« Posts under reviews

The Stranger

July 13, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

The StrangerThe Stranger by Albert Camus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the remarks of existentialism has do with how we conduct ourselves for ourselves among others who would rather we behave differently for them.

Camus here writes about an alienated man, one who is unable to come to know himself but for whom others, and their desires for how life should be, cannot fully pull him in either.

This man is a stranger to himself as he is a stranger to others. He reserves meaning for his own actions and he cannot answer in a socially acceptable way for himself or others for his own existence and his own actions. In being so selfish, he finds peace and happiness to realize himself, even as he is to be executed.

He does not own his actions. But he does minimally behave in others’ worlds. Spoken another way, he is a torsion in their localized existence and as such, must be eliminated. He is a subjectivity, one who becomes self aware for himself in himself. In a kind of highschool (Ernest Hemmingway kind of sense), Camus suggests this to be the greatest crime of all.

View all my reviews

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics

July 12, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic PoliticsHegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics by Chantal Mouffe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although heady, there is a reason why this book approaches (post)Marxist theory the way in which it does.

The basic push this book makes in tracing the history of Marxism is to recognize that formal equivalence creates a meta-formality of position that is not equitable with the content occupied by those positions. When we measure class struggle or lay upon a social field certain lines of oppression, the different intersections of these lines create nodes that are formally equal but actually different.

This concept relates directly to the recent rise in feminism of “intersectionality” in which different lines of oppression create localized views that cannot cohere. In other words in terms of feminism, a white woman that grew up in the 50s will have a different concept of feminism than a young middle eastern woman in college in the 2010s than a young white professional woman working in a corporate office in her 30s in the late 1990s. Each of the different social pressures create specific contexts that are inherently unstable. While our need to speak of these different pressures (for Mouffe and Laclau, in a Marxist context) in order to name them and specify how they operate the very act of nominalizing those positions will shift the field so that the context will be subtly different through its articulation. This correlates with the fact that oppression and nominalization are both social practices that operate through the articulatory process.

Much of the book seeks to introduce us to this quandary.

The concept of hegemony arises because of this need to cohere. In a way, Mouffe and Laclau introduce a Kantian-like transcendentalism in order to force a cohension of the mass of these inarticulations. While each localization “sees” its context from its own absoluteness, one that necessarily shifts in relation to other points of view, Mouffe and Laclau force coherency by constantly referencing an unchanging signification through the figure of Hegemony.

Liberalism is often characterized as a calibration of the state to its individuals. Social programs and welfare all engender individual optimization through the administration of the commons. The concept of Hegemony turns this around because in this view identity for each node is calibrated in relation to Hegemony so that each oppressive struggle can be indirectly relatable for each. A transcendental domain is necessary to enforce each node as coexisting with the others. In theory this appears to be the same worldview that most political groups have; but in truth most political views do not necessarily acknowledge the others as being viable views if a given local view supercedes the others’. Hegemony is meant to eliminate this problem of localization so that we get, as with Negri and Hardt a kind of “multitude”. While Multitude is written later, in the 2000s, it does share some features with Hegemony, although the concept of multitude is more a cacophony of incoherency and in that sense less “modernist” than Hegemony.

This “modernist” calibration to Hegemony as a teleological formation of each localization does however, run the risk of creating a fascism. As seen from the view of Hegemony, as Lauclau and Mouffe acknowledge, a revolution is merely only one minority becoming the State, so that its logic (its view) becomes the primary deployment of what everything is. Hegemony does always risk this problem of a minority of One, just as Hegemony runs the risk that a minority may retain power because all the other majorities do not want their peers to attain a more powerful position.

In this sense, while a short book, this is a highly theoretical exercise, one that becomes unclear in regards to practice. While logically sound, its rationalization is founded on a redeployment of the terms of engagement for progress of minority rights, one that would further highlight the relative instability of maintaining any coherent fairness as any expressible localization will shift through the very act of nominalization. While I do not believe they are incorrect, it is difficult to ascertain the pragmatic application of Hegemony in practice. In a way, this calibration of identity towards its others suggest a kind of Heidiggerian stance of dasein to mitdasien, although Mouffe and Lauclau do not make the same error of class equivalency that Heidigger, like Marx, also made.

View all my reviews

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

July 12, 2015 / posted in rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and MoneyThe General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Keynes is often touted as the most famous of economists, mainly because he was most influential as to how governments and economies are run today. We do have to recognize that his theory was the product of his times, and that economics as a whole is still developing.

