real cannot appear except locally, in a restricted horizon, they are partial objects, partial effects of the mirror and of equivalence. All doubling, all generalization, all passage to the limit, all holographic extension (the fancy of exhaustively taking account of this universe) makes them surface in their mockery (108 – 109).

Thus, the curve of meaning making is in fact what is created through the distortion of the absent remainder, leaving us only sensible sense, the trace that makes sense. In other words, when speaking of truth, or ideology, Baudrillard is able to show us how adding the unnameable nothing (the social totality, the remainder) back into the mix gets us the totality that we cannot exceed. The simulation always over-codes totality by naming its void, leaving us always within the wake of its own logic. Baudrillard writes: “As the social in its progression eliminates all residue, it itself becomes residue. In designating residual categories as ‘Society,’ the social designates itself as a remainder. (144, original italics).” This is another way of saying that in trying to split a totality like the social, we name parts of it also things, so as to make a thing out of its parts. But the social as a totality, as a bare named signifier, persists because the social always remains as a residue to mark the situation we are in. With the naming of any void, the absent remainder, we can never get away from conditions like being in society, whatever ideology or other kinds of hyperreality. Hyperreality is the kind of situation presupposes the very topography that we are trying to define, to get away from! If anything, what is confusing about Baudrillard is that he does not allow us any access, imaginary or real, to what we are talking about. What he calls simulation is also the very naming of a given set of the conditions that allow us to talk about anything at all, simply because such terms act as null reference points to its own generic logic.

I am split on liking the reviews (through Goodreads and Amazon) where people obviously didn’t get it, and thus didn’t like it, and disliking such reviews by hurt readers who rebelled at feeling stupid, or having their time wasted (and it’s hard to tell the difference when you’re not sure what you are reading about). To be honest, I’ve read this book three times over the past 10 years, and each time I’ve come away with a fuller picture. This is one of the hardest books I’ve ever read, and that includes any of Zizek or Deleuze’s works.

Overall, I appreciate this difficulty because in making you work for it, the concept will stick with you. You’ll make the concept your own, and you’ll remember it better. It can inspire you, help you along. If the entire concept everything was handed to you, you’d lose the influence. In this sense, by stretching in a new way, you end up in the ‘pataphysical, where the meaning stands on its own. Is this a site of resistance to the ubiquitous hyperreality? With ‘pataphysics, you get something that can stand in for itself on its own by itself, in this case, each particular re-reading. Although, it is arguable that while there is the process of reading, if you read the good stuff, each time it will be different. This difference however, is really a pre-fabricated genre soaked simularca because it is different. We assume, in Baudrillardian terms, that what we are reading relies on a kind of perhaps, “naïve faith in a pact of the similitude of things to themselves.” We assume that what we are talking about is the same as what we are talking about, and this is where our conception, or model or map, gets in the very way of what we are so desirous to speak of.

The real, the real object is supposed to be equal to itself, it is supposed to resemble itself like a face in a mirror—and this virtual similitude is in effect the only definition of real—and any attempt, including the holographic one, that rests on it, will inevitably miss its object, because it does not take its shadow into account (precisely the reason why it does not resemble itself)—this hidden face where the object crumbles, its secret. The holographic attempt literally jumps over its shadow, and plunges into transparency, to lose itself there (109, original italics).

And in this way, you can say that each time you process Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation you’ve actually miss-encountered it. Whatever process of reading you have, you inevitably create a conception of it, and in that conception, blur the totality of everything else around it, to make room for this conception. So in a twist of Baudrillardian logic, perhaps we read Simulacra and Simulation in order to claim everything is a simulation. In finding simulacra everywhere around us—we dig extra deep in order to hide the fact that we already don’t really live in reality, that our very response in naming and determining differences around us for orientation—to get at reality creates the very condition we want to escape from.

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Anti-Nietzsche

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

Anti-NietzscheAnti-Nietzsche by Malcolm Bull
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part of the problem with going against Nietzsche is that he says too much; and is hard to pin down. His books are all over the place, and he leaves you with aphorisms that are as philosophical as they are suggestively poetic.

In this vein, Bull does a pretty good job, even if it is a bit disorganized, at teasing out bits of Nietzsche. Bull’s approach is unique. He goes against Nietzsche to see if there’s something practical in Nietzsche. And I think that this untraditional approach works well, even if you have to read between a lines a little to see it.

