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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Taming Of Chance

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

The Taming Of Chance (Ideas in Context)The Taming Of Chance by Ian Hacking
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this amazing work, Ian Hacking shows us the development of statistics. At first, statistics was used to find the “laws” of society. The patterns that were discovered were then utilized to as both prediction and explanation, to calibrate both the past and the future. Out of this use, the figure of the “normal” took over. This reinforced a position by which society then sought to calibrate itself in mediocrity. The present was thus always in decay, as normal slipped away due to change. At the same time, normal was understood as a purified state, one that people needed to attain to be “healthy.” The resolution that these statistical laws were explanation and prediction thus reproduces itself in the field as ideology.

Both past and future are colonized by our imagined laws, explained by nothing yet colonizing everything.

Hacking here presents the theoretical mechanism, the heirs of Newtonism, as developing the formula for state policy and social control. From the end of the French Revolution to the development of the centrist liberal state, we have a consistent march towards state intervention through the technicalities of a healthier, managed people.

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Heretics of Dune

September 8, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Heretics of Dune (Dune Chronicles, #5)Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although Dune was meant to be a trilogy originally, Frank Herbert has masterfully been able to extend the series. The way he does this is that both book 4 and 5 recalibrate the entire series.

On the one hand, this book lacks the energy from the previous novels. Yet it is able to clarify what’s at stake for the other books. At first I had thought this was about utopia — in fact the first three books seemed so. But then the 4th book showed us that utopia isn’t it since Leto II had already presented us the picture of what it meant to have it; again it was politics and power as usual.

Here, Herbert shows us what is at stake. Raising human consciousness. Not just physically but the correct adaptability. He shows us also, corruption, incredible corruption that comes with humans trying to achieve the sublime so that the world becomes degraded into nothing but struggles for novel sensations.

Much of the book seemed to wander though, and while there was the understandable politics that comes with Dune, this seemed beside the point; tiresome. Unlike the first few books where we cared more about the characters in this, we start to get a glimpse of what it means to build a world… it means that we define new subjectivities. It means we have to outline the process by which this comes around. And although there is no perfect way, the destruction of Rakis as the release of humankind from a concentration of power was what Leto II was after; this is the truth of being human. Rather than the technology and power view of what a perfect world is, Herbert shows us the way for us is to choose freedom, to let others grow and develop, so we too shall grow and develop.

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I, Claudius

September 8, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, love, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)I, Claudius by Robert Graves
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a great book. Here, Graves takes some liberties with history, obviously, as no one knew what did or did not happen. But we do see the corruption of individuals within families interwrapped with such a complete power as to be a heady frightful mess.

While I saw the BBC tv show in serial as a teenager, this helped me appreciate history in a way that I did not for a long time. The interrelation of life, family, power, money and all the things that make us human is what elevates this story to a point of the human sublime.

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The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

September 8, 2015 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated PrimerThe Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Perhaps this is a matter that Stephenson is a programmer, but despite the amazing awesomeness of his expansion, the concept of creating a whole only from formalistically aligned agents is the only apparent limitation of this book.

What is the most futuristic about this book is what’s most interesting: beyond consciousness is material agency. Beyond technology is the conflation of agency and consciousness. Here we get a primer that reflects back the sum total of various social memes, presented as a subversive text that aligns to a developing consciousness. In a sense, primers have existed, but always under master guidance: tarot cards, for example. Or gnostic religious texts. Such high level manipulation of form is today, only given within a technical division. What is necessary for a developing consciousness though, is the ability to abstract patterns and then run their consistency forwards and backwards. From there, the partial worlds aligned by agency and ideology are at a loss as to the next direction.

This is where Stephenson turns to the mysterious seed, which is little more than a view espoused by a nanotech engineer. This view is the necessary meld of programmable reality, a belief in the completeness of human conception to manage material universes ideologically.

Where Stephenson ends mysteriously is in Nell’s subversion of the primer’s creator’s view, to reject a totalized agency of human consciousness/sexuality — where humans are little more than computational components. She releases from that mix individuality, and in that sense, subverts the primer completely.

Diamond Age is a view of human consciousness; whats at stake is our very freedom, to be ruled completely by managed eusociality (through the Victorians, or otherwise). Stephenson subverts the logic of his text in this ending, by choosing human freedom. In that sense, this utopic vision is dystopic because he shows us how it is limited, how it collapses, and is hypocritical to those who grew under its auspices but do not understand that the world they grew up in is an answer to a past problem, on that may no longer be relevant for today.

