Our second set of visitors is my wife’s mother and youngest sister. They arrive on the Friday of that same week (giving us a few days to finish off work, clean up, and tie up any loose ends). It also happens that our anniversary (has it only been four years??) falls between these two visits, so I hope to do something for that in the in-between time. Their first weekend will be a little tamer than our first visitor’s, as we’ll be staying around Glasgow for that weekend. However, once the weekend’s over, we’re heading up north into the Scottish Highlands. We’ll spend a night in Carbisdale Castle, followed by a run through Loch Ness, Skye, Oban (with a photo stop at Castle Stalker), Iona, and Loch Lomond before returning to Glasgow a few days later. We’ll spend the weekend recovering from that run, but it won’t last long.

Part three of our month will be a raid into English territory (finally). We’ll first make a run to London through the eastern part of England, passing through Leeds and Nottingham to see Fountains Abbey, Herriot country, and Nottingham Castle (with the Sherwood Forest). After a few days in London, we’ll begin our journey back through the western part of England (sorry, no Wales this trip), passing through Stonehenge, Avebury, Bath, Manchester, Carlisle (and the Lake District), Hadrian’s Wall, and possibly Edinburgh before returning to Glasgow. With July over, our visitors will return to the New World and leave us to hibernate in the quickly growing night that is winter in the north (we’ll lose two hours of daylight between now and the time they leave in August).

Needless to say, I’ll be very sparse in July.

As a result of Professor Leiter’s rudeness, the drama has continued. First, Graham posted an example of Leiter’s callousness regarding Derrida’s death. Not to be outdone, Leiter sends off retorts to Graham as well as Michael (the postgrad student). It’s great to stand one’s ground, however name-dropping and appealing to a reputation league table (which Leiter himself organises!) isn’t the best argument. We all know that good things only come out of the top 10 philosophy programmes in anglo-american analytic philosophy. We all certainly know that Leiter is the authority for reputation throughout the philosophy world, as he himself has demonstrated by naming people who he considers good sources…even if half of them are unheard of at continental programmes.  That’s probably because those programmes are ranked low on Leiter’s scale and therefore cannot be considered good sources of continental philosophy. Next, we’ll be hearing that Deleuze isn’t a major figure in recent continental thought. Go figure.

I take the main focus of the film to be that religious faith and objective science is incompatible. In fact, religious faith is now an absurdity in these modern times. Maher travels quite a bit throughout the US, Europe, and Israel interviewing people who would generally be classified as fundamentalists in their approaches to theology. At one point, he is interviewing Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis and its Creation Museum fame). He takes Ham to task in resolving huge differences between scientific evidence and the “common sense” literal reading of creation espoused by young Earth creationism. From my perspective, Ham’s creationism here has already lost its sense of direction by adopting the language and system of scienctific observation that negates the teleological goal of creationism. In oversimplified terms, Ham’s creation science is much like trying to raise freshwater fish in salt water; the freshwater fish behave at the cellular/organic level differently than saltwater fish. The language and goals of the creation story in Genesis, much like the stories of Christ in the Gospels, are not meant to adhere to modern-day scientific (or biographical) literature. In this respect, Maher is spot on with his critique of faith. If one holds religious faith to be coterminal with empirical science, faith will always lose because it centers on phenomena that exceed the bounds empirical science has made for itself.

On the other hand, Maher’s critique is the the “atheist version” of the very thing he critiques. In one segment, he is asking a few Muslims (including an imam) about the Qur’an. His questions fall along the lines of “the Qur’an says to kill infidels, is this true?” Every Muslim asked answers the question along the lines of “that is not how we interpret that text because it was linked to a particular historical context that no longer exists.” Maher pushes his point by denying the possibility of interpretation, setting himself up as the more accurate interpreter than the believers who study the text! This is the same thing that he critiques people such as Ken Ham (and others). In other words, Maher wants religious/theological hermeneutics to be a closed event ripped from any context and made into an absolute ideological framework in order to reject religion. He then rationalises his work by claiming its standpoint of doubt is the best position.

