« Posts under Theory

Recent Developments In Autism Research

October 1, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Recent Developments In Autism ResearchRecent Developments In Autism Research by Manuel F. Casanova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting collection of essays detailing the state of austism research. This book was published in 2005. I’m not a scientist or a researcher, but I did notice a few interesting things. Because austism is defined by phenomenon, it is difficult to define biologically, as there are many complex effects (through nuture or nature) that create the conditions for austist’s inability to process information like neurotypicals. This book goes a long way in attempting to figure out what the etiology is… I won’t repeat much of the biology talk, but I did find some interesting correlations in how austism is defined and how the various essays speculate on particular abnormalities in neuron or minicolumn or cerebral structures behave (as scanned in EEG or various other ways). Basically because austism is defined through in ability to extend particular behavior into generalities of context, what is known as weak coherency (or the maintenance of social context) researches speculate that weak neurological processes or abnormally formed structures contribute to a lack of larger functioning within the brain. This is to say that while parts of the brain can work well separately, in many austists, these same parts can’t work together as well as a neurotypical’s can.

Now, I have read some speculative literature however, that argues that austists have a more general functioning and it is the neurotypicals reliance on certain hardwired protocols that limit their ability to generalize contexts, but once one takes out a basis for how to measure deviance, one loses the ability to speak of coherency whatsoever. Being social creatures, we need to form group coherency, and while different social groups form coherency differently, the inability to form a strong coherency whatsoever between individuals does make for problems in social behavior. This is defined as austism.

What makes austism studies so interesting is that its abnormalities in functioning reveal to us outlier examples of how our own mind/brains work. What is missing in this austism research book, I thought, was further examples of how the diagnosises defined and cohered what austism is. Certainly the definition has changed over time, and such definitions would impact the study. After all, all this scientific research is an attempt to find a way to determine how it some humans cannot cohere neurotypical social and cognitive extensions… it would be interesting, although perhaps beyond this work to discuss what normal actually is.

Anyway, an interesting read as scientists and researches attempt to find patterns in one area (social behavior and discourse coherency) and correlate it to patterns in another (in this case, brain functioning) or genotypical expression.

View all my reviews

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!

View all my reviews

Sexuality & Space

September 23, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Sexuality & SpaceSexuality & Space by Jennifer Bloomer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pretty good collection of essays, even if it was a bit odd. Any title that puts space and sexuality together though, has got to be a little far reaching. Ultimately the themes come out pretty clearly, that space and our ability to create spaces (architectural, inside/outside, domestic) reflect our inhabited notions of sexual identity and sexuality together… This is pretty true. In our postwar American lifestyle that past may be somewhat muted, but it certainly was(is) a consideration still in how we designate what people are for and how we functionally inhabit different positions without a larger social hierarchy… whose mobilization is a narrative of gender roles and displaced positions.

There is nothing more than these positions; the displacement is the position. There is no higher order. And while this level of abstraction is difficult to explain at times, since explanation is often reductive to the next level down, there is no deferral to any other level, as this is the base level. In this sense, many of these essays resort to naming or connecting novel tropes together, creating quasi-figures that haunt the edges of our comprehension of social order… in order words, the authors are often forced into metaphoric language in order to better express the connections that are brought together in their analysis. When this happens, as with examinations of post-modern urban landscapes or musicology, there runs a risk that the reader may encounter a sublime object in the examination of such a diverse heterology. What I mean is that often such an examination runs the risk of collapsing into a trope to stand-in for the argument. Because this is a collection of essays however, and none of the essayists collaborated to share a theoretical angle or system, we don’t often have that collapse. But what is spectacular about these essays is that they run very close to that edge, standing at a position very close at times, to nonsense, all the while creating perfect sense out of that contortion.

Many of these essays are very good. I don’t want to reduce this review into a description of these essays, but in the connection of sexuality and space, we see at times, the introduction of gaze and looking as a figure that denominates both sexuality as an appraisal and distance — both as a mode of determination and control. We also see how viewing itself, through television, windows, and textual synthesis of video and images of architecture differentiate the contours of inside/outside, to define space as it were. We also have the social expression of space, be it an aesthetics of households or aesthetics of architecture, or art and photography as expressive of cityspaces or identity. Either way, this is an inspiring collection of essays all of which really deal with the two themes of the title. Since this is a collection of essays though, I’ll stop. But it would have been fun if somehow a centralized connection was to be made, a concrete metaphor to stand in for both sexuality and space could have been formed. But I suppose if that’s the case, you would need a monumentous figure like Luce Irigaray to do it.

