« Posts under reviews

Lavoisier; Fourier; Faraday (Great Books of the Western World, Vol 45)

March 6, 2015 / posted in agential realism, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Lavoisier; Fourier; Faraday (Great Books of the Western World, Vol 45)Lavoisier; Fourier; Faraday by Michael Faraday
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m not sure why I read this. Read about half of it, although towards the end I got lazy. Whats interesting is that these three books are included as “great books” but they are in fact dated. If anyone were to read this, it wouldn’t be for the content in it. We have here, Fourier’s “Analytic Theory of Heat”, Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry” and Faraday’s “Experimental Researches in Electricity” all of which are founding books of modern science but definitely dated by contemporary standards.

Still, with this we get very intelligent men documenting what they did, what others did, what they found and the methods they used to explore their separate areas of interest. While they still call themselves “philosophers” of natural philosophy, not yet making the distinction between philosophy and science, we get very little conjecture about the materials they work with. (Faraday towards the end of one of his letters, can’t resist contemplating that atoms “touch” each other. He outlines this in a really interesting way.) Really they talk mostly about process.

So the lesson here, if there is one, is that material practice generates knowledge. What makes these books great aren’t merely their methodology in the lab but also their strict mental disciplines, to just stick with what they are doing and logically ponder, what if I do this? What do I find? What if I do this? What do I find? There are strange conclusions. For example, Lavoisier believes that all plants are made of charcoal, since that’s what’s always left when you burn them and remove other elements from the plants. So he thinks charcoal is already in the plants to begin with since he didn’t add it. Okay, we can see where he’s going with that. But this is what I mean. Despite not having the wealth of understanding we have today to back up what one needs to do, these men went ahead and forged a large part of that understanding. Their mechanical methods leads to the mechanical science we have today because the mehcanical manipulations are immanent to the knowledge that is produced.

A great example is Fourier’s relatively tiny book. Most of his analytical theory has to do with decomposing heat in its movement, dissipation and collection through solids, liquids and airs. As he states early on, such an examination wouldn’t be possible without MATH. So math he applies, and boy does he apply it. He uses analytic geometry with calculus to describe the rate of change point by point, atom by atom as a derivative in order to organize his theory. This is brilliant! You can see how this book was widely influential in how other natural philosophers could then objectively compare notes and make predictions. Fourier, however, does not mistake the metric for the material. He doesn’t claim that math is more real than the reality he measures, as some physicists might do today. He does end his book on the general implications of his analytics. This is basically a recasting of length, time, conductivity and so on in terms of each other. He relates them as functions of each other and in this pure mathematical sense, it’s hard to argue with the formalism. You can see how people might eventually construe that math is more real than the materials. But the analytics was measured in terms of these units (time, conductivity/specific heat, length) because that’s what we have here to figure out how fast heat can travel through material. The basic units are given so their relation is formalized to begin with.

Ah! Objectivity and specific experimentation give us the very building blocks we find later on, abstracted in a general sense to one another.

I will say this. It’s not exciting reading for the most part. And these guys do not know how to end a book. Their endings usually conclude with a finding, a small detail left trailing. I guess in a way, since knowledge is incomplete, this is as a good as any a place to stop.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

Logics of Worlds: Being and Event

February 22, 2015 / posted in dialectics, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the onset, Badiou’s materialist dialectic seems fairly obscure. But while he doesn’t speak much about it throughout his book, it becomes clear that his materialist dialectic is predicated on the same kind of formalization that has swept up modernist thought: the creation of formalism in order to express relations in thought.

While you can tell that Badiou doesn’t want to dismiss his previous work, Being and Event in this one he seeks to engage with the non-philosophical more. On this end, while the previous was on ontology this book it seems far more about presentation, or existence. Having sublimated the formalisms of mathematics into philosophical though, Badiou would introduce to us a more specific (and thus generalized) logic on which to understand the various collections and connections we witness in our everyday lives.