Ironically, it is here that Maher again falls prey to the very thing he criticises. If doubt is the best place to stand, he hasn’t doubted enough! The “true” sceptic is the one that doubts everything, not just what one is prejudiced against. Maher emphasis empirical science as the strongest evidence for his position, yet he never doubts the framework of assumptions that undergird the empirical sciences. He never suggests that empirical evidence itself may be already tainted by a predisposition to certain beliefs (namely, that an external world exists and is discernable). Obviously, then, Maher should insist that some kind of belief is “acceptable” without entering into fundamentalism or scepticism. It seems, then, that the rational position is somewhere between the fundamentalism he decries while using and the scepticism he touts while evading.

One last thing of interesting note is that Maher suggests in his film that science has discovered a gene that is linked to belief in God. Ironically, the original researcher said that it was linked to spirituality and “feeling God’s presense” and not to simple belief in God. Further, these findings were never published in peer-reviewed literature. Even more striking is that this gene can also be associated with the feeling of beloning to a political party. In other words, it isn’t a very strong theory and it doesn’t suggest that belief in God is a genetic trait. Perhaps if Maher had utilised more of his “scepticism,” he would have noticed that.

Writing

• Finish up the 5000 word excerpt of my thesis for my annual review.
• A conference paper on Deleuze’s Logic of Sense as it relates to theological hermeneutics (which overlaps a bit with the previous item)
• A review of Adam Kotsko’s Zizek and Theology
• An additional 15k-ish words of my thesis working on ontology and metaphysics and their relationship to hermeneutics and symbolism

Reading

• Badiou’s Being and Event
• Badiou’s Logics of Worlds
• Zizek’s Parallax View
• Milbank and Zizek’s Monstrosity of Christ
• Levi Bryant’s Difference and Givenness
• Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks

Errata

• Update a few PHP scripts that I’ve been meaning to do for nearly a year
• Step down from my PHP scripting roles as I don’t have the time anymore (sorry guys!)
• Spend a month inundating myself with every tourist spot in Great Britain (and many in Ireland)
• ConnectDeleuze conference in Cologne
• “Brush up” on my French and German
• Added late: switch server hosting to a simpler plan

Deleuze immediately makes clear the infinite regress of sense. Carroll’s work is insightful because it makes us confront “a synthesis of the heterogeneous; the serial form is necessarily realized in the simultaneity of at least two series” (36). the infinite regress of sense is itself a series, a series of multiple series that each inhere on each other–a synthesis of series. The two series operate different: one as signifier and the other as signified. The direct result of these two inhering on each other is a disequilibrium created by the excess of one in the other. The signifier series manifests as an occupant without a place, a supernumerary object in the signified series. This signified creates an empty place within the signifier. The excess of each series manifests as both esoteric and exoteric words in paradoxical forms in which each exists “only through the relations they maintain with one another” (50).

These relations, then, create singularities–that is, points of turning, inflections, tears, fusion, etc. Each of these “correspond to each one of the series of a structure” and is “the source of a series extending in a determined direction right up to the vicinity of another singularity” (52-3). Visually, these singularities create sets of divergent and convergent lines like that of a magnet.  Singularities form ideal events. With regards to time, events in their purest forms are never actualities. They are only tales and stories, events which are about to happen and those which have just happened. They are never in the present, never happening.

The disequilibrium of sense, which Deleuze points to through the various dualities (e.g. empty square and supernumerary object), is always in relation to itself as the paradox of nonsense (66). Nonsense, however, is not the lack of sense. The relation between sense and nonsense is not simply a copy of that between true and false. Instead, there is an original relation between the two. Sense is always produced, an effect of the relation between the signifier and signified. The paradox of sense is that nonsense is also present within sense and within the event of signification. Nonsense must be understood as being opposed to the abscense of sense because it produces sense in excess.

