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The Anti-Oedipus Papers

April 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

The Anti-Oedipus PapersThe Anti-Oedipus Papers by Félix Guattari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In anticipation of re-reading Thousand Plateaus I thought I’d tackle this book. As a reader of Deleuze (I’ve read all his books), I always understood the progression of Deleuze’s thoughts with the turn coming after Logic of Sense. Some of Guattari’s books, such as Chaosomos enforced for me his role in bringing to Deleuze a completely different view. It didn’t help that Guattari did not publish nearly as much nor as systematically. But after reading this book, I fully acknowledge the debt to Deleuze that many do not see. Deleuze is often given credit since he is of an institution (of philosophy) but Guattari’s running amok, his ability to abstractly critique different ideas and view them from vastly different zones really hits home with his letters to Deleuze.

I’ve always understood Anti-Oedipus as a failed work in the sense that although they reject a metric by which to organize thought they still in interject a methodology (Marxism) by which to organize meaning. Part of this is due to the extension of their rejection of Lacan and psychoanalysis. By rejecting the normalization that psychoanalysis employs, D&G also end up rejecting all normalisations. In this manner they unwittingly step very close to Kant’s “all concepts are regulatory”. While I fully agree with Kant, I think Deleuze’s love of conception forces him to reject Kant’s systematization of thought on aesthetic grounds. In a way, Deleuze’s work ends up being very close to Kant in aesthetic but very different from Kant in method and content.

Again, reading this book allowed me to see that Guattari really pushed Deleuze, who was already pretty out there, to really refocus on how one should approach the problem of multiple-domain knowledges. There are many gems here, to be found. Various extensions of thought that may have gotten lost in Anti-Oedipus, various and of course, a seemingly lack of coherency on the part of Guattari to systematize a presentation that was not rambling. In a way, what Guattari brings to Deleuze is a grasp of normalicy that should be rejected. Guattari allows Deleuze to understand the effects of concepts outside of conception — the role they play on one another and society. In a way Deleuze already understood the way concepts match one another. He does this frequently, and to an extreme, as with Difference and Repetition. But what he failed to include was the political angle that concepts have on people, on subjectivities and logics of peoplehood.

Obviously this book would never have been published if D&G were not as popular as they are. Obviously this is not a complete work on its own because it references other works that you may not have read, that are not included in this volume. Still, if you like the other stuff, this provides another inflection point so that you can begin to understand what Deleuze and Guattari both brought to the table, and how their co-production was a unique synthesis that was necessarily a combination of their personalities, outlooks and backgrounds.

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The Church and the Kingdom

April 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, Theory / No Comments

The Church and the KingdomThe Church and the Kingdom by Giorgio Agamben
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Although very short, Agamben realizes the difference between the church and the kingdom can be found within the Catholic church’s ordination of time. Time here, is used to project a position of sacred reverence as a political tool, rather than one utilized to realize the potential spiritual awakening NOW. For Agamben, the projected position of the messiah is not a good thing because it never arrives. This presents a problem even for the church today, as a worldly institution. Obviously Agamben charges the church with not exercising their full role as they see it, and instead letting us dwell in a kind of non-time time, in perpetual waiting.

In a way this book can be read as a call to spiritual awakening, although Agamben does not necessarily go that far.

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Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Fractal Geometry of Nature

March 18, 2015 / posted in agential realism, life as we know it, love, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Fractal Geometry of NatureThe Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoît B. Mandelbrot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This beautiful book is about Mandelbrot’s love of science, mathematics and all forms of knowing. He is humorous at times, dense, and waxing on about fractals and changes that are self similar. It is through the figure of a difference that something is known. Fractals are unique in that they are that difference regardless of scale, that is, as Mandelbrot said of Leibniz, that Leibniz first recognized a straight line as being a curve whose arbitrary measure was universally applicable by itself by any other arbitrary measure.

Fractals are thus, a balance of form and measure and thus perfectly applicable to describing self similiarities that occur throughout various scales. By necessity these fractals are thus found in areas of maximal distribution where it be biological, informational, materially, socially or otherwise. Each bit of aggregate from each context can be traced through out some of the other contexts so that a distribution of their differences can be expressed mathematically as a formalization of unithood — difference — itself. Fractals can thus be understood as the limit of scaleless models of difference. Mandelbrot goes over a variety of contexts in which we can understand their expressedly different dimensions, differing topographies, as structured rules through time, or a static interface that modifies itself as scale is adjusted.

