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1509560440
| 9781509560448
| B0CSWYYTJC
| 3.90
| 1,826
| Mar 09, 2023
| Jan 19, 2024
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it was amazing
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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about rites of passage and how they no longer really match up with the major events in our lives – and tha
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about rites of passage and how they no longer really match up with the major events in our lives – and that it isn’t clear how we might fix that. This is likely to be different in different countries, of course – but in Australia we still celebrate people turning 21. Except, you can have sex from the age of 12 (as long as the person you are having sex with is a maximum of 2 years older than you), have sex with anyone you like over 12 at 16, buy alcohol and vote at 18. That is, basically nothing changes when you turn 21. So, we have a rite, but no actual passage. The problem is more complicated than this too. As I was telling a friend during the week, a rite of passage is a ceremony that marks a kind of death and a rebirth. So that, when you graduate from Primary School, that part of your life is well and truly over. You will never go back to being a primary school student. This is also likely to be true of when you finish high school – although, this is a much less hard and fast rule in high school compared to primary school. Graduating from university might mean barely anything at all – as you might immediately enrol to do a higher degree, or you might come back decades later. Certainly, it doesn’t mean a part of your life is over forever. But this is what such life transitions used to mean – a folk song I like to sing goes, ‘School days over, come on then John, time to be getting your pit boots on, on with your sark and moleskin trousers you start at the pit today, time you were learning the miner’s job and earning the miner’s pay’. And it isn’t that long ago when that transition was, for virtually everyone that made it, absolute. That is, a transition like a rite of passage, where coming out the other side meant your previous life was completely over with no going back. We hardly have those anymore. And those that we do, we generally don’t celebrate as rites. I’m thinking of the major life changes we have where there is mostly no going back to who you were before. Take being diagnosed with cancer. If it is a serious cancer, particularly one that involves aggressive treatment, you are unlikely to come through it feeling you are ‘the same’ person as before. Or take getting a divorce. I know when I separated from my ex-wife my entire world changed irreparably. And not just because I never married again, but also because, as the ‘leaver’, my conception of the type of person I was had also fundamentally changed. Or take being made redundant at work – when this happened to me I used the opportunity to go back to university and get an MA and then a PhD. My life has had few ‘passages’ that compare to either of those – but neither really involved a rite – and when I finally graduated the ‘change’ in my life was already years before. Basically, when I graduated with my PhD, the only thing that changed was that I stopped being called a ‘research assistant’ and started being called a ‘research fellow’. The point is, there is a disconnect today between the ‘rites’ we go through to mark life changes, and the life changes themselves. Han makes much the same point here – but much more generally. He says that we have lost the narrative component of our lives, and this is for a whole lot of reasons – mostly to do with us being connected to the internet and our lives being filled with ‘information’ and ‘data’. He says information and data are the opposite of what a story really is. That a story is made as much from what is left out as what is included – something not true of information. And because we are finding it increasingly difficult to fit our lives into a narrative structure (and my current obsession with rites of passage is part of this – since such rites provided such a narrative structure previously) our lives are no longer story-like, but more ‘one thing after another’. Meaning is story-like. Han links this is the consumer society – and he is not the first to do that, of course. Most of the book is him applying the ideas of Walter Benjamin to the modern world – or post-modern world. The problem is that in this world we increasingly do not belong to a common narrative structure – and so we feel isolated. Consumers are not really citizens, they don’t really belong to a community. This is something Bauman says, that a consumer might be standing in a line with other consumers waiting to buy the latest iPhone, but despite them being in the same place wanting to do the same thing – there is no commonality between them. In fact, if there is a shortage of iPhones, they might really be competitors, rather than within a community of iPhone purchasers. The consumer is an atom. This atomisation is also heightened by the shift from stories to information. And this has a long incubation period too, but is certainly worse today. Neil Postman talked about this in one of his books about the news, or perhaps it was in Technopoly. His point was that most news is of virtually no real meaning to the reader of the news. In my life, there are things that can have a real and immediate impact upon it – for example, when there is roadworks on one of the roads near where I live, or the trains are replaced by buses, it can be a pain in the bum for me. But I would need to go looking for this information ahead of time – not something I ever think to do. Rather, the ‘news’ that I have to spend no time looking for at all is the news least likely to have a real impact on my life. You know, that Trump called someone a nasty person, that King Charles is recovering well from whatever form of cancer he had, that the Blues beat the Swans by 15 points at the ‘G. Another book I read over the weekend on the importance of encouraging kids to read said they were particularly shocked when they realised, in a book written in the US, that their high school students didn’t know who the Vice President was. This was seen as shocking – but really, isn’t it just confirmation of how little most of what we are presented with on the news is trivia and of barely any real relevance to our lives? I’m someone who is obsessed with the news – but I do know that it is little more than a soap opera and of little to no import to my ‘real’ life. And this also breaks down any sense of community. The real events that impact our lives are between difficult and impossible to engage with – the ‘flooding the zone with shit’ news is everywhere and needs to be consciously avoided. I’ve friends who never watch the news – it is hard to say they are ‘ill-informed’ or suffer in any noticeable way. In fact, given how depressed I find so much of the news – particularly over the last nearly 2 years coming out of Gaza – they are probably much better off than I am. And this news is also almost never presented as a narrative. The news is always ‘new’ – and is virtually never presented with any context. If you want context, you would hardly turn to a newspaper – you would turn to a book. But who has time to read books on all of the current events filling our newspapers? So, we get data point after data point from Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico, Ukraine, Iceland, Indonesia – and these might be a demonstration here, a flood there, a building reduced to rubble, a child starving, some guys on the back of a jeep shooting machine guns into the sky. The images meld and blend and are mostly meaningless to us. And Han’s point is that this is also true of the rest of our lives – lives that are increasingly spent online in a world without pause – in a world of information and ‘news’, rather than narrative structure. He says a really interesting thing about the endless photos we have on our phones and that we post online. These are the data points of our lives – but since they have no narrative structure, they don’t tell anything about our lives, rather, all they do is provide clutter. In fact, not only do that not provide a story, they actively undermine the construction of a story – since they provide too much detail, they are too transparent. There is a lovely long bit in this where he retells the story of a young boy who could not tell stories. He gets sent to someone to help him learn how to tell stories – and is confronted with a string of bizarre and even terrifying events. When he finally gets out of the house he was sent to, he says something like, god, what until I tell you what happened. The point being that stories help us to explain what would otherwise appear to be inexplicable. He also argues that when all you have is information, you cannot aim to change your life. Any real change, revolutionary change, requires a kind of utopian vision – a vision of what the world could be like compared to how it is. That is, it needs a story that makes sense of the present and points the way to the future. The endless information we are confronted with does not allow such a story to be told – and so, it confines us to the eternal present – the ‘hell of the same’ as he calls it at one point. God, this review is now nearly as long as the book – and I haven’t covered half of what Han has. ...more |
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Jul 13, 2025
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Jul 13, 2025
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Kindle Edition
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1509523065
| 9781509523061
| 1509523065
| 4.02
| 2,438
| 2016
| Apr 30, 2018
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it was amazing
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I want to begin with something he doesn’t say – that empathy is a problem rather than a solution. Empathy is from Greek and means in common feeling. T
I want to begin with something he doesn’t say – that empathy is a problem rather than a solution. Empathy is from Greek and means in common feeling. This commonality is the problem here and something that Han spends a lot of time discussing as a feature of neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism is different from the capitalism Marx was concerned with. That form of capitalism pitted worker against capitalist and so there was a kind of common life experience and a common enemy that workers faced. But neoliberal capitalism is more closely aligned with a kind of Hobbesian war of all against each – or rather, a war of self against self. We have become ‘authentic’ in the sense that we see ourselves as projects to perfect. In this world, we are self-exploiting. We differentiate ourselves by our competition with ourselves. In such a world, a revolution is impossible, since it would be a war against ourselves. We define ourselves by our purchases – our labour is a commodity, and our identities are also commodities. We have been sold a myth of self-perfectibility on the basis of positive psychology. But the elimination of the negative involves the elimination of the other. We are confronted with a world of sameness. In such a world, we are attracted to those we identify with and so everything becomes a kind of bland sameness, where all difference is avoided. Positivity itself is the problem here, since it is only in confronting the negative that true growth is possible. This has been something that has been known for a very long time and has been a key feature of human rituals – not least in rites of passage which, virtually by definition, involve a kind of death and resurrection into the new, a process that always involves the kind of pain that we generally shun today in our world of hyper-positivity. Empathy, then, is something we tend to show to people we can identify with – I can show you empathy if I can ‘walk a mile in your shoes’. The problem is that the true other is not someone we can imagine walking in their shoes. At one time, this was the lesson of literature. Today, so much of literature is based on excruciating life experiences of people we can only identify with in the abstract – the victims of Nazi prison guards, those suffering the unspeakable isolation of severe illness, people who have lost everything. But the other who would really shake us from our lethargy are not these tragic figures, but rather those who, like Socrates, were out-of-place. People who are objects beyond the everyday. As he says, “The word ‘object’ comes from the Latin verb obicere, which means ‘throw at’, ‘put towards’ or ‘reproach’.” Something you might object against – the negative in a world of endless positives. Here we do not feel empathy, but rather a challenge. We do not walk in their shoes, but rather go into a kind of life-affirming battle with this other to test our own mettle and to overcome our own limitations. Such military illusions are perhaps necessary in the sense that in standing in opposition to empathy, such an attitude requires more than an understanding of the other, but an openness to risk one’s self in the confrontation. In empathy, we tend to remain the measure of others – in confronting a character like Socrates we must challenge our own taken-for-granted assumptions and ways of being. Empathy, in this sense, then, is a kind of additive process, were we see others as yet another life-style we could, if we chose, have adopted. In confronting the other, we risk our own death. Interestingly, Han doesn’t really use these military metaphors, but rather metaphors of seduction. He doubts we are today capable of seduction. We are much more likely to turn away from eros towards pornography. In pornography, we are either male or female – everything that is hidden in seduction is transparent in pornography. Pornography has all of the negative traits of desire with none of the possibility of transcendence seduction offers. Love is not pornographic – but seduction involves an openness to the other that is psychologically more naked than the superficial nudity of pornography can offer. In seduction, what is desired most is what can never be simply assimilated into ourselves. We do not want to become the other, but rather to become at one with the other. And this implies the most important gift we can offer the other as the object of our desire – the gift of listening to them. Listening is a gift that must be offered before the other begins talking. To truly hear them, we must first show we are prepared to listen. And this listening is not merely transformative to the other, but to ourselves. As such, it is not a gathering of information about the other, but an openness to ourselves being transformed in the very act of our own listening. Such an openness is the opposite of what positive psychology offers us. Positive psychology offers us a better version of ourselves, but this confrontation with the other we seek to seduce offers us more than a better version of ourselves, but rather a transformation in who we are – a kind of rebirth, a kind of death. He makes the point that the blandness of self-perfection has reduced many of us to finding our only means of feeling anything at all is through self-harm. Where cutting ourselves or bulimia are epidemic now because they offer an escape from the everyday and the stultifying sameness of self-perfection. It puts this in a kind of aphorism – much of his short books are really strings of aphorisms – by saying, “Seduction takes place in a space where