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jjupille's reviews
465 reviews
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber
medium-paced
3.0
What an odd book. Brilliant but breezy. Random passages and bullets follow.
The Brits conquered or traded with foreign nations. The Americans wanted to administer them. US is profoundly bureaucratic, but we miss it because this is bureaucratic capitalism, i.e., private sector (Graeber 2015, 13).
"Total bureaucratization" (Graeber 2015, 18): "the gradual fusion of public and private power into a single entity, rife with rules and regulations whose ultimate purpose is to extract wealth in the form of profit" (Graeber 2015, 17)
there is an anthro lit on "cults of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world" (Graeber 2015, 22). Meyer, etc. Strong decoupling. These formed almost "magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience or training they are supposed to represent" (Graeber 2015, 22).
Requiring pharmacists to be credentialed in all kind of elaborate and ongoing ways extracts from the students and gives to the financial interests that loan them money to pay for it. "This system of extraction comes dressed up in a language of rules and regulations" (Graeber 2015, 24).
"Whenever someone starts talking about the 'free market', it's a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He's never far away" (Graeber 2015, 31).
generic bank branches: "these are the perfect symbols of our age: stores selling pure abstraction -- immaculate boxes containing little but glass and steel dividers, computer screens, and armed security. They define the perfect point of conjuncture between guns and information, since that's really all that's there" (Graeber 2015, 33).
fascinating observation: ATMs never dispense incorrect amount (pp. 35-36).
DEF "structural violence": "forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm" (Graeber 2015, 57).
banks, etc.: "All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force" (Graeber 2015, 58).
"there is a direct relation ... between the level of violence employed in a bureaucratic system and the level of absurdity and ignorance it seems to produce" (Graeber 2015, 65).
"what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative" (Graeber 2015, 67). "Any alternative form of action cannot, without some sort of appeal to shared meanings or understandings, have any predictable effects at all" (Graeber 2015, 68). Hmmm ... running and jumping into a lake. May not have social effects, but may well.
"situations of structural violence invariably produced extremely lopsided structures of imaginative identification", (Graeber 2015, 69) i.e., interpretive labor (Graeber 2015, 67). "Within relations of domination, it is generally the subordinates who are effectively relegated the work of understanding how the social relations in question actually work" (Graeber 2015, 71). Recall politeness, the V and T, etc. Contradicts himself p. 95 in saying "those on top relegate to themselves the more imaginative tasks"
"Police are bureaucrats with weapons" (Graeber 2015, 73).
"Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization" (Graeber 2015, 75).
"The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly of coercive force come together" (Graeber 2015, 80).
the "real" in "real estate" is not derived from res as "thing", but form the Spanish real – whoa (Graeber 2015, 86).
Marx: what makes people unlike bees is that we first raise structures in our imagination (Graeber 2015, 88).
"The subjective experience of living inside … lopsided structures of imagination – the warping and shattering of imagination that results—is what we are referring to when we talk about 'alienation'" (Graeber 2015, 94).
notions such as the public, the workforce, the electorate, consumers, the population "are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic" … they are "machinery of alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered" (Graeber 2015, 99).
what happens to the working class struggle when there is no longer a traditional working class? It turns into identity politics (Graeber 2015, 112).
"there appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment [in] technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control" (Graeber 2015, 120). 95% of robotics research funded by the Pentagon, which is why we have no Jetsons maids. Biggest medical breakthroughts are Prozac, Zoloft, Ritalin: "tailor made … to ensure that [our] new professional demands don't drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy" (Graeber 2015, 129).
change of tax regimes: Bell used to invest in research because profits were so highly taxed (Graeber 2015, 127).
"There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers" (pp. 134-135). See Strathern's Audit Cultures for an anthro look at this sort of thing. See also Sarah Kendzior
great close to the chapter on declining rate of profit: free ourselves from bureaucracy, and "let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history" (Graeber 2015, 147).
path dependence of bureaucracies: once created, they find other problems that need solving, they create new problems, and they move to make themselves indispensable (Graeber 2015, 150). "The only way to rid oneself of an established bureaucracy, according to Weber, is to simply kill them all, as Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome, or Genghis Khan in certain parts of the Middle East" (Graeber 2015, 151).
#SMM high modernism is largely inspired by the German post office (Graeber 2015, 153). The Post Office created the German nation (Graeber 2015, 155).