At times, Mandelbrot can become overwhelming as he notices as particular “cut” in an equation, be it a variable or an expressed tendency, and in vocalizing it, circulates around that textual point to arrange chapters, whorls on whorls, in which sections and sections of sections let us know when one thing was described and another thing began.

And so, as this is a book about the fractal geometry of nature, Mandelbrot shows us his love by talking admiringly of other mathematicians, many not celebrated, or fully acknowledged in their time. These technicians and their stories become the backdrop of those who developed this metric enough to let us see, and explore these subtle differences and their odd refinements. Indeed, it is really to those quiet, anonymous men, who established the halls of science that Mandelbrot writes this book to, for he would have liked for them to experience the joy he feels at being able to explore these monsters, while many of them did not, due to the contemporaneous level of mathematical understanding not yet understanding how to recognize (and thus, explore) the fractal nature of geometry in all its glories.

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Reasons to Live

March 6, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews / No Comments

Reasons to LiveReasons to Live by Amy Hempel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hempel is able to draw out various minutiae. In her centering of each story around the presence or absence of this minutiae, we can find the root of this story as in principle, the driving force behind the actions of the characters. While at times, the characters may encounter the minutiae as periphery to a different activity not in the story, each story works as a collection constructed of the minutiae which in repetition becomes its own difference. Literally, the story takes on a life of its own, a certain plateau, a consistency of that minutiae that then becomes, as a collection, “reasons to live”.

Despite the easy language, at times I found it difficult to get a grasp on certain stories. For me, I would be able to read at most 3 or so stories before I had to put this down and do something else. Otherwise the abstract relevancy started to get lost. I think other readers may be able to appreciate Hempels attention to detail, at times, humorous, witty or provocative. She definitely is able to draw a thin line, weaving each story together as its own “reason”, bringing to characters as a unique slice of “living” as we know them and ourselves in different and new ways.

Truly this is a great example of how short stories can inhabit new spaces, in ways that epics or novels cannot. Each of this is, I felt, at times, a burst of meditation. It brings to light a fact; we can find in anything we do, a particularity to how we construct a situation. We can find ourselves different in how we know ourselves and how we subsist depending on what our attention covers. Interesting to show these meditations in these little funny stories.

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The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Nature and Properties of Soil

January 25, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, utility / No Comments

The Nature and Properties of SoilThe Nature and Properties of Soil by Nyle C. Brady
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We may not think about it, because we treat the ground we walk on as a surface to get around from place to place. But the soil is the collection of what earth’s crust. Mixed with chemicals and chunks of matter collected from geological, meteorological, cultural, technological, social and the soil becomes a matrix reflexive of more than just “recent” geological and climate events but it also comes to mirror the action of man. The depth of our knowledge of the soil correlates with the noticed differences in phenotypical expressions of plants, animals and society. We build on the soil, so we need it stable, we grow on soil, so we need it fertile, we live on soils so we need it to be productive, expansive, beautiful and natural. Natural here, acts as a term to stabilize this collection, as we recognize soil as what it isn’t by what we need it to be. Thus, our knowledge grows deeper and deeper as we track (un)desired changes in the areas of (un)welcome surprises. Plants don’t grow as good, or they have a discoloration. Floods happen. Buildings and roads collapse or crumble. Soil is one of the areas which has an influence, as soil is foundational to all aspects of human existence, as all life comes from it, all stability is attributed to it, without it we wouldn’t have a place to be. We are made of it. It makes us, and returns to us our waste as useful, life and abundance (at least before there was too much, and too great a variety).

Thus, this textbook’s depth reflects the depth to which humankind has become knowledgeable about the soil because we have traced our needs back to the soil, to this depth, that this 1000 page book is just the beginning. Yet even with its multitudinous diagrams, rampant calculations, redox equations, and geological terminology to nominalize difference in types, origins, natures of soil; you can still find hearty admonishments, and mentions of what humans use the soil for, what humans want from it, how humans mistreat it because it costs too much, or we were once ignorant. Our dependency on this prime earth is foretold in these pages by the amount of time, devotion and study it has taken to amass this depth of knowledge. And there are still things we don’t yet know about the soil but hope to find out! Our reliance is truly unending.