signifiers circulate without being confronted by the signified.” That is, like our concept of love itself, we have endless words we use to point towards what we mean by it, but none that fully capture its essence. This is eros in a kind of pure form – beyond mere desire – where desire is that which we want while we cannot have it, while this form of eros is a never completed dance we never finish learning, forever offering more, forever surprising us not only with what we learn about the other, but who we become in seeking to learn. Compared to the blandness of self-perfection, such openness to self-transformation through listening to the other and a willingness to being seduced by them is liberating beyond most of our ability to contemplate. And this is our only hope of redemption. As he says, “Only eros is capable of freeing the I from depression, from narcissistic entanglement in itself. From this perspective, the Other is a redemptive formula. Only eros, which pulls me out of myself and towards the Other, can overcome depression.” Rather than empathy, the allusion is to Kant’s notion of hospitality – a word Kant himself said was wrong, but that he could think of none better, in his work Perpetual Peace. Here the rational person is forced to the conclusion, in a global political version of Kant’s categorical imperative, to offer hospitality to the stranger. This acceptance of the other is the basis of all moral feeling – but as Han makes clear, it is also the precondition for our own self-transcendence. This is an absurdly short book – but as I said, it is more a book of aphorisms, more poetry than prose – and if you approach it like poetry, there is much here to consider. As a critique of the modern condition, it offers a path to salvation few other books consider. As someone who believes we have become atomised by neoliberal society – any recognition that our engaging with others, particularly those we will never understand enough to be merely in empathy with, is a step in the right direction. Some quotes “The pathological sign of our times is not repression but depression.” “The violence of the Same is invisible because of its positivity.” “Correlation is the most primitive form of knowledge, being not even capable of ascertaining the relationship between cause and effect. It is so. The question of why becomes irrelevant; thus nothing is understood. But knowledge is understanding. Hence Big Data renders thought superfluous. We surrender ourselves without concern to the it-is-so.” “The numerical makes everything countable and comparable. Thus it perpetuates the Same.” “Being-human then means being-connected to Others.” “It does not seduce. Pornography carries out a complete de-narrativization and de-lingualization not only of the body, but of communication as such; therein lies its obscenity. It is impossible to play with the naked flesh.” “Naked, pornographic truth permits no play, no seduction. Sexuality as functional performance likewise drives out all forms of play; it becomes entirely mechanical. The neoliberal imperative of performance, sexiness and fitness ultimately reduces the body to a functional object that is to be optimized.” “It sets up a ‘banopticon’ that identifies those who are hostile or unsuited to the system as undesirable and excludes them. The Panopticon serves to discipline, while the banopticon provides security.” “It prescribes that one must equal only oneself and define oneself only through oneself – indeed, that one must be the author and creator of oneself.” “Singularity is something entirely different from authenticity.” “The Other is bent into shape until the ego recognizes itself in them.” “Today, we flee desperately from the negative instead of dwelling on it. Holding on to the positive, however, only reproduces the Same.” “In all rites of passages, one dies a death in order to be reborn beyond the threshold.” “Two mouthfuls of silence might contain more closeness, more language than hypercommunication. Silence is language, but the noise of communication is not.” “Today, we live in a post-Marxist age. In the neoliberal regime, exploitation no longer takes place as alienation and self-derealization, but as freedom, as self-realization and self-optimization.” “Today, the silent voice of the Other is drowned out by the noise of the Same.” “All attention is focused on the ego. It is surely the task of art and literature to de-mirror our perception, to open it up to the counterpart, for the Other – as a person or an object.” “Listening is not a passive act. It is distinguished by a special activity: first I must welcome the Other, which means affirming the Other in their otherness. Then I give them an ear. Listening is a bestowal, a giving, a gift. It helps the Other to speak in the first place.” “The art of listening takes place as an art of breathing. The hospitable welcoming of the Other is an inhalation, yet one that does not absorb the Other, but instead harbours and preserves them.” “The ego is incapable of listening. The space of listening as a resonance chamber of the Other opens up where the ego is suspended. The narcissistic ego is replaced with a possession by the other, a desire for the Other.” “But anyone who seeks to evade injury completely will experience nothing; the negativity of injury inheres in every deep experience, every deep insight.… The wound is the opening through which the Other enters.” “Community is listenership.” “Today, everyone is somehow on their own with themselves, with their suffering, with their fears. Suffering is privatized and individualized.” ...more |
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not set
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Jun 24, 2025
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Jun 24, 2025
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0429681208
| 9780429681202
| B09BP2VSQZ
| 4.00
| 2
| unknown
| Aug 19, 2021
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it was amazing
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I don’t know what I was expecting in reading this book, but not quite this. What makes a history isn’t an easy question to answer, as are what makes a
I don’t know what I was expecting in reading this book, but not quite this. What makes a history isn’t an easy question to answer, as are what makes a big or little history, why are they different, why do we need more than one history of a period, people, event or thing? To set about answering these questions she starts with Aristotle and his ethics. This is in the sense that histories are rarely just about some time in the past, but more often a way to understand the present or rather what the world might be. And these are ethical questions as much as historical ones. And having said that, the broad scope of history – or its narrow scope in some histories – means that the history often tells us more about the person writing the history as it does the subject under discussion. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – since different people are likely to highlight different things in telling histories. The old saying that the victor gets to write the history might not always be true, but the underlying idea, that people from different perspectives will write different histories is certainly the case. The point is not to find the one, universally true history, but rather to seek to understand the underlying ethos that is driving the version you are reading. This book takes us on a journey through a wide range of histories – it is one of those books that will make you want to read a whole range of other books she hints at or provides thumbnails to along the way. She also discusses the role of storytelling in Indigenous histories and how these stories do not always tell ‘the simple truth’, but rather much more complex truths that do not always follow temporally in the way we have learned to expect. So that certain characters who lived in vastly different times might be pressed into conversation or action together to make a much deeper point. And then there are chapters that look at more recent theories – post-structuralist theories – which bring the human and non-human into contact, or that focus on the complex array of relationships that exist and persist that structure the ground upon which we mark out our stories of the unfolding of history. I was surprised by how frequently she referred to books by writers like Jarid Diamond or other non-historians (or at least, not ‘proper’ historians) to make her points. Again, she is interested in the variety of histories being told and how these might provide new insights into what it means to tell a history. Fascinating book and, as I said, one that is likely to encourage you to want to track down many other books she mentions along the way. ...more |
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not set
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Jun 05, 2025
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Jun 05, 2025
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3030807509
| 9783030807504
| 3030807509
| 5.00
| 1
| unknown
| Jan 06, 2022
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it was amazing
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This is a truly beautiful book – and in all senses. The plates in this are stunning and do more than merely illustrate the text. Sometimes, they right
This is a truly beautiful book – and in all senses. The plates in this are stunning and do more than merely illustrate the text. Sometimes, they rightly are the text. And the story told here is utterly fascinating. The book starts with three chapters on Broken Hill, where the author grew up. Australia is a strange place. The overwhelming majority of Australians cling to the coast. But our myths are of the inland, of the bush, of the harsh interior. Mumford talks of mining as being the first truly capitalist enterprise. This is both true of the need for massive capital investment, but also of the destruction mining wrought upon the natural environment and of the inhuman existence it imposed upon the miners. The transformation described here of the wrecked environment of Broken Hill back from this destruction is one that fills you with hope. Something that the rest of the book seeks to sustain – despite the overwhelming evidence of our continued destruction of the natural world. At its heart, this is a book about humanities moral relationship with the natural world. As such, much of the book is devoted to seeking to understand and track how the ‘religions of the book’, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, have sought to come to terms with nature and humanities role towards nature. There are some telling points made against what I guess could be called the New Atheists. Where they reduce religion to an overly simplified and dogmatic shadow, the author shows the various forces that shaped religious beliefs towards nature and some that went against the trend to uncover and preserve the majestic wonder of the natural world – or of ‘creation’ – and what it might mean for humanity to have ‘stewardship’ over that creation. This is far from a clichéd retelling of creation myths, although these are retold and interpreted across a wide variety of traditions and across time, but a deep, sociological analysis of the relationship between humanity and nature. Religion plays a starring role here because religion was, for much of this history, the guiding moral force shaping how we might frame our relationship with the natural world. Anyone who has read any of my other reviews will know that I do not hold much hope for the world. I cannot see the force that will hold those hellbent upon the destruction of the planet to account. I can see the same people mentioned here – the Attenboroughs and the Thunbergs – but I also see the international corporations and their shrills in the corporate media who distract and lie and deceive. In a just world, it would be clear which side would win. That we are certain who is most likely to win is proof enough that we do not live in a just world. Still, this is a powerful book, a beautiful book, a book written with great compassion and intellect. Find it. Read it. ...more |
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Apr 18, 2025
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Apr 18, 2025
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0415901707
| 9780415901703
| 0415901707
| 3.96
| 118
| 1990
| 1990
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it was amazing
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This is a lovely book. It isn’t the first of hers I’ve tried to read, but it is the only one I’ve finished. The other books I’ve started are more abou
This is a lovely book. It isn’t the first of hers I’ve tried to read, but it is the only one I’ve finished. The other books I’ve started are more about literary criticism – but of texts set in developing nations and therefore, mostly texts I haven’t read. It just makes me feel stupid reading criticism of texts I haven’t read – and I’m teaching a lot at the moment, so tracking down the texts and reading them isn’t really an option. In fact, reading anything other than the stuff for the lessons I’m giving is a bit of a stretch at the moment. What I liked most about this was that, like me, she doesn’t really feel like she belongs anywhere. These are always my favourite people. I don’t like nationalities and think the world would be – as John Lennon says – better without them. Nothing to kill or die for… I guess she is a kind of post-Marxist. Heavily influence by Derrida, although, at one point in this she says that is a label she sort of rejects – a lot of her work seems to be around questions like ‘given we now live in a world that is after theories can exist as ‘grand narratives’ – is liberation possible?’ She also uses ideas from Foucault – not least that power is related to knowledge and knowledge to power, and that the point is to resist and seek to reshape these power/knowledge relationships in a way that allows us to overcome the restrictions they impose upon us. She often talks of deconstruction as having become a kind of formulaic response that really limits its power. Deconstruction shouldn’t just be about proposing a contrary view to everything, but rather in seeking to understand the underlying structures that guide ways of engaging with the world and considering if other ways are also possible. She’s particularly interesting in relation to feminism and race. As a woman of colour who lives and works in both the US and elsewhere – but also India, her ‘background’ country – she is often presented as the go-to person on feminism or intercultural ideas. And she tries to get people to think again about their own assumptions when they make these assumptions about her. She doesn’t like how certain people - including people like me, say – get excluded from being able to speak about certain topics. I’m basically the zero category of humanity – male, pale and stale, as something I read recently said. I have all of the privilege and virtually none of the hurdles others face. And so, often people in my position have been encouraged to shut up and listen. And in the main, this isn’t terrible advice. However, like anything, it is terrible advice if it means I am never able to speak up, or speak out. As she says of Marx, his point wasn’t to give the working class the same advantages as the ruling class – but to abolish all classes. Other of her books are about allowing the subaltern to speak. Her point being that if the ‘lower orders’ are given the right and ability to speak, then that is the first step towards them no longer being the ‘lower orders’. The point not being to interpret the world, but to change it - again, as Marx would have it. This book is a series of interviews and I think that helps. I like it when people talk about their ideas. I think they often feel they ought to be clearer when they talk than when they write. And this book covers a lot of ground – which is nice when you are like me and just dipping your toe and really want to start with a helicopter view, rather than a microscope. As such, this was a really useful place to start. I’m hoping that I will do more than just start with this author – I’m not sure when, but I will need to read more of her. ...more |
