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Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

November 30, 2014 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and MeaningMeeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Barad presents an account of reality she calls agential realism. While intuitively we understand this in pop explanations as “point of view” she radicalizes this account by extending it into the formal fields of post-structural philosophy and quantum physics.

Taking the writings of the great physicist Neil Bohr, Barad dehumanizes his writing by removing what Meillasoux calls “Ptolomey’s Revenge” in which the sciences (and philosophy) take the human account of things to be the end point of justification. In other words, we take our familiar human account as the basis for determining what is out there. This repetition of a human account out there forms the discursive struggle between wave-particle accounts in quantum mechanics. Barad is very quick to emphasize that discursive practice isn’t a linguistic concept, a concept in words but rather material process that determines what is to be measured and how to measure it. In her words, the agential cut has to do with distinguishing between the material affects of the apparatus of measurement in creating phenomenon.

She doesn’t take phenomenon to be as opposed to noumenon in the Kantian sense but opposed to objects in the subject-object distinction. While she puts scare quotes around “subject” and “object” distinction, these scare quotes are meant to present such terms in their generic specificity rather than their philosophical baggage. Objects don’t exist out there. Rather than material construction of the discursive practice in formulating an apparatus of measurement determines what exists out there. While science is suspect to conception (theories), Barad want show that what’s at stake in agential realism is that our conception of the entire situation doesn’t simply highlight the terms of the concept but it also highlights the condition upon which we presume truth to be available.

While she makes the easy connection between material process and Judith Butler’s performativity theories, she avoids the distinction that such agential realism requires a human consciousness to perceive such distinctions. A human consciousness can provide an apparatus of measurement but the larger reality as a whole provides conditions for knowing itself. The impossibility of being able to objectively account for everything is the problem that in the universe one part of it needs to be “lost” (or in Zizek’s terms, less than nothing) for the other part of the universe to be analyzed.

This is in many accounts a difficult book to read, but Barad walks us through the trickly lines of thought. She doesn’t adhere to an (inter)subjective account of reality but rather mentions that the marks of an apparatus of measurement makes on existing bodies serves as the objective mark, one that is often itself registered in terms of the agencies of observation. In this way, agential realism is a way of noting how the universe meets itself half way, to constantly create the conditions for which unit-hood is registered and made distinct.

While a thick book, Barad has outlined an approach that is sure to provide a new framework for understanding why the experience of reality is different for so many, as our material practice is the conceptual condition by which discursive practices actualize… not as representations of a transcendentalism but through the conditions of materiality itself, entangled in itself. (As Deleuze would say, differentiation isn’t what happens to cytoplasm, rather cytoplasm contains all the differentials which create a given differentiation.)

There is so much more I can add, but I think this sums up what the book does and is about, enough for anyone who wants to read about this kind of stuff to pick it up.

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On Literature

November 25, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

On LiteratureOn Literature by Umberto Eco
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This collection of essays highlights what a fascinating and active mind Umberto Eco has. His appreciation of knowledge, literature and the written arts shines brilliantly through each page. Some of these essays are a bit erudite but Eco’s characteristic wit, charm and thoroughly creative reasoning shows us a path through the fogginess of such discussion.

While the essays start off more academic than not (the essays feel chronologically ordered), Eco seems to come out onto his own by the end, talking more personally (but not less rigorously) to remark on his own writing to show us what he loves about literature. And that’s quite a statement, that one who wrote so late in his life (his first book was written when he was in his late 50s), can still find more to be thankful for about writing, about books and about stories.

Thanks for this collection, Mr Eco, you remind us about what we love best about books and what we love best about your own work.

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Contents of Thought

November 23, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Contents Of ThoughtContents Of Thought by Robert H. Grimm
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m not well versed in analytic philosophy. But here’s a book of 5 analytic philosophy essays, seeking to verify the, you guessed it, “contents of thought”

There is an anesthetic in analytic philosophy that is to be concise, precise and to have real world impact. The idea is that whatever thought experiment is said, should also have application in the real world. That is, it shouldn’t necessarily debunk our every day understanding but it should add to it, if possible. That being said, there appears to be two main veins that run through these essays. The first is the content approach, which assumes that there is real stuff, be this an interior content that is separate, or a belief that has a role in the chain of causation. The second approach is a formalism, a syntax only approach, which assumes that the relationships of various things constitute what a thing is, rather than there being any original content. The two are at odds. It’s perhaps impossible to verify one over the other, since from the second approach we wouldn’t admit to there being any content even if we ran across it because how would we know that it is what it is without it being hooked in the way that it naturally is? From the first approach, we can simply retool the same situation and explain behavior without appeal to any particular content — and that is sufficient to show that content is not necessary.

