|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0316256579
| 9780316256575
| 0316256579
| 3.90
| 18,775
| Nov 03, 2015
| Dec 22, 2015
|
really liked it
|
I was at a research conference the other day and one of the speakers got us all to stand like a British Tory politician. They said it came from this b
I was at a research conference the other day and one of the speakers got us all to stand like a British Tory politician. They said it came from this book, or rather, the Ted Talk that is one of the most viewed Ted Talks that lead to this book. You see – right there, that would have normally been enough to convince me not to read this book. Then a friend at the conference sent me a copy of the book to read – perhaps because he would rather read my review than the whole book. I was talking to another friend about it and told her that it does a thing I’ve become very tired of – lots of individual case studies – you know the thing, Jill needed to break up with her boyfriend, but felt powerless and wondered if she would ever be in another relationship after she left Jack. Then one day, she pushed her shoulders back and stood with her legs splayd and decided to pour the bucket of water over his head. She’s now the CEO of a multinational corporation and dating a supermodel. From nursery rhyme to fairytale tumbling after each other. I think a lot of this is good advice. I believe we are much more embodied than we generally think we are and that it seems pretty clear that how we deport ourselves is likely to have a bearing on how we both behave and are treated by others. I don’t really think of myself as an alpha male – nor have I ever wanted to be one. But I have throughout my life been asked to represent others, particular in challenging circumstances. I’ve never really understood why. It certainly doesn’t, I think, have much to do with my posture. All the same, I think I can be slow and deliberate – and I had never really thought of that as being ‘powerful’ – but she makes it clear that while most ‘alphas’ take up space, it is often just as impressive to take up time. I also liked that she changed the ‘fake it till you make it’ idea to ‘fake it till you become it’. This is actually the advice that Pascal offered too – and the Bourdieu referred to when he said he saw himself as a Pascallian. Atheists often get upset with Pascal for his wager – that is, that since the benefits of being proven right for being an atheist (to die and be no more) as so slight, and the punishments so great (eternal damnation), your best bet would be to pretend to believe. The standard atheist response to this is ‘how could I fool an all knowing god that I believed – surely, he would know I didn’t and so I would still suffer the same fate’. But Pascal’s point is much more subtle than this. That is, that if you act as if you believe, eventually you will believe. Bourdieu (and Foucault) say this is pretty much how all of society works. We are taught how to behave and by behaving in that way, we become what we might not otherwise want to be. That is, we are all and always being shaped by our actions – but our actions are rarely merely our own. So, in a sense this is a book about fighting back. It is about finding ways to notice when you feel powerless and to adjust your posture so that you feel more in control. As such, the book offers some useful advice. But again, be warned, there are lots and lots of individual case studies – and these become a little tedious. And the book ends with, well, endless testimonials – at least as tedious as the case studies. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jun 29, 2025
|
Jun 29, 2025
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1509523065
| 9781509523061
| 1509523065
| 4.02
| 2,421
| 2016
| Apr 30, 2018
|
it was amazing
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jun 24, 2025
|
Jun 24, 2025
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
198217076X
| 9781982170769
| 198217076X
| 3.95
| 319
| May 21, 2024
| May 21, 2024
|
it was amazing
|
This is a stunningly good book. Over the last few years, I’ve been coming across people who are deeply into positive psychology. They are very well me
This is a stunningly good book. Over the last few years, I’ve been coming across people who are deeply into positive psychology. They are very well meaning. And it seems churlish in the extreme to be opposed to people being ‘positive’. How could that be a bad thing? I work in educational research and many schools are adopting positive psychology and particularly resilience – again, being opposed to these things sounds a bit like being opposed to motherhood. The problem is that I find that I am opposed to these things – while acknowledging that the people supporting them are, as I said, well meaning. Okay, so what is positive psychology? Basically, it all started with Maslow and the humanist psychologists. They noticed that psychology tended to work with people who were dysfunctional. People with ‘issues’ – whether this be autism or anxiety or depression or schizophrenia – have been studied and studied. But the humanists said that rather than studying what makes people dysfunctional, perhaps we should also consider what it is that makes people psychologically well. So, positive psychology, rather than negative. Resilience is about bouncing back after a setback. It is about grit and fortitude and going on the offensive and attacking your fears and combating adversity – and other military metaphors with all of their hyper-masculine implications. There’s a lovely bit in this where she talks of Shackleton and how he overcame endless adversity to get his men home safely. She makes a couple of really telling points about this story. The first is that much of what he did in motivating his men to stay alive involved him in deploying what are generally considered to be feminine traits. The second was that he couldn’t have made the expedition in the first place without the support of women – not least his wife. And that ultimately, he died on yet another expedition and left her and their children in debt and danger. Men may get to be adventurers, but they only do so with lots and lots of support. And that is the most telling criticism of resilience that she makes and makes repeatedly throughout the book – that too often it is taken to be, like merit, something held by individuals and therefore about character. She says that this is simply not the case. That resilience mostly comes from a position of privilege – and that privilege is social in nature, not individual. We claim it as our own, but really, like merit, it takes a village. Overwhelmingly, it is men that get to be resilient and so masculine traits are virtually identical to the traits that we associate with resilience. When was the last time you heard a story of resilience that involved a woman doing things we define as feminine? Our resilience myths almost always involve men doing manly things – killing the enemy in wars, rescuing the wounded, running into oncoming fire to take out the machine gun nest. She gives statistics in this that make your jaw drop. The growing number of young girls in the US who are committing suicide, the growing number of young people who, after being told to be resilience and to push through pain, end up having sports injuries, the mental health implications for students so exhausted from study who keep on pushing themselves beyond endurance because their whole lives depend on the marks they get on this one last exam. Our obsession with performance and being our best has become an illness. This reminded me of Beck’s The Risk Society – we no longer belong to communities or unions or religions or even really nations. Now, we must fully rely upon ourselves to meet all of the challenges of life. That is why we need to be resilient – we have no one else we can rely upon. But what is this resilience other than a total dependence upon a resource – our own isolated selves – that is simply not up to the task of overcoming the challenges we face. You cannot fix climate change on your own, you cannot end gun violence on your own, you cannot restructure the economy on your own. All of these things can only be addressed by us working together. And so, resilience is looking at the world down the wrong end of the telescope, where we see ourselves magnified and our connections to others diminished. But it is those connections that make us strong. Perhaps the best of this is towards the end where she discusses the power of stories to remake ourselves and our world. The importance of crafting stories so that our audience is capable of hearing the intent of them. She links this, and so much else in the book, back to native peoples and their intimate connection to the land and to their communities. She contrasts this with the hyper-masculine nature of our modern world and how this has made us all so terribly sick. Not just in the extremes of gun violence or our remarkable lack of empathy for the sick, the poor, the weak, the old, but also in our own self-loathing for not being good enough. We are thwarted desire – but rather than seeing our defeat as being a symptom of how we have structured our society, we end up believing that our failures are due to our own lack of resilience. As with merit, this sickness impacts everyone – the successful as well as the botched and bungled. In our grossly inequitable world, the successful need to prove that they got where they are due to their superior work ethic. And so, we hear stories of CEOs who get up at 4am and spend an hour in the gym before working 16 hour days. What they are doing in that time is anyone’s guess, just as it is anyone’s guess if any of that work amounts to anything productive or worthwhile. Except, it must, right? Otherwise, why are they getting so many rewards? All of this is pure nonsense – but if you are a winner in a grossly unjust world, you need to believe it is justified by your efforts – and so, like a rat in a cage, you keep pushing the lever to prove you deserve the rewards. We need to step out of this rat race. We need to be kinder to each other and to ourselves. We aren’t just killing ourselves with our resilience, but the planet too. The other statistic she mentions in this that made me wonder how I’d never noticed this before was that so many of the books that are banned in the US were written by either women or people of colour – often both. These are stories we prefer not to hear because they are stories that stress empathy as a curative for the disease of individualised resilience. This is such a powerful book – powerfully written and with a powerful message for all of us. One based on hope and one that points us towards a world that would not only be better, but a world we all would likely prefer to live in. Resiling yourself to live in a world that would otherwise be insufferable is not the highest level of human nature. Resilience in the face of unsufferable pain is not courage, but cowardice. Saying ‘enough, no more’ is sometimes what is necessary – rather than, ‘I can push through, I can overcome this’. Together, we are stronger than any of us can be alone. Great book. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 30, 2025
|
Mar 30, 2025
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0231178727
| 9780231178723
| 0231178727
| 4.33
| 278
| unknown
| Sep 20, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
I’m not going to be able to cover half of the ideas in this book – and that means you are probably going to have to track this one down yourself, I’m
