Bruce Andrews, "if the social arrangements..."
Rated • 0 reviews • literature, philosophy, poetry, writing, theory • upenn.edu
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b-bear/theory
Last seen: 4 months ago
b-bear is a 29 year old guy from Mountain Air, VIC, Australia
Drink your Bliss; for every Thing that Lives is Holy.
~William Blake
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Mon auberge était ŕ la Grande Ourse.
My inn was under the sign of the Great Bear. ~Rimbaud
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http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol6/number3/pdf/jwsr-v6n3-pr...
Rated • 1 review • internet, stumbleupon, networks, theory • ucr.edu
For the Russian-born Belgium scientist and theorist Ilya Prigogine, the rise of the internet and networked societies in the past few decades has destroyed 'the classical deterministic view of nature'. The freedom and self-organization that occurs in online communities has supposedly crippled the capacity of any single group to predict and control the movement of humans and nature. Yet to hold true to scientific values, Prigogine must mean only that the capacity to classically determine such a movement has been destroyed: the old means of understanding nature must change in the face of a revolutionary situation. In knowledge, theory and practice, the old borders of nations in sovereignty, cultures, communities, space and knowledge are breaking down in a global swarm.
Theorists such as Prigogine favor analogies to explain the Internet, and they draw them from the lives of insects:
In small colonies the complexity is localized at the individual, while in large ones complexity is more on the level on the interactions between the individuals. It is certainly not coincidental that in the largest and most integrated colonies--that is, in the army ants and termites--the individuals are practically blind. The networked ant societies are capable of extraordinary performances. In recent years, super colonies of ants, which contain hundreds of millions of individuals, have been discovered. These large colonies develop a network of communication between individual nests on tenths of kilometers--millions of times the size of a single ant.
When scrutinized, this is hardly the optimistic vision of the Internet we might expect. The destruction of classical determinations enables 'extraordinary performances', although beyond gathering and amassing we cannot say for what end. We are come to the future: 'the blindness of individuals' in the army of ants, termites and bytes. Where a super colony may connect many different nests, it would seem that it is only in small, nestling colonies that complexity belongs with individuals. Surely our own StumbleUpon is one of these super colonies. SU confirms the blindness of individuals, the generic complexity of the whole group and the individual complexity of small groups.
Yet Prigogine and many theorists of networked societies fail to point out that small groups continue to find ways, in a networked society, to interfere, control and determine the nature of the larger group. Such small groups have certainly long given up the classical deterministic view of nature: they've replaced it with a Machiavellian view; for them control does not need to be proved by a theory. If 'the mediate, without traces, becomes evanescent', to quote the poet, so too can the embedded mediation of the online communities - i.e. the systemic agents, engineers and controllers who work behind the scenes or the marketers and observers who make money out of the mere quantity of extraordinary performances. Just take a look at what's happening with Twitter.
Regardless of my problems with some of Prigogine's assumptions, I think that his three general questions are some of the central ones:
(1) Who will benefit from the networked society? Will it lower the wealth gap between nations?
(2) What will be the effect of the networked society on individual creativity?
(3) A recent pool has shown that, for the large majority of people, the hope of the third millennium is for greater harmony between man and nature and amongst humans. How will the networked society affect this harmony? For me, these are not only abstract questions, but also guidelines for reflection and action.
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Robert Archambeau - Manifest Destinies, Black Rains
Rated • 0 reviews • literature, writing, theory • culturalsociety.org
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Putting Man Before Descartes: an article by John Lukacs...
Rated • 2 reviews • history, american history, theory • theamericanscholar.org
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U B U W E B :: The Signifying Monkey: Two Versions of a...
Rated • 0 reviews • history, poetry, theory, music • ubu.com
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The Abolition of Work by Bob Black
Rated • 3 reviews • anarchism, theory, parasites, work • inspiracy.com
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History of Shit - Google Books
Rated • 1 review • arts, weird, books, theory • google.com.au
The History of Shit [Histoire de la merde (Prologue)] by Dominque Laporte (1949-1984) is the kind of book you can read in order to impress or ridicule (your choice) the kind of people who seem otherwise totally removed from such matters. The book would actually make very good toilet reading, but perhaps only for the intelligent set, especially for those who like being bogged down in the lavatory and who are brave in the face of self-consciousness. Hardly tackling light material, The History of Shit nonetheless manages to be short, funny and thought-provoking.
Laporte's study joins psychoanalysis together with marxism in a powerful geneological shit fest. Tracing out the history of shit in civilisation immediately prior to the modern age, Laporte discovers that at the basis of our civilisation we find a relationship to what any real child will tell you is always waiting there ready for play: shit.
Modern societies have spent an exorbitant amount of political, cultural and social energy in disciplining the basic facts of life. Much of the peculiarly humanist humour and theoretical power of The History of Shit is to trace out the many ways in which 'waste management' was placed at the heart of civilisation at the gradual dawn of the modern age - in engineering, in society, in law and even in language.
One of the most provocative conclusions that Laporte draws out of his material is that property is related to waste: "to produce is literally to shit." The base logic this involves finds its correspondence in an historical investigation. The rise of the modern subject with its property rights and ownership of its own 'genius' is directly related, for Laporte, to the rise of waste management: for Nation States and their governments, shit - just like ideas, or books or creative artworks or even in some respects money - is kept private, seperate from society, and safe. Once cleaned and made hygenic, shit can be recycled and turned into products, from agriculture to culture.
To push the logic of The History of Shit still further, if shitting is production, art and social behaviour in general is the reproduction of shit. The sad and funny thing is that in in our modern civilisation playing with shit is actually much more frequent than doing it.
In sum, the History of Shit is worth a read on the toilet or off.
Steaming e-book torrent of The History of Shit here.
I was inspired to seek out The History of Shit by Silllage, whose treatment of the olfactory is some good shit. Perfume is Silllage's thing, but shit also stinks! And while we can make comparisons between the perfume and the shit industry, Laporte's remarks on the history of musk is not worth turning up our noses at (and, yes, now even my language is breaking down like a turd in the earth).
P.S. Yes, waiting for this long post to upload was like waiting a long time for shit to come out. Sometimes I wonder if my blog is just a big bog.
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k-punk: What if they had a protest and everyone came?
Rated • 0 reviews • politics, theory, marxism, psychoanalysis • abstractdynamics.org