What these two approaches seem to me to highlight is what Karen Barad calls “the apparatus of measurement” which is to say what aesthetic tool we use to determine what is being questioned will emphasize or conclude a different aspect of the thought experiment. It’s beyond the scope of this review to really go into too much detail, but it’s suffices to say that the last essay in which Robert Stalnaker shows how the role of context changes meaning to impact belief and syntax appears to me to really highlight what is missing. All thought experiments pose a specific kind of inquiry, and in doing so, given the set up of the situation, beg the question. Changing the context will always inevitably change the meaning, or even destroy meaning itself. Lynne Rudder Baker’s essay does this quite well, wrapping our consideration within the context of what we would consider as being meaningful.

This split between formal approaches and content approaches however, is nothing new. Formalism as a whole is a modernist approach to development of theories. This kind of approach does have its limits, as we are seeing. What we are now at the edge of doing, across many different disciplines it seems, is to try and develop content itself as it arises from formalism. Something that, from a formalism only stand point or a content only stand point would appear to be near impossible.

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Multitude

November 22, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of EmpireMultitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The basic foundation in this book comes from Marx, that is to say, the form of labor — forces of production — shape subjectivity. Unlike Marx however, Hardt and Negri take the position that labor has already attained subjectivity. They dub this collective subjectivity as the multitude, not as a unity but as a collective resistance against the control of production that upper classes utilize. So while you can draw an analogy between communism as utopia, espoused by Marx and how Hardt and Negri take radical democracy of the multitude as utopic, the main difference from Marx isn’t democracy vs communism, it’s the concept that subjectivity is also produced by the mode of labor.

So to reconnect the dots, Hardt and Negri take a post-Marxist position that is analogous to Marx. Using the figure of the double articulation as a way of deploying meaning, the first articulation is the mode of labor to constitute subjectivity. The second articulation for Hardt and Negri is the state apparatus, the nest of multinational corporations that over grids national boundaries while defining the class relations within those national boundaries. Hardt and Negri envision a second articulation that follows the first articulation closely, in order to divide resource allocation more evenly.

They don’t pretend to know how to do this, this book is only meant to define the problem further.

So to follow their form, they do fall under the rubric of post-modernism as an accelerated form of modernism, because they take the populous multitude as having coherency within each separate identity, even if there is no coherency within a larger collection because such coherency creates a bottle neck that would centralize control, disrupting most positions within the multitude by “representing” them.

In this sense, their deploy is anti-representation, yet it also uses the political-social episteme as a model for itself. One assumes that we will not encounter Baudillaridian simulacra at the point, for Hardt and Negri like Marx assume that the subjectivities of the multitude are authentic and not a reflexive back-flow informed by the second articulation but wholly originary merely at the first level in-itself for-itself.

They don’t address this last point. Coached in the terms I just put it, their assumption becomes problematic and unstable, for as they point out, peace in the center requires expansive control of the territory directly outside. This seed is how they point out Empires start. And isn’t in this example, a singularity that would rule the multitude? They also don’t address this in the book; how a multitude could live with itself. I suppose their reach is to get away from abstract philosophy, but considering that their assumptions are centered from philosophy, it feels like a bit of a blind spot.

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[[there.]]

November 12, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, Theory / No Comments

ThereThere by Lance Olsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Written at the time he was in Germany, and perhaps inspired by the novels of David Markson (not sure if Olsen writes other works in the same kind of form), Olsen takes the aphorism as the implicit unit of narrative morphology.

Built from composites on his musings of history, other writers, autobiography Markson like many other post-structuralists approaches the creation of [[there.]] as a place of pure presence, neither explicable nor eminently reachable. In other words, Olsen resists naming this reference point all the while he constructs the place of it. Taken as a kind of “trash diary”/travelogue:

A week before you leave, you decide to keep a trash diary: a constellation of sense, thought, memory, observation, fast fact scraps.

