« Posts under reviews

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

September 17, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of ContingencyAfter Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I haven’t read any clearer reading of the philosophical tradition in a while, and that’s saying quite a bit. While Meillassoux is mostly interested in the philosophical tradition, and its constraints (extending it somewhat to religion and science) he is able to dance within that tight framework and come up with a clear summation of the larger picture.

Many thinkers tend to fight in the nitty-gritty, and that’s most likely because in the process of spending so much time learning what the “greats” have said, they become invested themselves. And because academia encourages people to disagree with one another. How else could they jockey for position?

I agree with most of the comments around; that Meillassoux has managed to say something different. And how he says is intensely fascinating. He sums up the aesthetic goals of so many familiar names: Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Leibniz in so many terms. He brings us around to Badiou and demonstrates in slightly different terms, Badiou’s genius and how that enables us to begin to formulate a new beginning, one that does not rely on Being or totalization in order to guarantee meaning. He leaves us then with a new project, one in which to find a new totem to anchor as the absolute reference, one that isn’t Kant’s old hat.

While I find his book and direction exhilarating, and agree with his reading (especially how he puts many terms) I do believe that there are other ways to put the pieces.

Here is another conception of philosophy: Philosophy isn’t so much about truth as it is about managing complexity. Much of the time you do need to have some way of organizing discourse so as to be able to relate to one another. This much is certainly how people interact with one another or how discourses are able to connect. Meillassoux ultimately wants us to find an anchor as to how to arrange understanding… the anchor he finds for us is to match whatever mathematics does, which in itself is very intriguing. I suppose math is a safer bet for legitimacy than any of the traditional absolutes to which philosophy has in the past adhered. The last pages of his book is basically an outline of a non-metaphysical but speculative absolute based off facticity should look like. I’d like to find out how this kind of speculation works too. But I think Meillassoux goes a little too far in his search for Truth and tosses some of the baby out with the bathwater because in a way, he takes too much for granted even though in another way, he takes nothing for granted.

I don’t believe that consciousness or causation or non-contradiction are necessary even if I find that the connection of the parts is what is most interesting as to what meaning is. In a way, perhaps that still makes me a correlationist in Meillassoux’s book… because I don’t adhere to the absoluteness as being external to our experience…that Meillassoux so wishes to determine. Yet if any axiometric is available — as Meillassoux admits — then why facticity? Why science? Certainly not the form of science! Science will not permit the asking of questions it cannot answer, because that is bad science. So he must be talking about the content science produces and in what way this kind of dia-chronicity should be found to be meaningful or not…perhaps as meaningfulness can be modifications of how we understand ourselves today, rather than as positions to be justified by where we are now, that reversal of a reversal he calls the counter-revolution of Ptolemy’s revenge. It sounds good to speak by naming “where we are” in this way, but then again, I am not so sure we even yet know where we are now. In this way then, I think I don’t really even show up on his radar because he takes the productivity of meaning in its mechanics to be beyond question, at least in this inquiry.

Meillassoux also didn’t talk about certain other positions contemporary philosophers have taken either. I’d be interested in hearing him on that regard.

All the same this is a highly charged book. It requires a familiarity with the tradition, and a willingness to consider thoughts from another angle, a difficulty many of us have if we are not able to distill this vast amount of information into its more fundamental terms.

View all my reviews

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

September 17, 2014 / posted in rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews / No Comments

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational WorldThe Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like this kind of book. It provides much to think about, and much of it is interesting. One thing that is a problem with any kind of modeling though, is that you have to draw borders around whatever you’re talking about. You have to decide at what point you’ll stop looking. Any easy example: Harford claims that the industrial revolution was, in a sense, started by James II’s greed. In a way, yes, you can draw that line. But you could also claim it was the greed of the rich merchant parlimentary class. Or it was the greed of William of Orange. See, it’s all rational.

But what’s rational depends on maximizing utility, and while money is the only objective way to measure that, you ultimately have to translate everything into money in order to weigh it. How much is love worth? Well, given a context, (all other things being equal), and given a large enough group you can measure it how much people value it, in terms of dollars and cents. So in an abstract, non-applied economic theory what we are really looking at is how much people value their values, whatever those values happen to be.