Bull says very clearly that Nietzsche’s insight is that values are due to social difference. That hierarchy and social organization give rise to values; the two are the same, but at different levels. The main contention here, is that radical egalitarianism would destroy values. The loss of values leads to nihilism. While egalitarianism and nihilism are not the same thing, “nihilism exceeds egalitarianism” and after equality has been done so that there can no longer be any difference to equalize, we would only be left with nihilism… where everyone could only “listen to Muzak and eat potatoes”. The question Bull leaves us rhetorically, is “what value could there be of a society where no one could distinguish themselves” likewise, how could we improve ourselves if there we don’t have values to know what better is?

The main thesis, and it’s buried in there, is that Nietzsche foresees nihilism approaching… and seeks to stop it with the quest for a Superman. Nietzsche wishes to save us from a life of a diluted, weak society in which we are all forced to be equal to its weakest members. To highlight the importance of this idea, Bull goes to the opposite lengths, to “read like a loser” and become animal: “subhuman”. If we want to see the value of Nietzsche’s project we have to experience the absence of such a project… we have to fall into the depths of nothingness itself, to be weak ourselves and beg others for compassion and sympathy. We have to induce society to think only of us and baby us for our well being… We have to be as animals, to not have a clearing in the world, only further darkening.

What perhaps, makes Bull difficult, perhaps for some readers, is that he pulls many readers of nihilism and thinkers of the state to task, using their thoughts to give structure to Nietzsche’s aphorisms. Bull impressively quotes Nietzsche often, supporting them with the philosophical vocabulary of others to make his argument. He runs circles around some concepts to show their limits, show how others apply them and to show ultimately how Nietzsche is right to approach nihilism the way he does. And in this exciting quest, Bull convinces me of what he sees in Nietzsche.

I find it curious that other reviewers thought Bull confusing and yet praised him as his book as being well-written… I find that there in such reviews, there is a familiarity with many authors but no coherency to be found… an argument against a book as being “well-written”.

Nonetheless, I do agree in part, that Bull throws too many people at us, sort of at surprise… and then scrambles to reformulate his argument. The chapters are also split into too many sections. The issue I have with sections is that authors do this sometimes, because it’s easier to write in smaller blocks… without having to resort to well formed transitions between them. Perhaps Bull writes all his books this way, but I think it’s the fault of the editor for not having encouraged Bull to devote himself to a sustained argument. The first chapter however, is marvelous. The last chapter did end without really clearly articulating the book as conclusions are wont to.

Still, I give him 4 stars for an exciting book that is well worth the reading, even if towards the end he starts to lose focus… but never comes to the conclusion about what kind of society we are to be left with, leaving us at the mercy of the Great Beast, with mediocrity.

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Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning

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

Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and MeaningPagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning by Edward Carpenter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At first glance, Carpenter seems to be heavily de-valuing Christianity as he examines how Christian rituals have precedence within pagan rituals. But in reading this book you learn this is not what he is trying to do.

He is actually seeking to find the root of religion. Carpenter grounds religious understanding in the development of human consciousness… so in that sense, pagan or Christian makes no difference — we are attempting to find our place in the world. How we do so through religion, is by grounding validation of our social reality through various external markers. In other words, we use sacrifice and ritual to maintain a consistency with the outside world.

The actual thesis comes fairly late in the book. About half way through, he notes that this humanity seeking place develops in turn from the increased consciousness that comes with the loss of drive…with knowledge. The 2nd stage is self awareness, when knowledge of the world is mobilized as functionality of the world oriented to the self. The last stage is a return to unity of humankind within the ground of Self.

Where Christianity steps in, is within the increased development of self-consciousness… for instance, Carpenter notes that with the rise of self-consciousness came self-will. This will according to self came as a threat to the coherency of the group. Christianity solves this by requiring that newcomers be born into the group, or I should say, born again. This doesn’t stop the selfishness though:

with the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached such an extreme that, as some one has said, each man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a corner to himself, in entire disregard to the damnation which might come to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality too, under the commercial regeime became as was natural, perfectly selfish. It was always: “Am I saved? Am I doing the right thing? Am I winning the flavor of God and man? Will my claims to salvation be allowed? Did I make a good bargain in allowing Jesus to be crucified for me?” The poison of a diseased self-consciousness entered into the whole human system.

Carpenter isn’t quite done yet with Christianity. He also writes that “Sin is actually (and that is its only real meaning) the separation from others, and the non-acknowledgement of unity.” After all, any sin is really the run-away of human will, for the exclusion of all else, an imbalance within human consciousness.