This formalism can be understood as the result of the Cartesian method of synthesis. One breaks down a situation into constituent atoms and then patches those atoms back together to come up with a composite world. The various different situations provide little input as to the method of the formalization, although the success of the formalization requires a method of atomization — “chunking”. How we decide to decompose a situation into unchunks will in reverse allow us to assemble them back together.

Part of Badiou’s genius, especially with this previous book to this, the first Being and Event relied on his insight that mathematics at its root was conceptual, not formal (despite how we in post-industrial education are introduced to mathematics, as pure formalism). By grasping the concepts, we can then also understand that mathematics is philosophical in its nature, although it is of a different kind. Math follows the inductive “analytical” side of the method. The missing piece is the synthesis. Much of philosophy post-ancient Greece, had to do with the presentation of the synthesis side. As Irme Lakatos notes, Descates realized their methods, and speculates that their “secrets” had to do with the method of analysis. The synthesis portion was given publicly and that’s why the Euclidean method is nothing but synthesis. We get the conclusions of their philosophy, but not their analysis. The end result of their analysis however, are their axoims. And so that’s what is missing in their method. This is also, incidentally, why mathematics and physics meld together so well. Two dissolve a situation via a formalism and then to patch it back together allows one to continually create new models, new methods of dissolution and then synthesis. The main impetus that arises from this the cherishes “occult hypothesis” by which one is able to grasp the missing “influx” that arranges the atoms and then sets the stage for how these atoms are to be stitched back together. For Newtonians, this occult hypothesis is gravity. The various other “conclusions” that theorists and scientists can come up with are varying but they consist of the “excluded middle”. Slavoj Zizek for example, in Less than Nothing has the occult hypothesis of less than nothing, the theory of two vacuums.

What is perhaps wonderful about Badiou’s approach, as well, is that he sidesteps the traditional jargon that Zizek has to deal with. Badiou can talk about past philosophers, and but Zizek, in order to make his point, MUST. This injection of mathematics is perhaps Badiou’s greatest contribution. It is a great strength as well, for he is able to introduce new relations on their own, rather than having to continually modify language we are already familiar with.

What is weak about Badiou however, is that he adds little content to a situation. His formalism is a tool that can be used to recompose existing worlds and relate them to one another. While he dismisses Kant in this book, he misses Kant’s greater understanding. As stated in his Critique of Pure Reason: mathematics is another synthesis. While math can be used analytically, and often is, its incompleteness in its axoims results from the fact that as a methodological field, math is stitched together through a variety of methods connected by sheer formalism. There is no one conception that rules mathematics in the same way that there is a singular conception that may rule Lacan or Descartes. So while formalism can be method to note new connections, it cannot replace the intuition of thought itself. In fact this is not an explanation what so ever.

Two additional weaknesses to Badiou

1. He critiques Deleuze heavily in claiming that his fourfold thesis is a reversal of Deleuze’s. This misses the point as both he and Deleuze understand that negation is not a rebuke of a logic but rather the emphasis of a missing totality. Badiou’s own method of formalising a transcendental envelope is predicated on the minimum gesture of negation of a missing piece. In fact, Badiou ends his book by noting that the presence of a body (or a grouping of conceptions as a topological family) is wholly subsisted on the missing of a minimum. His other critique — that Deleuze reduces everything into a monotonous elan vital, similiar to Spinoza’s lack of a transcendental distinction of substances and subjectivity is well taken, however.

2. His main value in the conversation is his ability to provide surjection between the domains of math and philosophy. This theory of points (book IV) is a pretty good aesthetic, only missing Dedekind’s cut of real numbers. While his analysis of what points provides to the conversation could have been (and should have been) interjected into his first book for the purpose of clarification, he misses out on providing an internal definition of knowledge even in this following book. One creates knowledge only when one can mark it, that is, surjectively translate it into a point. In fact, Weierstrass’s genius at the end of the 19th century relied on solifying what Descartes started: the overlay of points onto numbers in the form of analytic geometry. This move by 19th century mathematicians following Weierstrass’s reluctant but compelling argument for what eventually comes modern day set theory thus taken as being unequivocally true by Badiou and absorbed into his approach. Now, having explained the value of this formalistic surjection, Badiou misses the fact that the immanence of his theory is useless in itself.

