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Diderot and the Encyclopaedists

June 6, 2015 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2)Diderot and the Encyclopaedists by John Morley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Good introduction to Diderot. You get an idea that he was a first class “man of letters” although there isn’t much in the way of writing that he has left behind. The biggest accomplishment, in a way, was the first encyclopedia of knowledge.

I don’t know too much about literature of this time period, but Morley seems fairly knowledgeable about the time, the struggles and Diderot’s influence. He survived but didn’t become wealthy. Was more interested in finding facts about the world, and in that sense, was a scientist more than a philosopher, although science as we know it today didn’t exist in the 1700s.

I am mostly impressed with Diderot’s character, as Morley also admires him. Interesting glimpse into the past. Diderot’s insistence on calibrating understanding to the level of one’s surroundings — his letter on what it must be like to be deaf or mute was in some ways, a crude but first look at beginning to understand the end of the Classical period. That logic presentation does not take a standard form for everyone, that one’s experiences change one’s reasoning axoims. The first stabs at theorization with shifting basis.

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Runaways, Vol. 1: Pride and Joy

June 6, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Runaways Deluxe, Vol. 1Runaways Deluxe, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this story. The artwork was good, and the characterization was pretty strongly aligned. No weak characters, although like all comic books, the characters are bitingly logical when they need to be, and able to speak their mind plainly. I like that this story deals with how teenagers understand their parents. It has a kind of rag-tag feel but I think that’s appropriate for runaways. The twist in the end though, is a little heavy handed as it feels too forced. But I guess comic books like to wrap things together in a tight package.

The smattering of kids was very politically correct, which in some ways, is to be expected. All in all, a solid B comic. Reminds me of being a teenager and wanting to be part of a group… and finding yourself part a group that is well, put together through an odd way. But what groups aren’t oddly formed?

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What Is Philosophy?

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

What Is Philosophy?What Is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book three times over 10 years, before I really began to appreciate it. In a way, A Thousand Plateau‘s success kind of blinded people to what Deleuze and Guattari were doing. So this next book, feels more like a snap back. It’s not the poetry approach, it’s not the postmodernism. Here’s an analytic account of concepts. What makes a concept? How does it work?

What is Philosophy comes close to approximating the relationship between domains and logic. But there is still a tendency here to wax about relationships rather than to cut to an essential conciseness. Although they hit on many conceptual relationships I agree with their essential categorization of concepts (philosophy, science and art) reads too much like a list. To understand conceptualization as confronting chaos is correct. But the event that undergrids Deleuze’s conception of a mark on chaos, a primary cut to determine logic remains mostly hidden from view, instead of more spoken implicitly as an organizing feature. To understand, we need to get at the agential relationships! We must not mistake organization for productive generation.

For an analytic book, this already short book could be made tighter. Instead of hitting us quickly with the range of application, perhaps it’s better to speak simply and directly about the relationships involved and then approach the extension. In some ways, Badiou’s work on mathematics can actually be of great use here, to help outline the struggle, to give people a different method of approaching an age old question.

So in some ways, their 3 part categorization goes against answering the question “What is Philosophy” since philosophy is included as just another kind of concept. The mode that they are heading towards, but do not reach, I feel, is the deterministic view of logical apparatii, best caricatured by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in which we get the pure code of expression. Needless to say this is just another example of conceptualization, but the formalist approach, which is only one way, can help Deleuze and Guattari approach the concise outline of concept’s agency better than some of their other angles.

In a sense, the three kinds of concepts is more of a crutch for organizing their own exposition than serving to give us an understanding of the range of how concepts themselves can be extended. To that end, the conclusion feels a little strained to me, a bit too repetitious, where they reach a limit as to how to continue explaining what they have failed to outline.

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The Timeless Way of Building

May 29, 2015 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, love, lyrical-narratives, manifesto, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Timeless Way of BuildingThe Timeless Way of Building by Christopher W. Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this thoughtful book, Chris Alexander takes an approach to architecture that understands it through the filter of human (and non-human) agency. He understands that the most useful buildings are ones that are created by the maximization of agency of the people involved, with the utilization of language based patterns that we inhabit to organize our behavior. He writes this book almost as if talking in a dream. Reading this book is a visceral experience of stepping into the a shower.

