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The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

September 8, 2015 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated PrimerThe Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Perhaps this is a matter that Stephenson is a programmer, but despite the amazing awesomeness of his expansion, the concept of creating a whole only from formalistically aligned agents is the only apparent limitation of this book.

What is the most futuristic about this book is what’s most interesting: beyond consciousness is material agency. Beyond technology is the conflation of agency and consciousness. Here we get a primer that reflects back the sum total of various social memes, presented as a subversive text that aligns to a developing consciousness. In a sense, primers have existed, but always under master guidance: tarot cards, for example. Or gnostic religious texts. Such high level manipulation of form is today, only given within a technical division. What is necessary for a developing consciousness though, is the ability to abstract patterns and then run their consistency forwards and backwards. From there, the partial worlds aligned by agency and ideology are at a loss as to the next direction.

This is where Stephenson turns to the mysterious seed, which is little more than a view espoused by a nanotech engineer. This view is the necessary meld of programmable reality, a belief in the completeness of human conception to manage material universes ideologically.

Where Stephenson ends mysteriously is in Nell’s subversion of the primer’s creator’s view, to reject a totalized agency of human consciousness/sexuality — where humans are little more than computational components. She releases from that mix individuality, and in that sense, subverts the primer completely.

Diamond Age is a view of human consciousness; whats at stake is our very freedom, to be ruled completely by managed eusociality (through the Victorians, or otherwise). Stephenson subverts the logic of his text in this ending, by choosing human freedom. In that sense, this utopic vision is dystopic because he shows us how it is limited, how it collapses, and is hypocritical to those who grew under its auspices but do not understand that the world they grew up in is an answer to a past problem, on that may no longer be relevant for today.

In that sense, as the little sisters show us, those of us raised by a system become formalized — indoctrinated within that system. This is not the answer to human consciousness as it is not a solution for adaptability. What we want is for people to grow up able to choose for themselves. To this end, Stephenson shows us that the primer used mechanistically as a mass solution shows its formalistic weakness. Like stock market strategies that profit only in the hands of the few so truly subversive systems only work when they are hidden.

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Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature

August 22, 2015 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human NatureEmpiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gilles Deleuze continually amazes me. This incredibly tight and coherent book was written when he was only 28. it was his first book.

Here he utilizes Hume’s radical critique on induction (which is actually a critique on causation and empiricism) in order to realign not only culture and society but also subjectivity.

From here, Deleuze no longer speaks of subjectivity in his other works (for the most part). He immediately grasps the relation of subjectivity with time, as past coherences are also given in the present through a formal repetition of content deployment.

This is connection of Bergson and Freud; that process is knowledge, and the imprint of a particular process as being the “main line” highlights not only what is significant in an encounter but also significant for future encounters.

When we understand that relations are “outside themselves” as external connections that are imposed, we can grasp that subjectivities as self referential are also “relations outside themselves”. It is the process of this superimposition that creates mind, being and so on as synthetic relations of what we do. Knowledge is given to a material process. In later works, Deleuze shows the mixture of material sheets of consistency from which agency is expressed forms the partial objects of agential realism as the formation of new agencies as new material consistencies.

“Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what is”.

This is the jump as a young Deleuze pushes us beyond existentialism of a resoluteness of being into the functionalism of the 21st century.

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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.

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Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge

June 18, 2015 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge by Paul Karl Feyerabend
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Feyerabend writes a difficult book here, but one which is necessary. Taking a radically different perspective on the aesthetics of what theory is, Feyerabend attack one of the scared cows of science and mathematics — that of consistency.

In some ways, Feyerabend could have raised objections more metaphysically — that ideas have at their germination roots outside of a given domain — that culture plays a role in utilizing domains in one area to influence another — that science is a socially generated practice, on that mistakes methodology for reality — but in other ways, Feyerabend does well by sticking very close to his topic. His use of Galileo as an example is of interest, since he returns to it often but it is in his later chapters that his critique really stands out.