Along the way, you’ll find that much of this information is classified into chunks. But the parts of these chunks interact with one another, in dimensions the book still tries to highlight but obviously holds to be less important than the consistency of what has been chunked. Likewise, the soil itself has bands of interference as influences from one area, say climate, or another, say, by a farmhouse, all intermix. This is the nature of soil, that soil is a collection of anonymous particles that share similar constraints. For example, while the book mentions resistance in soil, this resistance is mostly due to contextual factors, such as what other influences of climate, geology, industry in its “surrounding” shall also claim influence. The creation of these contexts are the mutually shifting ground of shifting soil, as there is no soil; soil is what stays the same regardless of changes, and that formulates a substantive basis for naming them by what stays mostly the same.

Perhaps in some order of decades we may want to consider additional soil types, but this may not happen as our knowledge of the soil and our knowledge of our reliance on it, has introduced some movements whereby we wish for maintaining the soil, or even improving its functions in the aspects we deem to be desirable for the soil. This too is a sliding scale. As our knowledge increases, so we do find more ways in which our actions and treatment has influenced the soil heretofore unseen. The collection of our actions is a retroactive synthesis, ex post facto, of the true nature of our actions, not just in how we know but also how we are ignorant.

This differentiating edge of what soil can show us in our own knowledge highlights two aspects, both of which are parallax. On the one hand, we create our knowledge as an imprint (extension) of what we are… not just expressive of our desires but also expressive of aspects of our person as are unaware of being. On the other hand, this highlights the need for a post-rational approach to conceptualizing our frame. Following the work of Humberto Maturana, we can understand that “life is knowledge” and thus knowledge is the conceptual correlation with the extent of our ability to comprehend and appreciate what we are. The parallax isn’t simply that human consciousness is the limit that defines our fields of knowledge, but that the limit of our knowledge is the extent of our human differentiation from the manifolds of soil, flesh and matter. It follows then, that our discursive practices are the materialization of our knowledge. The two go hand in hand as more than epiphenomenal, as the correlation isn’t causal but it is a literal surjective distinction that expresses itself from the zones of ideational substance and material abstraction.

Following this, we can draw parallax lines in a projective geometry between economics as a rational material quantifiability, the internal classifications of which are on the level of value-form as espoused by the ideology of merchant capital and the post-structural conception of the void as the abstraction to which we ground all concepts immanently within a transcendence characterized by the value-form of the void, as the zero-phoneme signifier is the only position from which we can measure all determinate fields of knowledge against. We sacrifice knowledge of the union of a parabola’s curvature at the apex if we understand the apex as necessarily coinciding with the zero degree angle of measurement of a cartesian y-axis.

We can also understand the correlation of depth between our bodily elements and the elements adopted from a soil polluted with those reactive elements. This is akin to an expression of a generic within a transcendental field. Only within that field can we note the presence of a generic as a nominalisation when a functional value operates through blind procedure to highlight the operate distinction as reflective of a knowledge about the other domain. In other words, because we like our monoculture more, the stress of the soil is reflected in the diminished quality of vegetation, although we may notice first the diminished quality within ourselves.

Thus, the poverty of our soils knowledge is the poverty of our own organisms, as we attempt to master the earth; for it is not the individual human that struggles against the earth but the earth that struggles with the entire mass of humanity as we collectively shape our planet. Thus, the form of our knowledge as a discrete mathematics, the collective metaphor of set theory spacializes and flips the metaphysics of presence from a substantive position of a classical era in which knowledge was knowledge of material, but rather the formal interrelatinos become the means by which knowledge is generated. Thus our place of observation becomes part of the network of knowledge. In a post-rationalist conception, we understand where we are by where we want to see, intersubjectively, as stated by Vittorio Guidano is also explicated by John Galbraith in economics as a self referential series of groupings which create identity and sublimate actions for group subsistence. Although this post-rational approach developed by Guidano goes beyond economic justification for uber-production as outlined by Galbraith, we can see although with Badiou’s set theory that the formalization of knowledge is reflective of classifications and their attendant distinctions. These distinctions formalized as separate chunks that reify dimensions of the context for consideration is reflective not only of how humans understand themselves in larger organizations (family, clan, tribe or seniority, department, branch, corporation or citizen, city, county, state, nation) but also in impersonal relations such as within soil, or in symphony or other unified “fields” of experience. Of course we would study that which we found to be useful to us! And of course our study would be reflective of who we are and what we do.

In this way we can understand the our desire to learn about soils is our desire to relate to the other of us, that is, the matrix from which we come and to which we return, the soil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[[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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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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