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The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914

September 20, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 by Immanuel Wallerstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this latest installment of his amazing series, Wallerstein shows us how various contemporary institutions arose as a response to the sudden awareness the French Revolution engendered: that people could self rule.

From this point, the elites took over, commandeered the economic and political machinery and proceeded to institute laws in the name of equality. These laws/policies split populations into groups to divide them for state/technocractic management. We can thus understand the development of the modern state as the development of various fragmented knowledges (of technological/social institutional agency) in the name of the social body.

Wallerstein does not talk too much about technological development — in fact this period of world history is THICK. He sticks mainly to institutional development as the development of the state ideology — which it is his argument that this multifaceted approach to ideological interpellation has largely succeeded by this point. The elites rule the world. It is the triumph of the centrist liberal state to co-opt two other ideologies, progressivism and conservatism as arms pushing forth its own agenda for further globalization.

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The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

September 20, 2015 / posted in rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological CivilizationThe Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization by William Barrett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Those book started off very strongly with a focus on mathematics and logic. It drifted into a discussion of ontology (Being) and then ended with a cold war vision of two possibilities for technology, USSR and USA. Unfortunately for Barrett, this amazing book is marred by an economic invisibility. He is on the right track, but the weakest part of the book is its second part, which affects the last part. Barrett seemed to want the second and first parts to coalesce into a third view so that we can critique the first view again. Being (through Heidigger and William James) was meant to define for us freedom — and with this freedom we were meant to critique the rationality of technique.

What Barrett wanted was to find another point of view on human existence with which to critique the techno-rationality that the first section was meant to be exemplify. Unfortunately he was able to do this because transcendental philosophy is the basis from which this techno-rationality historically arose. He couldn’t use it to critique itself. Marxism might have been able to provide a basis to inflect a different point of view with a different set of values than techno-rationality except for the fact that Marxism arose as a response to the same state apparatus that helped centralize techno-rationality in the first place.

What Barrett realized was that mathematics and logic have the same aesthetics used to form social control (as with Behavioralism) but he was able to connect their formulation with transcendental philosophy, ontology and the economic rise of the state.

I do like his direction, although his research is incomplete. What this book eventually suffers from is a lack of energy in which the last section is woefully truncated due to his lack of connection. In a major way, Barrett needs to show us how we are chained before he is able to point the way we are free. Without an analysis that would involve corporations, economics, consumerism and present day politics, his last section lacks the punch needed to explicate freedom.

Only when Barrett is able to define freedom will he be able to show us how technique is an illusion.

I believe his attempt solidify human existence on the basis on ontology in order to debunk techno-rationality was the primary failure of his book… you really can’t use ontology that way because ontology is the grandfather for this rationality.

If anything this book of its time (1978) shows a philosopher who tried to do philosophy with respect to his tradition, but failed. The tools at his disposal are weak; dated. If anything this work shows us that at 1978 if philosophy were to have an impact it would need to reinvent its toolbox, which it is still in the process of doing so.

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Discourse as Social Interaction

September 20, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Discourse as Social InteractionDiscourse as Social Interaction by Teun A. van Dijk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a fairly standard introductory text. Here we see a Foucaultean influenced approach to rhetoric in which the positions and interruptions, cuts and corrections of a text reproduce the power structures and people’s places in them. Knowledge is presented as active positioning within a time index. This is managed through a variety of different contexts, each chapter meant to highlight a cut of institutional rhetoric, whether this is between sexes, as politicians, in a community, between races and so on. All the differentials are made available when we take a specific view — with our knowledge of how those institutions work. Is this a manner of finding the information we want in the text? Or are we super imposing only one view? There is only one view available at a time, otherwise how can we tell if someone is behaving in this or that manner due to their positions in a transaction (store owner, customer) or race, or age or any other difference?

This is where discourse studies breaks down, because we can’t isolate those interactions solely though one context at a time except in our study. In real life these contexts cross over each other and depattern one another.

