being and identity and reality

April 11, 2014 / posted in art, dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

I think much of politics stems from identity construction. Most discussions about identity are approached from the question of the Other — include them or teach them or change them. But really, any position of otherness must be mediated by what the Self is. The self mediating the self is the “invisible” point of reference that creates this initial distortion.

Post race isn’t exactly the same as post identity. Even if it’s a class distinction or, say, identifying as a “punk” which means “I’m real” then others who are not punk are “sell outs.”. Identity works that way.

So being American. Being a man. Being your age. Your personal history your children’s future your parent’s past your politics your sexuality your (in)unique soul. These are still pretty much identity construction that traps us as being a type and others as not being us. Except for genuine interaction, which basically needs both sides of the interaction to shed the image of itself, the Other is always a mirror that reflects back to us our negative that is not-me.

These groups of similar mes that see me as being us organizes groups, and super-groups. This organizationing(s) “hows” how we talk to one another and share resources/work. But each group, and group of groups also describe it’s own outside. You have to be outside the outside, to really step away. This organization/description/structure is not accidentally, how things are supposed to be. Based, on the outside of itself, it has to be this way, as defined by the outside that is not itself defining itself. So, each grouping also describes it’s own outside or “rebellion”. Being a punk is inscribed at the heart of being a sell-out. So it really seems impossible to step out of this reality.

But I guess that really doesn’t matter. Most people just want to fit in somewhere and be themselves. Lol, be who their identity tells them they are. :-)

for-itself, for-yourself

April 11, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human / No Comments

i don’t think it really matters to much what i do with my life anymore.

the human mind has the capacity to make the best of a bad situation. with paraplegics and lotto winners, happiness asymptotes to normal.

the most you can do, if you have adopted a story for yourself, identify with it and be it, is to try and live the life who you are in the story. this will bring you the maximal meta-enjoyment.

another way of putting this, is to simply say, “be true to yourself”

***
this of course assumes that what we want most is happiness. happiness is really only a surface feeling, prompted by conditions. conditions that are always changing.

what is most suspect lies in the identity construction — of having a story in the first place. as it seems, the creation of difference in identity creates a self and an other — the other serves as a repository for discarded affects, meanings that are lost, the extreme points on either side of the self, to define the self. NOT-ME relies on a fundamental recognition of other i’s as being i, a mistake of too much for the self, identified with others “like me” always, taking in too much substance for subjectivity.

what’s wrong about having a story, what’s racial about having an identity is the exclusionary features that by definition it needs.

true, having a story and finding that the world verifies that story — verifies YOU can lead one to happiness. it seems that being happy really needs a story to be happy of. the stricter the story, the more happy you can be, when the world fits it. no wonder people live in communities where everyone thinks like them, makes friends with people who are like them, find allies and constantly flock in groups that agree with one another.

and in this world, where change is constant and being impermanent, who doesn’t want to be happy? we aren’t hurting anyone! but making happiness requires a balance. if all things even out towards neutrality due to impartial statistics… you can expect as much happiness and you can sadness. furthermore, all identity relies on a formal exclusion. if people are more themself, they are also more not-someone else. by creating a self that the world can accidentally verify, you are also creating others for whom you know as they appear to you (Vorstellung), and not through genuine interaction.

being you qua identity also means being not-there and knowing others without ever really talking with them.

this is the root of all otherness — the self qua the image of yourself to yourself.

Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists

April 10, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great PhysicistsQuantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists by Ken Wilber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Around the time when theoretical physics turned increasingly towards mathematical models to predict discoveries about our collective universe, many fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality also changed.

Previous to the discovery of the quantum world, and the revolutions of general and special relativity, Newton’s scientific research program dominated the sciences. The aesthetics of this Newtonian world view specified scientific Truth, a dogma that militantly eschewed religion, mysticism and other “subjective” world views. Much of our ideas about the nature of science and religion still originate from the stranglehold of science, as it dominated the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries until Einstein presented a more exacting order of things… for example, some physicists and atheists alike will claim that religion is outdated, or that science can provide all the mystical answers in a clearer way than religion has.

