The Five Senses - Michel Serres

"The soul resides at the point where the I is decided." 

Who we are, and how we understand the world, is intimately bound up in our experiences of it. While life moves forward, in the creative novelty of the moment, we try to make sense of such radical difference. To do so we create theories and labels, give names to things, impose rigid identities on all aspects of phenomena (at least the ones we accept in the first place). Our main form of communicating the world to one another, to make sense of changes over time, to reconcile differences into knowable, understandable, apt for analysis, entities, is through our language. This language, must, by-necessity, rely upon our created labels as the avenue of communication. Michel Serres has a problem with this, and thinks that, as we have become overcome with language, we are ignoring crucial aspects, not just of reality, but of ourselves.

For Serres, our world has become overrun with language. By prizing this type of knowing and communicating, at the expense of others, he believes that we have lost touch with so much human-ness. The Five Senses: a philosophy of mingled bodies (I) seeks to alert the reader to all the different ways we know through our body's unique and evolving interactions with the world around us. Serres posits that there is much of the world that we have forgotten to touch, taste, smell and feel, and, thus, our understanding of it is more limited than need be. Our reliance upon language means a focus on that which is knowable in the most conventional (read: western) sense. This relies upon a fixed definition of identity, and upon a parsing of the minutiae of experience. Science excels at such a parsing; this is not meant as a denigration. What is problematic is when we begin to assume one right way of knowing, thus remaining willfully ignorant of so much else. No matter how fine-tooth our comb, the world remains a tangled and uncertain place. Simplifying it yields a certain type of truth only.

Rather than being made up of discrete and easily isolated entities, the world is, Serres writes, a tangled multiplicity. And we are a part of it. Just as a system must be investigated to speak meaningfully of the interactions therein, we are both the result of our placement, and our actions and interactions within, and as a part of, the world around us. Understanding what that means - knowing how to paint a more fulsome picture of ourselves - requires that we do not simply approach the world through the medium of language. We constantly transcend ourselves and our definitions, so too does the world. Life at the edge of creative novelty requires that we employ all of our faculties to know. We have forgotten many of them, and, in the process, made ourselves and our world more static; more dominated by stagnant identity. The result, is death.

A Little History of the World - E.H. Gombrich

A brisk affair, A Little History of the World traces the developments and crucial narratives of how the western world came to be. Seemingly written for a latter grade school audience, Gombrich's work is satisfying reading for anyone interested in the broader currents of history. Here the reader can see how the evolution of the Roman Empire impacted the settlement of feudal Europe, or why the Middle Ages can be accurately described as an interlude most analogous to a starry night. Though Gombrich does not shy away from making moral judgments (perhaps they are more like suggestions) about the actions of past actors, such commentary reads less as a modern imposition, and more as a way of drawing the reader in and making him or her think critically. Throughout Gombrich remains aware of the people and the time that he is writing for. Rather than marginalizing his history's power, it makes even the broadest scope that much more human.


By balancing a broad and sweeping scale with an attention to illuminating details, Gombrich has achieved a neat trick of pulling the reader into the minutiae of historical scenes while still retaining a fidelity to broader context. Though more broadly read historians could (rightly) criticize him for simplifying numerous complexities, Gombrich's emphasis is as crystal clear as it is necessary: to provide an overview of the palimpsest of the west, so that younger readers might take an interest in how their world has grown and changed. The young at heart, and flexible in mind of all ages will find much to recommend this work.

Malfeasance - Michel Serres

Michel Serres has written a slim volume meandering around his thoughts about our pollution, and how we tacitly and overtly use it to claim the world. His position is that waste, refuse, in other words, death, is the foundation upon which we claim space, both physical and mental. Once a zone has been demarcated, it is a space of exclusion, of a certain identity, value, or role, at the expense of a multitude of possibilities. While certain waste is an inevitable by-product of our very beastly-ness, Serres recognizes that we pollute all of our senses in a way that is remarkable in human (planetary?) history. My vision is obscured by advertisements along the road, while simultaneously my ears are overrun by the sound of an airplane. This type of soft pollution, Serres writes, is the by-product of us having become a soft people. Largely removed from the practical business of survival, we live in a soft world of words and ideas and concepts which we mobilize. In essence even our labors are, so we conceive, removed from tangibility of the physical.

But, Serres also points out, a thing within no-place has a dubious existence, and our concepts, ideas etc do yield physical outcomes. We require space to live, and this means that we dis-place, we appropriate more and more. Rather than think about an ownership of the world (an idea that Serres believes as outlived its usefulness) we must think of ourselves as lessors of it, as renters, responsible for its safe passage into the future. A zone of exclusion leads to wantonness, whereas one of mutual responsibility and temporary residence, yields, potentially, a respect how one's impact will last. Our social compacts reach into the world, in many cases, over-power it. Our compact must respect that we are situated within the world, and that we have become a global force. Our pollution now knows no bounds, which, inevitably, means that we ourselves cannot escape it.

