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Dune Messiah

February 8, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, #2)Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

While smaller and equally intense, this is a very different book than its original. In this, the action of life and death is toned down somewhat — but the ideas at play engage at a deeper level. Whereas the first Dune was more about what was at stake for the characters as individuals, in this book, what is at stake is less one’s lives than the fate of this enormous number of people.

I am a little bit fuzzy on who this messiah is supposed to be. Is this Paul? Is it Idaho? Or the children to come?

As always, Herbert’s dialogue is multi-faceted, with tense reflecting of so many different angles at once. I enjoy reading his dialogue as he is able to say much with so little. At the same time though, I think he explains too much. His characters sometimes exclaim or show harsh feelings in a way that seems like they are on edge all the time. But I suppose Alia and Paul (and others) prescience would lead anyone to be jumpy, if your entire future unraveled depending on what happens to you.

In a way though, I doubt that the future works this way; Herbert explains this as a kind of Bergsonian unfolding in which the past and the future have a present beside you. This retroactive ex (ante/post) facto synthesis is in fact how Hegel (and Zizek) explains dialectical synthesis. Depending on your current situation, new information will shift your context such that the future and past become revealed as differences in the present. As the present becomes a different present, so shall the past and future also shift. The past and future then, are little more than extensions of the very relations we embody. As new information forces a shift in relations so their extensions shift — in all dimensions, even temporal ones! As Zizek says, our envisioning of the future is always a utopic vision in terms of the present. We are in this sense, truly unable to comprehend any future whatsoever. And that proves true of prescience in this book. Possible futures are not really prescience futures, they are in this sense, truly analytic processes.

All the same though, I think this book — this series — is well worth the read. How it unravels and what is at stake is always far more weightier than what we may think of. Paul’s awareness in this book is monolithic — I am in awe of Herbert’s imagination, of his ability to tease out all the relations that would embody having an empire of this magnitude.

Having said this, I think some readers may be put off by how little “action” there is in the book. I suppose some may expect tension and plot to be expressed by dramatic effects like people being stabbed or things being blown up. In this sense, much of the book’s tension comes from the characters attempting to figure out who they are and what they are supposed to do. The “bad guys” however, know what they need to do; they lack the vision that the protagonists exhibit. And strangely enough, this is often reversed in standard stories; where good guys know what is at stake and the bad guys are not sure but want to find “it” or “get it”, whatever this absolute power is. Because of this reversal, this book is actually more in line as a spiritual journey than anything else, where the protagonists seek to find illumination. As Herbert states so succinctly,”enlightenment is not separate from its means” (and there is much to be quoted from this book in this manner!) And so, the tension and “journey” in this book is much like the mystical affects found in like books of spiritual awakenings.

The complexity of this primal mysticism with “high” technology of unthinkable means is, I realize, perhaps the most influential factor from the Dune series, that Herbert wasn’t just writing about some other world, but rather, struggling to make sense of the one we live in now. What he finds to be at stake today (or in its first publication in the 1960s) is still relevant, after all, we live in an age of seemingly unlimited technological wonder but struggle personally with our faith in our leaders, our planet and our seeming lack of direction. The jihad of Dune’s universe is the globalization of our planet, where we march as soldiers to wealth and knowledge but lack the prescience to understand how we have changed what we are reterritorializing, even as we seek material abundance and yet continue to find human misery and empty struggle, leaving us at times without even our utopic drive we initially entered the fray with.

In this sense, Dune Messiah is but a transitional text to the next one. But it does such a good job at laying down the lines for what is to come next! Do not read this book unless you like intellectual mysticism and want to be mired in its sequels!

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The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967

February 8, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967 by John Kenneth Galbraith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am definitely a fan of Galbraith…and I don’t say that about many authors. While not a complete collection of his writing, this is definitely a good selection of what he was about as an economist.

What I find fascinating is that The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State come from an American economist (or Canadian if you like) and yet support many of Marx’s conclusions about merchant ideology. The sense that merchant capital extended to producers and consumers alike (producers since the Dutch in the 1600s and then, to consumers after WW2, as state backed consumerism) guarantees the use value that makes production monetarily sound (completing the material dialectic of merchant capital) ex post facto is astounding. That Galbraith extends this idea by recognizing that technology is the key to capitalism, in terms of production and social disruption, something not yet recognized by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo or Marx is will worth the read. If communist minded individuals and Marxists alike read more of Marx and actually kept their minds open instead of being reactionary we might have a deeper understanding of our state backed capitalism.