Olsen insists on the event of being in Germany for a writing fellowship as the start of collecting this work together. So while the frame of the book subsists on this fellowship (much like how “there.” is doubly bracketed, the processing of placement: historic, personal and professional work off this justified event of being a travelogue, a venture into the another world.

The major trope of this work then, while often not explicitly stated (though stated often), hinges on being in another place. Olsen gives us vignettes not just his musings on Germany

A Polish saying: One German a beer, two Germans an organization, three Germans a war

Berlin feels disorienting because it is disorienting

In German, the noun gift means poison.

It shares the same Proto-Indo-European root as the English word gift–ghabh, meaning to receive–but German employs the origin meaning as a dark gesture: Gib ihm das Gift. Give him the poison.

The verb for to poison in German used to be vergeben, a word that now means to forgive.

(btw, here’s more germany)

I’ve been practicing my German for three months–ever since I received the news–in an attempt to bring it back to a semblance of life after more than 30 years in the mnemonic deepfreeze.

The block bearded graduate student with the wire-rimmed glasses who could read and speak sentences I can no longer even tangentially understand:

Who was that guy?

but also musings on travel itself

To walk is to lack a place, Michel de Certeau felt. It is the indefinite process of being absent

Traveling, I want to say, is like clicking a link on a website: a surge of disorientation followed almost immediately by a surge of reorientation.

Only in three dimensions.

Over and over again.

and

Traveling is a condition enabling recognition of the limits of human knowledge and mystery, inviting us to orient and re-orient our selves to an existence that will always exceed our grasp

It wasn’t until decades later the reason for that atomic commotion hit me: in addition to the obvious, that perfect novella is an allegory about continuous change, which is to say an allegory about travel.

Travel then, or at least being in an Other situation allows Olsen to begin to construct traveling, or the place of being in an unknown place. And I don’t mean just the situation of being in Germany, but also the situation of Other itself…not just a specific there, but a definite indeterminate [[there.]]

Olsen, however, isn’t content to let us sit still in an unknown situation. He uses this unknown situation much as he uses the aphoristic structure of his narrative, to jump anywhere.

(He didn’t know it would be his 9/11 novel. He’d been writing what he believed was a different book entirely when he looked up that glistening morning and saw the first plane explode into the World Trade Center.)

(The very next sentence he composed reconceived what he was doing and why.)

(His novel changed course in a breath of white space.)

Significant in this, is the use of the parenthetical, as if Olsen is filling in a gap, which would in some other case, may otherwise be left out. This corresponds to the metaphor of the journey, in which his trip to Germany at first alien slowly becomes familiar, blending in with what he knows until one day he isn’t there anymore, but here.

The here remains, however, an unspoken here, for one is always here. Reminiscent of traveling, one records the high points, photographs, destinations, but also the unexpected interruptions of how you get there. Travel, like life, Olsen reminds us, is the encounter of what is both familiar and unfamiliar. To sum it up quickly, Freud’s term in German is Das Unheimliche. Although most contemporary commentators would jump on unheimliche to speak of the “uncanny valley” Olsen supplies us with this critical framework for which to supply an attempt to name, to create a complete thing is to bracket it, as he unpacks unheimliche for us, thusly:

a construction that goes nowhere, teaches zip, embodies the purest form of Freud’s unheimlich: a term that contains within itself heim (home), unheim (not home), and heimlich (hidden, secret).

The unheimlich signifies what we know, yet has been made unfamiliar, a forever being-at-home that is also a never-being-at-home.

Which brings us back to the end of the opening vignette:

Being-at-home, Heidegger says, is not the primordial phenomenon. Not-being-at-home is more fundamental. To be not-at-home may mean to be AT HOTEL

the overriding travelogue nature of which, roughly takes us back to the topography of travel. More rightly speaking, both home and not home are elements of the familiar and the unfamiliar sitting together as one, on the edge of what is what we recognize.

This blending the opposites brings us to the limit of the expressible, in which what is nameable is also what isn’t nameable. Olsen in his metacritical way strikes upon the experimental in experimental literature:

The first definition of the word experimental is of a witness: having actual or personal experience of anything.

