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Illuminations

February 14, 2015 / posted in reviews / No Comments

IlluminationsIlluminations by Walter Benjamin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Although often classified as a Marxist, Walter Benjamin is more of a poet than a theorist, although he uses philosophy as material for creating connections. Benjamin fit into a very inopportune moment in capitalism, where we have the rising literary aspirations of the children of successful petty bourgeois parents but lacking the connection (and maybe some of the talent too) needed to be recognized by the elites. Coming onto his own in the early 20th century, Benjamin witnessed the rise of modern globalization. He got to ponder the many different changing aspects of society, wrote about them, but ultimately fell prey to these same trends as he eventually committed suicide to escape the clutches of Nazis.

Benjamin was one of the few who refused to work, devoting his life to the arts and letters. Although he never made a big splash in his time, he did leave us some interesting work. I didn’t find much in these essays to be too instrumental for myself, but I understand that his meditations on art and the changing orientation of meaning to be of interest, Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction not withstanding.

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The Sword of Agrippa: Antioch

February 14, 2015 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Sword of Agrippa: AntiochThe Sword of Agrippa: Antioch by Gregory Lloyd
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There are some interesting ideas in this book. Although ambitious, this book is only of a novella size. The major issue with this book is that there isn’t any real development. There is a beginning, and a middle but no end. This isn’t simply because it’s a serial piece, but it’s because the two twin story arcs leads nowhere. The story abruptly ends. There’s also some weakness with the writing, as the author opts for truncated sentences without too much explanation. Ursula Le Guin complains about sci fi today that it doesn’t explore any new ideas or seek out new arrangements for society. This book does do some of that, but it also tries to be technical without substance, to argue by analogy rather than analysis. You see the protagonist have tragedy in his life, but it doesn’t seem to mean much. Additionally, he’s a big shot with big ideas but there’s a lack of reasoning behind it. We get that the protagonist is floating on a cloud of investors and so on, but if this is a struggle where is it? If he’s opposing others, who are they? How should we the reader understand them? We only hear his account of the situation, we don’t experience him being interviewed, or facing naysayers, or read any articles about him from his detractors. His “enemies” are anonymous. We only experience his reaction to them, which is far less interesting than a real confrontation… it’s very much like Gregory Lloyd wishes only to present his view on things and nothing else, that he hasn’t taken the time to spell out how these ideas fit in a nest of anything else. For a book focused so much on ideas and exploring them, at least in this first book, there’s nearly no presentation on how these ideas came about, only that they can change the world. There’s no real development in the characters or in how these ideas work, in who is opposing him or what they say about him. We only see that he’s keeping them at a distance, and that’s kind of boring. If Lloyd developed the antagonists, if he presented the protagonist from the point of view, of say, an intern or a young relative who isn’t familiar with these ideas, we might get a sense of how these ideas fit into OUR world as well. Rather, the author is too focused on one vision to the exclusion of all other reason, and as such the ideas in the book are also nebulous, mysterious and lack any extension beyond “Isn’t this cool? This can be our future!” If Lloyd fleshed out the society of this book with its struggles and its alternate views, we may get a sense of what our world is like today and how this book applies. Perhaps Lloyd should have written a speculative article rather than a work of fiction.

Overall, I wish the author had taken some time to critically develop the structure of his book rather than focusing so much on the mystery of his concepts and where they lead to. I suppose though, that this is fiction, and we should allow for some license in presentation, but really, this reads as an incomplete draft more than a polished piece of craft. I didn’t give this book one star though, because I think there’s potential.

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Cakes and Ale

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

Cakes and AleCakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

W. Somerset Maugham presents the normative structure where elite culture takes it material from the profane underside of society. Told though a narrator, a young writer, who is to write a biography of an older writer, Maugham produces a situation wherein the older writer, who is valorized by the elites, gets his life blood and material from a common woman who is so full of cheerful life she eschews the middle class values of petty bourgeois. Of course, she is obscured such that the second wife of the writer, who has much more normal pretenses as to decent society wishes to eradicate the first wife from the biography. Nonetheless, the younger writer, seeking to understand WHY pursues the truth and discovers the tragedy of the death of their child from the first marriage. The older writer of course, mines this, and is wildly successful. It is only after he mines this however, that in writing their story, he loses the first wife but gains entry to the world of literary greats.