Just the same though, a good read.

View all my reviews

The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s

September 19, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840sThe Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s by Immanuel Wallerstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Once again, Wallerstein looks at great detail into a topic as complex as world systems analysis. This time, he focuses on a big question: What was the French Revolution and what did it do?

His analysis is largely historical, and from, as always, an impressive number of sources. When reading this book though, while the first chapter is devoted to further developing and answering the question, I think this book is a little weaker than its previous two. In part, because Wallerstein answers his question in the first chapter: The French Revolution did not spark capitalism, but was a continuation of it — and essentially did not provide a break in the logic of the world system, only a further point of it… so consequently the rest of the book examines how this time period developed and then exceeded the Napoleonic wars without much interruption. For sure, the French Revolution was a major event. It did give pause to all the actors who then perhaps, changed policy or strategy in order to account for it. But the world was already run by economic consideration, so really, business as usual.

Wallerstein instead locates the French Revolution as the last spasm of the French in their fight against the developing British Hegemony. As always, Wallerstein looks at economic basis and reads how policy responds to attempt to capitalize on this material basis, and whether or not these policies had its intended effect.

What I found really interesting was how freedom and ideology were instead utilized as a narrative to rally an unhappy people — especially in the Americas in part with the British colonies (most of which did not join the American Revolution) and also with the Spanish colonies, whose racial complexity (300 years of interbreeding gave rise to a mixed race that was part of the economic and social fabric) told a completely different story, giving rise to a different response. In part, the liberation of the Americas as political and economic units reflected the level of their economic development and inherent quasi-independence as individual actors in the world economy. Independence then, comes politically because it the opportunity presents itself as Europe goes through the Napoleonic war to reshuffle her political structure to “catch up” with its economic reality. What I would have liked Wallerstein to write more on, was how the rise of nationalism in Europe, something which happened with the French reshuffling, could be accounted for when people identify with their body-politic as an economic realization. Do people become nationalistic because they realize they need to be politically responsible for their economic wealth? I think this is the answer he would give. Reading between the lines it seems so, but if he had said it directly, then that would have been nice.

On the other hand, political instability follows a shifting of economic basis, as with the case of West Africa, China, India, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Now Russia went voluntarily, with that intention, it seems, so that’s a little different but with each other, their inclusions into the world economy were first marked by a destablization of their economic power base, a reshuffling of economic power into a new rising class, and then the dissolution of their major political unity as this new rising class pursued their own agendas rather than keeping social stability. India was particularly interesting as the British eventually tried to keep the country together in order to ensure profitable trade… this did not prove fruitful for them, as the cost was too great, except in keeping India under their control as a route to China which was more profitable.

Within all this, I see the rise of the bourgeois class, with their identity and social ambitions… their taste for exotic foods, goods, and status helped enslave entire foreign populations, and restructured the entire world to learn to acquire the same taste for luxury items… Wallerstein doesn’t look to this as a driving force, at least he doesn’t really mention this in this book. Instead, he concentrates on the economic exploit and the changing political landscape as an attempt to solidify lines of trade, political dominance and military exercise in the name of the former two. If anything, over the last three books of his, he has been convincing me that economics — access to resources — remains the primary motive for individuals and populations. That our political well being and agendas are not due to ideology (it can be for individuals) but it is due in greater part, for our desire to secure wealth for ourselves (or with the masses, at least enough to maintain an accustomed lifestyle).

Seen in this way, the French Revolution like many other revolutions, as Wallerstein points out, was mainly the very poor rising up, caught in the ideology and stirrings of a merchant class that is unhappy with how the ruling class has managed their interests… and then the merchant class taking command of the rising masses (only because they want to direct its growth to secure their own stability, rather than seeing their own place in society like-wise overturned) and then a finally, the installation of conservative governance, or at least a government somewhat conservative, to maintain at least enough of the power structure so as to secure some economic status quo so that resource and ownership are not taken away from the wealth that be. It is in this way that many Latin-America countries have their “revolutions” (that those that benefit most from the existing order would see a revolution that continues to benefit their order), revolutions where the existing economic infrastructure remains the same.

