« Posts under Theory

Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing

Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life WritingHélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps it was a mistake for me to read this book first, without reading much of Cixous first. The interview, while long, provided for me much interest as to what Cixous was trying to do. I didn’t much appreciate the sectioning of the conversation, but I did like the free flow. In a way, it was about what writing is for her, what she does with it and how she exceeds herself through writing.

The interview revolves around what writing is, what it does, where it arises and ultimately what it means for others, for the self, what we find in it, and how we come to be… for Cixous, writing seems to be about touching herself and others in ways that were perhaps unsaid by language… for there is much language can say but does not find voice in social reality, or reality at all… and that exploration makes writing a kind of love, to love the other in the self too. If anything, the interview’s length attests to the ground it uncovers as it runs through all the gambit of the traditional meanings and attitudes surrounding writing to uncover at its root, love and the other.

As Cixous notes, we often cannot be tempted to love, running from it more often than pursuing it…

Perhaps I should return to this after reading more of Cixous’s work, instead of just snippets, for much of this read a little too abstractly for me. I guess at my basic nature, I’m a structuralist in many ways, which is why this was so hard for me to read.

View all my reviews

Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone

Religion within the Limits of Reason AloneReligion within the Limits of Reason Alone by Immanuel Kant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In his late age, Kant presents a final last word on religion, as seen from his phenomenonal system. It’s kind of amazing that even though he was an old man when he wrote this, the church didn’t try and kill him after he wrote it.

Despite his many pleas that he isn’t writing about scripture, that this is best left to the experts in church, and he only uses this as an example for philosophy, Kant ends up writing a very damning view indeed on how religion fits in with everything else he’s already written about; ethics, subjectivity to name two subject areas.

Kant basically proposes that reason itself is insufficient to account for religion. That God and ethics are beyond reason, although reason itself plays an important part in constituting the right path to religion. While he can’t find any real natural state of man internally that is the root of good or evil, because man has free will, Kant does admittedly find that man can be evil if he chooses to be swayed by the opinions of others, to follow a sensuous path, to satisfy his own animal desires, or if he chooses to have dominion over others. In fact, Kant basically finds all forms of contingency to be evil; all ways of man to limit his focus to things in the here and now, the earthly pleasures, to be sure, but also in terms of religious rituals, in what he calls “historical faith”… that time tested ways of being faithful can be ways in which the very hierarchy of a religion can be antithetical to what ethics and morality is about.

When Kant talks about the role of the state, he means that we need an overarching state (of Being) in order to unify us, so we can be good neighbors. This seems right and fair. This primarily second point of view on us, the small other, is a way in which we can get along with one another. And yet this is not enough. He introduces a 3rd point of view, that is, religion, because we need universal principles that can objectively tell us where the boundaries of our relationship with our neighbors lie. That is to say, it’s not enough for people to negotiate the boundaries of their own social interaction, people need a third position, one that supercedes the second point of view (but does not limit it or replace it) in order to have a true ethics. This point of view is religion itself.

What’s interesting about this book is that Kant is speaking about something beyond the boundaries of what he can speak about. The limits of reason on religion is that reason itself can only service religion, it cannot define it. Instead, Kant uses this tool of reason to demonstrate (conclusively or not, up to you) how corrupt our faith can get, how “beside the point” everything can be. If God and religion are beyond us, and that’s something that seems obvious, then we can only adhere to the strictest purest point of worship, to follow the guidance of religion for its own sake. He says this pretty clearly… and it may as well be from the Bhagavad Gita: 1) do your duty (with no thought of the fruits of labor) and 2) love everyone else as your self…

With this, he lists false conclusions that corrupt these two principles. For instance, while reason is instrumental to sorting out sensuous (visible) distractions, reason itself cannot run the show, for it cannot replace the binding that religion and God can afford us, to each of us individually, and to all of us collectively.

In this sense, this book is built on the same principles of intangible, inexpressibles such as his Critiques are; understanding which cannot be expressed but through the sensuous, for example. Or the legislative law of desire, which also cannot be expressed but through the sensuous. In each, but especially here, Kant seems to say that the way to have a taste of the completeness of Being lies solely in reasoning that directs us towards a sublime. Like as in Critique of Judgement, we turn our attention outwards, towards a position in the suprasensible that cannot be felt through ecclesiastical faith, unlimited and non-contingent (unlike historical doctrine).

If anything this makes Kant a kind of neo-Plato.

Overall I thought the book was well written (or at least also, well translated). In particular, Kant writes these long sentences because he’s being very particular. He needs to outline what that particularity is, so he asks that we keep one thought in our head, while he detours it with examples, and asides. Then, we can return to the idea that has transgressed itself, and continue on (Hegel does this in extreme). So if you can get used to his unadorned language, his lengthy sentences and his complex but very specific thought, you’ll find that this book isn’t so hard to read. Kant is thorough too. He has a slight sense of humor but its always in service of this dogmatic reason, getting to the edge of what can be thought. This time, to bring us to the font of religion itself, right on God’s doorstep.

View all my reviews

Timaeus/Critias

Timaeus/CritiasTimaeus/Critias by Plato
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These two works together were meant to be a trilogy about Athens, Greeks and their place in the world. Unfortunately, the 3rd book was lost, or never written, and the 2nd book, Critias only survives as a fragment. Still, interesting. The three men, speak to Socartes about the nature of everything, highlighting the Other of the Greeks, the Egyptians, as being part of the primary source needed to complete the story.

