Writing on the Wall

I have just been very entertained.

Allen, my new Taiwanese-Canadian web-friend asked me to go look at the film Zeitgeist (Z)

So I did the unthinkable and threw myself into a conspiracy theory film. And I have to say it was really good fun, I was thoroughly gripped and entertained throughout, and learned some very interesting things, although verifying them is entirely another matter.

So I want to do a sort of film review of this web film. It is a film that attempts a global vision, and that is distributed on a global media, and so is probably worth debating as a form of emerging global public debate.

It is interesting how constructing myths these days so often takes the form of debunking other myths. Z takes this form, part I attacking Christianity, Part II attacking the official account of 9-11, part three turning explanatory and discussing the history and power of the federal reserve and of the banking elite that are standing behind it. The synthesis is that these banking groups have been triggering wars for profit for donkey’s years, that they are happily dumbing down the American public, and that they hope to produce a world government, totalitarian in its application of accounting standards.

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Keith Kahn-Harris points out that denial, the slasher flick baddie of Global warming debates, is related to the mind protecting itself from things it can’t cope with. So why not take the taboos, the worse case scenarios, and explore the positives in them? Surely that is a way to open up things a bit.

So yes, maybe it is a good thing if, over the next few hundred years, the vast majority of life on earth goes extinct. Just think, if humanity survives this crisis, and goes on to colonize other planets, what a problem that would be for those other planets,and those that live on them.

We don’t have a great track record, what with colonialism and environmental destruction, so maybe we will have saved the universe at large from a terrible fate. Besides, if you take a giant step back you can see it is all futile anyway: Lives will come and go, planets will live and die, and eventually stars, including our own, will burn out. The rest is just not worth getting too upset about, or is it?

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For a society that is so oriented to growth and progress, we seem remarkably immune to good news. We have a deep philosophical cynicism about such simple things as love and sympathy, even though there is evidence that these are forces with significant impact in our world. We are suspicious of ideas like happiness, even if they are central to our highest ethics, both freedom and progress. How can you be free if you are so unhappy you cannot enjoy your good fortune? How can there be progress where this becomes a general condition? Progress or Prozac?

Take the decline of violence in the world: There are fewer and smaller wars now than ever before. The depressing spectacle of embedded journalism, during the last attempt to make war work, had lying beneath it a very good piece of news. People so dislike seeing others blown to pieces, that wars must now be structured around the public not seeing this happen. The media has extended people’s senses, and with it their consciences, and this has shaped the geopolitical ‘realism’ of the most powerful players in the world.

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There is a new book out on the history of imagined futures. This has some interesting implications for development:
Imaginary futures: frozen and fluid time Richard Barbrook - openDemocracy

Funnily enough, development studies and this kind of social theorising seldom shake hands. I had a few things to say about this:
What is interesting about the information age is that communication becomes a stand-in for the future, for progress.

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New Statesman - Time Out with Nick Cohen
Oh my God! Nick Cohen has written something I agree with.
It is always instructive to actually get close to people and understand how they view the world. We have a name for it among the liberal lefties, it is called Anthropology. But Nick is right, people in North London have a tendency to prefer “natives” in far flung fields, and that is strange.

But this is not an English Phenomenon. I sit here in India observing the same thing: Urban Indians coming to visit the village that I am living in, and finding it hard to understand the locals. This is a fairly general phenomenon.

As is the emphasis on place amongst the general population. Baggiani has attempted to understand this, because his philosophical pragmatism takes him past worshipping ideas as abstracts, and draws him to understanding how ideas are found in practice, in people’s lives.

But Nick, you are not so far from Islington really, you are also an urban intellectual idealist really, you signed up to the Euston (North London?) Manifesto, out of a belief in Democracy as an ideal. You supported a war to support such an ideal. How very urbane of you to put your idealism above the lives of [working class] others.