Carpenter’s final point, the rise of the ground of Self marks for him a return to past truths, half sensed within human consciousness but not fully articulated. This ground of Self is really a return to philosophy, something Carpetner shys away from, but being from the earlier part of the 20th century, this was how existence was conceptualized, along a kind of immanent ground, be it consciousness or Self.

And that is my only compliant. His argument is from a structuralist framework, and it works well when dealing with other religions. Where it becomes sketchy is in that he slides from speaking of consciousness to speaking about Self… as if the two are the same. They aren’t. Nonetheless he ends on a positive note. He quotes one Dr Frazer from “The Golden Bough”

The laws of Nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion and science are nothing but theories (of thought); and as Science has supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter itself be superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some perfectly different way of looking at phenomena–of registering the shadows on the screen–of which we in this generation can form no idea.”

Carpenter does hope that we can find out of self-conscious obsessed world, wherein we think only of ourselves, to find unity. What he doesn’t mention is that science too, is a knowledge based oriented along the self, for humankind and so on…. at least in the 20th century it was viewed as such. More understanding of how we are interconnected with nature has been revealing a different picture, one in which we cannot take a self interested view only, for to only be interested in things for us, is to lose the rest of the world… and no one can live without that.

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A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market

June 11, 2014 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

A Mathematician Plays The Stock MarketA Mathematician Plays The Stock Market by John Allen Paulos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What’s really interesting about other people’s reviews of this book is that they seem to expect a book on the stock market from a mathematician to be somehow be based in finance.

There are plenty of books on the stock market out there… that do so from a finance point of view.

This book is pretty brilliant although at first glance, it appears to be pretty straight forward… you think a mathematician would use his knowledge about math to somehow find some brilliant trick about the stock market. But that’s not how this plays out.

Math is a game of numbers. It’s a field of study that looks at patterns. But ultimately the numbers are a measurement, some kind of metric. What’s faulty about using the stock market from a pure numbers point of view is that the numbers in stock prices need to measure the a consistent value for any math relation to work. What I mean is simply that stock prices are based on what people do in terms of trading volume of a stock. Abstract all you like, but the immediate particular reason why anyone does what they do with stock is anyone’s guess.

We can assume that a change in stock prices has to do with an anecdote on the news about a company, or something happening somewhere related to a company. But that’s not always true. Sometimes things happen for seemingly no reason. Much of this, Paulos tries to explain has as much to do with how people perceive the market as much as it has to do with actual values. The later chapters are particularly brilliant on this account. The earlier chapters which seemed to promise this or that mathematical model, or this or that economic model… don’t pan out because as Paulos convincingly tells us, any model that we use to predict the stock market can be outdated unless the model itself anticipates how others will use it, made predictions and how those predictions will affect the market. In other words, any stock market model needs to also be self reflexive in how it’s applied — not just when it’s applied.

Paulo makes some pretty complex abstractions to do this; for instance, applying how the “Efficient Market Hypothesis” is either always correct (when people believe it to be wrong, thus playing the stock market off of information in the news, or about a company’s state) or it is always incorrect (when other people believe the information on the news is invalid as the stock prices already reflect the current value of the stock)… that is to say that particular hypothesis doesn’t work as it should because it takes for its model an absolute system of values based on how other people act. People don’t do things as mechanisms do; people evaluate based off of what they believe others will do as well.

This twist of self reflexivity makes it particularly difficult to formulate any theory that is both consistent (non-contradictory) and complete… in essence, we need to formulate a model that can predict how its predictions are taken into account and then provide us with “a few steps ahead” so that profit can be captured. That would be a pretty sophisticated theory; and in fact be impossible because that theory could only work in the case of the one individual who has it. By definition the same theory could not with all the other individuals who also have it, otherwise there would be no profit!

So a quick conclusion is that the market can at times reflect real values, but often it doesn’t because there’s too much white noise as meanings, theories, trends and news all impact the same metric. So how can we make any consistent model on the stock market if all this information flies under the same metric as the very metric a stock price is supposed to represent?

This is all of course, extracted from the book. What I found really interesting, if one read between the lines from the get go, was that one can always take the meaning of a stock’s movement anyway one likes. That is to say, we have an abundance of narratives that can fit the model of “what really happens”. We simply pick the one we like the best, and go forth as if that were true. As Paulo points out, even through random chance a few individuals are bound to hit it big. And once people notice that, they will follow that person’s movements, ensuring that they will always be right.