In this exact way, the structure of this novel follows a journey of discovery, an uncovering of one’s greatness. At the root of it, Maugham suggests its not only tragedy but the sexist muse of a lively woman, one who is so full of life so as to be enough to supply literary greatness for the elites. This juxtaposition of the profane within the valorized is a criticism of the hypocrisy that the elites have, in that they have no life of their own. Their values and their attitudes are derivative of commoners, in much the same way that the riches of the few are built off the backs of the labor of the many.

Indeed, Rosie, the first wife, becomes immortalized by this book to be the secret muse, in-itself a valorization of commonly women, but for their lack of art, their lack of bourgeois pretension, for their “genuineness”. In that sense, while criticizing the hypocrisy of UK society, it also participates within the same genre of logic. And so Rosie lives on, having lovers, living life and being cheerful.

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Dune Messiah

February 8, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, #2)Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While smaller and equally intense, this is a very different book than its original. In this, the action of life and death is toned down somewhat — but the ideas at play engage at a deeper level. Whereas the first Dune was more about what was at stake for the characters as individuals, in this book, what is at stake is less one’s lives than the fate of this enormous number of people.

I am a little bit fuzzy on who this messiah is supposed to be. Is this Paul? Is it Idaho? Or the children to come?

As always, Herbert’s dialogue is multi-faceted, with tense reflecting of so many different angles at once. I enjoy reading his dialogue as he is able to say much with so little. At the same time though, I think he explains too much. His characters sometimes exclaim or show harsh feelings in a way that seems like they are on edge all the time. But I suppose Alia and Paul (and others) prescience would lead anyone to be jumpy, if your entire future unraveled depending on what happens to you.

In a way though, I doubt that the future works this way; Herbert explains this as a kind of Bergsonian unfolding in which the past and the future have a present beside you. This retroactive ex (ante/post) facto synthesis is in fact how Hegel (and Zizek) explains dialectical synthesis. Depending on your current situation, new information will shift your context such that the future and past become revealed as differences in the present. As the present becomes a different present, so shall the past and future also shift. The past and future then, are little more than extensions of the very relations we embody. As new information forces a shift in relations so their extensions shift — in all dimensions, even temporal ones! As Zizek says, our envisioning of the future is always a utopic vision in terms of the present. We are in this sense, truly unable to comprehend any future whatsoever. And that proves true of prescience in this book. Possible futures are not really prescience futures, they are in this sense, truly analytic processes.

All the same though, I think this book — this series — is well worth the read. How it unravels and what is at stake is always far more weightier than what we may think of. Paul’s awareness in this book is monolithic — I am in awe of Herbert’s imagination, of his ability to tease out all the relations that would embody having an empire of this magnitude.

Having said this, I think some readers may be put off by how little “action” there is in the book. I suppose some may expect tension and plot to be expressed by dramatic effects like people being stabbed or things being blown up. In this sense, much of the book’s tension comes from the characters attempting to figure out who they are and what they are supposed to do. The “bad guys” however, know what they need to do; they lack the vision that the protagonists exhibit. And strangely enough, this is often reversed in standard stories; where good guys know what is at stake and the bad guys are not sure but want to find “it” or “get it”, whatever this absolute power is. Because of this reversal, this book is actually more in line as a spiritual journey than anything else, where the protagonists seek to find illumination. As Herbert states so succinctly,”enlightenment is not separate from its means” (and there is much to be quoted from this book in this manner!) And so, the tension and “journey” in this book is much like the mystical affects found in like books of spiritual awakenings.

The complexity of this primal mysticism with “high” technology of unthinkable means is, I realize, perhaps the most influential factor from the Dune series, that Herbert wasn’t just writing about some other world, but rather, struggling to make sense of the one we live in now. What he finds to be at stake today (or in its first publication in the 1960s) is still relevant, after all, we live in an age of seemingly unlimited technological wonder but struggle personally with our faith in our leaders, our planet and our seeming lack of direction. The jihad of Dune’s universe is the globalization of our planet, where we march as soldiers to wealth and knowledge but lack the prescience to understand how we have changed what we are reterritorializing, even as we seek material abundance and yet continue to find human misery and empty struggle, leaving us at times without even our utopic drive we initially entered the fray with.

In this sense, Dune Messiah is but a transitional text to the next one. But it does such a good job at laying down the lines for what is to come next! Do not read this book unless you like intellectual mysticism and want to be mired in its sequels!