While Galbriath does not advocate revolution, he definitely insists that we need to change our values if we want to survive in a degrading environment and do more with our lives than make the anonymous bureaucrats wealthy (technocrats of our technostructure as he calls them).

Despite this insistence that humanity use its powers for more than making wealth and endless production and increased poverty and degradation, Galbraith adds with this thought a heavy analysis of the inner workings of state and industry as a unity that transcends the explicated boundaries of American politics. He understands that we are not really free anymore; that our freedom is limited to our consumerist subjectivity. While this analysis does miss some of Marx’s social understandings (that a change in material relations means a change in societal arrangement) Galbraith does add a refreshing view of how economics and infact higher education is complacent in arguing for the status quo. For why should they bite the hand that feeds them?

Furthermore, as we specialize deeper and deeper into fields of study, we lose the ability to connect the more general dots. Our world becomes fragmented across many areas. Specialists cannot see where they are going, much like those economists who eschew math appear less rigorous. People doing specific tasks will more likely see their world through the filter of that task, and be unable to comprehend outside of it. As our complexity in our world rises with each year, it becomes less and less likely that there is anyone driving the wheel. This is how we can see the technostructure, as an faith that promotes itself so that we become less and less able to break from it as time goes on, as our specific interests (employment, leisure, study) becomes less and less able to identify the nature of our cage — as an over arching planning structure. Much like how the planning system in the Soviet state was run by anonymous bureaucrats in a state apparatus, our planning system is run by anonymous technocrats in various corporate chains backed by a state system.

I won’t continue on about how this is reflective in our worldview of modernism — our production of epistemes — but there is a direct link here, between how our knowledge is formed and our value system is driven by philosophical, educational and economic concerns for no other reason than to develop itself further, for us to be more completely mired in its logic and its mindless production of demand desires and status on various corporate and civil chains of our own unthinkable making.

We live on this Earth, and fulfill the needs of the very game we create in order to live together on this Earth without ever really looking up and acknowledging that we have created extreme wealth and extreme suffering with no end in sight… if only so that one can be satisfied at the expense of another, and for what? So we can die together and leave the world a slightly more ugly place?

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Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

February 8, 2015 / posted in manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Tractatus Logico PhilosophicusTractatus Logico Philosophicus by Wittgenstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When asked in an interview by Clare Parnet about Wittgenstein, Gilles Deleuze declared that Wittgenstein was the “assassin of philosophy.” Nonetheless, between Badious’ Being and Event II and Deleuze’s work, you can see that Wittgenstein was on par — that is — he was interested in the same topics they were. While Badiou and Wittgenstein appear quite similar in many regards — both approach the presentation of sense as an order of logic — Deleuze’s relationship with Wittgenstein seems strained. After finishing Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, however, it’s clear that Wittgenstein advocates stepping out of the circular logic of presentation inherent within his propositional language solely to be silent about the very thing language is meant to speak of, and for that, Wittgenstein fails. When you see that this Elan Vital is central to Deleuze’s work, that as Badiou rightly states, is in a sense, what Deleuze’s philosophy can always be reduced to as this concept is so central to Deleuze, you understand that Wittgenstein only formally approaches Deleuze: The two veer off in inseparable difference due to aesthetic reasons (inherent to Wittgenstein’s desire for a crystaline purity of logic).

Nonetheless, the two are nearly ontop one another. You could almost read Logic of Sense as a broader version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But even further still, when you recognize that Wittgenstein considered this book to be a failure, that at the very end he ends up discarding the very Spinozian-like formality of his Euclidean presentation, of top down truth that dribbles into particular branches only to lead nowhere, you’ll understand that if Wittgenstein was given a longer life with broader exposure to issues, perhaps avoiding Bertrand Russell’s poisonous influence, he might have been able to gleam the larger subliminal essence language has to offer… the very essence that he eliminated through the very rigid formality of his approach.