But going back to the first paragraph, you can always draw a line in narrative between events and claim causal connections. I suppose I could talk more about William of Orange’s upbringing perhaps, or James II’s upbringing, or the conditions for merchants to get wealthy enough for governments to borrow from them. In a way, you can make life rational if you narrow the constituent claims enough for only certain relationships to be highlighted. Drawing straight lines, as it were, in a narrative (all events chained through time are basically narratives) so in that sense, you might want to consider some of this with a grain of salt. Or you can suspend some disbelief and be blown away by these studies.

I rather found his research and his terse concise writing to make a pretty entertaining read. We do believe things happen for a reason because we clear the board of much of the possible nonsense (that NYC has many single women because most of those women have a certain undesirable haircolor, or that the % of people with a Brooklyn accent tend to be single) and in that way, leave only a few recognizeable pieces. From there, we see things happening, and so we believe that if things change there has to be a material change in their condition for things to change, otherwise things would stay the same.

The same here, is the thought that you wouldn’t have any narration at all. But of course we have events, having events happen is a matter of what happens! So you have to pose a question, but pose it in a way that is answerable with the pieces on the board.

But that’s systems thinking, and that’s what science does. We notice a pattern and apply a pattern and if it fits we think we have understanding. We can’t deal with the complete chaotic reality, so we have to narrow it down. In the process of narrowing it down we have to end up with pieces, so we already dropped quite a few of the data bits out. (Can we measure how much neighbors trust each other in terms of race? Can we do so with house values? Maybe, or maybe not.)

In a way this book is really about how our modeling as humans (how we evaluate the world) seems to make sense to us, but proves to be inadequate to the task (see purple workers) because we have incomplete information. So economics in this way is about how our modeling as humans is inadequate because we have incomplete information as individuals…but then economics itself is nothing but modeling under a specific constraint. Now doubt some of what he says seems to really apply, such as bosses or group bills at the dinner table, but maybe that’s because this kind of thing is what economics was designed to do, and that’s how people make decisions when there are clear markers — because they model them in terms of money (we all know how much a dollar is worth to us). But applying it to things outside of money? Is chopping wood during pre-historic times worth a dollar amount? I have no idea if what he says is correct or not. Most likely, it’s somewhat or mostly correct, but then again, I, like everyone else, have incomplete information. No one has the total picture… probably because that picture is impossible to have.

View all my reviews

Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity

September 11, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human IdentityMeeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity by Tom Crompton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although quite short, this book tackles the effectiveness of basic environmental issues from a psychology perspective. The idea is simply stated in the title. How people construct their extended intersubjective selves determines their attitudes towards the environment. Further on, calling awareness to their coping mechanisms best allows activists to determine approaches that won’t scare people away, or cause them to invoke their defense mechanisms, leading to further pursuit of pleasure which will degrade the environment.

I thought this book was clearly written. Considering the depth of this topic and the brevity of the book, it was a joy to read. The clinical experiments cited were appropriate, although I would have liked more data on alternate approaches and their effectiveness.

View all my reviews

Difference and Repetition

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Difference and RepetitionDifference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book. I think the first time, I found the first two chapters mind blowing, but the rest of the book mostly escaped me.

This time around, the other chapters seem even more amazing then the first two.

What’s difficult about reading this kind of Deleuze is that he really does expect you to be familiar with the other philosophers he would throw at you. And yet we all understand that many of these philosophers wrote and thought within certain, perhaps imcompossible aesthetics. Deleuze pulls out these aesthetics and combines them together to show how they line up and how they differentiate. This makes his writing difficult because while he is writing philosophy he is also writing philosophy about philosophy. The amount of complexity that arises quickly can get out of hand.