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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 Meaning of Meaning

February 8, 2015 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Meaning of MeaningThe Meaning of Meaning by C.K. Ogden
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In many ways, this is a very unsatisfying book. Since it is written in the early 20th century, coming with this book is a reading of structuralism that is not quite formed, but definitely in full swing. The title is apt, but also guaranteed to be a let down, because if anything the book doesn’t come close to providing any meaning of meaning, although that is what it is about.

As considered, the text was revolutionary for its time. You can see that the two rhetoricians went far in their attempt to flesh out the topic of their book. But given its inconclusiveness, what were they hoping to do? How can anyone write a book with this little conclusion? Nonetheless, apparently this text was highly influential for its time. I gave it two stars because I am reading it today, although if I read this 70 years ago (I wasn’t alive 70 years ago) I may have felt differently.

Nonetheless the title is apt, because they are looking at the whole of language for meaning. Despite their formalistic leanings, they fail to recognize that meaning is inherent only within a logic when viewed from the outside. Meaning in this sense is orientation — but it is not a fixture of a system. When you are within a system, the very rituals and gestures attain a meaninglessness about it. So they do recognize this; but also fail to reconcile that meaning is produced when you are in one logic moving within a different logic. In other words, within the logics of language there is transcendence and there is immanence. The dialectical interaction between these two, respectively “inside” and “outside” create the experience of meaning.

Still, there is much information to be gained here, although it is a preliminary text. In this sense, as an influential marker of the time, it is well worth studying, although our grasp on the subject has passed this book up. I suppose in this sense, as a relic, it is more like an open letter; some experts writing to any other experts out there, who might care to respond. And in that sense, it is meaningful. But as a precise marker of the conversation today, it is meaningless since it doesn’t add anything — it presents no new logic, no new formalistic relations we might use, so to speak.

Given my curiousity on the subject, I can’t pass up reading a title like this. So I’m glad I read it. But it added very little to my understanding on the one hand, but also helped me shore up the understanding that I do have, on the other.

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Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

February 8, 2015 / posted in manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Tractatus Logico PhilosophicusTractatus Logico Philosophicus by Wittgenstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When asked in an interview by Clare Parnet about Wittgenstein, Gilles Deleuze declared that Wittgenstein was the “assassin of philosophy.” Nonetheless, between Badious’ Being and Event II and Deleuze’s work, you can see that Wittgenstein was on par — that is — he was interested in the same topics they were. While Badiou and Wittgenstein appear quite similar in many regards — both approach the presentation of sense as an order of logic — Deleuze’s relationship with Wittgenstein seems strained. After finishing Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, however, it’s clear that Wittgenstein advocates stepping out of the circular logic of presentation inherent within his propositional language solely to be silent about the very thing language is meant to speak of, and for that, Wittgenstein fails. When you see that this Elan Vital is central to Deleuze’s work, that as Badiou rightly states, is in a sense, what Deleuze’s philosophy can always be reduced to as this concept is so central to Deleuze, you understand that Wittgenstein only formally approaches Deleuze: The two veer off in inseparable difference due to aesthetic reasons (inherent to Wittgenstein’s desire for a crystaline purity of logic).

Nonetheless, the two are nearly ontop one another. You could almost read Logic of Sense as a broader version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But even further still, when you recognize that Wittgenstein considered this book to be a failure, that at the very end he ends up discarding the very Spinozian-like formality of his Euclidean presentation, of top down truth that dribbles into particular branches only to lead nowhere, you’ll understand that if Wittgenstein was given a longer life with broader exposure to issues, perhaps avoiding Bertrand Russell’s poisonous influence, he might have been able to gleam the larger subliminal essence language has to offer… the very essence that he eliminated through the very rigid formality of his approach.

We all know that language can’t be reduced to logic. This is true, because language can be used to present any number of inherently contradictory hypothesises. Language has to be ambiguous in this way because if it was not, if it was 1:1 as a method of designation, we’d have to invent whole new languages each time we changed the power structure. We may not have to invent new languages for entirely new cultures, but it seems to certainly help. The multi-valence inherent in language isn’t a weakness, as Russell or Wittgenstein may have thought… it’s not an imperfection needed to be weeded out. Rather, it’s a partial resolution of an infinitely resolute difference, one that is further refined…to the point of collapse only to be refined again as needed. The very ability for language to come about, ever changing and alive reflects the totally continuous becoming of the very essence of human knowledge.