I hang back from giving him 5 stars mainly because I would have liked to see some examination of ideology in this view… something touched upon but not fully developed… if anything a strong view of ideology from an economic position would be to claim that all ideology is propaganda, meant to direct the masses either to overthrowing the ruling class or maintaining some economic basis for those who already have economic power… a weak view of ideology is that it does reflect some new ideas about the role of people, to legitimatize the freedoms that people can gain through mass political action. While this is not Wallersteins thesis in this book, his introduction to his world systems analysis promises a deeper view of world capitalist systems in order to also account for ideology… something which is largely takes a backseat in this book to the actual moves of economic realities… that is to say, save for questioning the role of the French Revolution in the rise of capitalism.

View all my reviews

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

September 17, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of ContingencyAfter Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I haven’t read any clearer reading of the philosophical tradition in a while, and that’s saying quite a bit. While Meillassoux is mostly interested in the philosophical tradition, and its constraints (extending it somewhat to religion and science) he is able to dance within that tight framework and come up with a clear summation of the larger picture.

Many thinkers tend to fight in the nitty-gritty, and that’s most likely because in the process of spending so much time learning what the “greats” have said, they become invested themselves. And because academia encourages people to disagree with one another. How else could they jockey for position?

I agree with most of the comments around; that Meillassoux has managed to say something different. And how he says is intensely fascinating. He sums up the aesthetic goals of so many familiar names: Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Leibniz in so many terms. He brings us around to Badiou and demonstrates in slightly different terms, Badiou’s genius and how that enables us to begin to formulate a new beginning, one that does not rely on Being or totalization in order to guarantee meaning. He leaves us then with a new project, one in which to find a new totem to anchor as the absolute reference, one that isn’t Kant’s old hat.

While I find his book and direction exhilarating, and agree with his reading (especially how he puts many terms) I do believe that there are other ways to put the pieces.

Here is another conception of philosophy: Philosophy isn’t so much about truth as it is about managing complexity. Much of the time you do need to have some way of organizing discourse so as to be able to relate to one another. This much is certainly how people interact with one another or how discourses are able to connect. Meillassoux ultimately wants us to find an anchor as to how to arrange understanding… the anchor he finds for us is to match whatever mathematics does, which in itself is very intriguing. I suppose math is a safer bet for legitimacy than any of the traditional absolutes to which philosophy has in the past adhered. The last pages of his book is basically an outline of a non-metaphysical but speculative absolute based off facticity should look like. I’d like to find out how this kind of speculation works too. But I think Meillassoux goes a little too far in his search for Truth and tosses some of the baby out with the bathwater because in a way, he takes too much for granted even though in another way, he takes nothing for granted.

I don’t believe that consciousness or causation or non-contradiction are necessary even if I find that the connection of the parts is what is most interesting as to what meaning is. In a way, perhaps that still makes me a correlationist in Meillassoux’s book… because I don’t adhere to the absoluteness as being external to our experience…that Meillassoux so wishes to determine. Yet if any axiometric is available — as Meillassoux admits — then why facticity? Why science? Certainly not the form of science! Science will not permit the asking of questions it cannot answer, because that is bad science. So he must be talking about the content science produces and in what way this kind of dia-chronicity should be found to be meaningful or not…perhaps as meaningfulness can be modifications of how we understand ourselves today, rather than as positions to be justified by where we are now, that reversal of a reversal he calls the counter-revolution of Ptolemy’s revenge. It sounds good to speak by naming “where we are” in this way, but then again, I am not so sure we even yet know where we are now. In this way then, I think I don’t really even show up on his radar because he takes the productivity of meaning in its mechanics to be beyond question, at least in this inquiry.

Meillassoux also didn’t talk about certain other positions contemporary philosophers have taken either. I’d be interested in hearing him on that regard.

All the same this is a highly charged book. It requires a familiarity with the tradition, and a willingness to consider thoughts from another angle, a difficulty many of us have if we are not able to distill this vast amount of information into its more fundamental terms.

View all my reviews

Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity

September 11, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human IdentityMeeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity by Tom Crompton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although quite short, this book tackles the effectiveness of basic environmental issues from a psychology perspective. The idea is simply stated in the title. How people construct their extended intersubjective selves determines their attitudes towards the environment. Further on, calling awareness to their coping mechanisms best allows activists to determine approaches that won’t scare people away, or cause them to invoke their defense mechanisms, leading to further pursuit of pleasure which will degrade the environment.