Thus, the modeling of stocks, properly considered, must also model how we think as well. But that’s nothing new. Paulo is of course, writing this book as a lament of his own failed investments…and in the process of doing so, he’s also somewhat justifying the bubble bursting was inevitable, a kind of normal market behavior. But he’s correct; the uncertainty in the stock market is not just an uncertainty as to what the price means, but similarly that its certainty is also a reflection of what we all would also believe it to mean.

All in all, I found the book to be really entertaining and interesting. I would have liked a little more direction midway through the book… with each theory or direction Paulo brought up, he quickly shot it down at the end of the chapter. Of course, he was setting this bed of failed theories for the self reflexive analysises… but I didn’t see it coming. So it felt much like wandering, and that’s not a good way to treat your reader as it throws your reader out of the process of reading.

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I Am a Cat

May 30, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

I Am a CatI Am a Cat by S?seki Natsume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This very charming book works as a kind of rhetorical pun.

Told from the point of view of a cat, who comes lazily to live with a disinterested, shiftless teacher, one can only help but think that the cat’s arrogant, obsessive observations of his human companions epitomize the nature of being a cat.

And then it hit me. The cat, through all this narrative posturing, his anthropomorphic renditions of human traits based off their inscrutable, sayings and behavior could is very much like the projection of how humans impart anthropomorphic characteristics via observing their feline companions.

What I mean is, through the filter of a cat, the cat in his narrative prowess becomes more human-like: objective and rational, whereas humans become more catlike: indolent and paradoxical, full of self obsessive habits, unconsciously arrogant in their assumption that all should give way to their needs, plans and desires.

This rhetorical stance creates many delightful antinomies, humorous and playful. We get to laugh at ourselves, as our petty habits and self-importance are downplayed as often as we downplay a cat’s unassuming kingship. Still, this translation offers many delightful gems applicable equally to human or cat:

For every living being, man or animal, the most important thing in this world is to know one’s own self. Other things being equal, a human being that truly knows himself is more respoected than a similarly enlightened cat. Should the humans of my acquaintance ever achieve such self-awareness, I would immediately abandon, as unjustifiedly heartless, this somewhat snide account of their species as I know them. However, just as few human beings actually know the size of their own noses, even fewer know the nature of their own selves, for if they did they would not need to pose such a question to a mere cat whom they regard, even disregard, with contempt. Thus, though human beings are always enormously pleased with themselves, they usually lack that self-perception which, and which alone, must justify their seeing themselves, and their boasting of it wherever they go, as the lords of creation. To top things off, they display a brazen calm conviction in their role which is positively laughable. For there they are, making a great nuisance of themselves with their fussing entreaties to be taught where to find their own fool noses, while at the same time strutting about with placards on their backs declaring their claim to be lords of creation. Would common logic or even common sense lead ay such patently loony human being to resign his claim to universal lordship? Not on your life! Every idiot specimen would sooner die than surrender his share in the fantasy of human importance. Any creature that behaves with such blatant inconsistency and yet contrives never to recognize the least minim of self-contradiction in its behavior is, of course funny. But since the human animal is indeed funny, it follows that the creature is a fool.

And thus, you have the seed of Soseki Natsume’s thoughts and very detailed observations of human beings in their ego driven mania, self centered in their world view, and self important in their neediness to value themselves above others and all other beings around them.

I highly recommend this book. Though it’s not a treatise on humans metaphysically, it would be sure at maximum, help you take your own problems with less gravity…at the minimum, help you have a good laugh…

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The Fountainhead

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

The FountainheadThe Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was first introduced to Ayn Rand about ten years ago. I found her works distasteful and naive… but I was largely also responding to what many of her fans were saying about her works, to support capitalism and conservativism. So imagine my surprise when I read this book, and found out that it was amazing.

Like Rand’s aesthetic, this book follows one over arching arc to explore as many facets of her philosophy as possible. To this end, her narrative is thick in order to create a world… though it is presented as a tour de force, an unstoppable motion.

The basic idea is that most people only acquire a sense of self through the creation of an ego, which is really the image that one maintains in order to position oneself among others. For Rand, this ego in most people, only exists through the validation of others. That is, most people are selfless in the sense that they can only find values mirroring and parroting one another. This externally based validation of the ego is similar to a cognitive psychology theory about the development of the ego. This theory is called spiral dynamics.