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0674258940
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| 0674258940
| 3.60
| 84
| 1999
| 1999
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it was amazing
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I’m not really going to review all of this book, just that bit that reminded me of my daughter’s PhD thesis that she abandoned before I was far enough
I’m not really going to review all of this book, just that bit that reminded me of my daughter’s PhD thesis that she abandoned before I was far enough into my own thesis to be of any real help to her – despite taking two weeks off from mine to help her prepare for her confirmation. Her thesis was on Japanese food ways. Claude Lévi-Strauss says essentially in his The Raw and The Cooked that we have a troubled relationship with food, or rather with meat. We rarely like to eat meat – particularly mammalian meat – unless it has first been elaborately transformed. This relates to the prohibition on cannibalism. It is also why, when people are forced to eat humans, they rarely eat the hands – as this cannot be transformed in a way that allows us to not see ourselves eating something human. And so, we cook meat, and even the meat we don’t cook – like Carpaccio has been pounded to such an extent it is impossible to say what it had previously been. This is less true with fish or even chicken. The only mammalian meat that, once cooked, looks much as it did when alive is perhaps suckling pig. But even this isn’t eaten whole, but sliced and eaten as portions are unrecognisable as being from the pig itself. Pig’s trotters probably are the closest thing to refuting this argument. This book discusses the cultural differences of different groups of scientists in starkly different laboratory situations – one nuclear physicists and the other biologists. The physicists were working with atom smashers – but because they were seeking to find particles that, by definition, are impossible to see, their equipment needed to be calibrated with theory and essentially the process of ‘discovery’ was one of near total reliance upon the equipment and the inscriptions made by these devices. And the devices proved to be incredibly temperamental. So much so that the physicists humanised these machines. Whenever they spoke of them they almost invariably gave them personalities and human like intentions in their metaphors. This was quite different from the biologists where were seeking to find the DNA in the creatures they were analysing – and although this DNA was mostly invisible to them too, they needed to gain this by processing various animals – often mice that had been specifically bred for the purpose. I hadn’t realised that you couldn’t just use any old mouse for this task, but needed a kind of standardised mouse that would not have any complicating viruses that wild mice might have. Although they killed the mice themselves, they generally referred to these animals using mechanical metaphors. The need to distance the experiments from the living organisms being studied was seen in the machine-like metaphors the scientists used for them. My daughter’s thesis was that the Japanese had kinds of rituals of respect for the animals that they killed and ate. This meant that it was almost disrespectful to eat them and not to attend to what it was that you were eating. And so, being presented by food that was clearly the animal itself was a way to acknowledge the respect owed to the animal you were eating. This was most evident when her Japanese boyfriend brought her to an expensive restaurant to eat fugu – the fish that can kill you if not prepared properly – although, this is mostly overstated. The problem was that the fish that arrived at the table had been filleted alive and so the filets were still moving when they arrived at the table. My daughter could not bring herself to eat this still moving flesh. But her boyfriend kept telling her what she was missing out on – how fresh it was. She later showed me a video of an octopus that had had his head cut open and the meat inside its head sliced. This was called ‘dancing rice’ – as when you poured soy sauce over it, its tentacles would wave about. Again, you ate the meat directly from the body of the octopus. Under the video there was both English and Japanese comments. The English comments invariably spoke of how disgusting they thought this was. The Japanese said things like ‘I wanted this for my 21st birthday, but it is so expensive’. I would be curious to know if Japanese biologists use mechanical metaphors to describe their experiments and if they use human metaphors to describe the machines they use when doing physics experiments. ...more |
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| Apr 09, 2024
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it was amazing
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One of the problems with Foucault is that he learnt too well a lesson from Nietzsche, that power is inevitably and all-pervasive. And this means there
One of the problems with Foucault is that he learnt too well a lesson from Nietzsche, that power is inevitably and all-pervasive. And this means there is no real hope of freedom in the traditional sense. We are either the subjugated or the subjugators and, since each defines the other, are ability to be free is impossible. This book does something similar with alienation. We hope for community as a means of reinforcing our identity, but identity denies us freedom in a similar way to how power does – if they are not already synonymous. It is only in our feelings of alienation that we have any hope of becoming ourselves – even if there is no real thing that truly is ourselves. To take this all a bit more slowly. He begins this book by saying that we are essentially alienated from even our names. We are given our names by our parents, often in the hope that our name will define the person we will become. This is most evident with names like Chastity or religious inspired names like Peter – the rock upon which a church might be built. But even when I named my first daughter, Fiona, it was because I knew the name meant fair one, and that was a large part in my choosing it. The names we are given are just that – given to us – and so not entirely ours. This theme runs through our lives. If we are a carpenter or a priest we have joined a kind of community that has expectations and rituals and forms of respect across society that we then are expected to live up to. We identify with these symbolic worlds and become part of them. They become our identity – but there is always part of us that rebels. I learnt this when I realised, after not having been in Ireland since I was 5, that I could not really consider myself Irish. Not only had the accent faded with the years, but also I knew virtually nothing of the day-to-day being that being Irish involved. This became particularly obvious to me when I spoke with people ‘just off the boat’. They knew things I would never know. And yet, I could never fully believe I was Australian either. The sense of not belonging fully in Australia was not negated by the feeling of not being truly Irish either. The sense of being an outsider would not go away. That said, people are much more likely to treat me as if I was an Australian than they are to treat me as if I were Irish. And I can easily pass as Australian. Much more easily than someone born here who does not have white skin can pass as Australian. Belonging is a complicated affair. And more than that, there is something in us that never wants to fully belong in any of the categories and classes and groupings that society presents to us. And that is alienation. The author argues that it is that feeling of alienation that allows us to change – to deny our identity and find pathways towards our subjectivities that might otherwise appear to be denied us. His point is that rather than the task of life being to end alienation, alienation is actually a boon and the only way for us to be able to become something different from the people the structures of society has mapped out for us. Rather than being a bad thing, alienation is something to be celebrated. This flies in the face of much of what society wants to achieve. It also undermines something many revolutionaries believe is the basis upon which to build their utopian visions. Marx, for example, wants to end the alienation of the worker from the product of their labour – by abolishing surplus value and capitalist exploitation – this abolition of alienation is meant to bring about the start of history. But the author here refers back to Hegel and says that, like Nietzsche and his obsession with power – that alienation is inevitable and linked to freedom. He quotes Marx on the relationship between freedom and necessity – where freedom is a kind of overcoming of necessity. But what too often becomes socially necessary is a world without a sense of alienation – and this would only be possible in a world where we do what we can to ensure that we belong. And we belong by fully realising the demands of our identities – identities that have been determined before we were born and into which we need to attempt to fit like a glove. This is a kind of positive identity – where we make life easier for ourselves by fitting in. And this he says is a kind of death – because we can only grow as people once we are dissatisfied with that as an option. That dissatisfaction is the sense of being alienated from the various socially constructed forms of identity available to us. As such, alienation is the motive power that drives us towards self-realisation. I think this is a fascinating argument. Much more dialectical than I had expected. The point isn’t to avoid discomfort – but rather to see why we feel discomfort and where that discomfort is attempting to lead us. As such, even though feeling alienated is never a nice place to be, without it we have no hope of constructing an identity that is truly our own. ...more |
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4.03
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| 1987
| Oct 15, 1988
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it was amazing
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In large part, this book is about black boxes. You see, all science becomes a black box once it is more or less settled. There is a long discussion in
In large part, this book is about black boxes. You see, all science becomes a black box once it is more or less settled. There is a long discussion in this on the history of the Deisel engine. The problem was that such an engine was remarkably difficult to design, despite many scientists actively seeking a way to achieve precisely such a device. But once it had been achieved, it could be used without the person using it understanding this history or the problems associated with its creation. It became a black box – something you could assume would just work according to the specifications written on the box. This is also shown to be true of just about every problem in science. The artifacts of science are a series of black boxes that we trust will work – but that trust is always provisional, since, if the black box doesn’t work as intended, we may need to go back into it to understand its workings to see why, in this particular case, it is no longer doing what we intended it to do. This is a book of sociology – but a particular form of sociology – one that avoids the large sociological categories we generally assume will form the foundation of the social science. Society being one of those categories, but also capitalism, race, gender and so on. These only are mentioned if they are observed directly as having an impact on what is being studied – science and technology – and if those directly engaged in such work – scientists and technologists – appear interested in these categories or make some use of them while they are engaged in their work. And this is shown to be virtually never the case. Instead, they are shown to be interested in their place in what I guess could be called the canon of science and technology. They want to be acknowledged as having contributed to the sum of human knowledge – but this is a difficult exercise. Not least because it is so competitive. And the basis of this competition is the desire to shape our understanding of the world. This isn’t quite the same as seeking to uncover the truth of nature – but like Khun’s paradigms, truth in this sense is seen as historically bound and socially conditioned. One of the problems is that scientific research is built upon endless black boxes. This is what a laboratory is. It is almost meaningless to talk about a single inventor any longer. You know, a kind of Elon Musk reshaping the world in his image. This is because every laboratory is in essence a collaboration with everything that has come before. Just as a research paper without references to the work of others would never be published, so also a laboratory that did not contain various black boxes the technicians and scientists working in that laboratory did not know how they were built or how they work is also unimaginable. For example, if you are trying to redesign an engine, you are likely to need to use a computer, but you are unlikely to have more than an overview knowledge of how the computer works – even of the computer programs running on the computer hardware that your results are likely to depend upon. Your work is inevitably social – you will depend upon this social nature of your work if you are to move your research forward at all. We like to think that if a scientist presents a theory that we do not agree with, we can simply challenge the assumptions they have made and test it according to the underlying logic of science – or of nature itself. The problem is that this is a bit like saying that if we don’t like the news, we can easily set up our own newspaper, or news website, and exercise our democratic rights. Which is true enough, if you are a billionaire, but less true for the rest of us. The same goes with science. Not only is the entry cost having the appropriate qualifications, but also in having the laboratory space with its multiple and very expensive black boxes. Criticism is not cheap. This means that you might come up with something incredibly interesting about the nature of the universe, but if no one ends up using your idea as part of a black box, your idea is virtually meaningless. This is a bit like the fate of the Avogadro number, which is now so important to chemistry, but was initially ignored for 50 years until after his death. If people don’t know about your black box, they can’t use it, and it is only in its use that it becomes ‘true’. And if it is only in other people using your ideas that your ideas become worthwhile, finding ways to promote your ideas becomes a central task of science. And this becomes