In many ways this was a good refresher as to the many approaches and methods, although these different views only work because we assume an identity as a more basic substrate to the participants identity — one founded on the unquestionable equality of subjectivity. It is only with this unquestionable “0 level equality” that we are able to understand that there is a difference in power between participants. This difference must then be attributed to the institution and their relative agency in their roles, because without it, how could we under that there is any differential at all (so therefore, they must be equal).

This normalization of equalization has often been the role of universities in order to insist that knowledge based approaches is a way to elitist enforced equality… that the advanced studies of rationalization (mostly only available to the wealthy) is the way for one to signify that one is more deserving to be equal and not fooled by the power differential of institutions used to create inequality.

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The Baphomet

September 8, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, reviews, Theory, universal nothing / No Comments

The BaphometThe Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Klossowski writes beyond our sense of realism, to bring about meditations on life, death, morality and so on, from the depths of gnostic heresy. The mix of breaths reveals the hallucinatory experience wherein hermeneutic literalness exceeds our sense of self. This is the gap inherent within language and the gap inherent within ourselves brought to page.

It’s difficult to write about this book, since it defies any sense of genre. Obviously people would say this is experimental. But it succeeds in convincing us that this view — of the intermix of personal, interpersonal, political, social, and so on — that reality is interconnected with knowledge and morality. How we live and exist among others is not an actual reality the way most of us believe, but an intermix within the gap inherent between us and others, within us and within others. We navigate this interstice often with blind faith. When we start to question the fundamentals of an ideology, or when we expect that within a view the truth will be apparent, that is where we become more lost than ever.

Although this book is a fiction it shows us something of how we are by showing us how we illicitly exist within the gaps of our knowledge by extending everything at once and contradicting itself in the point of the other.

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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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Studying Popular Music

September 8, 2015 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Studying Popular MusicStudying Popular Music by Richard Middleton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Middleton takes a discursive formalist view of popular music. As he probably meant this to be a marker to define the study of music by bringing in a syntax-Foucaultean view, Middleton splits his time between talking about what others have said of music with how to dissolve music into pure syntax.

The view of a complete atomization of music in order to highlight the study of music betrays a kind of Newtonianism in Middleton… his extensive survey of musicology likewise does the same thing. The assumption here is that there is an objective stable view of music “outside of music” that allows all the characteristics of music to be understood. This view however, is one that is immanent within musical discourse (what critics say, what listeners say, the flux of what we understand to be the content of the study) without much appeal to other terms. But Middleton is not looking to study music as a science. Middleton doesn’t try and examine music as a physics (like Philip Ball) or in terms of brain chemistry or larger social movies of history qua subjectivity (although he does to some degree involve class struggle and technology). Instead, Middleton expects to be able to calibrate music to some kind of non-atomization that is atomization or pure structure in order be able to measure the torsions in music.

Since Middleton has not established a particular view he is sticking to, this book wanders. He of course, doesn’t want to venture too far into philosophy or metaphysics, so he ends up without much of a point. In the end of the book, he ventures to talk of a “history of the future” thinking that some utopic ideal of subjectivity will provide the unit of measurement for music. Of course, this doesn’t happen either.

While this is a great resource for a bibliography, and Middleton has done lots of work, the question he doesn’t fully get to, but only hints at, is “what is at stake (in the study of music)?” This will answer why we should study music. Unfortunately this is a work of nearly pure academia, so he doesn’t seem to think this question needs answering, as study is its own reward. Unfortunately without knowing what is at stake we have no way of deciding what approach is appropriate. We can’t find a completeness in our approach either, because we have very ill defined borders for what music is (that is, where it ends, and other subject matters begin, such as materialism, or consciousness and so on).

On the one hand it’s too easy to say “so what?” but being able to answer this question will provide a view by which Middleton can stop wandering and start to intrumentalize his vast number of theories.