I’m not going to be able to cover half of the ideas in this book – and that means you are probably going to have to track this one down yourself, I’m afraid. I’ve been fascinated by the whole idea of desire for quite some time. The problem with desire is that as soon as you have achieved your desire, you have lost your desire. It is a deeply strange thing, that is lost as soon as it is achieved. This book argues that this strange nature of desire is one of the key driving forces of capitalism and helps to explain why thwarted desire is the thing that makes capitalism so appealing. This contradiction, and seeming paradox, is why we need a psychoanalytic understanding of capitalism to understand the hold it has upon us. In that, a lot of this book is focused upon this seemingly contradictory longing that capitalism creates in us. That is, this book supplements Marx with Freud to explain why the self-defeating nature of capitalism for the true flourishing of our natures holds such an appeal to us. The longing for the object of desire is pure desire. The obtaining of the object of desire kills the desire and therefore actually obtaining what we think we desire is to be avoided almost at all costs. And so, we self-sabotage so that we can go on longing for what we can never have. Of course, this longing never recognises that it is the thwarted longing itself that we ultimately want – we believe that if only we can have what we desire we will be complete. And so we spend our time trying to find ways in which we can achieve our desire, to possess it. It is like that saying that people are in love with the idea of being in love, rather than actually in love with someone else. Capitalism, particularly late stage capitalism, is about consumption (a word that is related to fire, in the sense that what is consumed, like obtaining the desired object itself, ceases to be) and so the act of consummation is a destructive act reducing to ashes what we thought we wanted most. As such, we are all King Midas – we desire gold, but turning everything to gold kills everything we otherwise ought to have loved. This death wish is central to the desire capitalism breeds in us. And yet, we remain convinced that we are one more purchase away from being complete. The problem is that what we desire is too often defined less by ourselves and more by what we think others would be impressed with us possessing. We want the latest gadget, less for the functionality of the gadget itself, but also for what we think others will believe this says about us. He makes an interesting point about the nature of desire and sacrifice – that all objects of value are only valuable in the sense that they embody sacrifice. This is both in the sense of the sacrifice we have to make in choosing this object over all others that we could otherwise possess if we had not chosen it – something that only then goes on to heighten our desire for the purchase not made and to regret the one chosen – but also that the objects we desire embody the sacrifices of others. He says that this is a fundamental feature of capitalism – that capitalism always involves sacrifice, of the child slaves who dig the rare earth metals that power our iPhones, the workers who must sign contracts that they will not attempt suicide while working in the factories that put our iPhones together, the rivers and environments reduced to wastelands by our factories and mines. Sacrifice is fundamental to desire, and loss is a consequence of desire that is always thwarted. You would think that we would learn that this is a fool’s game and find ways to break the cycle – but the whole machinery of capitalism is desired for us to never make this connection. And so this is the revolutionary act we need to make – to recognise that whatever it is to be fully human is not to be found in the desires capitalism places before us. That finding ways to transcend these desires – these beliefs that we can be completed by the commodities on offer to us – is the path towards becoming true individuals defined by choices that make us whole, rather than choices that leave us perpetually longing for what we can never have. This is the difference between love and desire. A kind of acceptance. At one point in this, and I’ve been thinking I’ve never really been loved in this way other than by my own children, we know we are in love when we can see the faults of our lover and love them all the more for those faults. This is not something we are able to do with an object of desire. The faults of an object of desire are the reasons we reject that object and begin desiring something else. The latest model or the chocolate cake we should have ordered instead of the cheesecake. If love creates scars in us, it also teaches us to love those scars. If our lover has scars, we love them as much for those scars as we do for their perfections. For in the end, perhaps all we have left is our scars. Finding ways to move beyond the false promise of desire towards the acceptance of love is perhaps the only way out of the hold capitalism has upon us. The sacrifices capitalism imposes have strong psychological holds upon ourselves, but the sacrifices are too much – they are killing the planet in capitalism’s death wish. Capitalism is premised on infinite accumulation and that is an impossibility. The alternative is a kind of gratitude, an acceptance of enough. I’ve no idea if such a psychological shift is even possible – not only for one person, but what is necessary is that it be achieved for everyone. That said, playing a game where we already know that desire will always be thwarted is hardly one that makes sense either. The shift from desire to love is not inevitable or easy – but it is one that seems worth attempting. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 10, 2025
|
Jan 09, 2025
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0791459683
| 9780791459683
| 0791459683
| 4.38
| 53
| Nov 2003
| Nov 20, 2003
|
it was amazing
|
The McCandless version. At the dawn of capitalism, the priority was for it to be an economic system based on production. Capitalist production is base
The McCandless version. At the dawn of capitalism, the priority was for it to be an economic system based on production. Capitalist production is based on hierarchy and near fascist command structures. You need to be at the factory gates at 7am or the gates will be locked to you. You will only be paid enough to ensure that you will turn up again tomorrow morning. You are to follow the instructions of your manager and not think for yourself. You are in a master-slave relationship for the length of time that you ‘choose’ to sell your labour power to them. It is not pretty, but it is pretty accurate. We could argue over the existence of political democracy under capitalism, but certainly there is no economic democracy. It is hardly surprising, then, that the main form of social psychology is that of the authoritarian father – where father knows best and you quake at his frown. The moral maxim is thou shalt not. Enjoyment, then, is to be found in following the rules – and this is no real form of enjoyment at all. This is a book about enjoyment and the shift that occurred last century in capitalism from a society premised on production towards one premised on consumption and the subsequent change in the psychological father figure from the authoritarian towards a more permissive, or even absent father. The example given of this transition is the film Dead Poets Society. In this the Robin Williams character encourages enjoyment over following authority. He encourages his students to find their own path through life and to live a life where they cease the day and live each day as if it could be their last. As such, enjoyment isn’t an ornament that decorates our lives, but life’s main imperative. In fact, it is increasingly seen as our main objective in life. So much so that the author says that we can’t fully enjoy ourselves because the point of enjoyment is to be lost in the moment and that becomes hard when you are constantly wondering if you are fully enjoying yourself – or if you would have enjoyed yourself more if you were doing something else. Enjoyment is seen as a kind of breaking the rules, and so is essentially non-productive. In a consumer society this strangely non-productive time becomes our chief desire. And this non-productive time is time spent purchasing things for our personal enjoyment. And that is the other point of enjoyment – it is anti-community. We enjoy ourselves. It is not that others can’t also be enjoying themselves at the same time, but their enjoyment isn’t as important to us as our enjoyment. Or rather, their enjoyment might actually take away from our enjoyment – since we might consider that they are enjoying themselves more than we are. And this competitive enjoyment becomes a problem for us. Not least because enjoyment feels like it needs to be total, and someone having more fun than we are is a threat to our own enjoyment. This is the other aspect of modern capitalism, it turns us all into individuals seeking to maximise our own enjoyment. The author ends this by discussing that most American of modern phenomena – mass school shootings, that also became a popular sport at about the same time as enjoyment became mandatory. And who are killed in such shootings? The popular kids and the foreigners – everyone living a life of more enjoyment than the shooters are. And this is also why they tend to be from nice, white, middle class families too – the ones who had been promised everything and end up being the bullied, the victimised and the worthless. If I can’t have it all, I will make sure I take from you what ought to have been mine. The author says that both left and right think that the way out of this mess is by returning to some form of the disciplining father – but that is now impossible. The only way out is to find a way to recognise the false hope that enjoyment offers us. But the whole of the system depends on the maintenance of that false hope. You are always just one more purchase away from happiness – the metaphor of our age is that of Tantalus – forever grasping for what is always just out of reach. Except it is worse than Tantalus, because we are allowed to grasp the fruit and drink the water – it is just that it immediately turns to ash in our mouths. The way out is to find a way out of the trap that is our desire for enjoyment based on ashes. He also says that because we are obsessed with enjoyment, we are politically apathetic. The point being that political engagement requires us to think more of our community that ourselves - and enjoyment gets us to focus almost entirely upon our own satisfactions. An interesting thing to consider when a friend tells you they don't watch the news or vote. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 03, 2025
|
Jan 03, 2025
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
162892084X
| 9781628920840
| 162892084X
| 4.02
| 58
| Jan 29, 2015
| Jul 30, 2015
|
it was amazing
|
The last part of this book is literally an analysis of a film called The Rules of the Game – a 1939 film by the French director Jean Renoir. I’ve neve
The last part of this book is literally an analysis of a film called The Rules of the Game – a 1939 film by the French director Jean Renoir. I’ve never seen this film and so, like so many pieces of modern film criticism that works through a film I have never seen, I tend to get a bit lost in it all. Film is such a visual medium and descriptions of film always feel like they are leaving out what is most important in the film itself – its immediacy and the symbolic meaning of its imagery – that I’m not sure how to attend to the descriptions that I’m being presented with or the interpretations I’m being offered. This is an extended discussion of Lacanian psychology, particularly that of the gaze. Now, I don’t pretend to fully understand this. The difference between the gaze and just watching is that we are confronted by ourselves in the gaze. In the gaze we see hints of our repressed desires. And film works best when it forces this realisation upon us. The author mentions the moment in Psycho after the shower scene when the murderer seeks to get rid of the woman’s car by driving it into a swamp. The problem is that the car does not fully sink. And it is here that we are confronted with the gaze – with our unfulfilled desires. Because we ought to be glad the car didn’t sink, since it is the best hope we have that he will be caught and held accountable for his murder – and yet, like him, our repressed desire is that he will get away with his murder and it will be – unlike the car – covered up. The problem with desires is that they only remain desires if they are thwarted. Once we possess the desired object, it is no longer desired. And this makes for interesting film criticism, since ‘getting the girl’ is always something that comes after a long process of obstacles that need to be overcome and where this penultimately means the object of our desire will be forever denied us. These obstacles heighten our desire for the desired object. And the problem is multiplied because our desire for the other implies that we should seek to obtain them by giving them what they want – but we can’t do this because not only do we not know what they want, it is likely they don’t know what they want either. The Guardian has a kind of ongoing series of articles in which couples talk about the time when they knew their partner was the one. What is often interesting about these is that this isn’t always the most likely moment, but is often an everyday event that suddenly acquires heightened significance. They perform a simple act of love and it is like the entire world changes. This is probably also true of the opposite – when we suddenly stop desiring the other. It doesn’t have to be an act of cruelty, it can also be a mundane act. Suddenly, we see them as they are, or as they are now, and our desire slips away. This is a kind of working out of Lacan’s distinction between the gaze and the look. In the gaze, we never see what we are looking at, but what is always hidden. This is the nature of desire, and this can be taken both literally and figuratively. This is part of the reason why lingerie is sexier than nudity. What is hidden plays with the gaze rather than the look. Metaphorically, cinema is at its height when it forces us to see what is left unseen. That we cannot merely look at and see. Here desire is heightened and we gaze, because there is always more to see, even though we cannot already see what it is we most want to look upon. And if the scene is particularly good, not only will we form an image of the unseen in our mind’s eye, but also this image will display the other hidden object – the object of our desire, the object of our repressed desires. I’m going to have to read some Lacan, it seems. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 02, 2025