It’s quite a masterful work, one that deals with the aesthetics of embodiedness rather than the more mundane (but necessary) considerations of budgeting, and so on. In a way, this a book of one who is entering a mastery of the craft, where the detailed considerations fall to the wayside as the considerations of that pure level of agency come into full consideration.

Alexander’s method is more meditative and thoughtful, one that seems geared towards his process of consideration and his familiarity with the “pattern languages” that he utilizes more than anything else. What I find most interesting in this book is that he utilizes spaces from other cultures all the while remarking that such patterns are built into our native language. Are they then, really more a function of our cultural-mind? He suggests we know this intuitively, and yet most people cannot build accordingly as buildings cannot be formed from a poverty of our languaged patterns. So that seems like a big epistemological-cultural hole. But at the same time, his thoughts are so compelling, you want to believe in them. That there is a potentially rich environment of knowledge and consideration that we can dig from, only if we were in tune with it!

It’s no surprise then, that he originates in the Berkeley area, as San Francisco is the hotbed of such hippy mysticism. Still, there’s something to be said for his approach and his “method” which takes a much less mechanical view of building. We should gear our use appropriately to the individuals for whom a building should embody! Our culture is impoverished due to the fragmentation of disciplines and the jealous guardians who don’t want to share with their economic competitors! In a very real way he is talking about Taoism. I look forward to reading more of his work.

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Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science

May 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive ScienceComputation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science by Zenon Pylshyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Zenon Pylshyn presents a strong foundation for how cognition should be literally thought in terms of: cognition. He provides a functional approach to understanding how humans can be generic thought machines. We seem to have the ability to parrot the functioning of processes themself. His later chapters in which he provides evidence in cognitive studies as to how people seem to follow a process oriented algorithm is the strongest push for this.

Having said that, looking back, it’s apparent that most of his book was simply describing the inner workings of computation and arguing that cognition needed to work on a symbolic level anyway; that the physical materialism was only the vehicle for the functionality that the functionality is what we want. In some ways I am reminded of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s attempt at providing a mechanical notion of rationality. Zenon doesn’t go as far, but he wants to provide us a coherent and discrete value system upon which to weigh cognition. This isn’t a bad idea, but it appears that people don’t often make decisions on purely discrete values. We are capable of doing so, but whether or not we do so, especially outside of scientific tests, which always tests for discrete values if possible, is another matter entirely.

This is my second time reading the book. The first time was about ten years ago, and I am not sure I understood the latter parts of it. In a way, Zenon should have probably reversed the order of some of his chapters. He should have provided the cases arguing for cognition as computation with an emphasis on how cognition is process oriented based on functional equivalence, and then provided the chapters on functional architecture’s inner workings. I understand however that he was most likely providing the functional architecture first as a theoretical basis, so that we can understand what we see later on in terms of the theory…but since his book was geared towards arguing for functional architecture as the mode of consideration, it may make more sense to work towards the argument first, rather than having some cognitive proof later on as a BTW, this stuff can be explained by cognition.

In a way, what’s missing about this work is the null state of cognition. That is to say, once we get the system going with equivalences, that’s fine and good. But what mark do we make in order to start it going, where we come to identify as a self? This is perhaps troubling theory but Pylshyn does not get into this. He also seems to think that computation is the literal process of cognition. I would rather consider, in the spirit of functional architecture, that we can’t ever know what the literal process is, we can only denote equivalency in functionality. I guess that makes me fallibilist. It’s suprising that Pylshyn isn’t a fallibist, since he takes some of the question as to how memory works exactly or how processing works exactly as not being important since equivalency trumps actuality when it comes to trying to make sense of how this could work. It doesn’t matter how it works specifically, what matters is that it does in these kinds of algorithmic steps. Perhaps in this sense, this book isn’t that radical after all.

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Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City

May 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global CityReinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City by Robert Gottlieb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Robert Gottlieb considers the city of Los Angeles as the parable of the modern city. The dilemma as he draws it has to do with the conflicting social changes of technology and globalization on the cultural and natural ecologies of the city. Taking Los Angeles as a model, Gottlieb includes an astounding amount of information about Los Angeles in how it developed, changes historically and comes to embody the mixed bag of tricks it is. As a native Angelino I was fascinated by Gottliebs take on the politics and inner struggles of its class, racial and resource management groups.