the central concern of scientists and their endless fascination with being published and being cited. To be cited is to be confirmed, even if the citation is a refutation – for someone to bother to refute your work shows its impact. The social nature of science goes all the way down. Muscling your way into this crowded space becomes central to having a productive scientific career. There is an interesting discussion on the economics of science here – in the sense that the cost of copper was a factor in the electrification of the US. The point was to reduce the amount of copper used in the network. But this had further consequences, not least the need to have a high resistance filament in lightbulbs. High resistance filaments had not been discovered, and posed remarkable technological challenges – but the cost of copper was felt to be even more insurmountable if electric lights were to outcompete gas ones. And so the race was on for a high resistance filament that would persist. Society imposes restrictions, in much the same way that nature does, addressing those restrictions and redefining them is the work of scientists as they turn technological problems into settled science and from there to back boxes that can be used to address the issues of new restrictions and problems that need to be addressed. This is quite a different way of understanding the workings of science. Rather than science being about addressing nature directly, it always is mediated by the social, the networks of scientists in an ongoing dialogue with each other over the immediate problems of the day. Rather than scientists being the great revolutionaries of our day, they are often highly conservative, relying on the endless black boxes created by the science of the past. These black boxes are often little understood, but they create an assemblage that has its own momentum, something it becomes increasingly difficult to redirect or overturn. Something that is inherently social with its own hierarchies, structures, power relations and demands. ‘Truth’ is presented as always being ‘enough’ in the mythology of science to overturn prejudice, but this is increasingly impossible unless your truth can be backed up by the money needed to engage in research – something that is highly competitive and therefore skewed towards those more in line with the paradigm of the day. I think this is an interesting take on the sociology of science, and I would probably recommend it above Latour’s other book I have read and not reviewed, Laboratory Life. ...more |
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0860915883
| 9780860915881
| 0860915883
| 3.91
| 827
| 1990
| May 17, 1993
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it was amazing
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I never cease being amazed at how many other philosophers steal from this guy. The book this one made me think most of was Byung-Chul Han’s The Transp
I never cease being amazed at how many other philosophers steal from this guy. The book this one made me think most of was Byung-Chul Han’s The Transparency Society – and not just because of the similar titles. And this guy is like Han in other ways too. Both pack more ideas to the page than seems completely reasonable. In fact, this book is so overflowing with ideas it is quite breathtaking. I’m saying that as a way of also saying that this review does not pretend to cover everything that is discussed here. Baudrillard is a controversialist in many ways. He says things designed to shock and this, I feel, is quite intentional. A way to get us to rise above our normal torpor and to see anew what is always already right in front of us. I’ve a dear friend who does something similar. Once, when we were waiting for management to begin a meeting, he said that since we were all sitting around doing nothing perhaps we could sharpen our debating skills. He suggested the topic of rape. He was prepared to head up the negative team – since he fundamentally objected to the whole concept of rape. He asked who would like to lead the affirmative. Unsurprisingly, there were no takers. I guess one of the ideas being played with here is that sameness is a very modern condition and one that makes the world strangely bland, even though we think we have so much more now than we ever did in the past. He distinguishes between three types of value – use value, exchange value and symbolic value. And says that capitalism defeated Marxism, which he still believed was the most thorough critique of capitalism, by transforming itself into something without classes other than the capitalist class. This is a strange kind of victory, one that is almost also self-negating. He says we have entered an age after an orgy, where all things – commodities, sex, good and evil – are now bland and without the sort of liberational power we had once hoped they would have. And it is how they have all become the same that has cost them their power. He says we have all become essentially transexual - using people like Micheal Jackson as a case in point. I didn’t quite understand his point here – although it matches his belief in the overall sameness of everyone now. He also discusses the death drive and I had to keep reminding myself that he wrote this before the internet and social media. He talks of a woman following a man through Venice, stalking him, I guess, but not out of lust, but more to be his shadow. To learn more of him than he knew of himself. He says at one point that the only real photographs are those we take of primitive peoples – people who do not know how to pose for a photograph and so are therefore themselves, despite them not really having a self in the sense we mean it today. The death he speaks of that we desire as we shadow people, watching their every move, is a curious kind of death. One that we may not even wish upon them, but one that is the ultimate end of our following of them. Ideas are smashed together here – but the underlying theme is that of a loss of the real within the symbolic and the now unreality of our world. We think that we want authenticity, but we have lost the ability to know what is authentic and what is pose. Like I said, so many ideas. I feel I would need to read this multiple times to follow all of the fractals to their end – but that might take me many lifetimes. ...more |
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1859847927
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| 1859847927
| 3.72
| 447
| Mar 01, 2001
| Mar 17, 2001
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really liked it
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I think this book was just too hard for me to follow. I don’t know nearly enough about Lucanian psychoanalysis and so I struggled with a lot of this.
I think this book was just too hard for me to follow. I don’t know nearly enough about Lucanian psychoanalysis and so I struggled with a lot of this. For most of the book I was wondering how what he was saying about Hamlet or other works of fiction had to do with totalitarianism. I guess the answer is that totalitarianism is based on a leader and the leader is a kind of father figure and the father figure is basically the little other when compared with the big other of society – and so the same psychological principles can be applied to both. I’m not totally sure how accurate a description of what he was trying to achieve here, or even if it is a justifiable conclusion, but it was the best I could make of it all. The book provides nightmare visions of the two great totalitarian projects of the twentieth century – Fascism and Stalinism – and presents them as quite different in kind. He provides an interesting discussion of the Stalinist show trials, but his point is to look at the psychology of those who would have been happy to sacrifice themselves for the good of the party if they could believe the party actually believed in the truth of what they were doing – even if they had mistaken their actions as those of enemies. His point is that the earnestness of those accused was met with the cynicism of those making the accusations – they were playing the game by the stated rules, rather than those actually in play. I think Zizek’s argument is a bit like this - that all societies have their totalitarian side. That they demand conformity to the truth of their constitution and do what they can to eliminate dissent. That leaders are father figures - hence all the talk of Hamlet - and that overcoming conformity requires a kind of cynicism that is very hard to sustain since the whole of society is forcing us towards acceptance. Forcing in the sense that we are surveilled within an inch of our lives, but still think we are living in a democracy where we have options and choices, but these are so constrained as to be effectively meaningless. This is similar to Chomsky’s idea that in a liberal democracy debate is very strictly limited, where saying things like the Old Testament is a guidebook to genocide, is not really tolerated, regardless of how true it is, but that debate is furious within the set limits of accepted dispute. I guess part of the problem is that we don’t really have a notion of what a utopia might look like any longer – and anyone who professes a utopian vision is treated as a madman. This is interesting in the sense that dystopian visions are completely acceptable. Any step outside of the accepted narrative is seen as taking us down the ‘road to serfdom’ and so, as imperfect as the world might be, all possible alternatives are worse. And this is a problem because change is inevitable – as we are seeing with AI and so on. We seem to be living in a perpetual state of nostalgia, nostalgia for a world that never existed – where people didn’t exist in silos and echo chambers and where there was a kind of truth we could move ever closer to discovering. Today we live in TS Eliot’s world of bricolage made up of the half-remembered fragments of our broken societies. These fragments I have shore against my ruin – but we are in need of new pieces, and the new pieces on offer don’t fit very well with the past images we had of a stable society. I guess the problem we have is one we have always had – a terror of those who have a vision contrary to that of the world as we know it. It is why we need to kill Socrates. His demand that we celebrate him as a gadfly is the exact opposite of the world we want to live in, and yet, without gadflies biting us out of our complacency the difference between the world we live in and a totalitarian society is one of quantity rather than of kind. I’ve become fascinated with our seeming inability to negotiate anything. Russia is pure evil, Hamas is pure evil, Iran is pure evil, China is pure evil. You cannot negotiate with pure evil, it must be defeated – even if you must make yourself evil to achieve that end, it is the end we must strive for. We do not recognise the death wish at the heart of this obsession. We go on producing more and more weapons regardless of the fact that the world is on the edge of climate destruction and our endless just wars are racing us to our doom. Our inability to see the constraints in our thinking is coming up against the physical constraints of the planet. We are, to quote Eliot again, certain of certain certainties – whether these will ultimately matter on a dead planet seems beyond our ability to reason. We may not see Trump or Harris as ‘father figures’ – but that is what they seem to want us to envision them as and so the limited debate remains constrained by our acceptance of the totalitarian desires of the ‘truth’ both believes they offer. The contempt each shows for the other is the same contempt we feel for those outside our own constructed father laws. Laws that we force the world to conform to. It is all a very bleak vision. And not one I can see a way out of – other than in seeking understanding of the other as a manifestation of our own fears, repressed desires and crushed hopes. Even that recognition is probably not enough – but perhaps it is better than our current course rushing us towards oblivion. ...more |
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0063142880
| 9780063142886
| 0063142880
| 3.84
| 1,686
| Apr 23, 2023
| Apr 25, 2023
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it was amazing
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It is not easy to be a polymath - as the author says at one point in this, with so much information in the world today, the chance of us knowing every
It is not easy to be a polymath - as the author says at one point in this, with so much information in the world today, the chance of us knowing everything there is to know, even in a small section of the wealth of human knowledge, is beyond the abilities of most of us. There was a time when there were polymaths. But that time is long past. And really, if this author could be anything at all, I’m nearly certain a polymath would be exactly what he would choose to be. This is a book covering a wide range of topics - but particularly epistemology, but epistemology for the general public. It is clearly written and accessible, two things an aspiring polymath should definitely try to be if they possibly can. And this is a book about technology and how technology changes the ways in which we think and the ways in which we know. At one point in this he talks about navigation and how there was a time, a very recent time, when knowing where you were at any point on the earth’s surface meant you needed to know how to use a sextant and be able to apply trigonometry. Now, all of this is ancient history with global positioning able to tell you exactly where you are with virtually no prior knowledge at all. Does this diminish us? I remember in high school we were taught logarithms. We had bought a strange silver covered book with pages and pages of numbers. They weren’t all that hard to learn. But it was years later that I was finally told why we had learnt them. They were also important for navigation. In finding your location on the surface of the globe you needed to frequently multiply very large numbers together. But we are only human and humans tend to make mistakes when multiplying large numbers - did I carry the one? Someone realised that every number could be rewritten as a power of ten. This gave you a ten with a number as its index - the little number above the ten. If you had two large numbers, you could look up the indices of these two numbers and simply add them together - giving your the product of the two numbers. Since adding is much easier than multiplying, that is why log tables proved so useful. The teacher who told me this said that since we all have calculators now, the point of everyone learning logarithms was mostly down to mathematics teachers not bothering to keep up with the times. Perhaps an overstatement, but what would I know? This is actually one of the big themes of this book - not logarithms as such, but how technology makes a lot of old knowledge pointless. The question then is, if today we carry with us a device that allows us to access the sum total of human knowledge in our back pockets, what is the point of holding knowledge in our heads any longer? This is not an easy question to answer. He does the standard thing of differentiating between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Just because you have access to lots of information doesn’t in the least mean that you are knowledgeable and certainly doesn’t mean you are wise. Which then begs the question of what it is to be wise. There is a lovely story of one of the physicists who was asked if he was a genius - he said he wasn’t, he was just really quite smart. He knew he wasn’t a genius because he had known lots of geniuses and they were quicker and smarter than he was. Which then also comes back to how philosophy got its name. When someone said to Pythagoras that he was a wise man, he said that he wasn’t wise, but a lover of wisdom - in Greek, a philosopher. Or Socrates when he was told he was the wisest man alive replied ‘all I know is that I know nothing’. Which, of course, is wisdom indeed. I would love to be able to draw - but it has never been something I’ve ever been able to do. I love the simplicity of some people’s drawings, as much as the awe inspiring complexity of that of other artists. Picasso gets a bad rap now, but he had a sense of line that takes my breath away. To criticise him for what he did with his penis seems somewhat beside the point to me. I’m nearly certain I would not like him in the least. But I guess that might also be true of other of my heroes. I’m not sure I would like to spend a whole lot of time with Kafka or with Beethoven or with Marx. The more you learn about your heroes, the harder it is to keep thinking of them as heroes, well, other than in the sphere of achievement they excelled at. Try to write like Kafka and unless you are Ishiguro, you are probably going to make a total mess of it. The kinds of people I find most interesting are those who can take a topic that is otherwise absurdly complicated and explain it in ways that are accessible to the rest of us poor mortals. When people fail at this - and I’ve read many books by physicists where this has been the case - it is a deep disappointment. I’m more interested in sociology than most other subjects now, but many of the sociologists specialise in overly complicated language. Even those I think really ought to know better. One is Bourdieu. He even wrote a fabulous book called Academic Discourse. I’m going to give a lecture on that next month. In it he talks of a survey his team did on French university students. Basically, what they did was to attend a series of lectures the students also attended. They took down the key words used by the professors at these lectures and then asked the students after the lectures to define these key words for them. Words like dialectic or epistemology or polymath, I guess. Unsurprisingly, the students couldn’t define these words. So they asked them why they hadn’t interrupted the lecturer and ask what they meant. The most general response was that they had understood the words in context, even if they now couldn’t define them. But then, a while later, they read over the essays these students wrote and found they had used all of these words they could not define in their essays. Bourdieu said that you aren’t really taught how to think at university, but rather you are provided a relationship to a culture - and in a sense you fake it until you make it. That is, you write in a way you don’t understand, but this positions you in a way that will, hopefully, lead you one day to knowing what you are talking about. True story. In my undergraduate degree I had an experience very much like this. I had to write an essay on Foucault and I was incredibly proud of it - not least because I got a very good mark for the essay. About a year later I was clearing out my papers and spotted the essay. I thought I would have a quick read over it again to see just how brilliant I really was. The problem was that I could hardly understand two words I’d written together. It was so pretentious, and convoluted, and impenetrable. I could hardly believe I had written it. Rather than feeling a sense of pride, I felt crushed. I decided then to not give as much thought to getting good marks, but rather to try to write in as clear and simple a way as I possibly could. But if that is my story, I can’t say it is Bourdieu’s. He often writes in ways that are too difficult for me. This is particularly true of the first chapter of just about any book he ever wrote. I think the point in life, in many ways, is something a machine struggles to do. And this is the idea of wanting to be a polymath, even when that is ultimately impossible. That is, not just to know lots of stuff, but to find ways to bring those different strands of knowledge together and to do so in a way that helps people understand something they didn’t know they didn’t know beforehand. We are social animals and to share knowledge - to share anything - is the most human of exchanges. I’m not sure I enjoyed this book as much as I hoped I would. I’ve enjoyed other of his books more - but I like reading his books. He brings joy to the writing of them and he holds my hand as he explains things - even things I already know - and that is a lovely and deeply human thing to do. There should be more of that. ...more |
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0241422795
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| 0241422795
| 3.97
| 195
| unknown
| Sep 24, 2020
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it was amazing
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There are so many ways in which you can fail and so few ways in which you can succeed. And sometimes even success can feel like failure. And ultimatel
There are so many ways in which you can fail and so few ways in which you can succeed. And sometimes even success can feel like failure. And ultimately, if we see death as a kind of failure too, we all will fail eventually. At one point in this he talks about people who have created CVs documenting all of the times they have failed – novels we started and that came to naught. Relationships that started with such promise and ended in screaming matches or just faded to nothing. Projects that we thought would be life defining that we procrastinated over and that died on the vine. These CVs were not created out of a morbid fascination, but rather to show that we are as much made out of our failures as our successes. This is not a self-help book in the traditional sense. One of the things the author says throughout is that too often the narrative we construct of our lives presents our failures in the context of our ultimate success. He’s not as interested in this. Sometimes our failures remain just that. And as I said, often regardless of our successes, we still feel like failures. A friend of mine used to tell me stories of people who had committed suicide on the day of their ultimate success. And how tragic and sad he found this, but mostly how inexplicable. I guess part of the problem here is having an ambition that can be realised. It is almost as if we need a reason to go on striving. There is a nice bit in this where he talks about something Freud mentions somewhere – that people often have a dream where they are forced to retake an exam they did quite well in – but this time they feel underprepared and assume they might fail. Freud wasn’t quite sure what to make of this dream, but the author says it is one he often has and believes that it relates to the fact that we are never fully prepared for an exam. Our success in the exam originally feels like it is more related to good luck and is therefore not fully deserved. Our dream failure in it tells us that we never fully accept our successes. The book discusses many people who have tried and failed. And yet, this seems a rather optimistic book to me. In the end he says that one of the reasons why Greek Gods often fell in love with mere mortals was that our perfections are always temporary. We are ephemera, we are here and gone in a moment. And yet, it is in our seemingly pointless trying against the odds that make us truly human. That and seeking to be well remembered souls. It is a sad life indeed that is lost without a single tear being shed over it. I kept thinking of Pink Floyd’s song Time while reading this. “Tired of lying in the sunshine Staying home to watch the rain You are young and life is long And there is time to kill today And then one day you find Ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run You missed the starting gun.” We all miss the starting gun. We all have regrets for time wasted that has come to nothing. Success isn’t assured or even all that likely. But we can all do things that might just make the world a slightly better place. And that effort is worth the effort. ...more |
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| May 28, 2019
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it was amazing
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This is an excellent introduction to Hegel. It begins by saying that he is the most misunderstood philosopher, not least due to his followers, both le
This is an excellent introduction to Hegel. It begins by saying that he is the most misunderstood philosopher, not least due to his followers, both left and right. It says this because his followers failed to understand the importance of Christ to Hegel’s philosophy – not least Christ’s death and humiliation as the culmination of his life. It also says that Hegel’s philosophy is really one of love and that love needs to be understood as self-negation. Hegel’s dialectic is essentially that of unresolvable contradiction. And this means that the characterisation of the dialectic into thesis, antithesis and synthesis, about the only thing most people know of Hegel, is both something he never said and a complete misunderstanding of what he meant. For Hegel, there could never be a synthesis, rather just a new contradiction at a higher level. He starts his philosophy by asserting the identity of being and nothingness – since pure being has no definite characteristics and so cannot be differentiated from nothingness, which also has no definite characteristics. Contradiction becomes central to Hegel’s dialectics since things are never self-complete, but always in a process of change, of coming into and going out of being. This is also true of concepts, which contain within themselves fundamental contradictions that force them to become self-identical with their opposites. A is never simply equal to A – but rather A always becomes not-A and so is insolvably contained within self-contradiction. This means that contradiction is not something that produces the illogical, but rather something that shows the interconnectedness of all things, processes and conceptualisations of the world. The author says that Hegel would have been much more readable if he had lived after Freud, someone who never really made any use of Hegel’s philosophy at all, but who also came to very similar conclusions on the nature of our self-contradictory selves. Where our desires seem to us to be just about obtaining the object of our desire, but that this obtaining of our desired object never satisfies us. This is because desire isn’t about satisfying lack, but rather about trying to resolve a contradiction we are unconscious of, something buried in our sub-conscious and ultimately repressed and misconstrued. But for Hegel, love is a way out of this. In loving someone we stop being purely ourselves and become realised in our relationship with the other, with our loved one. This negation of the self is essential for any possibility of us becoming what we truly desire to be – completed in our love for the other and for the product of our union with that other – our children. This is also why Hegel is so interested in Jesus. For God so loved the world that he sent his only son who died naked and humiliated on the cross for our sakes. This humiliation of God is essential, rather than trivial. It opens up the possibility for humanity to be in a relationship with God otherwise denied us. A god that is at once both human and divine, a god that is the realisation of the fundamental contradiction at the heart of human existence. There is an interesting critique of phenomenology, or rather the 20th century phenomenologists, in this too. They sought to get rid of the concept by replacing it with a concerted focus upon experience. That by turning to ontology, they could overcome the metaphysics of epistemology. But while Hegel also wants to return to ontology, he knows that by ignoring the concept, you are not left with the concrete in a pure form, but rather with eclecticism – all of the contradictions, but with them hidden beneath the particulars of existence. This mass of particulars never reaches the level of the universal since it rejects any underlying concept to choose between the infinity of facts and concrete being. Theory allows us to choose between the infinity of concrete facts to see underlying patterns in existence – as contradictory as these always remain. The abstract is no more complete than the concrete, but it is within their contradictory dance that we are able to move towards a fuller understanding of the limitations of both. Rather than seeking a final synthesis, these contradictions move on to a higher level and more pressing and unresolvable contradictions too. The process is never complete since the universe is never complete. Contradiction is not confusion, but rather the ability to accept that only in acceptance of contradiction is the world understandable at all. In the end Hegel’s philosophy is one of movement and of interrelatedness. Quality implies quantity, the abstract defines the concrete, the particular sets limits to the universal and in turn is limited by it too. This eternal dance refers back to Heraclitus, where you cannot stand in the same river twice – or even the first time, since change is all. Following this insight to its logical conclusion is the point of Hegel’s philosophy. I know this review is too hard – but the book is better. He has more space and is therefore able to discuss these ideas, and others too that are essential to understanding Hegel, in more depth and also much more clearly than I have space to do here. Hegel’s interest in the Haitian Slave Revolution was also something I never knew about before, and the discussion of that in relation to his ideas of the slave and master contradiction is also a fascinating discussion on the nature of the universal at odds with Hegel’s sometimes racist undertones. ...more |
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it was amazing
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Many of the people that I have been supervising lately have been wanting to do a policy analysis and so I’ve suggested they might want to use Carol Ba