We all know that language can’t be reduced to logic. This is true, because language can be used to present any number of inherently contradictory hypothesises. Language has to be ambiguous in this way because if it was not, if it was 1:1 as a method of designation, we’d have to invent whole new languages each time we changed the power structure. We may not have to invent new languages for entirely new cultures, but it seems to certainly help. The multi-valence inherent in language isn’t a weakness, as Russell or Wittgenstein may have thought… it’s not an imperfection needed to be weeded out. Rather, it’s a partial resolution of an infinitely resolute difference, one that is further refined…to the point of collapse only to be refined again as needed. The very ability for language to come about, ever changing and alive reflects the totally continuous becoming of the very essence of human knowledge.

In other words, our language changes as the conditions of our knowledge change. Our language changes because our knowledge shifts as we grow and evolve. This constant shifting isn’t reflective of the imprecision of our knowing, but rather, reflective of the depths to which we continually try to know and with which the unfolding of time reveals how much more there is to know.

Given that Wittgenstein wanted only the determinacy of propositions, recognizing that the limits of truth conditions was merely a range upon which we did speak, we can become more mature when we understand that language contains within it the very seeds of indeterminacy so that truth can be presented to us. Only because the void of the indeterminate pure multiple hides within the shadows of language’s incessant murmur can a fully formed truth jump out to us. Wittgenstein definitely chased the absolute point of reflection within language but he didn’t seem to realize that such a “picture” of a logically perfect structure is only possible, albeit briefly, because language is raggedly rough. Only given the inclarity of indeterminacy, with appropriate revelations, at appropriate contexts, can we, when presented with generic knowledge, momentarily recast the whole and for one moment a concise seed can become Truth, locking and freezing us in perfect comprehension, before we realize the beyond the immanence of a particular range of truth values for that presentation, before we then continue onward to newer fuzzier skies.

In other words, we can only have the experience of an accepted truth given that we have the experience of undecided and improper truths. This experience of truth are merely the continual unfolding social contexts by which we consider different (and newer) aspects of the same. As Badiou points out using higher math that Wittgenstein was not yet (and in some cases never) exposed, with even an infinite cardinal we have an uncountable infinitely more relations of its parts, relations which given retroactive composites of other cardinals which may not even be presentable (as they are incompossible), do we continually arrive at further truths beyond our finite comprehension. It is not that we must remain silent because incompleteness is out of the picture. Rather, we are only silent so that we can speak. And in speaking, we must realize as well, that we are speaking only but a fraction of what we are silent on. All knowledge is only possible at the exclusion of other, even greater knowledge.

It’s a shame Wittgenstein stopped here. This is a mature work, but only one in which we can get but a taste of what can come further when we use his methods but discard this naive Euclidean dogmatism of absolute eternal truth.

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Transcritique: On Kant and Marx

January 30, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Transcritique: On Kant and MarxTranscritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kojin Karatani argues for the formal equivalence of Kant and Marx as for Karatani, both thinkers critique their fields of study (Kant in philosophy and Marx in economics) by positioning themselves in the interstices. For both, all knowledge is a constructive difference, a synthesis of different transcendental fields. For Kant, we have empiricism and metaphysics suspending the transcendental apperception. For Marx, money weaves a field from which surplus value can perpetuate capitalism through the extension of merchant capital. This reading relies on the understanding that different spheres of money, different cultural, geological, economic and semiotic values allow merchant capital to attain surplus value through what is basically arbitration. Karatani then expands on Marx, applying him in various ways up to the current consumerist state. This reading by itself isn’t enough — Karatani emphasizes that such disparate spheres are created through the metaphoric union of the capitalist-nation-state. Much of Karatani’s chapters on Marx are devoted to arguing for this articulation while correcting much simpler readings of Marx as perpetuated by Engels. Of course, Marx and Kant are both difficult thinkers to read. Kant is notoriously erudite, and Marx is notoriously long winded. Yet Karatani manages them both, along with various supporting thinkers and their various positions, to illuminate Marx and Kant while maintaining a slender volume just over 300 pages in text.