This book states the opposite. In this wonderful collection, we have “mystical writings of the world’s greatest physicists”, all of which proclaim that science has its place (and limits) and religion with mysticism has its place in our human world. For to be a complete human being, we would need both.. and as more than one physicist wrote, you need faith first and foremost before you can even proceed into the unknown domains that are science’s areas of study.

While the message was a little repetitive, I did get a good sense that these amazing men, who shook the foundations of our world, came away from their search for the real substance, a deeply profound respect for the mysteries of being and the universe. Rather than discarding the work of humans for thousands of years (in areas of religion) they turned back to these areas with a greater respect after tackling basic questions about the nature of reality. The editor, Ken Wilber, did well to end with Sir Arthur Eddington. Eddington’s lucid remarks on how understanding reality through mathematics and how this compares to religion goes at great lengths to demonstrate just how in the search for making sense of the world, we end with equations that nearly make no sense in themselves, leaving more questions than answers.

After all, science is to be the study of what is. That doesn’t necessarily even begin to address how we should be, or what has meaning or how meaning even comes about. We’ve got a long way to go before these two different areas can even begin to rightly address one another in ways that make any consistent sense.

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The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

April 5, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual EnlightenmentThe Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The subject of this simply written book is your identity. Eckhart Tolle writes in a question and answer format about the subject that makes the subject — identity, ego, self. You can lose yourself, and you probably should because that isn’t you. But you probably won’t do it (and there’s nothing wrong with not trying to) if you aren’t already unhappy and suffering.

This book won’t change who you are though, at least not from the point of view of everything. You’ll still die. You won’t fly. You won’t gain immortality… although you will be a part of the universe that is a part of itself, as you are. Really, the book won’t change anything except your mind. If it’s true, you will alter your consciousness and lose the trappings of this world. Of course, losing your identity and losing your attachment of the image of yourself that you have as yourself also means losing all the things we struggle for: success, recognition, wealth. What is the difference anyway? On the one hand, you could find happiness, although happiness never lasts forever, because happiness requires conditions that change. Being with the change, or not being at all, as Tolle might write, is what will really give you inner peace. The struggle, he says, is simply that trying to gain inner peace itself will cause you to lose it… as your ideas of inner peace will also disturb true inner peace.

His answer to how is simply the title of this book. Be fully present, not in your dreams, your fantasies… and not in your ideas of what now is… which is what I found so fascinating… much of what he says already coincides yes, with Eastern philosophy, but also Western philosophy, namely through the works of Hegel. The actual function of unrealizing thought is undoing the terms x and it’s negation, which of course is also the root of identity creation (I am X, Others are not-X). But that’s enough mechanics.

You probably also won’t read this book if you are already content. And you won’t pick it up if you think you already know what you will read! And if you identify with the oppositions inherent within thought you probably won’t see the common ground he speaks of because the split between the two will seem so natural, there won’t be any common ground at all. That’s okay though, it’s part of the dialectic before synthesis. If it works for you, in some way, you will like it. If it can’t work for you, you won’t like it.

But then again, all books pretty much work like that.

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Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

March 23, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research ProgrammesPhilosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes by Imre Lakatos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After the enlightenment, people started to seriously make a distinction that how they distinguished what they really knew from what was really going on around them. The actual knowledge, epistemes, were favored over “opinions” or doxa. The debate that surrounded that amid the turmoil of increasing technology and religious unrest eventually flipped around: doxa became the norm with epistemes being questioned as being attainable. With this flip, after the revolution of special and general relativity, scientific theory became the norm rather than dogmatic scientific truth.

The examination of the flip, and the proper aesthetic form that scientific theory can be generated — namely via scientific method — is the subject of inquiry in this short but very very dense book. Lakatos examines how different critiques determine how the line should be drawn, be the line negative through the lack of connection between phenomenon or should it be drawn through what degree of unfitting the phenomenon before we should consider the distinction wrong? He also asks the question, through scientific inquiry, can we know anything, and if we can, how can we think we know it (or at least feel justified that this is the best we can do)?