Rand’s exposition of ego and spiral dynamics share many things in common, although they aren’t the same. For example, Rand doesn’t explain how ego develops, or how it grows from nothing since infancy. (Spiral dynamics splits into two sets of stages, conventional and post-conventional.) While Rand does cover both sets of stages, this book feels stunted philosophically, in not covering how the ego develops. Still, Rand’s purpose is more illustrative and this book is great at exploring how people of different stages interact. Although Rand takes this idea literally, that some people are nothing more than their open attempt to pull validation from people by appeasing people, this book is still nonetheless interesting.

Validation from others comes from fitting in an image, being admired, being kind, being pleasant, being the complete image of status, success and sophistication. Often in real life, you do find people who lack some sense of self, and thus need to prove themselves. People who set out to prove themselves in all the conventional ways sometimes become successful, and it is those people who often become the leaders of our communities. This is why leadership is often conservative, because it needs the crowd it leads in order to define itself as leader. This is where Rand and political conservatives start to part, as for Rand, the internal image of a leader, as he sees himself, defines who he is, not the people he leads.

So whereas the main character and protagonist Howard Roake, finds himself a companion, Gail Wynand who is a “Creator” like him, Wynand occupies the position in what spiral dynamics calls the 4th stage, the last stand of conventionalism. Here, Wynand dominates the entire social landscape, although he never realizes it, his quest for power still creates an ego in him. His sense of self worth is based off of the money and power he’s attained, and in the end this explodes in his face when he tries to make use of it. Wynand ultimately realizes his true position, exactly that of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic (although Rand doesn’t use these terms), when he realizes that his leadership is based off of the crowd’s values, not his own. He is a mirror of other people’s values just like everyone else. The 4th stage is the stage when success itself is understood as still finding validation outside the self… Wynand at that moment transcends that stage and enters the post-conventional stages…in which the ego starts to break free of the undergrid of meaning which cages egos. Wynand faces the dissolution of the ego, which is inherent in the post-conventional stages.

What’s particularly interesting about reading the Fountainhead is how the characters navigate the social hierarchy within titles and dialogue. This is much like real life, in which people show their mettle through witty conversation. Being a novel though, the characters do understand one another directly in the language Rand has developed, and when they position themselves, there is much dialectical twisting, in the form of Hegelian dialectics, because the values in question are significant inasmuch as they are sometimes also absent. Rand realizes this same structure later on as in Atlas Shrugged when she names the sections of her book “non-contradiction”, “either/or” and “a=a” although, of course, the structure is loose (most likely as it comes from a text of fiction and not a purely philosophical text).

But I digress. The characters in the Fountainhead don’t change much. Most of what they do in change is self reflexive, much like real life. They realize what they are (like Peter Keating) and stay stagnant. Other than Wynand, the only other character to go through change is Dominique Falcon.

Falcon is a problematic character. She’s obviously supposed to be the female counterpart to Roake, but lacks herself any sense of being. In fact, for much of the novel she isn’t his equal, simply because she has an ego… one form or another, in most of the novel, she tries to kill it off. She does this by attempting to fit in the various roles she’s landed (through marriage mostly). And that’s basically her thing. Roake at least seems to have a thing that he is (architecture) but Falcon has nothing but her body and her image as a woman. In fact, as woman, she confines herself to being prosopopeia to her man, by erasing the self… which is to say, wholly to support her man’s ego. Perhaps this is why, in part, Rand decided to give her character Dagney Taggart from Atlas Shrugged a thing of her own.

This brings us to Howard Roake, who is the protagonist. He has no ego, cares not for what other people think of him, or what they think of at all. His embodiment is his work, and that’s all he is. He is 100% self. And this is where spiral dynamics and Rand part, at the last stage of post-conventionalism. If the self is wholly informed as to who it is, via the image of an ego, and the ego can only be the social position of a self in language, then says the theory, Roake cannot be as selfish as he is. Roake’s sense of person should dissolve in a major way, and be integrated into the experience of the universe… which is also missing from Rand… that ego and worldview are intimately tied. The less developed the ego, the more black and white the world. By assuming that the self is in fact completely separate from the world, and the world is obvious in its materiality, Rand has failed to take her understanding of selfhood far enough. In other words, even though Rand can see how language and social reality are intertwined with the ego and how the ego forms itself from the fabric of social reality, Rand fails to understand that all objects are in part languaged-objects and the external world is rightly, exists as it is only in service of humankind’s ability to create meaning, and define things in the world in terms of who we are… So when the ego changes who it is, the meaning of the self and world, and the world as the self sees it changes too.

