mark-the monastry is just shutting the library-so i'll get back soon
(tomorrow if i can) on this very relevant post.
Ruth.C
>>> Mark Crosby <Crosby_M@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 01/17 7:56 pm >>>
Ruth, you mentioned discussing impulsive gambling with
J and he surprised you by describing how one could
watch the fruit machines and learn the rhythms of
their payoffs. I knew some statisticians who
discovered they could make more money doing this than
consulting for the government!
Re the _D&R_ (p147) quote about Artaud (and embedded
acephalism in thought, amnesia in memory, aphasia in
language, and agnosia in sensibility), yes, this
counters the scientistic models of the Royal/National
Academy and is echoed in _What is Philosophy?_ (p49)
where Nietzsche's "four great errors" or illusions are
outlined: transcendence, universality, eternity, and
discursivity. (Also, just read the related discussion
of Artaud in ch.7 of _Cinema 2_, maybe more later..)
When you mentioned the politics of Patricia
Churchland's reductionist approach, I was slow to
grasp why. Being allergic to politicians and their
practices, that's what I tend to think of first when I
hear 'politics'..
Then, in my rhizomatic reading roulette, up popped
William Irvin Thompson's _Annals of Earth_ 8.3 1995
interview with Arthur Zanjonc, "Cultural Enzymes,
Charismatic Academies, and Routine Institutions". (see
http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/Thompson/ under
interviews) In this conversation, Thompson & Zanjonc
really get to the crux of politics in
relatively-wealthy pluralistic societies:
"Well, with engineers it's always basically
simplification and reduction of process into code...
The Marvin Minsky and Churchland types, they basically
become very, very unsettled by complexity, by play,
delight, enchantment... They suffer from a kind of
cultural aphasia". Thompson talks about academics who
are either "marginal to the field" or those who are
"clerks" and "show up faithfully at the national
meetings and slave markets". Some that Thompson
mentions getting along with include Gregory Bateson,
Lynn Margulis, Francisco Varela - because they always
seem to be "connecting the little to the large".
Thompson also talks, in this essay, about how, growing
up at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, "I
wanted to be the Dante of a new age and I wanted
Whitehead to be my Aquinas", how he went to MIT in the
60s "to teach the big picture of literature to
scientists", but got smacked by the Vietnam war and an
"imperialistic scientism". He adds that "Those who
take for granted that there is some objective, real
matter that they are going to manipulate and be in
charge of, they don't like artists at all and prefer
to hang out with politicians and people in power ...
these guys are basically control freaks... Their form
of taking control is to eliminate everything that is
other than their way of handling matter... you create
a military-industrial complex as a substitution for
nature". (Tomorrow's control freaks are nascent in
today's Extropians preparing to pounce on the big
bucks about to be unleashed in the U.S. for
nanotechnology research..)
The second half of Thompson & Zanjonc's 25-page
conversation is about the cultivation of what Guattari
might call "subjectivities", how to create
"charismatic academies" and avoid "routine
institutions", to educate rather than train. While
they definitely have their fingers on the pulse, I
feel they are sometimes fumbling with the fog of
illusions D&G refer to; because, there will always be
BOTH: the charismatic academy to preserve spiritual
value - nurturing pioneers to open new fields - until
some threshold is reached for broader shifting of
levels; then, the appropriating machines of capital to
move in and routinize, quality-control and
o/efficiate, to maximize the generation of surplus
material value. But, as Thompson admits, "there are
institutions AND there there are enzymes that work at
large in culture to break down or connect".
Thompson's looking for what it takes to sustain a
Charismatic Academy and an "isomorphic angelic
economy", asking "How can one have a place that is
both Orphic and Archimedean". Thompson helped set up a
number of these, from Lindisfarne to Findhorn, but
warns: "We were always trying to be immanent and not
just transcendental. But that's very hard because
there is no political constituency that wants to
support it".
Thompson concludes that "There has to be a new and
sacred form of producing wealth", and muses that "in
the old days [Medieval times!] the monastery was
basically a social development, public-service
corporation... So communities of being - as opposed to
knowing and doing - are going to become really
important". Thompson mentions an "anthroposophical
bank" and a "credit union kind of thing" - but doesn't
mention guilds, which could make a come-back to let
artisans and professionals compete against
multinational corporations and governments.
Ultimately, though, Thompson frets that "whatever
strategy I've taken, it has been immediately captured
and cloned in degenerate forms".
There's more than a little sacred hubris here too
which reminds me of Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ where,
as Slavoj Zizek puts it in his "Lesbian Session"
(
http://www.lacan.com/frameXII5.htm), "it is not
workers but the capitalists [the 'prime movers'] who
go on strike, thus proving that they are the truly
productive members of society who do not need others
to survive". The thing is, there's always (at least)
two types of 'prime mover': the engineer in er lab and
the visionary in er 'monastery'.
Thompson captures the sense of this aristocratic vs
plebian imbalance when he talks about how, for his
mentor Gregory Bateson, "Education was a conversation
among gentlemen; it was an oral culture"; whereas,
Thompson himself "read with a working class ferocity
and avarice, but Gregory didn't read very much.
Education for him was a conversation with his peers,
so he never bothered to read Varela". In fact,
Thompson sometimes seems to realize he's now in the
same position, telling the younger Zanjonc it's now
his "mission impossible to create a new cultural
strategy", because Thompson himself is allergic to the
new media of the Web: "I guess I'm a bit paranoid and
think that everything that's plugged in gets plugged
into and controlled by Ahriman".
So, Thompson retreats to his mountain communes, wary
of Y2K, wondering "where is it all coming from? ...
where do people in a troubled economy get the money to
throw away in gambling? ... Watching TV destroys
exercise and walking, so TV is filled with spectator
sports ... this new information economy is not based
on ideas but on illusions". Few pioneers are able to
taste the fruits of their efforts.. Mark
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