In short, this book is pretty packed with terminology and illustrations of those terminologies. To be clear, Lakatos highlights what moves thinkers and scientists made and perhaps why, and what moves they could have made and what meaning they generated distinguished from the meaning they didn’t generate. You can imagine how much thinking, research and effort this must have taken. Lakatos also challenges other thinkers of scientific history, naming how their different explanations of scientific movement falls short, miss-explains theories and massages meanings and histories in service of their pet theory. He also explains how his teacher Popper formulated the scientific method through language rather than classical induction and why we should consider science as being more than formulations in language although Popper disagrees — that scientific theories are only different consistencies in language (surprisingly much like Deleuze and Guattari’s plateaus).

At times, Lakatos also slips into the terminology he uses, applies them to other scientific philosophers, although that is dependent on what other researchers think and find and eventually collaborate as well. Lol.

See, really, how we know things is pretty important, and why we should know one it through one theory vs another theory changes how we can coexist together in the final context, to best get along with one another. This is a sophistication far from what people are taught in school as being what a justifiable belief is. In a way, this book is more philosophical than metaphysics, or doxa or opinions… Lakatos is talking about how we might construct a view of the world around us that is reasonable, the most accurate view. Objects of science are assumed to have an existence and consistency independent of what we observe of them. People are also assumed to have an existence and will independent of what we observe of them. So in a way, this too is applicable to people, although we shouldn’t experiment on them. What I mean to point out is that the forms of this book can be worked through a variety of life situations, as a kind of guide to how to understand what is going on. Simultaneously, this kind of deep examination is kind of a paranoia, where we need to look into every detail and possibility while also being a kind of hysteria, where we don’t know what we are looking at/for… because of course, we deal with the limits of knowability, making it up as we go along… though if Lakatos is right, we only need to follow his general methods.

Really Lakatos falls into the idealist who believes that we can know everything (a positive maybe for Lakatos)… while he can’t do science, or at least doesn’t in this volume, he can help smoothen the irregularities of how scientific truth can be found out… so we don’t waste our time on distinctions that don’t make any knowable difference, such as religion or critical theory… but that’s really his opinion or doxa… although he hopes you’ll find it to be as solid as an episteme. ;).

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The Book on the Living God

March 14, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Book on the Living GodThe Book on the Living God by Bô Yin Râ
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this because Eckhart Tolle had listed it as being one of the books that so fascinated him. Bo Yin Ra really builds up a case for arguing for a very narrow spiritual path. The basic idea is that such a path does exist — and like many of the esoteric spiritualities, the idea is simply that what is ultimately spiritual is real. And thus, being of the universal sense, it must exist outside of human meaning making.

Over and over he emphasizes how difficult it is to do this. What’s interesting is that spirituality must be about getting outside of your ego. So anything that has to do with ego, or building ego is the opposite of what is spiritual. This includes anyone who leads, or has spiritual followers… which is a very human meaning making activity, and thus not truly spiritual.

So the book has a hard dichotomy in it, which is taken to extremes. I find this work so interesting in that he ends up saying things that you may not think about. But in some of his moves to be “complete” I think he runs up against some very odd points.

If you are interested in spirituality and being spiritual… and want a window into a strange approach to what is an intensely personal experience, I would say go and read it. Of course, if writing such a book, predicated on expressing the path to spirituality while avoiding the “pitfall of human meaning making” seems like a direct contradiction in terms to you, you can bet that it literally is.

He does have some interesting ideas about desires/drives/feelings/chora — whatever you want to call it. The only thing he doesn’t explain is the book itself. But then again, you got to start somewhere right?

I guess this is the second book of this series… I have not read the first book.

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Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture

March 14, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Studies and Further Studies in a Dying CultureStudies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture by Christopher Caudwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Written from the early context of the civil unrest between the two world wars, Caudwell takes a vulgar Marxist view of the end of capitalism for reality. He expands on himself in this two volumes, talking about various structures that center our social reality… from beauty, and reality and consciousness to the arts and the place of psychoanalysis. Caudwell seeks to show us exactly how our culture of capitalism is dying and withering in its own material (and intellectual) excess.

What makes him at times difficult to stomach but also admirable is his very strong view of deterministic relationships between access to resources and every aspect of our culture and being. His range of topics and how he manages to see his line of dialectical materialism conveys his passion for the theory and love and his disgust of people through the separation of what is good in us and what is bad.

