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The whole of Greece is now a factory
Do we possibly have the luxury to dismiss the strike of the lorry-drivers as somewhat “reactionary” or “conservative” because they aim at protecting the reserved benefits of their trade? (it is true that this, along with a few more trades, is one of the so-called “closed” trades, requiring licenses of 200K upward, which often pass on via family, political and other often dubious connections). Can we still keep reading developments in this way? Lorry drivers “are protecting their closed trade”; dockworkers are “driven by the Communist Party”; peach producers “only rise up when their profits sink”. Of course, there is some truth in all these statements. But this is no Colonial India, nor should we ever allow it to come to this… To divide and rule is the oldest trick in the book. Our position as anarchists, as libertarians, as people in the grassroots struggle, must be on the side of those who fight from the grassroots, from the wider working class – with all the past wrong-doings of some of its parts. Our aim, to strengthen their struggle with that powerful bond of solidarity – this, which could ensure that next time they don’t get into another dog-eat-dog situation, that they don’t turn against each other, that their aim is where it truly deserves to be, against state and capital intervention in our lives. These are unprecedented moments when enormous ruptures open up and where the potentials are high. We either seize the day or let everything and everyone around us crumble fall, one by one._ |
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Decolonization or social
Decolonization or social justice, what is meant by the 'social antagonist movement? i.e. your following statement seems to be ambiguous as to what exactly you mean by “the wider social antagonist movement (anarchists, anti-authoritarians, the libertarian left)”
--- “To divide and rule is the oldest trick in the book. Our position as anarchists, as libertarians, as people in the grassroots struggle, must be on the side of those who fight from the grassroots, from the wider working class – with all the past wrong-doings of some of its parts. Our aim, to strengthen their struggle with that powerful bond of solidarity – this, which could ensure that next time they don’t get into another dog-eat-dog situation, that they don’t turn against each other, that their aim is where it truly deserves to be, against state and capital intervention in our lives.”
Anti-authoritarianism or anti-capitalism etc. is a very simple geometry that doesn’t acknowledge the principle (Einstein’s) that “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Expressions like ‘on the side of those’ and ‘against state and capital intervention in our lives’ imply ‘simple opposition’ but anarchism as in ‘decolonization’ speaks to a deeper level of consciousness. As for ‘divide and rule’, this is foundational to the secularized theological system called ‘sovereigntism’ (aka ‘colonization’) that the western culture has made dominant in the world. The recipe is ‘put some imaginary lines on a map to divide the world up into separate ‘pens’ and have each one unilaterally declare its own ‘independence’ and its right to pursue its own self-interest, appoint/elect a supreme central regulatory authority, and have all who reside within the lines swear a blood oath to bear arms and give their lives to keep up this ‘make-believe’ in exchange for a piece of the ‘real estate action’ and the plunder from global exploitation launched from this staging ground.
'Divide and rule’ may have been around for a long while, but sovereign statism is its most spectacular implementation! Anyone who is beat upon (by the authorities) within this imaginary-line bounded pen has had little recourse since almost all of the supreme central authorities of these ‘independent sovereign states collaborate in order to sustain belief in one another’s ‘rightful existence’ and sole right to govern its domestic affairs.. This is an entirely abstract and unnatural ‘organization’ that depends on people ‘believing in it’ and the police and military are there to ‘make believers out of the dissidents’, or at least beat them into submissive compliance. It spawns, in turn, self-similar internal organizations; i.e. the corporation, the hierarchical trades worker organization etc.
‘Solidarity’ ‘works’ on a global basis because it ignores the imaginary line boundaries and the local ‘supreme central authorities’. It works because the world isn’t ‘really’ a collection of ‘local independent sovereign states with their own locally originating, internal knowledge and purpose directed behaviours’ putt-putting around under their own steam to act/interact in absolute space, ... it ‘works’ because the world is INSTEAD, ‘really’ a sea-of-mutually-interdependent-relations that, like the wind, the water and the thermal flow, do not defer to imaginary-line boundaries and to local self-declared supreme central authorities..