The first book, Timaeus is interesting because he speaks of how the universe started before man was made… how man was made rationally with intention, and all that. With Timaeus you see how Plato tries to ground everything, the 4 elements for example, into Being, with ideas being the root… (as the 4 elements are basically tiny shapes, and what’s more pure as an idea than a shape?) From this, you get the idea that once everything is built up from Truth, we should then, with the history of Atlantis in Critias, and the lost 3rd book, come to a systematic understanding of the way in which Athens has developed and should develop… with an eye on purity and rightness.

The idea is simple. If there was a way we were made, a reason for us being the way we are, then there too is a way for us to be, an intented way for us to live, and a right way for us to not go against our nature.

Only in a democracy like Athens can someone like Plato have existed… Plato who feared the nihilism of the Sophists, in which their collectively disordered wisdom threatened to destroy the inherent meaning and values that made Athens what it is. He of course, wrote his entire life, to try and find coherence; find Being which could bind those disorderly ideas, and bring them up from negating each other, so that we can have values, so that we can have orderly society. So that we can be a people with a moral and ethical content we could be proud of and exhibit.

At least, that’s how I see this book within the larger scheme of what Plato was doing.

View all my reviews

Spiral Dynamics

Spiral DynamicsSpiral Dynamics by Don Edward Beck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this book because it offered an easy structure of how to classify ego growth. Plus it was from psychologists. But unlike psychology (or perhaps like psychology), this book is a mirror: it takes what is supposed to be a science of describing development and treats it as a prescriptive model for how things are supposed to be.

Having gone through the gambit now, there are a couple features I find to be puzzling. What is the swing between self and group as the focus important? And the expansion of the ego self — while expressible as a kind of hegelian dialectic (and synthesis) — why should we expect a self to follow this kind of progression? For those of you reading this review and not sure of what I am talking about, it’s simple. Hegelian synthesis happens when two unlike phenomenon, perhaps subject and object, find themselves at first in opposition, but then later coming to terms with how the boundaries between them are mentally constructed, find themselves in unity, absorbed into common ground. What Hegel is saying about our classification is simply that the process of learning also involves the process of reclassifying things so as to make greater abstractions of what difference lies between them. So to go back to why we should expect the self to follow this kind of progression: why should ego develop follow along the parameters set by the authors of this book? Why should rule based grounding qua self be between self qua domination vs self qua acceptance?

What gives the authors a bit of a cop out here is to also say that ego development in a particular spectrum can happen anytime regardless of environment. This makes sense too; that ego development has to do with how the ego sees things, or how the ego creates the world. But it is with this lesson that we step away from spiral dynamics as a science and enter the field of metaphysics. Without a determinable metric from which to gain a vantage point, we find ourselves immersed in dogmatic fields from which we cannot find any kind of orientation.

But that’s also part of the problem of the book too… that when talking about ego development, different egos reading the book will find themselves seeing the different ego positions differently. So to say it another way; depending on who you are, the book you are reading will change. This much is said in the first chapter. So how do we understand what book we are reading in the first place?

There are commonalities in the language, but we are talking about the relationships between points that makes the difference. So this book really only works by grounding itself as an objective field, using common language. But that really forces us out of understanding and into a list-view… that is to say, this book reduces people into stages without giving any kind of justification or deeper understanding as to what ego development is all about.

Perhaps I miss the point of the book. Perhaps all this is meant to do is provide some kind of application rather than a theory to understand why we are the way we are or why we should change from position to position. Again, Hegel can provide us answers to how synthesis works, and needs to work, as we reach the limits of each stage… but that’s crow-barring a theory which doesn’t distinguish what specific limitations of each stage carry… and in fact, there isn’t any explanation as to why each of the features in the spiral should be arranged the way they are, expect that one gets more and more abstract with each stage.

All in all, not a book that is terribly interesting intellectually, but it is useful if only as a quick and easy guideline.

View all my reviews

Simulacra and Simulation

Simulacra and SimulationSimulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is not an easy book to read, in part because Baudrillard starts off with his ideas in full development and then talks around them, to explain them. He will start off with an example, develop the idea within the example, and then end by wrapping the example around itself, rather than ending on continual applications of the idea. In any case, he doesn’t do the historicity thing by telling you the past, where the idea may have come from, and then develop the series of thoughts that outline the form of the idea. Instead, Baudrillard plops you in the middle and makes you flounder. And unlike other thinkers, he doesn’t quote too many philosophers; in fact, nearly none at all. Instead of giving you guide posts along the way, he’d rather you sink or swim. Get it or not.

Baudrillard’s basic idea is that we don’t live in reality—that is, in the common sense use of the word, there is no thing-in-itself. He doesn’t even talk that way, as though the thing-in-itself is unnecessary. Following Quentin Meillasoux, Baudrillard is an absolute correlationist: the relationship we have with language is what also determinates any outside of language. Thus, for Baudrillard, we live in a world of simulacra. That’s easy so far. But there’s a catch. For Baudrillard, reality has already been exceeded because the processes that we buy into. These processes are unthinking, mechanical means that produce the simulacra which we then take for the actual thing. The easy examples of postmodern malls in America come to mind, or Disneyland.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation (12 – 13).