I highly recommend this book. This is my second time reading it. The first time, I was a little lost, better read on Kant but not very well read on Marx. This time around, about ten years later, I ate this book up. Karatani proves to be a close reader while being a precise reader, a difficult task. He brings up details when details are needed and illustrates broad topics when overviews are to be given. If I were to characterize his approach of transcritique, it is less about utopia (both Kant and Marx are prone to be understood as utopic thinkers) and more about understanding the context by which the logic of their fields of study are arranged. Marx did so in his volume 3 of capital, understanding the state’s irrational role in supporting and promoting capital in relation to other states. This is much like how Kant, according to Karatani, in his 3rd critique moved forward to speak of a “plural subjectivity” often thought of as his thoughts on aesthetics.

It’s strange that Marx and Kant can be read against one another with such similar structures.

In a way, I wish for Karatani to have included at least a conclusion, to tie both of these guys together, as he did so in the beginning. What have we to gain from this methodology of transcritique? It’s true that his last chapter on Marx moves forward to provide alternatives and reasons as to why capitalism should not be allowed to persist, and why it will inevitably fail. Still, he leaves this methodological approach behind, and the first third of his book (on Kant) without mention in the conclusion. His big take on bracketing as being necessary for knowledge leaves me wondering — what does this method of transcritique bracket, and where are Karatani’s antinomies? What assumptions does he see himself making? Technology for Karatani is in pure service of capitalism’s ability to create organic unity in production and capital as well as the creation of new temporary values in the form of lifestyles. He brackets the possibility for technology to create relations outside of the 4 social relations as he espoused by Marx.

In a way though, this book could stand a third section, one on information, knowledge and money together. This section would combine these two points and statistic a new domain of examination, namely that of the internet… with bitcoin and the like. Coming out in 2003, it’s surprising that only 10 years later, transcritique could stand to be updated in this way. Technology has surly surpassed our ability to grasp what we are doing as it extends much more quickly how we can do it.

Still, a great book. It’s amazing how little Marxists, even staunch communists, have read of Marx. They get too caught up trying to solve the problems of capital that they don’t seem to appreciate or understand what capital is, and how it allows for much more than just problems. If you’re on the fence about this book I would recommend reading it. Nearly every page has something worth taking away from, and that means you probably have to reserve two hours to read 50 pages. The time is well spent.

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Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

January 30, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into BeingWhere Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cognitive linguistics has at its underlying aesthetic the very literal understanding that how we think of things is what they are. This follows post-structural rhetoricians like Paul Ricoeur who argue that the connective tissue of language is metaphor — where metaphor is the substantiation of the naked copula form is through content. We forget the form of the copula in metaphors and thus experience the content as a variation of the copula form instead of being the actual connection. In other words we understand our world through representations, never understanding that an ontologically reified point of view is only possible because metaphors position the copula through its latent content so that the form of the copula becomes seen as the “ding as such”. In other words, representations only appear to be representations because one of the formal representations comes to represent nothing but the pure presence of its own linguistic connectivity.

Having said this, I was surprised (but also not surprised) by the comments below. Many people were confused by this book, blaming either the psychologists for not living up to their expectations (of not being neurologists), or blaming the thickness of the mathematical concepts presented. We often think of the pure formalism of math as being objectively isometric (as one reviewer said) to the proposition that reality is always present beneath our representations. One key connection that Lakoff and Nunez being up repeatedly is that many mathematical formalisms (such as zero, negative numbers, complex numbers, limits, and so on) were not accepted even long after their calculatory prowess was proven effectual… what made these concepts acceptable wasn’t their caculatory significance, but rather their introduction to the cannon of mathematical concepts via metaphoric agency. For instance, we take zero for granted as being “real” even though we understand it to not be a true number. It only was after a new metaphoric concept was presented for zero to be sensible (numbers as containers and origin on a path) was then zero incorporated into the cannon of what was acceptable. This understanding proves to be the very “twist” needed for Lakoff and Nunez to write this book. While many of the concepts are perhaps difficult for some of us non-mathematicians to grasp, I found their presentation to be concise and illuminating. Their tabulatory presentation of metaphors side by side allow us to grasp the mapping of logically independent factors from one domain into another. This basic movement is in fact a methodology they may have picked up from analytic geometry as invented by Rene Descartes: the translation of continuums into discrete points.

While it is understandable that they trace the building of conceptual metaphors via simple to the more complex, I did find their delay of speaking of analytic geometric to be confusing. When a topic is presented I want it to be explained, rather than having to wait half a book to read on it again. This is really my only possible complaint.