In a sense though, Keynes is less a creative theoretician than he is a mechanic. If you understand neoclassical economics as a set of relations, Keynes is best understood as ushering a new era of economics in which the “natural” point of equilibrium is no longer viable. This is like the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism. Keynes allows us to understand that given a particular initial context, the “natural” equilibrium could be anywhere else. This allows governments today to twist the economy around so that we don’t focus so much on producer credit as we do on consumer credit. Keynes has found a new way to exploit a market bubble, one founded on consumption.

We are paying the price for his ideas.

Yet his ideas are really only a mechanic’s patch. If the machine works only in certain temperatures, then let us keep that machine in those temperatures. Not revolutionary. Just understanding a limit of economics’ rationalism.

Towards the end of his book he makes a stab at understanding the limits to the formal limits of economics when he realizes that all he is really doing is questioning assumptions in economics. He ends by stating that often economists only go for the logically consistent and easy answers rather than risk being wrong going for an obscure truth. He admires those of the latter but isn’t seemingly willing to build a new theory based off of any obscure truths. In this sense, his questioning of economics rationality is a questioning of his own theories as well. Does he undermine his book? In a way he does. He should have started with this foundation instead. But alas, I guess Keynes is more an academic than anything else.

I did find his writing to be stuffy. His precision is remarkable but his writing is too flat. He could emphasize his ideas better and explicate them by speaking sometimes of an outside of economics.

I think that as an economist he is important to understanding where we come from. After Keynes we got away from all the speculation panics that used to rock the economy every 20 years with its horrid unemployment. Too often, as many of these reviewers demonstrate, that, in not knowing where Keynes is responding to, we only see the insufficiency of his ideas. And so, his ideas are too dated. As a mechanic he helped usher in an era of abundance but this abundance was found on tooling the neoclassical system and “hacking” it to work a certain way, not on building a new theory, one that would ultimately be sustainable. Our current consumer and government debt in sustaining endless demand for relatively full employment is proving to be worrisome.

View all my reviews

Taoist Sexual Meditation: Connecting Love, Energy and Spirit

July 12, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Taoist Sexual Meditation: Connecting Love, Energy and SpiritTaoist Sexual Meditation: Connecting Love, Energy and Spirit by Bruce Frantzis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Taoism is founded on flow. It’s origins are mysterious but the bookish librarian Lao Tzu attained an understanding of flow after working for an Imperial household. In his retirement, he sought to exit civilization. A gatekeeper bade Lao Tzu to write down what he knew. Those writings became the Tao Te Ching. While there is evidence that Taoism is much older than that; that fragments of the Chuang Tzu were available before, Taoism has always been about the flow of life energy. It is no mistake that a human understanding of flow would be split into two energies that are sexualized; yin and yang. Female and male. Taoism gave rise to a host of other practices, from medicine, martial arts, meditation, feng shui, architecture, astrology and so on. All of it connected through these energies. So it’s no mistake that there would be a sexual component to Taoist practice which emphasizes the intermix of energy.

A huge part of Taoist mastery of its technology involves the focus and release of various kinds of energy, so that we can flow with effortless will to a changing and tempestuous context. It seems that enlightenment would be the awakening of meta-energic abilities. In a sense, much of meditation and its machinic practice is like the calibration of various machines to emphasize technical aspects — such as a bit parity check or testing each part of a muscle for its strength and dexterity. Being able to move effortlessly across a given field is analogous to mastery of a musical instrument — so that the practitioner can run across the scales and play various patterns inside outside and upside down. Only in this area, it’s moving energy: releasing and collecting it, focusing and patterning it from yourself to your partner and back. Once the field can be made smooth and awareness is gained though the technology of these techniques is one then ready for a higher plane of existence.

While at first grasp, this may appear to be a matter of various bodily poses, massages and internal awarenesses of focus, this book also talks about how these energies and their attendant blockages are bound karmatically, expressed in energy. The two for Taoism are the same. What we do, what we strive to do and how we effect others largely requires that even out and free up the flow between ourselves and others around us. Not to disturb others as nodes of flow but to compliment them. To interact with them at a mutually beneficial level, the most foundational of which would be this energetic state in which people can interact in terms of energy. The root of this would be at the most intimate, sexual practice — although spoken of in the tradition of Taoist China.