The sovereign state is like a whorl in the flow and has spiral arms or 'a root system' (or tentacles or starfish-like suckers) that wrap around the world . The workers of the world are included in (woven into) the global root systems. There is no ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ to a sovereign state in the ‘real world’. As Peter D’Errico observes;
"Sovereignty" in "international law" is a power system originated in the 16th century by Christian European states in their dealings with each other and the Catholic Church. By the nineteenth century, “[T]he European outlook upon the extra-European areas ... became one which instinctively applied the concept of the sovereign state and the notion of international sovereignty to conditions in which these ideas remained alien “ – Hinsley, F.H. ‘Sovereignty’... “Sovereignty became "the dominant concept in the field of ... political assumptions. ... the essential qualification for full membership [in] the international community." The concept of "sovereignty" provided state power with an "inside" and an "outside." – Bartelson, Jens, ‘A Geneology of Sovereignty. ... States claimed supreme power inside what they called their "domestic" realms and defined other states' realms as "outside." --- D’Errico, P.
‘Decolonization’, if it is considered to parallel the activism of “anarchists, anti-authoritarians, the libertarian left” (and I’m not saying it is; that’s really my question), is not SIMPLY about ‘being on the side of those who fight from the grassroots’. As Taiaiake Alfred points out, many natives are fighting for ‘social justice’ in an economic sense (not him) and many natives are fighting for ‘just settlement of legal claims’ (not him). According to him, the big battle is ‘decolonization’ as way of life, where we acknowledge ‘Mitakuye oyasin’ (we are all related) and thus we see the world as a connected web of relations where whatever one does locally has an effect on everyone. The other battles will never get us to ‘decolonization’ (de-western-authoritarianism) and, in his view, the focusing on social justice and legal justice is a distraction and misplaced use of our limited energies (they will be achieved with decolonization but decolonization is bigger than both of them). ‘Solidarity’ in the terms of decolonization is thus in the context of Mitakuye oyasin, we are all related. It is about ‘people without boundaries’. It may be that the lorry drivers in England and the various worker – government battles in Greece are to do with ‘social justice’ and ‘legal justice’ and some fraction of those workers, beyond these goals, may be fully supportive of their local independent sovereign state and its purposeful drive to pursue its own private self-interests. That is, Darwin’s theory of ‘The Preservation of Favoured Races’ and the Olympic games (competitions) as embodied in the sovereign state may be the accepted models for social organizing for some of those workers; i.e. they may not be supportive of ‘decolonization’, in which case, the solidarity that stops at social and legal justice is not the ‘anarchism’ of the ‘workers of the world’ in the 1900s and to orient to it, in Taiaiake’s view, would be a ‘waste of energy’.
The question is, does anarchism in its popular sense and/or as used in this post, orient to ‘social justice’ or to ‘decolonization’? If it pursues the latter, it pursues the former at the same time, but if it pursues the former, the latter may be left in the lurch.
emile
I would love to get a
I would love to get a response from you on my recent blog "Suburbanite Counter-Revolutionaries" or whatever I titled it. I'm interested in what distinctions you can make between de-suburbanization and de-colonization. Whether one is part of the other, if you think a distinction between the two is reasonable, and if you think a de-colonization approach would cut through what may be specifically particular to a preliminary step of de-suburbanization. I gather you don't like the idea of "steps" but I won't be too presumptuous from our past discussions.
-Squee
Where I would start with any
Where I would start with any inquiry into ‘organization’ is with ‘extrinsic influence’. I could compare this to Ackoff’s (systems sciences) argument [there are subtleties missed in this, but it is a fairly useful metaphor] that since every system nests inclusionally within a suprasystem, we can’t start with ‘analytical inquiry’ (in-and-back-out-again inquiry).
Ackoff uses the example of the ‘university’; i.e. we can’t really understand what a university is by breaking it down into its departments, faculties, support systems and various processes and then make sense of this by how all these parts work together. The university was a niche need in its dynamic spatial suprasystem (community dynamic) before we ever put a name to it. So, for example, if the ‘health’ of the university is troubled, we won’t necessarily discover what is wrong by examining the health of the departments faculties, physical structures, processes etc. OF the university. The problem may be in the conjugate suprasystem-system (habitat-inhabitant) relation; i.e. the ‘shape of the niche need that the university is fulfilling could be transforming due to the emergence of other ‘systems’ within the common ‘suprasystem’. Hence Ackoff argues that ‘out-and-back-in-again’ (‘synthetical’, he calls it) inquiry must provide the grounding for ‘in-and-back-out-again’ (analytical) inquiry. [[Ackoff actually uses ‘up-and-back-down-again’ and ‘down-and-back-up-again’ phraseology but that is too ‘euclidian’ (flatspace) for my preference]]
In my view, these two different types of inquiry, the one (analytical or in-and-back-out-again) which is more simple and the other, where we GROUND the analytical in the CONTEXT of the ‘synthetical’ (out-and-back-in-again) inquiry, are more deeply understood in terms of ‘extrinsic’, ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic/intrinsic’ (relative or relational inquiry).