Many of the people that I have been supervising lately have been wanting to do a policy analysis and so I’ve suggested they might want to use Carol Bacchi’s work on What is the Problem Represented to Be? This is really useful, since it takes Foucault’s ideas and puts them into a framework that is easy to apply while still retaining his core idea of the relationship between power and knowledge. But when we get about half-way into the process I mention to them that one of the problems with Bacchi’s work is that it can seem overly proscriptive. Any method that has a number of steps is likely to suffer from that, I guess. And so I’ve been suggesting they consider moving to another form of analysis that is less proscriptive – Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis. The problem here, as some of my more observant students notice, is that CDA isn’t so much a method as a disposition and so it can seem like anything goes. This isn’t as fair a criticism as it might initially seem, but like anything else, CDA can be open to abuse. I generally get them to read his Language and Power – also coming out of the tradition of Foucault – but which provides a series of worked examples. From now on, I’m going to be more likely to point them to chapters in this book. This book is much more comprehensive, while also containing lots of examples of him using his method to make clear how it can be applied. There is a chapter in this where he analyses a number of texts by Marx to show that Marx was a kind of early critical discourse analyser, and that his analysis developed throughout his career. The debt Fairclough owes to Marx and Bourdieu is at least as great as that which he owes to Foucault. And he also points out that Marx owes a huge debt to Aristotle in his dialectics – at least as much as to Hegel. I’ve found myself having to explain dialectics to people lately too. This is also something Fairclough spends a lot of time on in this book. For instance, he says repeatedly that dialectics is important because of how it treats things as being different, but not distinct. This is such an important point, but is more meaningful once you get an idea of what dialectics is actually about. People often confuse dialectics with dialogue. This is compounded by the fact that it is often understood to have come from Socrates (truth through discussion or questioning) and is being used to understand how discourses work – which also seem to be about discussion too. So, what is the dialectic? Essentially, it can be reduced to two absolute statements: that everything is connected to everything else and that everything is in a constant state of change. This sounds different from Fairclough’s claim that the dialectic is things being different, but not distinct – but only superficially. The problem is that we have a preference for thinking about the ‘thing-ness’ of things. That a thing is distinct from other things and to understand them we need to see their essence. The dialectic does not really spend as much time worrying about things – but rather is obsessed with relationships. That is, their non-distinct nature. In this sense we are asked to consider things as they spring forth from relationships, rather than of them existing in and for themselves. This should be reminiscent of Marx’s (and more particularly Bourdieu’s) understanding of social classes – that is, classes don’t exist in isolation from each other, even while they seek to differentiate themselves from each other, but rather that they need to be understood in relation to each other. That is, they constitute themselves by distinctions from each other, rather than as in isolation from each other. For the middle class to exist there must be an upper and lower class. One presumes the others and only exists in relation to the others too. And not only are these classes not isolated from each other, but they only make sense in the movement of each in relation to the others too. Change is inevitable, interrelationship is also inevitable. Focusing upon these processes is therefore the pathway to understanding each and the whole. Forcing ourselves to look at these relationships is the key to critical discourse analysis. Because these relationships are inevitably also relations of power. And these relations of power are often made clear ideologically – in how language is used to justify or explain power as something that should be taken-for-granted. This means that critical discourse analysis focuses upon how systems of power use language to make the world make sense in ways that make the current state of the world seem natural and inevitable. How language is used in this process helps us to understand the workings of the relationships that exist in society. It is the critical aspect of the analysis of discourse. And discourse does not only mean written texts, although, clearly, this is a large part of what it does mean, but all of the ‘texts’ we encounter – from written, images, webpages, all the way to also how buildings and streets and institutions are formed and the enactments of civil rituals within these spaces too. Who gets to speak, what they are allowed to say, where they are allowed to stand, what they are likely to understand of the various texts they encounter. All of these are open to an analysis of CDA and in doing so the power relationships that are ‘hidden’ in them are brought to the fore. Fairclough provides lots of examples of this in his chapters in this book. Analysing various texts to show the hidden assumptions they contain and how these work to impose interpretations upon the readers of those texts. As such, he shows what critical thinking looks like – how it is situated in interactions and how those interactions have symbolic and political meanings beyond what we generally assume. This is a powerful introduction to how to perform a critical discourse analysis. It is a fairly long book, but that is actually a strength. I can’t recommend it too highly. ...more |
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0813937353
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| Aug 28, 2015
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it was amazing
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We live in a world where we have come to believe that hope and optimism are synonyms. And that optimism is an unequivocal good. This book is a curativ
We live in a world where we have come to believe that hope and optimism are synonyms. And that optimism is an unequivocal good. This book is a curative for both of these notions. Optimism is a disposition – in effect it is a preference to believe things are going well regardless of the evidence. This, in itself, isn’t a bad thing – but it is of less consequence than people think. As Eagleton says, whether you think the glass is half-full or half-empty, the quantity of liquid in the glass remains the same. Hope is of quite a different character. Sure, it can be misplaced, but it is something you can act upon. Whereas optimism tends to encourage inaction and acceptance. Optimism also has been associated with the growing phases of Capitalism. As he makes clear at one point, there was hardly a tragic Late-Victorian novel – and so Thomas Hardy’s novels stand out for that fact alone. Optimism needs nothing but itself to feed upon – and so we can reflect on those who pit themselves Job-like against the cruelty of God in His bet with the devil to retain our faith regardless as this act of faith was the highest moral virtual. But hope endures through catastrophe due to the presence of contingency. This is made clear in Eagleton’s discussion of King Lear – one of those plays that ends with virtually every character dead. As he says, it is possible to see this end as having been otherwise – and every one of Shakespeare’s sources for the play ends thus. It is in this contingency that our hope for a better world can be based. I really loved this book. I’ve long refused to be called an optimist, but only because I’ve always felt uncomfortable in being optimistic in a world where everything appears to be getting worse and optimism would place me on the same side as Pinker and Gates. Here I can choose hope over optimism – it is a trade I would make every day. ...more |
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it was amazing
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New Review Yesterday I was in a meeting where we discussed the new introduction to this book and in doing that close reading I’ve become dissatisfied w New Review Yesterday I was in a meeting where we discussed the new introduction to this book and in doing that close reading I’ve become dissatisfied with my previous review and have decided to have another go. I want to start by saying that the author is a Jewish woman who was born in what she refers to as the Zionist colony of Palestine. I’ve read two books by her in quick succession. The other is called The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. I have read many books this year on Palestine – that is easily the best. But I am unlikely to get time to review it in a way that I would feel would do it justice – you should read it. It is stunningly good. The other thing I want to say is that she has rewritten the introduction to the second edition of this book in a way that I find breathtakingly interesting. She has written over parts of her old introduction – which she retains in normal text – with text in italics. I want to say that she is speaking back to her previous self in doing this, or arguing with herself, or correcting herself – but none of these are quite right. But since she is not the same person as the person who wrote the original introduction, now she shows how her ideas have become clearer and modified over time. And she does this by overlaying new text in italics across her selection of text from the previous edition. Photography is a complicated thing – much more complicated than you might expect. Does it have a role in emancipation? Photography produces images – but who owns those images and who gets to decide what those images mean? Photographs, like so much else from colonies, are ‘taken’. Is it possible for photographs to not be appropriated? The book is called the Civil Imagination and so we should think about those two words and what they mean. In one sense the French Revolution moved people from being subjects of the state to becoming citizens. As citizens they were understood to be able to act in ways that are simply not available to subjects. She says that in a society like Israel’s there are effectively two classes of citizens, sovereign citizens and effectively subjects. However, the myth of the society is that it is a democracy and so there is really only one class of citizen. This fundamental untruth lies at the heart of the conflict across these occupied lands. This is not merely a matter of dispossession, something at the heart of every colonisation, but also of a kind of legal fiction about what it means to be a citizen and so of the definition of the civil. Imagination imagines what does not currently exist. And in this, the author sees the role of photography, to create an image of possible worlds. Rather than photographs being ‘taken’, and rather than them being objects that are owned by the person ‘taking’ them, photographs become part of an event of emancipation. The question then becomes not only who took the photograph, but what is it that they chose to record, what is the context of that recording, who is included, who is left out? That is, image theory becomes contextualised and each photograph becomes an event in that context. As such, any photograph is political in that it is always about more than the choices of the photographer, but is embedded within a civil context and speaks to that context, whether the photographer recognises this or not. I am going to have to read more of Azoulay’s work. And in doing so try to read it more closely. She is seriously intelligent and throughout this book I could feel her taking my breath away with her insights. I wanted to add to my previous review, but felt it would be wrong to do so as she does in her second introduction, by writing in italics to show her additions/editings – but rather to leave my previous review as was. Old Review One of the best things about reading is the opportunity it gives you to think inside the head of someone who thinks quite differently to how you do. The author of this is remarkably systematic in her thinking. She refers to ideas like the three versions of the judgement of taste, or that the political judgement of taste has both an inclusive and exclusive form. This always makes me think of Aristotle or Kant, and how reading them I am constantly struck by how differently our brains work. I really don’t think in well-ordered categories that build into coherent structures. But I marvel at it while I watch someone do exactly that. In many ways this book is a working through of the author’s attempt to understand her own reaction to a photograph she reproduces on the first page of the Introduction – also on the cover. And central to how she attempts to understand this is to question whether she should respond to this image as a work of art – that is, using aesthetic criteria and judging it according to formal considerations like how it is composed, lit, framed and so on – or whether, given it is the photograph of a Palestinian woman at her son, a woman who has just been removed from months of Israeli administrative detention while her home was demolished, she should consider it as a political image. That is, what is the relationship between the aesthetic and the political? Can a political image be too aesthetic or a work of art too political? How do we go about making these judgements? And should they both be held separate? In many ways her answer follows her own engagement with these questions, except she frames these within remarkably interesting discussions with some very important ‘image theorists’, including Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes and John Berger – that is, some of my heroes. Her point is not to say that art is political and the political is also artistic – although, this might well be something people reading her might take her to be saying – but rather that while there clearly are spheres and ways of understanding the world that are political and aesthetic, visual culture is always both aesthetic and political, in the broadest senses. An image always has been created with formal constraints that can be judged aesthetically, and images exist within communities and those communities are essentially political. She makes the very interesting point that the history of photography could be seen as introducing us to a new way of seeing. One that is not exhausted by the mechanical processes that go into making particular images, but rather where the meanings of images are, in many ways, the product of a process of negotiation between the photographer and those who observe the image. And that the context in which the image has been taken, or even just understood to have been taken, and what that is then taken to mean, provides a layer of interpretation and understanding of images that are much harder to pin down and fix for all time than people sometimes assume. She gives an example of Jonathan Walker who was tattooed with SS (Slave Stealer) after he had helped smuggle slaves to the north. He went into a photographic studio and had his hand photographed – people then referred to the SS as Slave Savior. Her point is that photography provided a means to effectively overturn the decision of the legal system – a way for the community to pass judgement upon the politics of the day. And this was done within an aesthetic medium, within a photograph. A discussion of how and whether this was political or aesthetic, or where on the spectrum between the political and the aesthetic this photograph might have sat seems almost entirely beside the point. I’m Irish, and so I am more likely to think of these distinctions in terms of songs, rather than photographs. And I’ve never really had a problem with songs being political, but being political is never really enough. Take Kevin Barry – the story of an 18 year-old who was tortured and then hanged by the English – clearly a political song – but there is no subtlety to it. But a very similar song, on a nearly identical topic, the murder by the British of an Irish rebel, James Connolly, virtually moves me to tears whenever I hear it. “The black flag was hoisted The cruel deed was over Gone was the man who loved Ireland so well There was many a sad heart In Dublin that morning When they murdered James Connolly The Irish rebel.” I think this is the dance that is necessary between the aesthetic and the political. It is pointless saying something is too political to be aesthetic – art is about life and life is inherently political – but also that something is too aesthetic to be political too – the political cannot exist outside of formal considerations. I feel her main point is that images now exist within civil imaginations in the sense that they exist, and derive their meaning, from where they sit within communities. This book is written by someone who was brought up in Israel and who uses the complex and insanely difficult situation there to explain the politics and aesthetics of images. She provides breathtaking analyses of photographs and, in the last chapter, of architecture. This is a stunningly interesting book that I’ve barely scratched the surface of. Honestly, get hold of this book. She is so incredibly smart, interesting and so worth reading. ...more |