Overall, this book helped me connect the observation of formalism being prevalent as an organizing feature of pretty much all procedure and knowledge formation today with the root of that formalization, being the atomization of discrete epistemes of knowledge, whether that knowledge is granular or point or vector, or some other kind of rigor. We can also thus understand mathematics as being synthetic, contrary to what most philosophers in the west (excluding the great Immanuel Kant, Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze) understood.

Today, through our rockstar mathematicians and physicists we revisit the old Platonic hat that math is somehow natural, only apparent in our minds and yet more real than anything else this world has to offer. This is a troubling and definitely cold and etymologically naive sentiment. It’s mysterious that anything in this world is the way that is, let alone consistent as though following laws, but that isn’t any reason to be hypnotized by our own intellectual conceptions. As Lakoff and Nunez point out, while some math is applicable in the physical world most conceptual math remains beyond application of the physical world, as there is no physical correlation with those domains. Such application may be possible in alternate universes, but such universes remain the sole conception of our mind.

In other words, how we think of something is what we understand it to be, that is true, but it’s also how we experience what we understand to be to be what it is. To get into that deeper thought requires an unpacking of the most erudite philosophical concept of all — that of the number One, arguably the only number there ever has been and in fact the only thing there has ever been. Understandably this is beyond the scope of mathematics itself, or at least beyond the tenants of what most mathematicians are willing to go. I don’t want to belabor the point here, but I will state that the case study at the back of the book is quite compelling. If Euler’s equation may work in formal procedure alone, but as Lakoff and Nunez point out, the construction of that equation is only possible through the discrete projections of layered metaphors to understand equivalence of conception regardless of the different construction domains these metaphors originate from (logarithms vs trigonometry, vs Cartesian rotation vs complex numbers)… ultimately a unity is made possible because such closure is driven by the singular domain of our minds. In our minds, with their ornate metaphors, their clearly trained disciplines and their innate mechanisms of spacial orientation, we are able to combine complex concepts into the most brilliant of abstractions.

As such this book may be too difficult for most of us to read, because it requires we re-orient our thinking along different parameters, different assumptions about who we are and what we are doing when we study and create math. This probably won’t jive with most people, as it seems for most people, knowledge is less about reworking what they already know into a new arrangement, and more about filling in gaps in the arrangements they already have.

I’m not saying that this cognitive linguistic approach is equivocally true, I’m saying that truth is more than how we arrange something, but the entire range of what we can conceive of to be a relation that brings to light new connections. In the end, I think for most of us, the only legitimatizer of reason remains one’s singular emotions, of what feels to be acceptable. To get around this, requires the most stern of discipline and the most unabashed eagerness to learn something new. This is also a reminder that math is not formal procedure as we learned long division in our elementary grades. Rather, math is the unabashed conceptualization of formal arrangements in their absolute complexity. In this way, even understanding how highly educated mathematicians think of math is illuminating to how you and I can understand something (ourselves and the universe) in new light. That alone is worth reading this book.

So do read this book because it’s beautiful, but also read this book because it’s another way of considering something you already think you know. After all, learning isn’t a matter of facts. Facts are boring; the world is full of facts we can never memorize (such as where your car was on such and such date and time. Kind of useless, except in special cases, such as in the immediate). Learning is the mastery of how to conceptualize, how to arrange information and how to further that arrangement through metaphor of what is.

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Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics

January 30, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, PoliticsDeleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics by Paul Patton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From the translator of Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton takes on Deleuze as a thinker, and sums up much of his work, comparing him to Derrida and (surprise) American analytic philosophers like Rawls and Rorty. Patton also brings to light the scattered understandings of Deleuze about the event, a specific principle not often spoken of when examining Deleuze’s work. I thought much of Patton’s examination aggressive, intense and very interesting — certainly an above par review of Deleuzian concepts, although not complete in the sense that most books on Deleuze concentrate on one or two of his ideas, eschewing an examination of the complete picture.

The application of American philosophers then, is a way in which Patton “applies” Deleuze, allowing us to step back from the hypnotic twists of Deleuzian language and see where this particular kind of conceptual arrangement can get us. This is far from a complete exposition however, and it may be likely that Patton decided to concentrate on lesser examined concepts of Deleuze in order to streamline the book and present a stronger punch. Still, I like his exposition of Deleuzian ideas and intend to return to them when I want inspiration on a particular thought.

