I've finished my third trio of literature, and I'm here to tell you all about it.
For this set, we have:
Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive by Giorgio Agamben
The Stand by Stephen King
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Reviews follow after the break.
Remnants of Auschwitz. Giorgio
Agamben pursues a number of ethical and philosophical questions that
arise when confronted by the testimony and records of Auschwitz
survivors. Chief among them is what it means to be a witness to
something so impossible to describe, and both what it means to be a
subject that can bear shame and to be beyond subjecthood. The book is
divided into four sections. First is The Witness, which is a discussion
on what what a witness is, and how a Holocaust survivor can and cannot
be a complete witness to the death camps. The second section is the
Muselmann, which is a term that arose for those in the camps who were
still alive, but had essentially stopped being subjects, incapable of
doing anything other than surviving, calling into question the limits
and thresholds of ethics and humanity. Section three enlarges on the
notion of subject, considering shame, the subject, and the "I." And the
final section brings these points together, as Agamben defines in the
archive and the testimony in light of the potentiality and possibility
of language. I'll quickly admit that a lot of the book went right over
my head, especially towards the latter half; Agamben's finer points on
language and poetry in relation to the threshold of subject kind of
escaped me. He's also using a lot of rather heavy theorists, including
but not limited to Kant, Foucault, Heidegger, and Bettelheim, and if
you're not reasonably familiar with these figures, you're going to find
the book hard going. In addition to the theorists, Agamben also relies
heavily on the testimonies of survivors,such as Primo Levi, while at the
same time questioning what a testimony can even mean. While it wasn't
an easy read, Agamben does convey the significance of the problem, and
the emotional void that lies at the heart of the issue. Part of what's
at stake here is what it means to be human and ethical in a world where
like Auschwitz exist, turning them to their limits and going beyond.
The Stand.
** spoiler alert **
Do spoilers still count for a
book that, even in its newer, uncut, form is over 20 years old? We'll
assume they do. The plot: A superflu called Captain Trips is
accidentally released, and the world loses about 99% of its population
in the course of a few months. The American survivors soon band
together, with one group forming around a kindly old woman, and another,
centered in Las Vegas, forming around Randall Flagg, he of In the Eyes
of the Dragon and the Dark Tower series, here making his debut. I
suppose my biggest problem with this book is that once the communities
coalesce, the main protagonists all seem rather identical and
interchangeable, despite the superficial differences. It had me rooting
for the villains for a while, just because they were the ones showing
some personality. The ending wasn't particularly to my tastes either; I
do appreciate the "evil is its own undoing" sort of theme, but the flip
side to that is the ending is one of those endings where the
protagonists win by showing up--and in this case, they might have been
slightly better if they hadn't shown up at all. I think there's also
something to be said about setting--Dark Tower and the Dragon story have
an explicitly fantasy setting, where it's easier to accept figures like
Flagg, as ultimate evil, existing. In a real world setting--even a
post-apocalyptic one--there's only so much I'm willing to accept, and
protagonists who are operating purely on faith is not one of them. It's
not a bad book--the initial parts leading up to the virus and its
aftermath are very compelling in the way they depict a society
collapsing in on itself. And the later passages definitely have their
moments. But at 1000+ pages, it's a bit of a slog.
Alone Together. Sherry Turkle argues that we
need to take a step back and think about how our networked technology
and distance from fellow human beings are negatively affecting us. Her
book is divided into two broad parts: section one looks at human
relationships with robots, and section two looks at human use of
communication technology. The methodology is basically the same
throughout; Turkle bases her results on the analysis she performs on
interviews and studies she performed of children, adults, and the
elderly using digital technology. It's basically pop scholarship, but
Turkle constantly references underlying structure of psychoanalytic and
sociological theory behind it. While the divisions aren't absolute,
different chapters tend to focus on slightly different technologies.
Robots studied include the Tamagotchi, Furby, My Real Baby, the robot
dog AIBO, the MIT robots Cog and Kismet, and Paro the sociable seal-like
robot. And throughout, Turkle's concern is that the robots are being
used as companions to replace companionship that human beings should
provide. The networked section includes Second Life, texting, phone
monitoring, the decline of actual phone calls, designing a Facebook
persona, and so forth, with the concern here being that we're
sacrificing meaningful interaction for something that leaves us less
vulnerable, but less fulfilled. The book is a rather large reversal
from Turkle's previous position, but whereas before she was a bit too
utopian, this book strikes me as a bit too dystopian. There's also an
unspoken human essentialism behind it, in that no robot can duplicate
the human touch, or no text message equal the emotionality of the human
voice. It's a little easier to take her side in the second half, where
she argues against the current overuse of communication technology than
in the first half, which is on the near future replacement of human
companionship with robots. Ultimately, what's at stake here is the
human relationship with technology. I think Turkle goes a bit far in
the direction of technological determinism, but taking some time to
reflect on our technological habits is rarely a bad idea.
There's not a lot to say about how these three speak to each other, save to say that reading them back to back really drove home the point that Holocaust trumps... anything really. In comparison to Auschwitz, the Stand's horror seems like really light fare. And compared to the Muselmann, Turkle's whole book can be reduced to a "firstworldproblems" hashtag. However much people may be treating other people as objects, at least we're not treating them as excess, inhuman waste. My thoughts on the Stand haven't really changed much with time; I still don't have a lot of truck with a plot that essentially amounts to trusting in God's plan, especially when God's plan coincides with Author's Convenience. King is a lot better at writing society falling apart than society coming together. I actually sided with the villains in being disappointed that the heroes re-instituted the US constitution
without any discussion, especially when they complain at the end that the mistakes of the past may be repeated. Want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? How about starting by not blindly accepting the rules of the past? I've never understood the American reverence of the founding documents. In my mind, a truly great constituting document evolves with the people who wrote it. Finally, it seems to me that the key to Turkle's book is her relation with her daughter. Honestly, I think it's watching her daughter react to modern technology and comparing it to her own relationship with her mother that influences her current stance, perhaps even more so than the entire sum of her case studies and interviews. I could make more gross assumptions about people I don't know, but I think that's enough. See you next time.
Later Days.
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