Ok, returning to what is going on with ‘sub-urbanization’ (the sub-system to system relation is just different words for system-to-suprasystem relation). The analysis of what is the ‘suburban dynamic’ makes it sound as if it is an ‘intrinsically organized system’, that it is ‘designed’ for some ‘purpose’; e.g. you say;
“Basically, the Suburb is designed for the purpose of convenient consumption of goods.” ... “The selling point of the suburbs is "Safety, Convenience, Family, and Comfort".
Sub-urban ‘sprawl’ is not a designed entity even though elements within it are designed. People head to the suburbs like wildgeese head south in the winter. Some say the wildgeese are ‘sold’ on the basis of the 'warmer weather', 'the more accessible food' as if they ‘know what they are doing’, but the truth is that if you lay down a trail of delicious morsels that spells out ‘our geese-behaviours are orchestrated by the dynamics of the space we are included in’, ... they will confirm this truth.
The human clam-diggers will always claim, in spite of the fact that they follow the receding waters of the ebb tide out onto the intertidal flats and retreat to shore to escape the encroaching waters of the flood tide, that their movements are intrinsic, intentional, because they see [their ego sees] themselves as ‘local independent systems with their own locally originating, internal knowledge-and-purpose directed behaviour. A Vulcan, like Spock, would rightfully suggest that this intrinsic-driven view of one’s self was merely ‘the ego speaking’ and that it is a bullshit view. The clam-diggers behaviours ARE ORCHESTRATED EXTRINSICALLY by the dynamics of the space the clam-diggers are included in. True, they do not have to pay attention to the tides, and they do not have to get up with the rising sun and they do not have to plant crops in the spring, but just because they DO attune to the dynamics of the space they are included in does not justify turning the whole dynamics around and crediting their knowledge and purpose with the originating of their behaviour.
Millions of people around the earth rise up as the sun's illumination envelopes their homes and recline again as darkness sets in, like a massive rising up then bowing down to the sun-god or Allah or 'the great mystery', and our western scientific culture wants to explain this collective behaviour by models which insist that it is fully and solely driven and directed out of the local internals of the individual humans; e.g. the power-drive is provided by a local internal biochemical engine, and the direction/steerage is provided by local internal knowledge and purpose. No need to give the spatial dynamics of nature any extrinsic credit at all in this transparently bogus Aristotelian intrinsic final cause based modeling paradigm.
The suburb is not ‘designed’, and it is not populated by the intrinsic knowledge and purpose of would-be suburbanites, the surburb is an artefact of people’s behaviour being orchestrated by the dynamics of the space they are included in. If you drop crumbs of ‘safety, convenience, more space, less intensity (more comfort and relaxation) from the city outwards, some people will follow the crumbs. And of course, the trail of crumbs for people, also leads out of the wilderness/boonies into the suburbs and urbs.
‘Decolonization’ is, at its core, a reaction to the rational intellectual organizing schema aka ‘colonization’ based on locally originating design and purpose (intrinsic final cause); i.e. decolonization is a desire to restore the organizing primacy of natural extrinsic/intrinsic influence.
But, ‘colonization’ and ‘suburbanization’ are not of the same sort of origin. Colonization is by locally originating design and purpose and ‘surbanization’ is not.
A metaphor for ‘surburbization’ can be found in the ‘spandrel’ as in ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’ by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin (e.g. at http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/wescourses/2004s/ees227/01/spandrels.html )
In essence, the spandrel is the space that is ‘left over’ from the arches and beams and intentional elements of deliberate structural architecture; i.e. the ‘shape’ of the spandrel space is reciprocal to the deliberate form of the architected structure, it is the place where one paints murals or hangs tapestries or whatever. Rather than being part of some ‘driven’ evolution, it is a space whose form is shaped from the outside-in. One cannot directly define what is in a spandrel without grounding the description in the deliberate form the spandrel is the unintentional reciprocal to.