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The Experience of Freedom

August 31, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Experience of FreedomThe Experience of Freedom by Jean-Luc Nancy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the tradition of transcendental philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy tackles the experience of being existing as freedom itself. Nancy attempts to draw an ontological ground for experience by calibrating existence as its own freedom. He finds an angle through Kant, Hegel and Heidigger so as to release being from the world of ideation. He takes the split of phenomenon and unifies it as its own logical independence, citing the cut as the logical difference of being itself rather than one of ideation or sensuous apperception.

This is a rather easy cut to make. Jean-Luc Nancy runs through the gambit of freedom from a variety of standard sources and then ends with questions of morality. Since he has separated being from thought, there remains little to guide a relationship between being and thought. He ends up with this hard nugget of being that is totally independent, finishing with an experience of being that is free. Free not only of categorical imperatives but also breath-takingly free of any kind of understanding what so ever. We now have nothing to guide our decisions about being when left to being itself.

In many ways this is a very boring book, despite my interest in philosophy. Nancy ends with an ontological version of “laissez faire” where we are free for whatever. This is disgustingly relevant, obviously, to our post-industrial capitalism so that in a way Nancy didn’t even really need to write a book on this topic… as it isn’t particularly useful to anyone.

Despite his impressive range of quotations and his attempt at systematizing being and freedom — which is near impossible to be coherent about since each of these different philosophers offer different systems of their own — his distortions end up saying very little new. This is a bad kind of academic-philosophy because it re-calibrates thought in a way that leaves the familiar categories realigned without introducing any new idea whatsoever.

In that way, its an embarrassing book to read because it’s written so backwards it ends up being “so what?” So the rift of freedom, experience and being has been widely struggled with for centuries! Why don’t you say something that we don’t already know? Just because there has been a problem doesn’t mean that this problem needs to be revisited.

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Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe

August 31, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval EuropeReligious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe by Lester K. Little
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here Leter K Little traces the development of the profit economy from a gift economy. He highlights how the legend of the usurious Jew comes about when the main stream culture through the wealth of the church comes to occupy the scapegoat of greed so that the church’s tides system and the emerging banking system in Europe can be free to operate. As money comes to take the center stage in organizing culture we see a revival through the various groups within and associated with the church as a twist from living well to purposefully making poverty a choice in order to maintain moral purity necessary to mark themselves as being alienated from the “dirty” emerging money economy.

Despite the promise of a dry book this was actually very interesting. Little’s writing is clear. I would have liked a little more background on the money economy’s emergence but I suppose that is beyond the scope of the book. The emergence of poverty as a religious asset is a reflection of the emergence of money as the central organizing principle. Religion fights to maintain a suprasensible hold on organizing human activity above and beyond money. And this seems to work, at least, in the middle Medieval ages.

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Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation

August 31, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second FoundationFoundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although this book would deal with understanding human society through the indeterminacy of human quanta, the specter of psychohistory (and the second foundation) presents a Newtonian ideal by which the observer (second foundation) is able to erase its existence perfectly, “eat its own non-existence” so that we are left with perfect knowledge of the workings of humankind.

I found the journey of reading this to be exhilarating — even though that there is mathematical expression of society, knowledge, unconscious and human zeitgeist as one logical coherency to be a dubious idea. Nonetheless, this aesthetic has long been sought after. In modern times that we can start with Thomas Hobbes, as Phillip Ball does, in Critical Mass and understand that statistics was first developed to hide the inconsistencies of experimentation in physics. So we return back to the Kantian norms of finding the hidden logic of reality, one that is somehow suprasensibly suspended beyond our everyday material reality but governs those relations completely.

There is much to find interesting, despite the conservative nature of the story. Asimov is a very imaginative writer.

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Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

August 31, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Flatland: A Romance of Many DimensionsFlatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A somewhat interesting short book in which dimensionality is parsed into social relations to reflect the biases of human culture. The increase or decrease of dimensions is seen as a bad synthesis by others who would like to understand their own dimensionality in its limitations. An amusing idea.

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