In particular I like Patton’s exposition on “events” and how he ties these to sense and history. His application of Deleuze’s use of colonization as a expressive metaphor is also interesting — and in some sense serves as a defense against critics of Deleuze who would accuse Deleuze of being Euro-centric in his expression. Patton’s inclusion of “What is Philosophy?” was also refreshing as this book is sometimes overlooked in favor of the rich conceptual precision of Deleuze’s previous collaborations with Guattari. Patton’s choice of examining Democracy was also illustrative of Deleuze’s anti-transcendetal approach, although this can be critiqued further.

All in all, a good book to read on Deleuze, although it feels pretty selective. Overall I think Patton does a good job at grasping Deleuze’s utopian aesthetic.

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Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design

January 30, 2015 / posted in art, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through DesignUniversal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design by William Lidwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While this book may seem like a motley alphabetical list (because it is) of design “principles” what this book is really about is about how people chunk information. Each of the monikers isolates a “principle” according to the metaphor that logically independent relationships are separate axioms of organization. The book isn’t meant to be deep, or tell you why something is, it’s simply meant to be an inspiration, a guide to help one organize how to approach a project. The key to this book is that it tries to explain how best to approach each of axiom of organization, how it leads people to digest the presented information.

It’s of particular interest that many of these design principles aren’t so much about even presentation of design, but also include how to design (what processes, kinds of procedures). Design is one of those areas where everyone thinks that they are a designer, that what intuitively makes sense to oneself should make sense to everyone else. That if it’s obvious to “me” then it is obvious to everyone else. This is not true. Good design requires a channel to unpack potentially complex bundles of information, find out what message one wants to impart, and then present that message through the organization of those bundles of information in such a way that the message comes across as the immanent sense of that organization, that most people will select for the criteria presented as being what that information is rather than understanding it in a different way.

In this sense, the optimal organization of a specific complexity for a particular deployment is what design is. This book doesn’t talk about that though, it assumes we understand this already, and goes ahead to present the “meat and potatos” of design through a list of design principles. The authors were keen to also point out that the rise of design as a profession requires the vast accumulation of different areas including “art, science, and religion…the basic workings of nature” to solve a particular problem. I’m not sure that this is exactly what design is (in this sense, anyone who solves problems creatively is a designer…a little too vague) but I think design has to be understood as “cross-disciplinary” simply because what is necessary for a successful designer is the ability to unpack complexity and then select the best presentation for the most optimal deployment of that complexity to serve a purpose. Design in this way is related to philosophy via the organization of information — the unpacking and realigning of complexity — not the academic jargon that philosophy is so often wrapped in. The selection of various “principles” then bridges the desired message and the nature of the material to be presented. Really, quite a complex procedure which needs one to also understand the target audience’s framework intimately. Doubtlessly there can be no simple book about such a procedure.

This book could be better explained through what I just said, the meta-aesthetics of design. But in lieu of that, the authors don’t go much deeper. Instead, I think, they aim to be more practical and throw a bunch of stuff at you, to get you to think… which is misleading because they claim this book is good for teaching. And while throwing a bunch of junk just be what a designer needs to get his juices flowing, it may not be appropriate for a teacher!

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The Nature and Properties of Soil

January 25, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, utility / No Comments

The Nature and Properties of SoilThe Nature and Properties of Soil by Nyle C. Brady
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We may not think about it, because we treat the ground we walk on as a surface to get around from place to place. But the soil is the collection of what earth’s crust. Mixed with chemicals and chunks of matter collected from geological, meteorological, cultural, technological, social and the soil becomes a matrix reflexive of more than just “recent” geological and climate events but it also comes to mirror the action of man. The depth of our knowledge of the soil correlates with the noticed differences in phenotypical expressions of plants, animals and society. We build on the soil, so we need it stable, we grow on soil, so we need it fertile, we live on soils so we need it to be productive, expansive, beautiful and natural. Natural here, acts as a term to stabilize this collection, as we recognize soil as what it isn’t by what we need it to be. Thus, our knowledge grows deeper and deeper as we track (un)desired changes in the areas of (un)welcome surprises. Plants don’t grow as good, or they have a discoloration. Floods happen. Buildings and roads collapse or crumble. Soil is one of the areas which has an influence, as soil is foundational to all aspects of human existence, as all life comes from it, all stability is attributed to it, without it we wouldn’t have a place to be. We are made of it. It makes us, and returns to us our waste as useful, life and abundance (at least before there was too much, and too great a variety).

