Category: Thoughts

We are all struggling with garbage. It comes in so many varied forms. In the world of information the battle against garbage may not take the form of a threat to the environment, but its threat to our time, sanity, and intellectual positions is clear and present. Like any researcher in an archive or a student in their favorite library, the moment all of us began using the internet for our work, study, or daily questions, we have all needed to refine our garbage filters. The arts of skimming, sorting, and analysis are combined with our most powerful weapon against garbage on the internet: the back button.

Of course, one researcher’s garbage, is another’s gold mine. The same, I think, can be said for some of the physical garbage we are filling our landfills and furnaces with. However, I’ll leave that question for another time. It is the many different ways of dealing with this physical garbage which has caught my interest of late…
Continue reading Garbage Regimes

I took a lot of notes today. I have a growing collection of typed up notes from various things I have read of late which is a great source to go back to. I do a lot of highlighting or tabbing (if I don’t own the book or a photococpy) of what I read and then type up these tabbed or highlighted passages and/or notes/summaries/responses to them.

Not only is this very time consuming but I am really worried about whether or not this method is any good. Unlike some, after having read a book or book, I soon forget both the details, argument, and even interesting points found in it. Thus, I feel like to gain something from the activity, I must make some “record” of my having read it. While I may never review these notes, at least I have them to refer to, thus ideally acting as a “substitute” for engaging a given, perhaps difficult, text again at a later date. So far this has been in the form of selecting quotes and passages that I feel represent the important arguments or points in a passage.

However, I am worried about whether this is really a good method. I would ideally like to take “notes of notes” (which a professor of mine once insisted as the best method) where a second pass over notes reduce your notes even further to a short readable narrative. However, I find that going back to my notes, I can hardly reconstruct that narrative. Even after reading a chapter I don’t feel confident enough in my ability to summarize an argument coherently or even have the energy to recreate it with a more free interplay of my own ideas with the text. I feel that this act “violates” the text in a way. This of course, may reveal more about my lack of attention in reading than my lack of skill in note taking. However, I suspect there is a deeper problem which I only barely understand. It is the problem of negotiating my relationship with a given text and of certain problematic assumptions I have long held about the status of my role as reader. I think I am reading too much theory…I can’t think straight.

I have spent a full week focused on reading, and haven’t allowed any programming distract me. I try to divide my time between my Korean study, Japanese readings in history, and more theoretical stuff mostly written in English. In this last category I’m currently stumbling through Wittgenstein and Derrida and Partha Chaterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Chaterjee is an easy read (although to be fair, it would be difficult to imagine how one could make the first of these two books an “easy read”) and although I’m only through the introduction, I already find some of his observations sharp and relevant.

What prompted me to post today is confusion I feel at his attack, by now quite familiar to me in my reading, on what he consistently refers to as “liberal-rationalists”. While I have a similar reaction to many other things I read in the same vein, Chaterjee’s succinct summary of his version of the argument makes it easy to reproduce for comment.

I am gradually beginning to understand the range of criticisms of “analytical” or “modernist” or “liberal-rationalist” and have begun to sympathize with some of their moves and choice of targets. However, I am still very uncomfortable with approaches which seem to result in blatantly circular reasoning or, to put it another way, seem to launch an attack on reason itself, by means of reasonable arguments, only then to go on and continue to use familiar methods of the “rational” mode both to argue their own positive case, and to condemn their opponents within their own camp of critical thinkers.

I will get to some specific examples from Chaterjee’s introduction shortly. I will first say that I’m familiar, or at least becoming familiar, with some of the potentialy responses to this. That is, there are ways in which rationality, and particularly its propensity for universality, progressivism, and a “logic of the present” are critiqued, rationality delimited, and then revived in a new delimited state. Much of this hinges on key debates on the nature and limits of language (which justifies my digression in the world of Wittgenstein and Derrida). However, I don’t believe this process, even if it is possible, escapes some of the consequences of relativism. I believe that what results is a necessary split amongst those who endorse this form of critique: They may choose to believe that the consequences of relativism are indeed great and hold that there is a moderate “third way” which neither suffers the totalizing ills of modern “liberal-rationalist” thinking nor the “Nietzschean” extremes of the other side. Another option is to profess that there are no disturbing consequences of relativism, or that there is no way to avoid such consequences (so we might as well deal with them), or that the normative judgments implicit with the identification of such consequences is merely a reflection of traces of “liberal-rationalist” thinking.

For those who are confused, read on for a less abstract example of a point in which I feel this issue arises.
Continue reading Liberal-rationalists

Many of my friends know that sometime half way through my masters degree I found a renewed interest in history and theory. This has prompted a lot of new reading and re-thinking. Much of this reading involves areas of thought I have never had much exposure to while some of it is re-covering old ground. Today I read a short introductory work on Wittgenstein, a somewhat problematic figure in the field of analytical philosophy, where I spent many of my undergraduate days.

The work has left me a bit frustrated, to say the least. In addition to many other reactions I won’t share here, it made me realize the incredible lack of context which marked my undergraduate training in philosophy…
Continue reading ‘Cat on the Mat’ and other Troubles

My study of the Korean language is progressing only slowly, especially since I’m neither enrolled in any serious program of language study here nor am I in Korea where I might use the language daily. I supplement the study of various textbooks and the use of my flashcard software with a number of language exchanges with Korean friends of mine. Their patience and kind explanations have been the most crucial to my attempt to gain proficiency while I’m in Japan.

I have been using a number of textbooks of varying quality. All of them have little attached sections which introduce the culture and history of Korea itself or the city of Seoul. None of these little sections have (yet) taken up the topic of Christianity in Korea and its strong evangelistic tendencies, which, prior to my study of the Korean language, has been the feature of Korea that I took greatest notice of.

However, in two of my textbooks, Christianity does pop up indirectly in the instructive language material of the text itself, and it does so in a way I have seen in no textbook for the Japanese or Chinese languages…
Continue reading Korean Language Textbooks and Christianity

I just finished watching “Hero”. I was fascinated by it, but found it to be a deeply disturbing movie. In fact, it is a very difficult movie to review. The movie’s basic story surrounds the attempts of a group of assasins to kill the ruler of the kingdom of Qin. The movie alternates between Jet Li’s conversation with the king of Qin and the various battles and stories of the assasins themselves.

On the one hand, it is a very simple movie. It is possible to describe the movie as one with a simple story, very simple images, simple characters, and a very simple message. You could either criticize the movie for its simplicity, or pour praise on it for its beauty and sincerity. It has and doubtlessly will continue to receive awards and admiration for its perfection of a kind of purity of style we are used to seeing in the best of Chinese cinema.

On the other hand, the movie, or specifically, its message, is disturbing. I think Chinese and non-Chinese alike who are familiar with the history of Qin, or at least understand the basic ideas of the movie will, after seeing this movie, feel at least torn and at most horrified. I would like to think (and I have yet to read any reviews or web sites discussing the director’s own thoughts about the movie) that we are meant to feel deeply torn and disgusted by the movie, but the final images and captions of the movie suggest otherwise.
Continue reading 英雄 (Hero)