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The Anti-Oedipus Papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Church and the Kingdom

April 29, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, Theory / No Comments

The Church and the KingdomThe Church and the Kingdom by Giorgio Agamben
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Although very short, Agamben realizes the difference between the church and the kingdom can be found within the Catholic church’s ordination of time. Time here, is used to project a position of sacred reverence as a political tool, rather than one utilized to realize the potential spiritual awakening NOW. For Agamben, the projected position of the messiah is not a good thing because it never arrives. This presents a problem even for the church today, as a worldly institution. Obviously Agamben charges the church with not exercising their full role as they see it, and instead letting us dwell in a kind of non-time time, in perpetual waiting.

In a way this book can be read as a call to spiritual awakening, although Agamben does not necessarily go that far.

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Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary

April 29, 2015 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Between the Absolute and the ArbitraryBetween the Absolute and the Arbitrary by Catherine Z. Elgin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While clearly written, this book is also frustrating. What’s frustrating about it, is also what I liked about it. Elgin attempts to calibrate between the absolute and the arbitrary. The way she does so is through this series of essays in which she emphasizes a constructivist approach to language, meaning, belief, identity and other kinds of objectivities. Unfortunately she is unable to find a stable point to align to. While she takes an analytic philosophy basis between these differences she ultimately judges these attempts on the basis of agency. She seems unable to realize that her pragmatic function relies heavily on the applicability of any knowledge as a philosophic credit, all the while she talks about this as if it’s in plain sight. In a way her addressing past philosophers with their previous inquiries, which is a credit to her book, act as a barrier for her to really establish her own platform of assessing and generating philosophical knowledge.

I think in a greater sense, absolute positions are also arbitrary, even if they are absolute immanently. The main cut that creates this inflection point in establishing such a difference is that of the transcendental. While Elgin realizes there are different domains of knowledge, she does not seem to able to account for how these domains are different or how they interact or do not comprehend one another. In this sense, while I admire her book, her book is an incomplete gesture at attaining a fundamentally consistent application as to what is absolute and what is arbitrary. The accepted synopsis given by the publisher demonstrate this distinction quite clearly in that absolute is relied on in a traditional sense of being a true basis where as arbitrary is understood as being what is contingent. Nowhere in this book does she have a discussion about these categories even if she titles her book after them. In this sense, her reliance on the “absoluteness” of her definitions betray a blind spot in how she judges the validity/applicability of any concept. I think a discussion involving domain parameters (transcendentals, if you will) will be a good place to begin to frame how this distinction is itself arbitrary, although of course, such a discussion should not remain locked in terms of transcendentals at all.

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Descartes; Spinoza (Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 31)

April 14, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 31 - Descartes; Spinoza)Great Books of the Western World by René Descartes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Descartes is the father of modern philosophy. Descartes is the father of modern math. What do they have in common?

He gives us his rules for the mind, his meditation on first philosophy — that is, the very method by which he seeks to find for us the truth. This method, described in part by Irme Lakatos as analysis-synthesis brings to us the very foundation of both math and philosophy. In fact, together, math and science form the same pair bond for analysis-synthesis paralleling each other’s formulation as each provides inflection points to form the other. Descartes’ method is no longer in vogue however, as it relies too much on a hidden conjecture to get to first philosophy but his methodology and its grounding assumptions still stand.

That is to say, with Descartes we get the calibration of a cut. If you read his philosophy or how he formulates his analytic geometry, one piece is used to measure the other. The model is calibrated to itself. The split predicate of “i think” therefore “i am” work in the same way that he uses lines through euclidean angles in order to measure parabolas in order to calibrate them to each other. The description of parabolas through their roots is a way in which we define the “zeros” of the coordinates in a domain. In a way, although Descartes was looking for some absolute referent (in philosophy) he found also in math, the arbitrary referent becomes the absolute referent! This missing link isn’t provided as any given cut can work, if treated with the proper methodology, but rather is raised to a metaphysical level as being an expression of the model of the cut to be made. If you read between the lines in Descartes treatment of the matter, especially in describing his methodology you’ll see how he breaks down the process into a series of chunks (cuts) and then those chunks inform us how to synthesize them back together, so as to be sure that this is in fact the only way to do so. I owe this analysis in part to Irme Lakatos. The analysis gives you the synthesis in part, and that assured nature that is self reflexive is a powerful aphrodisiac. I am sure Descartes sees his eternal truths quite well after experiencing how magically the pieces he made fit back together again.