While much of the book is on specific practice and poses, in a way these techniques are beyond the scope of what a book form media can do. Actual practice requires a teacher. So this is a very basic text, much of which is designed in its brief 500 pages, to introduce us to the philosophy of how to contextual what we are doing and why we ought to do it. The how is mentioned but it is less expressible in a book form. Bruce Frantzis is clear and precise. I suppose it’s important to write a book to distribute knowledge but given that much of what he talks about is praxis that requires the guidance of a teacher, I wonder if the purpose of this book is to signal to others to get students more than it is to write a book that could in any way ever be complete unto itself.

View all my reviews

Chester Alan Arthur (The American Presidents, #21)

July 12, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Chester Alan Arthur (The American Presidents, #21)Chester Alan Arthur by Zachary Karabell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a way, Arthur had not very much to fight for or against as the Gilded Age was in full swing. Yet he rose to the occasion. It makes sense that as a party man who kept to himself, was likeable and caused no controversy, that history should forget him. Yet it is because he had those characteristics that he was chosen as a placeholder for vice-president. When Garfield was assassinated, we did not know what kind of President Arthur would be — as he was a nonentity. Yet he proved to be the correct president for the times, one with a moral backbone. It is because he had that moral backbone however, that others in power sought to utilize him as their right hand man. He did not serve Conkling, as he went for VP without Conkling. And he did not serve the Republican party. He served America, thinking that America was best served by the Republicans. As president, he stood against corruption, although he rose through corruption. In that sense, he most likely was not introspective as a man, but merely did the best he could in the time that he had. Any presidential candidate seeking to reform or further their interests, to take a stand for something, would have had a hard time getting to Presidential office. The following president, Grover Cleveland made it his mark to stand against corruption. And for that, Arthur proved to be ahead of his time.

This author credits Arthur as being the president to help transform our American government from a rewards system for party goers to a bureaucracy that can administrate policy; in a sense, laying the groundwork for technocrats and the perpetuation of the economic administration as a different layer of government from politics qua corruption.

This of course, will lead to business corrupting administration, but that’s an entirely different topic.

View all my reviews

Deleuze: The Clamor of Being

June 26, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Deleuze: The Clamor of BeingDeleuze: The Clamor of Being by Alain Badiou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read this book three times. As long as I’ve been reading post-structuralism, I have pursued an understanding of Deleuze’s work. But only on this last round have I really begun to grasp Badiou’s own work.

Badiou here, presents a Deleuze that is in some respects barely recognizable. Nonetheless, he is able to pull through Deleuze’s rhetorical structure in order to present how he and Deleuze differ and are the same. The obvious difference is their approaches. Badiou takes formalism to be standing on its own, that all is reducable to formalism. Deleuze would understand that content and form are the same; that a given content formulates form but that formulation is only one aspect of the virtuality of that content (this reading is available from Difference and Repetition). This is one way to specify their difference but we can talk about it geometrically.

Said another way this difference is in terms of boundaries. For example, Badiou understands events as being incompossible in terms of time. For Deleuze however, each event also is an absolute reference (a static segment) but the boundaries of that event coexist through their incompossibility. Badiou would negate all the relations that do not appear within the scope of a given event. Badiou would seal that event as an infinite extension that forms a transcendental. So for Badiou, a world qua transcendental is sealed as a complete and consistent entity. While Deleuze has this structure available as well, as seen through incompossibility, his “worlds” are not sealed. His worlds qua folds are in fact, intermixing with each, influencing one another. Given where you are locally, certain relations within the virtual become available, and you experience them in their actuality.

In this sense, what Badiou calls “logic” would be concepts that are always present for Deleuze, although they may be inexpressed. This reading is available for Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as Kant understood that concepts are only guidelines. The difference is that Kant also took his concepts seriously and tried to ground these ideas in terms of a non-idea, the thing-in-itself. He nailed the transcendental conception down and in this manner both Deleuze and Badiou would avoid Kantian noumenal/phenomenal split because it suggests a singular logic rather than a multiplicity/multitude. A thing-in-itself traps Kant within one world.

So while both Deleuze and Badiou are interested in multiple/mutiplicity the difference in their world/folds lies in how open or closed they believe those relations to be. For Badiou there is less interaction within these worlds than Deleuze. Deleuze would think the substance-relations at their contingency, in a sense, sacrificing consistency for a recognition of the virtual completeness. This is also why Badiou’s book Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II begins to recognize the need for a Deleuzeian “leakiness” between worlds, although for Badiou, the transcendental remains the limit of a worldly domain, even though he recognizes the (in)existence of relations from world to world. So from the view of a given transcendental, a certain relation may not be available.