But such simulations only act to hide the fact that we can’t get back to reality because we’ve lost it. So this explains why Baudrillard drops us into the mix. He can’t explain why this happened. Once we’ve gotten sucked into hyperreality we’re here. It’s a traumatic event. The sheer force of hyperreality obscures any possibility of a central signifier. There is no metaphysics of presence; in fact he doesn’t even mention such a concept because it’s not important. Instead, he talks of what remains when the model has exhausted itself. “When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothings remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder (144, original italics).” One of the key sections, philosophy-wise, in this book has to do with the remainder, which is another way of talking about emptiness as a thing. The remainder is the excessive real, “in a strict sense, it cannot be defined except as the remainder of the remainder (143)”—that is, left over after processes have stopped. You might say hey, wait, isn’t everything real? And yes, that’s how language is, but the model for what is real and what is hyperreal have become the same. For instance, in talking of diplomas, their ubiquity and the ease at which they can be acquired— for whoever goes through the process gets one—signifies nothing but their meaninglessness. What makes diplomas meaningless is that it’s not about knowledge; it’s about process. Diplomas connect in a system of simulacra that only point to other simulacra. Similar to Derrida, with Baudrillard, we end with a passed reference that is always missed. What’s left over is the reality we deal with, the remainder that we must recycle back into a process for it to be what we think it is, which is a problem we have today with things that are “meta,” that the meaning of a thing today is often exactly what it is, a simulation, a context that determines our locus, not what it should be for us. For example, if we go to say, Paris, that trip will be like “a family trip,” with all the clichés and potholes of a family trip, which might as well be a sitcom simulating a family trip. The process of going through replaces the reality of a family trip, so that really, you’re just “doing” the “family trip.” You can’t otherwise because we are trapped in hyperreality. This is like how fake internet money in a game treated like real money in an economy becomes real money. The caveat is that real money then is just as fake as fake money because it’s just another simulation due to a formal process. Baudrillard notes that, like the Borges story, the territory itself decays when the map of the territory replaces the territory by being the territory itself. The simulacra of simulation, the pattern itself, the hyperreality has taken over reality by replacing reality. In hyperreality, the map meant to represent reality becomes a simulacra of reality itself so that we don’t get real, we get the map qua real qua map.

The fact that he is able to note the lack of a lack, as Zizek would say: the anti-philosophy at the heart of philosophy, so to speak, places Baudrillard with all the other philosophical greats of our time. He notices the void that persists throughout simulation: that which organizes simulacra and leaves only sense making in its wake.

Meaning, truth, the real cannot appear except locally, in a restricted horizon, they are partial objects, partial effects of the mirror and of equivalence. All doubling, all generalization, all passage to the limit, all holographic extension (the fancy of exhaustively taking account of this universe) makes them surface in their mockery (108 – 109).

Thus, the curve of meaning making is in fact what is created through the distortion of the absent remainder, leaving us only sensible sense, the trace that makes sense. In other words, when speaking of truth, or ideology, Baudrillard is able to show us how adding the unnameable nothing (the social totality, the remainder) back into the mix gets us the totality that we cannot exceed. The simulation always over-codes totality by naming its void, leaving us always within the wake of its own logic. Baudrillard writes: “As the social in its progression eliminates all residue, it itself becomes residue. In designating residual categories as ‘Society,’ the social designates itself as a remainder. (144, original italics).” This is another way of saying that in trying to split a totality like the social, we name parts of it also things, so as to make a thing out of its parts. But the social as a totality, as a bare named signifier, persists because the social always remains as a residue to mark the situation we are in. With the naming of any void, the absent remainder, we can never get away from conditions like being in society, whatever ideology or other kinds of hyperreality. Hyperreality is the kind of situation presupposes the very topography that we are trying to define, to get away from! If anything, what is confusing about Baudrillard is that he does not allow us any access, imaginary or real, to what we are talking about. What he calls simulation is also the very naming of a given set of the conditions that allow us to talk about anything at all, simply because such terms act as null reference points to its own generic logic.

I am split on liking the reviews (through Goodreads and Amazon) where people obviously didn’t get it, and thus didn’t like it, and disliking such reviews by hurt readers who rebelled at feeling stupid, or having their time wasted (and it’s hard to tell the difference when you’re not sure what you are reading about). To be honest, I’ve read this book three times over the past 10 years, and each time I’ve come away with a fuller picture. This is one of the hardest books I’ve ever read, and that includes any of Zizek or Deleuze’s works.

Overall, I appreciate this difficulty because in making you work for it, the concept will stick with you. You’ll make the concept your own, and you’ll remember it better. It can inspire you, help you along. If the entire concept everything was handed to you, you’d lose the influence. In this sense, by stretching in a new way, you end up in the ‘pataphysical, where the meaning stands on its own. Is this a site of resistance to the ubiquitous hyperreality? With ‘pataphysics, you get something that can stand in for itself on its own by itself, in this case, each particular re-reading. Although, it is arguable that while there is the process of reading, if you read the good stuff, each time it will be different. This difference however, is really a pre-fabricated genre soaked simularca because it is different. We assume, in Baudrillardian terms, that what we are reading relies on a kind of perhaps, “naïve faith in a pact of the similitude of things to themselves.” We assume that what we are talking about is the same as what we are talking about, and this is where our conception, or model or map, gets in the very way of what we are so desirous to speak of.

The real, the real object is supposed to be equal to itself, it is supposed to resemble itself like a face in a mirror—and this virtual similitude is in effect the only definition of real—and any attempt, including the holographic one, that rests on it, will inevitably miss its object, because it does not take its shadow into account (precisely the reason why it does not resemble itself)—this hidden face where the object crumbles, its secret. The holographic attempt literally jumps over its shadow, and plunges into transparency, to lose itself there (109, original italics).

