Saturday, June 14, 2025

“The Sublime Object of Ideology” by Slavoj Zizek

Alright well here’s another philosophy book that I certainly won’t do justice to. I grabbed this from Verso Books as I hadn’t read any Zizek and I was both pleasantly surprised by how much I got out of this while also sure that I didn’t fully understand it. The main issue is that this book is largely about Lacan, who is a philosopher that I haven’t actually read anything by, so I’m forced to take Zizek’s word for what different passages mean. But Zizek is blessed with being a relatively clear writer, he makes plenty of references to movies and pop culture so it’s very easy to follow along and get the gist of what he’s saying.

The first part of the book has to do with “the symptom” which I believe is a specific phrase to describe life under capitalism here. He discusses how it was actually first described by Marx, that there’s this contradiction between being free to sell your labor, and then once you do that, you are no longer free. This dissonance leads to the symptom, of seeing these contradictions and yet being trapped. I think Zizek coined the phrase “enjoy your symptom” and while that isn’t directly in this text I could see that coming up in a lecture or elsewhere. I’m not sure I grasp the full significance of the symptom as that seems to be his answer to everything (there’s a passage along the lines of “what existed before anything the symptom” of course) but there is an intuitive sense to it. I liken it to the idea of the absurd, that nothing really matters, there’s just this inherent sense that there’s a contradiction here we are ignoring the same way we don’t talk about the meaning of life constantly. He expands on the symptom and talks about how it has symbolic meaning as well, that the symptom can expand and turn into a source of joy as it becomes our main sense of meaning in life.

The next section is much more technical and I confess I was skimming a lot of it. Lacan has these diagrams that illustrate what language does when we refer to different objects of desire and how we get meaning from them. Zizek appears to be going through these and elaborating on them/explaining further, but I also just don’t really care too much about what the letter S means on a diagram from a guy I haven’t read. I did appreciate more though the discussion about what language does, since that’s common in philosophy. Are we referring to the universal? A particular? That sort of thing. From there he talks about the two deaths, that we die once physically and again when we realize we are dead. I thought this section was interesting, but I couldn’t follow the connection beyond that it was an extension of the discussion of desire. Once we stop desiring or realize that what we desire is impossible, that constitutes the second death.

The third and final section was the roughest for me because it continues into he weeds on the ideas of the subject introduced with the Lacanian desire diagrams. I did quite enjoy a part on how the object is a lack. He uses this example of a painting called “Lenin in Warsaw” of Lenin’s wife with another man where “Lenin in Warsaw” is the object specifically because he is not there. This idea that the object of desire or whatever is by necessity a lack that’s given meaning by the desire resonates a lot with me.

So there’s what I got out of that. Primarily that I should have read Lacan (and probably brushed up on my Hegel) first. But I honestly was impressed with how much I could follow, and I quite enjoyed Zizek’s jokes and references to pop culture along the way. It is so hard to keep up with philosophy once you’re out of classes, so I’m trying to not get too discouraged, but I honestly like revisiting it every once in a while just to see what I’m able to get out of the experience. And I can always reread something later and learn more!

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

This Is Beautiful: Progress

 Not like a super fleshed out post, but in the past week I had a thesis committee meeting and submitted an abstract to a conference. And it's nice to just look back and realize that I have gotten a lot done. I'm trying to not focus on how much I have left to do, and this was a nice reminder that I am making progress and I am going to graduate eventually!

Saturday, June 7, 2025

"Genetics in the Madhouse" by Theodore M. Porter

 I was really lucky to get a free copy of this book through the Science, Technology, and Society group at my university, and I am so glad that I did! The book group does have a selection of multiple books most years, but it's not every year that I get something that is so directly related to my actual degree and my interests.

This book looks at the history of asylums and in particular how asylums documented patients and their madness. This forms some of the earliest examples of big data, and directly impacts the study of statistics and heredity. Researchers figured out pretty early on that insanity and mental illness were passed on in families, but their understanding of it and how to treat it varied wildly. The book focuses a lot on Great Britain, Europe, and the US but there are mentions of elsewhere in the world as well. The main thesis though is that eugenics was not simply a misunderstanding of Mendel, it started way before that, with these asylum researchers and the work that they were doing, and it has larger roots in big data itself.

I honestly found this whole history fascinating. As a genetics researcher, I have tried to make it a priority to learn about eugenics and the hooks that it has in our modern understanding of genetics and the way we teach it. (We do not typically get taught this in hard science classrooms, hence branching out to STS.) And I have to say that I am deeply swayed by this argument, I think it makes a lot of sense that eugenics came from the failure of asylums as forced sterilizations were so tied to ablism and still is!