I did not read Spinoza’s Ethics also contained in his book, as I aim to read Spinozas’ work in a different book.

Still, we owe Descartes much. Reading him verifies the basic root of his method, so that we can then use his thoughts as fodder for calibration of modern thought to itself. With these cuts, we can begin to see the unsupported cut as being arbitrary but also as being absolute, when we continually cut with consistency so that the entire situation comes to be constructed in terms of that arbitration. This is a way for us to recognize the constructed nature of our knowledge, as it has been continually refined, to the point at which knowledge becomes fragmented because each discipline interjects their own cut, following their own scientific truths as each attempst to reify each respective field as an absolute domain of self sufficient a priori presentation.

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The Universal Exception

March 23, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

The Universal ExceptionThe Universal Exception by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having read Zizek for over a decade, this work speaks out much more to me than it would had this been Zizek’s latest book. Here we see many figures of reason, a display of logic some of which did not make it to later works. Others of which show us how some tendencies may be further developed. The heady nature of this subject, an application of the theory of exception to politics can be summarized as the universal exception which must be removed before knowledge is generated.

This applies directly to politics as politics is nothing if not knowledge of others. Our ability to get along with them, to know them, to be able to understand (contain) large masses of people, trends and response to them with the understanding of policies and edicts that will effectively shape how we understand and get along with one another. In a way, Zizek is saying that we can understand our context but we cannot understand ourselves. Or we understand ourselves but not our context. The point of view needs a basis of comparison, even if it is about the point of view itself. This basis becomes invisible, absolute and profound as it is literally understood as its own shadow.

In a way, since this null point is still being shaped; the less interesting parts of this book are the parts where he lapses into his familiar terms, you get a sense that this exception is still new to him, a fragile point of hypnosis which captivates his full attention. As he gets into parallax gap, and then less than nothing, Zizek comes to understand that point has having any and every content possible. Never mind that he generally prefers the same hero worship. This worship, as silly as it may be can only be understood as a repetition of the difference he highlights. It works as both justification for the difference (it has appeared twice, as a repeat) but also as a tool of refinement in which Zizek can calibrate the theory, in this case to itself. A proper dialectical motion would follow in which Zizek insisted that Hegel was the first mistake, a random, chance, pure genius, whereas his repetition was a recognition of pure genius, the first true calibration point, in which a theory can be explicated and the point of split; the cut can be highlighted.

It would follow then, that our third effort, would be the chance to break free of the constraints of that cut, the chance to realize it as more than a singularity but a world logic. This would be the finding of a new transcendental model but only because its reflection requires that we jump back one step to justify Hegel, leaving the Byzantine ramblings of Kant. And from there, we can abstract to the method of Descartes and the ancient Greeks themselves, recognizing that the bridge between Descartes unnamed transcendental which affords only differences that self-evident and Kant’s Transcendental logic in which the functioning of that self evidence is made possible by the interstice view of the excess of various faculties’s interactions as these interactions are only visible outside of all these spheres of localized logics. Of course there is Understanding, which is self evident, Reason which extends itself into paradox, and Imagination which is spontaneous to be unpredictable. Each of these paradoxes wraps up the same faculties within their own immanence as to merely describe various anti-nomies themselves. These facial “black holes” that looking into another’s eyes or the unknown orifices in logic always present different realms of incoherence from the point of view of the outside looking in. We never get a full sense of our own arbitrariness without eliminating the possibility of there being strict rules. All topographies are distinguished by their handling of zeros. At first structure, then to texture. The procedure is logical but can be expressed via its own displacement, of which its kind of regularity is its logic. This then, becomes the genius of Descartes, as the first leap into dimensional mapping. To further this trend, we need to proceed into pure multiples.