Basically Feyerabend shows us that knowledge is always procedural. Knowledge and theory are generated through processes of agency. By attempting to manipulate or influence a specific phenomenon, we generate procedures to gain access to that phenomenon. This requires that we calibrate our actions to an appropriate cut. Nonetheless, any cut we calibrate to is simultaneously a distortion of the very object of study, because it casts it in a certain relationship. Thus

Expressing it differently, we may say that the assumption of a single coherent world-view that underlies all of science is either a metaphysical hypothesis trying to anticipate a future unity, or a pedagogical fake; or it is an attempt to show, by a judicious up-and downgrading of disciplines, that a synthesis has already been achieved. This is how fans of uniformity proceeded in the past (cf. Plato’s lists of subjects in Chapter vii of his Republic), these are the ways that are still being used today. A more realistic account, however, would be that ‘[t]here is no simple “scientific” map of reality–or if there were, it would be much too complicated and unwieldy to be grasped or used by anyone. But there are many different maps of reality, from a variety of scientific viewpoints’

One should be quick to realize that Feyerabend is not against science at all; in fact he encourages it in his “irresponible” and “anarchist” ways. What Feyerabend is objecting to is the imagined consistency/consensus of science, a “sacred cow” of science all the more because science doesn’t need such a “petit object a” in order to function. One of the underlying criticisms that Feyerabend levels is that all social institutions (including science) are in fact first and foremost, social institutions. We understand this to be even more true when we realize that the academic/scientific community often operates as a ranking system more than as a theory generating procedure; that grants and individuals are awarded more for position than they are for work. That the entire procedure of science is one of self promotion (through the modality of whatever science they are using) more than anything else.

In some ways, Feyerabend does well to criticize past methods in order to highlight inconsistencies in how they are aestheticized and presented. But this of course, will stop no one, because past procedures are in the past. After all, aren’t we better now?

I cannot stop praising his book, because there is so much in here. I appreciate the clarity and freshness with which Feyeraband approaches this topic. On a more abstract level, one that I think Feyerabend would appreciate, is that we should approach all polemics and theories understanding that they are generated through the auspices of their own consistency and meaning. We often reject theories and ideas just like we reject people — they either don’t make the cut due to some personal inclination, or they are competitors for the same social capital. Often, these are the same thing. I whole heartedly agree with Feyerabend. With the lack of any “true” authority, one that “naturally” supersedes whatever authority we could imagine here on Earth (as there is none like that), we ought to utilize any theory that allows us to increase our agency. Should we not desire any particular agency, we should embrace any idea for what it is worth, at the time that we need it. Of course, some ideas will become undecideable should the foundation for that idea be incommensurable with our own foundation. But that is not a fault of that idea. This is merely the fault of our own localization. Sometimes, a question simply isn’t available from a given point of view because its context is not available.

This is of course, in a big way, where Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason steps in, and it is at this point that Feyerabend stops short. He doesn’t wish to get into the logistics of what is reasonable. He only wishes that we set ourselves free of the chains by which we adhere to an image of what good science ought to look like so that we can do better science. And for that, I find that there is a resonance with martial arts, or with music or any other technicality/agency. We must learn the basics to define what the modality is. From that point on, mastery begins when we start to release ourselves from technique in order to be more appropriate to whatever situation we find ourselves in, simply because technique is a pedagogical tool, and its rigid organization will make certain acts impossible because they are incommensurable with that technique.

Ultimately, consistency is how we make sense of a localization for the purposes of ordinance (organization). We must never mistake the map for the territory since the territory is always changing as our desires/designs and agential relations change — so we too change.

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The Anti-Oedipus Papers

April 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

The Anti-Oedipus PapersThe Anti-Oedipus Papers by Félix Guattari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In anticipation of re-reading Thousand Plateaus I thought I’d tackle this book. As a reader of Deleuze (I’ve read all his books), I always understood the progression of Deleuze’s thoughts with the turn coming after Logic of Sense. Some of Guattari’s books, such as Chaosomos enforced for me his role in bringing to Deleuze a completely different view. It didn’t help that Guattari did not publish nearly as much nor as systematically. But after reading this book, I fully acknowledge the debt to Deleuze that many do not see. Deleuze is often given credit since he is of an institution (of philosophy) but Guattari’s running amok, his ability to abstractly critique different ideas and view them from vastly different zones really hits home with his letters to Deleuze.

I’ve always understood Anti-Oedipus as a failed work in the sense that although they reject a metric by which to organize thought they still in interject a methodology (Marxism) by which to organize meaning. Part of this is due to the extension of their rejection of Lacan and psychoanalysis. By rejecting the normalization that psychoanalysis employs, D&G also end up rejecting all normalisations. In this manner they unwittingly step very close to Kant’s “all concepts are regulatory”. While I fully agree with Kant, I think Deleuze’s love of conception forces him to reject Kant’s systematization of thought on aesthetic grounds. In a way, Deleuze’s work ends up being very close to Kant in aesthetic but very different from Kant in method and content.