What Deleuze wants to do, and what makes this book so great, is that he tackles the implicit aesthetic of the philosophical tradition itself. He is highly critical as to how we understand the particular reference points of philosophy as they are presented. As so many have said yes, Deleuze turns Plato on his head here. Deleuze is taking the concept of identity as not being the primary mode of philosophy but instead takes difference itself. One way to get to this is to understand a tri-part system of difference, where we first have difference which may not even exist, we have differentiation which is what Badiou calls being-as-countable and we have differenciation which is best understood as Being, or at least the unitary wrapping of Oneness itself.

This concept of the one, that for Deleuze there is many and there is sometimes One, is best exemplified by the eternal return. The form of what returns is always One but it is the same one even if it is different… this is to take chaos itself as affirmation.

Which really is the main push here. Deleuze wants to get away from the boring dialectic identity that envelops any kind of dialectical analysis using Not. He wants to get away from the boring hypostasis of representationalism; that deferral of meaning implicit in more traditional forms of thought that create structure but only to wrap its meaning making “structureness” within the exteriority of ontology metaphysics of presence. Deleuze does this by looking at the various contingencies themselves, localized as difference and building from the formality of difference so that we can begin to get at how the force of ideas carry through, how the creation of the content expressed in the general idea can arise from contingency itself… so that we don’t always have to appeal to some kind of fictitious absoluteness to ground identity or make ground an expression of the identity of One. We can understand each difference on its own, as its own originary process. This loses for us the possibility of totality itself, but not necessarily… Deleuze seems to go so far as to want to explain everything in terms of itself but he stops short in the asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible. We don’t need to define a noumenomenal world of Not to buffer our own universality. In this sense, Deleuze is fine with contradiction and over-coding. We see here in this post-structuralism the loss of the absolute in order to have a world… that the most concise referent in discourse isn’t the absolute One, which makes it a boring discourse of enforcing the one everywhere — rather the most concise referent is the world itself, which not only includes the possible but also the impossible.

This advances Deleuze to the point of pure contemplation. He over turns the aesthetic controls on philosophy so as to free thought up for its own interplay rather than using it as a point of control of what we are allowed to think or not think. I repeat. The lack of explication and wrapping of thought (as what makes it asymmetrical) is a force on its own, its own formalism. And though he appeals to other discourses, such as math and science to exemplify these structures, their appearance is seemingly uncorrelated. How can he justify this? The normal aesthetic of philosophy, as we are so familiar with it, would be of comfort as it repeats what we already understand. It makes sense through its repetition of formality. But this new point: the argument can only be its own justification. Determination is its own difference. For that reason, there are points at which Deleuze approaches nonsense. For in talking about the creation of meaning, we can only appeal to mechanisms that are foreign to meaning. Said again, Deleuze opens the door, to let us think the impossible. It is this very edge of sense that Deleuze would have us stand, at the font of the thinkable itself.

View all my reviews

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Time and Narrative, Volume 1Time and Narrative, Volume 1 by Paul Ricoeur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While a brilliant work, I found the layout of his work troubling. Ricoeur is definitely able to tease out minute difference between ideas, explicate authors who may not speak directly to one another, and relate them to the larger thesis as a whole. But I found his structure to be troubling as the work is split into two sections, which seem only related via the concepts of time and narrative… (even if this is a multiple volume work, he should outline a better road map.)

Really, these two concepts do not coexist at the same level. When he first starts, Ricoeur seems to be willing to just talk about time and narrative as general ideas. His use of Aristotle and Augustine were quite inspired. Like a radio, he tuned to the concept of narrative so as to highlight how time was used as an excuse to connect disparate things. His citing of narrative and metaphor as methods to justify understanding (the function of connecting two different things) was remarkable. From that point on, he could have spoke at length about anything he liked; after all what analysis, discursive or philosophy was not made to achieve understanding? But then, he turned to history as narrative.

History was an interesting maneuver as that field encompasses both time and narrative. Like his examination in the first part, he is able to use narrative as a high level organizational filter to scrub history so as to show how history is less about time than it is about narrative organization. I actually don’t have much to add, except that chapter 5 felt like the weakest part of the book. At all times Ricoeur’s analytical ability, and the range of his study was astounding and a little overwhelming. Still, at parts, he seems to meander, seems draw conclusions that feel a unclear as far as where he wants to go. This could be an issue with how he draws his analysis…often what he says and who he is quoting feels muddled. I am not complaining that I wanted less material. I don’t mind that he rag picks among different thinkers to support what he wants to say or that he mixes them together. I would have liked a little more structure to highlight what he wants us to take away.