The suburbs are like ‘spandrels’, they are not understandable in the self-asserting terms of ‘what they are’ or ‘what they offer’. They do not represent a local driving force in the evolution of the social/spatial organizing dynamic. The suburb is a secondary phenomena and not a thing-in-itself (attempts to define it in itself will not work).
Decolonization will invert the relationship between ‘spandrel’ and structure in that the dynamic space of nature will be restored to ‘primacy’ and then be on ‘the outside’ of the deliberate structures; i.e. the ‘flesh’ will then be supported by the ‘framework’ (skeleton) rather than the flesh being confined in the nooks and crannies (spandrels) left untouched by the deliberate framework, flesh which will be warped out of shape in its struggle to live within the encroaching framework.
In other words, the ‘government’ of pre-colonized people (pre-sovereigntist paradigm people) was in support of extrinsic influence shaped social organization, it was not a framework which ‘came first’ and took precedence over the extrinsic shaping of form and organization. Putting the deliberate governance structure first, the organizing paradigm we have made ourselves captive of, leaves unintentional free spaces in which dynamic forms emerge which are shaped by un-intention rather than by either ‘the spatial dynamics of nature’ or ‘the deliberate architectures of local authoritarian governance systems’.
emile
[[footnote on the prolific use of 'quotes': 'cantorian realists' like to take word-concepts 'literally' while 'pragmatist idealists' like to remind the reader that many of our definitions are not 'real' but are simply 'idealizations', hence they put 'single quotes' around the word-concepts they are using when they want to remind the reader that these words are intended as 'idealizations' that should not be confused for reality (the reality of our natural experiencing). But as Poincaré notes in ‘Dernieres Pensées’, Ch. V. Les Mathematiques et la Logique;
"At all times there have been opposite tendencies in philosophy and it does not seem that these tendencies are on the verge of being reconciled. It is no doubt that it is because there are different souls and that we cannot change anything in these souls. There is therefore no hope of seeing harmony established between the pragmatists and the Cantorians. Men do not agree because they do not speak the same language, and there are languages that cannot be learned. And yet, in mathematics, men ordinarily understand one another, but it is due precisely to what I have called ‘proofs’. These proofs pass judgement without appeal and before them the entire world bows. But wherever these proofs are lacking, mathematicians are no better off than simple philosophers.”
As he goes on to say, all that can be done is to "corner one's adversary with a contradiction" but this still doesn't 'hold' because Cantorians will continue to stick with what they can prove, even if the theories continue to become more comprehensive so as to expose the fact that what was proved last time was solid enough except that the proof applied to an over-simplified 'reality'. The proof that humans are local, independent systems with locally originating behaviour' is one of those Aristotelian intrinsic final cause based proofs (see, here are the biochemicals that cause this, and see, here is the knowledge that is being acted on) that only works in the simplified euclidian flatspace reality where extrinsic outside-inward orchestrating influence is ignored (implicitly deemed non-existent). Cantorian realists mistake this synthetic reality where 'proofs' are solid, for the reality of our natural experience, and so long as they do, they continue to use the same words while 'speaking a different language', so there is no way that agreement with pragmatist-idealists will be forthcoming. ]]
Thanks - Let me see if I am
Thanks -
Let me see if I am getting better at listening to your arguments. Are you saying that the partiality of analyzing a part of the colonized world is inadequate because it doesn't incorporate the dynamic relationship this part (suburbs) has with other parts (urban; and rural)? I know my writing will be unpalatable because it is steeped in intrinsic causals, but am I otherwise recognizing the problems you are presenting with the methods I am using to understand these dynamics? Any recommended reading, btw? I'm pretty sick of western philosophy and psychology the past year.