Again, reading this book allowed me to see that Guattari really pushed Deleuze, who was already pretty out there, to really refocus on how one should approach the problem of multiple-domain knowledges. There are many gems here, to be found. Various extensions of thought that may have gotten lost in Anti-Oedipus, various and of course, a seemingly lack of coherency on the part of Guattari to systematize a presentation that was not rambling. In a way, what Guattari brings to Deleuze is a grasp of normalicy that should be rejected. Guattari allows Deleuze to understand the effects of concepts outside of conception — the role they play on one another and society. In a way Deleuze already understood the way concepts match one another. He does this frequently, and to an extreme, as with Difference and Repetition. But what he failed to include was the political angle that concepts have on people, on subjectivities and logics of peoplehood.

Obviously this book would never have been published if D&G were not as popular as they are. Obviously this is not a complete work on its own because it references other works that you may not have read, that are not included in this volume. Still, if you like the other stuff, this provides another inflection point so that you can begin to understand what Deleuze and Guattari both brought to the table, and how their co-production was a unique synthesis that was necessarily a combination of their personalities, outlooks and backgrounds.

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Logics of Worlds: Being and Event

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two additional weaknesses to Badiou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

November 2, 2014 / posted in rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Fold: Leibniz and the BaroqueFold: Leibniz and the Baroque by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this difficult book, Gilles Deleuze takes the figure of Leibniz as a starting point to reach a determinate position of differentiation. Another way to say this is that Deleuze abstracts/extracts conceptions of change and inflection from infinitesimal nuances. Building upon the figure of the monad as indecipherable but also holographic, Deleuze forces us from the position of understanding ontology as a passive substance and active concept. From here, we need first to select a context and then abstract from that context the mode of change that operates throughout it. Deleuze would have us absorb melody from pure harmony, building concepts and trends from the multitude of monads which would pose a mass of singularities.

Another way to put this? Deleuze outlines a project by which we can choose the scale at which we are to determine what we are looking at. This free-for-all view, lacking any selected distance from its object is different from the philosophic tradition which centers itself on subjectivity as the primordial figure. By zooming in on the monad and then zooming out, Deleuze gives us two vectors (two floors as he calls it) by which we can start to carve out difference between them. This makes all determination a matter of scale, which is another way of saying that it’s a matter of categorization. Which set of monads should we take to be primary? Which collection expresses the trends we wish? If not on the level of monad, then on the level of concept. What Deleuze poses for us is a radical de-substantialization of thought. Thought was often taken as a reference to something, or as a pure given form for something. Thought, in philosophy, is conceived as a reference point for purity of form. Rather than taking a metaphysics of presence as the primary scene, he deontologizes thought by collapsing it into its constituent particles, called monads. From there, we can build the scene of determination rather than skipping ahead to universals that are simply given.

What makes Deleuze radical in this regard, is how he debunks the classical categories which philosophy has sought to make necessary for its condition of philosophy. He pulls the monad from difference itself, as Leibniz did, and then reconstitutes concepts from it. The concepts are nonetheless pure concepts, as they ride on harmonies between monads, of the monads but never determined by monads. In fact, towards the end of the book, Deleuze shows us that monads can subsume other monads. From here we get the change of scale, that the figure of the monad as a compete singularity can also bind other monads. In this way, we can see how Deleuze’s monads run against a stricter line of Badiou’s set theory in which sets can be constituted in any desired size to be the primary set, the limit cardinal. This puts Deleuze closer to math than you might imagine, as this book is written in poetic language. Yet this poetry is essential in the sense that Deleuze wishes for us to saddle the inflection point between the two floors, before monads disappear from view and Being is revealed, or before Being is dissolved into a mass of monads that have yet to organize into coherency as a concept.

As always, Deleuze doesn’t go easy on us. He forces us to the edge of conception and leaves us there to sit and watch. Unfortunately, most of us probably won’t know what we are looking at. In the absence of our familiar points of reference I suspect much of this would appear to be senseless and unusable to most of us, even though in our daily lives, we go through the process of (re)constitution all the time.

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Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition

September 29, 2014 / posted in reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and CognitionKant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition by Umberto Eco
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Umberto Eco starts off in the first chapter with asking why is there something instead of nothing? Although he references much philosophy in this first go around, this is just a way for him to get to a more interesting question (he says that the fact that we can ask this question isn’t to question Being itself, but to question common sense… that Being is the initial condition for common sense). So let’s get to what he really wants to ask. Eco is really asking, how can we know that something is what it is and not something else.