A Primate's Memoir - Robert Sapolsky

What comes across most in Robert Sapolsky's memoir of his time living with "his" baboon troop in Kenya, is the level to which he cares for his study subjects. As he ages Sapolsky becomes more at-peace with the idea that his care for these primates is not going to undermine his ability to contribute meaningful scientific insight. Rather, it is because he knows these primates so well, because he puzzles over them and worries about their well-being that he can reflect on the deeper aspects of what he observes. Does Sapolsky project? Of course - but his insight seems the stronger for it.

Interspersed with reflections gleaned from traveling across East Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, A Primate's Memoir is, truly, mostly about baboons. How they spend their lives. How they live and love and grow and die. While interweaving observations from his own life with those of the baboons gives a stronger feeling of kinship to Sapolsky's subjects, it also provides the reader with a localized, and thus fairly novel, insight into a changing African landscape of ecosystems and cultures.

Throughout Sapolsky does mercifully little soap-boxing - and when he does it seems eminently forgivable. By remaining introspective and self-deprecating, Sapolsky transparently exploits his own foibles and shortcomings. His wit and awareness make this work at turns humorous and heartbreaking, light and morose. Sapolsky has pulled off the neat trick of conveying his depth of care and appreciation for this one corner of the natural world, and the need for conservation, without sounding preachy or condescending to the unlettered audience. A fine read for anyone passionate about field work, conservation, or how we find our place in a complicated world when the answers are far from straightforward.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power - Robert Caro

Robert Caro's fourth installment of his life's work documenting the years of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power, details how LBJ, unable to overcome some of his most deeply-rooted demons, was unable to grab for the presidency when it might have been his. Eventually receiving second-billing on the Kennedy ticket, Johnson was seemingly ushered off the stage of history, relegated to a ceremonial bystander while "the best and the brightest" governed America. But, as of course we now know, this was not to be Lyndon Johnson's political obituary. With the crack of an assassins bullet that fateful morning in Dallas, the power Johnson had so long striven for, "by God, I'll be President someday," was suddenly thrust upon him. What Johnson did then, was, in Caro's detailed recounting, nothing short of unequaled in the history of the American republic. In a moment of supreme national agony, Johnson not only ably and with great command grasped the reins of power, but simultaneously assured the smooth transition of government, engineered the passage of monumental domestic legislation, and all but assured his re-election in a Presidential contest less than a year hence. While Johnson's three years as Vice-President may have been pure personal torture, his first seven weeks in office redound as perhaps his greatest personal triumph.

Caro has painstakingly researched the life and years of Lyndon Johnson to such an extent that we cannot help but wonder if another biography of the man and his times will ever be necessary. Throughout the four (soon-to-be five) works he has maintained a coherency of narrative allowing the reader (at least those willing to venture through 3,000-plus pages already published) to connect Johnson's strengths as a leader and man of vision, with the deeply rooted convictions bred in him from the his youth in the Texas Hill Country. What is more awe-inspiring, and perhaps more tenuous, is how Caro allows his audience to see, and to feel, LBJ's monumental insecurities, which, though he may have been able to overcome them in his first weeks as President, cannot help but loom as a grim specter over this volume. For if Lyndon B. Johnson's first days as President redound to his credit, and can be seen as a momentous capstone to a life dedicated to the pursuit of political power, then the reader cannot help but sense the extent to which the next (and final) volume, due out in two or three years, will fully detail how Johnson's weaknesses (as well as his strengths), of character, of upbringing, will conspire with events beyond his control to derail his long-held ambitions. In the end, Johnson's story cannot but be one of tragedy, pure and simple.

Tragedy requires that, for those with eyes to see, the writing is on the wall: it is only with an inevitable sense of impending doom that any tragedy is deserving of the title. We can begin to see here that the seeds for Johnson's destruction were sown in his earliest days. From The Path to Power up through this latest installment, Johnson's character has at once been his greatest strength, and his own worst enemy. What has been inescapable throughout has been LBJ's inability to moderate himself for any extended stretch of time; his seeming unwillingness to recognize that he can be his own worst enemy. When Caro describes Johnson's first weeks as President as so successful despite the man's shortcomings, the reader knows exactly what is meant. Now it is up to Caro, long after the death of this towering figure, to truly complete his story. In his research and writings Caro's work has become the definitive voice on the Years of Lyndon Johnson, and we can now begin to fully understand that those years cannot adequately be measured, our assessment of Johnson as man and as a political, as well as historical figure, not fully understood, until Caro has written his final line. For now, the last bit of Johnson's legacy still remains undisclosed and untold. Only Caro can achieve such an ending. It is the historian who will have the final word.
We wait with baited breath.