And in this way, you can say that each time you process Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation you’ve actually miss-encountered it. Whatever process of reading you have, you inevitably create a conception of it, and in that conception, blur the totality of everything else around it, to make room for this conception. So in a twist of Baudrillardian logic, perhaps we read Simulacra and Simulation in order to claim everything is a simulation. In finding simulacra everywhere around us—we dig extra deep in order to hide the fact that we already don’t really live in reality, that our very response in naming and determining differences around us for orientation—to get at reality creates the very condition we want to escape from.

View all my reviews

Anti-Nietzsche

Anti-NietzscheAnti-Nietzsche by Malcolm Bull
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part of the problem with going against Nietzsche is that he says too much; and is hard to pin down. His books are all over the place, and he leaves you with aphorisms that are as philosophical as they are suggestively poetic.

In this vein, Bull does a pretty good job, even if it is a bit disorganized, at teasing out bits of Nietzsche. Bull’s approach is unique. He goes against Nietzsche to see if there’s something practical in Nietzsche. And I think that this untraditional approach works well, even if you have to read between a lines a little to see it.

Bull says very clearly that Nietzsche’s insight is that values are due to social difference. That hierarchy and social organization give rise to values; the two are the same, but at different levels. The main contention here, is that radical egalitarianism would destroy values. The loss of values leads to nihilism. While egalitarianism and nihilism are not the same thing, “nihilism exceeds egalitarianism” and after equality has been done so that there can no longer be any difference to equalize, we would only be left with nihilism… where everyone could only “listen to Muzak and eat potatoes”. The question Bull leaves us rhetorically, is “what value could there be of a society where no one could distinguish themselves” likewise, how could we improve ourselves if there we don’t have values to know what better is?

The main thesis, and it’s buried in there, is that Nietzsche foresees nihilism approaching… and seeks to stop it with the quest for a Superman. Nietzsche wishes to save us from a life of a diluted, weak society in which we are all forced to be equal to its weakest members. To highlight the importance of this idea, Bull goes to the opposite lengths, to “read like a loser” and become animal: “subhuman”. If we want to see the value of Nietzsche’s project we have to experience the absence of such a project… we have to fall into the depths of nothingness itself, to be weak ourselves and beg others for compassion and sympathy. We have to induce society to think only of us and baby us for our well being… We have to be as animals, to not have a clearing in the world, only further darkening.

What perhaps, makes Bull difficult, perhaps for some readers, is that he pulls many readers of nihilism and thinkers of the state to task, using their thoughts to give structure to Nietzsche’s aphorisms. Bull impressively quotes Nietzsche often, supporting them with the philosophical vocabulary of others to make his argument. He runs circles around some concepts to show their limits, show how others apply them and to show ultimately how Nietzsche is right to approach nihilism the way he does. And in this exciting quest, Bull convinces me of what he sees in Nietzsche.

I find it curious that other reviewers thought Bull confusing and yet praised him as his book as being well-written… I find that there in such reviews, there is a familiarity with many authors but no coherency to be found… an argument against a book as being “well-written”.

Nonetheless, I do agree in part, that Bull throws too many people at us, sort of at surprise… and then scrambles to reformulate his argument. The chapters are also split into too many sections. The issue I have with sections is that authors do this sometimes, because it’s easier to write in smaller blocks… without having to resort to well formed transitions between them. Perhaps Bull writes all his books this way, but I think it’s the fault of the editor for not having encouraged Bull to devote himself to a sustained argument. The first chapter however, is marvelous. The last chapter did end without really clearly articulating the book as conclusions are wont to.

Still, I give him 4 stars for an exciting book that is well worth the reading, even if towards the end he starts to lose focus… but never comes to the conclusion about what kind of society we are to be left with, leaving us at the mercy of the Great Beast, with mediocrity.

View all my reviews

A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market

A Mathematician Plays The Stock MarketA Mathematician Plays The Stock Market by John Allen Paulos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What’s really interesting about other people’s reviews of this book is that they seem to expect a book on the stock market from a mathematician to be somehow be based in finance.

There are plenty of books on the stock market out there… that do so from a finance point of view.

This book is pretty brilliant although at first glance, it appears to be pretty straight forward… you think a mathematician would use his knowledge about math to somehow find some brilliant trick about the stock market. But that’s not how this plays out.

Math is a game of numbers. It’s a field of study that looks at patterns. But ultimately the numbers are a measurement, some kind of metric. What’s faulty about using the stock market from a pure numbers point of view is that the numbers in stock prices need to measure the a consistent value for any math relation to work. What I mean is simply that stock prices are based on what people do in terms of trading volume of a stock. Abstract all you like, but the immediate particular reason why anyone does what they do with stock is anyone’s guess.

We can assume that a change in stock prices has to do with an anecdote on the news about a company, or something happening somewhere related to a company. But that’s not always true. Sometimes things happen for seemingly no reason. Much of this, Paulos tries to explain has as much to do with how people perceive the market as much as it has to do with actual values. The later chapters are particularly brilliant on this account. The earlier chapters which seemed to promise this or that mathematical model, or this or that economic model… don’t pan out because as Paulos convincingly tells us, any model that we use to predict the stock market can be outdated unless the model itself anticipates how others will use it, made predictions and how those predictions will affect the market. In other words, any stock market model needs to also be self reflexive in how it’s applied — not just when it’s applied.

Paulo makes some pretty complex abstractions to do this; for instance, applying how the “Efficient Market Hypothesis” is either always correct (when people believe it to be wrong, thus playing the stock market off of information in the news, or about a company’s state) or it is always incorrect (when other people believe the information on the news is invalid as the stock prices already reflect the current value of the stock)… that is to say that particular hypothesis doesn’t work as it should because it takes for its model an absolute system of values based on how other people act. People don’t do things as mechanisms do; people evaluate based off of what they believe others will do as well.