|
Jan 01, 2025
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1915672228
| 9781915672223
| 1915672228
| 4.20
| 71
| unknown
| Apr 09, 2024
|
it was amazing
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 2025
|
Dec 31, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1484983122
| 9781484983126
| 1484983122
| 3.90
| 68
| 2003
| May 23, 2013
|
did not like it
|
Ages ago someone asked me to read a book called Invisible Women. And so I did. And I got very upset about it and wrote an upset review. I think that r
Ages ago someone asked me to read a book called Invisible Women. And so I did. And I got very upset about it and wrote an upset review. I think that review has more likes then any other review I’ve ever written. There are also lots of comments under it. A couple are from men who invariably say I only wrote the review to either impress a girlfriend or because I like it when women praise me. It couldn’t just be that the book documents how the taken-for-granted gender is male and how females are too often after-thoughts, if even that. And that, despite decades and decades of women pointing out that this problem exists, it never seems to go away. Once, when I heard about that test they have for films where they see if there is a scene where two women speak to each other about something other than one of the male characters, I assumed that would improve too – just by being pointed out to people. But it never has. It is not that there is a conspiracy to make men the central characters of films, where it is almost impossible that women could think of anything else to talk about other than these men, it is that our culture normalises this to the extent that even when it is pointed out, we still can’t think outside of the constraints of these gendered stereotypes. A couple of days ago a man sort of recommended that I read this book as a kind of curative for how I had been betraying my sex. He said, and at least he was honest, that this book was neither subtle nor unbiased. The book is written by an academic – it really ought to be both subtle and unbiased, or nuanced maybe, but his proved to be a remarkably accurate description of the book. The whole idea can be boiled down to a couple of points. In the battle of the sexes, men get the worst deal. Women are lazy and neurotic. They are self-obsessed and spoilt rotten. Men are prone to die young, get injured at work, forced to pay for the raising of children – whether or not they are their own – and suffer endless other indignities. Women generally either lie about being raped or exaggerate. Some of them only complain years after and do so either to get attention or revenge or both. Women are looked after by men, men have to put up with women’s shit. There is barely a line from mensphere that doesn’t get a run in this book. I can’t pretend that I can recommend the book. Nothing said here really addresses the issues that feminism is concerned with. If you want to read a better book on feminism and masculinity – particularly Black masculinity – I would suggest bell hooks We Real Cool. This author seems to think that feminists do not believe there are any benefits for women under patriarchy – but only a fool would say such a thing. As Foucault says – if all power did was to repress it would not last long. It needs to also, and mostly, provide pleasure and rewards, and that is the best way for it to achieve its ends. The book ends by saying all of this is partly biological and partly social – but the book itself spends so little time considering the social reasons for the differences in the tastes of the sexes that he might as well have not mentioned this at all. This is really an aggressively biologically deterministic book. Even when he is describing the social benefits and pleasures of gendered differences he hardly scratches the surface. Often he will say that it is women themselves who encourage women’s subservience, but says this as if it was a lay down misère, rather than something that needs to be explained in social terms. He also thinks that because something has happened for a long time it must be how it must always have happen. But humans are cultural animals, not merely biological ones – and complex social behaviours need more than simplistic biological explanations. Frequently, his only explanation is that women are inexplicable or prone to being neurotic. Hardly satisfying explanations in a book that is surely about explaining the differences between the sexes and why women ‘have it so good’. At one point he says men are much more likely to be killed in wars. This is ironic at the moment, given he is an Israeli academic and where his nation’s army is killing so many women and children – at least 70% of all people who have died in Gaza have been women and children. I don’t intend to check his figures – some of them seem a bit iffy. But even if they are all true, it hardly matters. To argue that masculine domination of society has costs to males, as well as females, is hardly a startling revelation. And that is ultimately the point of feminism. It is why so many conservatives get so upset about Trans people. They may be a tiny minority, but their very existence is a fundamental challenge to the strict gender divide – Trans people can’t be ignored because they pose a direct threat to the fundamental division in our society and show there are alternatives. He could also have said that many of the most rabid anti-trans rights people are women. What any of this is meant to prove is beyond me. You could certainly have found Black people before the abolition of slavery who could not conceive of being anything but slaves. One of the great truths in life is that we respond to stereotypes society imposes upon us, even the most negative, frequently by adopting the characterisations those stereotypes present. I can’t recommend this book. It is rather dull and the ‘evidence’ it presents is almost laughable. The patriarchy harms everyone – male and female alike. I’m a feminist not because I want women to dominate the world – he could just as well have said that female leaders rarely prove to be more peace loving than male ones – and this is undoubtedly true – again, he could have relied on an example from his own country to prove this. Having more female leaders is, as they say in the classics, a necessary, but not sufficient way to make the world a better place. What we really need are leaders who seek to fundamentally change the structure of our society to allow us all to become more fully human beyond the dichotomy of hyper male and female. The extent to which women are given equal rights with men is clear indication of how advanced a society is. That he can list a series of ‘benefits’ women derive from our current social relationships is almost beside the point. The point is that power too often sits in the hands of men. Ignoring this social fact ignores too much and makes his arguments hollow and without substance. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 26, 2024
|
Nov 26, 2024
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||
0679723951
| 9780679723950
| 0679723951
| 4.17
| 37,296
| 1962
| Apr 1989
|
really liked it
|
I had hoped I would like this book more than I did. Jung is much more of a spiritualist than I am and so I found a lot of those aspects of the book a
I had hoped I would like this book more than I did. Jung is much more of a spiritualist than I am and so I found a lot of those aspects of the book a bit off-putting. In fact, I wasn’t completely sure what to make of those parts at all. My earliest memory is from when I was about to turn five. I clearly remember walking down the street in Belfast and thinking that I had no memories prior to then. It was the strangest thing for a four year old to think – I even thought so at the time – but it was the start of my life long fascination with memory and what it might mean. I remember being in primary school and wondering if I would ever remember what was happening right now in a year’s time. I was sitting on the floor in the school library listening to the teacher read to us. I have had much the same thought at other random times during my life. So, when Jung said his earliest memory was from when he was about 2 years old, this struck me of the difference between the two of us at least as much as some of the other things he says of his life. The book is essentially an autobiography – but one that says it will be an unusual one, since it is more interested with his coming to understand his inner life, rather than the events of his life as such. A lot of this is about him coming to terms with how he understood his relationship with god. I hadn’t been expecting that either, to be honest. For Jung, god is immediate and religion is mostly a joke. He never really questions the existence of god, but rather how god has been understood throughout history. His god is unlikely to be very much like your god if you have one. His father was a religious man, and for this Jung felt a kind of pity for him – since he did not believe that his father really believed in the god that he professed to his congregation. Jung felt he had two versions of himself – one that he spent a lot of his life keeping hidden from those around him. Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is his discussion of his relationship with his other father figure – Freud. This was also troubled because Freud had hoped Jung would go on to be his great disciple. This didn’t work out – mostly due to Jung’s spiritualism, but there were other differences between the two men as well. Not least that Jung did not believe the sex drive explained as much as Freud believed it did. The role of art in this is also worth trying to understand. Not just literature, but also how Jung turned to drawing and even architectures as a way to illuminate his own inner life. His turning to mandala was interesting, but I’m not sure how any of that worked, as it would seem to me that to draw something would be a necessarily conscious act and so I’m not sure how this might help to uncover the unconscious. His discussions of various dreams he had had and the turning points they presented him also left me a little confused, as I couldn’t read into the dreams anything like what he read into them. My dream life is so confused, they rarely suggest anything to me that isn’t either completely obvious or so obscure as to be virtually meaningless. The other night, in a dream, I had the perfect solution to the current crisis in the Middle East and could not understand why those I was explaining it all to could not seem to follow what I was saying. I’m hardly alone in that, I guess. Autobiographies have their flaws, but this both is and isn’t an autobiography. I think it could have done with being more about his ideas, but I guess other books are available that could fill in those details. Jung still stands as an incredibly important figure in the history of ideas, and for that alone the book is worth looking into. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 29, 2024
not set
|
Oct 29, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
191224831X
| 9781912248315
| 191224831X
| 3.68
| 1,232
| Jul 09, 2019
| Jul 09, 2019
|
it was amazing
|
A couple of years ago, in the midst of what seemed at the time as an endless stretch of unrequited love, a friend here on Good Reads recommended I try