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I have been thinking about quantum mechanics and information, since everyone has to have a hobby of some sort. I had been pursuing David Deutsch over the question of weither the universe was a giant computer for quite some time. The nub of my beef was if the universe could be considered as akin to a Universal Turing machine.

My point was that this was impossible, becuase the universe is not basically digital: it is not based on discrete particles or differences, so therefore there is no basic 1/0 structure to it that a universal computer could be based on. Or in other words the basic fabric of the universe does not conform to the basic assumptions of information theory, that things can be expressed as a series of discrete states.

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The two people who mind the garden in our house, between them they earn 2000 rupees a month. That’s about £25-30. Funny thing is that the housekeeper, who makes 1000 rupees a month (for half-time work, that’s a relatively good deal for the market she is operating in) questioned why they struggled to get by on that money.

The answer came back that so many people come and eat at their house. In other words, on that kind of money, they are acting as a form of local social welfare, and it would be seen as strange if they didn’t do so. Upshot of it is that the wife of our care-taking couple has arthritis and needs 30 rupees (50 pence) to get on a bus to the local state hospital. I suspect that this is true, but actually don’t care if it is not. It is almost harder to deal with their honesty than with being ripped off.

Funnily enough I just read a piece by John Gray in the New Statesman about human agency, and the wierd take poltical philosophers tend to take on it. It was incidentally about Nazi Germany.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120045

Gray, as ever, was taking a pop at our weird image of enlightenment man being able to transform the world at will. OK John got the message. He also had a plug to his latest book , something characteristically morose and pessimistic. His point being that people often don’t have control over their lives.

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The tension between those that see things in terms of dominant groups persuading the rest to do their bidding, and practical folk who are concerned with how things get done, has some very interesting philosophical underpinnings.

Action requires a basis. This is simple in principle: In order to exercise agency and bring about some outcomes in preference to other outcomes, you need to be able to exercise some control. That control is in turn only possible if you can render things in some way predictable.

Fixed forms therefore either need to be picked out as stable entities from the surroundings, or need to be rendered as fixed entities by some sort of effort. This applies as much to representations as it does to materialities. These two can be seen as aspects of social practices also.

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I recently got over an existential angst.

The sense of nothingness that my ex-supervisor’s philosophical take was bringing on, under the surface of it all, had been getting me down. That sense of nothing being equal or real, or anything at all, of all things being nothing more than splintered instances, a kind of material emptiness underpinning the world and leaving us like leaves in the empty ocean.

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There is a heated debate on postmodernism on the World Socialist website:
An exchange with a reader on postmodernism

Here was my comment:

The debate on PM can actually be resolved somewhat by referring to early Marx, and by taking into account more contemporary interpretations of theories of practice.
Marx’s work on alienation actually dealt with the philosphical issues debated here rather well, but in a nascent form. He pointed out the human need for a relationship with the material, as formed by our actions, a way of recognising ourselves in the world. He also pointed out how mechanisms of exchange tended to generalise the fruits of people’s labour, thus obscuring the possibility of people recognizing themselves in the world.

If you carry the analogy from the material to the representational, then you can see that the project of Marxism is to humanise representation as well as production. From this standpoint it is clear that there is a need to pay attention to how people create their realities, and how this is related to their other acts of creation.

An objectivist epistimology is the ultimately alienated product: The whole universe is cast as a system of generalised exchange , where some set of principles of sameness, or evaluation, serve as a universal basis for relating things in a mechanical manner.

If such principles (or formalised truth relations) are not asserted, then you have an “external” reality with its own integrity, but without any basis for one coherant and structured representation of it. Thus the “real” without the “objective.”

Marx was urging us to celebrate human creativity, and human fellowship, founded in mutual recognition rather than alienation. Practice theories, where knowledge and representations are seen as created within specific historical relations and sets of material practices, stand far closer to that original ethic.

This does not imply rejecting forms, or rather practices, of generalisation, but these should be seen as historically situated with their own specific dynamics and standards. That way we are able to see the primacy of the human over the cold world of ideas.