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4.39
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it was amazing
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I hadn’t quite thought through the implications of the title of this one. A hospice is somewhere where a person goes to die, where they are treated wi
I hadn’t quite thought through the implications of the title of this one. A hospice is somewhere where a person goes to die, where they are treated with all due care and respect, but ultimately, they are there because their time is now limited. So, what does it mean to put modernity into a hospice? The author of this book spends quite a lot of time at the beginning of it warning the reader that they are likely to be challenged by the conclusions of the book and that it might even be better for them to not actually read the book. In fact, I can’t remember reading a book that has advised me quite so often that I should stop reading it. The point being that the author believes we are so committed to modernity that any challenge to it is likely to be met with so much resistance we are unlikely to actually hear the criticism and rather we are likely to build so much cognitive dissonance that the end result is likely to be us further entrenching ourselves in our own already held convictions. I’ve recently been reminded of this when someone commented again on a review I wrote on the book, The Scout Mindset. That book is a good example of the notion of modernism that the author here believes needs to be placed in a hospice. The problem is that as soon as you say something like that, people are likely to hear that what we need to replace such modernist ideas is some version of relativism or irrationalism or post-modernism. The author doesn’t really make any claims here about what ought to replace modernism – rather, her point is that modernism has so failed in its objectives that the best we can do is allow it to die a natural death. I guess she is with Gramsci in believing we are in an interregnum – where the old world is dying, but the new world is unable to be born, and so we are in a time of monsters. Her point is similar to the criticism Bauman makes of solid modernity – that it is a concept out of time and one that has caused more harm than people generally are prepared to recognise. This idea of modernity being dangerous is the antithesis of many books currently popular – such as Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. In these books modernity is simply the application of science and reason to society and so is our only hope in what would otherwise be a terrifying world. The impacts of modernity such as misogyny, colonisation, racism, classism, gendered discrimination, or ablism are all presented as misapplications of the core tenets of modernism. But if these are misapplications, they are remarkably persistent ones. The point of this book is to show that rather than being unintended consequences of modernity, they are in fact central to its influence. Modernity structures the world according to these exclusions. The world it creates alienates the majority of those on the planet to reinforce the benefits of the very few defined as normal. The author refers to those who benefit most from modernity as those who live in the north of the global north. Everyone else is forced to pay and pay for the privileges enjoyed by these very few. Her point is that even if some redistribution of the benefits of modernity were to be possible (something even the most cursory glance across the history of modernity ought to dispel), such a redistribution would be condemned to failure by the inherent contradictions modernity presents in its inability to even recognise other ways of understanding the world. It is these that she makes most use of, particularly at the start of the book. Her concern is not merely to point to traditional cultures and ways of knowing, but to also encourage us to adopt ways of understanding the world that are not only ‘human’ – but on time scales beyond the human as well. As she says at one point in this, humans have only been here for a very short time – our arrogance in believing we have all of the answers and the only valid perspective is a large part of the problem. That modernity is racing us towards catastrophic destruction is hardly something that is novel to point out. That the only response that is considered reasonable is to double down on modernity ought to be taken with at least some level of distrust. I did warn you that this book sets out to challenge our most cherished beliefs, but as with Gramsci and the interregnum, the new world is unable to be born – this is not a rejection of all things to do with modernity, but rather a call to see what can be salvaged out of the wreck modernity is offering us. And doing this while recognising that modernity is totalising, it barely leaves room for us to think outside of its strictures. So, how do we operate this hospice? She calls for an openness to how other people (and creatures and the world itself) might be responding to the changes happening around us. She does this through a metaphor of a bus we are all on and the types of people who might be experiencing that journey quite differently from one another. This book is premised upon deep levels of compassion, given it takes as its starting place that we are all in this together and so we need each of us involved in any solutions on offer. She repeatedly stresses in her questions throughout the book the need to display concern for everyone and to find ways to ensure everyone is given a hearing. This is so clearly the opposite of how modernity has treated the vast majority of people on the planet, the distinction could hardly be starker. All the same, I don’t expect those enraptured by modernity to embrace this new vision. Rather, I expect the exact opposite, as has been my own experience. She goes so far as to say that people’s minds generally only change when there is no option left. She quotes a saying – perhaps from Brazil, but I would think that given her background – that we can only start swimming once the water has reached our waists. She says many little things like this and often I found them catching my breath. With all of the warnings the author issues as she starts her book, I still think you should consider reading this book. ...more |
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0199256047
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| 3.98
| 1,130
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it was amazing
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I’ve struggled with this book. Firstly, for the obvious reason that it is, despite assurances, quite a difficult read. But more importantly, because i
I’ve struggled with this book. Firstly, for the obvious reason that it is, despite assurances, quite a difficult read. But more importantly, because it is a challenging read, a provocative one and intentionally so. Latour wants to do to his readers what Hume did to Kant – wake us from our dogmatic sleep. And so, he slaps us about the head with challenges to many of the things that (well, I at least) cling o dearly. Which would be fine, if I could find a simple argument against what he has to say. But I can’t. So, I’ve found this book deeply disturbing on many levels. Part of me knows he has to be wrong – but there are no obvious flaws in his arguments. I don’t know what to make of this yet. I’m not going to even pretend to summarise this book – tell you his five sources of uncertainty or his three moves to keep the world flat – I’m going straight to the heart of my concerns with his central idea that most of what sociology calls ‘the social’ simply doesn’t exist. Now, this isn’t the same as Thatcher saying ‘there is no such thing as society’ – he is not stupid. But his point still stands. What has existed since the beginning of sociology as the social level of explanation is not something that can actually exist, and that is a real problem for sociology. In this book, Latour is also trying to explain Action Network Theory (ANT), something he repeatedly says is misnamed in every one of the three words making up its name. He spends a lot of time playing with language in this book – in much the way French theorists do. And like I said, he is being provocative, and being provocative means playing with language in ways that both annoy and get you to think differently. He’s trying to pull down the main edifice of sociology, so… Anyway, part of me feels like I’m Anti-ANT. Not in the same way I’m anti-fascist – I’ve no interest in punching people who believe in ANT, rather more like anti-matter – there is something in ANT that I fear will turn all of my beliefs to nothing. Okay, enough foreplay. For ANT theory (yeah, I know, theory, theory – bad luck) the problem has been that in appealing to grand explanations, such as, society, is that society is not a thing so much as an emergent property of the actions of real things. I’ll take that a bit slower. Latour says we have to become myopic – shortsighted. That is, only see the things in front of ourselves that act upon one another. He doesn’t care if these things are people or animals – he actually doesn’t care if they are lumps of dirt – but they have to have a clear and obvious power to impact something else and be using that power. So that a speed hump is an actor when you are driving, but your expensive car sound system might not be, if it is turned off. The speed hump gets you to change your driving, the turned off radio ‘exists’ but has no impact. If there is to be such a thing called society, then it has to be produced out of the actions of things with some sort of power to bring it into existence – in much the same way that driving is brought into being by various actors – the driver, the car, the road system, the road rules – you see the point. Not all of these are ‘human actors’ but all of them act to make it possible for driving to exist. And this is Latour’s point. Without all of those being in place and interacting with each other, driving – the big idea that emerges from all of these various interactions and entanglements – couldn’t exist. There is no place were you can point to the perfect Platonic form of ‘driving’ and say, ‘see, that is what causes driving to exist’. Driving emerges out of the sum total of interactions between both human and non-human ‘actors’, not the other way around. Well, society is the same. Society emerges out of our interactions that we call social. It doesn’t exist on its own – in much the same way that ‘driving’ doesn’t exist on its own. For it to exist independently of other things, and to impact them, there would need to be a thing that acted socially that we would could isolate from all other things. We should be able to point to it and say, ‘see that, that’s the social, watch out for it, it does lots of strange stuff’. But there is no such thing – the social is a property that emerges from the interactions of real agents, it is not a real agent in itself. The best we can do, according to all this, is not develop a theory, part of the reason Latour doesn’t like that his ANT ends in ‘theory’ is because he doesn’t like theory. The point of theories isn’t to explain what is going on so much as for them to be able to be generalised and applied elsewhere. He doesn’t think that is very likely in something as complicated as the social. And so, he believes the best we can do is ‘describe’ what we see according to what all the actors are doing. If it is not a good description, you’ll soon know, but if it is good, it’s the best we can achieve. Adding theory is a bit like Greek literature’s Deus ex Machina – the ghost from the machine – a supernatural entity that suddenly appears when description gets stuck and saves the day. Latour’s point is that ‘society’ is this ghost and it explains too much. Like I said, I’m struggling to see a flaw in this reasoning. But I can’t help feeling it is wrong. And not just because he literally tears down many theorists I’ve learned so much from (Bourdieu, Marx, Goffman…) but also because I can’t see how we can do without what he refers to as the non-flat parts of the world. Let’s use Bourdieu’s field theory to explain. Bourdieu talks about fields as a way to explain certain types of human interactions. There is the education field, the legal field, the cultural field. And each of these have their own characteristics. He agrees that these only exist since humans interact with one another in particular ways that maintain them. He agrees that these would not exist if humans did not interact in those ways. But he also says that these fields directly impact us. That these fields existed before we were born and will continue to exist after we die. That while we, as individuals, might be able to have some small impact on changing the fundamental natures of these fields, ultimately, they will have more impact on us than we do on them. The small changes we might bring are, as that saying I’ve just recently heard would have it, more stays the same in revolutions than is changed by them. But can we point to any of these fields in a way that Latour demands? Can we say – ‘here it is, this is the legal field’? I don’t think we can. But my problem is that I believe the emergent field still has an impact upon us – and that impact is bigger than the impact of any of the actors composing it. I can’t be consistently myopic with fields or society or culture – they are generalisations, it is true, but I’m not sure how we can do without them. And I can see the contradiction I’m in here. And I don’t know how to get out of it. I can’t agree with Latour, but I haven’t found a satisfying way to disagree with him either. It’s very annoying. Which is, I suspect, exactly his point. ...more |
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Jun 08, 2024
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0674983513
| 9780674983519
| 0674983513
| 3.95
| 851
| Apr 06, 2021
| Apr 06, 2021
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it was amazing
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It would be impossible to have not noticed that AI is the talk of the town, or that the claims of those who promote AI the most are quite extraordinar