Thus, this textbook’s depth reflects the depth to which humankind has become knowledgeable about the soil because we have traced our needs back to the soil, to this depth, that this 1000 page book is just the beginning. Yet even with its multitudinous diagrams, rampant calculations, redox equations, and geological terminology to nominalize difference in types, origins, natures of soil; you can still find hearty admonishments, and mentions of what humans use the soil for, what humans want from it, how humans mistreat it because it costs too much, or we were once ignorant. Our dependency on this prime earth is foretold in these pages by the amount of time, devotion and study it has taken to amass this depth of knowledge. And there are still things we don’t yet know about the soil but hope to find out! Our reliance is truly unending.

Along the way, you’ll find that much of this information is classified into chunks. But the parts of these chunks interact with one another, in dimensions the book still tries to highlight but obviously holds to be less important than the consistency of what has been chunked. Likewise, the soil itself has bands of interference as influences from one area, say climate, or another, say, by a farmhouse, all intermix. This is the nature of soil, that soil is a collection of anonymous particles that share similar constraints. For example, while the book mentions resistance in soil, this resistance is mostly due to contextual factors, such as what other influences of climate, geology, industry in its “surrounding” shall also claim influence. The creation of these contexts are the mutually shifting ground of shifting soil, as there is no soil; soil is what stays the same regardless of changes, and that formulates a substantive basis for naming them by what stays mostly the same.

Perhaps in some order of decades we may want to consider additional soil types, but this may not happen as our knowledge of the soil and our knowledge of our reliance on it, has introduced some movements whereby we wish for maintaining the soil, or even improving its functions in the aspects we deem to be desirable for the soil. This too is a sliding scale. As our knowledge increases, so we do find more ways in which our actions and treatment has influenced the soil heretofore unseen. The collection of our actions is a retroactive synthesis, ex post facto, of the true nature of our actions, not just in how we know but also how we are ignorant.

This differentiating edge of what soil can show us in our own knowledge highlights two aspects, both of which are parallax. On the one hand, we create our knowledge as an imprint (extension) of what we are… not just expressive of our desires but also expressive of aspects of our person as are unaware of being. On the other hand, this highlights the need for a post-rational approach to conceptualizing our frame. Following the work of Humberto Maturana, we can understand that “life is knowledge” and thus knowledge is the conceptual correlation with the extent of our ability to comprehend and appreciate what we are. The parallax isn’t simply that human consciousness is the limit that defines our fields of knowledge, but that the limit of our knowledge is the extent of our human differentiation from the manifolds of soil, flesh and matter. It follows then, that our discursive practices are the materialization of our knowledge. The two go hand in hand as more than epiphenomenal, as the correlation isn’t causal but it is a literal surjective distinction that expresses itself from the zones of ideational substance and material abstraction.

Following this, we can draw parallax lines in a projective geometry between economics as a rational material quantifiability, the internal classifications of which are on the level of value-form as espoused by the ideology of merchant capital and the post-structural conception of the void as the abstraction to which we ground all concepts immanently within a transcendence characterized by the value-form of the void, as the zero-phoneme signifier is the only position from which we can measure all determinate fields of knowledge against. We sacrifice knowledge of the union of a parabola’s curvature at the apex if we understand the apex as necessarily coinciding with the zero degree angle of measurement of a cartesian y-axis.

We can also understand the correlation of depth between our bodily elements and the elements adopted from a soil polluted with those reactive elements. This is akin to an expression of a generic within a transcendental field. Only within that field can we note the presence of a generic as a nominalisation when a functional value operates through blind procedure to highlight the operate distinction as reflective of a knowledge about the other domain. In other words, because we like our monoculture more, the stress of the soil is reflected in the diminished quality of vegetation, although we may notice first the diminished quality within ourselves.