If Liebniz understood that a curve was where any arbitrary measurement that was much like any other arbitrary measurement it follows that we’d have to reverse our way back out to get back to full points of content, back to ‘pataphysics and immanence. This is a move that Badiou and Deleuze do, but which I think we will find Zizek going to, but only if he is willing to give up the hero worshiping imposition of making a theoretical cut that includes too much of itself. The only point that creates this particular world as being what it is, as a limit to its maximal value (with no limit on its minimal) is the universal exception, the bulwark which we push off from, in order to jumpstart our content.

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Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology

March 18, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and EpistemologyPhilosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology by Imre Lakatos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lakatos stands at the edge of a vast tradition, and in his conservative way, decries those who would draw demarcation lines along those of community or traditional ideas of how discovery, math and science should be drawn as they always were. In seeking truth that is independent of human observation or valuation, Lakatos would fall along the same issue that Zizek would bring to many others — the lack of a transcendence. This much is so; Lakatos is as much a former Hegelian as much as it is a decrier of non-useful knowledges (like vulgar Marxists). What I admire most about Lakatos is that he isn’t afraid to approach the former basis of the formulation of math and science — in philosophy, and tackle the Cartesian synthesis as a modality of providing the basis for its own verification. This ties together the many aspects of Lakatos’ careful research work, his scholarly devotion to what others have said, and how they said it, and how they were (un)able to understand and respond to one another.

In other to be able to understand where Lakatos comes from we need to be able to understand that (ir)rationally he would have to disavow himself of those who he was most like in order to be distinguished from them, essentializing them by a singular disavow he found distasteful (or superfluous, thus discarding them as being superfluous). In this manner, his rejection of Marxism appears to be because of the implicit use of their historiographical techniques in order to highlight the logical difference their ideology makes, a technique he often uses to highlight competing and often contemporaneous schools of science. By revealing the shifting of sense making demonstrated by the cuts of history, we will always be able to detect minor unaccountable differences in understanding that question any possible aesthetic validity to the foundation that the use of human reason can be independent of superstition and wholly reliant on the strictest of causation.

Lakatos notes this is the unanswerable question of Hume: Can there be causation that is not mere induction? This is a question whose answer is to show its own impossibility, that human laws seem wholly immanent on itself rather than on principles that are consistent and surjective to the universe itself.

In fact, this lack of assurance is the very project Lakatos wishes to show, marking him as a philosopher of science, an inability to know what real in the naive classical sense is (should we encounter it). Many of his longer essays are devoted to this subject matter — the instability of the acceptedness of a theory despite or even because of its foibles and its refutations as understood from various points from its inception.

One of Lakato’s favorite mentions is that new theories are always immediately refuted before they are accepted. In other words, there is a lag between when a theory is too new to be validated or even understood before it is accepted as unequivocally true. There is a lack of resolution in this issue because we have no real way of measuring what was accepted only what at least a few individuals were saying at various times. So the question becomes even more precarious because what we know of a theory and what we know of a theory differ from each other depending on context. The unaccountableness of this change is where Lakatos organizes his conception of truth and epistemology in response to other’s certainties. In fact, where he is alike with Popper and structuralists, is that Lakatos is formulate an immanent critique of various logics, such as Newtonian, or mathematics, or Quine or Tarski or Toulmin in order to lead us to grasping what is excessive in their ideologies, as the overriding weight/basis for a judgement on verisimilitude. This requires a more rhetorical formalistic reading on Lakato’s part, in order to understand a curve in reason as being local to itself rather than to the material at hand; given the possibility at various points of inflection to determine opposite alternate possibilities. This is perhaps his greatest lesson from (and disagreement with) Karl Popper — that falsification of science can happen alone at a plateau detached from any concordance with induction. (Lakatos wanted at least weak induction, Popper thought that induction was not necessary).

If we were to believe that progress was in fact measurable, it would be the in theory detectable since there would be a steady retreat of the amount of uncertainty of the nature of nature as time progressed. We might expect that with the retreat of uncertainty we would find more concordance — but this has been shown to be untrue as the very nature of the universe is still to be questioned, as to what we can expect of it or how we should understand the nature of time or space itself (not to mention quantum mechanics and so on). In a way, Lakatos should have written a book, as his ideas criss-cross in a variety of manners, showing an immanence of understanding and relevance that this nest of ideas’ connectedness is nearly sustaining (Although no one essay really encapsulates the entire range).