As it is, the conclusion of second part didn’t add back to the first. He really only talks about history and time at the end of his conclusion, instead of wrapping back to Augustine and Aristotle. Perhaps this conclusion was meant to only be a conclusion for second part, not for the entire work.

At all points though, Ricoeur is eager to show us how narrative (and history) are forms of creating knowledge. We use time as an excuse to order objects of narrative (be it cultural, historical, social or otherwise). These different objects of narratives are fields of discourse that we use to ordain a master order to achieve unity in a concept, for example, the history of the Mediterranean or the history of Victorian England. The construction of these high level unities require the meshing of first and second order objects, which attain a dual status; their gap between what we see them and how they belonged to a time and place we have no access to, except through indirect semiotic objects. Their connection and quasi-status as objects was weaved through what Ricoeur calls historic intentionality… this intentionality not only doubles the objects in study they also create the supra-object of study, a unity whose grasp we take to be synonymous with understanding.

I think Ricoeur’s greater thesis seeks to explicate the what human understanding is, and so an analysis of history as narrative still lacks some higher level grasp on what history is as a totality as he also in the first part, is mired in the mechanics of emplotment and how the concept of time is the ground we use to bind temporal objects as greater unities (like narrative that we call justice). Beyond the immanent mechanisms of how these parts are ordered, how they work aesthetically, Ricoeur does not speak too much about the power of narrative or understanding… for example the role of history in greater society. We see that history is one kind of narrative that links other narratives through causal singular imputation rather than generic law (as with physics), but are there other orders that are not narrative? Is all understanding narrative? I think Ricoeur says yes. But he doesn’t go in this direction yet; he’s still talking about the narrative immanence, using the concept of narrative to demonstrate its essentiality in constructing temporal unity. Perhaps he will cover this along with other kinds of narratives in his second volume.

View all my reviews

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral MindThe Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What’s particularly hard to swallow about this book is that Jaynes goes far to argue for undermining not only how we know ourselves but also how we are to account for what we are doing. One of the basic rubrics of science and philosophy is our concept of consciousness, as a container for our individuality and our ability to comprehend/experience. To question consciousness itself in the form that we believe it comes in, in the method by which we determine ourselves is to question the very possible ordering of how we coexist today. This isn’t to say that our conception of ourselves isn’t natural, or that consciousness itself isn’t natural, but that is to say that we don’t have to live as we do or be how we are.

When one argues for the dissolution of such a basic structural artifact, it becomes terribly difficult for people to follow in how to evaluate that argument. Many of the comments around this book reflect both how clear and powerful Jaynes is in setting up his argument, but also many of the comments display a complete lack of trust in his argument because they do not see a deeper underlying appraisal of how to evaluate what he says.

Its true that in a big way, his ideas are unfalsifiable. We can’t disprove them. We can’t do EEG readings on people that were alive many generations ago. We only have textual analysises. And we can’t reproduce the results of the past either because it’s unethical or we have become so tainted with our own evaluations of consciousness that such “experimentation” would be impossible to reproduce in a pure clinical environment. In this sense, what Jayne is doing isn’t science, even if he is coming from a scientific background. What he is doing is doxa, or opinion. And science really only likes questions that it can readily answer… meaning that it only poses questions it can answer, in general, questions that do not shake things up too badly so that we lose our ability to even know if a question has or has not been answered.

What I like especially about this book is that Jayne takes us to a far away place. He throws his thesis out there, marks it as a point for us to follow. In doing so, he begs us to loosen our sense of what we take to be knowledge and consider the reality that our given ideas of ourselves limit how we even frame the things we are desirous to study. The objects of knowledge are objects created by what we think we know. But what is the proper basis for authority?