Of course, he realizes this implicitly, but he does not seem to understand, as Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant did, that navigating the interstice is what brings a formalism its value. Kant’s genius lay in realizing the synthetic nature of phenomenon. His transcendental dialectic surpassed the different singular (“logically independent worlds” qua) faculties to give us a method of relating phenomenon together, stitching together a world through the continuance of their parts. Likewise, Marx explains exchange value through the various different use values of products. That the connected use values of these products is what creates value for money, and that different kinds of money are in a way, different kinds of sublimated use values. In his approach here, Badiou continues to wrap different worlds as increasingly complex localizations that appear to one another, but in the process of doing so always presents it within an absolute envelope (m) that is routely defined as the mode by which these different atoms can interrelate and be associated with one another. And while he states early on that there is no Being that covers all being, like there is no Body that can cover all, I do not think he realizes that by sublimating presentation as a formalization within these sets, he at all is able to step outside of the pure multiples themselves and wrap all of being as only that which appears under immanent logic. At the end of this book, he laments the dismissal of concepts, quoting Descartes that mathematics is eternal. And yet, hasn’t he contradicted himself? He defines early on that there is no Being — that it there is no way one envelope can wrap all of the different worlds, and then he defines it through sheer nominalization (m) and then acts as though this nominalization surpasses the physical presentation of the logics of worlds, stating that there are worlds in which we cannot have access to because their presentation is too baroquely different from our own.

This is the same entrapment that thinkers that the great Roger Penrose, or even Richard Dawkins falls into. Their sublime ability to create complex and yet fantasically concise occult hypothesis allows them the decompose and recompose with such sheer mastery that they have forgotten the reality of their own methods. They are hypnotized by their own defined immanence, forgetting that even in this present world there are points that lie outside of the rigor of their own presentations. Badiou follows this routine, coming to the conclusion to speak of the totality of Idea as an absolute shield. Nevermind the fact that such methodology did not exist for all time, and that the formalism of our own knowledge is a fragmentary creation of the conditions of what we accept to be knowledge. If our knowledge is fragmentary it is because we reject the interstices which gives each world of knowledge value, value which exists wholly outside of each field but is understood as immanent to that fields own internal non-sense.

This tact understanding is also Deleuze’s greatest insight which I think exceeds Badiou. Deleuze’s own language: the conceptions of territoriality, plateaus and the like, consist of Deleuze and Guattari’s genius at producing traces (rhizomes) by which different machinic assemblages influence one another. (Un)fortunately, Deleuzean language either leads people to reject it outright as being non-knowledge, as there is no “point” by which one can make heads or tails of it, books which review Deleuze and only write about a few of his concepts as though this is the great aspect that is to be gleamed, or books which abandon Deleuze but are “about” Deleuze and seek to create their own immanence. Badiou’s method does allow for some greater control in adjusting and decomposing with greater control, but I think that Badiou himself misses the larger aesthetic of Deleuze by pursuing too recklessly the desire for validation. On the one hand, Badiou understands that his philosophy only has value if he is able to connect it to real life situations (thus his talking about life and death) but on the other hand, he wishes for the most obscure concepts in order to be recognized with his heros, as a philosopher).

Having gone this far in the review, I do wish to pull back a little and return to the material dialectic. This insight is profound on its own, but Badiou misses stating it explicitly in his text because he is too enamored of his mathematical rigor: this point is simply that all creation of knowledge (analysis and the synthesis) is predicated on procedure. The truth of mathematics as a rigorous activity and the formation of knowledge as points wholly subsists on the exteriority of various groups that are able to formulate their knowledge as a logical consistency of their profession/activity. That is to say, the pure immanence of a specific approach requires the route nullification of external connections in-itself. Worlds become whole when they eschew other worlds, and nullify the influence of exterior factors. This pure modeling becomes all the more valuable when it is connected to a process which then is able to modify one another. Professions like attorneys and architects are gatekeepers to officiated activity, activity which is inflated because of the formalism of capitalism… but that in itself, is to encroach on an entirely different subject.