It would be impossible to have not noticed that AI is the talk of the town, or that the claims of those who promote AI the most are quite extraordinary, or that people are saying we are all about to lose our jobs to AI, or that they are about to make us all slaves. And then there are bits of software that can write better novels (and even reviews of novels) than the rest of us can, and other bits of software that can draw better than the rest of us too. I didn’t have to wait until Deep Blue for a computer to be better at chess than I am. I’ve never seen Jeopardy, some sort of American quiz show, from what I can gather, but I do know a computer can beat the best Americans at it. I’m yet to use any of these AIs. I know I should have a look, but I never seem to find the time. This book is written by someone who is something of an expert on AI – someone you might expect to be a kind of go-to person on the subject. He thinks most of the big claims on AI, the breathless ones, are mostly overstated. It’s not that he says they will always be overstated, but that the timeframes used and the logic used to guess those timeframes are mostly based on nonsense. And the evidence he provides along the way – whether philosophical or in explaining the limitations of the ‘cognitive’ abilities of computers to date – makes for compelling reading. He mentions the Turing Test – essentially, if a computer can confuse me into believing it is intelligent, then it must be intelligent. And computers have been doing that a lot lately – convincing people they are intelligent, that is. But one of the nicest things about this book, and why I would recommend it unreservedly, is because he carefully unpacks what it is that computers actually do and how incredibly limited this is, and this leaves you having to agree with him that most of what they can do looks infinitely more interesting until you know the full story – the devil, he says at one point, is in the details. He explains the problems facing AI by discussing Pearce and his logic. Deduction, induction and Abduction. And of these three, induction is the one that AI mostly uses – take lots of instances of something, learn the patterns, and move on to the next – but the thing that makes us human isn’t so much our hypotheses or our abilities at recognising patterns, but perhaps our abilities to make wild guesses and to see if and how well they fit. I’m not going to follow him down that particular rabbit whole, rather I’m going to give a companion piece on memory. So, years ago I read a book on the brain – so long ago that I don’t remember the title or author of the book. In it the author said that we have three distinct kinds of memory. Recall, recognition and recollection. So, recall is the hard one, and therefore the one that gets the most reward. We have TV shows call Jeopardy, for example, where I assume people win prizes for having good recall memories. In what year did The Beatles release the White Album. Or even trick questions like, what is Paul McCartney’s middle name? To which the answer, obviously, is Paul. We are generally hopeless at this type of memory. If they were to show you a thousand photos and ask you to recall as many as you could, you would likely be able to remember about 2-3% - I’m not just saying that, they have tested it, it’s true. But if I was to show you a thousand photos and then add another thousand to them, shuffle them and then ask you to identify the ones you’ve seen before, you would recognise about 98% - filtering out the ones you hadn’t seen before, even though you’d only seen them once. We are crap at recall, but insanely good at recognition. Computers are great at recall, but hopeless at recognition – hence why the way they ask us to prove we are human is to point to the squares with steps or traffic lights (recognition tasks) rather than Hitler’s birthday (a recall task – I must have been told this at some stage, possibly multiple times, but couldn’t even guess now if my life depended upon it). This incompatibility between how our memories work and how computer memories work is perhaps one of the things that convinces us that they are smarter than we are. They are also great at multiplying 5839987 by 29076545. And as someone who spent years at school carrying the one or doing long division, this trick will never quite grow old for me. But what humans are really, really good at, is recollection. This is, for me, storytelling. It is how we actually live our lives. It isn’t quite deduction and not quite induction, and not even quite a mixture of the two. It is a kind of process where we bring together all the available evidence and basically all of our live experience and try to make it all make sense. This is both our least trustworthy, and most trusted form of memory. We trust it so implicitly that we would often be prepared to die for the stories this form of memory creates for us. There are innocent people in gaol today because someone mis-recollected evidence. Anyone who has ever spent any time in a courtroom will be able to tell you that no two people recollect the same event in nearly the same way, and they are not doing it to cover their crimes or to hide some embarrassing foible like smoking or an affair – but because how they fitted the pieces of evidence together to make a consistent story is always based on incomplete pieces. But the jigsaw must be finished, and the picture always looks complete in retrospect. This makes recollection sound more of a hinderance than a help – but this isn’t true. Recollection, the re-collecting of the facts of our lives into a coherent story, is about as human a task as it is possible to get. It is how we make meaning of our lives. And it is something a computer cannot do. Shortly after I started working at Deakin University, doing my PhD, they decided to employ IBM to transform our website. Deakin’s website (webshite) is terrible. I literally go to Google to search for people at Deakin, rather than the website itself. I use Google to search for everything I might find on the website. It is almost as if those who put the Deakin website together belonged to a sadomasochist design team. So, there was a kind of collective sigh of relief when we were told that IBM were bring their new Watson AI to Deakin. Watson had just won Jeopardy and it was touted as a kind of natural language wizard that would answer all of our questions and make our website both super and duper. We were told to ask it as many questions as we could, since it was learning all of the time, and it would only get better and better. And it really did start off shite. At least as shite as the previous, human shite site had been. But the difference was that this time what had been shite would, by AI learning networks and the wonders of non-human intelligence, soon start smelling of roses. And what happened? No idea. I don’t even remember Watson retiring to the coast or going off to get married or whatever it is that AI systems do when they don’t quite make the grade. I assume what happened, after all the hype, is that IBM and Deakin came to some agreement, probably financial, that had a ‘you don’t say anything bad about us and we won’t charge you are much as we said we were going to’ clause in it. Pure guess on my part, by the way, I’m a shit-kicker at Deakin, they don’t ask my approval for such things. Watson had been great at Jeopardy, but the problem is what the author here explains. A computer programmed to be great a Jeopardy isn’t going to be any good at just about anything else other than Jeopardy. Just as Deep Blue didn’t give up chess and take up poetry, or the Go! Computer didn’t start translating Sumerian into Greek on weekends. Computers don’t have ‘general intelligence’ – Christ, most of us barely have that – they have very particular intelligence. And we don’t know how to ‘program’ them to have general intelligence and we don’t know how to program them to program other computers to be smarter than they are. So many of the myths about what computers are about to do are just that – and now you know why the author named the book as they have. I was recommended this book under my review of Ghost Work, along with God, Human, Animal, Machine and You Are Not a Gadget. I’ve read both of these now, and didn’t find them nearly as interesting as this one. But this one should move quickly up your ‘too read’ list. You might find parts of it heavy going – but it is worth the effort. ...more |
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Hardcover
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0465056741
| 9780465056743
| 0465056741
| 4.08
| 1,282
| Dec 20, 1998
| Oct 08, 1999
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it was amazing
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This really is a fascinating book. I’ve read a couple of other books by Lakoff, and the other book by the two of them, Metaphors We Live By, is probab
This really is a fascinating book. I’ve read a couple of other books by Lakoff, and the other book by the two of them, Metaphors We Live By, is probably one of the books I’ve found most influential to how I understand the world. There point in that book, as with this one, is that metaphors are anything but mere linguistic flourishes, but provide us with conceptual schema that allow us to make sense of the world. Essentially, a metaphor is a way of comparing something we struggle to understand – often big ideas like love or time – by structuring those ideas in ideas we already understand. That is, we use metaphors to understand difficult ideas according to their similarities to other, often simpler ideas. And so, metaphors can also be dangerous, in that we can sometimes confuse the complicated idea for the simple metaphor. Their point in this book is to show that metaphors are often, at base, embodied. That is, that they can often seem completely natural to us because they rely on ways that our bodies work. This naturalness then means that the metaphors seem to us even truer than they might otherwise be, since they can literally ‘feel’ right. A large part of the point of the book is to show how advances in cognitive science have provided evidence showing how our minds work and that these new understandings are in direct contrast to how philosophy has understood the role of reason and morality back to the pre-Socratics. In short, most of these are based on ideas that truth is disembodied – that truth exists regardless of how we are in the world. As such, if we can just be completely rational and logical we will have a better chance to understand the world as it really is. The make a lot of Descartes’ philosophy that stresses the mind/body split. In this the body is understood to be the cause of many of our errors in understanding the true nature of the world – an idea that they show has been central to much of philosophy since, including the ideas of Chomsky, for example. They then show how such philosophical systems depend on various metaphors, and how these metaphors are in turn shaped by embodied ideas that we then transfer onto logical systems. In Metaphors We Live by they did a wonderful working through of the metaphors we connect with Love – something that I’ve thought back to repeatedly over the years. They said that love is often thought of in terms of a cluster of metaphors such as love is war, love is an infection, love is madness – and while we have all experienced love as these, they also constrain love within a schema that isn’t necessarily all that healthy. In each case love is something much less than something we have very much control over, or the control we have over it isn’t very positive. They proposed in that book that it might be better to think of love as a co-produced work of art. I really like that idea. Not least for all the things it allows love to be. Something that will get better over time, not something any of the other metaphors really imply, and that love is something the two people in love help bring to fruition. In this they talk about time and link the metaphors we use for time, in some cases, back to our bodies. Our bodies are not completely symmetrical, we have fronts and backs, and we move forward with our fronts. This means many of our metaphors for time have a direction that reflects the material structure of our bodies. We look back on past events, we look forward with courage, we dither and feel trapped in the present. Or we think of time as a river, something that moves without our ability to slow or alter its direction and speed. We also connect time to metaphors of profit and loss. So that time can be wasted, time is money. These metaphors seem completely natural to us, and so we don’t generally notice the problems they can also present to us. That ‘spending’ time on one thing involves multiple ‘opportunity costs’ and so we are not really present where we are since this current ‘investment’ of time is unlikely to pay any real ‘dividends’. One of the parts of this book I particularly enjoyed, and feel I learned the most from, was the discussion on Chomsky and how his linguistics is based on a version of Descartes’ philosophy, particular in how there is a base grammar that is unrelated to how we interact with the world or our own physical makeup. They also show how this understanding of a truth outside of our physical selves also structures his anarchist political views. That is, that there are universal political truths that do not depend on the social system that we live in, that these relate to us wanting to have ‘enough’ and that capitalism is a gross distortion of this fundamental human nature and therefore need to be criticised to show the excesses it creates outside of our more fundamental natures. They also link all this to other ideas that Lakoff discusses in his own more political works. In these, he asserts that the differences between the left and the right are due to differences in family structures. That is that right wing people tend to see the family as being based around a strong father figure who sets the rules and ensures everyone follows them. This gets translated into many other aspects of our lives, not merely how we relate to our fathers, but also the state, leaders in general, religion, but also philosophy. For example, they see Kantian morality as being a system of dominant father morality. The categorical imperative being universal and not derived from experience, but rather from pure reason. And as such, needs to be followed, not because it produces the best results, necessarily, but because it stands outside all results or considerations of results. They compare this to left wing ideas which see the family as nurturing and so more aligned to ideas of compassion, empathy and understanding. They end the book by referring to some work done in what is becoming known as behavioural economics – but they criticise the understanding of this that it mostly shows how ‘irrational’ we are. Their point is that the schemes we use that lead us astray in the examples provided by behaviour economists are really just a case of applying otherwise highly successful mental strategies outside of their useful contexts. And this then means we need to find ways to recognise when we are operating outside of those contexts and what makes this context so different that it leads us astray. ...more |
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3.90
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3.72
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really liked it
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3.84
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it was amazing
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3.97
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it was amazing
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3.98
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it was amazing
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3.95
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it was amazing
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4.08
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it was amazing
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Apr 29, 2024
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