Sense should not be confused with “good sense.” “Good sense” always come second to sense as it presupposes a distrubution of sense. It, like the arrow of time, determines the direction which sense runs. The paradox of sense, though, is that it goes both directions simultaneously. Common sense identifies the objects within a language. Yet in Alice, identity is completely lost. The paradox is this reversal of both good sense and common sense. Alice discovers through the looking glass that common sense has long disappeared. Yet, at this very point where language itself seems impossible, “having no subject which expresses or manifests itself in it, no object to denote, no classes and no properties to signify according to a fixed order,” that the gift of meaning occurs before all good and common sense (79). With the passion of this paradox, language reaches the height of its power. The two directions of sense, of becoming-mad, are represented in by Carroll’s doubles. The pair of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare each live in one direction, the two inseparable from one another. Each direction segments itself to “the point that both are found in either” (79). The Hatter and Hare killed the present which survives only in the Dormouse. The present subsists only as the abstract moment, infinitely subdivisible into past and future. The maifestation of sense is always a fragile one within and without the abstract moment of the present.

Historically

Fundamentalism’s roots were perceived to be “good grounds.”  What are these grounds?  Fundamentalism began in the mid-19th century American. Historically, it has been associated strictly with American evangelicalism as a reaction to contemporary ideological changes. Its main concerns were the “higher criticism” of European Biblical scholars and the “discovery” of evolutionary science. In many ways, fundamentalism wanted to protect the theology and tradition from these new, radical ideas. The first concern was seen (and is still seen by the theological descendants today) as an attack on the integrity of the Biblical text, largely because the fundamentalist understanding was based on a literal, common sense reading.  What Biblical scholars now call the grammatico-historical method (other names include textual criticism, historical-grammatical method, etc) and practice regularly was a new thing in the 19th century and some proponents of it had radical (revisionist) readings of the Bible.  The emergence of fundamentalism (what I will call historical fundamentalism) was a reaction against such readings.  The reasoning used by these fundamentalists was that the meaning of the Bible is very clear and in plain English; further study was not needed because one only needs common sense to clearly understand the Biblical text (WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get).

The second reaction historic fundamentalism had was against recent scientific developments, namely Darwin’s evolution. This was perceived as an attack on the literal interpretation of the creation account which narrates God’s carefully guided sculpting of things. We can see the effects of this reaction in documentaries like Jesus Camp where children are taught that “science proves nothing” (which would also include the Copernicus’s heliocentrism, modern immunology, and modern technology).

The Fundamentals

Here is the very true “lie” behind historical fundamentalism: their reading is the closest reading to that of the earliest Church. They believe they have recovered the lost truth hidden behind traditional readings. It is this concept of having recovered the “real interpretation” that marks fundamentalism across religious boundaries.  In order to differentiate it from the historical variety above, I will refer to it as generic fundamentalism.  We see this aspect in modern fundamentalist groups whether they be Christian (e.g., Army of God, Moral Majority), Muslim (e.g. al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood), Hindu, or Buddhist. This type of thinking is common to both Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell, even though their practices (terrorism vs. political campaigning) were very different. The methodology focuses on a highly literal reading of texts. As a result of this methodology, newer theologies (e.g., premillenialism) were advocated over older ones on the basis of simple, literal interpretation divorced from any kind of contextual understanding of the text (whether it be linguistic, historical, or even textual).

The second true “lie” that permeates fundamentalism is that the fundamentalist interpretation/reaction is recast as being the most reasoned, logical possibility. Earlier, I mentioned Jesus Camp where children are taught “science proves nothing.” This is followed by an argument that all of science is merely faith belief (which I think is a poor view of faith as well, but that’s another story!). Therefore, the fundamentalist opinion must be the best option because it rests on the stable absolute, unchanging interpretation of things that can be traced all the way back to God’s thoughts and actions. In other words, fundamentalists have God on their side and must be correct because of that fact. The irony, however, is watching the fundamentalist use things that are direct results of scientific exploration (which apparently gets lucky every now and then even if it proves nothing), such as celleular phones (radio waves discovered by science as well as the technology to use those waves as a medium for communication), electricity, modern farming (which uses chemicals developed by science), etc.