With this definite-ambiguity, Olsen pulls us towards the creation of the subject from a situation.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke, David Foster Wallace advanced: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle.

Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

So it should come as no surprise that Olsen also runs alongside many different aspects of Wittgenstein. And through this frame, [[there.]] is another commentary on Wittgenstein:

How the aim of Wittgenstein’s work is to show us–by making us aware of the bottle’s presence, and thus its inherent limitations into which we are forever bumping our foreheads–the means by which to get out, no matter what we do, because the top is sealed, because we can’t think beyond language’s glass grammars, because our perceptions are meditated by what we imagine verbs, nouns, and the rest do.

How one gets out (by not getting out), not through applying a single philosophical method to all the linguistic knottinesses but by moving from topic to topic every which way in an ongoing calisthenics of inquisitiveness and alertness.

While at first graze through the first ten pages, one may wonder, where is he going with these quotes, these disparate angles, this decentralized narrative? Olsen definitely wants to say it all, force it together in a double articulation of brackets in which the second articulation is the dissolution of meaning found in the formality between the formulated white space. The latter pages of [[there.]] reflect heavily on death, suicide by authors, writers, thinkers. Death isn’t simply the ending of the text itself, where Olsen needs to find a resolution, but also a marked position within [[there.]], bracketed with the rest of life, travel, the human condition. Said simply:

[[That is here (or there).]]

So what is constructed in [[there.]]? How do we get to a point of caption to understand what Olsen has made? By breaking such oppositions such as here and there, home and un-home where has Olsen taken us?

In the end of Of Grammatology, Derrida’s placement of logocentricism on the Western tradition is mostly hinged on through the central figure of Rousseau (where Rousseau stands-in-for the Enlightenment tradition). Logocentricism isn’t simply the practice of anchoring language in writing, Derrida names the essence of logocentricism as the pure presence that speech, writing and culture refer as the penultimate mark of orientation. In this way, all discourse circumambulates pure presence as the crowned position that creates the space for endless linguistic play to work. Naming this pure presence as the supplement forced into metaphysics, Derrida writes:

[Rousseau] dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signifier to signified, representer to represented, mask to face, writing to speech. But all oppositions are irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics[…].

But what does that mean? The opposition of dream to wakefulness, is not that a representation of metaphysics as well? […] At the bottom of a page of Emile, after having once more cautioned us against books, writing, signs […] Rousseau adds a note: “…the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will say too I am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.”

This finding of ourselves in our travel, in our life, in our home-not-at-home takes us to the middle way, in which oppositions of what we recognize are also what is unrecognizable in us as we find each other and ourselves, find the collective I.

And so, Olsen notes the history of the program founded at the American Academy which was meant to foster greater understanding between Americans and Germans after the horror of our shared experience in the two World Wars.

On 4 July 1945, less than a month after entering Berlin, US Forces requisitioned Arnhold’s villa as an Officer’s Club.

Forty-nine years later, as the last American troops departed the city, German ambassador Richard Holbrooke proposed the establishment of a research and cultural institution designed to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and Germany.

[…]

In 1998 the first class of fellows walked through the Academy’s doors.

Since then, more than 300 writers, artists, musicians, and academics in literature, humanities, politics, economic, law and philosophy have worked here: a dozen each spring, a dozen each fall.

Look: there [[I]] am.

So we can now end the review on this note, that writing is collective collaboration, as travel is the meeting of the familiar in the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar in our familiar selves. Olsen’s ambitions for this trash diary are actually quite high. Despite the seemingly random vignettes he holds together a larger vision of our shared experience using the formalism of white space itself to articular the layer, a pacing of where we would expect the next token.

This is why critics write criticism, why philosophers write philosophy, why theorists write theory: every critical monograph, theoretical essay, philosophical tome is ultimately no more than no less than an act of spiritual autobiography.

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Of Grammatology

November 10, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Of GrammatologyOf Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Derrida blames Rousseau for logocentricism.