In other words, our language changes as the conditions of our knowledge change. Our language changes because our knowledge shifts as we grow and evolve. This constant shifting isn’t reflective of the imprecision of our knowing, but rather, reflective of the depths to which we continually try to know and with which the unfolding of time reveals how much more there is to know.

Given that Wittgenstein wanted only the determinacy of propositions, recognizing that the limits of truth conditions was merely a range upon which we did speak, we can become more mature when we understand that language contains within it the very seeds of indeterminacy so that truth can be presented to us. Only because the void of the indeterminate pure multiple hides within the shadows of language’s incessant murmur can a fully formed truth jump out to us. Wittgenstein definitely chased the absolute point of reflection within language but he didn’t seem to realize that such a “picture” of a logically perfect structure is only possible, albeit briefly, because language is raggedly rough. Only given the inclarity of indeterminacy, with appropriate revelations, at appropriate contexts, can we, when presented with generic knowledge, momentarily recast the whole and for one moment a concise seed can become Truth, locking and freezing us in perfect comprehension, before we realize the beyond the immanence of a particular range of truth values for that presentation, before we then continue onward to newer fuzzier skies.

In other words, we can only have the experience of an accepted truth given that we have the experience of undecided and improper truths. This experience of truth are merely the continual unfolding social contexts by which we consider different (and newer) aspects of the same. As Badiou points out using higher math that Wittgenstein was not yet (and in some cases never) exposed, with even an infinite cardinal we have an uncountable infinitely more relations of its parts, relations which given retroactive composites of other cardinals which may not even be presentable (as they are incompossible), do we continually arrive at further truths beyond our finite comprehension. It is not that we must remain silent because incompleteness is out of the picture. Rather, we are only silent so that we can speak. And in speaking, we must realize as well, that we are speaking only but a fraction of what we are silent on. All knowledge is only possible at the exclusion of other, even greater knowledge.

It’s a shame Wittgenstein stopped here. This is a mature work, but only one in which we can get but a taste of what can come further when we use his methods but discard this naive Euclidean dogmatism of absolute eternal truth.

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Transcritique: On Kant and Marx

January 30, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Transcritique: On Kant and MarxTranscritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kojin Karatani argues for the formal equivalence of Kant and Marx as for Karatani, both thinkers critique their fields of study (Kant in philosophy and Marx in economics) by positioning themselves in the interstices. For both, all knowledge is a constructive difference, a synthesis of different transcendental fields. For Kant, we have empiricism and metaphysics suspending the transcendental apperception. For Marx, money weaves a field from which surplus value can perpetuate capitalism through the extension of merchant capital. This reading relies on the understanding that different spheres of money, different cultural, geological, economic and semiotic values allow merchant capital to attain surplus value through what is basically arbitration. Karatani then expands on Marx, applying him in various ways up to the current consumerist state. This reading by itself isn’t enough — Karatani emphasizes that such disparate spheres are created through the metaphoric union of the capitalist-nation-state. Much of Karatani’s chapters on Marx are devoted to arguing for this articulation while correcting much simpler readings of Marx as perpetuated by Engels. Of course, Marx and Kant are both difficult thinkers to read. Kant is notoriously erudite, and Marx is notoriously long winded. Yet Karatani manages them both, along with various supporting thinkers and their various positions, to illuminate Marx and Kant while maintaining a slender volume just over 300 pages in text.

I highly recommend this book. This is my second time reading it. The first time, I was a little lost, better read on Kant but not very well read on Marx. This time around, about ten years later, I ate this book up. Karatani proves to be a close reader while being a precise reader, a difficult task. He brings up details when details are needed and illustrates broad topics when overviews are to be given. If I were to characterize his approach of transcritique, it is less about utopia (both Kant and Marx are prone to be understood as utopic thinkers) and more about understanding the context by which the logic of their fields of study are arranged. Marx did so in his volume 3 of capital, understanding the state’s irrational role in supporting and promoting capital in relation to other states. This is much like how Kant, according to Karatani, in his 3rd critique moved forward to speak of a “plural subjectivity” often thought of as his thoughts on aesthetics.

It’s strange that Marx and Kant can be read against one another with such similar structures.