In this sense, Badiou’s Logic presents many tiny ones, all of which share the same structure of the One. Badiou claims that the One does not exist. And certainly not as a logic nor as an ontological content — though Badiou would insist that each one amounts to the same One in terms of an empty formalism, which is why he can talk about each world’s structure by invoking any given world.

I used to be confused as to why Badiou saw Deleuze as being a philosopher who primarily invokes the univocity of the One, when that seemed to somewhat antithetical to Deleuze’s multiplicities. I see the answer now though, for Deleuze through elan vital talks about a second order of conception. By understanding Deleuzian formalism as being a kind of monad, a form that carries with it seeds of content, Badiou would read Deleuze as necessarily needing a One in order to meld a common domain. In terms of transcendental logics, it is impossible to have phenomenon within a given interaction without there being a whole, a common domain that specifies the absolute infinite totality. Because Deleuze would speak from the interstice between domain logics, Badiou assumes that Deleuze necessarily invokes a univocal One.

I am not certain how Deleuze would respond to this, but let me try. The passages that Badiou references do suggest that Deleuze may agree, although I think that Deleuze would understand the formalism of conception within the virtual as being a derivable non-world that is material process on its own, a vitality that continued chaotic mix of originary essences that contain the seeds of their own localized differentiation. Concepts here are tactical, differenciations (events) always derived from the particularity of the atoms involved.

I do not think that Deleuze would agree to an infinite extension of conception that Badiou would insist on in order to create a transcendental completeness qua world. I do believe that the insistence of a Deleuzian One is possible but gives up too much. Badiou would seek to be rid of Kantian noumenal nonsense, as an academic “left over” of Kant’s conception, when Badiou himself would posit a many worlds of “complete” consistency, a very heavy conception of infinite extension of each brand of logic. For Deleuze this is probably too much; infinite extension is not necessary when we only need to deal with tactical, localized differenciations that arise on their own. This is of course, where territorializing machines and abstract assemblages interact, in the space of many plateaus that would constantly overcode. In these there is no need of One because there is no need to guarantee that machinic assemblages are compatible with each other or that any given assemblage can interact with every other one, because they are not, and they do not need to.

In this sense, Deleuze’s philosophy is on a second order of conception, about the differences and processes inherent within concepts themselves as they self generate. Badiou seems to recognize this when he understands that for Deleuze there is no chance of chance — that Deleuzian concepts like the fold only operate as a way of interiorizing the exterior; the becoming of concepts through their own vitalism. Yet Badiou would want to extend this as another kind of ontology. This is also where I find Deleuze and Badiou differ at their very root; in terms how central they see formalism.

For Badiou class equivalence would mean ontological equivalence. After all, Badiou as a formalist understands content as only being wholly derived from form. For Deleuze, class equivalence is too controlling. He would reject formalist equivalence as he would reject Kant’s transcendental structure as a chimera. Any kind of formalism only captures one kind of plateau/consistency in logic. After all, the entire book Anti-Oedipus is an attempt to get away from the control of metaphysical consistency in psychoanalysis and social structure/planning. Thus, Badiou’s move to equate one rhetorical form with another is a falsity that Badiou himself imposes but reads onto Deleuze. As Badiou later on notes, the eternal return is not a return of the same, it cannot be. But what is it a return of?

Badiou accepts that each Event cannot be the same Event even if it meta-functionally works in a similar fashion as the last. And so it is with eternal returns; that each return is a return of pure difference. Thus, for Deleuze, such a “return” may not mean entirely different worlds, it does mean different slices (folds) that can interact but also may be varying degrees of incompossible with each other in terms of immanence, even as some interact, colliding and recoding one another. In a way, Badiou approaches Deleuzian understanding as he starts to shed the strict boundaries of his transcendental qua worlds and allow them to interact in the non-space inbetween plateaus.

Over all this book is still a good book. Badiou goes very far in grasping and concisely stating Deleuze’s words and thoughts. Badiou seeks to refract on Deleuze the way Deleuze through free and indirect speech refracted on other thinkers. Though I think in this reading there is still too much Badiou, that the torsion of a barely recognizable Deleuze is due mostly to Badiou’s appropriation of Deleuzean concepts but attempting to guide and understand Deleuze in terms of a Badiouian formalism.