The figure of Rousseau stands in for logocentricism and the entire tradition, although Derrida grounds the discussion in terms of a spacial analysis. So to conclude, Derrida ends his close reading of Rousseau with

Rousseau could not think this writing, that takes place before and within speech. To the extent that he belonged to metaphysics of presence he dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signifier to signifed, representer to represented, mask to face, writing to speech. But all such oppositions are irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics. Using them, one can only operate by reversals, that is to say by confirmations. The supplement is none of these terms. It is especially not more a signifier than a signified, a representer than a presence, a writing than a speech. None of the terms of this series can, being comprehended within it, dominate the economy of differeance or supplementary. Rousseau’s dream consisted of making the supplement enter the metaphysics by force.

So while it’s difficult for me to suss out where Derrida ends and Rousseau begins at time (because I’ve never read Rousseau directly) it becomes clearer as you read the book that the figure of Grammatology is the centralized arrangement by which we create the space necessary for differance to effectively operate. Much of this text then, is Derrida’s slow etching of the spatial oppositions that create a beyond of language that is inherent to language and contingent on language. Derrida’s point is that this exteriority that exists beyond signification, this metaphysics of presence is constructed out of the natural philosophy of Rousseau. Rousseau seeks with this naturalization narrative to justify his reformulation of an inner sanctum within language. This creation of a dichotomous values of difference sets the stage for our cultural evaluation of everything else. Now that there exists a polarity Derrida shows us how to separate out the lines of value, with the implication to see these kinds of constructions exist as primarily artificial through Rousseau’s claims of naturalism.

Derrida of course, could have been more direct in saying that Rousseau can show us how our conception of what is right and just came from a division of labor, a management that is classist and elitist by dividing up sounds and words, by creating difference to elevate those in the know of such differences and alienate those who do not fit the elevation. He does, some what at the end, but this is a long and laborious effort to encapsulate the western philosophical tradition. Derrida sees what came before as a building up of logocentricism, in order to understand that philosophy within its terms, history and our discourse that creates and limits culture is seen as a literal transaction of the becoming of the episteme through the play of differance.

What’s interesting about differance is that Derrida understands it as being the key structure to the division of the poles and at the same time, less than nothing. Different from Zizek, Derrida understands this basic structure as being wholly created, not transcendentally contingent on a self mediating subjectivity. This writing then, is a fiction created within itself. There is of course, the possibility under which concepts of artifical and natural become devalued. When this occurs, should we continue to understand, as Derrida seems we should like, the artificial process by which Rousseau creates an inner limit to be false? What then becomes a way to value natural over artificial? That judgement remains beyond logocentricism itself, of which Derrida has not yet given us a line (at least not in this book): “No ontology can think its operation”. And in this sense, to step outside the outside is to reject the division of valuation of logocentricism, to make writing atonal and let us give up the thing-in-itself.

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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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Neuter

October 28, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

NeuterNeuter by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Neuter is a difficult book to read, because Cixous starts where she starts, slightly outside the context of your storied-expectations. Through a series of opening ephigraphs, and outlines of meditations on readings and texts, Cixous draws you deeper into the cramp inner space of story, subjectivity and analyst. Both psychoanalytical and philosophical, Cixous draws the thin null space, the non-existent middle, by which we see the internal dynamic structures that sustain the situation of subjectivity.

This is another way of saying that Cixous desexualizes subjectivity, by further castrating the subject. Rather than posing the master discourse of the universal All-Father, Cixous chooses instead the mother-son relationship, in order to show how a desexualized subject, one that is reversed in their “phallic-essence” is in fact one that is null. From there, she highlights the stakes of the story itself, and the relative positions of analyst and subject.

It all seems pretty mystical though (or musical, if you like), because Cixous walks the line using metaphors and literal meanings of words. Of course words are both literal and figurative at the same time, so she plays heavily with that ambiguity. As part of the writing, the text approaches self awareness, describing its own audience as it creates its own bridges and metaphors. It questions its own page turning, layering for us an introduction that takes us out of the context and turns us back around so that we can leave behind what we are supposed to experience and begin to experience what is there, outside the context of familiarity. This heavy introduction is the chanting part of the text: dive deeper-deeper! as she drops into the very inner void, and places us in the place for a master-text within the master-text, showing us bare subjectivity and bare story as the elements of the narrative are actors in the narrative itself.