The weakest part of the book is that Gottlieb splits the conclusion as a non-conclusion. His chapters are fairly strong as he picks certain events to highlight recent developments in the life of the city, particularly with the neighborhood struggles of Latinos. He isn’t however, able to cohere these into one unified vision for what Los Angeles has to overcome. When you contrast this with the strength of his understanding of the ecological struggle (anti-polluters who want to stop people from pollution vs preservationists who want to create more green spaces) you begin to get a grasp of the larger trends that characterize the struggle. When it comes to immigration, gentrification and economics, Gottlieb is a little less insightful and more “just quoting the facts”. In a way, Gottlieb could buffer this area more if he were to introduce a theoretical cut on culture the way he did on ecology.

Additionally, with recent developments in the last 5-10 years, this book could also be updated. The influx of globalization with the housing bubble crash has really hurt working class and middle class families as they are being forced out of the real estate market by outsider money. This added struggle can also help characterize the way in which large cities with their governance and their political cartels allow certain trends to develop.

All in all, not a difficult book to read. But one that was insightful. Much better than some of the other hodge podge urban studies texts that I have examined.

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The Consolations of Philosophy

May 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Consolations of PhilosophyThe Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As so many other reviewers have noted, this book is a strange mixture of philosophy and self help. Like the other De Button books I’ve read, it is clear, expressive and makes a driving point. I thought it more like a cliff notes told through the personal lives of these men, more than anything else. De Button wishes to present these at times, difficult philosophers as fodder for how philosophy can be useful. In some ways its appropriate to understand that these ideas came from individuals who had to experience and embody them. In other ways its inappropriate to lessen the force of the ideas in order to humanize them (and use these figures as puppets for their thoughts). I am strangely not liking this book, but at the same time, I also find it to be an interesting and quick read.

Definitely something you can do when you are bored and want some easy distraction. I feel that his chapter on Socrates and Seneca to be the strongest. His chapter on Nietzsche and Montaigne were fairly weak, as at times these chapters seemed an aimless collection of ideas that are somehow related. So in this sense, this book is more fitting as an introduction than anything else. What makes me give it three stars even though its a light introduction is that there isn’t much consolation at all. He should have dropped the self help theme unless he wanted to end the chapters with a stronger sense of self help.

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Being and Other Realities

May 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Being and Other RealitiesBeing and Other Realities by Paul Weiss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Paul Weiss gives an interesting take on Being. He offers a content-level split on the domains of Being as a recognition that we cannot have a “flat” experience since so many facets of human experience today are incompossible, on different levels, that do not meet.

Nonetheless, he carries with himself a strong notion of Kantian transcendentalism as a mark on how to appropriate Rationality and Dunamis. What he calls Dunamis is simply contingency, the actualization of being itself. In a way, I think he misses a more elegant picture, one that doesn’t allow for a simple numbering of different domains through various kinds of relations, as he calls each marked by “Ultimates”: “Voluminosity, Coordinator, Affiliator, Assessor” In introducing these terms, Weiss leaves it very vague. Perhaps these are explained in past texts, but he lacks a direct explanation here, and I for one would have liked more direct talk.

It’s great that he wants to bring Being back into the world of humanity, with culture and science. In this sense, he works as a kind of heir to Heidigger. Unfortunately, wanting to say something and being too aloof to say it doesn’t help his argument. The main pull he makes that is different, I believe, to be his attempt to include agency: praxis, as one might call it. Much of what he says however is still too vague to be of use, and it’s simply a translation of what we already know about the world into the philosophic terms he wishes to utilize. In a way, I was at times embarrassed reading this book because he tries so hard to be deep, that he mystifies his relations a little too much. I don’t mind poetic language or mystification but I do not find it useful if you want people to utilize and fully embody the project as you wish to color it.

Weiss however is right, that philosophy is a deeply personal endeavor, one fraught with difficult and self revelation. A difficulty in writing a book like this is being able to effectively convey what you want to say. He doesn’t throw too much history of philosophy at you, or too much jargon, which comes at first as a relief, but very quickly becomes a failure of the book to explain itself better.

What I got out of it was merely a reinforcement of traditional philosophy as I understood it. He needs to demonstrate the feasibility of his terms more as they differentiate and influence one another. Having 4 terms named as he does doesn’t help, since he spends most of the book waxing about the different areas of human experience (nature, cosmos, individuation, culture and so on). His first chapter was very good, however.

