> I don't in spite of this believe that reality is an entirely disorganised
> and "potentialised" muddle. It has powerful self-organising tendencies,
and
> can be curtly "actual" when it feels like it (as anyone who has ever
walked
> into a lamppost should appreciate). There's a sort of dualism that would
> have it that all human "dreams of order" are delusions caused by a failure
> of the imagination to apprehend the primal chaos of existence. This is
> bollocks, and is used all too often by muddled thinkers to excuse the
> failure of *their* imaginations to cope with any order of systematicity
> higher than that of an A-level social psychology textbook...
>
> Dom
>

Well, the lamppost is an artefact, Dom! Seriously, I think we're in danger
of getting muddled over levels of perception of reality here, on the
'common-sense' level, for instance, Newtonian physics works, just as poets
have to pay their rent, in the mundane sublunary world, but poetry remains a
contradiction of the huge certainties of fact. But determinism, of the left
or the right, only works in retrospect, when we look back over our
shoulders, to the wave-collapsed patternings of the schematised past. While
no-one could deny the self-organising bias of life, where I would argue is
against the notion of the predictability of the forms it might follow, that
applies very much to issues of poetic form too. That most ancient of
predictive tools, the I Ching, essentially ends with a message called
'not-yet', that's its ultimate pronouncement on the future: it hasn't
happened yet. I like the irony of that. If one looks at that hardest of hard
sciences, physics, that hymn to 'force', one finds it pullulating with
notions of absolutely unverifiable 'fact', reaching to the ends and
beginning of time, which to my mind consist of 'bollocks' of the highest
order.

And Erminia, how lucky you are to be able to identify with being a
communist. Here it has no meaning, as no-one can be a communist in a country
without a communist movement. After all, that's a social affair.

Best

Dave


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

www.paintstuff.20m.com/index.htm

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "domfox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 8:24 AM
Subject: Re: (no subject)


> > What did concern me was Fred's endorsement of some odd elements in
> Dominic's
> > post. I've read that latter about five times now, and it seems to me
that
> it
> > is (whether consciously or not) perpetuating one of the hoariest
> > conservative myths of all: that people are naturally evil and therefore
> need
> > to be curbed, by the force of law and the force of 'hard-edged' economic
> > realities.
> > That telling word 'determinism' was lodged in Dom's post.
>
> On the occasions when I've run into people behaving in evil and stupid
ways,
> I've often tended to wish that something forceful and hard-edged would
come
> along and curb them. Batman, for instance. Authoritarian fantasies come
> readily to people who are used to being picked on. The robes of the
Taliban
> are a kind of superhero costume - "your bullets cannot harm me - my wings
> are like a shield of steel..."
>
> I don't think it's true that you have to believe that people are naturally
> or preternaturally evil in order to think of the rule of law as something
> useful. "Potentially" evil will do. I suppose I don't believe that the
> potential for evil is ever not there. There's always someone somewhere
> drawing little felt-tip skulls on the walls of his rumpus room.
>
> Economic determinism is as much a feature of some marxisms as it is a
> feature of some right-wing ideologies. The joke doesn't work without the
> punchline: I was describing the rather commonplace accommodation of
> neo-liberal tenets about the "icy" or "iron" determinism of markets with
the
> incompossibly "warm" and "fuzzy" hopes and wishes of social democracy.
Every
> "sensible" person accepts the former to a greater or lesser degree, and
> every "decent" person has at least a minimal investment in the latter; but
> it's actually senseless and contradictory to be "sensible and decent" in
> this way. Anyone whose politics can be mapped according to the currently
> prevailing intellectual stereotypes is caught up in this contradiction,
> which defines Blairism as much as "compassionate conservatism". Whether
you
> lean leftwards or rightwards within this supposed consensus ultimately
makes
> no difference to its bogosity.
>
> I agree about the experience of work: the managerial perspective is that
> people have to be continually bullied into getting their act together,
> "people" meaning everyone below oneself in the management hierarchy, but
the
> chaos goes all the way up and is in no way rooted in the incompetance of
any
> single tier of an organisation. Having to implement other people's
> thoughtlessly-taken "strategic" decisions means having to square circles,
> fit quarts into pint-pots and add one and one together to make three.
What's
> interesting is that there *is* an "iron law" of sorts at work here after
> all: the one that says that one and one together does not and cannot make
> three. If the wishes of managers could be effortlessly fulfilled without
> encountering any sort of resistance from what for want of a better word
I'll
> call "reality", then the chaos would vanish.
>
> I don't in spite of this believe that reality is an entirely disorganised
> and "potentialised" muddle. It has powerful self-organising tendencies,
and
> can be curtly "actual" when it feels like it (as anyone who has ever
walked
> into a lamppost should appreciate). There's a sort of dualism that would
> have it that all human "dreams of order" are delusions caused by a failure
> of the imagination to apprehend the primal chaos of existence. This is
> bollocks, and is used all too often by muddled thinkers to excuse the
> failure of *their* imaginations to cope with any order of systematicity
> higher than that of an A-level social psychology textbook...
>
> Dom
>