What we see here, is the most nihilistic of philosophers, one whose field is technology itself — knowledge which is useful, and we get that not even from the point of view of knowledge can knowledge maintain consistency with itself. Lakatos gets that science is impacted from the outside, as all knowledege is, and because of this, insists that science be accountable to society even though science itself is amoral.

In a strange way, Lakatos nearly refutes himself, as his search for validity on the order of its own logic (and impossibility) becomes negative as he understands the aesthetics of the search to be about more than some academic scholarly immanence. Rather, our understandings become an allegory of itself, tainted with the atmosphere of its origins. In this strange way, we might understand this as a formalism of knowledge, if that expression is Hegelian or otherwise centered on its own difference. Lakatos can never find his own answers to his own questions by looking within just like he can never fully justify the lemmas of hard research programmes that came to be completely acceptable and then suddenly out of favor. Marred with this in-transience between different fields, Lakatos may be ranked with many post-structuralists as being trapped outside or inside a tradition, for if they speak from the outside it is because they, in the mystifications of Lacan, are “Cogito ergo sum,” ubi cogito, ibi sum. I am not, there where I am the plaything of my thought: I think of what I am where I do not think to think. In this same way Fichte was right to point to Antoss as the cogito’s inability to think where it is, but by pointing it out, Zizek demonstrates that Fichte too was not where he could think to think, meaning Antoss was but petit object a. In this same manner, Lakatos finds himself settled in “the third way” in the interstice of what can be nameable, in the (in)articulated depths of Wittgenstein’s language games where its successful performance is autonomous, detached and wholly invaluable/invalidable because they are strict reference points to absolutely itself.

Lakatos then, if we were to fling him from his comfort-zone, would be speaking of various inarticulable truths that appeared as marked events throughout history. Each zone is distinguishable only by itself, and wholly uncapturable by each other. We see zones of interference and resistance, characterized by contingency itself, when it reaches the highest levels of verification only by being repetitious enough to become a thing, a difference unto itself.

We end up with territories of language genres, a truth that perhaps Lakatos wouldn’t have wanted to acknowledge as being the strong version of science’s fallibility, that its champions, its expert-elite should get the acknowledgement they want, for their being individuals rather than for some autonomous process that could be drawn in the sand when in fact, that rockstar elitism can only insist on a community’s shared immanent ideology, a pack of thieves among any other pack of thieves, a distribution system that sustains itself, only this time with the indebtedness of verisimilitude. Lakatos was rather that we were impersonal, cut throat and yet responsible to more than just science when we be a philosopher and a defender of science from its own communal excesses.

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The Fractal Geometry of Nature

March 18, 2015 / posted in agential realism, life as we know it, love, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Fractal Geometry of NatureThe Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoît B. Mandelbrot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This beautiful book is about Mandelbrot’s love of science, mathematics and all forms of knowing. He is humorous at times, dense, and waxing on about fractals and changes that are self similar. It is through the figure of a difference that something is known. Fractals are unique in that they are that difference regardless of scale, that is, as Mandelbrot said of Leibniz, that Leibniz first recognized a straight line as being a curve whose arbitrary measure was universally applicable by itself by any other arbitrary measure.

Fractals are thus, a balance of form and measure and thus perfectly applicable to describing self similiarities that occur throughout various scales. By necessity these fractals are thus found in areas of maximal distribution where it be biological, informational, materially, socially or otherwise. Each bit of aggregate from each context can be traced through out some of the other contexts so that a distribution of their differences can be expressed mathematically as a formalization of unithood — difference — itself. Fractals can thus be understood as the limit of scaleless models of difference. Mandelbrot goes over a variety of contexts in which we can understand their expressedly different dimensions, differing topographies, as structured rules through time, or a static interface that modifies itself as scale is adjusted.

At times, Mandelbrot can become overwhelming as he notices as particular “cut” in an equation, be it a variable or an expressed tendency, and in vocalizing it, circulates around that textual point to arrange chapters, whorls on whorls, in which sections and sections of sections let us know when one thing was described and another thing began.