Neuter then, is Cixous’s way of castrating the story, taking out the contingencies of names, place and time, by which we read universal “common” experience through each sideline of particularity. Cixous allows us to experience the arbitrary relationships of a story, and she does this masterfully, by turning all its elements inside-out, defamiliarizing the story itself by castrating it of its essential contingencies. In a sense, she makes the story a pataphysical experience of what was previously universal. Neuter is the smallest null space one can get. Neuter is the barest outline of the essential arc. Neuter is the null subjectivity, the zero degree point of view. Truly a difficult and masterful piece of writing, controlled, deliberate and evocative.

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Being and Event

October 18, 2014 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

Being and EventBeing and Event by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Alain Badiou does something particularly difficult. He provides a nexus of interplay between formal mathematics (in set theory) and ontology as presented in the philosophical tradition. It’s often an understood but unacknowledged fact that explanations don’t really “explain” in so far as they translate between discourses. For this book, that is most definitely true. The intrusion of formalism into philosophy and the intrusion of nominalism into what was before a formalism that cannot name anything because it cannot decide anything on its own. The axiom of choice is “illegal” because it cannot discern nor can it choose anything at all.

In writing this review, I am a little torn between two implicit choices in how to proceed. On the one hand, I want to point out that Badiou allows us to get to the root of discursive meaning itself — in this case the axiom of foundation. In having the ability to choose what stage we enter, even if the choice is “made for us” by us, anonymously, we can extend a generic knowledge about a situation through the act of forcing a choice in which one empty term matches another, thereby in extension, naming a situation. This is a pretty delightful bit of connection here, because it allows us to then, if we want to, absent cardinals left and right. We can take this choice and begin to dissolve various limit cardinals into successor operations, in a sense, assaulting the legitimacy of ontology. On the other hand, we could as Badiou suggested, utilize the formalism of these various mathesis and recapitulate philosophy as we knew it, trace back various events and allow formalism to become a bulwark upon which we encapsulate various points of tension, defraction and inflection within the tradition. The first thought outlined above is akin to being a kind of philosophical assassin, as Deleuze called Wittgenstein. The second thought is akin to being the boring kind of conservative academic who doesn’t at all create but only hangs his hat on work by others. As Badiou said

I have to say that philosophy does not generate any truths either, however painful this admission may be. At best, philosophy is conditioned by the faithful procedures of its times (340).

I don’t find this to be damning but Badiou resolves to make the best of it:

A philosophy worthy of the name–the name which began with Paramenides–is in any case antinomical to the serivce of goods, inasmuch as it endeavors to be at the service of truths; one can always endeavor to be at the service of art, science and of politics. That it is capable of being at the service of love is more doubtful (on the other hand, art, a mixed procedure, supports truths of love). In any case, there is no commercial philosophy (341).

And that, I very much doubt, although this short quote really only betrays Badiou’s own allegiance to a very tradition topography!

I suspect some readers who are desirous to quickly get to the point may feel that this book is unnecessarily lengthy, obtuse and just plain long winded. I found with each turn, such amazement with Badiou’s terse language, his tightly compacted sentences and the immediate grasp with which he had with so many familiar thinkers, but aligned in new ways. One may find his application of set theory to be illegal, or at least not enlightening, but it is a mistake to read this book in solely in terms of set theory or solely in terms of ontology. Badiou wishes to say something about both, as One, and thus it’s difficult to separate the two from each other within imposing the traditional academic borders from which they came. Nonetheless people do so, even though people may insist that this particular set Badiou creates is non-constructible. The only way this can be done is to regulate the set to a position of being undecidable, which is another way of saying that it’s nonsense or at the very weakest, inapplicable because its terms do not align with anything that can be summarily named.

I find, counter to Badiou, I think, in this book a much deeper, darker implication. This implication mainly being that there is no real legitimacy within thought, that our ability to make sense relies solely on our ability to apply categories, to tease out, to decide what the indiscernable is by naming tentatively and then engendering a generic situation fully by extension. What about shows us however isn’t simply that discourse itself is an arbitrary set of conditions that have been formed by the inclusion of itself as an empty signifier–but that understanding itself is the acknowledgement of its own absurd axiom but through the act of repetition… that the only real tool we have for determining the truth of any discourse is the weak form of testing its consistency. Only that which remains most consistent (and applicable) remain what is to be best determined as truth, though to be sure, a truth which mostly depends on what a subject can recognize in the void.