I gave this book 5 stars because it’s a tight piece of world. It’s flawed for the reasons I point out, but it’s still wellworth the read.

View all my reviews

The Savage Detectives

February 21, 2015 / posted in art, images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

The Savage DetectivesThe Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me a while to get into this book. Admittedly it’s thick, and while the headers have names, dates and places, the sheer number of outlying characters threatens to dissolve attempts to make a cohesive narrative anything but conclusive. What Roberto Bolano has done is to show how there is no unifying trend in a group identity. That something as erudite and ideal as poetry can create a group is but a sheer coincidence among youths. As time progresses the boundaries of what makes a group dissolve, leaving but a faint trace of what had existed.

This novel is bookended by a character whose entry into the group, the viseral realists, breaks the group apart. He falls in with a prostitute who runs from her pimp. Their fleeing is supported by the leaders of this poetry group, whose absence eventually unravels the group. We see this as the group no longer has contact with one another. We hear of people faintly by hearsay. Eventually a young academic even writes about the group, including a trace of influence. In that sense, the fantastic nature of the subplots, the vignettes is where Bolano is able to give us choice pickings as the larger edifice melts into time. We catch up to the modern era but swiftly, as a coincidence destroys what may have, some day, in another world, amounted to a mainstream group. We don’t even know what happened to break up the two leaders although it becomes clear that their lives become in an instant, inexplicably altered.

In this way, we can read this as a coming of age story of individuals, but also as a coming of age story of nations entering into the globalized market. The heaving of capitalist trends always rearranges people socially, so that they do other things, odd tasks, specific to their own abilities and ambitions. Ultimately we are shuffled like so many decks of cards as the different decades come and go, different fashions changes and different values highlight out collective experience. In our older age we may return to our ideals of when young, having exhausted our sense of market sensibilities, and found greater joy despite the monotony of change. So we then end, individuals of so many potentials, being effaced on the shores of history, some of us, never to achieve our potential, many of us to be minor players who contributed to movements but only as vanishing mediators. Bolano writes about life, and perhaps this un-covering is the savage detective work as what he examines is both viseral and real.

View all my reviews

Misreadings

February 21, 2015 / posted in art, reviews / No Comments

MisreadingsMisreadings by Umberto Eco
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Normally I die for Umberto Eco’s works. This however, seemed less interesting mainly because it becomes clear that this is an exercise in saying one thing though the filter of another. At times the meaning is twisted as with “Make Your Own Movie” where we play with the narrative form by exporting different possibilities. Other times, it’s the form of two news broadcasters speaking about the landing of Columbus for the first time. Perhaps this is because written in the 60s, these essays would have been more cutting edge than they are now. Either way, I am not certain they stand up today as works in themselves. As always, Eco’s observations and musings are interesting, compelling and insightful. But given the push that they are in, I am less interested in them as comedy than anything else.

In a sense, parody is only the pushing of what something is through its opposite. This is how comedy shows like the Daily Show can be news. It creates the news through its focusing on one object simply because it is “about” something “out there”. The form of its presentation preserves its content even if the deployment is “opposite”. I didn’t think that this is astounding as an execution, but it is astounding as a way in which we humans think and process information.

Still, if you want a brainy book about silliness, here it is.

View all my reviews

One

February 21, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

ONEONE by Blake Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There’s not much one can go here. This book is an assemblage by three writers, one for the “inside” one for the “outside” and one to arrange its parts. Like much writing via concept, the major tension is inherent within the presentation of the language. Eventually the two sides disappear and through the figure of the narrator (narration) we get the formation of a unity, a strange assemblage (as one reviewer put it) that defies the normative structure we place on narrative. There is by its very conception, a defiance of structure and yet as readers we wish to cram the content of this piece into that structure, in order to make sense of it. This is another way of saying, as Deleuze brought up, that the mind is a cage on the body. Only in this case, understanding is cage that the narration ends up against, struggling to coexist with the cage and yet trying (not) to be in it all the more. Congruent with other fiction aspects of American writing, we get the figure of the house, in which an immanent logic of familial cognizance underlies the bizarre presentation. In this One the very boundaries of the text are arbitrary in nature. In art we may attempt for spiritual awakening through inexplicable experience — this text is an attempt at that — though I find it more to be an exercise in writing tedium than an inspired masterpiece.