As a semiotician, he is interesting in understanding why we get what we do, and how we come to learn about new things. This is not an easy task at all. While he strings together the disparate discourses of philosophy, piecean semiotics, linguistics, psychology and cognition in a complex and fascinating way, he eventually comes to hinge his articulation on the figure of the sign as a mediating device. He distinguishes between internal and shared external meanings, and then extended intensive “expert” modeling. What makes Eco so impressive isn’t the vast range at which he runs, he also writes clearly and cleverly, demonstrating that a specific formulation of how to get from A to B can have a multitude of pathways, some of them contradictory but all consistent in their own logic.

This can wrap around itself however, as the articulation of new knowledge itself requires the continual deferral of old knowledge in the place of new knowledge. But knowledge isn’t all that he is after; because knowledge is only the expression of an internal understanding. This is to say that he also creates new understanding in order to supply understanding to understanding itself! So in a very reductive way, he can’t fully explain understanding except so much as to describe a possible path. If we accept it internally, then we can say that we understand it. If we reject it, we would claim it nonsensical or that we can’t understand it. While I am getting a little astray from Eco’s formulation, it is safe to say that Eco is best interested in trying to gasp the steps in formulation to get at any difference in deployment of any aspect of formulation.

In a way, I wish Eco had come up with a better conclusion. He did say what he wanted to say, but the crux of his discussion comes to us when we understand that the act of naming a difference is the creation of that spectrum. Between two differences, or between many discourses that may not connect (that he connects) if we are able to articulate a difference between them, then that difference appears. The difference between them is negligible, shrinking to nothing. If we however, do detect a difference then we can speak of it sideways, and that itself is a metaphor.

I think Eco should have encountered the work of Paul Ricoeur. It would have been interesting to see a conjunction between the two of them. Ricoeur is interested in the same things; although as a philosopher of language, a rhetorician, he approaches the formulation from a position of narrative… the root of which is metaphor. The connection of two unlike things is what metaphor is; and that generic connection can be what creates narrative, though the excuse of temporal displacement in which multiple events are strung together as one long “thing”, a string of causation that is complete only if it has all its parts.

But that may be a sideline. Eco eventually ends up in the position of generic objects, which gives us back to semiotics and signs. From there, he utilizes generic objects to set up identity and knowledge. For this, he could connect to Alain Badiou’s work in set theory, with the formulation of “naked” signs that are generic events… with their indiscernible aspect that allow them to be applied multiple times, anywhere without losing their connection to Truth. Once we get to this point, though we are only talking about icons, which are representations in themselves, without actuality. Their difference, their next step “down” is the hypoicon, which names the immediate first object, without representation but only the sensory form itself, which leaves us in limbo.

Perhaps this is why Eco did not write a conclusion. He had none. He could only leave us to our imagination as to how to connect the two. With the visual pun “Mexican on a bicycle” he leaves us to ponder the ambiguity of experience; that contextual changes or hypoiconic changes although different in type leads us with completely different understandings. While he wants to connect semiotics to philosophy (as an anterior buffering) and semiotics to cognition (as an internal marker of order, to relate sense datum to signs) he only at best manages a description. Never can we understand that connection without first naming it. And never can we name it without forcing it to become something other than what it might be otherwise, a way of plugging parts together. Not an easy task by any means for anyone to write about, and Eco does a great job of hammering through what could have been far much denser text.

I suppose this is what we get for being creatures of language. Language lets us model, but it only lets us model generics. When we subtract particularities from the object we get the generic, but adding those particularities back gets us identities, singletons which are unique and yet a different object. Mysterious that we can extract type from tokens and then speak only in types when talking about tokens. I forget where he says it, but we speak in generics even if we mean individual singletons. This is very much a root of racism, or an issue with categorization of how we can know anything, and the limits of what we know can be. And yet, often without really knowing, we are still able to speak and negotiate and navigate to come to new understandings, often without having to completely reconstruct the language we use at all.

This ability is very much a kind of miracle. I suppose then it is best that we can’t find that missing piece that lets us connect the old to new, or create new from old. Lest if we did find it, and examine it, we would end up losing our very ability to create new narratives, formulate new metaphors and ultimately give rise to new words. We would in fact, lose the ability to create new history.

This is very much the wonder I wish to look at, and Eco gives us a great if somewhat long (yet relatively simply written) narrative for which to guide us about pondering this miracle. 5 stars!