In fact, his person taken literally, Roake should be nearly outside of language, incomprehensible in totality to all others… although in the novel he often says exactly what he is. Two alternate models of a self outside of language come to mind: Herman Meville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street”, or an enlightened guru who has retreated to the tops of mountains to contemplate the eternal Tao (or something like that).

Of course, neither would make for a compelling story about ego relations in Depression era New York, so Rand decided to make Roake a solid self, a self that was completely architect, so that the reader can see him. And seeing him is important, so that in order to stablize the relations of ego, Rand has a language and a world that is full of consistent objects, not dissolved objects or selves with blurry post-conventional “ontologies”. In other words, the language of the Fountainhead is consistent because Rand needs to show us clearly how her characters interrelate in terms of ego and self, to hierarchialize her characters… which of course, maintaining social hierarchy is all about what stable unchanging controlled language is about, but alas, again I digress.

Also, don’t forget, that after all, architecture is the most resource intensive thing humans do, it’s also intersects political, economic and aesthetic interests… and has at its handle, all the range necessary for Rand to show off her ideas, which impact creation, industry, media, art, fashion, beauty, friendship and love.

So even while Rand doesn’t also show how the world changes with the self… her book still reads very well. Its driven, its clear and its engaging. After all, wasn’t it her goal in the first place to show how egos can change? Her goal is to show how most of humanity stumbles around on trying to please and placate itself while getting in the way of those few who seek progress. Having developed enough of a theory of ego, Rand does assume an external reality, one in which language is firmly what it is even if the ego isn’t, which is probably why all her characters and protagonists can exist as unchanging models on a never ending background. After all, if language changed depending on the strength of the ego, how would we understand who is winning? How would we understand what progress is, or what things mean? In this sense, Rand’s solid world, is a world that is the same no matter who is walking in it. Things will mean the same thing, because Rand means for us to see something in her novel greater than any of the characters independently.

It is by this measure of objectivity that a self unleashed by the bonds of society can be shown to be equal to the creative force of progress for the betterment of humanity… a triumph of human spirit… For if the background changes with the social tides it would be very easy to show that an individualist is simply the formation of a bad guy, which is the stance most socially free individuals tend to become… unless of course, society itself is ill… which in this case, society is in fact very very ill, making Howard Roake the hero and protagonist in extreme.

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Truth, bullshit, Identity(ego) and Bullshit

May 3, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

If you take words like Truth seriously, you’ll find yourself going into a beyond. Because Truth with a capital T is a place, not a specific content… it’s an empty position, which means only itself. The narrowest point of all, it is also the most distant, the axis around which discourses circulate as satellites.

This “north star” only operates as itself, without meaning because it is completely itself… (meaning is always the deferral of meaning, words leading to more words, thus when it is itself, it is without meaning, an irrational point standing in for nothing but itself). Truth, must remain outside of discourse to organize discourse.

Truth is the opposite of bullshit.

First, bullsit:

I spoke with one of best friends about this. Bullshit is machine language. It’s code. It’s a self-enclosed, self-referential discourse which does not connect well to outside discourses. Thus bullshit, which is always encased in a system (of bullshit) which generates bullshit is like Truth in that it does not refer to anything but itself, it is also equally irrational.

The difference though, is that when you participate in bullshit, when you have a stake in it as an identity in it, it is no longer bullshit, it is meaningful.

For example, you can think that as a college professor, your mission is to educate young minds. Educate them. But the colleges themselves operate on a different level. Colleges rank themselves, compete with each other for funding, create complex apparatuses which organize their departments in the form of hierarchies, ranking its employees and so on. So while a college professor can identify themself like dead poet’s society — through discourse and elucidation, a college will foist on its professors a different identity, one encoached in metrics of grading, ranking, preening and processes… all of which generally serve the college’s needs directly and only the students indirectly, if at all. Such a professor will protest this hijacking of his identity (“I am not a cog in your machine”) and thus the system and its output will be seen as “bullshit”. If you were a college administrator, or a teacher heavily invested with the system and the college’s needs, you may see yourself as both elucidator AND a position within a rank in file within the college — also a representative of the college, befitting the needs of the college. In that case, you won’t see such output as “bullshit” because your identity will be wrapped up within the logic of that hierarchical discourse.