It’s a strange thing to see him care so deeply about other people in the abstract (that he took the risk of dying in a war) and yet would condemn his fellow man’s action, being, psychology and identity… if that man had not yet woken up the proletariat truth. His passion takes him deeply also, into thought has he critiques even the most abstract of the sciences, mathematics and philosophy in order to sweep all these topics under the rug of Marxist revolution and explanatory power.

What is strange and odd about him though, and what makes his books also difficult to swallow is how often you catch him agreeing with himself. A good author should also present counter arguments, demonstrate how the dialectical truth twists in its logic to create false poses that must shift into more stable positions in later revolutions. Instead he rushes too quickly to the point, making it obvious that he is railroading us swiftly into the proletariat reality as if writing books, (even keeping journals, or papers) would help usher in the Marxist dream of plenty for all, and the end of suffering.

For example, in talking about the flaw of bourgeois science, Caudwell will make the claim that much of scientific knowledge is swayed, or fragmented by bourgeois decay — the blind hoarding and administration of the ruling class would impede science from making real discoveries, else use science to justify their agenda. Yet Caudwell, decides to tell us what the real discoveries are, the overlooked gems that science has to offer… how does he decide this? By what supports the idea for him of the Marxist paradise — that man must move towards as the absolute stable equilibrium? The question I would have is how does he know what scientific truths are to be valued? And if so, what is it that is reasonable about such criteria? And if not this, then also if every institution or form of human thought is created through class struggle between the class conscious ruling class and the unconscious working class, then is not Reason and Rationality itself also created by this decaying and dying culture?

Of course he does not go so far, as to justify why Reason or even the dialectical materialism provides such answers… he is less a theorist than say, Jameson or Engels but more of a practioner, or applicationist… he heard the call and merely extends their thoughts for himself, to give himself direction and that extends for him as far as his eye can see. And he sees a lot, tries to see everything.

These writings may not have been intended for public eye, but it is refreshing to connect with a mind from so long ago, and get a taste of what he thought to share with someone… although he doesn’t tell you who he thinks you are, he does seek to enlighten you, pull you up from your oppression and unconscious acceptance of your oppression.

He also does not talk about what things will be like when the day will come.

All in all, I felt this was like visiting an old mind, trapped in old photographs of a time when things seemed so much simplier and the answers fathomable. He doesn’t talk about his life — he is being serious though, and for that, I don’t mind he doesn’t break his shield and be more personal. Still, for the vulgarness and the directness, Caudwell seems sometimes like a brick wall, unmoving, uncompromising and unhearing. We sometimes want the other’s stance to acknowledge us as well, so maybe the visiting metaphor was not apt at all. =p

Still, that he doesn’t question his own roots, seems to me to be a big reason why I wouldn’t take what he wants to convey too seriously. He fits the form of a thinker, and has a good heart, but is critically unaware of his own stance. That’s probably okay though, because who of us would want to fall into a pit of despair of not knowing what to value, or how to be, or what should matter? Certainly not Caudwell, although you could maybe take his Marxism as an answer to what seems like a deep despair and loss of person early on in his first volume. So in that sense, maybe this isn’t a Marxist work… but the Marxism takes place as a practice of a deeper philosophy, perhaps an existential one, one in which Caudwell paid the ultimate price for, dying in the Spainish Civil war in the name of la revolución.
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Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom

March 4, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild FreedomActive Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The our minds are very complex places, and there’s many ways to approach understanding yourself, and gaining a better balance. This book may work for some people. Moss approaches things through a varied and complex list of techniques, other worldliness, demons, angels, animals, you name it, he’s got it in there. And all through the tapestry of dreaming. I think he’s an interesting man. I’ve heard him speak through a pod-cast and I must say that he’s very convincing. It’s kind of amazing that he too went to so many different dreaming groups, helped so many people out in so many places. In a way, he is respectful, and yet personal. He wants to show you the way to yourself. He wants to complete your inner child and you — to show you the universe is your play ground, and that the further deeper you dive into yourself, the more world you will find, to better yourself and others in increased understanding.

At least, that’s what he says.