"games are pure rule-governed action" … they "allow us our only real experience of a situation where all ambiguity is swept away. Everyone knows exactly what the rules are" … "Games, then, are a kind of utopia of rules", whereas play "implies a pure expression of creative energy" (Graeber 2015, 191).
play is present "when the free expression of creative energies becomes an end in itself" (Graeber 2015, 192).
"What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play" (Graeber 2015, 193).
play is purely generative of rules, not constrained by them (Calvinball). In social theory, this logic finds expression in sovereignty (Graeber 2015, 193).
Freedom is "the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating" (Graeber 2015, 199). Language really exemplifies this. We love to play around with different formulations, but we also write a grammar book.
"no system can generate itself. Any power capable of creating a system of laws cannot itself be bound by them" (Graeber 2015, 213).
Galtung on structural violence
Jonathan L. Katz "Don't Become a Scientist" at wustl
Victorian era sci-fi futures "last moment before the carnage of WWI, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible" (Graeber 2015, 251) #SMM
The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler
challenging
medium-paced
3.5
Act of Creation is one of my favorite books. This one provides more foundation and more scaffolding around that one, especially as it relates to the nature of hierarchic systems and a logic of paedmorphosis (step back to leap forward). A trusted friend finds his account of evolution a little too Lamarckian, but I found it pretty persuasive. The last part, on schizophysiology as why we are so fucked, is fascinating. He goes off the rails in several places, IMO, but I just love reading Koestler.
Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Very hard for me to evaluate this very odd book.
In my simpleton's view of the world, this slots in to "the shattering of the modern mind" that occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century, involving Freud, Einstein, etc.etc., but most importantly World War I, when any worldview premised on the idea that the world made sense no longer made any sense. Cendrars lost an arm in WWI, and the whole book is really just a way to engage madness without getting too worked up about it.
The title character is famously misogynistic, and the title of course can be read that way. I read it as "death by vagina", the idea that as soon as we are born this crazy world starts killing us with its craziness. I'd need to read around the book a lot more and porobably read it again more knowledgeably to really get into other takeaways, but to me it expresses the kind of nihilism that the avant-garde in every field was expressing.
Some philosophizing on pp. 102-103 of my edition, starting with the theme of the uselessness of all action. This sets the only real task as annihilation. "In the last analysis, scientific knowledge is negative. The latest discoveries of science as well as its most stable and thoroughly proven laws, are just sufficient to allw us to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally, and the basic folly of all abstract notions. We can now put our metaphysics away in the musuem of international folklore, we can confound all a priori ideas. How and why have become idle, idiotic questions. All that we can admit or affirm, the only synthesis, is the absurdity of being, of the universe, of life. If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God's digestive system" (p. 103).
And,
"Haven't you gotten it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past ...? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral, and animal, all disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions and systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?" (pp. 181-182).
In my simpleton's view of the world, this slots in to "the shattering of the modern mind" that occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century, involving Freud, Einstein, etc.etc., but most importantly World War I, when any worldview premised on the idea that the world made sense no longer made any sense. Cendrars lost an arm in WWI, and the whole book is really just a way to engage madness without getting too worked up about it.
The title character is famously misogynistic, and the title of course can be read that way. I read it as "death by vagina", the idea that as soon as we are born this crazy world starts killing us with its craziness. I'd need to read around the book a lot more and porobably read it again more knowledgeably to really get into other takeaways, but to me it expresses the kind of nihilism that the avant-garde in every field was expressing.
Some philosophizing on pp. 102-103 of my edition, starting with the theme of the uselessness of all action. This sets the only real task as annihilation. "In the last analysis, scientific knowledge is negative. The latest discoveries of science as well as its most stable and thoroughly proven laws, are just sufficient to allw us to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally, and the basic folly of all abstract notions. We can now put our metaphysics away in the musuem of international folklore, we can confound all a priori ideas. How and why have become idle, idiotic questions. All that we can admit or affirm, the only synthesis, is the absurdity of being, of the universe, of life. If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God's digestive system" (p. 103).
And,
"Haven't you gotten it through your head that human thought is a thing of the past ...? You make me laugh with your metaphysical anguish, it's just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral, and animal, all disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought, history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions and systems. It's always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out of it? And what will you make? What are you looking for? There's no truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. What can you do about it, my poor friend?" (pp. 181-182).
This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan
hopeful
informative
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
If you like Pollan, you will like it. It's a little breezier than how to change your mind, but it's really good.