The two “lies” that form the foundation for fundamentalist ideology are as important to understanding fundamentalism as are the truths. This is because these “lies” fabricate the illusioned reality that fundamentalism has reached its ultimate point of interpretation: the Truth. As such, no alternative can be entertained without entering the danger of total collapse. By setting up camp in a particular conflux of history and ideologies, there is no possibility of change or growth within an iteration of fundamentalism.  There can only be a whole new fundamentalism, more extreme than the last and yet exactly the same. Fundamentalism, as an ideology, is a perfect example of Nietzsche’s eternal return as it is a repetition of the Same. The difference itself is as much of an illusion as the foundation beneath fundamentalism. It is the potential of change that creates the violence which always surfaces through militant groups battling the evil that is contemporary society, whether it be seen in spiritual asceticism or physical attacks. These two images are one and the same coin, always occuring simultaneously that form the central element of a living religious tradition, especially when the two are at odds with one another.

Following the previous post on signification, the 4th series in Logic of Sense turns to dualities.  Speaking occurs as a movement along the surface (of the Möbius strip of meaning) and has everything to do with eating and being eaten. When one speaks, the subject which one speaks erupts from one’s lips (i.e. when one says “horse”, a horse jumps out of one’s mouth). The same is also true of hearing in that we eat the words; that is, the duality of cause (speaking) and effect (meaning) must coexist within one another in order to make the event of sense.

The 5th series turns back to the name of sense. It is an infinite regress of signification and denotation, which we find in Alice’s encounter with the Knight:

“The name of the song is called ‘Haddock’s Eyes‘” — “Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested. — “No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name of the song is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man.’” — “Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself. — “No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means‘: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!” — “Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. — “I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a Gate‘!…” (29)

In Carroll’s writing, there are four classification of names: “there is [1] the name of what the song really is; the [2] name denoting this reality, which thus denotes the song or represents what the song is called; [3] the sense of this name, which forms a nre name or a new reality; and [4] the name which denotes this reality, which thus denotes the sense of the name of the song, or represents what the name of the song is called” (30). These four names are enough to provide a model of infinite regress of meaning as an alternation of a “real” name and a name which designates that reality. Sense is independent of this regress of signification. The event of sense always occurs twice in Alice because “they are two simultaneous faces of one and the same surface, whose inside and outside, their ‘insistence’ and ‘extra-being,’ past and future, are in an always reversible continuity” (34).

In the “Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects” in Logic of Sense, Deleuze turns the play between causes and effects to the surface (so to speak). The two are transformed into bodies and events that manifest on the surface. In Alice in Wonderland, the animals (which are deep) are usurped as “nobility” by thickless card figures (p. 9). Deleuze suspects that Alice isn’t about the adventures of Alice (as the original title suggested) but about the single adventure of Alice: “her climb to the surface, her avowal of false depth, and her discovery that everything happens at the border” (9). It is on the surface where bodies produce events and have effects and Lewis Carroll saw this clearly.  In Sylvie and Bruno, the character “[learns] his lessons in all manners, inside-out, outside-in, above and below, but never ‘in depth’” (10).

Manifestation is part of the hermeneutical cycle for Deleuze.  Unlike Heidegger’s hermeneutical circle, Deleuze suggests it is a Möbius strip.  This strip highlights the logical paradox of signification that “‘Z is true if A, B, and C are true…,’ and so on to infinity” (16). The truth of a proposition is much like the Snark in Alice. It is by unfolding and untwisting the Möbius strip that the dimension of sense appears as it animates the (truth of) the proposition (20). The image of the Möbius strip represents the hermeneutical cycle not as a circle but as “the coexistence of two sides without thickness, such that we pass from one to the other by following their length” (22). Sense is not an effect or a result but the extra-Being which inheres or subsists; it is an “event” but “on the condition that the event is not confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs” (22). Language itself is the flat world of the sense-event.