Thus, the poverty of our soils knowledge is the poverty of our own organisms, as we attempt to master the earth; for it is not the individual human that struggles against the earth but the earth that struggles with the entire mass of humanity as we collectively shape our planet. Thus, the form of our knowledge as a discrete mathematics, the collective metaphor of set theory spacializes and flips the metaphysics of presence from a substantive position of a classical era in which knowledge was knowledge of material, but rather the formal interrelatinos become the means by which knowledge is generated. Thus our place of observation becomes part of the network of knowledge. In a post-rationalist conception, we understand where we are by where we want to see, intersubjectively, as stated by Vittorio Guidano is also explicated by John Galbraith in economics as a self referential series of groupings which create identity and sublimate actions for group subsistence. Although this post-rational approach developed by Guidano goes beyond economic justification for uber-production as outlined by Galbraith, we can see although with Badiou’s set theory that the formalization of knowledge is reflective of classifications and their attendant distinctions. These distinctions formalized as separate chunks that reify dimensions of the context for consideration is reflective not only of how humans understand themselves in larger organizations (family, clan, tribe or seniority, department, branch, corporation or citizen, city, county, state, nation) but also in impersonal relations such as within soil, or in symphony or other unified “fields” of experience. Of course we would study that which we found to be useful to us! And of course our study would be reflective of who we are and what we do.

In this way we can understand the our desire to learn about soils is our desire to relate to the other of us, that is, the matrix from which we come and to which we return, the soil.

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An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

January 24, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

An Enquiry Concerning Human UnderstandingAn Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The style might be dated, but this amazing work did more than wake Kant up from his “dogmatic slumber”. While its true that Kant’s Critiques set off modern philosophy by providing an inflectional structure for us to better consider the nature of phenomenon, it’s also arguable that Kant’s critiques did not in fact adequately address Hume.

This thick, and well thought book of Hume can be summed in one statement: “If it needs explicit statement then it is not natural” While our conception of natural-ness today has been modified — meaning more (and less) than what Hume would have meant, Hume’s genius lies in grasping that what is common sense, or given as the way of things, is often a way of justifying what is. This is to say that the supposed nature of things is often a little more than a ruse, a stablizing point for social relations… that all things moral, ethical, valuable reflect our human need to determine difference of social standing between one another. It follows then that even our highest conceptions which are to provide elucidation and stability in our norms and practices are in fact methods of convention dictated by mistaking cause for effect.

This is to say that often our reasoning works backwards, to justify what we want to be, rather than working from a position of generality and finding what principles operate on the broadest terms. In contemporaneous terms, Meillasoux would all this Ptolemy’s Revenge as Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” works not to debunk a human centered universe but works explicitly to guarantee that the universe require human consciousness be at the seat of all understanding.

For this reason, many thinkers today (Deleuze seemingly the first) return to Hume as a way to balance out the “waking dogma” of Kant and his successors.

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The Visible and the Invisible

January 14, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Visible and the InvisibleThe Visible and the Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Too much negative dialectics, although, his goal seems to be to put us back into the flesh… not just as an embodiment of a singularity at the level of the subjective but at the level of flesh. He goes out of the way to try to die our sensory experience with our ability to create and formulate ideas; something echoed earlier in Hume. But nonetheless, a nearly impossible task. The few pages he leads to trying to tie the immense chiasm between sight and texture itself seems impossible. Given the different platforms for sense data, it does seem miraculous that we are able to synthesize a coherent experience from these two threads. Compound the difficulty of the subject with the unfinished nature of the manuscript, this makes it even harder to read. I suppose I will return to this after reading more phenomenology. This is perhaps understandable, since the back of the book states that this is a boom to read if only for the insight into the working mind of a philosopher. Not a strong recommendation for coherence.

Not having read Maurice Merleau-Ponty before, I wonder (but strongly doubt) that in his polished works, he writes with such a stream of thought, with at times, such an ill defined context. In some ways though, this text (in the 60s) is a late expression of a bygone era, since structuralism was nearing its heyday, existentialism had long past relevance, and the early post-modern era was in full swing (but not yet named, with post-structuralism on the horizon). In a way, Merleau-Ponty can be thought of as a kind of throwback then, to Husserl, the true heir to Kant, in the sense that we can be subjects embodied as we accept the transcendental field as absolute… something that was sure to get shaken up soon enough, although Merleau-Ponty didn’t get to see that happen.

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