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Heretics of Dune

September 8, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Heretics of Dune (Dune Chronicles, #5)Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although Dune was meant to be a trilogy originally, Frank Herbert has masterfully been able to extend the series. The way he does this is that both book 4 and 5 recalibrate the entire series.

On the one hand, this book lacks the energy from the previous novels. Yet it is able to clarify what’s at stake for the other books. At first I had thought this was about utopia — in fact the first three books seemed so. But then the 4th book showed us that utopia isn’t it since Leto II had already presented us the picture of what it meant to have it; again it was politics and power as usual.

Here, Herbert shows us what is at stake. Raising human consciousness. Not just physically but the correct adaptability. He shows us also, corruption, incredible corruption that comes with humans trying to achieve the sublime so that the world becomes degraded into nothing but struggles for novel sensations.

Much of the book seemed to wander though, and while there was the understandable politics that comes with Dune, this seemed beside the point; tiresome. Unlike the first few books where we cared more about the characters in this, we start to get a glimpse of what it means to build a world… it means that we define new subjectivities. It means we have to outline the process by which this comes around. And although there is no perfect way, the destruction of Rakis as the release of humankind from a concentration of power was what Leto II was after; this is the truth of being human. Rather than the technology and power view of what a perfect world is, Herbert shows us the way for us is to choose freedom, to let others grow and develop, so we too shall grow and develop.

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God Emperor of Dune

July 13, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

God Emperor of Dune (Dune Chronicles, #4)God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After the first three books of Dune, I was unsure of what else Herbert could do. In a way, this is a new beginning, one that is able to adequately build from the first three and yet usher in the end of a given line. Herbert is brilliant as he grasps the very beginnings of the series and is able to draw a line to this fourth installment so that its conclusion shifts the first three texts and makes room for this fourth.

The dialogue as always, as is his political and social thoughts, magnificent in their brevity. Stunning in their conciseness. Herbert proves himself a statesmen in his understanding of the human animal.

Like the other books, the mysteries of the future guide the grievances of the past. In this however, Leto II in his 3000 year reign, finds the presence of the future to be very much on his thoughts as it shapes his actions. I found puzzling his easy acceptance of the present, his readiness to die, and also his generous understanding of the troubles of the future. In this, Leto II seems too willing to allow the horrid creature he has become to mismatch the humans around him. He builds himself up to hide the monstrosity he has become. This seems like a blindspot, but I am sure that Herbert will find a way to patch this in the next book.

In a way, with each text, Herbert is able to outline the increased requirement for clarity of purpose, one that exceeds a general lifespan. In a way, the demand he outlines for his characters, in this case, shown by the mechanizations of Leto II on his descendants, lies in educating them about the nature of their own rational being by subjecting them to the rigor of discovering who they are and how they can exist with their place in humankind.

Herbert has thus designed a mythic-o fascist state for the Empire of Leto II, one that exceeds terrestrial bounds by keeping humans savage, ignorant and calibrated for continual furtherance of the species. In this case, the militarization of women, not only as a force of socialization but also as breeders. For his own end, Leto II has kept his family as a nobility to be educated as administrators to keep humankind on the narrow path of continuance.

Perhaps not ironically, this aristocracy of a split humanity in which we have the keepers who service the ignorant commoners so the commoners can remain ignorant and live their lives in human perpetuance mirrors our current situation now, as we have administrators who form a government in bureaucratic perpetuance and the worker bees who continually struggle to maintain their slippery hold in the economy as workers stratified along technologically driven lines of production.

Herbert again has highlighted in stasis what it means for us to be an organized people. This horrific vision of Leto II is intuitively against our sense of humankind as a people reaching self enlightenment. In this vision, only a few are able to see the trap of being one of the nobility is one that is tied to a servicing of a mob that is too ready to believe in the stupid myths of their own service, when in fact they are the ones that have the ability for change. This dialectic reversal is the fear (and hope) that has driven politics of the 19th century founding both fascism and marxism kinds of revolution in the early 20th century. So far, Herbert has traced our development into this 4th text into the stagnation of today, in which production and abundance rules as the imagery by which we are all enslaved.

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Children of Dune

May 4, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Children of Dune (Dune Chronicles, #3)Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book wraps up the trilogy, by critiquing the themes of the previous two Dune books. It does the expected thing of bringing all the characters together, while wrapping up the ending tightly. There is a bit of ridiculousness in Leto’s ability towards the end, and that seems like a deus ex machina, but that’s the only complaint. The ideas were at full force.

In a way, trilogies have to follow the initial good step, the mistaken second step, and the correction of the final step. The system of three follows why we get three lives in video games, why tripods have three legs for stability and why Hegel’s dialectic can be read as a three step process (although its really four steps, with three steps happening twice, overlaid on each other). Leto remarked on the calibration perfectly. We looking inward, at the end of the second book was Paul’s mistake, so the empire rotted. Looking outward, in the first book, with no sense of direction the empire expanded but the individual had no guidance. Paul walked into a self made trap through his error. I am not certain Leto does better, but with his twin sister perhaps that works.

Thus, we have the Preacher’s inward guidance with no external ability. We have Alia’s external ability but a rotten internal force. This bad reflection is corrected by the twin’s movement.

Typical of Herbert as well, he is able to guide self knowing mysticism as a genetic/spirit reality with the muster of political implication. The characters in their technological empires are less technicians of execution than they are forces requiring self knowledge. In a technological age when we have mastered all the materials (of space, food, shelter, &c) all technology becomes transparent to the core of our inner essence. Since our inner beings guide what technology does, and technology as a tool of the empire is the pure execution of a dictator, so must the elite come to know themselves if they are to be effective rulers. The people around them have less need to know themselves as they are focused outwardly, as technicians and policy implementers. Focused on outward action, this becomes an area where they covet power above them rather than focusing on knowing who they are.

I think this line of reasoning works well for at the top of the technological empire. In this sense, however, this book is less a book about the dune empire than it is for as a guide for inner peace.

Having read this book, the conclusion seems inevitable, although when I started it, it seemed completely without guidance, as in, what could the third book possibly be about? This is a sign of mastery, that Herbert wraps up the potentiality of the text beyond what at least I can see.

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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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Dune

December 31, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1)Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am not sure what science fiction had in terms in motifs before Dune, but with reading Dune, it becomes apparent that Frank Herbert expresses a great many motifs that later on become cliches, including, neo-religiousity, a female infant whose perspicacity is beyond comprehension, space age warfare that includes the most brutal of hand to hand combat, and so on. In a way, this book’s setting is the only thing that makes it sci-fi. Technology becomes invisible to the reader so that we reach the forefront of human exploration: social interaction. In a way, this kind of science fiction isn’t done anymore today, as Ursula Le Guin points out. Most sci-fi is centered around the awesomeness of technology, repetitious explosions, repetition of crowd pleasing effects (such as how the new Star Wars/Star Trek movies serve to repeat what the crowd likes), and other phenomenon based on past understandings.

In this way, Dune with its harshness and its strange world is different — you are confronted with society different than your own, but is seemingly non-arbitrary while being immersive. In many ways, the plot isn’t all that surprising. From the get go you realize what is going on, what needs to be done and how the book has to end. But at the same time, you realize at the end, that it’s not really about who you thought it was. The journey, while questionable before you get into it, isn’t at all questionable once you are in it, because it’s well worth the attempt to read it.

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