In a way, I wish for Karatani to have included at least a conclusion, to tie both of these guys together, as he did so in the beginning. What have we to gain from this methodology of transcritique? It’s true that his last chapter on Marx moves forward to provide alternatives and reasons as to why capitalism should not be allowed to persist, and why it will inevitably fail. Still, he leaves this methodological approach behind, and the first third of his book (on Kant) without mention in the conclusion. His big take on bracketing as being necessary for knowledge leaves me wondering — what does this method of transcritique bracket, and where are Karatani’s antinomies? What assumptions does he see himself making? Technology for Karatani is in pure service of capitalism’s ability to create organic unity in production and capital as well as the creation of new temporary values in the form of lifestyles. He brackets the possibility for technology to create relations outside of the 4 social relations as he espoused by Marx.

In a way though, this book could stand a third section, one on information, knowledge and money together. This section would combine these two points and statistic a new domain of examination, namely that of the internet… with bitcoin and the like. Coming out in 2003, it’s surprising that only 10 years later, transcritique could stand to be updated in this way. Technology has surly surpassed our ability to grasp what we are doing as it extends much more quickly how we can do it.

Still, a great book. It’s amazing how little Marxists, even staunch communists, have read of Marx. They get too caught up trying to solve the problems of capital that they don’t seem to appreciate or understand what capital is, and how it allows for much more than just problems. If you’re on the fence about this book I would recommend reading it. Nearly every page has something worth taking away from, and that means you probably have to reserve two hours to read 50 pages. The time is well spent.

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Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

January 30, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into BeingWhere Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cognitive linguistics has at its underlying aesthetic the very literal understanding that how we think of things is what they are. This follows post-structural rhetoricians like Paul Ricoeur who argue that the connective tissue of language is metaphor — where metaphor is the substantiation of the naked copula form is through content. We forget the form of the copula in metaphors and thus experience the content as a variation of the copula form instead of being the actual connection. In other words we understand our world through representations, never understanding that an ontologically reified point of view is only possible because metaphors position the copula through its latent content so that the form of the copula becomes seen as the “ding as such”. In other words, representations only appear to be representations because one of the formal representations comes to represent nothing but the pure presence of its own linguistic connectivity.

Having said this, I was surprised (but also not surprised) by the comments below. Many people were confused by this book, blaming either the psychologists for not living up to their expectations (of not being neurologists), or blaming the thickness of the mathematical concepts presented. We often think of the pure formalism of math as being objectively isometric (as one reviewer said) to the proposition that reality is always present beneath our representations. One key connection that Lakoff and Nunez being up repeatedly is that many mathematical formalisms (such as zero, negative numbers, complex numbers, limits, and so on) were not accepted even long after their calculatory prowess was proven effectual… what made these concepts acceptable wasn’t their caculatory significance, but rather their introduction to the cannon of mathematical concepts via metaphoric agency. For instance, we take zero for granted as being “real” even though we understand it to not be a true number. It only was after a new metaphoric concept was presented for zero to be sensible (numbers as containers and origin on a path) was then zero incorporated into the cannon of what was acceptable. This understanding proves to be the very “twist” needed for Lakoff and Nunez to write this book. While many of the concepts are perhaps difficult for some of us non-mathematicians to grasp, I found their presentation to be concise and illuminating. Their tabulatory presentation of metaphors side by side allow us to grasp the mapping of logically independent factors from one domain into another. This basic movement is in fact a methodology they may have picked up from analytic geometry as invented by Rene Descartes: the translation of continuums into discrete points.

While it is understandable that they trace the building of conceptual metaphors via simple to the more complex, I did find their delay of speaking of analytic geometric to be confusing. When a topic is presented I want it to be explained, rather than having to wait half a book to read on it again. This is really my only possible complaint.

Overall, this book helped me connect the observation of formalism being prevalent as an organizing feature of pretty much all procedure and knowledge formation today with the root of that formalization, being the atomization of discrete epistemes of knowledge, whether that knowledge is granular or point or vector, or some other kind of rigor. We can also thus understand mathematics as being synthetic, contrary to what most philosophers in the west (excluding the great Immanuel Kant, Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze) understood.

Today, through our rockstar mathematicians and physicists we revisit the old Platonic hat that math is somehow natural, only apparent in our minds and yet more real than anything else this world has to offer. This is a troubling and definitely cold and etymologically naive sentiment. It’s mysterious that anything in this world is the way that is, let alone consistent as though following laws, but that isn’t any reason to be hypnotized by our own intellectual conceptions. As Lakoff and Nunez point out, while some math is applicable in the physical world most conceptual math remains beyond application of the physical world, as there is no physical correlation with those domains. Such application may be possible in alternate universes, but such universes remain the sole conception of our mind.