He has many techniques on how to help yourself and others in dreaming. Many times, it’s remarkable how personal people get with their dreams. We think of dreams as being solitary activities. But Moss wants us to share them with others, and even dream with them. In a way, the conversations people have in here, is like talking through a cloud. Everyone sees something different and everyone has something to contribute. With love and care, Moss writes that we should all dream together, to heal you and heal them. The vision Moss creates of the world is that we should share our experiences and learn and assure each other that through all the trials in the world, in the end, we are all ok.

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America

February 12, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

AmericaAmerica by Jean Baudrillard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am not well-versed in Baudrillard. Nonetheless, it was given as a gift to me, and philosophy is something I am interested in. The comparisons to Roland Barthe’s Empire of Signs is pretty apt. If you’re expecting heavy philosophy, then forget it. If you are expecting a travelogue, as one reviewer said, you should forget that too.

America rests somewhere in the middle. America is a book less about a geographical place than it is a landmark. Baudrillard takes us to the cultural economic center, in an epic tour through America. He is amazed, fascinated by what he sees. He wants to take it all in, so most of the book are his impressions, just knee-jerk reactions, his musings about the logic of a non-geological place. The book America culminates with his descriptions hoovering around an inaccessible center, as he notes how the repetition is more real than the original.

Isn’t the simulacra, the semblance, the image, itself immanent in our experience? The symbols with their non-subjective/non-objective meanings point to so clearer an understanding than the messy reality which appears chaotic, orderly, but chaotic.

But there is an ontology of sorts though, a triad that Baudrillard points out every so often, between poetic phrases and well intentioned observation. He oscillates the point between a proposition, and it’s reversal to end on a mixed view a little subjective, a little objective. This becomes the copy of the original in which our judgement oscillates to settle as if in a dream, where all relations contain their own void.

He examines America in light of this, dwelling much on the American Southwest, Los Angeles and New York, ending of course with Las Vegas, and it’s empty signifiers that only connect to more signifiers. America, where so much is allowed, the center of so much sublime beauty, economic, cultural and political power mirrors itself in its senseless nothingness. The assumption behind repetition, behind representation is that there is a representation of something. With a double, where all the flaws disappear and you get the perfected ideal, that which hides behind or where all the variations of the copy disppear. But that original ideal, the perfect thing the symbols stand for is itself the result of a double, a copy of the flawed and varied originals, the disagreements between actual particulars being averaged out. So the relations are of an ideal nothing reflected from many who are not identical nothing. However, it is this oscillation between a point he makes, examines and then returns to the center that moves us. We experience the simulacra. In this sense, both the copy and the experience. Thus, this simulacra is only noticeable in the processing of it, but not as a thing out there, but only as a thing because we are processing it.

This is where he leaves us, not in the desert, the natural void, or in a casino gambling, continuing to create more and more signs for the effect of creating more and more signs. Both activities are endless, and this creates an indeterminate space, “a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.” Because wealth too, is substanceless, if it can be granted at an instant, so it can be taken away without any material appeal. Of course, you begin too, to see material in this same way, as a copy of itself, without substance or any claim to externality. We are now dealing with absolute universal particulars, whose absoluteness is their limitations. Meaning behind them begin to dissolve, the shadow becoming the ground. We are now in hyperreality.

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The Tent

January 19, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The TentThe Tent by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m a fan of Margaret Atwood. I wasn’t sure what to expect of this book. While the cover claims it’s a collection of essays, this book is more like a collection of impressions that aren’t formulated into what we may traditionally know of as a narrative (although there are narrative voices)… while at the same time, the collection doesn’t make as much a thesis-point as the traditional anglo-saxon epistemic essay structure. So it’s a little difficult for me to write a review in that sense. I think of this collection more like a palette of colors, or swatch patterns to be saved for future use… most of the ideas in here are of interest, but they don’t connect anywhere and don’t seem to be easily collated into a single narrative impulse.

If you’re looking to be receptive to subtle emotions, and you want to read something without taxing yourself too much, I think this is a good book to read. Since I tend to dive deeply into whatever I read — and try to find how this text allows me to orient myself more or less in the world I already exist in — it was difficult for me to read this book. Despite it’s slim size, I took forever working through it.

I wouldn’t say that the descriptions are misleading, but my expectations were definitely not in line with what I read. From glancing at the other reviews, I am in the minority on this one.

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