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods - Bruno Latour

Still engaged in uncovering what he calls the anthropology of the Moderns, Bruno Latour interrogates the differences, and strange similarities between science and religion. Resulting from his investigation is the conclusion that we, us Moderns, have got the relationship between science and religion all wrong. While we cast religion as being primarily concerned with some illusory world out-there, inhabiting some sort of alternative plain, Latour seeks to convince us that religion is first and foremost concerned with the here and the now, with our internal relationship to the world as we move about it. Conversely, while science is held to be concerned primarily with what is evident and immutable all around us, Latour demonstrates that it is only by covering vast spaces and leaping between different manners of reference that we can say with some certainty of faith that scientific endeavors allow people to speak meaningfully about the world.

Central to Latour's arguments is the revocation of the subjective/objective world view. Once we are able to disprove that the world simply exists "out-there" while we ourselves are trapped "in-here" (as Latour ably proves), we are led to re-imagine what sort of relationship our ways of knowing have to the manner in which we live, and, in how we conceive of the relationships between our epistemologies. Latour argues that trying to compare the differing knowledges of religious insight and scientific truth is misguided, for they are dealing with fundamentally different realities. Once we understand that the two spheres are not engaged in speaking about the same aspects of experience, we can reconcile their shared insights rather than contrasting two approaches that were not meant to contest in the first place.

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan - Herbert P. Bix

If we are to believe Herbert Bix, history has largely cast Japanese Emperor Hirohito as a relatively uninfluential bystander of Japan's involvement in the Manchuria and World War II. If we are to further believe Bix then a more in-depth look at what records are available reveals a picture of the Emperor as not only integral to Japan's war effort, but as systematically protected by his advisers in the aftermath of Japan's capitulation. With these assertions firmly in place - and to be  fully supported by what appears to be exhaustive research - Bix examines the life of the Showa emperor, particularly his political life leading up to the end of US occupation in Japan - in great depth. The result is a biography of one of the twentieth century's most misunderstood, shadowed and, eventually impactful men.

Seemingly miscast for the role of god-king into which he was born, the Showa Emperor, and grandson of the eminent Meiji, would forever remain uncomfortable asserting his total authority and even cowardly in accepting responsibility for Japan's armed forces. With a naturally retiring personality Hirohito would hold meetings of his advisers in which, after long hours, he would have said nothing at all. Leaving it to his lieutenants to deliver news, good or bad, to Japan's decision-makers, we are led to believe that Hirohito largely allowed himself to be led by wherever his strongest advisers wanted him to go. How then to square that with Bix's claim that, more so than anyone, it is upon Hirohito's shoulders that responsibility ought rest for the course of Japan in the 1930s and early 40s? While publicly trying to paint the Emperor's role as that of a British-style constitutional monarch, the truth is that Emperor's power was potentially, and at times in actuality, much more absolute. Hirohito had utmost control over Japan's armed forces and willingly allowed his generals and soldiers to perpetrate crimes that he viewed as unacceptable, but was simultaneously unwilling to stop. It was potentially within the Emperor's power to punish perpetrators and enact Japanese policies, which he was often made aware of long in advance, that could have altered the course of events, in relation to crimes against humanity and failures in persecution of the war effort. Yet, time and again, Hirohito refused to live up to his responsibility. When defeat came to Japan at the end of World War II, he was consumed with ensuring that he would remain Emperor of his country and free of any official suspicion of war crimes. As such the Emperor allowed, and sometimes encouraged the misrepresentation of war-time blame that was placed upon his generals and advisers. With the help of General MacArthur, Hirohito ensured the role of himself as necessary figurehead of a Japan in transition to post-war state. Though he was rendered largely politically impotent by the new Japanese constitution, the Showa Emperor was allowed to retain his title, his baubles and his freedom.

While Bix's biography sometimes lingers over the details of Japanese political machinations, while ignoring the larger impacts on the country - thus painting a picture of a political culture totally isolated from the people it governed - the inner workings of the Japanese system and the man whom they revolved around are given great detail and fleshed out with a character believable for his flawed nature. It is too simplistic to call the Emperor a coward, rather, Bix paints a picture of a man thrust into a role he at once felt duty-bound to succeed in, and was cursed to carry his entire life.