The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

December 10, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human SciencesThe Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this impressive book, Foucault takes on the basic organizational episteme of our current epoch. He highlights the contemporary modality of our post-modern world by tracing the development of our episteme from the 16th century to the present day.

While this may seem to be a simple tale of historical causation Foucault says explicitly on several occasions that he cannot account for the break between the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century. What he is referring to has several possible angles to it, which strongly emphasizes that in our current era we have not processed this break fully, that we are still within this logic and therefore unable to account for it.

One way to speak of this break is to note that in the Classical era, knowledge was mediated through a reference to the infinite. This had the happy consequence of making language transparent. If there was a limit to our knowledge it lay in the fact that human beings were finite and unable to extend to the fullest reaches of knowing, which would otherwise be available. When one contrasts this with the current epoch, we have the condition of knowing being mediated by man. As Zizek might say, a subject-hood is self-realized selfhood, that all conditions of knowing pass through the self.

While it may be tempting to digress into philosophical contemplation with this idealist twist, Foucault is quick to add that this subjectivity is only made possible because the inherent formalization of various fields have fragmented into their own logic (for him, biology, economics and philology are the ones he looks at, but by no means are these positions foundational). What I mean by immanent logic is that the formalization, which is expressed as the adoptation of mathesis as a neutral symbology by which to express immanent logic, forces each of these fields to define the conditions of their knowledge by an appeal to a central agency that is both immanent to the field and conditioned beyond it. What ends up happening is that we chase our own shadow. Human beings created these fields of knowledge to solve specific tasks relating to how we valuate our situation. We want to know certain things and value knowing those things in the way that we do; thus these fields come to reflect our basis premises as to who we are and how we are.

To say this in another way, these different fragmented sciences are created from and simultaneously inform the cultural biases which outlines these various fields of study. In these areas (biology, economics, language and so on) ultimately reflect back how we create knowing, so that when we attempt to know these fields completely we end up chasing our own reflection. Foucault uses the Diego’s painting Las Meninas as the metaphor for this knowing. The various figures in the field become stabilized in our attempt to see what is going on, and in that moment we catch a faint glimpse of our own reflection in the distance. For this reason, man and subjecthood, as Foucault notes, are in fact recent authorizations which did not exist previous to this break.

You can find many ideas that he skims here as echoing positions by other thinkers, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Meillasoux, Baudrillard… they all arrange our situation differently but their arrangement of our situation isn’t a genuine stepping out of it. In much the same way, writers like Kafka and Beckett are only made possible because of the epoch; they are already expressing the confusion of the order which refers back to us, they are not creating the order nor are they recording its transition.

One of the most telling features that Foucault writes about, telling in the sense that this is an Event, is how he recasts time as a matter of epistemological entrapment. Our inability to decide for ourselves an origin for consciousness is a sign that consciousness exists outside our ability to know because it is the condition of how we know. This strongly matches Badious writing on the Event, signaling that our criteria for knowing remains invisible to us. Consciousness like the figure of Man remains the limit to our knowledge because we are the figure by which we can come to know everything else around us.

Foucault would like to realize the historical causality in the rising of this event but he can’t explain it. There can be no causality because our methods of understanding will not be able to account for itself. In fact, I am expressing this episteme right now, as the current trace of philosophy and knowledge today (sciences included) wish to think the unthinking, to bring about consciousness to the real conditions of knowing. This of course is a problem because if our human parameters for what matters isn’t objective enough for us, and in fact can only bring about the cultural biases which are expressed in how we decide what is, worthy of knowing and how we should know something (what terms are relevant) then what should be the basis for the creation of a new knowledge?

Foucault offers Nietzche’s superman as a possible condition of the new. The Eternal Return marks a horrifically new epoch for which we can have new conditions. (The Nazi trauma as it were, was not it, because it was not enough to mark a difference– that false event was too conditioned already by recent and ancient histories, its baggage signaled an allegiance to the current epoch in much the same way Mao or Stalinism did the same.) Of course, a new condition also means a new history, also means the end of philosophy… but I digress.

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The Sickness unto Death

December 7, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Sickness unto DeathThe Sickness unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’d like to give this 3.5 stars, but I guess since that’s not possible, let’s go with 3 stars, since the ending fell flat.

Kierkegaard follows the Hegelian dialectic through the realization of spirit from self. Different from other readings, but not incompatible, Kierkegaard notes that it is through God as man as the mediator that self is realized as spirit, that like Hegel, Jesus is the bridge for the insurmountable gap between man and God. What’s particularly compelling about this work is that Kierkegaard defines despair and sin as conditions of separation from God. For Kierkegaard there can be no other understanding than a relation grounded in God since God is all there is, from start to finish. We may question what it means to stand before God and accept God but with this reading, there can only be faith in acceptance since any other posturing is deceptive and a sin — since such deployments would seek to separate us from God.

So in this sense, all separation and struggle is immanent to the self, as the self is the only other position for which there can be any deception or posturing. On the one hand, this seems incredibly boring since it’s a basic dialectic form. But Kierkegaard is able to walk through a Christian conceptualization based on the work by an already very Christian philosopher.

I suppose in a way, he is detailing out his own situation in abstract, outlining for others, what he finds to be vanities of humanity. We would like to be seen a certain way, understood a certain way, and often this even before us in the eyes of God, a posture we would like to hold to be genuine, never realizing that our own wishes for a particular understanding belie our unacknowledged desires for self acknowledgement and self acceptance. In that sense, complete acknowledgement and truthfulness about who we are is only possible in the face of an all knowing, all seeing deity who is witness to even the dark depths of our soul. I suppose this is perhaps, a great function of bringing God into our lives, that we cannot lie to ourselves and must come to realize our own imperfections so that we can be better people.