A couple of years ago, in the midst of what seemed at the time as an endless stretch of unrequited love, a friend here on Good Reads recommended I try Head Space. I’d always liked the idea of meditation, although, the idea of it had never turned to practice. I’d heard good things about it – particularly in reducing stress and reducing stress seemed exactly what I needed at the time. I also believed that it stopped you thinking – and stopping my thinking, particularly stopping me thinking about the person I was infatuated with, seemed like a totally productive thing to seek to achieve. She was a constant presence in her absence. I don’t remember ever being so focused on anyone ever before. We would go for walks twice a week and I would talk to her about sociologists and philosophers – from Socrates to Foucault – and our two lots of 45 minutes together were the sunshine in my week, and preparing what I was going to talk to her about became nearly as obsessive as my other obsessions about her too. Finding a way to not think, or at least to not think about her, seemed like a very worthwhile objective in life. As my friend who recommended Head Space said – you might want to consider why you are so attracted to a partial relationship based upon constant rejection. But then I would see her as I walked up to the corner where we would meet and a smile would engulf the world, and all manner of things would be well. The first thing I learned was that the guy who had once been learning to be a Buddhist priest had the voice of a friend of mine at work. One of the few people in my 3-D life who knew about my infatuation. Having him tell me to make myself comfortable and to focus upon my breathing was a deeply odd thing. I also learned that the point wasn’t to stop thinking, but rather to acknowledge the thoughts that I was having and to find some form of acceptance of them. I can’t say I proved as good at this as I had hoped. Sometimes I would find myself crying during these meditations. I so very rarely cry that this seemed totally out of character. It didn’t particularly make me feel better – as a good cry is supposed to do. Rather it just seemed deeply strange. The program was a once-a-day thing that was meant to last an entire year. But it kept getting longer and longer – so that I was expected to sit attending to my breathing for over half an hour per day. I was working from home, and so that felt like an awful lot of time. In the end I just stopped – I can’t remember why. Things with the relationship settled – if settled is the right word – and things at work got busy and life went on. I didn’t hate the experience – I even decided that if I had more time at some stage, I would hand over the money again and start from scratch. My partner is Indian and is sort of spiritual in ways I’m not – thought mostly in the sense of practicing a kind of universal gratitude mixed with a loathing of what I guess might be called unkindness. She believes she’s a worse person than she is – which is the exact opposite of what everyone thinks she is like. Something that only confirms her belief in how easily fooled people are. She gave me a book to read on meditation that I still have on my bedside table, but have never opened – I’m not sure why not – we are complicated creatures and not always as aware of our motivations as we pretend to be. This book is written by someone who is a Buddhist – and like in meditation where the point isn’t to find a place outside of thought, he isn’t what we in the West would associate with a mindful Buddhist. Rather he is disgusted with what mindfulness has become – something he sees as McMindfulness or rather a neoliberal version of Buddhist teachings that turns people into atomised subjects – something he sees as very much the exact opposite of what Buddhism is actually striving to achieve. He challenges many of the cliches about Buddhism – particularly those spouted by such people as Sam Harris – who proposes a kind of meditation without spiritualism as a kind of science of mindfulness. His problem with Harris is that Harris does not recognise that Harris’s version of mindfulness seems just as ‘religious’ as any other form of spiritualism. I don’t particularly like much about the new Atheists – the neoliberal atheists as I like to think of them – also finding that I prefer a religious person who believes in helping the poor more than an atheist who thinks greed is good. This book takes pretty much that line. That mindfulness turns us into people who think that the path to salvation is through learning to be resilient in the face of what we should otherwise struggle against. It ignores the social situation we find ourselves in and presents us with essentially relaxation techniques ultimately designed to help us adjust to an unjust world. This is interesting because about the only other thing I ever really knew about Buddhism is that it is concerned with suffering and therefore concerned with reducing suffering in the world – and that it is interested in overcoming the limitations of our obsession with the self. Focusing on your breathing is unlikely to reducing suffering in the world, nor is it likely to help you see yourself as part of a bigger picture. It is unlikely to help you find ways to change the way the world is so that it better matches how the world should be. That is why the author sees himself less as a neoliberal mindfulness practitioner and more of a revolutionary practitioner – someone who believes we need to move beyond making ourselves more resilient and rather changing the world to make it a better place. Particularly when confronted by repulsive social facts such as the school to prison pipeline, growing inequality, unequal access to health care, and this and so much more. It is not that he is ultimately opposed to self-care – rather, he knows that we are social animals and so looking after yourself is never enough. He also challenges many of the supposed benefits of mindfulness – much of which is cloaked in the language of pseudo-neuro-science. He quotes lots of books I’ve read throughout this – from Bourdieu to William Davies – all of which stress that sometimes if you want to fix yourself it is best to do so by seeking to fix the world. He even quotes a lovely line by Davies that depression is often anger turned inward. Like I said, this is a stance that acknowledges the primacy of our social nature and therefore that the main danger of mindfulness is that it is done alone and is a revolution based on the premise of fixing the world one brain at a time. But since there is no moral guiding principle behind this mindfulness other than reducing the stress of the individual it really only amounts to accepting what should otherwise be the unacceptable – a grossly unfair and unequal society. He talks of going on a mindfulness retreat at one point in this and finds himself wondering, while looking at the other people on the course with him who he sees as the walking wounded, how long after this break from the pressures of their lives will they be back to their old selves – some had already done the course multiple times – and how the ‘tools’ they had been given to find acceptance might just as likely make them believe that the problem was yet even deeper within themselves – looking in exactly the wrong place to find what it was they were actually looking for. It is a sad fact in a world where too often it is the situation that makes life intolerable and fixing yourself is likely to prove not nearly enough. I really enjoyed this book. I certainly didn’t come away from it thinking that meditation is a rip-off or evil or a waste of time. But rather that it is being used in ways that are unlikely to help those who turn to it for help. That it alone can’t fix problems that it is not designed to fix. These are incredibly useful things to learn. And not lessons I was expecting to learn about mindfulness from someone who considers themselves a Buddhist. And thus our stereotypes catch us out again. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Oct 15, 2024
|
Oct 15, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1854875957
| 9781854875952
| 1854875957
| unknown
| 3.63
| 298
| Aug 31, 2000
| Jan 01, 2000
|
liked it
|
Oddly enough, I read this book because I thought it was written by the other William Davies. Who writes about economics and social theory and who I wo
Oddly enough, I read this book because I thought it was written by the other William Davies. Who writes about economics and social theory and who I would recommend without hesitation. It didn’t take long to realise my mistake, which was an irritation, obviously, but not so irritating that it made me angry. I’m not particularly prone to anger. Which, in itself, might be something of a flaw. But I do get irritated at times. I read on, despite quickly learning my mistake. This isn’t a terrible book. It essentially argues that you can reframe situations so that they become less irritating and less likely to make you angry. That sometimes it is okay to be irritated and even angry, but that both need to be short lived – since they are likely to otherwise prove self-defeating. There are lots of little stories throughout of people getting upset over things and how they might have reframed these – and these are probably quite useful if you are prone to over-reacting. I got a bit bored towards the end, to be honest. All the same, the book is what it is – a kind of self-help book written by someone who is an expert in the field. Not really the sort of book I would normally read. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Oct 06, 2024
|
Oct 06, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
1139989715
| 9781139989718
| 1139989715
| 4.67
| 3
| Jun 05, 2014
| May 22, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
I went to see the lead author of this research give a talk at Melbourne University. In it she said that most people found chapter 4 of this book the m
I went to see the lead author of this research give a talk at Melbourne University. In it she said that most people found chapter 4 of this book the most interesting. I can understand why. In it they present typical outcomes as represented by four case studies as represented by four of their participants. Two from low SES students, one who had performed above expectations and one who had performed below expectations. The other two were from high SES but who had also performed below and at expectations. The research focuses upon Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model – that is, looking at the various life worlds that these children inhabited and what had contributed or subtracted from their potential for success. This makes for interesting reading. All the same, I thought the most interesting chapter in this was chapter 9, where they discuss how various attributes in the life worlds of these children worked to make their educational journey better or worse for them. As such, this chapter is a kind of ‘what works’ look at their education and therefore has more to say about what we can do than the more descriptive chapter 4. So, what works? There is always an important role set out for child agency – that is, if the children themselves cannot see the point of education to their lives, it is unlikely that other things are going to be as effective as they otherwise might be. That said, one of the things that seemed to make a real difference was if they had been engaged in high quality early childhood education. This was particularly beneficial for low SES boys. It also helped if their parents read to them and do so in ways that was done both out of love – mostly for stories and therefore literally engaging with the written text, rather than merely reading the words on the page. This was harder for parents who had experienced failure at school and in learning more generally – however, even here reading to and with children had a powerful impact on their future ability to engage in education. This is related back to the work Bernstein did on the language of school – which expects the children to be able to have access to an explicit language code and a wide vocabulary. This is not something that children are likely to pick up just by being spoken to by their parents, as useful as this proves, but more that books often contain words that spoken English rarely has. Books also need to be explicit – since there is nothing outside of the words used that explain the context of the story. This is an essential skill that cannot really be learned in any other way. Access to the explicit code that is taught in being read to and in reading often for pleasure is a key means to ensure ongoing achievement at school. And ongoing achievement means that you feel like you are successful and this in turn brings about further success. This research also makes much of Annette Lareau’s work. Lareau found that working class children experienced a significantly different form of development than middle class children. They were left more to their own devices in the sense that working class parents were more likely to consider educational attainment as being something you were either naturally inclined towards or not. This idea of natural growth was not shared by the middle class families in her study. For these children the world they experienced was one of concerted cultivation. They were presented with a wide range of educational experiences and this meant that they saw education as something you can achieve in and that effort