I thought this book was clearly written. Considering the depth of this topic and the brevity of the book, it was a joy to read. The clinical experiments cited were appropriate, although I would have liked more data on alternate approaches and their effectiveness.

View all my reviews

Venn Diagrams

September 9, 2014 / posted in dialectics, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Wrote an article on Venn Diagrams.

Published here: http://entropymag.org/venn-diagrams/

The modernist project extends itself from Descartes’ aesthetic, to build from Truths, necessary and universal. But what is a universal? Being themselves, universals must necessarily also be a priori. For something that is a priori is a predicate that is its own subject. Such a relationship is by definition necessary because subtracting the predicate dissolves the subject. Such a relationship is also universal because no matter what you add to a universal, the universal is still primarily itself, in-itself. What is also a feature of universality is that such a subject will always give rise to itself. Like reason, universals form their own reason, their own ground, and their own existence…

Difference and Repetition

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Difference and RepetitionDifference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book. I think the first time, I found the first two chapters mind blowing, but the rest of the book mostly escaped me.

This time around, the other chapters seem even more amazing then the first two.

What’s difficult about reading this kind of Deleuze is that he really does expect you to be familiar with the other philosophers he would throw at you. And yet we all understand that many of these philosophers wrote and thought within certain, perhaps imcompossible aesthetics. Deleuze pulls out these aesthetics and combines them together to show how they line up and how they differentiate. This makes his writing difficult because while he is writing philosophy he is also writing philosophy about philosophy. The amount of complexity that arises quickly can get out of hand.

What Deleuze wants to do, and what makes this book so great, is that he tackles the implicit aesthetic of the philosophical tradition itself. He is highly critical as to how we understand the particular reference points of philosophy as they are presented. As so many have said yes, Deleuze turns Plato on his head here. Deleuze is taking the concept of identity as not being the primary mode of philosophy but instead takes difference itself. One way to get to this is to understand a tri-part system of difference, where we first have difference which may not even exist, we have differentiation which is what Badiou calls being-as-countable and we have differenciation which is best understood as Being, or at least the unitary wrapping of Oneness itself.

This concept of the one, that for Deleuze there is many and there is sometimes One, is best exemplified by the eternal return. The form of what returns is always One but it is the same one even if it is different… this is to take chaos itself as affirmation.

Which really is the main push here. Deleuze wants to get away from the boring dialectic identity that envelops any kind of dialectical analysis using Not. He wants to get away from the boring hypostasis of representationalism; that deferral of meaning implicit in more traditional forms of thought that create structure but only to wrap its meaning making “structureness” within the exteriority of ontology metaphysics of presence. Deleuze does this by looking at the various contingencies themselves, localized as difference and building from the formality of difference so that we can begin to get at how the force of ideas carry through, how the creation of the content expressed in the general idea can arise from contingency itself… so that we don’t always have to appeal to some kind of fictitious absoluteness to ground identity or make ground an expression of the identity of One. We can understand each difference on its own, as its own originary process. This loses for us the possibility of totality itself, but not necessarily… Deleuze seems to go so far as to want to explain everything in terms of itself but he stops short in the asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible. We don’t need to define a noumenomenal world of Not to buffer our own universality. In this sense, Deleuze is fine with contradiction and over-coding. We see here in this post-structuralism the loss of the absolute in order to have a world… that the most concise referent in discourse isn’t the absolute One, which makes it a boring discourse of enforcing the one everywhere — rather the most concise referent is the world itself, which not only includes the possible but also the impossible.

This advances Deleuze to the point of pure contemplation. He over turns the aesthetic controls on philosophy so as to free thought up for its own interplay rather than using it as a point of control of what we are allowed to think or not think. I repeat. The lack of explication and wrapping of thought (as what makes it asymmetrical) is a force on its own, its own formalism. And though he appeals to other discourses, such as math and science to exemplify these structures, their appearance is seemingly uncorrelated. How can he justify this? The normal aesthetic of philosophy, as we are so familiar with it, would be of comfort as it repeats what we already understand. It makes sense through its repetition of formality. But this new point: the argument can only be its own justification. Determination is its own difference. For that reason, there are points at which Deleuze approaches nonsense. For in talking about the creation of meaning, we can only appeal to mechanisms that are foreign to meaning. Said again, Deleuze opens the door, to let us think the impossible. It is this very edge of sense that Deleuze would have us stand, at the font of the thinkable itself.