This is one of the most frightening implications of what he says. There is no proper basis. All authority is self referential. The most rigid of us (or unimaginative) would consider that he makes no sense, because sense making requires certain correlations in our thinking that are made unavailable if we are to consider what he says as being actual. His chapter in hypnosis is most telling. If we consider what he says to be true: that different hypnotic experiments parrot the ideas of what the hypnotized subjects thought was hypnosis then it frighteningly follows that our own ideas of what is true inexorably alters what we believe can be true… which means a rejection of everything which cannot follow the ideas we have to be given.

I don’t want to make a review of this book too long. I do want to point out that consciousness and language today can be studied under the rubric of cognitive linguistics. And the idea that metaphors are the basic mode of understanding does follow many contemporaneous thinkers today, even if it was less compellingly so when he wrote this book. So we seem to be catching up to him, although we will wonder about the possibility of an awareness that isn’t as discrete and individualized as the consciousness he describes being so in past humankind. Matching his idea to the contours of what we know to be history (as a series of events) isn’t proof of truth, but it does add his reasoning among everything else… including the question as to what is the proper authority of how we should know things.

For me, the key to what seems to be confusion in reading Jaynes’ work comes from the position of understanding as metaphor. As anything can be metaphorized, so can any position be created as a justified reality. This goes against science’s desire for rigor, that to know the universe means its mathematical formulation… even though mathematicians themselves may disagree as to what are ultimately valid constructs by which understanding can extend, and those extensions may be incomplete in the sense that they cannot be translatable to the daily experiential lived positions we take for granted. For example, the birth of life explained by biology does not follow our lived experience of life among the living… not only to say that while someone who maybe an interbehaviorial psychologist or a physicist may claim that their field can explain reality, it can never justify why one twin may become a psychologist and the other a strict mormon or any other ridiculously constrained situation… for such “explanations” always require endless deferral into other regimes which can then mirror the movement as an originary “cause”. We can talk about this as a discursive form of Hume’s take down of causation.

In other words, formal understanding explained without content can never justify particular contents and particular understandings even as understanding exploded into such a general paradigm may lead to any number of contingencies that we may find to be without cause. The confusion has to do with description or prescription. Is science (or any collection of relations that constitute a system) only to describe or is it to prescribe?

For Jayne, science rests wholly on the former, and for that I applaud his efforts. We may not like what we read, but if we find that we cannot take sense of it, then the failure is wholly on our part. What is so objectionable that how we conceive of ourselves today is wholly contingent on a very basic conception of how we fit in with one another? Are we so into our set ideas of social groups that we cannot accept what we call as madness as a more general position of what we call sanity as it insists on itself for-itself?

In the end though, how one reader, you or I, apprehend this work, or any other work, is a very personal question. But I find his intensity and clarity to be rare among thinkers. At the end of the day though, who knows? We might as well look into it. And if he inspires it, so all the better it must be.

View all my reviews

Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing

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

Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life WritingHélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps it was a mistake for me to read this book first, without reading much of Cixous first. The interview, while long, provided for me much interest as to what Cixous was trying to do. I didn’t much appreciate the sectioning of the conversation, but I did like the free flow. In a way, it was about what writing is for her, what she does with it and how she exceeds herself through writing.

The interview revolves around what writing is, what it does, where it arises and ultimately what it means for others, for the self, what we find in it, and how we come to be… for Cixous, writing seems to be about touching herself and others in ways that were perhaps unsaid by language… for there is much language can say but does not find voice in social reality, or reality at all… and that exploration makes writing a kind of love, to love the other in the self too. If anything, the interview’s length attests to the ground it uncovers as it runs through all the gambit of the traditional meanings and attitudes surrounding writing to uncover at its root, love and the other.

As Cixous notes, we often cannot be tempted to love, running from it more often than pursuing it…

Perhaps I should return to this after reading more of Cixous’s work, instead of just snippets, for much of this read a little too abstractly for me. I guess at my basic nature, I’m a structuralist in many ways, which is why this was so hard for me to read.