And so, as this is a book about the fractal geometry of nature, Mandelbrot shows us his love by talking admiringly of other mathematicians, many not celebrated, or fully acknowledged in their time. These technicians and their stories become the backdrop of those who developed this metric enough to let us see, and explore these subtle differences and their odd refinements. Indeed, it is really to those quiet, anonymous men, who established the halls of science that Mandelbrot writes this book to, for he would have liked for them to experience the joy he feels at being able to explore these monsters, while many of them did not, due to the contemporaneous level of mathematical understanding not yet understanding how to recognize (and thus, explore) the fractal nature of geometry in all its glories.

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Lavoisier; Fourier; Faraday (Great Books of the Western World, Vol 45)

March 6, 2015 / posted in agential realism, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Lavoisier; Fourier; Faraday (Great Books of the Western World, Vol 45)Lavoisier; Fourier; Faraday by Michael Faraday
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m not sure why I read this. Read about half of it, although towards the end I got lazy. Whats interesting is that these three books are included as “great books” but they are in fact dated. If anyone were to read this, it wouldn’t be for the content in it. We have here, Fourier’s “Analytic Theory of Heat”, Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry” and Faraday’s “Experimental Researches in Electricity” all of which are founding books of modern science but definitely dated by contemporary standards.

Still, with this we get very intelligent men documenting what they did, what others did, what they found and the methods they used to explore their separate areas of interest. While they still call themselves “philosophers” of natural philosophy, not yet making the distinction between philosophy and science, we get very little conjecture about the materials they work with. (Faraday towards the end of one of his letters, can’t resist contemplating that atoms “touch” each other. He outlines this in a really interesting way.) Really they talk mostly about process.

So the lesson here, if there is one, is that material practice generates knowledge. What makes these books great aren’t merely their methodology in the lab but also their strict mental disciplines, to just stick with what they are doing and logically ponder, what if I do this? What do I find? What if I do this? What do I find? There are strange conclusions. For example, Lavoisier believes that all plants are made of charcoal, since that’s what’s always left when you burn them and remove other elements from the plants. So he thinks charcoal is already in the plants to begin with since he didn’t add it. Okay, we can see where he’s going with that. But this is what I mean. Despite not having the wealth of understanding we have today to back up what one needs to do, these men went ahead and forged a large part of that understanding. Their mechanical methods leads to the mechanical science we have today because the mehcanical manipulations are immanent to the knowledge that is produced.

A great example is Fourier’s relatively tiny book. Most of his analytical theory has to do with decomposing heat in its movement, dissipation and collection through solids, liquids and airs. As he states early on, such an examination wouldn’t be possible without MATH. So math he applies, and boy does he apply it. He uses analytic geometry with calculus to describe the rate of change point by point, atom by atom as a derivative in order to organize his theory. This is brilliant! You can see how this book was widely influential in how other natural philosophers could then objectively compare notes and make predictions. Fourier, however, does not mistake the metric for the material. He doesn’t claim that math is more real than the reality he measures, as some physicists might do today. He does end his book on the general implications of his analytics. This is basically a recasting of length, time, conductivity and so on in terms of each other. He relates them as functions of each other and in this pure mathematical sense, it’s hard to argue with the formalism. You can see how people might eventually construe that math is more real than the materials. But the analytics was measured in terms of these units (time, conductivity/specific heat, length) because that’s what we have here to figure out how fast heat can travel through material. The basic units are given so their relation is formalized to begin with.

Ah! Objectivity and specific experimentation give us the very building blocks we find later on, abstracted in a general sense to one another.

I will say this. It’s not exciting reading for the most part. And these guys do not know how to end a book. Their endings usually conclude with a finding, a small detail left trailing. I guess in a way, since knowledge is incomplete, this is as a good as any a place to stop.

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Logics of Worlds: Being and Event

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two additional weaknesses to Badiou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities

February 21, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Death and Life of Great American CitiesThe Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What Jane Jacobs is really responding to, and criticizing is the spreading of the capital through what John K Galbraith calls the technostructure. Since capitalism’s main drive is technology, as technology reduces cost, affords greater material agency through large capital investments, this is no small subject, although it is a somewhat hidden angle. The megalopolises that exist today are really only possible because of major advances through technology, major investments in infrastructure and major innovations through technological advancement. For this reason, it makes sense that the planners of cities will also invest in the aesthetic of knowledge the technostructure affords us: expression of good design.