In that sense, as the little sisters show us, those of us raised by a system become formalized — indoctrinated within that system. This is not the answer to human consciousness as it is not a solution for adaptability. What we want is for people to grow up able to choose for themselves. To this end, Stephenson shows us that the primer used mechanistically as a mass solution shows its formalistic weakness. Like stock market strategies that profit only in the hands of the few so truly subversive systems only work when they are hidden.

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Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe

August 31, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval EuropeReligious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe by Lester K. Little
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here Leter K Little traces the development of the profit economy from a gift economy. He highlights how the legend of the usurious Jew comes about when the main stream culture through the wealth of the church comes to occupy the scapegoat of greed so that the church’s tides system and the emerging banking system in Europe can be free to operate. As money comes to take the center stage in organizing culture we see a revival through the various groups within and associated with the church as a twist from living well to purposefully making poverty a choice in order to maintain moral purity necessary to mark themselves as being alienated from the “dirty” emerging money economy.

Despite the promise of a dry book this was actually very interesting. Little’s writing is clear. I would have liked a little more background on the money economy’s emergence but I suppose that is beyond the scope of the book. The emergence of poverty as a religious asset is a reflection of the emergence of money as the central organizing principle. Religion fights to maintain a suprasensible hold on organizing human activity above and beyond money. And this seems to work, at least, in the middle Medieval ages.

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Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature

August 22, 2015 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human NatureEmpiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gilles Deleuze continually amazes me. This incredibly tight and coherent book was written when he was only 28. it was his first book.

Here he utilizes Hume’s radical critique on induction (which is actually a critique on causation and empiricism) in order to realign not only culture and society but also subjectivity.

From here, Deleuze no longer speaks of subjectivity in his other works (for the most part). He immediately grasps the relation of subjectivity with time, as past coherences are also given in the present through a formal repetition of content deployment.

This is connection of Bergson and Freud; that process is knowledge, and the imprint of a particular process as being the “main line” highlights not only what is significant in an encounter but also significant for future encounters.

When we understand that relations are “outside themselves” as external connections that are imposed, we can grasp that subjectivities as self referential are also “relations outside themselves”. It is the process of this superimposition that creates mind, being and so on as synthetic relations of what we do. Knowledge is given to a material process. In later works, Deleuze shows the mixture of material sheets of consistency from which agency is expressed forms the partial objects of agential realism as the formation of new agencies as new material consistencies.

“Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what is”.

This is the jump as a young Deleuze pushes us beyond existentialism of a resoluteness of being into the functionalism of the 21st century.

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American Psycho

August 7, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews / No Comments

American PsychoAmerican Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Too many reviews seem to judge a work based on whether it is true or not. Taken literally, this story is ridiculous. Taken metaphorically, it may be truer. But truth is pretty irrelevant. What matters more to a story is how it allows to navigate a new world… and from that new world understand our current one.

This book is disturbing. Horrific. In a way, it’s meant to shock, disgust, titillate. So in that sense it is a shallow story. What makes the story unshallow is that you realize in the end that all the characters, even the women, are predators. They may not kill, but the dismantling of women into sex objects where the narrator uses the bodies of women for his own designs (against their will) and then takes from them everything (he debases them, to put it lightly) is a major part of the critique. In fact it seems to be the most outlandish direction of the novel. But it’s not. What is most disturbing is the overdetermined emphasis on superficiality. Name brands, images, looks, having a good time. Women are part of the furniture, part of decorum. Everything in this world is simply going out to eat, seeing and being seen. There is no future here, there is only the repetitious, nausea of endless drive to consume (murder, rape, debase) and then do it over and over again. Everything becomes a simulation, a dream, to follow the violence of capitalist consumption so does Bateman carry on violent consumption.

In a very strange way though, Ellis takes some of the easy way out. He shows women as sex objects by presenting them as sex objects. He shows us the horror of rape by presenting rape. He shows us superficiality by pushing on us the superficiality of the worlds we navigate. The disjointed dialogue, the inability of the characters to feel or understand one another. Ellis could have shown this to us in a variety of ways but instead chooses to do so with many winks and nudges. Hey, isn’t it horrible that this attractive woman is being mistreated? Lets mistreat her in the text by describing her untimely demise. The debasement of women though, is okay, because it’s not anyones fault but this despicable Bateman fellow.

Additionally, the inability to maintain coherent subjectivity, arguably the most interesting parts of the story seem only to be best played at the end, when Ellis ends the story just when the language and narrative break up seem to be getting the most interesting.

I admit. I was colored by the movie. I expected an ambiguous ending, one where it didn’t happen and it did happen. There is none of that. There is only the beginning of an interesting disarray and then the story ends, as if it can’t get any worse. Ellis took the entire 400 pages to get us to the font of what this is and then leaves us there, as if the indictment was enough, he doesn’t want to tell us what any of it means. Perhaps he doesn’t know what it means either. Perhaps he has no idea what to make of this, he’s just trying to entertain us.