In other words, how we think of something is what we understand it to be, that is true, but it’s also how we experience what we understand to be to be what it is. To get into that deeper thought requires an unpacking of the most erudite philosophical concept of all — that of the number One, arguably the only number there ever has been and in fact the only thing there has ever been. Understandably this is beyond the scope of mathematics itself, or at least beyond the tenants of what most mathematicians are willing to go. I don’t want to belabor the point here, but I will state that the case study at the back of the book is quite compelling. If Euler’s equation may work in formal procedure alone, but as Lakoff and Nunez point out, the construction of that equation is only possible through the discrete projections of layered metaphors to understand equivalence of conception regardless of the different construction domains these metaphors originate from (logarithms vs trigonometry, vs Cartesian rotation vs complex numbers)… ultimately a unity is made possible because such closure is driven by the singular domain of our minds. In our minds, with their ornate metaphors, their clearly trained disciplines and their innate mechanisms of spacial orientation, we are able to combine complex concepts into the most brilliant of abstractions.

As such this book may be too difficult for most of us to read, because it requires we re-orient our thinking along different parameters, different assumptions about who we are and what we are doing when we study and create math. This probably won’t jive with most people, as it seems for most people, knowledge is less about reworking what they already know into a new arrangement, and more about filling in gaps in the arrangements they already have.

I’m not saying that this cognitive linguistic approach is equivocally true, I’m saying that truth is more than how we arrange something, but the entire range of what we can conceive of to be a relation that brings to light new connections. In the end, I think for most of us, the only legitimatizer of reason remains one’s singular emotions, of what feels to be acceptable. To get around this, requires the most stern of discipline and the most unabashed eagerness to learn something new. This is also a reminder that math is not formal procedure as we learned long division in our elementary grades. Rather, math is the unabashed conceptualization of formal arrangements in their absolute complexity. In this way, even understanding how highly educated mathematicians think of math is illuminating to how you and I can understand something (ourselves and the universe) in new light. That alone is worth reading this book.

So do read this book because it’s beautiful, but also read this book because it’s another way of considering something you already think you know. After all, learning isn’t a matter of facts. Facts are boring; the world is full of facts we can never memorize (such as where your car was on such and such date and time. Kind of useless, except in special cases, such as in the immediate). Learning is the mastery of how to conceptualize, how to arrange information and how to further that arrangement through metaphor of what is.

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Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics

January 30, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, PoliticsDeleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics by Paul Patton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From the translator of Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton takes on Deleuze as a thinker, and sums up much of his work, comparing him to Derrida and (surprise) American analytic philosophers like Rawls and Rorty. Patton also brings to light the scattered understandings of Deleuze about the event, a specific principle not often spoken of when examining Deleuze’s work. I thought much of Patton’s examination aggressive, intense and very interesting — certainly an above par review of Deleuzian concepts, although not complete in the sense that most books on Deleuze concentrate on one or two of his ideas, eschewing an examination of the complete picture.

The application of American philosophers then, is a way in which Patton “applies” Deleuze, allowing us to step back from the hypnotic twists of Deleuzian language and see where this particular kind of conceptual arrangement can get us. This is far from a complete exposition however, and it may be likely that Patton decided to concentrate on lesser examined concepts of Deleuze in order to streamline the book and present a stronger punch. Still, I like his exposition of Deleuzian ideas and intend to return to them when I want inspiration on a particular thought.

In particular I like Patton’s exposition on “events” and how he ties these to sense and history. His application of Deleuze’s use of colonization as a expressive metaphor is also interesting — and in some sense serves as a defense against critics of Deleuze who would accuse Deleuze of being Euro-centric in his expression. Patton’s inclusion of “What is Philosophy?” was also refreshing as this book is sometimes overlooked in favor of the rich conceptual precision of Deleuze’s previous collaborations with Guattari. Patton’s choice of examining Democracy was also illustrative of Deleuze’s anti-transcendetal approach, although this can be critiqued further.

All in all, a good book to read on Deleuze, although it feels pretty selective. Overall I think Patton does a good job at grasping Deleuze’s utopian aesthetic.

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