A quick summary of the series: humans are nearly eradicated by Cylons (robots created by those humans a while back) and are chased by them for most of ther series.  Some Cylons rebel against the rest and join forces with the humans.  Oh and many of the Cylons are indistunguishable from humans.  Come to find out some Cylons from a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away as well) came in and stopped the “first war” between them and, in exchange, helped the Cylons perfect their human look-a-like models.  Now, fast forward to the end of the series during the final confrontation between the human side and Cylon side. The Final Five Cylons that came into the fray and crafted the armistice are siding with the humans (and, in fact, did not know they were Cylons until late in the game).  The humans have destroyed the central system that allows the Cylons to live forever (basically, the persona data gets downloaded into a new body of the same model when the old one dies/is killed).  The Final Five offer a new armistice: give the Cylons the information needed to recreate what was destroyed and both sides go their separate ways believing/hoping in faith that the other is trying to hunt them down (again).  The humans agree to this as well as the Cylon “leader”, Number 1 (this being his model number).  For the Final Five to get the information, they need to interface together in order to piece together the data that each has.  Of course, when this happens, the dark past of one of them enrages another and results in one of the Final Five being killed immediately and the information lost forever.  Throughout the confrontation, the Cylons have the military advantage (the battle being on their home turf with plenty more operational weaponry and numbers than the humans.  However, at this point in the finale, #1, who is fully aware of this situation, commits suicide; he moves the handgun in his hand to his mouth and pulls the trigger.

What is it that made #1 do this when the Cylons could have easily destroyed these humans (as well as the last bit of worthwhile weaponry the humans had)?  Sure, because of the numbers in that specific situation, #1’s chances of surviving the fight was minimal, but suicide?  I think the issue came down to that of hope.  Throughout the series, #1 claimed to be an atheist (whereas the rest of the Cylons were monotheists), however I think his suicide contradicts these claims. He wasn’t placed in a difficult position, nor was he forced into the compromise. He willingly accepted it because it offered him a hope of a life after death, in effect a religious hope. He quickly grabbed hold of this hope for purely selfish reasons: so that he could live another day. The very moment that hope was postponed (after all, the Cylons would have eventually recreated the missing pieces), he panics–something out of character. Instead of reasoning this as a poor choice from the writers, I will assume it was intentional and not as a way of quickly ending the series.

This panic, then, reveals #1’s true nature as a believer. He had always wanted to believe, but was afraid of what that might entail. In this sense, #1’s suicide isn’t a random act, but one of total desperation for the very belief he truly cherished.  The hope he briefly saw was the removal of his mask of unbelief. When that faltered, suicide was the only option he saw that would remove the mask because he would rather have died a believer than to live either as a believer of lies or as a false non-believer. It is within this irony that #1 reveals that his guise as a preacher was the best guise of all as it was the real him masking an illusion of an atheist.

It has been a few years since I read Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.  Since that first reading, I have wanted to read it closely, as I believe it is undervalued (or even unknown!) in hermeneutics. After much reading elsewhere, I feel comfortable enough to provide a close reading of Logic of Sense. I will not stop at every “chapter”, that is series (Deleuze has a mastery of breaking traditional authorship manners), but will instead concentrate on Deleuze’s framing of sense in hermeneutical terms, one of the larger points I believe he makes in the text. In the short preface, Deleuze provides some insight into what his focus is:

We present here a series of paradoxes which form the theory of sense. It is easy to explain why this theory is inseparable from paradoxes: sense is a nonexisting entity, and, in fact, maintains very special relations with nonsense. (Logic of Sense, xiii)

This resonates very well with Nietzsche’s concept of truth as “an army of metaphors:

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (from The Portable Nietzsche, 46-7).

Deleuze’s tactic, however, differs from Nietzsche’s.  While Nietzsche focused on genealogical analyses, Deleuze is instead insterested in seeing it relationally where “certain points of one figure in a series refer to the points of another figure” (xiv) but without depth. Deleuze’s concept of sense aims to be one of purely surface structures without any kind of hidden meaning or depth underneath it all.