This last part may not be in Kierkegaards book. I am not Christian though, nor do I seek to be Christian, but Kierkegaard makes no promises about what sickness unto death can lead us to; the absolute defiance of not-believing in God despite the option being there constantly. Instead, he leaves this off, not mentioning what comes after, perhaps because he is not there either, although for him, such despair is an all consuming struggle from which the only reprieve can be to leave it be and move on to better things.

I think if you are struggling in your life and need to find a resolve, this book could work for you in the sense that you may come to some kind peace, knowing your despair is not alone and that it is, in a very universe sense, a mode, a choice that you made for yourself. Although the solution in this book may not be one you find useful, as I did not, you may not want to read it as it kind of doesn’t really speak to you. But you wouldn’t know if it did or not though, unless you read it.

So it’s probably worth reading if you are depressed or need some guidance at least for a while. All in all, it’s not a thick book, so why not?

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Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution

December 6, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific RevolutionThird Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The preface of this book sets out to debunk the place of literary intellectuals with the very heavy hand that such intellectuals are jargonistic, anti-realist, arrogant pricks who would usurp the place of the real intellectuals, humble scientists whose work has been long misunderstood. Or something like that. The introduction is kind of off putting, with the claim that literature isn’t applicable to anything whereas science is. This position isn’t very interesting, although it’s been present as a debate between these two sides for too long.

The essays in this book however, are far more interesting and don’t have anything to do with the frame of the introduction. Much of the work of these scientists is theoretical, yet they speak in clear mostly unambiguous terms. Brockman seeks to create an intercourse with the public and these scientists who work, often, in the fringes of their communities. That’s what he means by third culture. And to some extent it’s kind of successful, I think. There’s plenty to pick from, and lots of different ideas to choose from. Frankly, it’s a little overwhelming. But this is a good introductory text. It’s difficult sometimes to make the claim that science is only useful if it yields a useful application. But useful is such a subjective term. And theoretical works are more about reframing issues so as to create new relationships in familiar areas which may be dismissed by traditional methods of inquiry.

So really, this book is exploratory, as theorists tend to be. Interesting reading but it’s truly undecidable. Food for thought, really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Heir to the Empire (Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, #1)

November 30, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Heir to the Empire (Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, #1)Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not too bad. Timothy Zahn is definitely interested in presenting compelling, well crafted stories for us, extending the Star Wars universe. This was written before the Star Wars franchise has really taken off recently. What Zahn has done is mostly good. What I actually didn’t enjoy was the repetitious dialogue the characters have in reference to previous movies, where in some sections dialogue is recycled verbatim. I suppose this gives us a feeling of that there is continuity of the characters, more of the same. But I found it disturbing, as it kicked me out of the environment. I think Zahn’s attempt to include the feeling of familiar characters in a new (extended) environment didn’t quite work. His writing is strong, so much so that I enjoyed his descriptions and explorations of new aspects of the Star Wars universe more than his recycled dialogue, that obviously wasn’t his. So that was mainly the only patchwork.

I was unexpected into the story half way through, expecting that I wouldn’t want to continue the trilogy. But now having finished it, I do. So that speaks tons of Zahn’s good writing.

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On Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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Contents of Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Multitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[[there.]]

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

ThereThere by Lance Olsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berlin feels disorienting because it is disorienting

In German, the noun gift means poison.

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

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

(btw, here’s more germany)

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

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

Who was that guy?

but also musings on travel itself

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

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

Only in three dimensions.

Over and over again.

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

Look: there [[I]] am.

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

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

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The Gargoyle

November 12, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, love, reviews, universal nothing / No Comments

The GargoyleThe Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story has two different themes which are inextricably tied together: love and redemption. That in itself is not so new or different, but the way in which Davidson goes about it is intensely interesting.

While the neutral background characters provide the context for understanding this story as a love story (their background romance is sneaky in the sense that it works well to do this), Davidson also intersplices many other background stories and inherent side chapters to do the same thing. None of these stories by itself is compelling. And while they provide the skeptical narrator interest at first, he soon drops this rhetoric in favor of oh, you get the point. In fact much of the narrator acts as a skeptic for us, so that we can further suspend our belief.

In that sense, it’s quite a good structure.

I did find much of the passionate pleas for love, for unconditional acceptance to be moving, probably because it’s so fantastic. But that is how faith is supposed to work, as Pascal’s Pensees work, Christianity is so inexplicable and unexplanable, we have no choice but to believe! And Davidson’s craft works in much the same way. If you are able to go with it, including the highly contingent and very fantastic characters that provide the fodder for disbelief–that each of these very different characters from very different worlds can connect with one another on such a common basis such as pure presence–in the form of love.

In that way, this book works like a multicultural manifesto, in which people from all walks of life must seek a connection to the unnamed anchor that acts as an absolute reference beyond both life and death. At this point both hero and heroine make their way through all their reincarnated lives in an effort to be redeemed. Not just through their heart, but to give up their heart through each other into the hands of a loving God.

It’s definitely a nice tale that strikes at a complete world view appropriate to the readership of probably mostly northern European/American audiences with a small smattering of Other in the form of polite Japanese discourse. And that’s cool, I guess.

One could always just read Pascal and get the same point. But then you wouldn’t get some of Davidson’s lovely lines.

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