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transcendental immanence

May 23, 2013 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

deleuze and guattari develop the concept of the plateau as being a level that is consistent with itself. there are an infinite number of plateaus, just like there are an infinite number of logics, each different but with its own internal consistency. plateaus have at their core, an absolute logic that we can understand as being a “plane of immanence” — which is an even harder concept to define. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_of_immanence )

this plane of immanence is only immanent to itself — and this is what allows it to also be simultaneously transcendental but to other phenomenon outside the plane.

the easiest way to conceive of planes of immanence is to think of a specific consciousness — animal, human or alien. how sensory data enters the consciousness, or how that consciousness purposefully arranges phenomenon IS what makes that consciousness itself. this is the easiest way to understand immanence. but immanence is not limited to consciousness. it could be how a specific species of bug is, or how the building code is itself (regardless of what it specifically says), or how a system gravitation works. it could be a logical formulae and its extending existential statements. anything really. even a poem, potentially. anything with its own internal sense, or logic.

plateaus then, are planes of immanence but as they relate to other plateaus, and signs that float between them. if you take a line of flight, a thought as it escapes a plateau, it can then become another plateau. plateaus are the status quo of tight-knit groups of people. when a group of people that absolutely form a group (rather than a collective of individuals) navigate through a new space, they leave behind tracks unique to themselves. like survivors in a zombie apocalypse movie, they take certain choice items, leave others behind, and make muddy prints everywhere. forensic dramas like CIS, law & order, mentalist and bones, and whatever new tv shows exist now… they all hinge on the fact that people are planes of immanence. people can’t help it; they are immanent to themselves. their tracks are unique to them, and can be left by no one. each episode is the piecing together of a criminal profile like a new bear claw in the mud can tell the biologist the age, size, sex, diet and whatever about the bear so they can define it, contain it and capture it… normalizing the forest.

in case you aren’t impressed by the organizational power behind this post-structural philosophy: palmistry, astrology, alchemy… these are all planes of immanence on the scale of their immersion. if you grab any media, like anime or any movie or tv show — if this media is successful it will create a plane of immanence — a world uniquely itself so that we can insert any number of anything into this world and it will follow a logic. (one imagines aliens landing in the middle of an episode of SUITS and harvey spector defending earth by “out lawyering” a bunch of alien invaders)

so, if you think about planes of immanence and how they relate to things like real estate… or doing philosophical forensics — e.i. reading the signs people leave lying around and trying to reconstruct their psyche-footprint — no doubt planes of immanence is related to how we as human beings conceive and arrange things. that is, cultural knowledge can be arranged in a series of multiple planes of immanence. it follows too that biological, and physical phenomena can also be arranged this way, but only as it relates to how we define the study of that phenomenon — or more rightly speaking — how we define that phenomena. because when you take said knowledge and extend it beyond the academic field, we see (more and more so, through the internet’s ability to open us to other people’s thoughts and conversations) that nothing is by itself… changes even in one small area affect phenomena in conceptually remote places. for example, bees. pesticides. earthquakes in distant regions as they make our computer hardware more expensive. economic analysis often trace roots to surprising historical ontologies as they originate through natural or political disasters or technological disruption.

so i’m guessing that these plateaus are more a formulation of our mind than an actual out-in-the-world noumenon.

the question then becomes, for me, how is it that we choose one plateau over another? we (and i mean us 1st worlders who exist so much online) are so exposed to alternative medias, alternative media channels, lies, truths, advertisements that seek to blow our collective minds. yet we filter out some messages when other messages resonant so strongly with us. i understand that too much twisty logic is distasteful. such logic is rejected because it asks that we sacrifice too much of ourselves to follow it. but too little is boring, even cliche. so somewhere in the middle, is the pleasurable playfulness of being exposed to some kind of nonsense. it seems to me that philosophical economics is the proper field of study here.

economics is all about why we choose one thing over another. why we make decisions the way we do. granted, this isn’t psychology or sociology — economics today isn’t even about the maximization of utility. economics today is about the maximization of the objectively quantifiable utility (money and all the things that are money (commodities… stocks, real estate… branding… whatever…)). but the fact of the matter is, we make choices all the time about what we are willing to expose ourselves to, and why we chose to embrace one plateau (say, global warming) over another (say, scientology).

to me, this is MOST fascinating. it’s also not enough to say, okay, here’s a weird club, who goes with it, and can enjoy it… who wants to leave immediately? i want that experience to somehow say something about our psyche, how it reaches our core. i want to trace that line. so i suppose then, that i buy into the fantasy that so many forensic tv shows share: that everything is about us. that our choices matter, that they reveal to the world who we are despite ourselves. we cannot help but be who we are.

the root of this fantasy though, isn’t just that things touch us at our core, that everything reflects on us, because everything is psychologically revealing… it’s the fantasy that we even have a core in the first place.

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