This twist of self reflexivity makes it particularly difficult to formulate any theory that is both consistent (non-contradictory) and complete… in essence, we need to formulate a model that can predict how its predictions are taken into account and then provide us with “a few steps ahead” so that profit can be captured. That would be a pretty sophisticated theory; and in fact be impossible because that theory could only work in the case of the one individual who has it. By definition the same theory could not with all the other individuals who also have it, otherwise there would be no profit!

So a quick conclusion is that the market can at times reflect real values, but often it doesn’t because there’s too much white noise as meanings, theories, trends and news all impact the same metric. So how can we make any consistent model on the stock market if all this information flies under the same metric as the very metric a stock price is supposed to represent?

This is all of course, extracted from the book. What I found really interesting, if one read between the lines from the get go, was that one can always take the meaning of a stock’s movement anyway one likes. That is to say, we have an abundance of narratives that can fit the model of “what really happens”. We simply pick the one we like the best, and go forth as if that were true. As Paulo points out, even through random chance a few individuals are bound to hit it big. And once people notice that, they will follow that person’s movements, ensuring that they will always be right.

Thus, the modeling of stocks, properly considered, must also model how we think as well. But that’s nothing new. Paulo is of course, writing this book as a lament of his own failed investments…and in the process of doing so, he’s also somewhat justifying the bubble bursting was inevitable, a kind of normal market behavior. But he’s correct; the uncertainty in the stock market is not just an uncertainty as to what the price means, but similarly that its certainty is also a reflection of what we all would also believe it to mean.

All in all, I found the book to be really entertaining and interesting. I would have liked a little more direction midway through the book… with each theory or direction Paulo brought up, he quickly shot it down at the end of the chapter. Of course, he was setting this bed of failed theories for the self reflexive analysises… but I didn’t see it coming. So it felt much like wandering, and that’s not a good way to treat your reader as it throws your reader out of the process of reading.

View all my reviews

Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties

Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the FacultiesKant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Deleuze is perhaps the best reader of texts that I know of. In this short work, he presents the immanent critique hidden within Kant’s philosophical product.

In doing so, Deleuze shows both how Kant is not a rationalist or an empiricist, and how Kant is the anti-philosopher. Although Kant today is considered to be the epitome of modern philosophers, at that time Kant sought to break through the limits of Descartes’ subjectivity to achieve a deeper understanding of the human condition one not founded on false or speculative reasoning.

As Deleuze points out, Kant’s methodology works in this way by highlighting the structural points of inflection within his philosophy. These structural features exist immanent within each of the conditions Kant outlines within empirical reason — ultimately to exist as a faculty that stands on its own. In other words, Kant notices what is the same within each relation despite empirical difference. Each of the three domains of experience (feeling, desiring and knowing) balance out the others to provide the higher immanent vehicles that together legislate human balance (judgement, understanding and reason). As Kant analyzes types of experiences encountered within empirical reason, Deleuze shows how Kant points to the suprasensible as the beyond that grounds Kant’s philosophy (and humanity) as being that is both good and moral in the face of Law immanent within transcendental reasoning.

What makes Kant so difficult to approach is his rejection of speculative reason. Bad philosophy has a habit of legislating positions as filters for experience, using a top-down approach to the field of experience. Kant sticks strictly to the thinnest difference within each domain, using the form of language to describe immanent relations of their predicates within itself… in a sense noting the universal form inherent within each field as the criteria for what a faculty is, what is an immanent vehicle within human processing. In other words, Kant finds the universal arising within our navigation and arrangement of phenomena as a spontaneous law grounded within our consciousness, what is the same no matter what, and how those samenesses inter-relate.

The point of all this is to show the reason for reason, to show how the structure of reason itself from the immanent faculties that operate as transcendental reason becomes its own reason, the accord of which reveals for us our place in the world. We are made to be reasonable, and our reasonableness itself is what provides the grounds for our existence, and the meaning of our existence, which Kant insists is the natural product of our natural and good synthesis with nature… not for the goal of fulfilling instinct/nature but for incorporating the beyond, a limit we ourselves cannot understand:

When imagination is confronted with its limit by something which goes beyond it in all respects it goes beyond its own limit itself, admittedly in a negative fashion, by representing to itself the inaccessibility of the rational Idea, and by making this very inaccessibility something which is present in sensible nature.

For through the imagination, no doubt, finds nothing beyond the sensible world to which it can lay hold, still this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded; and that removal is thus a presentation of the infinite. As such it can never be anything more than a negative presentation – but still it expands the soul.

Deleuze does all this in this breathtakingly short book. Deleuze places Kantian desire as the organizing feature, in the synthesis of feeling, rationality and understanding within the free ‘accord’ of the faculties and how pure relation forms the immanent critique of human experience; bringing to light the clear synthesis of the transcendental method and the three faculties… and in this sense, conjoins with Deleuze’s own readings of philosophers, as Deleuze can rightly be said to be a philosopher who only practices immanent critiques.

The only thought I have; what I wished Deleuze focused on as well, was Kant’s question of freedom. Towards the end of his life, Kant had an answer, an undesirable answer to how our freedom comes about, one which tortured him in his last days. This issue, was not brought up. But perhaps this was because Kant never wrote a specific work to outline this issue.

View all my reviews

The Fountainhead

The FountainheadThe Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was first introduced to Ayn Rand about ten years ago. I found her works distasteful and naive… but I was largely also responding to what many of her fans were saying about her works, to support capitalism and conservativism. So imagine my surprise when I read this book, and found out that it was amazing.