My one critique of the book is that in presenting the history, it focuses just on that. There are very few, if any, elaborations on how these historical figures were wrong. Which maybe if that was included it would be a very different book with a different focus, as that's adding a lot of information, but I was curious going through what was more accurate than others. And part of that is beside the point, a big contention was how different hospitals were defining insanity and cure rates and things like that. But I so wanted to know what the modern arguments against these ideas were! I knew probably more than average as a genetics researcher, but I did wonder if the average layperson would be able to pinpoint what the fallacies were.

This is immediately going with my other books on eugenics and genetics history. I hope that others read it and that I can get some of my lab mates interested in it!

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

This Is Beautiful: Cooking

 A combination of a few factors have led to me cooking much more in my regular life. First, I have started protecting my weekends much more. I do a lot of meal prepping, so having time on Saturday or Sunday to actually do that is crucial. We also started getting a kind of farm share box that is local foods only, some prepared even, and you can opt in or out each week. So it's pretty flexible, but still gives me access to different foods I might not buy on my own.

And I'm really enjoying it. The challenge of how to use the different foods in a way that we will actually eat is pretty exciting in a way that makes my brain happy. Taking the time to really do this and make something good, plus we get so much food from this box that it's always a feast on Saturday or Sunday night. It's so satisfying!

Friday, May 30, 2025

Mentoring and Transitioning

 As I near the end of my PhD, I'm reflecting a lot on mentoring and the transition that I feel like I'm being pushed through to get from mentee to mentor. I am trying to get a paper out before I leave, and my mentor has always been... well a mentor. In that he looks things over and approves and gives suggestions and we go through several iterations of that before anyone else sees the thing. With this paper, he is giving me much more leeway to lead the project and loop him in as needed. And in some ways this feels cool and as though I am taking charge and ready to graduate and lead these on my own. But in some ways it feels like getting shoved in the deep end of a pool.

Getting a doctorate means that you are learning really deeply about a field and contributing to it. It isn't very cut and dry what that exactly means, and in a lot of ways that has kinda changed into just "fulfill the requirements and get what you want out of it" rather than the grandiose contributing to science origins. For me though, I am much closer to that earlier definition where because I want to stay in academia I wanted that experience of having a paper get out. So I am doing what I set out to do and what I wanted. But I have also been asking about this experience for years without much success. And I understand that my project is going to be dead in the water after I leave, but in some ways I do not feel as though the past few years have prepared me for this.

With this paper I have been analyzing data and drafting up figures. It is really a bioinformatics paper primarily, but my degree is in Genetics. The past few years I have been doing some analyses, true, but I have been struggling against cell culture and wet lab experiments as well. This as a culmination, in some ways, feels as though I am breaking out into a new path rather than a continuation. To be clear, I don't hate this, I wanted to learn dry lab techniques. But it still feels like a pivot point rather than anything else.

To get back to the mentoring though, I have only been meeting with my mentor every other week on this. We cannot possibly get through everything in that time, so it feels more like I am pulling him in for select things that I want his input on. But now I have to present it to my thesis committee and there are definitely aspects that he has not seen or signed off on. And that makes me a little nervous. Not to mention that other students I talk to are meeting almost every other day when I am out here meeting every other week. It puts a lot of responsibility on specifically me since I am the only person working on this project to begin with.

I don't know if this is the way I would want to mentor, but I know that I have more of a tendency to hand hold. In some aspects, I do think I needed this as I transition out, but I do wish it was a little smoother and that I had more time for feedback and such. But some of that also isn't by design it is just the amount of time my mentor has right now. Regardless, it is my degree and I am getting the experiences that I want out of it. So in the end, it will probably end up just fine.

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

This Is Beautiful: Stuff is... Working?

 I'm at this home stretch of my degree where I'm doing a lot of analyses, and also at this point where I'm trying to wrap them up and just about everything I have left is super annoying to figure out. But this past week felt really good, I had multiple things work out! It feels good, and I'm trying to just remember that and focus on that because it's so easy to just focus on what doesn't work instead of what does. But things are in fact progressing! It might not be as fast as I'd like, but that's ok because I will get there eventually and while I still have a timeline I think it'll work.

Saturday, May 24, 2025

"Assassin's Quest" by Robin Hobb

 I finally finished the Farseer trilogy by Robin Hobb! I covered the first two in this post and this one. This was definitely a mixed bag of an experience, for a lot of the book I was a little bored and wondering where we were going with this, but the conclusion was definitely satisfying in a way that not many series are for me these days. So while I wouldn't jump to recommend it, I did have a good time with this book.