View all my reviews

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Time and Narrative, Volume 1Time and Narrative, Volume 1 by Paul Ricoeur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While a brilliant work, I found the layout of his work troubling. Ricoeur is definitely able to tease out minute difference between ideas, explicate authors who may not speak directly to one another, and relate them to the larger thesis as a whole. But I found his structure to be troubling as the work is split into two sections, which seem only related via the concepts of time and narrative… (even if this is a multiple volume work, he should outline a better road map.)

Really, these two concepts do not coexist at the same level. When he first starts, Ricoeur seems to be willing to just talk about time and narrative as general ideas. His use of Aristotle and Augustine were quite inspired. Like a radio, he tuned to the concept of narrative so as to highlight how time was used as an excuse to connect disparate things. His citing of narrative and metaphor as methods to justify understanding (the function of connecting two different things) was remarkable. From that point on, he could have spoke at length about anything he liked; after all what analysis, discursive or philosophy was not made to achieve understanding? But then, he turned to history as narrative.

History was an interesting maneuver as that field encompasses both time and narrative. Like his examination in the first part, he is able to use narrative as a high level organizational filter to scrub history so as to show how history is less about time than it is about narrative organization. I actually don’t have much to add, except that chapter 5 felt like the weakest part of the book. At all times Ricoeur’s analytical ability, and the range of his study was astounding and a little overwhelming. Still, at parts, he seems to meander, seems draw conclusions that feel a unclear as far as where he wants to go. This could be an issue with how he draws his analysis…often what he says and who he is quoting feels muddled. I am not complaining that I wanted less material. I don’t mind that he rag picks among different thinkers to support what he wants to say or that he mixes them together. I would have liked a little more structure to highlight what he wants us to take away.

As it is, the conclusion of second part didn’t add back to the first. He really only talks about history and time at the end of his conclusion, instead of wrapping back to Augustine and Aristotle. Perhaps this conclusion was meant to only be a conclusion for second part, not for the entire work.

At all points though, Ricoeur is eager to show us how narrative (and history) are forms of creating knowledge. We use time as an excuse to order objects of narrative (be it cultural, historical, social or otherwise). These different objects of narratives are fields of discourse that we use to ordain a master order to achieve unity in a concept, for example, the history of the Mediterranean or the history of Victorian England. The construction of these high level unities require the meshing of first and second order objects, which attain a dual status; their gap between what we see them and how they belonged to a time and place we have no access to, except through indirect semiotic objects. Their connection and quasi-status as objects was weaved through what Ricoeur calls historic intentionality… this intentionality not only doubles the objects in study they also create the supra-object of study, a unity whose grasp we take to be synonymous with understanding.

I think Ricoeur’s greater thesis seeks to explicate the what human understanding is, and so an analysis of history as narrative still lacks some higher level grasp on what history is as a totality as he also in the first part, is mired in the mechanics of emplotment and how the concept of time is the ground we use to bind temporal objects as greater unities (like narrative that we call justice). Beyond the immanent mechanisms of how these parts are ordered, how they work aesthetically, Ricoeur does not speak too much about the power of narrative or understanding… for example the role of history in greater society. We see that history is one kind of narrative that links other narratives through causal singular imputation rather than generic law (as with physics), but are there other orders that are not narrative? Is all understanding narrative? I think Ricoeur says yes. But he doesn’t go in this direction yet; he’s still talking about the narrative immanence, using the concept of narrative to demonstrate its essentiality in constructing temporal unity. Perhaps he will cover this along with other kinds of narratives in his second volume.

View all my reviews

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral MindThe Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What’s particularly hard to swallow about this book is that Jaynes goes far to argue for undermining not only how we know ourselves but also how we are to account for what we are doing. One of the basic rubrics of science and philosophy is our concept of consciousness, as a container for our individuality and our ability to comprehend/experience. To question consciousness itself in the form that we believe it comes in, in the method by which we determine ourselves is to question the very possible ordering of how we coexist today. This isn’t to say that our conception of ourselves isn’t natural, or that consciousness itself isn’t natural, but that is to say that we don’t have to live as we do or be how we are.