was generally rewarded. This research did not find as strong a demarcation between low and high SES families in this as much as Lareau had. Some low SES families also engaged in concerted cultivation – despite not having the same resources to facilitate this. But this was something common to families that saw their children perform above expectations. They created a world were education and achievement were normal and where their children understood that engaging with learning was natural, normal and worthwhile. The problem is that low SES families need additional support, often because the family itself does not have the educational background to help their children succeed at school. But this support can come from schools or from their extended families and communities. Going to museums or libraries, for example, can help children directly engage with learning. The lack of money and time are also factors that work against low SES families from being able to provide these experiences for their children. The role played by expectations is also crucial here too – if we do not expect our children to succeed, they are unlikely to. The problem is that expectations alone are never enough, even if they are essential. Feeling that you can succeed is very important. Many of the children from high SES families who failed despite the odds had various learning difficulties. The children themselves felt shame at not being able to succeed at school and this meant that they either acted out or found ways to remain under the radar and hide their difficulties. Learning that you are a failure early in your educational journey proves difficult to overcome. This form of self-defeating self-definition presents barriers that too often low SES families assume is ‘natural’ for their children and therefore not something that can be overcome. This also proved to be sometimes the case with children how had failed despite the odds coming from high SES families. Interventions are much less effective when the child has decided they are not good at school. In the end, things can be done, but it is difficult for any of this to work unless high quality learning experiences that allow children to feel educational success are available. How we go about funding schools also works to undermine this. A large part of how we organise schools, particularly around funding, means that we do not allocate resources in ways that will necessarily work to allow children from low SES families to experience feelings of educational success. This book shows ways in which families, schools and communities can work together to better meet the needs of all children. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 27, 2024
|
Sep 27, 2024
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
0241422795
| 9780241422793
| 0241422795
| 3.97
| 194
| unknown
| Sep 24, 2020
|
it was amazing
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 10, 2024
|
Sep 10, 2024
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0231192703
| 9780231192705
| 0231192703
| 4.43
| 215
| unknown
| May 28, 2019
|
it was amazing
|
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 |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 2024
|
Aug 31, 2024
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
1782832025
| 9781782832027
| 1782832025
| 3.62
| 505
| Jun 02, 2016
| Jun 02, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
Before I’d finished this book, I’d already recommended it to four friends. This is such a good book. Better than I could possibly have hoped. The basic Before I’d finished this book, I’d already recommended it to four friends. This is such a good book. Better than I could possibly have hoped. The basic idea is that we think we live in a knowledge economy, where intelligence is core to our work lives and where we are expected to do life-long-learning because the intellectual demands of work are growing all of the time. But the fact is that this is not really backed up by the evidence. Rather, the point of capitalism is to simplify work since this process of simplification makes what capitalism produces increasingly cheaper. The division of labour is designed to make work processes ever simpler and to therefore deskill the people doing this work. Economists have known this forever. Marx referred to it as the ‘alienation of labour’ – that is, work was made so mindless, boring and repetitive that it was impossible to have any ‘pride’ in your work. Adam Smith referred to the same thing by saying factory work – the extreme example of this hyper-application of the division of labour in his day – made people as stupid as it was possible to make them. So, it might seem a little strange that today we think the exact opposite is occurring. That we now live in a knowledge economy where to function at all you need to have high stores of human capital – advanced degrees and clearly articulated and defined skill sets – if you are to be able to meet the demands of the economy. The authors here show that this is hardly the case. Rather they show that the majority of the jobs the economy is now producing barely require a high school education. However, other factors are driving the remarkable increase in credentials we are witnessing. The say that to overcome the dissatisfaction that might otherwise come from being massively overqualified for work, companies have deployed a number of strategies that make their organisations ‘functionally stupid’. You need to remember that these strategies are only applied sparingly across the economy – for most people work really is as mindless and horrible as Marx and Smith said it would be. For these people the stupidity of work is hardly something they would be expected to question. They are required to do what they are told – and they get paid so incredibly poorly for what they do that expecting to go ‘over and beyond’ is, frankly, insulting. But for others their qualifications imply that they might amount to more. Except, the work itself really doesn’t require them to do much more than follow routines. This means the organisations often address this mismatch by giving employees high-sounding job titles, or in making their employees ‘experts’ in very, very narrow activities. And these ‘solutions’ can have unanticipated consequences. If you believe you are an expert, you might not be particularly open to taking on advice or questioning your own assumptions. You might, that is, believe your own bullshit. Which is fine, as long as the process you are engaged in works – but when it stops working or needs to change, are you likely to notice? Especially since now your own self-esteem has become tied to you being the expert on whatever narrow field of activity it is you have made your own. This book does not only discuss stupid people doing stupid things – that really would be too easy, and all of us who have worked anywhere for any length of time would have noticed exactly this time and time again. Rather, they are particularly interested in more general stupidity – brought about by the culture of organisations, or by the structures they operate, or the dogmatic belief in ‘leadership’. Oh, let’s do that. I spent 20 years of my life working in one form or another for a union. For 12 of those years I was employed in an organisation in various roles, but was also involved in the union workplace committee. We had quite a good relationship with management and they would set up subcommittees that would involve us as union representatives to provide input into various change processes the organisation was implementing. To be honest, I got along very well with many of the HR and other managers I worked with. The problem was that the change processes often made virtually no sense at all. In one organisation I represented as an industrial officer for the union a manager told his staff that it made no sense for them to get upset about a restructure he was imposing upon them – since all leaders now were ‘change leaders’ and so whatever restructure he implemented would only last a year or so before someone else started another change management process. Hardly surprisingly, this did nothing to dispel the anxiety staff were feeling about how the change being proposed was going to impact their jobs and their lives. Leadership was always presented as some intangible quality that needed to be honoured. I’ve had lots of great managers, but I don’t really believe in leaders – if they exist, I’m yet to have met one. But then, I’m only 60, so I guess there is still time. As this book makes clear, it isn’t entirely clear what a leader would actually do. And yet, the world is coming down with leadership courses. I think my current boss is one of my favourite ‘leaders’ – although, I’m not sure she would even call herself that. Mostly, she leaves people to their own devices. Sometimes I think she trusts us too much. She certainly doesn’t micromanage us. But she does talk to us about our work and offer suggestions and changes – it’s just that most of the people who work for her have PhDs, so, if we can’t be trusted to get on with it, who can? I hadn’t realised that the Dunning Kruger effect was first discussed when someone rubbed lemon juice on their face because they thought it would make them invisible – like with invisible ink, I guess. But our capacity to exaggerate our abilities and how unaware we are of the limits to those abilities is a constant theme throughout this book. Although, as I said before, this book stresses the stupidity of experts more than of ‘fools’. A large part of the problem is group-think, where cultures reward conformity and punish ‘negativity’. In fact, the book ends with an extended praise to Keats and his negative capability. There is also a lovely bit in this that I will quote at length: “While diversity was often presented using images of harmony, participants were aware that this did not always fit the facts. After participation in one such programme, a manager said: ‘It really is a feel-good exercise. You know, we can all feel good that we are this happy multi-colored family – that’s going to bring in all this money for the firm. The truth is quite another matter. If people are really different, they don’t get along that easily, they want to do things differently, and they get upset about how they are told to do work.’” The idea that organisations say they want diversity, but actually want uniformity, isn’t a million miles away from nations like Australia saying they want multiculturalism, while so much of what we do shows what we really want is assimilation. The benefits of diversity are remarkable, but conformity is much easier to manage. I’ve barely scratched the surface of this quite short book – I’ve read it in a day – but it is overflowing with ideas. It made me catch my breath a dozen times throughout. Often about things I thought I knew well, only for them to put another twist on it. Look, you need to read this book. From its discussion on corporate speak to branding (just two of the other things I haven’t even mentioned in this review) this book should be compulsory reading. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 27, 2024
|
Jul 27, 2024
|
Unknown Binding
| |||||||||||||||
1922253995
| 9781922253996
| B01DI6E5NK
| 4.46
| 20,873
| Aug 15, 2013
| May 16, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started this book. Well, that’s not totally true. What I thought I was getting myself into was an