-Squee
squee, .. you’ve got it.
squee, .. you’ve got it. the western practice of lifting out foreground ‘content’ (the storm-cell) and presuming that the reference framing context (the ‘background or the ‘ground’ in the ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ of gestalt), is useful, but as kepler observed it is a case of our “choosing not that which is most true but that which is most easy’”.
mcluhan termed this the ‘trading out’ of ‘visual space’ which is concerned with superficial images for ‘acoustic space’ (which is ‘everywhere at the same time’) and pointed out that our language is architected for visual space presentations (Gutenberg's printing of visual content was the worst thing that could have happened, in this context); i.e. rendering dynamics in terms of the foreground images of ‘what things do’ wherein the ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ of the holodynamic gestalt are split apart (he was an english teacher). culturally, it leads the western observer into splitting apart ‘organism’ and ‘environment’ and dividing the world into the ‘inanimate realm’ and the ‘animate realm’ so that it is popular in our western culture to conceive of the universe as a dead, mineral universe ‘locally infected with life’ (no Amerindian all-inclusive web-of-life here, thank you), and we conceive of ‘life’ as some Johnny-come-lately phenomenon (which converts the universe into some kind of ‘object’ that ‘changing over time’, a view the implied an observer ‘outside of the universe’ with a supranatural clock and measuring rod, documenting the progress of ‘the universe’).
none of this western ‘reduction to foreground images’ or imposing of animate/inanimate division is supported by ‘the new physics’ (relativity, quantum mechanics) with its thingless-connectedness and quantum entanglement but we continue to use the split-apart rendering of habitat and inhabitant’ = ‘visual space reductions’ of the world as our ‘mainstay’ and talk in terms of ‘what things do’ as if that is a close enough approximation to ‘reality’ that it can substitute for the ‘more realistic’ reality of our experience, a more true but less easy (to discuss) reality wherein Mach’s principle acknowledges the relativity of space and matter where; ‘the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat’; i.e. the whole schmear is a dynamic unity, a ‘holodynamic’ (bohm) an enfold/unfolding (into and out of itself) spatial relational spacetime continuum etc. and where the foreground visual image based dynamics are ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances) in schroedinger’s terms.
so, there has been lots written about it; schroedinger, poincare, mcluhan, wittgenstein, bohm, f. david peat, and if you ask most people, they will agree with mcluhan that describing the world dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’ is the lesser story since the space that we experiencing living in, is transforming as we do something; i.e. our experience is that there is no way to isolate foreground dynamics (organism behaviour) reference frame dynamics (environment). we can watch the human organisms building and operating the cornflakes factory and see this as a local material system but if our mind opens up to the suprasystem view, these same people are involved in much more, they are coming off the farms and into the factory and the farmlands are being left unattended. it is impossible IN REALITY (the ‘reality’ of our real-life experience) to isolate the spatial-relational transformation in the suprasystem from the foreground view in terms of ‘what things do’ (the factory dynamic). but can we talk about the factory operation in terms of ‘what things do’ and can we back up that talk with film footage, ... yes we can. as mcluhan says, this is the stuff that our discourse is generally made of, stories in terms of ‘what things do’, the system dynamic as if it were not included within a spatial-relationally transforming suprasystem dynamic.
ok, we can live with the fact that our visual space rendering of dynamics is ‘schaumkommen’ (appearances) which depends on what is impossible in ‘reality'; i.e. it notionally splits out the foreground imagery (e.g. the storm-cell inextricably woven into the atmospheric flow) and re-renders it as a local, independently existing system with ITS OWN local behaviour. This is not ‘the whole truth’ but we can live with it BECAUSE it is a very easy and useful depiction, even if it fails to capture, at the same time, the more comprehensive view in terms of the spatial-relational transformation of the suprasystem it is included in. this depiction in terms of ‘what things do’ is going to work well for the design and operationalizing of factories (cornflakes factories, Cadillac factories, etc. etc.). there is a little trick going on here though. when we present the plans for the factory to ourselves, the plans for how we are going to construct it and operate it, ... such a representation is entirely ‘portable’ because we haven’t ‘put it anywhere’ yet. when we actually construct the factory and put it into operation, we have to do it SOMEWHERE and this ‘somewhere’ space is already loaded with goings on, so that the implementation of the factory can only be constituted by a transformation of the pre-operating dynamic space. but wait a minute, ... let’s go back and look at what our assumption was when we were just presenting the local system in itself to ourselves, where was it at that time? it wasn’t anywhere, the way we extract a view of a local system in terms of ‘what things do’ is to implicitly impose an absolute fixed reference space that does not participate in the ‘foreground’ ‘what things do’ dynamics. that’s how we manage to make visual space imagery ‘portable’.