East West Street by Philippe Sands
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Sands is a legendary international lawyer and here he weaves the threads of his grandfather Leon and celebrated international lawyers Raphael Lemkin (who originated the legal concept of genocide) and Hersch Lauterpacht (who originaed the legal concept of crimes against humanity). All three of these Jewish men have early-to-mid 20th century connections to Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv in what is now Ukraine and its environs, and had personal / family experience of the horrors that people can inflict on each other on ground bringing so many different folks into proximity. A fourth protagonist is the Nazi governor of the region around Lemberg during WWII, who implemented the Final Solution there - Treblinka was in his territory.
Lemkin and Lauterpacht articulated alternative frameworks for thinking about The Final Solution and the rest of the Nazi atrocities. Lemkin favored the notion of genocide, the systematic extermination of a group of people. Lauterpact favored an individual conception of human rights. So the group vs. the individual conceptions were contending. Ironically, given that this is in Sands's professional wheelhouse, I found his elucidation of these rival concepts to be somewhat weak, betrayed in part by the author's apparent preference for Lauterpacht's conception. He just never really does justice to the idea of genocide, and the critique of the concept - that it would reify the very collective identities that it was trying to defang - didn't persuade me. Lemkin is kind of desperate and nutty and workmanlike, while Lauterpacht is plugged in, refined, brilliantly original. With one pillar so robust and the other so withered, this basic dichotomy doesn't entirely suffice to hold up the intellectual edifice.
Still - Sands writes wonderfully, he narrates the research process with glee and enthusiasm, he grapples with the personal and the abstract, and he offers a wonderfully rich window onto the historical forces radiating around and through Lemberg. Especially as the city (now Lviv, Ukraine) is again the site of man's inhumanity to man, the timeless themes at play feel especially timely. I recommend this highly.
Lemkin and Lauterpacht articulated alternative frameworks for thinking about The Final Solution and the rest of the Nazi atrocities. Lemkin favored the notion of genocide, the systematic extermination of a group of people. Lauterpact favored an individual conception of human rights. So the group vs. the individual conceptions were contending. Ironically, given that this is in Sands's professional wheelhouse, I found his elucidation of these rival concepts to be somewhat weak, betrayed in part by the author's apparent preference for Lauterpacht's conception. He just never really does justice to the idea of genocide, and the critique of the concept - that it would reify the very collective identities that it was trying to defang - didn't persuade me. Lemkin is kind of desperate and nutty and workmanlike, while Lauterpacht is plugged in, refined, brilliantly original. With one pillar so robust and the other so withered, this basic dichotomy doesn't entirely suffice to hold up the intellectual edifice.
Still - Sands writes wonderfully, he narrates the research process with glee and enthusiasm, he grapples with the personal and the abstract, and he offers a wonderfully rich window onto the historical forces radiating around and through Lemberg. Especially as the city (now Lviv, Ukraine) is again the site of man's inhumanity to man, the timeless themes at play feel especially timely. I recommend this highly.
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow
medium-paced
4.0
Graeber and Wengrow's _The Dawn of Everything_ got lots of play in various high-falutin' review venues late last year, and being a sucker for big history I checked it out. I have to say it was pretty amazing, though I think they lay out far more threads than they can manage to weave together. The key takeways for me, off the top of my head, are the following: 1) agriculture is not an absorbing state, where once you discover it, you get stuck with it; 2) having agriculture does not condemn you to social inequality and a coercive state; 3) not unrelated, the deep historical record shows lots more variability, lots less linearity, and TONS more creative agency in shaping how we live than the conventional narrative allows for.
I found the "indigenous critique" fascinating and it really made me think. Schismogenesis seems likely and I accept what they have to say about it. The whole thread of how "caring work" translated into the bigger picture kind of lost me. I leave the book still somewhat uncertain as to how we landed on a world of social inequality and coercive states, given that none of it was inevitable. There are probably lots of other things I might want to say, but feel free to weigh in. If you liked Diamond's _Guns, Germs and Steel_, Harari's _Sapiens_, or Scott's work on "grain states", I do highly recommend this.
The Prophet with The Forerunner and The Madman by Kahlil Gibran
inspiring
medium-paced
4.0
Delightful
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
dark
lighthearted
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Great read. I was amazed at how light and airy the prose was, given how dark the subject matter is. A pretty fantastic contrast there.