Design is really only the highlighting of a particular axis of an independent logical relationship. That is to say, if there are three mutually exclusive choices, their presentation in design as three separate but equatable types is good design. Good design allows us to equalize non-differentials by allowing their containment within logically more important groupings. If we are looking at a series of individuals, it makes sense to present information about these individuals in such a way that highlights through equitable features of however the information is being presented so that these individuals can be arranged to be easily sortable. So that we can make decisions about these individuals. It would make less sense to cram the information together in logically independent relations that have very little to do with our ability to make decisions.

In this sense, much urban design as criticized by Jacobs holds along the axis of decision making for individuals, or at least from the planning perspective, to equate logically independent relationships that have little to do with the ability for common urbanites to make decisions about their environment. For Jacobs, which may be dated these days, urban designers thus, have little understanding of the walkable experiences of urbanities for community building, community strengthening. In short, their knowledge is based more on aesthetically “cold” principles from a bigger view. There’s a good quote from this book: That a region “is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution” In other words, such bureaucracies are too abstract to understand small problems, thus their knowledge and their creation of models is based on these “cold” aesthetically split models that do not demonstrate interactions that stand outside of their modeling. They “average” out too much data, and end up with an impoverished but clear picture that is unsustainable as it is not supported by an exterior topology their model cannot account for.

Galbraith uses the term techostructure in order to denote the melding of planned economies with technologies. This means that administrators and managers need to be able to organize their information according to technologies and functional uses. While regional governments will lag behind the development of new technologies, their division along previous lines of technological influence, their division according to technological functionality will deny the collected effects of their management. Such administrative bodies deny confluence. Early on in the book, Jacob goes to argue that it is in the intermix of diversity, technologies, and mixed uses (where an area is used one way by a population for a time, and then later on, has a different use at a different time) that creates a strong community, enriches its citizens and promotes good economic and social growth.

One of the geniuses of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx was their recognition that value and phenomenon are created synthetically. This is to say that all topographies are determined by their exterior. As Jacobs notes, communities are generally held around a few key socialites who are able to navigate the interstices of different circles of interest that are geographically aligned by otherwise do not mix. These key individuals carry with them an excess of value since they provide the nexus to which communities and built around and attain cohesion of vision, value and identity. These individuals, like key spaces, be it a park, a mall or otherwise, are not the product of a singular focus, but a mix of logically related cues that deploy individuals together, forcing them to interact, create friendships and build trust.

In a technostructure kind of language we can claim that the very thing any technologically influenced management structure — that relies on the creation and management of specific “expert knowledge” — must necessarily miss the very object they are attempting to manage as a whole. There is department of community, or department of individuals — there is no management of human interaction (socially or economically) as these are the very values that a techostructure wishes to maintain. Rather, this element is destroyed by a technostructure as it is split between departments that have conflicting authority to manage their immanent spheres. The result of this, is understood as chaos as each sphere of influence manages its immanence but in the process of doing so impacts (through the excess of its immanence) other spheres as this influence organizes parts of society that impact other spheres of influence. This excess of planning can only be understood as chaos in reference to the rigorous “planning” of each sphere… what is unplanned is the outside impact.

While Jacobs does not talk about society and cities too much at this abstract a level — her book is more examples of various principles along separate dimension (each chapter is a meditation on each logically independent feature, such as streets, parks, sidewalks, age of buildings, and so on) I think her book would have been more cohesive if it were able to address the issue from a large standpoint of aesthetic philosophical division, as a concept like technostructure would afford. Nonetheless, while dated in some examples, and in use of language, Jacob’s book remains a good marker for the consideration of the interstices that make up society, that any logically independent axis is in fact not truly independent in how that value is created even if we organize it along lines of presentation that appear to be wholly independent. Cities die and grow by chaos, even as this chaos is technologically created through capitalism, forming new social alignments all the while, it is poor understood by existing bodies that use dated models. One wonders how this would have played out should Jacobs had written this in the present age of the internet.

So the 4 stars is really only because she lacks a unifying feature of the book explicitly, even though it is beautifully thought out, and written with rigorous passion. This book is somewhat dated and will be even more so in the near present.

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