The major issue I have with this text is that it is “too easy” that the writing placed out here is somewhat mediocre only because there’s nothing to it. I would rather have something crafted that pushes the envelope than something that can be hurriedly put together. In a sense, James Joyce had already come upon this level of abstraction — although he did it in a way that is more labor intensive. And considering that he had already done so before, to enter that distant abstraction — this text is more of a statement of who the writers are and what they are doing than it is either thought provocative or interesting.

View all my reviews

Blindness

February 21, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Seeing (Blindness, #2)Seeing by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a different kind of book than its predecessor, Blindness. While both books are fairly different, the unifying feature between the two of them has to do with the absence or presence of governance. In Blindness which I have not reviewed, everyone goes blind inexplicably except for one woman, who witnesses the decay of civilization. In Seeing people do not lose their sight, except that the democratic process becomes stilted as most of the ballots that come in are blank. The response of the government is somewhat understandable, it is afraid people do not follow its ideology anymore, and declares a state of emergency. In the process of trying to justify its actions, it digs up the one woman who did not lose her sight so recently ago, and seeks to make a scapegoat of her. The ensuring politics that occurs with the policy and the national government give expression to the major tension in this book.

My main issue with this book is that over half of it has no appropriate tension. The government merely flounders. And yet, in doing so, we see that the titles of these two books could be reversed and in a sense, it ought to be. In the first book, the nameless woman bears witness to the absence of sight, in which all major activity breaks down. Without economic exchange people have no reason to maintain the ties of “normal” society and so it falls apart. In this second book, while people still see, without the absence of government, there is no problem — people live on, they “see” appropriately that their governments panic is excessive to the situation. The government adds nothing and takes nothing away by withdrawing form the city and “punishing” its population.

Saramago’s position is clear, populace is the rule, not some hierarchical edifice that only seeks to further its own existence and continuance. Of which, government is, it seems. Generally the economic take care of itself, although its arguable whether or not the presence of government matters this much one way or another.

I did find the general structure of the book to be cumbersome, having struggled to read it because there seemed to be no real issue for the first half of the book. I’m not sure what Saramago could have done about this; the context is unusual and really important to this work.

View all my reviews

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

February 21, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Death and Life of Great American CitiesThe Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What Jane Jacobs is really responding to, and criticizing is the spreading of the capital through what John K Galbraith calls the technostructure. Since capitalism’s main drive is technology, as technology reduces cost, affords greater material agency through large capital investments, this is no small subject, although it is a somewhat hidden angle. The megalopolises that exist today are really only possible because of major advances through technology, major investments in infrastructure and major innovations through technological advancement. For this reason, it makes sense that the planners of cities will also invest in the aesthetic of knowledge the technostructure affords us: expression of good design.

Design is really only the highlighting of a particular axis of an independent logical relationship. That is to say, if there are three mutually exclusive choices, their presentation in design as three separate but equatable types is good design. Good design allows us to equalize non-differentials by allowing their containment within logically more important groupings. If we are looking at a series of individuals, it makes sense to present information about these individuals in such a way that highlights through equitable features of however the information is being presented so that these individuals can be arranged to be easily sortable. So that we can make decisions about these individuals. It would make less sense to cram the information together in logically independent relations that have very little to do with our ability to make decisions.