Like Rand’s aesthetic, this book follows one over arching arc to explore as many facets of her philosophy as possible. To this end, her narrative is thick in order to create a world… though it is presented as a tour de force, an unstoppable motion.

The basic idea is that most people only acquire a sense of self through the creation of an ego, which is really the image that one maintains in order to position oneself among others. For Rand, this ego in most people, only exists through the validation of others. That is, most people are selfless in the sense that they can only find values mirroring and parroting one another. This externally based validation of the ego is similar to a cognitive psychology theory about the development of the ego. This theory is called spiral dynamics.

Rand’s exposition of ego and spiral dynamics share many things in common, although they aren’t the same. For example, Rand doesn’t explain how ego develops, or how it grows from nothing since infancy. (Spiral dynamics splits into two sets of stages, conventional and post-conventional.) While Rand does cover both sets of stages, this book feels stunted philosophically, in not covering how the ego develops. Still, Rand’s purpose is more illustrative and this book is great at exploring how people of different stages interact. Although Rand takes this idea literally, that some people are nothing more than their open attempt to pull validation from people by appeasing people, this book is still nonetheless interesting.

Validation from others comes from fitting in an image, being admired, being kind, being pleasant, being the complete image of status, success and sophistication. Often in real life, you do find people who lack some sense of self, and thus need to prove themselves. People who set out to prove themselves in all the conventional ways sometimes become successful, and it is those people who often become the leaders of our communities. This is why leadership is often conservative, because it needs the crowd it leads in order to define itself as leader. This is where Rand and political conservatives start to part, as for Rand, the internal image of a leader, as he sees himself, defines who he is, not the people he leads.

So whereas the main character and protagonist Howard Roake, finds himself a companion, Gail Wynand who is a “Creator” like him, Wynand occupies the position in what spiral dynamics calls the 4th stage, the last stand of conventionalism. Here, Wynand dominates the entire social landscape, although he never realizes it, his quest for power still creates an ego in him. His sense of self worth is based off of the money and power he’s attained, and in the end this explodes in his face when he tries to make use of it. Wynand ultimately realizes his true position, exactly that of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic (although Rand doesn’t use these terms), when he realizes that his leadership is based off of the crowd’s values, not his own. He is a mirror of other people’s values just like everyone else. The 4th stage is the stage when success itself is understood as still finding validation outside the self… Wynand at that moment transcends that stage and enters the post-conventional stages…in which the ego starts to break free of the undergrid of meaning which cages egos. Wynand faces the dissolution of the ego, which is inherent in the post-conventional stages.

What’s particularly interesting about reading the Fountainhead is how the characters navigate the social hierarchy within titles and dialogue. This is much like real life, in which people show their mettle through witty conversation. Being a novel though, the characters do understand one another directly in the language Rand has developed, and when they position themselves, there is much dialectical twisting, in the form of Hegelian dialectics, because the values in question are significant inasmuch as they are sometimes also absent. Rand realizes this same structure later on as in Atlas Shrugged when she names the sections of her book “non-contradiction”, “either/or” and “a=a” although, of course, the structure is loose (most likely as it comes from a text of fiction and not a purely philosophical text).

But I digress. The characters in the Fountainhead don’t change much. Most of what they do in change is self reflexive, much like real life. They realize what they are (like Peter Keating) and stay stagnant. Other than Wynand, the only other character to go through change is Dominique Falcon.

Falcon is a problematic character. She’s obviously supposed to be the female counterpart to Roake, but lacks herself any sense of being. In fact, for much of the novel she isn’t his equal, simply because she has an ego… one form or another, in most of the novel, she tries to kill it off. She does this by attempting to fit in the various roles she’s landed (through marriage mostly). And that’s basically her thing. Roake at least seems to have a thing that he is (architecture) but Falcon has nothing but her body and her image as a woman. In fact, as woman, she confines herself to being prosopopeia to her man, by erasing the self… which is to say, wholly to support her man’s ego. Perhaps this is why, in part, Rand decided to give her character Dagney Taggart from Atlas Shrugged a thing of her own.

This brings us to Howard Roake, who is the protagonist. He has no ego, cares not for what other people think of him, or what they think of at all. His embodiment is his work, and that’s all he is. He is 100% self. And this is where spiral dynamics and Rand part, at the last stage of post-conventionalism. If the self is wholly informed as to who it is, via the image of an ego, and the ego can only be the social position of a self in language, then says the theory, Roake cannot be as selfish as he is. Roake’s sense of person should dissolve in a major way, and be integrated into the experience of the universe… which is also missing from Rand… that ego and worldview are intimately tied. The less developed the ego, the more black and white the world. By assuming that the self is in fact completely separate from the world, and the world is obvious in its materiality, Rand has failed to take her understanding of selfhood far enough. In other words, even though Rand can see how language and social reality are intertwined with the ego and how the ego forms itself from the fabric of social reality, Rand fails to understand that all objects are in part languaged-objects and the external world is rightly, exists as it is only in service of humankind’s ability to create meaning, and define things in the world in terms of who we are… So when the ego changes who it is, the meaning of the self and world, and the world as the self sees it changes too.

In fact, his person taken literally, Roake should be nearly outside of language, incomprehensible in totality to all others… although in the novel he often says exactly what he is. Two alternate models of a self outside of language come to mind: Herman Meville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street”, or an enlightened guru who has retreated to the tops of mountains to contemplate the eternal Tao (or something like that).