I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started this book. Well, that’s not totally true. What I thought I was getting myself into was an extended discussion of how terrible life was in the Soviet Union and then a kind of extended dancing in the streets now the yoke of communism had been overthrown in Russia or whichever of the other post-Soviet countries they lived in. And don’t get me wrong – there is lots of that. One of the people whose story is told here reminded me of the woman from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged – one of those ‘I’m the master race and I deserve what I’ve got’ people who really would have struggled under the Soviet rule, and she lets you know it. But the thing that strikes you about this book is how many of the stories involve people not merely being nostalgic for the Soviet Union, but that feel their lives had been actively destroyed by what replaced it. And, in many cases, that is self-evidently the case. As Naomi Klein makes all too clear in The Shock Doctrine and Castells in End of Millennium, the US neoliberal handover of wealth to gangsters in Russia was one of the most remarkable heists in recent history. And this had unspeakable impacts – with male life expectancy declining by six years and female life expectancy declining by three after the collapse. Many of the stories told here make the fury around what was done to these people all too very clear. Not least from those who were utterly betrayed, like the people who had gone out to support the Yeltsin revolution, they felt risking everything, believing what they were risking everything for was to get socialism with a human face, only to see the ugliest possible face of capitalism imposed upon them. Some of the people here say things like, I know the top people in the Communist Party were living a better life than we were, but at least they weren’t billionaires with houses in London and Milan. Many of the people hated that the community feeling they had been brought up with, had been driven out and replaced by a love of money. Others that socialism had been betrayed for a banana and a pair of sneakers. That the country that had beat Hitler over the blood of 27 million Soviets lost the cold war without a fight. That law and order had also been shifted to gangs and gangsters, that inter-ethnic clashes had become outright war – and here are some of the hardest parts of this book to read, the stories of pogroms and the murder of pregnant women with their babies ripped from their bodies. I’m Irish, well, by birth and song, anyway – and the Irish can drink. We even have a patron Saint who is celebrated each year across the world by people getting so drunk they can barely bite their own finger – and the Saint himself was so pissed that he saw snakes everywhere, you know, like, in freezing icy cold Ireland, for Christ sake. So, don’t get me wrong, I know what it is like to have a cultural, unhealthy relationship with alcohol. But I think I know why there are Irish, rather than Russian pubs around the world. And Australia, where I live, is currently having a long overdue conversation (yet again and again) on how we treat women – and that is appallingly badly – but Russian men seem to be in a class of their own on this score, as far as I can work out from reading this book. A lot of this book is heavy going – but it is a lightning fast read too, despite it being quite long. And you learn so much from it at the same time, bits of Soviet history, customs and traditions that you would struggle to find out about otherwise. And the stories are of normal people, not the billionaires, the people themselves. What is particularly interesting is reading the Russians themselves talking about the Russian character – describing themselves as a sort of sleeping bear that will remain asleep for too long, but once it has awakened… or the need for Russians to have strong leaders, like a Tsar or a Stalin – and once the right leader comes again, and honestly, a reborn Stalin wasn’t something I ever would have expected Russians to be hoping for, then the country would also be reborn. I had known that Russians are very keen readers, and that literature plays a more important role in Russian life than it does here, where Australians might know the names of some our writers, but they would struggle to tell you the name of anything they wrote. Case in point, we have a poet on one of our bank notes – I would doubt if one Australian in a thousand would be able to recite a single line of her poetry. That’s the $10 note and Mary Gilmore who tried to bind the heart of a man, but the heart of a man is a wandering thing.... So much of this book involved Russians discussing the relevance of one character or another from a famous book of Russian fiction. This is a beautifully written book, and it is almost too much to take in. I’ve passed it on to my ex-wife through my elder daughter, as I think it is exactly the sort of book she would find fascinating. I am probably going to need to read more of Svetlana’s writing. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 07, 2024
|
May 07, 2024
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
B07JDNP5M6
| 3.94
| 26,269
| 1997
| 2018
|
really liked it
|
Unsurprisingly, there is a back story to my reading this book. Recently, the Melbourne Comedy Festival has been on and I went to see two shows. The fi
Unsurprisingly, there is a back story to my reading this book. Recently, the Melbourne Comedy Festival has been on and I went to see two shows. The first was a kind of teaser, where a number of comedians did 12-minute stand ups. Of the five or six comedians, there were probably three that we felt were funny enough to want to see more of. One of them was a tall guy who had moved to Melbourne from Newcastle in the UK. There are two problems with comedy. And I class these around recall and recognition memory. After the show you might say to someone, ‘oh, there was a guy who did a very funny routine’. And someone might say to you, ‘oh, great, what was in it about?’ Well, this is a recall task – and you are likely to say something deeply enlightening like, ‘I don’t know, funny stuff about, you know, life and stuff.’ When he finished his set, he basically said, ‘come and see my hour-long show, I don’t repeat anything in that that I’ve said here.’ A lesson in life I never seem to learn is that when people say things like that, they might well believe themselves, but what they are saying is likely to be total rubbish. I had an English teacher at one time when I was doing night school who said that since we were mostly adults, and he spent most of his day with children, he expected us to do almost all of the talking. Needless to say, you couldn’t shut him up with a machine gun pointed to his head. When we got to the guy’s show a few days later he started with pretty much the entire 12-minutes he had done in the teaser show. You see, this is a recognition task, you always recognise when you’ve heard a joke before – even if you otherwise couldn’t recall it to save your life. After we had heard many of the jokes he had done before, the show suddenly shifted to how he and his ex-partner had broken up. He started this section of the show by saying, ‘don’t worry, this won’t be a half-hour long trashing of my ex as a form of therapy…’ I wonder if you have already guessed what the next half hour of the show turned out to be? Anyway, his ex-girlfriend was interested in starting (or had kinda already started) a polyamorous relationship and she didn’t so much want to leave her current partner (our hero telling the ‘jokes’) but would rather they could come to some sort of accommodation where they could have an open relationship while staying together. Best of all worlds. Now, to help him through this transition they both started going to therapy but also she recommended he read this book. In part, I’ve read this because I was keen to know how a book might make it easier to accept your partner is about to go off having sex with other men and somehow this book was going to make that not only easier to accept, but perhaps even something you might look forward to. A big ask of any book, I’d have thought. Now, I want to start by saying a lot of this book is seriously quite damn good. I don’t normally read self-help books, not since my marriage breakup a million years ago when people suggested I read some god-awful things (I remember one was called ‘Pulling Your Own Strings’, which, bizarrely, wasn’t even about masturbation). The advice was always couched in ‘this will change your life’ hyperbole followed by a series of key points that were as mindless and they were fundamentally unhelpful. As you can see, I’m not really a fan of self-help books. So, my saying this one was good is really as high praise as I’m likely to give. The premise of the book is that sex is a deeply problematical thing in our society. That it is too often associated with rubbing genitals together until there is a mess. That it should only be done with someone you ‘own’, in the sense of being in an exclusive relationship with them. That sex and love are pretty much the same things and each involves one other person. That introducing anyone else into this equation automatically cancels the equation to zero. That we are so fundamentally jealous that loving relationships, either involving sex or not, will provide so much destructive force to any relationship, that it simply will not survive. Now, look. There really is a lot to all of this. I do worry that most of our notions of relationships are based on essentially ‘property’ relationships, where the man is the owner and the woman is the owned. And, in fact, neither role is as appealing as people might think, even though being the owner is almost certainly preferrable. And I think a hell of a lot of extra-marital sex is about as close to meaningless as it is possible to get. We are driven by hormones and smells (smells especially – I think we totally underestimate our noses as sex organs) and a couple of drinks and a quick kiss can end in said rubbing of genitals together until there is a wet mess. Should that be the end of these two’s ‘primary relationships’? Probably not. I’ve often felt that if one of my partners got themselves into this situation, I would much rather never know. ‘You might want to be an ethical slut by telling me about your infidelity, but it feels to me like your ethics is my nose being rubbed in the mess left by the rubbing of genitals… not my mess, but definitely my nose.’ So, this book shifted that idea a bit for me. A relationship needs to be based on trust, and trust can hardly be based on telling lies. Although, in the version of this story I’ve just told, I think I would still prefer not to know. The problem starts when your partner doesn’t just want sex. And this is where the authors have a new kind of definition of sex, again, one I sort of agree with. That sex should probably be defined as any deeply intimate connection we have with another person. I’ve had relationships where I’ve exposed more of myself to the other person than I ever have with some people I’ve been naked with. And this is true of both sexes, even though I consider myself a boringly heterosexual man. And I think this is the bit where I would be incapable of ever becoming an ethical slut. I’m simply too insecure to play these games. As the comedian ultimately proved to be too, try as he might. As I said to someone after the show, if my partner came and kissed me on the head and said, ‘I’m just off to make love to Jack, back at 11’ – that would be me fucked for the rest of the night. Not because I would be missing out on sex, that is hardly a novel experience, but because my insecurities involve a belief that my partner would inevitably find the other person more interesting and more attractive and more fun than I could ever be. The sense that this serious, loving relationship she would be having with another man would just be something I could either shrug off or accept as part of life’s rich tapestry, where the world would become a better place with the explosion of multiple loving relationships, ‘love, love, love…all you need is love’, I know is beyond my powers. Part of me really wishes this wasn’t true. I see all of the logic of the authors’ point, but the very idea leaves me feeling a little queasy. The other advice in the book is well worth reading. I loved their stuff on ‘outer-course’ – the whole sense that sex is about ejaculation has increasingly become odd to me. The thing I love more than anything in the world is to watch my partner orgasm. I’ve rarely enjoyed an orgasm of my own nearly as much. But I’ve found women (a couple of my previous partners) are just as likely to say, ‘no, that’s not right/fair – it’s your turn’, as if there is a great accountant in the sky counting pleasures and these are always measured in coming. I’ve come without ejaculating many, many times. I’ve been in relationships where I’ve spent a long time ejaculating without ever orgasming. Sex is a complicated thing, and as this book says, no less fun for not being like a porn scene. Something I think only people who have been denied closeness for an extended period of their lives can fully comprehend. But then, who is that? Even those of us in long term, loving relationships, have experienced long periods without true closeness. A lot of this book, and a lot of the reason I enjoyed it, despite not really expecting to, and despite not coming away being totally convinced by it either, is based less on ethics as such – although, you know, a word doesn’t get into the title if the authors didn’t think it was important – but rather about care. The world really could do with more care in it. And more acceptance that we can’t be everything to someone else. Even when, for quite some time, it can feel like they are the only thing we can think about or who we want to be with. Nothing is simple, nothing stays the same, but sometimes love finds ways. I couldn’t do this lifestyle. I would give up many things for a loving relationship, but this would ask me to give up my mental health, and that’s simply too much to ask. That said, I really do understand the power of desire and the need to be with someone else – christ, that’s how my first marriage broke up and as the breaker-up-er-er, I totally get this – and so, I also understand that being presented with a range of options, beyond ‘in or out’, might actually work for some people. As Ani Di Franco says in a song, “She was numb with the terror of losing her best friend, but she never sees things changing, she only sees them ending…” I’m sixty. If I’ve learned anything it is that a truly deep connection between people is infinitely more rare than people who say shit like, ‘there are millions of fish in the sea’ seem to really have ever comprehended. But also, none of this is easy. I didn’t come away from the show particularly liking the comedian, I didn’t want to sit down and have a beer with him, say – but maybe I’m more like him than I prefer to think. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Apr 25, 2024