It starts where the previous book left off, Fitz induced his own death to escape a dungeon by bonding his soul with his wolf's. His surrogate father Burrich and mentor Chade then brought him back into his body after he was buried and essentially brought him back to life. However he still has to learn to be a man again, which Burrich bullies into him. Eventually though he does regain his memories, painful as they are, and he chews out the both of them. This triggers both of them into leaving. Fitz and his wolf, Nighteyes, start traveling to find King Regal and kill him as revenge.

This is tragically a lot of the book, them traveling on their own. They get there and he fails to kill the king but word is now out that he's still alive. Verity, the true king, realizes what Fitz is doing and Skill commands Fitz to join him. (The Skill is like telepathy essentially.) So Fitz starts traveling to him. On the way he realizes through his Skill dreams that his partner before he died, Molly, has given birth to his daughter with Burrich there to help. He tries to go to them, they both think he's dead, but is physically unable to due to Verity's Skill command. So he keeps going. He meets a minstrel, Starling, who figures out who he is. He is briefly captured and escapes, then the two of them start heading up to the mountain kingdom. They meet up with Kettle, an old lady heading the same way. Of course they are ambushed on the way but narrowly escape again.

Fitz had to separate from the other two and is nearly dead when he gets there. The Fool, now the White Prophet, finds him and starts to care for Fitz. Chade, Kettricken, Kettle, and Starling all stop by. Eventually Regal finds out though and most of them (all but Chade) start heading up the mountains to try and find Verity. They eventually find him at the top of the mountain in a quarry. He is carving a dragon. Kettle reveals that she was a member of a queen's Skill users and starts to help him. Fitz wants to but is rebuffed, and Kettricken is aghast to find her husband half out of his wits as he focuses so single-mindedly on the dragon. It becomes clear that Verity is putting himself into the dragon to eventually become it, and Kettle will join him. Verity refuses to put Fitz in, and that reveals that it isn't enough to wake the dragon. Fitz makes a deal where he can put some of himself in but only if they do not take his daughter to become the new heir to the throne. They Skill to Burrich and Molly and Fitz sees them sleeping together as they both think him dead. He's devastated, but Verity keeps his end of the bargain and gives Kettricken an heir. Verity is able to wake the dragon, and there's a final battle where Fitz wakes the other dragons, and the Fool leads them all to fight off the Red Ships. Peace is restored.

We leave Fitz as an old man writing up his memories. Starling still comes to visit, but he never reveals that he is still alive to anyone else.

For the vast majority of the book, it felt like a big slog. Fitz is constantly going through boring periods of him just traveling with the wolf, and once you think it cannot get any more monotonous he gets captured. He gets a few new scars, but manages to escape. And then it starts over again. Once he gets to the mountain kingdom it does get more interesting with the reappearance of Kettricken and the Fool. The Fool is one of my favorite characters, very funny and a gender neutral icon.

What stuck with me the most was the way Hobb dealt with Fitz's relationship with Molly. I think it had such a large impact on me since Fitz is constantly thinking about her. He so desperately wants to get back to her and the child but cannot. He does so much to try and ensure their safety, but it is simply not enough in the end. She thought he was dead for too long and he wasn't there to help. Usually storytellers would have a couple like that reunite, but not Hobb. And that really broke my heart, I truly felt for Fitz with that. Plus then the rest of the characters are dealing with it pretty flippantly and that made me indignant on his behalf. I am glad he never started up a strong relationship with anyone else. He had to actually feel that pain and process through it and not seek them out ever again. Just brutal.

I also appreciated the ending with the dragons. They feed off of life, and the blood then wakes them up and reminds them that they're hungry. But in the process the people in them are consumed. Verity does not respond as a human after that, even though his purpose is to save his kingdom. And it is revealed that the shadow of a dragon causes you to lose your thoughts, revealing how the Forged ones that have been terrorizing the kingdom came about. The dragons flew over the kingdom's enemies so many times that they forgot everything and turned into shells of humans, so they did the same back. The book ends implying that this is a cycle, and I enjoyed that. The big bad of the trilogy is really King Regal, the Red Ships are never made clear who or what is behind them. But this detail at the end humanized them and made it more than barbaric fighting.

As a result I am not really sure how to leave this series. Again I do not think I would recommend it without caveats, but the world was fun to inhabit and the ending was so satisfying. It takes a bit to get there, but maybe it is worth it if you are looking for a new fantasy series.