In this sense, much urban design as criticized by Jacobs holds along the axis of decision making for individuals, or at least from the planning perspective, to equate logically independent relationships that have little to do with the ability for common urbanites to make decisions about their environment. For Jacobs, which may be dated these days, urban designers thus, have little understanding of the walkable experiences of urbanities for community building, community strengthening. In short, their knowledge is based more on aesthetically “cold” principles from a bigger view. There’s a good quote from this book: That a region “is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution” In other words, such bureaucracies are too abstract to understand small problems, thus their knowledge and their creation of models is based on these “cold” aesthetically split models that do not demonstrate interactions that stand outside of their modeling. They “average” out too much data, and end up with an impoverished but clear picture that is unsustainable as it is not supported by an exterior topology their model cannot account for.

Galbraith uses the term techostructure in order to denote the melding of planned economies with technologies. This means that administrators and managers need to be able to organize their information according to technologies and functional uses. While regional governments will lag behind the development of new technologies, their division along previous lines of technological influence, their division according to technological functionality will deny the collected effects of their management. Such administrative bodies deny confluence. Early on in the book, Jacob goes to argue that it is in the intermix of diversity, technologies, and mixed uses (where an area is used one way by a population for a time, and then later on, has a different use at a different time) that creates a strong community, enriches its citizens and promotes good economic and social growth.

One of the geniuses of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx was their recognition that value and phenomenon are created synthetically. This is to say that all topographies are determined by their exterior. As Jacobs notes, communities are generally held around a few key socialites who are able to navigate the interstices of different circles of interest that are geographically aligned by otherwise do not mix. These key individuals carry with them an excess of value since they provide the nexus to which communities and built around and attain cohesion of vision, value and identity. These individuals, like key spaces, be it a park, a mall or otherwise, are not the product of a singular focus, but a mix of logically related cues that deploy individuals together, forcing them to interact, create friendships and build trust.

In a technostructure kind of language we can claim that the very thing any technologically influenced management structure — that relies on the creation and management of specific “expert knowledge” — must necessarily miss the very object they are attempting to manage as a whole. There is department of community, or department of individuals — there is no management of human interaction (socially or economically) as these are the very values that a techostructure wishes to maintain. Rather, this element is destroyed by a technostructure as it is split between departments that have conflicting authority to manage their immanent spheres. The result of this, is understood as chaos as each sphere of influence manages its immanence but in the process of doing so impacts (through the excess of its immanence) other spheres as this influence organizes parts of society that impact other spheres of influence. This excess of planning can only be understood as chaos in reference to the rigorous “planning” of each sphere… what is unplanned is the outside impact.

While Jacobs does not talk about society and cities too much at this abstract a level — her book is more examples of various principles along separate dimension (each chapter is a meditation on each logically independent feature, such as streets, parks, sidewalks, age of buildings, and so on) I think her book would have been more cohesive if it were able to address the issue from a large standpoint of aesthetic philosophical division, as a concept like technostructure would afford. Nonetheless, while dated in some examples, and in use of language, Jacob’s book remains a good marker for the consideration of the interstices that make up society, that any logically independent axis is in fact not truly independent in how that value is created even if we organize it along lines of presentation that appear to be wholly independent. Cities die and grow by chaos, even as this chaos is technologically created through capitalism, forming new social alignments all the while, it is poor understood by existing bodies that use dated models. One wonders how this would have played out should Jacobs had written this in the present age of the internet.

So the 4 stars is really only because she lacks a unifying feature of the book explicitly, even though it is beautifully thought out, and written with rigorous passion. This book is somewhat dated and will be even more so in the near present.

View all my reviews

The Literary Underground of the Old Regime

February 21, 2015 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Literary Underground of the Old RegimeThe Literary Underground of the Old Regime by Robert Darnton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Darnton wants to say that the literary underground helped accelerate the destruction of the Old Regime. This is, of course, an undecidable thesis. On the one hand, Darnton shows how the population became increasingly irreverent as the symbolism of the Regime was degraded. On the other hand, Darnton also shows us how the Old Regime created the conditions that fostered the literary underground. More importantly should the Old Regime keep out the literary ambitions of so many new young writers, pushing them into poverty and blocking their ability to earn a living at every turn, how much of this officiated oppression was also expressed in other channels?