When one argues for the dissolution of such a basic structural artifact, it becomes terribly difficult for people to follow in how to evaluate that argument. Many of the comments around this book reflect both how clear and powerful Jaynes is in setting up his argument, but also many of the comments display a complete lack of trust in his argument because they do not see a deeper underlying appraisal of how to evaluate what he says.

Its true that in a big way, his ideas are unfalsifiable. We can’t disprove them. We can’t do EEG readings on people that were alive many generations ago. We only have textual analysises. And we can’t reproduce the results of the past either because it’s unethical or we have become so tainted with our own evaluations of consciousness that such “experimentation” would be impossible to reproduce in a pure clinical environment. In this sense, what Jayne is doing isn’t science, even if he is coming from a scientific background. What he is doing is doxa, or opinion. And science really only likes questions that it can readily answer… meaning that it only poses questions it can answer, in general, questions that do not shake things up too badly so that we lose our ability to even know if a question has or has not been answered.

What I like especially about this book is that Jayne takes us to a far away place. He throws his thesis out there, marks it as a point for us to follow. In doing so, he begs us to loosen our sense of what we take to be knowledge and consider the reality that our given ideas of ourselves limit how we even frame the things we are desirous to study. The objects of knowledge are objects created by what we think we know. But what is the proper basis for authority?

This is one of the most frightening implications of what he says. There is no proper basis. All authority is self referential. The most rigid of us (or unimaginative) would consider that he makes no sense, because sense making requires certain correlations in our thinking that are made unavailable if we are to consider what he says as being actual. His chapter in hypnosis is most telling. If we consider what he says to be true: that different hypnotic experiments parrot the ideas of what the hypnotized subjects thought was hypnosis then it frighteningly follows that our own ideas of what is true inexorably alters what we believe can be true… which means a rejection of everything which cannot follow the ideas we have to be given.

I don’t want to make a review of this book too long. I do want to point out that consciousness and language today can be studied under the rubric of cognitive linguistics. And the idea that metaphors are the basic mode of understanding does follow many contemporaneous thinkers today, even if it was less compellingly so when he wrote this book. So we seem to be catching up to him, although we will wonder about the possibility of an awareness that isn’t as discrete and individualized as the consciousness he describes being so in past humankind. Matching his idea to the contours of what we know to be history (as a series of events) isn’t proof of truth, but it does add his reasoning among everything else… including the question as to what is the proper authority of how we should know things.

For me, the key to what seems to be confusion in reading Jaynes’ work comes from the position of understanding as metaphor. As anything can be metaphorized, so can any position be created as a justified reality. This goes against science’s desire for rigor, that to know the universe means its mathematical formulation… even though mathematicians themselves may disagree as to what are ultimately valid constructs by which understanding can extend, and those extensions may be incomplete in the sense that they cannot be translatable to the daily experiential lived positions we take for granted. For example, the birth of life explained by biology does not follow our lived experience of life among the living… not only to say that while someone who maybe an interbehaviorial psychologist or a physicist may claim that their field can explain reality, it can never justify why one twin may become a psychologist and the other a strict mormon or any other ridiculously constrained situation… for such “explanations” always require endless deferral into other regimes which can then mirror the movement as an originary “cause”. We can talk about this as a discursive form of Hume’s take down of causation.

In other words, formal understanding explained without content can never justify particular contents and particular understandings even as understanding exploded into such a general paradigm may lead to any number of contingencies that we may find to be without cause. The confusion has to do with description or prescription. Is science (or any collection of relations that constitute a system) only to describe or is it to prescribe?

For Jayne, science rests wholly on the former, and for that I applaud his efforts. We may not like what we read, but if we find that we cannot take sense of it, then the failure is wholly on our part. What is so objectionable that how we conceive of ourselves today is wholly contingent on a very basic conception of how we fit in with one another? Are we so into our set ideas of social groups that we cannot accept what we call as madness as a more general position of what we call sanity as it insists on itself for-itself?

In the end though, how one reader, you or I, apprehend this work, or any other work, is a very personal question. But I find his intensity and clarity to be rare among thinkers. At the end of the day though, who knows? We might as well look into it. And if he inspires it, so all the better it must be.

View all my reviews

« Older PostsNewer Posts »