So, other forms of bullshit also depend on identity positionings. If your identity does not fit an imposed external discourse, you will see that discourse as bullshit. You might as well be a mechanic looking at a doctor’s chart, or a doctor looking at a mechanic’s documentation of a ship’s engine. Both discourses are separate from each other, self referential with its own semiotic chains, its own indexical peculiarities, its own bullshit.

In a way, bullshit is the system itself, seen from the outside. No bullshit is bullshit unless you don’t identify within its meanings at an unconscious level. But Truth, is the standin axis for all discourses… in a way, an attempt to contain discourses within one rubric. In our fragmented postmodern world, we generate many self referential codes. Law codes, building codes, computer codes, academic codes, bureaucratic codes, administrative codes, tax codes, stock codes, logic codes, mathemes… all of which are only meaningful within their own self reference. How many tv shows create their own jokes, create their own meanings by referring to an encyclopedia of history? Comic book wikis, Star Trek wikis, Star Wars wikis, Doctor Who wikis, Lost wikis… the list goes on and on.

In the age of information, we create nestings of code in an attempt to attract people to join our languages, our plateaus of sense and reason, and thus invested they exist in a 2nd Life, Sim, fanbased community for which there can be nearly no beyond because self referentiality forecloses interaction between outside discourse. At least, online that’s the case. In person, your neighbors intrude, your economics intrude, your politics intrude and disrupt these fragile sensibilities, reminding us of a larger discourse.

For example, the master discourse today is not spoken in words but in money. Economically, with the current money laundering laws and identity theft laws, our financial institutions seek to mire us within their own code, so that we cannot escape their domain. Everything needs a bank account, or a social security number. We may have gained some autonomy to create separate spheres of influence, but the larger appratuses of capital also seek to dominate us by forcing us to psychically invest in credit scores, tax returns, and to play the game their way… their Truth of course, is money, which is meaningless in itself… Money is the petit object a, of the discourse of money, as it stands only for itself, a zero sum signifier, to guarantee that we are within the system of money, that all things can be exchanged for money as a kind of Money.

This locking of us into this immobility also involves slowly locking us out. Cities have started to impose “good neighbor fees” on home based businesses, so that only the residents can work at such home based businesses. Already in a post-industrial economy, our material dialectic is split by market mediation. We are purely consumers, purely meant to work as employees and consumers. The early 20th century saw the leftovers of consumer culture recycled back into the producer’s side of the cycle… but that divorce only increasingly locks us out of that side… the masters of production seek to keep newcomers out of competiting for production as a way of retaining their access to profit by imposing more power against those who might do otherwise. People who seek to do business on their own face increasing challenges, a nest of laws that would prohibit and limit access while increasing information cost (compliance laws) and start-up costs, raising the amount needed to start a business. People who would be in business see these external constraints as “bullshit” because they do not recognize that the system’s imposition on them as being central to what they are trying to do or who they would to be… that business people see themselves doing transactions (marketing, service or production, shipping) rather than seeing the outside state apparatus demanding of them a piece of their action before they even do anything.

This kind of dialectical opposition through identity is very illustrative of how the category of bullshit is created from the self’s position within a discourse that would locate the self in a different position than where it thinks it ought to be.

Second, Truth:

So if bullshit is being outside of a discourse of self-referentiality, then what is Truth? I sought to take such terms seriously that I looked into meta-language, philosophies, in order to clarify what Truth might be, or how it might be attained. In doing so, you examine words. Language. In doing that, you start to notice words and how they work, what they mean.

When you notice words as words, reality and language start to separate. This is an odd phenomenon, after all, as Lewis Carrol has been so often been paraphrased: Take care of the sense and the words will arrange themselves. The reverse is equally telling. Take care of words themselves, and the very thing you seek (sense itself) will slip from your grasp. When you reach a point that words like Truth mean only what they mean, and that their nest inevitably refers back to itself, you will hit reach the limits of language… for language can explain the objects in language — language moves such objects, manipulates them, for what else is language for, but the negotiation of meaning and personal position among Others — but language cannot explain itself, just as the thinker cannot think itself. This quote from Slavoj Zizek (from Less than Nothing) is useful:

In the opposition between the symbolic order and reality, the Real is on the side of the symbolic—it is the part of reality which clings to the symbolic in the guise of its inconsistency/gap/impossibility). The Real is the point at which the symbolic itself, mutilating it from within: it is the non-All of the symbolic. There is a Real not because the symbolic cannot grasp its external Real, but because the symbolic cannot fully become itself. There is being (reality) because the symbolic system is inconsistent, flawed, for the Real is an impasse of formalization. This thesis must be given its full “idealist” weight: it is not only that reality is too rich, so that every formalization fails to grasp it, stumbles over it; the Real is nothing but an impasse of formalization—there is dense reality “out there” because of the inconsistencies and gaps in the symbolic order. The Real is nothing but the non-All of formalization, not its external exception.