View all my reviews

Vegan Vampire Vaginas

September 9, 2014 / posted in art, reviews / No Comments

Vegan Vampire VaginasVegan Vampire Vaginas by Wol-vriey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Books normally start off with a displacement. Not always a problem, but a displacement that is in fact something out of the normal.

This is interesting because in the bizarro genre, the idea of normalcy is what’s at stake here. Characters sometimes seem normal; that is they get freaked out by things we would get freaked out by. But other times, they seem okay with things we wouldn’t be okay with; that is they don’t get freaked out. So you can understand that for bizarro fiction, what’s at stake is often the sense of normalacy which itself isn’t normal. As readers, we bring to bizarro fiction, the normalcy which then needs to be reiterated in the book after the contradictions that are created by the displacement get resolved… the ending of course, is a non-normalacy which “feels” normal.

Wol-vriey ups the ante here by writing about the bizarro world in the bizarro genre. That is to say, this book doubles almost everything. There are levels within levels here: the bizarro world in the bizarro dimension, but also bizarro Boston vs the normal Boston. What we have is a recursion of being inherent in the bizzaro dimension, where the “platonic forms” of bizarro world appear themselves “up there” in the bizarro dimension. One way to say that the bizarro Boston is an inherently unstable world, needing explanation. So the explanation is located in the bizarro world that is intruding onto bizarro America… that like a machinic assemblage, weaves “bizarro-ness” onto bizarro America… as this bizarro world is self justifying, “without sufficient reason” so it acts as the original site of displacement for the bizarro world.

This doesn’t seem to cut the cake, though, as the ticket into this world isn’t grounded on simply being bizarro. The main character Tom, doesn’t find himself into this world without meaning… he enters this world through the use of raunchy sex and suicide… and that marks the entrance into bizarro. For bizarro is grounded on debauchery, of the sexual and the organistic. Both go together, for cannibalism, sexuality and death are wrapped in an endless cycle thanatos, “death drive”: a proposition made by late Freud to match “eros”. Libido is often thought of the capacity for human subjects to enjoy themselves sexually… but Freud exceeded his libido theory when he found thanatos as the true form of human enjoyment. Thanatos isn’t a will to death, but it is a will to endless enjoyment, often an enjoyment which imbalances the subject… that is, this drive doesn’t kill people, but it does exceed the life capacity of the organism. So that enjoyment marked in excess is results in the bizarro dimension, endless sex and the endless bloodshed, the two of which are enjoyed liberally by all in the bizarro dimension… but it doesn’t explain what bizarro is in itself.

Or does it?

Bizarro is founded on the bizarre… the freakiness that exceeds normality… such that this freakiness can define normality itself: that is, as bizarro shows us as a genre, as Wol-viery shows us, what’s most bizarre about bizarro worlds is that anything can be normal. The defamiliarization of normality is what bizarro gives back to us. Bizarro shows us how normal itself isn’t normal, that what exceeds freakiness is how normality makes what is freaky normal… it helps us recognize that the hyperreal world we live in wasn’t always normal.

So to achieve that non-normality, bizarro often positions most things, in “opposite”. The king is a child. A woman can have a dick. Eaters think eating people is normal. There’s enough in here to make you wonder. And yet, the (in)consistency of what is odd is part of what makes it normal enough… kings must be obeyed. The police are there to help you (but are often scummy because they enjoy their job too much). Penises go in vaginas (sometimes). And of course, in real life, people constrain themselves. They don’t just do what they want, or have endless fucking, or endless murder… they hold some semblance of order… so there’s a little bit of that.