as poincaré said, for a physicist or anyone to say ‘the earth rotates’ is 'nonsense' (it rests dependently on our notional imposing of absolute space as a reference frame). it is nonsense in the same way as saying ‘the convection cell rotates’. the truth is (according to our experience) that the energy-field-flow churns up some eye-candy for us, some ‘energy-flow-features’ and we are so mesmerized by them (depending on their relative size and relative speed of movement relative to our human size and speed of movement) that we mentally ‘lift them out of the flow’ and using words and definitions, render them local, independently existing and impute to them their own locally originating behaviour.
the reaction to poincaré’s statement was widespread confusion. it put him into a public (in the journal ‘Mind’ ) argument with bertrand russell on the nature of ‘perception’ that they never settled but agreed to disagree on.
the western authoritarian system of imposing order depends on visualizing dynamics in the simple terms of ‘what things do’, a view in terms of ‘local systems with their own local agency’ that is “most easy though not most true” which misses entirely the ‘greater reality’ in terms of spatial-relational transformation.
those who believe in managing the social dynamic on the basis of ‘what things do’ (the authoritarian world view) rather than on the basis of spatial-relational transformation (e.g. that’s what the Amerindian ‘learning circle’ is for, to ground one’s understanding in ‘what is really going on’; i.e. ‘how the spatial-relational dynamics are actually transforming’) have the most to lose if we re-orient our world view to spatial-relations, because all of the prestige of ‘I made such and such happen’ is upstaged by the greater reality of ‘the associated spatial-relational transformation’; e.g. ‘I am producing billions of tons of biofuels which are helping to keep America running’ is upstaged by ‘millions more people are exposed to starvation as a significant proportion of arable lands are shifting from foodcrop production to biofuels production’.
this type of spatial-relational transformative shift is ‘unmanaged’ in the sense that it is unintended and unanticipated so far as the authoritarian movers and shakers who deal only in ‘making things happen’ are concerned.
so, in conclusion, this ‘gap’ between the ‘simple view’ of dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’ (local system with its own local behaviour) and ‘spatial-relational transformation’ (where the ‘local’ system dynamic is no longer the reality-in-itself but grounded in dynamic suprasystem context) is an acknowledged gap. it has been written about by philosophers and physicists etc. we can see that the Amerindians orient their dynamics to the spatial-relational transformation (what we experience as actually unfolding irrespective of all our analytical talk about ‘who is doing what to whom’) and we can see that we western acculturated folks continue to manage on the basis of ‘what things do’ which is where all of the sovereign statism and authoritarian hierarchical ‘make things happen the way we want’ (abetted by the 'right' to pursue our own self-interest) organizing comes from.
those who are sitting up at the top of the authoritarian hierarchies would ‘lose their authority’ if we ‘got realistic’ and re-oriented to what is actually unfolding (spatial-relational transformation) rather than chasing our tails by orienting to ‘what things do’.
thus ‘anarchism’ is a political activism that implicitly wants to reorient the social collective to ‘what is actually unfolding’ (spatial-relational transformation). anarchism intuitively understands that the authoritarian system is ‘not natural’ but very often, it explains what is going on in the simplistic ‘making it happen’ terms of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. we have all of the theoretical tools that are needed to show what is going wrong, it's just that we are not using them, and because ‘those in authority’ are the ‘gatekeepers’ of what theories on perception (reality-view-building paradigm) we accept (through the mainstream media etc.) they are not about to saw off the upper boughs that they are dependently perched on. in the simplistic ‘make it happen’ pseudo-reality paradigm, those in authority hold themselves responsible for ‘making good stuff happen’ and in a worldview where dynamics are seen exclusively in terms of ‘what things do’, ‘it can’t get any better than that’
emile
I've been trying to find a
I've been trying to find a copy of Arnheims' Visual Perception, and have a feeling he really gets into this. Oddly enough, the foreground/background perception is something I wrote about ally in my last book. I came to the conclusion that since everything is always changing, since the present is an instance of the past, the unique is a particular amalgam of the general, the new is a transformation of the old, and the individual is a piece of the species, etc. That the foreground was very important and the background was more-so the general truth. Your perspective is a very specific shift in focus for me, but not a radical break with what I had been working out 5 years ago. I was never able to reconcile some huge problems coming from that valuation (which is a value of the self above reality) with the real dynamics of fields and the illusion of self. I came up with this strange reduction of the Self to the Pronoun and Proper Noin... to a visual-linguistic construct, but didn't get beyond that. Anyway, I haven't read bohm, schrodegger (sp) or any of the quantum physicists actual work but have read the typical stuff: the Tao of Physics, the dancing wu li masters, and the holographic universe.