Now, perhaps counter to some postmodernists (I hesitate to suggest that Badiou is a post-structuralist as this is the only book of his that I have read, but being a constructivist does align him with post-structuralism), Badiou does admit to there being some truth, sometimes. To be sure much of various other writers have hit upon this form of truth as contingency too, many characters whose names are probably well known to you, Zizek and Meillasoux to name two. I won’t go over their differences here, but it is suffice to say that we have come around upon a zeitgeist of sorts, wherein we cannot find any outside legitimacy so we start to assume that it comes from thin air. But this is another way of highlighting that we do have a choice in the matter. This decision is understood and made by so many already, that their version of the truth is what ought to be best for us all, if not said in words, than in action. This feels very weak to me, and it’s not where I would like to end. Badiou ends on a note of utopic joy for philosophy. Good for him. He’s started a school, perhaps. But in service of truth, he’s hammered in a procedure that suspends us in a being-in-situation that separates us from the void. If you take Badiou to his supreme conclusion, I think we end up floating in a null space, one in which we end up simply doing what we do because there’s no reason not to.

In that sense, he is right, he has not created any truth at all. He has only shown his the emptiness of nominalism as philosophy, in a way, highlighting how all is axiom of choice, made all the more jarring as it is layered upon the formalism that is set theory.

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Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

October 1, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other LanguagesThrough the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting and easy to read (clear book) with lots of examples. Deutscher definitely loves language.

He asks the question, how does language relate to experience? Though specific examples, like color, deixis and gender, he attempts to eek out an answer. While historically we’ve assumed language, or at least well formed language, accurately reflects experience, the conclusion of Deutscher’s book shows us somewhat reservedly, that language in fact shapes our experience in very subtle ways. He isn’t saying that language closes off the door for us to abstract concepts, but he does say that language through its internal syntax, or connotations does force us to reveal specific information and suggest certain meanings to us before hand.

This book isn’t too deep, but I did enjoy its anecdotes, well researched information and clear writing. What Deutscher is basically saying however, is that language creates its own reality, as a subtle, filter that then can be used to create whatever concepts we wish to express. He is correct in pointing out, through the example of Orwell’s 1984, that the absence of certain words doesn’t mean a lack of one’s ability to conceive them. Although with the example of British researchers on color and the Guugu Yimithirr about English speakers regarding directions, that speakers generally attribute a lack of word conception as absolutely correlative of another speaker’s inability to convey the same information. An abstraction of this, Deutscher does write can be aptly summed:

According to the dominant view among linguists and cognitive scientists today, the influence of language on thought can be considered significant only if it bears on genuine reasoning–if, for instance, one language can be shown to prevent its speakers from solving a logical problem that is easily solved by speakers of another language. Since no evidence for such constraining influence on logical reasoning has ever been presented, this necessarily means–or so the argument goes–that any remaining effects of language are insignificant and that fundamentally we all think in the same way.

But it is too easy to exaggerate the importance of logical reasoning in our lives. Such an overestimation may be natural enough for those reared on a diet of analytical philosophy, where thought is practically equated with logic and any other mental processes are considered beneath notice. But this view does not correspond with the rather modest role of logical thinking in our actual experience of life. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of abstract deductive reasoning, compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse, or practical skill? How often have you spent your day solving logical conundrums, compared with wondering where you left your socks? Or trying to remember where your car is in a multilevel parking lot? How many commercials try to appeal to us through logical syllogisms, compared with those that play on colors, associations, allusions? And finally how many wars have been fought over disagreements in set theory?

The influence of the mother tongue that has been demonstrated empirically is felt in areas of thought such as memory, perception, and associations or in practical skills such as orientation. And in our actual experience of life, such areas are no less important than the capacity for abstract reasoning, probably more so.

With this Deutscher comes to the point of the book, and its exploration. While he is simply reciting other examples, theories, other people’s studies, he provides the connective tissue to preform what is essentially a philosophical argument, one that is predicated on a higher sophistication in how we should all deal with one another in our daily lives. This argument isn’t completely overpowering in his book, as the meat of his book is also very interesting. But it is nonetheless a good reason to have written (or to read) it.

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