So as discourse is unable to cohere completely, make things what they are, we get the gaps and distortions in things within the symbolic discourse itself, always as an indexical “beyond” representation to stand in for the distortion which is only “true” as it coincides with the un-able to be symbolised formation. Where Truth as a marker of stablization sets in the discourse, it acts as the single sign that is itself, to tie in the external inconsistency/gap of the Real back to the symbolic force. Another quote from Zizek, to continue the thought:

Since reality is in itself fragile and inconsistent, it needs the intervention of a Master-Signifier to stablize itself into a consistent field; this Master-Signifier makes the point at which a signifier falls into the Real. The Master-Signifier is a signifier which not only designates features of reality, but performatively intervenes into reality.

Our loss of a Master-Signifier, as Zizek puts it, from the modern to the postmodern marks the fragmentation of discourses today, unable to cohere together as they split into their own alignments. Nonetheless the modern world exists today, through the auspices of Money and in its spectral form.

So how does Truth and bullshit tie together?

Third, Identity/ego:

For each of us today, as we develop identities and egos, we invest in different discourses, hoping to find one that is legitimatized and mostly compatible through whatever other discourses people around us engage in. Example of such discourses abound: a church discourse, a video game clan discourse, a fraternity discourse, academic discourse(s), economic work discoures… legal discourse(s)… these all intersect at the body of identity, bombarding us with fragmentation and contradiction. Coming to find one’s self, or to “discover yourself” is another way of saying, “I need to find an image/position immanent within a discourse where I can fit in, and become myself…” Spoken cynically, “I need to become the image others will then see as me, so that I may belong to a discourse, without the gap/distortion/inconsistency inherent in being a personality whose psychal investments connect to nothing.” Losers are narcissists for whom their meanings only mean something to themselves… no one else, no outside discourse recognizes their meanings/connections as being inherently meaningful.

Fourth, Bullshit:

And of course, noting how Truth itself functions within a discourse, radically itself because it is irrationally itself. Everything is contingent, although Truth only exists as itself, an emptiness within discourse but not of it (the center is not the center) to guarantee an anchoring of discourse. All is contingent, including the fact that sometimes necessities come out, but only do so contingently. In other words, dissolving words into words instead of reality forces us to lose the very thing we seek to gain… we lose our place because the functionality is localized into an objective model that is not-us. Truth becomes truth, and discourse becomes bullshit.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

April 27, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Pedagogy of the OppressedPedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although a small book, Freire’s tight analysis of oppression as it dehumanizes or forecloses oppressed subjectivities from fully forming is astounding.

Freire’s thesis is fairly simple: Freedom can only be attained when people are clear on how they are not free. Thus, only though education can one attain the proper human freedom of realizing one’s place in the world.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. One’s place in one’s world is tied to who one thinks they are, and how they are. People’s identities have a solid anchor in their subjectivity. They often do not seek liberation by way of questioning their own hidden assumptions… rather they often seek liberation by attempting to become in the form of their own oppressors.

Although he doesn’t fully go into the philosophies behind his writing, it’s clear that he’s read Hegel and Marx, dived deeply into dialectics and come back with the same credo so many philosophers before him have acknowledged: radical freedom is only attained through the re-coding of who one is, of understanding the implicit choices we do have instead of limiting one’s self by not being the proper subject. So often does not simply not allow oneself permission to be simply because of habit, or social standing… The implications of new agency aren’t simply in discourse, or social hierarchy, but also in resource and labor division. Freire seeks to bring about revolutionary action through real education… on the street education, where one lets the people speak, and gives them agency to speak.

Strangely enough, much of what he says does echo cognitive psychology’s development of ego in the spiral dynamics model. One can only realize who one is, after one has realized the conventionality of being, stumbled into the negation of post-conventionality and come back with a better understanding of how we are all in this together.

I won’t echo all of his book on here, I can’t. Although less than 200 pages, Freire has not wasted a single sentence. He has cut out so much of what is inessential to emphasize what is essential.

Rarely do you meet an author who has come across such forceful passion AND thought through his message with such clarity… it was such a pleasure to read this.

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