Blah blah blah - anyway, thanks again.
-Squee
Btw, you are definitely on
Btw, you are definitely on to something in recognizing anarchism as a gestalt (social)psychology. Fritz Pearls is something else. Ercksonian Psychotherapy is interesting too, in this regard. I know I didn't mention either in the "Anarchist Psychology" blog but both of those are up there with dasiensanalysis for me.
-Squee
why not try to co-develop
why not try to co-develop these concepts openly on this website? ... perhaps on your blog? (i.e. allow anyone to comment). the concepts are already there, you have intuited them and so have i, and who knows how many others, but they are intuited in different ways and all are hard to articulate and so they stay in the background. as far as i am concerned, if the foreground/background notion becomes clear, then ‘anarchism’ becomes clear and where the stupidity lies in hierarchical control based organizing becomes clear. i.e. ‘what things do’ is a foreground view and ‘how spatial relations are transforming’ is the background view which includes the foreground view.
hierarchical authority is built to manage ‘what things do’ (foreground ‘appearances’) and is blind to ‘how spatial relations are transforming’ (conjugate background-foreground relation).
non-euclidian geometry is part of the anarchist’s intuition. a hierarchical control based manager is focused on ‘making his objectives’ and his view of space is euclidian; i.e. he believes that the damage that he inflicts in the course of ‘making his numbers’ and moving forward is left behind. this comes from the notion that time is like a straight line that goes from the past to the future. it is not the same when one lives on the surface of a sphere. the boat that jettisons garbage and leaves it ‘in the past’ and heads off into the future will bump right into it again and again as is what happens when one moves ahead in a straight line on the surface of a sphere. mach’s principle captures this non-euclidian (spherical) geometry of space; i.e. when the hierarchical manager jettisons the garbage thinking he is leaving it behind in the past, it is more realistic to understand his act as ‘conditioning the space/habitat’ he is included in; e.g. as mach’s principle says; ‘the dynamics of the habitat condition the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat’. space is a participant in dynamics, hierarchical control based organizers assume that space is a non-participant. a single powerful sovereign state can suck the natural resources (e.g. petroleum) out of the entire surface space of the earth and flood the entire surface space of the earth with effluents. sovereign states and their corporate offspring account for ‘what they do’ (as if space was a non-participant); i.e. they do not account for how their actions transform the common space THAT WE ALL SHARE INCLUSION IN. joseph stiglitz won a nobel prize in economics for showing this obvious fact and noting that ‘free market economies’ have this flaw that externalities associated with free market activity go unaccounted for and must ultimately be paid for by all of us.
the foreground view gives us a view of the boat with the crew jettisoning garbage off the stern as it moves forward into the future. there can be thousands of boats like this. if the earth were flat, the garbage truly would be left in the past but if the earth is round then nothing is being left in the past, the space we live in is transforming in the continuing present.
my sense is that it would render what the anarchist intuitively is ‘going on about’ more communicable if these habitual western over-simplified perceptions (which are foundational to hierarchical control based organizing) were brought openly and clearly to the fore. one approach is via ‘the geometry of space’ as mentioned here but whatever works (is easily communicated) would merit development
emile
I am definitely down for
I am definitely down for collab on this. I'm going to read these latest posts first (including yours), and probably sleep/think/process. But, I think this is important and the Radical Psychology email list has been boring lately as well. There are places for this work outside @news. Though I do think this site is great to work on such an endeavor.
-Squee
I wish I knew you.
I wish I knew you.
you must have an
you must have an unbelievably uninteresting social circle
Different anon here, I have
Different anon here, I have no social circle. Seriously, someone please be my friend.
Your overuse of the single
Your overuse of the single quotes make me want to beat you to death with a shovel. The fact that there are multiple instances in which you don't even close off your quoted phrase makes me want to defecate on your now-dead body. Otherwise, it's a very worthwhile read.