Of course, neither would make for a compelling story about ego relations in Depression era New York, so Rand decided to make Roake a solid self, a self that was completely architect, so that the reader can see him. And seeing him is important, so that in order to stablize the relations of ego, Rand has a language and a world that is full of consistent objects, not dissolved objects or selves with blurry post-conventional “ontologies”. In other words, the language of the Fountainhead is consistent because Rand needs to show us clearly how her characters interrelate in terms of ego and self, to hierarchialize her characters… which of course, maintaining social hierarchy is all about what stable unchanging controlled language is about, but alas, again I digress.

Also, don’t forget, that after all, architecture is the most resource intensive thing humans do, it’s also intersects political, economic and aesthetic interests… and has at its handle, all the range necessary for Rand to show off her ideas, which impact creation, industry, media, art, fashion, beauty, friendship and love.

So even while Rand doesn’t also show how the world changes with the self… her book still reads very well. Its driven, its clear and its engaging. After all, wasn’t it her goal in the first place to show how egos can change? Her goal is to show how most of humanity stumbles around on trying to please and placate itself while getting in the way of those few who seek progress. Having developed enough of a theory of ego, Rand does assume an external reality, one in which language is firmly what it is even if the ego isn’t, which is probably why all her characters and protagonists can exist as unchanging models on a never ending background. After all, if language changed depending on the strength of the ego, how would we understand who is winning? How would we understand what progress is, or what things mean? In this sense, Rand’s solid world, is a world that is the same no matter who is walking in it. Things will mean the same thing, because Rand means for us to see something in her novel greater than any of the characters independently.

It is by this measure of objectivity that a self unleashed by the bonds of society can be shown to be equal to the creative force of progress for the betterment of humanity… a triumph of human spirit… For if the background changes with the social tides it would be very easy to show that an individualist is simply the formation of a bad guy, which is the stance most socially free individuals tend to become… unless of course, society itself is ill… which in this case, society is in fact very very ill, making Howard Roake the hero and protagonist in extreme.

View all my reviews

Truth, bullshit, Identity(ego) and Bullshit

If you take words like Truth seriously, you’ll find yourself going into a beyond. Because Truth with a capital T is a place, not a specific content… it’s an empty position, which means only itself. The narrowest point of all, it is also the most distant, the axis around which discourses circulate as satellites.

This “north star” only operates as itself, without meaning because it is completely itself… (meaning is always the deferral of meaning, words leading to more words, thus when it is itself, it is without meaning, an irrational point standing in for nothing but itself). Truth, must remain outside of discourse to organize discourse.

Truth is the opposite of bullshit.

First, bullsit:

I spoke with one of best friends about this. Bullshit is machine language. It’s code. It’s a self-enclosed, self-referential discourse which does not connect well to outside discourses. Thus bullshit, which is always encased in a system (of bullshit) which generates bullshit is like Truth in that it does not refer to anything but itself, it is also equally irrational.

The difference though, is that when you participate in bullshit, when you have a stake in it as an identity in it, it is no longer bullshit, it is meaningful.

For example, you can think that as a college professor, your mission is to educate young minds. Educate them. But the colleges themselves operate on a different level. Colleges rank themselves, compete with each other for funding, create complex apparatuses which organize their departments in the form of hierarchies, ranking its employees and so on. So while a college professor can identify themself like dead poet’s society — through discourse and elucidation, a college will foist on its professors a different identity, one encoached in metrics of grading, ranking, preening and processes… all of which generally serve the college’s needs directly and only the students indirectly, if at all. Such a professor will protest this hijacking of his identity (“I am not a cog in your machine”) and thus the system and its output will be seen as “bullshit”. If you were a college administrator, or a teacher heavily invested with the system and the college’s needs, you may see yourself as both elucidator AND a position within a rank in file within the college — also a representative of the college, befitting the needs of the college. In that case, you won’t see such output as “bullshit” because your identity will be wrapped up within the logic of that hierarchical discourse.

So, other forms of bullshit also depend on identity positionings. If your identity does not fit an imposed external discourse, you will see that discourse as bullshit. You might as well be a mechanic looking at a doctor’s chart, or a doctor looking at a mechanic’s documentation of a ship’s engine. Both discourses are separate from each other, self referential with its own semiotic chains, its own indexical peculiarities, its own bullshit.

In a way, bullshit is the system itself, seen from the outside. No bullshit is bullshit unless you don’t identify within its meanings at an unconscious level. But Truth, is the standin axis for all discourses… in a way, an attempt to contain discourses within one rubric. In our fragmented postmodern world, we generate many self referential codes. Law codes, building codes, computer codes, academic codes, bureaucratic codes, administrative codes, tax codes, stock codes, logic codes, mathemes… all of which are only meaningful within their own self reference. How many tv shows create their own jokes, create their own meanings by referring to an encyclopedia of history? Comic book wikis, Star Trek wikis, Star Wars wikis, Doctor Who wikis, Lost wikis… the list goes on and on.

In the age of information, we create nestings of code in an attempt to attract people to join our languages, our plateaus of sense and reason, and thus invested they exist in a 2nd Life, Sim, fanbased community for which there can be nearly no beyond because self referentiality forecloses interaction between outside discourse. At least, online that’s the case. In person, your neighbors intrude, your economics intrude, your politics intrude and disrupt these fragile sensibilities, reminding us of a larger discourse.