I don’t think he only wants to entertain. I think he wants to illuminate us. If that’s so, he did a nasty job of it. He took way too long to get to this point, as if he blew his load way too soon and decided to cover it up by ending on a few statements from the narrator. The narrator’s decay at the end is never brought to full bloom, he is never allowed to completely fall apart.

That is a weakness. It’s a powerful tale (now that you’ve gotten us with the debasement of beautiful women, of yuppie self indulgence and confusing narrative) but so what? Are we to expect that Bateman is now the new boogey man? That he is going to continue on and on forever? Bateman is an unreliable narrator. I can’t help but think that Ellis did a poor job framing the entire story; that even with an unreliable narrator, Ellis could have found a truer beginning that is an opening and thus a greater finish one that closes off the opening. Instead we have a dinner party that goes nowhere but annoy and a lunch whose conversation is completely vacuous.

Sure feels like a cheap shot at yuppies (no doubt a story about even vacuous people shouldn’t be vacuous) with a lot of empty entertainment (as rape and snuff fantasies). Lord knows yuppies can take a cheap shot, but only if you don’t already think they are capable of being much more.

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Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism

July 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, Universal non-all / No Comments

Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and AutismLife, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism by Ron Suskind
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At first I was a little dubious about the topic. The book starts off slowly but with the sure guidance of Ron Suskind’s writing. The story is positive, triumphant. It doesn’t necessarily highlight how great Disney is, but it does give us an interesting peak as to what family is about; and how good family supports itself and is able raising children in an environment that fosters their growth. What is of interest is how the public’s perception of autism has changed to better facilitate autistic inclusion, and yet still has room for improvement.

What’s of interest here isn’t the neurotypical/autistic as a real tragedy, but more about how that divide ignores the fact that all of us function differently. Normalcy is the expectation that all of us are able to function adequately to each other. And we are; but with exceptions. What is of great profound interest is that an autistic boy is able to use Disney as a social lattice to map his interaction with his family and then with the outside world. All of us use stories and cliches to guide our interaction/expectation with the outside world. Some of us just are more able to ground our behavior on a moment to moment guide. We need less structure to foster growth, but we all still need structure. I think the conception of normalcy in some way hides this structure because this structure is expected. With autism that structure is inadequate. We need some other way of allowing for growth.

Part of growth today requires that we are able to create a smooth rationality to realize things forwards and backwards. Not all people can do this to the same degree, of course. With autism, reasoning works only within a certain configuration. This story is about a family that was able reach their son by allowing that configuration to map outwards and envelope them all.

I used to dislike Disney to a great degree. I found the narrow confides of their socialization to be unacceptable. Restraining. To a great degree I still do. I’m not saying this book has helped change my mind about what (sub)cultures and social rigidity can do/impose on people, but I think we can see that there are many modes of reasoning and none of them are invalid although not all of them are socially acceptable.

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On the Improvement of the Understanding / The Ethics / Correspondence (v. 2)

June 26, 2015 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, reviews, Theory / No Comments

On the Improvement of the Understanding / The Ethics / Correspondence (v. 2)On the Improvement of the Understanding / The Ethics / Correspondence by Baruch Spinoza
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Perhaps it is the repeated exposure to Deleuze’s Spinoza and readings of this slender collection that leaves me a little blank on what to say. Spinoza remains the imminent thinker of substance. Pre-Kantian, he shows us a world where relation and thought interact as pure geometry. His aesthetics for human understanding and interaction remain inspiring, even after all these years. While he encapsulates his system through the excessive nominalisation of God, Spinoza is able to return for us not a transcendental limit, of a lesser obscurity, one that reflects our limitation as beings of finiteness. This is different from a transcendental completeness, in which inconsistency is hidden through contingency. For Spinoza, there is only one manifold of infinite variety but of the same substance. Spinoza still preaches a completeness through God’s perfection but he shows us that inconsistency is only given our modality as finite beings.

Still strange and interesting is his conception beyond Good and Evil, in which these are layers of human localisation. This is almost Buddhist in conception. What makes Spinoza a philosopher is His calibration to the “faculty” of rationalism as the modality for emotion, understanding and modal being. His religiousity is instead, an extension of his thought, a characterization of the common mode of relation available for him at the time. If Spinoza were alive today, he might as well extended his geometric volume from pure relation of substance to algorithmic functionality.

His correspondence is interesting though, as it is able to show how he deals with a variety of different people and points of view.

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