Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Edward Said's Orientalism

"I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico's great obser- ((5)) vation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geo-graphical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities —such locales, regions, geographical sectors as "Orient" and "Occident" are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other."

"My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too positivistic a localized focus."

"In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: "The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is `knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory." The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci's comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci's Italian text concludes by adding, "therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.'""



"It is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality. A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call "the land of the barbarians." In other words, this universal practice of designating in one's mind a familiar space which is "ours" and an unfamiliar space beyond "ours" which is "theirs" is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word "arbitrary" here because imaginative geography of the "our land—barbarian land" variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for "us" to set up these boundaries in our own minds; "they" become "they" accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from "ours." To a certain extent modern and primitive societies seem thus to derive a sense of their identities negatively. A fifth-century Athenian was very likely to feel himself to be nonbarbarian as much as he positively felt himself to be Athenian. The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is "out there," beyond one's own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the un-familiar space outside one's own. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote an analysis of what he called the poetics of space. The inside of a house, he said, acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagfined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. The same process occurs when we deal with time. Much of what we associate with or even know about such periods as "long ago" or "the beginning" or "at the end of time" is poetic—made up. For a historian of Middle Kingdom Egypt, "long ago" will have a very clear sort of meaning, but even this meaning does not totally dissipate the imaginative, quasi-fictional quality one senses lurking in a time very different and distant from our own. For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away. This is no less true of the feelings we often have that we would have been more "at home" in the sixteenth century or in Tahiti."

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Thoughts October 20th, Post-Foreign Policy Analysis Lecture

Just got out of my Foreign Policy Analysis lecture on "Goals, Rationality, and the Means/Ends Problem."

As I get deeper into the theory behind foreign policy and any international action, which involves quite a bit of psychoanalysis on the state-as if it was an individual- I realize how congruent these themes are with everyday life and relationships.

The cognitive revolution rejected simple behaviorist models and began to speculate on how thought processes shaped one's choices. The men working in this field found that humans are not rational beings and do not follow the rational model that so many theories of social science are founded upon (i.e. we expect actor A to do this and this, so we, actor B, will react with this and this).

  • Humans are simple and ignore historical context and use analogical reasoning when they shouldn't.
  • Humans are uncomfortable by dissonant information and will deny or discount inconsistent information to preserve their beliefs (we saw this within the Bush administration and his preference for intel stovepiped by Rumsfeld). People implement "defensive cognitions" to maintain what is called "cognitive consistency," the trend of people to resist change. 
  • Humans are poor estimators. Probability is not our strong suit, not when it comes to formulating the math, but rather when it comes to acting on that math. For instance, policy makers always overestimate the likelihood of war and then base their foreign policies on the possibility of war. 
  • Lastly, humans are adverse to loss and would prefer an immediate smaller gain than taking a chance on a longer term reward. 


Neuroscience has shown that many, if not most, decisions are the product of strong emotional responses, and that humans feel before we think or reason. 

Monday, October 19, 2015

Natalie Babbitt

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.”