But the actual plot is that the main character enjoys himself too much. He steals the economy’s enjoyment (gold) and aligns it with the excesses of bizarro (hiding it up there). If that isn’t a shame, he also has a cousin who enjoys herself in a most unorthodox way; she avoids sex in a world that is predicated on sex. It is in fact, her doubling herself (but not her cunt, as that is what ties the double to her) that allowed the main character to enter our normal world, forgetting his real bizarro nature one of excess enjoyment (sex, thievery, murder…). Her displaced cunt then, separated from her body, fought between herself and her double, but positioned in her cousin’s hand, forms the link of “excess” enjoyment, enjoyment for him (to be both man and woman) but also enjoyment of the cunt itself (beyond whatever he may want) and enjoyment of the cousin to learn her magics without sex interfering. That cunt “for-itself in-itself” holds the key to the truths of this world, as its excess enjoyment of disembodied orgasming speaks the truth of this world. Like religious sacrifice, when people give up something they value in this world to the Sacred Other to get truths, when this cunt “for-itself in-itself” is pleasured, its enjoyment of the other’s offering allows it to speak the truth of this world for the fucker…. that is to say cunts in this book, are the small other that hold the key for your own desire… but like the end, this disembodied cunt takes its place as the Big Other, the Sacred Other, after it swallows its limit, and is thus rightly worshiped as such.

I don’t want to get into too much here, as there’s plenty, but the construction of this world is constantly the embodiment of the Other, such as the menschs, the vavs, the eaters… each position constitutes a set of values for us in the real world. Gods as idols, celebrity women as needing our lifeblood to constitute their dumb continuance, humans who want to live the good life and are unapologetic in their consumerism such that they literally eat other humans…

So what is this book about? It’s about the raising of the Other, that the natural order of things in bizarro, is in terms of its excessiveness, the primary point being a disembodied cunt has the key to all the mysteries of pleasure in-itself… such that human beings have no place in this world, as we are simply “food”, as others can enjoy us more than we can them.

View all my reviews

Disgrace

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, universal nothing / No Comments

DisgraceDisgrace by J.M. Coetzee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a well written and enchanting book. Coetzee tells a tale of the falling of the old guard. A professor in an ivory tower, one who has all he needs in his old age, materially, status-wise, and so on… Thrown out of routine when he gets too close to his familiar prostitute, he pursues a student too young, too innocent for him, and this opens an opportunity for him to take a stance, to be someone meaningful again.

Given that he has everything to lose, he does so, even though the university, going through the motions to save face, implicitly offers an unofficial protection of him, so he could keep what he has. But instead of doing what his peers expect him to he throws everything away rather than merely saying the politically correct lines.

This seems like it should be enough for him, but it isn’t. In the middle third of the story, he stays with his daughter who is robbed, raped but refuses to go to the police. Instead she stubbornly stays on her farm. He thinks this is a lesson to him, “what men do to women” but she refuses no. It’s not. She, like him, takes a stance to risk everything, including her life and public dignity, eventually agreeing to be another man’s third wife, a man who only wants her farm, a man who she does not love… just so she could keep living in her house. He thinks this too is a lesson; he wants to rush in and save his daughter but she refuses him, refuses to recognize his authority, refuses to let him meddle in her life…

The last third of the book revisits the first two parts, as if the first time we went there was not enough. He apologizes to the dad of the student he molested. He revisists his home to see it vandalized. He revists his daughter to see her stubbornly refuse to leave, now pregnant with the child of the rapist… he throws away the last of his money to settle in a town he doesn’t care about and take a job he does not like.

He gives his daughter up to her deed, convinced that she is a fool, but also convinced that he cannot save her, he is not her father anymore.

What he does not see is that he is just like her. And as it turns out, he is just like his students. He thought his teaching wasted on them…he thought his wasted teaching taught him humility but it does not. “The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”

This line in context refers to how teaching humiliates him, how his lofty ideas are wasted on those who just want a passing grade. In fact, this is quite the opposite; it teaches him that he can say anything, and get away with it. But then he doesn’t get away with anything in the book, even though he thinks everything is fine.

In the end, he ends with a dead end job, euthanizing dogs that no one wants… he feels their pain, can’t stand the horror. But does so, in the end even euthanizing the dog he likes best. This is the rarest irony here, that life wastes its lofty ideas on him, giving him a “graceful” way out of each situation — yet he continually chooses the wrong situation — he chooses to be himself, to stand not for values but simply for his own will and desire, whatever that may be. This is how he could not fathom his daughter’s will, as she gave away her image, she chose not to live as a proper white woman (in holland or anywhere else) but instead, chose living among angry South Africans, in a hostile rural area. Likewise, he too gave away his image of being a dignified college professor, and then being a powerful father, impotent in the rage of the post-colonized.