not set
|
Apr 24, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
0241291771
| 9780241291771
| 0241291771
| 3.47
| 268
| Mar 18, 2021
| Mar 18, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
Sometimes I will start a book feeling I have a pretty good idea what it will be about. But when this one started talking about conversion experiences
Sometimes I will start a book feeling I have a pretty good idea what it will be about. But when this one started talking about conversion experiences and desires I was put off-balance. I thought, wait a second, I wasn’t expecting conversion, I thought we were talking about change. Except, of course, what is it to want to change other than to become what you currently are not, and, well, how is that not a kind of conversion? Which is the other thing that can be a bit annoying – when I realise there has been no sleight of hand involved in putting me off balance, nor that the discussion of religious conversion the distraction I might have otherwise anticipated, but that all of this should have been much more obvious from the start. All the same, I was put off-balance. I think what I rebelled against when being told wanting change was about conversion was that I think of conversion as a complete transformation – and I’m not sure that is what people normally mean when they say they want something in their lives to change. You know, you might want to get another job, find a new partner, move to another city or country, learn how to play chess or meditate. But we generally don’t think of these as being examples of conversion experiences – in the way that if we were to wake up one morning and find ourselves an animist or a socialist might be. The changes in the first list are often not made with the conscious intention of becoming a fundamentally different type of person to who we already are, rather they are often made with the intention that we will become ‘more like ourself’ or our ‘true selves’. “If only I lived on the Sunshine Coast, I could finally be me.” Whereas conversion experiences like becoming a Christian or Hindu don’t feel like we have chosen them, so much, as we’ve been chosen by them. I’m becoming increasingly what Bourdieu referred to as a Pascalian, someone who believes that our social situation forms and structures us much more than we can bring ourselves to believe. My ex-wife was always very keen to have epiphanies of one kind or another. But I doubt she actually ever wanted a conversion experience. For her, I guess, she was after what the author calls here ‘seeing with new eyes’ – but given Paul is the first of the converts and his experience was the first use of epiphany, the conversion aspect of an epiphany cannot be ignored. All of which is likely to be made even more confusing if moving to the Sunshine Coast might prove to have a more lasting change on us than a sudden epiphany and conversion, where moving provides consequences we might never have considered or even thought possible. All change changes us, but change is only recognisable in amongst the sameness. Which also brings us to the idea that conversions are not as simple as we sometimes think they might be – not even deeply felt religious conversions. Another book I read recently, Eagleton’s The Real Thing, made the point that there are more things that stay the same after a revolution than that change. This is hardly different from that saying, ‘wherever you go, there you are’. And, naturally enough, such a sentiment is the opposite to what I was just arguing, and so almost definitely must have a kernel of truth in it. We are unreliable witnesses of our own lives. We frequently misunderstand what we desire, what will make our lives better. What this author does not do, as much as I might have expected him to, was to talk about how capitalism is fundamentally premised on the idea of thwarted desire. And desire is always the driving force behind our felt need for change (I’m being tautological here, but hopefully with a purpose). We desire what we do not have, in the belief that if we were to get what we do not have we will become what we currently are not but rather want to become. Capitalism’s need for a permanent purchasing class is required since it helps drive production and consumption and this in turn requires a permanent desire-producing industry finding links to the identities we wish we had and to objects and experiences that can be purchased, used, discarded and replaced with new objects of desire. Here the stress is placed on the ‘wanting’ from the title of this book, the desire, and the manipulative deception involved in the underlying premise that this desire will never be realised, and, in fact, is never intended to be realised, since the system’s continued health depends upon this desire being endlessly thwarted. The problem doesn’t stop there. The last century was scarred by regimes that wanted to convert entire nations so that ‘a new man’ might flourish. This was premised upon what Bauman called ‘hygiene tasks’, realised in the great conversion machines of either death camps or gulags. Hygiene is being used in the sense of ‘ethnic cleansing’ – that is, once enough of them have been removed, the world will be a better, safer place. We will have achieved true liberation. We fool ourselves that these hygiene tasks have been relegated to history. As we are currently witnessing in Gaza, and taking the Israelis at their word, they need to kill enough of those who hate them so that they can finally negotiate peace with those who love them. This means we have no option to negotiate settlements anywhere, since all change must first involve the conversion of our enemies into ourselves. Before we can negotiate, they must become identical to us. Otherwise, death is the only option available. Here the ‘wanting’ of change is not change for us, but change in them, they must change or die. The 4.5 million people murdered across the Middle East following 9/11 according to a recent report by Brown University also fit this category – our desire for change justifies any atrocity and is the motive power of our vengeance. This is a book where psychoanalysis provides the undercurrent. And so, sublimated desires, particularly displaced sexual desires, play an important role here, not least in deluding us about the true nature of ourselves. This is not merely in our relationships with other people, you know, hidden homosexual desires that have us being cruel to our heterosexual partners, but also the hidden drives behind those other life partnerships we have, with books or work or art or sport, that similarly serve as means to repress our guilty subconsciouses. I don’t really see myself as a follower of psychoanalysis, or Freud for that matter, but I do think Freud’s ideas of repressed desires is a very useful one to play with. Particularly if we think we want change in our lives. All desire is a desiring after, but if the underlying motivation of our desire is hidden from us, and almost must remain hidden by definition, as Freud asserts, then what is it to want change? This in no way is me saying we should seek stasis – that isn’t even an option open to us – but again, notice that the focus is again placed on the desire, rather than on the ‘change’ per se – so who is it doing the wanting? Which part of us wants this? And do we have any control here or are we automatons to our desires? The worst forms of ‘wanting change’ are those times when we don’t really want change at all, but are confronted by a new reality – and when we are being asked to choose between ‘least worst’ options. Here the western idea of Buddhism, the reconciling of oneself to change, of letting oneself go in seeking acceptance, probably seems appealing. And as appealing as it seems, I’ve never been able to achieve this form of nirvana. For me, underlying everything, and again, contrary to so much of what I said as I started this review, I feel it is almost impossible to not feel devoid of agentic power in my life, maybe not in total control, but still an agent and not an object. I acknowledge that my surroundings do so much to determine my life, and if sociology has taught me anything, it has taught me to try to notice the options I would otherwise assume were not available to me due to my habits and dispositions, but even so, I feel there are choices to be made and that often I’m the one making them, not the structures around me only, or my repressed desires. Right – this review is now about 1400 words, and really I wouldn’t have anticipated writing any of them in a review when I started reading this book. The book is short and powerful – I can’t help but recommend it. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Apr 25, 2024
|
Apr 24, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0385262094
| 9780385262095
| 0385262094
| 4.24
| 224
| 1989
| Jan 01, 1990
|
it was amazing
|
A dear friend of mine at work recommended I have a look at a video that was prepared on the work of William H. Whyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R
A dear friend of mine at work recommended I have a look at a video that was prepared on the work of William H. Whyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKEjW.... There is something that anyone who actually knows me knows – and that is that I’m terrible with names. The fact I’ve read quite a few books on cities and how people behave in them probably means I’ve come across this guy multiple times, but if I have he has not left a real impression before. Recently, I’ve been writing a paper at work on the pedagogy of space, who spatial affordance of exhibits in museums, say, impact how and what we learn in those spaces. I have been using Goffman’s ideas – but the problem with Goffman (don’t get me wrong, the guy is a god) is that he is infinitely more interested in the interactions between people in his little dramas than he is in the material surrounding people in these dramas. All the world might well be a stage to Goffman, but the stage itself, and the various props contained on the stage, is less interesting to him than the bodily and spoken content of symbolic interactions. Whyte is also an insanely close observer of human interactions, but his question was much more about how spaces themselves encouraged these interactions. For example, he notes that spaces work best, particularly as little squares in cities, if there are places where people can sit. If they can sit, people will. He also noticed that planning was best achieved if it didn’t interfere too much with people being able to improvise – so, if chairs could move, people would move them to suit the number of people in their group. Many things I might have just taken for granted were disproven by Whyte. For instance, I’d always assumed that if two people were walking down a street and saw each other and decided to stop and talk, they would move to the side of the street, so others could get past them. But this is the opposite of what people actually do. The stand right in the middle of the busiest part of the street. I used to get annoyed when I saw people doing this, but after reading this book I can’t see the point in getting upset. It is human nature. He also says people might expect lovers to kiss in nooks or away from where they can be seen – but he also found the opposite. To kiss your lover on the street is a kind of public declaration and he even witnessed them sometimes looking around to see who had observed them, even while pretending to be so lost in their love as to be unaware of others anyway. The rule seems to be that the more people there are, the happier we tend to be – the exact opposite of what we might believe intuitively. He talks of the best height for stairs, and how this is often based on someone’s observations from many centuries ago, but that these measurements are now out of date, given we have gotten taller since. But stairs too can also be used as seats, as just about anything that is vaguely chair like can be. If we can be located where we can sit