Gerard Chote wrote: Tue May 16, 2023 1:52 pm

InMySoul77 wrote: Tue May 16, 2023 5:13 am Allen Ginsberg's collected poems. One of my favorites. In a different era stuff like this would have gotten him kicked out of the country like Emma Goldman:

http://www.naseeb.com/journals/industrial-waves-94329

Freedom to put pederasts in Prison

nambla alert

Yes, I'm not defending that.

The Order of Things (Foucault, 1966).

This book charts the development of Western thinking through a series of stages termed épistémès. An épistémè is a certain configuration of methods, habits and attitudes for classifying and ordering things in the world, which determines the bounds for what will count as knowledge in any given setting.

In the 16th century, what passes for science takes place concurrently with studies of ancient manuscripts and the Bible. All these are considered to take place within the same sphere, the content discerned through them to proceed from the same source. Nature is here imagined as a kind of text, written by the creator, which is to be read and interpreted by humans. The creator speaks knowledge directly through things by means of marks or signs which serve as clues for an interpreter. These clues have the character of resemblances - resemblances in colour and the like; or resemblances in terms of metaphor, or the idea of a thing having its counterpart somewhere else (the head is like the heavens, or hair is like grass or whatever). Several examples of these are given, only a small part of which I can clearly form an idea of. The ones called "sympathies" draws my mind to The Golden Bough, where it is said that in "sympathetic" magic, something red might be used to cure a disease of the blood, or something white to cure fever, since white means cold, and things like that - I'm assuming it's something similar here.

This view begins to dissolve as it becomes clear that surface-level perception and intuition are inadequate to gain satisfactory knowledge. In 1620, Francis Bacon voices this burgeoning awareness in noting that our senses deceive us and are unreliable (he also firmly rejects magic, which is a centerpiece of the 16thC épistémè, for reasons I didn't quite grasp).

In the 17th and 18th centuries, knowledge is a question of identifying types of things and their properties. Going beyond the thing as it appears, things in the world are analyzed, picked apart into their components, classified according to which of these properties they share with other things, and ordered according to degrees of difference. Whereas earlier, nature was a kind of tale that went on forever, now there is a set number of knowable things in the universe, and there is no hidden backside, no secret depth from which something further might go on to be told - once it is known, it is known. At the same time, knowledge is still pre-written into the world, in the sense that things have an unambiguous essence to them, the exact nature of which can be known. For the investigator, it is then a question of correctly distinguishing and naming the component parts of a thing and their composition - forming a representation, an accurate model of the real thing - and furthermore classifying and cataloguing all available things.

Knowledge has now undergone a formalization, and constitutes a sphere unto itself, separate from things. It has its own content and inner structure, which can be studied by methods internal to itself. Mathematics become the way to conceive the fundamental structure of the world, and language becomes an object of systematic study.

In the same way as there is a one-to-one relationship between sign and thing, all knowledge functions within the sphere of ordinary language - it is possible for a learned individual to converse on these things on the same terms as a scientist. This is something which changes in the 19thC, where science becomes professionalized and breaks up into a number of specialized discourses, making unhindered communication much harder, and establishing a separate "language of science", consigning everyday language use to a strictly literary sphere. This at least this is my guess from a handful of clues given, I haven't quite gotten to that part yet.

In the national mythology, Sweden is often said to have had a particularly long history of political equality. A recent book, whose translated title reads The Most Equal Country in the World?, makes the case that the reality is the opposite. Sweden in the late 1800s, as a democratic mass movement was taking shape, was a particularly unequal country, compared to most other European nations.

While in several other places - France, England, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the United States - extended male suffrage, in whole or in part, was an established fact, in Sweden political power was fully concentrated among the very wealthiest. Interestingly, this provides a plausible explanation for why the pro-democracy movement became so broad and numerous - since such large parts of the population were excluded. The different groupings making up this movement were also relatively free from attempts at infiltration or compromise by the powerful - the Swedish elite were secure in their control of the government, and therefore didn't worry as much about controlling public opinion. In England by contrast, the Tories made extensive efforts to court working class support, and Labour had a harder time gaining a foothold.

Adding to this fact, Sweden had a particularly sophisticated state apparatus going back to the 16th century, with unparalleled powers of record-keeping and taxation. The Social Democratic party therefore inherited a fully-formed advanced bureaucracy, making implementation of thoroughgoing reforms a simple matter. The book names the United States as a contrast, where a much more chaotic administrative structure has proved an obstacle to similar attempts, and furthermore has made itself vulnerable to capture by partisan interests.

Noteworthy is that in a diagram comparing economic inequality between different nations over the 1800s, the US comes out significantly better than the rest - which I guess makes sense, since so many European workers migrated in this period. Unclear how slavery fits into this picture though. The US is noted as having a vibrant political culture, but also particularly vicious anti-union practices.

Vashti Bunyan’s book is beautiful

i'm reading Pedro Paramo again

The Last Duel by Eric Jager.

Just read The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin. Kind of a history of perfumery but heavily into the chemistry of the molecules both natural and synthetic that go into perfume. Pretty technical, will have to read again.

Just started You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr. Pretty good so far.

The KLF book.

^I had not heard of that book nor this author. I'm fascinated by his choices of subject matter and interests. Guess I have a new author to explore, thanks.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. Heard about it from a podcast interview with Chuck Palahniuk. It's good so far.