For example, the master discourse today is not spoken in words but in money. Economically, with the current money laundering laws and identity theft laws, our financial institutions seek to mire us within their own code, so that we cannot escape their domain. Everything needs a bank account, or a social security number. We may have gained some autonomy to create separate spheres of influence, but the larger appratuses of capital also seek to dominate us by forcing us to psychically invest in credit scores, tax returns, and to play the game their way… their Truth of course, is money, which is meaningless in itself… Money is the petit object a, of the discourse of money, as it stands only for itself, a zero sum signifier, to guarantee that we are within the system of money, that all things can be exchanged for money as a kind of Money.

This locking of us into this immobility also involves slowly locking us out. Cities have started to impose “good neighbor fees” on home based businesses, so that only the residents can work at such home based businesses. Already in a post-industrial economy, our material dialectic is split by market mediation. We are purely consumers, purely meant to work as employees and consumers. The early 20th century saw the leftovers of consumer culture recycled back into the producer’s side of the cycle… but that divorce only increasingly locks us out of that side… the masters of production seek to keep newcomers out of competiting for production as a way of retaining their access to profit by imposing more power against those who might do otherwise. People who seek to do business on their own face increasing challenges, a nest of laws that would prohibit and limit access while increasing information cost (compliance laws) and start-up costs, raising the amount needed to start a business. People who would be in business see these external constraints as “bullshit” because they do not recognize that the system’s imposition on them as being central to what they are trying to do or who they would to be… that business people see themselves doing transactions (marketing, service or production, shipping) rather than seeing the outside state apparatus demanding of them a piece of their action before they even do anything.

This kind of dialectical opposition through identity is very illustrative of how the category of bullshit is created from the self’s position within a discourse that would locate the self in a different position than where it thinks it ought to be.

Second, Truth:

So if bullshit is being outside of a discourse of self-referentiality, then what is Truth? I sought to take such terms seriously that I looked into meta-language, philosophies, in order to clarify what Truth might be, or how it might be attained. In doing so, you examine words. Language. In doing that, you start to notice words and how they work, what they mean.

When you notice words as words, reality and language start to separate. This is an odd phenomenon, after all, as Lewis Carrol has been so often been paraphrased: Take care of the sense and the words will arrange themselves. The reverse is equally telling. Take care of words themselves, and the very thing you seek (sense itself) will slip from your grasp. When you reach a point that words like Truth mean only what they mean, and that their nest inevitably refers back to itself, you will hit reach the limits of language… for language can explain the objects in language — language moves such objects, manipulates them, for what else is language for, but the negotiation of meaning and personal position among Others — but language cannot explain itself, just as the thinker cannot think itself. This quote from Slavoj Zizek (from Less than Nothing) is useful:

In the opposition between the symbolic order and reality, the Real is on the side of the symbolic—it is the part of reality which clings to the symbolic in the guise of its inconsistency/gap/impossibility). The Real is the point at which the symbolic itself, mutilating it from within: it is the non-All of the symbolic. There is a Real not because the symbolic cannot grasp its external Real, but because the symbolic cannot fully become itself. There is being (reality) because the symbolic system is inconsistent, flawed, for the Real is an impasse of formalization. This thesis must be given its full “idealist” weight: it is not only that reality is too rich, so that every formalization fails to grasp it, stumbles over it; the Real is nothing but an impasse of formalization—there is dense reality “out there” because of the inconsistencies and gaps in the symbolic order. The Real is nothing but the non-All of formalization, not its external exception.

So as discourse is unable to cohere completely, make things what they are, we get the gaps and distortions in things within the symbolic discourse itself, always as an indexical “beyond” representation to stand in for the distortion which is only “true” as it coincides with the un-able to be symbolised formation. Where Truth as a marker of stablization sets in the discourse, it acts as the single sign that is itself, to tie in the external inconsistency/gap of the Real back to the symbolic force. Another quote from Zizek, to continue the thought:

Since reality is in itself fragile and inconsistent, it needs the intervention of a Master-Signifier to stablize itself into a consistent field; this Master-Signifier makes the point at which a signifier falls into the Real. The Master-Signifier is a signifier which not only designates features of reality, but performatively intervenes into reality.

Our loss of a Master-Signifier, as Zizek puts it, from the modern to the postmodern marks the fragmentation of discourses today, unable to cohere together as they split into their own alignments. Nonetheless the modern world exists today, through the auspices of Money and in its spectral form.

So how does Truth and bullshit tie together?

Third, Identity/ego:

For each of us today, as we develop identities and egos, we invest in different discourses, hoping to find one that is legitimatized and mostly compatible through whatever other discourses people around us engage in. Example of such discourses abound: a church discourse, a video game clan discourse, a fraternity discourse, academic discourse(s), economic work discoures… legal discourse(s)… these all intersect at the body of identity, bombarding us with fragmentation and contradiction. Coming to find one’s self, or to “discover yourself” is another way of saying, “I need to find an image/position immanent within a discourse where I can fit in, and become myself…” Spoken cynically, “I need to become the image others will then see as me, so that I may belong to a discourse, without the gap/distortion/inconsistency inherent in being a personality whose psychal investments connect to nothing.” Losers are narcissists for whom their meanings only mean something to themselves… no one else, no outside discourse recognizes their meanings/connections as being inherently meaningful.

Fourth, Bullshit:

And of course, noting how Truth itself functions within a discourse, radically itself because it is irrationally itself. Everything is contingent, although Truth only exists as itself, an emptiness within discourse but not of it (the center is not the center) to guarantee an anchoring of discourse. All is contingent, including the fact that sometimes necessities come out, but only do so contingently. In other words, dissolving words into words instead of reality forces us to lose the very thing we seek to gain… we lose our place because the functionality is localized into an objective model that is not-us. Truth becomes truth, and discourse becomes bullshit.