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Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”

May 29, 2015 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” by Judith Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here Judith Butler expands on the agental role that “queering” performativity allows for the creation of individuals beyond sexuality. While most of the book is geared towards shoring up (and critiquing) psychoanalytic roles of sexual determination of identity and subjectivity, Butler also includes a few complex examples of how marked positions within the sexual dichotomy as it relates to phallics and sexual identity is problematized.

Although at times with terse sentences that sometimes say too much in one bite, I feel that Butler successfully sees both sides of the issue and navigates through this minefield with a fresh outlook on how sexuality plays a role in determining how we consider ourselves and how we consider others. Using the various figures of transgender and drag and so on, Butler ultimately demonstrates that the agency relationship of performativity still requires that dichotomous hetereosexual cut. Although the performative natures of drag and trans, “queering” normative roles is always a subversive possibility, the reliance of the dichotomous hetereosexual norms as a queering always has the possibility of retroactively reinforcing rather than subverting. Put on the street, a gay pride rally may make non-normative hetereosexuals express themselves with aplomb but it will also allow conservative types to dig further into their entrenchment simply because the dichotomy is always invoked as a way of identifying who we are and where we are located.

This transcendental cut is a difficulty with queering, one that Butler does not seem able to resolve. In a way, this has to do with the fact that despite performativity’s power in one’s ability to redefine one’s self, this is always in relation to how others can define one’s self through their acts. Thus her chapter on “lesbian phallus” and the straight woman as a melancholy lesbian or the straight man as a melancholy straight man is a way to note that all positions are “queering” when we begin to eradicate the normative judgements socially and understand the relations on the sexual “phallic” transcendental as mere positional exchange. We may want to inhabit certain positions above others, and in that sense all identity is performative and “queering” when understood through alternate filters.

In a way, Butler stops in an appropriate spot. She doesn’t go too deep into critiquing transcendental reason (as obviously this would take us afar off field) but she doesn’t shy away from mentioning either, when appropriate. I feel that her ending could be tighter, as she takes a very long time to conclude where she wants to end, but she does the best that she can in outlining the fact that identity is created through sexual performativity as blind truth procedure rather than as an ontological given. She engages feminist theorists to this end in a way that is appropriate, although I feel she spends a little too much time with psychoanalysis, simply because she needs a bulwark that is hetereo-normative in order to sexualize the field in order to make her point.

The twist from ontology to procedure is really the takeaway key here, to how Butler redeploys social identity for all of us. Taken in that approach, in theory, we could have avoided sexuality all together in performativity, but the charged nature of sexuality as a key to identity allows Butler to tackle the subject all the more strongly. Bravo.

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The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

May 29, 2015 / posted in Business, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, rules / No Comments

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things DoneThe Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Peter Drucker outlines wha makes an effective executive. Perhaps understanding and anticipating the role of “technocrats” as nominalized by Galbraith, Drucker notes that effective executives make effective decisions.

A huge portion of this, as Drucker outlines has to do with a few things.

1. understanding the material process a corporation is embedded in (the industry, its market)
2. understanding the needs of individuals working within a corporation
3. understanding the material organization a corporation has for placing individuals

All of this is to structure and effectively limit (yet empower) employees agency for the corporation.

In this manner, effective executives must be able to understand the maximal agency of their own situation, in order to make decisions. Drucker also sagely advises that such executives don’t make decisions lightly but still do so in a timely manner. All of this rests on the maximization of a corporation/departments ability to enact materially. To understand this, one must of course, understand the technical requirements of the corporation/position as lived by people on the ground. In this way Drucker is correct in anticipating a regime of individual whose job is to make decisions from theory rather than practice. In this way, Drucker explains the larger mode of executive apprati, seeing a need for the contemporary executive to “think outside the box” by welcoming greater opportunity to process information, take in points of view, and weight things according to process metrics.

He also correctly anticipates the role of computers in requiring people make decisions more often. You can read this as a self help manual for improving your executive role, in aligning yourself for the corporate world. Or you can conversely see this book as a calibration needed for executives to fit the modern international corporation milieu. Drucker may be a little dated in some ways, with his examples, but on principles, this is still how business is run today.

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