All tragedies only work as tragedies because the singular one stands before the universal, to take in all of its fury… and falls short of mastering it… and are conquered by it, and eventually learn to embrace it, giving everything up to chaos and loss. In essence, this professor chooses to learn the keenest of lessons himself, he chooses to learn nothing… the very nothing that he is.

View all my reviews

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

September 9, 2014 / posted in Business, reviews / No Comments

Flash Boys: A Wall Street RevoltFlash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When you start this book, you’re given a vague impression that the “bad guys” are the high frequency traders (HFT) because they are exploiting the market, or cheating people, or what not. In fact, we get that because most of the book is written from the point of view of who we think are the good guys who oppose HFT… we know this because these guys have names and histories. We identify with them. Not with the anonymous HFT firms.

What started off as a scandalous book about brokers and traders who take people’s money and give them less bang for their buck, even willfully doing the opposite of what their clients want, soon takes an unexpected turn, however.

As the story develops deeper and deeper, things seem worse and worse. Constantly, it’s a detective novel. Small changes, small anomalies in their consistency reveal larger patterns that need explaining. The men in this story are as much brilliant as they are idealistic. For if nothing else, than ideas of fairness and free trade are but excuses for a system built on air. After all, money is nothing else but idea. Sure, it moves material, transforms it into anything we like. But its basis is a shared idea. As we dive deeper, the idea seems to become more corrupt and more controlled. But then, an interesting turn happens.

We consider things from the HFT’s point of view: “I think most of them have just rationalized that the market is creating the inefficiencies and they are just capitalizing on them.” Are they not supposed to? What makes it cheating is that they are utilizing a gap in technology to effectively find out orders in one exchange to execute them on another. The lag in the decentralized stock market allows HFT’s orders to travel through time. The way to see it as cheating is to recognize that true market inefficiencies can be corrected by the market. True profit, defined economically, is only available for a short time when the innovation is new and unheard of. But once the market knows about it, the market can adjust. Technological gaps on the structure of executing trades are not something markets can easily account for… at least not of this kind. But it will adjust. New exchanges (such as IEX) will arise and compensate for such HFT advantage, or laws will be passed to counter them.

This last paragraph seems to detract from the scandal of the story. But as Ron Popeil said, “But wait, there’s more.” We see things from the banker’s point of view. With their dark pools. We see things from the trader’s point of view. We see them from the technologists’s point of view. In the end, no one is really behaving badly; or rather they are behaving badly against the client’s wishes… but also, they are also behaving rationally. Maximizing utility. Using what they have to preserve their own position.

Lewis stops short of jumping off this deep end, and that’s okay. He’s not out to critique capitalism itself, although there are a few of these: “It’s rational for a broker to behave badly.” Of course, a true critique would entail a discussion of homo economicus, and to note that the model for this behavior, defined as rationality, isn’t complete because it fails to grasp many actual intangibles that humans do value and gain utility from.

One reason to stop at this point is to avoid becoming mired in academic jargon. The other point is that people may want to read about Wall Street corruption, but it’s unlikely they will want to throw everything out because of “a few bad apples”. For many of us who can read this book, and do so, are living nicely, with freedom and wouldn’t wish to destroy a system which supports us in our leisure (among many other things). Still, it is a myth to think we can simply carve out a group of people get rid of all the corruption that human greed can entail. Because greed isn’t found just on Wall Street or any other capitalist exchange. We are greedy creatures, because the future is uncertain. A system founded on greed is one we hold dear to much of our nature, but it’s also a lopsided system as it only rewards part of how we are. Those of us who are fuller, rounder and more generous as human aren’t often praised by a system that only focuses on a narrow sliver of being human.

So even while I’ve undid the entire premise of the book here… the book is well written. Clear, and deals with fairly complex stock trading information in an easy to understand, distilled form. I rather enjoyed reading it. I kept not wanting to put it down.

View all my reviews

« Older PostsNewer Posts »