View all my reviews

The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion

June 26, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and ReligionThe Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion by Pope Benedict XVI
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was less a debate than, as the introduction says, an short summation by two thinkers of their thoughts. One secular neo-Kantian, Jurgen Habermas, and one Roman Catholic (to be Pope) Joseph Ratzinger about the necessity of society’s two halves, secular and religious to learn from one another.

Both recognize that the organization of society is in some sense what religion excels at; the mapping of human organization and understanding to solidarity and justification of a statehood. They both also recognize that religion in some sense goes too far in organization; that there are pathologies that religion can force because it is mobilized too far in a particular way.

This gets at the heart of human eusociality. We want to belong. We are made to calibrate with one another. This touches on areas that reason (qua secularization) cannot reach. Societies do need to account for the non-reasoning part of people. People need to have calibrating experiences to be at the same level with one another. Instead, we have ultra-rationalism in the form of markets engineering approaches that do not calibrate people, but instead, allow people dominance and agency over one another. Having a point outside of reason, one that signals for people direction is the function of religion that both thinkers believe secular society can benefit from.

What’s interesting is that historically, religion and culture were the same. It is only through the split offered by reason as a different mode of organization that splits religion and culture apart. A secularized religion, seems to be the synthesis with which both thinkers offer, although the book merely ends with Pope Benedict (Joseph Ratzinger)’s essay.

Short book, but interesting. A quick read.

View all my reviews

Runaways Deluxe, Vol. 2

June 26, 2015 / posted in art, reviews / No Comments

Runaways Deluxe, Vol. 2Runaways Deluxe, Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Still good. Not as good as the first volume since there’s none of the that focus. But you still see that our heros are settling into the normal comic book routine. Still, the characterization is okay, though I would have liked to see more. The art is also enjoyable. There is a hint at a larger arc developing but much of that is left hanging. Still if you liked the first volume, there is enough here to keep it interesting.

View all my reviews

Interrogating the Real

June 26, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Interrogating the RealInterrogating the Real by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many of Zizek’s books that are less well known are kind of transistional periods for him. He writes books the way I write on tumblr, to digest information and to posture so as to try it out. If the pose doesn’t work, he discards it later on to try something else.

With this tight but small book, it becomes apparent that Zizek is after the non-changing invariance that is found in all thought, reason and experience. Through the figures of his most favorite philosophers, Zizek does two things. To show us the applicability of these concepts. And to explicate these ideas. The explication part is easy, because it’s right in our face 24/7. The applicability is more difficult. What are we to do with the organization these ideas create for us? Perhaps this is unanswerable, as Zizek himself doesn’t seem to know what to do with his own ideas. So many of these articles are poses, self-wrapping thoughts that reiterate themselves. Sometimes self titled like “beyond discourse analysis” or “hair of the dog that bit you” we get his explication of that theme through a particular theoretical angle. In his most theoretical however, we see the bare parts of the theory eventually spread out, that this maximal difference within this concept is signified, and so these two positions remain, unsynthesizable.

Later on, I believe, Zizek will realize that the Real of Lacan is breakable into two parts, the first being the Real that is unswallowable by the symbolic (so as to be expressed through pathological difference that is the characteristic of a symbolic that is always applied). The second being the pure code that is pure symbolic self-reference but lacking any way for anyone from the outside to gain access to its inner sanctum of difference. In a very real sense, this book, as I suppose all if not most of Zizek’s books, goes ahead to indulge in their philosophical rhetoric as a literal application of the first (because what else would you apply, but this philosophy?) to lead us into the heart of the second, where we have Lacanian mathemes that are left in their solemn ratios without alteration.

We are introduced to a concept, and then left holding it without any direction as to how to use it, what to do with it. Zizek is leaving us his reading glasses.

Perhaps that is the fun of Zizek. That he leads us on these journeys that act like light comedies, taking us to various different areas the way Family Guy or South Park might. Defamiliarizing familiar cultural references enough to reconfigure them in an amusing and strangely upside down deployment that shows us how their logic works backwards to resemble what they always were: purely logical organizations that take in nonsense to create nonsense. In the end these (re)organizations changing nothing about our world yet giving us insight into the way arguments by extension continually intrude in our lifeworld. This parrots the the way market brands, as material orderings, will some day arise to only quietly disappear into the void of capitalist intention, the way we visit one philosophy to briefly see who we are through them.

I would say this is an above average book of Zizek’s. It could work as an introduction as well, if you are interested.

View all my reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

View all my reviews

« Older PostsNewer Posts »