Darntons writing is clear. His use of specific case studies is entertaining, interesting and allows us a glimpse at the frantic hypocrisy these writers were forced to participate in as they faced economic ruin at every turn at the hands of the Old Regime, which cared not what they do. France’s policy of absolutely policing of who and what was allowed to be said proved to be their own undoing.

In a way, this book provides us the chance to see how a rising middle class, increased literary agency and expression proved to be too uncontrollable for the Old Regime. This fits largely with Wallerstein’s thesis that the French Revolution was not in fact the first sign of modern capitalism arising, but in fact, a symptom that capitalism had already progressed — the governing population did not realize it just yet — and a bloody revolution was the only way everyone could recognize that the time had already passed for the old order. In a sense, Darnton’s book shows us that the groundwork for a rising new social order had already been laid; and could not be repressed no matter how much the existing government had wanted it to be. Although Darnton really only demonstrates this to us through the filter of literary ambition, it’s nonetheless interesting (and depressing) to see how this plays out, to see specifically how individuals navigated their way between oppression and foreign markets for a rising class that demanded books of all sorts, not just the ones that were legal.

In this sense, it doesn’t even really matter if Darnton is correct — that this underground through its literary works played a super important role. The individuals involved (some of whom attained power in the revolution) and their resentment in their impoverishment is enough to show us that this frustration was present. What I mean to say is that illegal books was only the tip of the iceberg.

View all my reviews

The Godfather

February 14, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

The GodfatherThe Godfather by Mario Puzo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s amazing to me that this work is Mario Puzo’s “sell out work” as it is Coppola’s. It’s arguable that neither writer nor director ever topped this story.

What you get here is a re-centering of family values for the purposes of resource accumulation. Don Corleone’s ability to position himself at the nexus of exchange (promising use-value for one side and then for the other) in the form of favors is exactly the kind of personalized economic exchange that our consumer oriented economy wants. Do you have a problem? Here’s the fix. Only instead of often doing this with money, Corleone does this with personal clout. His ability to manage people, to appear as uncontingent (without display of emotion, without giving away what he is thinking) extends from the lowliest common baker to the highest politicians in Washington. This is the frightening circle that he draws, absolute loyalty to him, in the guise of personal friendship. In fact, Michael experiences this when he goes into the old world, where Puzo explains the rise of the costa nostra as a society within society, where the mafia unifies its social regime in the underbelly of the “legit” government, which oppressed its people far too much. This doubling of governance occurs when the legit government needs to appear clean, and in this sense, the mafia is part of the social arrangement of the legit government, because the legit government can only do so much to forestall social unrest while keeping its hands clean. You see this happening with policemen who take grifts and small time bribes. You see with Puzo that attraction of violent men like Negri and McCluskey and Luca have to this underbelly world, where they are able to interact with a strange code of ethics, one that is enforced with violence and deep appraisals of character.

It’s significant as well that the Corleone family understands the need to blend in and become legit like the Americas, that Michael by defying his father was in fact following orders, to be more American. He understood though, that the time was not yet, and thus joined his father in this world. His wife Kay’s separation and then reconciliation too, bespeaks of this unofficial alliance between legitimacy and violence. In this sense, the ideology of American society runs throughout this book, as understood by both its detractors and its fans. Immigrants here want the goodness of American society, but they bring with it, so you can read, a violence and un-Americanness that needs to be contained, to be kept, because Americans are wary of immigrants, so immigrants must fend for themselves and adhere to a kind of quasi-justice that is a mixture of cleanness and decent folk and the violent enjoyment of the Other. Incidentally, this fundamental separation, this duality of ideology is what makes The Godfather completely racist even as Puzo is able to spell out an alternate economy, an economic exchange that binds the underbelly of American society into a thing that can be marketed bought and sold.

Although there are stereotypes all over this book, Puzo surprises me with his depth of understanding, his attention to characterization and his monolithic vision of life at the top of a mafia regime. Definitely worth the read, if you are interested in exploring this kind of alternate social arrangement.

View all my reviews

« Older PostsNewer Posts »