and watch others, we couldn’t really be happier. We love the sun too. And this is a real problem, since many tall buildings – and the layout of the grid patterns of streets themselves – often actively work to cast shadows that steal sunlight from city streets. But warmth isn’t only provided by the sun, but also by colourful other humans. In the chorus of the song about Dublin, The Mero, it talks of Bang Bang, who shoots the buses with his golden key. This is exactly the sort of person being talked about here – or various street performers. Whyte says shop owners often hate them, but actually, they bring people into close proximity and set a mood where them going on to purchase things is probably more likely. Of course, particularly in the US, the inner city has become associated with poverty and crime. Melbourne, where I live, was lucky to have had an explosion of office building in the late 1980s that then meant there was a chronic oversupply. This was solved by converting many of these office spaces into apartments. Melbourne, for a while, was one of the fastest growing residential areas in the country. And it therefore became known as one of the most liveable cities too. Cities are spaces where people interact. Without people they are terrifying. In New York, where Whyte is particularly interested, since it is where he did most of his research, businesses started to move out to the suburbs. And this was one of my favourite bits of this book. The businesses said that they were moving to be more convenient for staff. But Whyte checked and the major staff member that was being helped by the move was almost always the CEO – the relocation just happening to be close to where they lived in most cases. I love it when people do a simple empirical test that shows something so interesting – and this book is over flowing with such bits and pieces of research and observation. Really, a lovely book. I assume there has been more recent work done using similar or even better techniques – but this is so readable and so interesting, it is worth reading regardless. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 16, 2024
|
Mar 15, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1642052442
| 9781642052442
| B07R92C5GW
| 4.20
| 5
| unknown
| Apr 29, 2019
|
it was amazing
|
I hadn’t known there was an entire field of study on postnormal times. It started with some work done by some scientists on post-normal science. The s
I hadn’t known there was an entire field of study on postnormal times. It started with some work done by some scientists on post-normal science. The short version is that while science was once about finding solutions to problems to make the world a better place, now a lot of science is about fixing problems the application of science created. Some of the authors here – and this is a book bringing together the work of multiple researchers from multiple fields – want to differentiate themselves from postmodernism, which they see as too prone to despair. Their vision is that we are in an interregnum – something Gramsci referred to by saying, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. They basically quote this three times or so throughout the book, but never attribute it to him. The point stands. And this is why they prefer to call this time ‘post normal’. The old logic no longer really works, so the old normal doesn’t work either. But although we are beyond the old normal, we have not yet entered the new normal – but unlike their characterisation of postmodernism, they believe there is some hope that a new normal will arise. They say post normal times are dominated by the 3Cs: complexity, chaos and contradictions. The world is complex in the sense that all aspects of our world are interrelated and anything but composed of simple binaries. Turning one dial might produce cascading effects, rather than a simple up and down response in the system. In fact, the whole system is prone to chaos, that is, non-linear responses to small changes in initial conditions. All of which is dialectical in the sense that it is a system over flowing with contradictions, where fixing one problem is as likely to cause three or four other problems. In one of the papers here the author discusses the ‘menagerie of postnormal potentialities’ – the menagerie being made up of Black Elephants, Black Swans and Black Jellyfish. To take each in turn. Black Elephants are issues we have known that exist for a long time, but we have in many ways convinced ourselves that they aren’t going to be nearly as bad as they actually are going to be. The most obvious one is global heating. We’ve known about it since the 1960s or so, but now, whenever a once and a thousand year weather event occurs once every other week, we are shocked by it. There is an elephant in the room, but we don’t see it until it causes lots of damage, and then we pretend it wasn’t an elephant, but a black swan. The difference between a black elephant and black swan is that the elephant is something we really ought to have noticed and done something about. In fact, with black elephants, the whole point was that people had noticed them and told us to do something about them – want another, think nuclear weapons. I know Stephen Pinker has said we don’t need to worry about them anymore, so, who am I to argue? But if they are finally used (and you could take quick look down the list of countries that have them if you are feeling reassured by the great Pinker’s prognosis) then we would be hard pressed to argue we hadn’t been warned or that we didn’t know what they could do to our one and only world. Black Swans are events that we cannot predict. This is based on the fact that up until the discovery of Australia, all swans were, by definition, white. And then, suddenly, there were these swans and they weren’t white, but black. No one saw it coming, but come it did. And it took one of the favourite definitions of philosophy, that all swans are white, and basically wrecked it. Black swan events are happening with increasing regularity – particularly in the world of finance. The third is the black jellyfish. These are things we now about, I mean, we all know what jellyfish are and think we know just about everything there is to reasonably know about them – except, suddenly there is a bloom of them and they do things like stop ships or nuclear power plants from operating, and well, we learn we didn’t quite know all we needed to know about them after all. A black jellyfish is something innocuous in our environment that suddenly stops being innocuous. The examples that might be given include the Arab Spring, where what looked like settled societies suddenly erupted into revolt. Now, some might say the Arab Spring was more a black elephant, than a black jellyfish – but that hardly takes away from the usefulness of the menagerie as a way to characterise various events. In part, although I quite like these ideas, there are perhaps a couple too many of them in this book. They talk about the 3Ts (three tomorrows – and the Four S’s, I can’t remember what they stood for). If anything, there are too many TLAs in this book – Three Letter Abbreviations. Even Post Normal Times sometimes becomes PNT, and then there is also PNC – Post Normal Creep. I hate TLAs – I always have to flick back to remember what the hell they were again. I know they save letters, but I would much rather know what I was reading, I know, weird of me. The bottom line with this book is that the world is complex and non-linear and you don’t fix complex, wicked problems with simple solutions – complex problems require complex solutions – but since we are making ever more things interconnected, our problems are becoming ever more complex. And so, we need to do contradictory things – we need to somehow simplify things, while also finding complex responses to the complex problems we face. At one point an author talked about the problems of endless growth and I posted the quote on Facebook once I had read it. I’ll put it in here too: “At the heart of the economic system are assumptions that present us with is basic contradictions. For example, that growth is essential and will continue into the far future. The ideal figure that any country should aim to grow at is said to be 4.5%. However, as the investment banker Jeremy Grantham notes, ‘the fact is no compound growth is sustainable’. To show just how unsustainable this is in reality, Grantham suggests that we imagine an ancient Egyptian culture that seeks a growth rate of 4.5%. How much wealth would they have accumulated after 3000 years? The answer: 2.5 billion billion solar systems worth! At 1% compound growth their wealth could not be accommodated on the planet. Even a lowly 0.1% rate of growth would break the system. Thus the seeds of postnormality are inherent in the very idea of growth. The more economic growth we have the more postnormal we become.” (p.84) The other thing that needs to happen is we need to allow more points-of-view in. This is something a particular kind of reductionism utterly hates – the kind you sometimes hear from people like Richard Dawkins. He has a simple view of the world and seeks to impose that simple view upon the rest of the world. I’m not merely talking about his atheism – and as an atheist myself, I guess I can say that I find his atheism crass and simpleminded – but also his views on trans people, for example. His simple truth – you’re born with your bits and you had better just live according to what you were born with – somehow ignores the fact that such simple mindedness leads to this group of people being massively over represented in the suicide statistics. If your ‘scientific method’ is so lacking in compassion, maybe it deserves to be condemned. As is said repeatedly in this book, a book that also has problems with postmodernism, “in postnormal times Aristotelian logic is part of the problem and not the answer” (p.58). I’ve read a few books recently on how weird the world has become – this book tries to offer more hope, I guess, but I can’t really see how we are going to move from post normal times to new normal times. Complexity, Chaos and Contradictions are here to stay, I feel, and are likely to get worse. I know this is me wallowing in postmodern despair, as the authors might say – but I do feel it is beholden upon those who are offering hope to show it is based on something more than the nice warm feeling it brings them. You know, you can get a warm feeling by wetting your pants, but I’m not sure I would recommend it. I do believe that opening the debate to more voices is precisely what is necessary. I feel we have become a world of specialists and experts, and we need more generalists and people prepared to start from the premise that they are perplexed and that is a reasonable thing to be. Don’t get me wrong – you should read this book. If only as a curative for books like The Scout Mindset. There are also some excellent chapters on the Middle East, European Union, Japan, Islam, religion, science, and ‘unknown unknowns’. There is lots to think about here. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 10, 2024
|
Jan 10, 2024
|
Kindle Edition
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3.90
|
really liked it
|
Jun 29, 2025
|
Jun 29, 2025
|
||||||
4.02
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 24, 2025
|
Jun 24, 2025
|
||||||
3.95
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 30, 2025
|
Mar 30, 2025
|
||||||
4.33
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 10, 2025
|
Jan 09, 2025
|
||||||
4.38
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 03, 2025
|
Jan 03, 2025
|
||||||
4.02
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 02, 2025
|
Jan 01, 2025
|
||||||
4.20
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 2025
|
Dec 31, 2024
|
||||||
3.90
|
did not like it
|
Nov 26, 2024
|
Nov 26, 2024
|
||||||
4.17
|
really liked it
|
Oct 29, 2024
not set
|
Oct 29, 2024
|
||||||
3.68
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 15, 2024
|
Oct 15, 2024
|
||||||
3.63
|
liked it
|
Oct 06, 2024
|
Oct 06, 2024
|
||||||
4.67
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 27, 2024
|
Sep 27, 2024
|
||||||
3.97
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 10, 2024
|
Sep 10, 2024
|
||||||
4.43
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 2024
|
Aug 31, 2024
|
||||||
3.62
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 27, 2024
|
Jul 27, 2024
|
||||||
4.46
|
it was amazing
|
May 07, 2024
|
May 07, 2024
|
||||||
3.94
|
really liked it
|
Apr 25, 2024
not set
|
Apr 24, 2024
|
||||||
3.47
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 25, 2024
|
Apr 24, 2024
|
||||||
4.24
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 16, 2024
|
Mar 15, 2024
|
||||||
4.20
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 10, 2024
|
Jan 10, 2024
|