The Rhythm war of Change.
The war is everywhere- and very very brutal.
It gathers desperate events, placing them one against the other – making them matter, making them important. The changing cycles of nature are bound to a logic of nation states, and the desire to endlessly grow and have the possibility for change, and they all become the water wars. Or again the desire to endlessly grow ones state, and have the possibility to become ever wealthier (or at least to make good an ancient injustice), slips into a currency war, which looms over the entire system. Rhythm wars happened endlessly when w are making or ensuring other plans. That is when we are acting at on time to ensure one future, not forgetting that our actions have effects in lives far removed from our own – life’s where our actions will have a very different feel and power form the ones we attribute to them. As there philosopher Deleuze says we live in world full mini-universes, and personal cosmoses, each akin to a monad- and yet all these worlds impinge one upon the other, all constantly break each other, and force each the change in ways unlooked for or an wanted: In short the Rhythm war…
A war which has two deep strategies, two ways we endless try to understand how others impinge upon or world. The strategies fall roughly two old philosophical or theological debates: Strategies are either transcendental or immanent. Transcendental strategies work up imposing that land that is between us all, as if it were something real (if not actual). In Rhythm war is then held within a nexus of change, change than is deduced or understood in its actions – and which might (or might not) have laws or homogeneity of its own. rhythms are then all caught in a greater laws or power, one we must cohere within. The alternative view point insists that actually all rhythms and their effects one upon the other are immanent and emergent. There are no given rules, really none The uses rather emerge at the time and the place, in the conflict, and developed and change as it changes. One cannot then use the model of western developed to understand Eastern industrialization and can not assume that one model of thought must win.
Both these view point then insists the world is akin o an experiment (what else is a rhythm war but the insistence that all is experiment and changing). But the nature of the experiment is simply different. in the first transcendental account, what is being demonstrates is an underlying principles which is to be witnessed in the fall of an apple or the growth of a market. There are then ‘divine facts or rules at play. In the second experiment theories are merely caught as part of the system – caught within its exchange. They are not tested so much as belief in them is itself an effect, or rather changes everything. A theory is then not an explanation for much as an agent for change. In understanding and thing it, we allow ourselves to do or feel or believe more. We change then the position of our rhythm in relations everyone else. In both these strategies thought is linked to changing the world we are within. We open our minds to other rhythms, and gain the right to slip worlds. The only real debate is about the engine that takes between worlds. Can we understand it in a formal (if temporary) constructs - a genuine time machine. Or is the time machine merely the action of flipping itself, and the ideas that in thinking them allow us to change our fate and nature.
These alternate ways we situate ourselves between worlds might seem rather poetic and very abstract. And yet they are the stuff of political day to day life. The problem every politician faces, is that they only get elected by advocating one or other of these strategies. A strategy that is then made to make sense of their actions, but also of all the other actions in the word beyond their immediate concern. So that it is the role of the politicians and the language they sell to provide for a nation (or a ‘people’ or perhaps a localized landmass) a set of machines or threads to understand the rhythm war through. There are them two great moves one can make. One might talk about trusting a people to act and to think – one light then don the garb of the immanent mind (or at least say letting it free is the goal)– or one might talk airily about change and hope that lie between us all, that we all might believe in. both strategies are clearly in play at different point of the globe and the movement, and both a revealing their strengths and weakness, in the rhythm wars as it opens into our political world.
Taking the transcendental first, Obama was clearly is greatest modern prophet. A man who could paint a picture in words of a world that lay between all, and hope or dream we all could believe in and identify with. It did not really matter that this dream was not fleshed out, for the transcendental image of it was enough. It could come to pass – for we all had the dream. The trouble of course is that it never quite works that way. The manner in which one transcendental theory into the actual world is always at once open and difficult. One never gets the world one wanted, and never the political reforms. They get caught in the real politic of immanent life, and muddled up – and the problem that Obama and every politician then faces is what o do when it all goes not work out as it should in theory.
At which point philosophy fairly bubbles with rather a lot of models for understanding what happens, and the consequences of this failure- models that go right to the heart of what the transcendental might be, and how we might understand it. That is reasons why merely raising the manner of belief and change (or nationalism) is so very bad an idea. Theories that might be classified in two types, there are those that think that the transcendental change is beyond our nature, either because it is structurally separate or merely apriori to it: alternatively there are those theories that accept that we are transcendental in nature, and then go on to show why this fact itself makes for difficulties. All of which again is hopelessly abstract, and yet provides a structure to locate different explanations.
The classic example of the first of these options, a structural transcendental, is Marx. Marx suggested that it was the economy stupid that drove the entire show onwards. Our endless chatter about our aspirations and our hopes, of what we were going to change this or that was at worst codswallop, and at best merely a way of attempting in some garbled manner to understand the realities of the economic world in which we were all bound up. The economy defined then what we as individual could do, and how at a base level we ought to relate to one another. Our social position then set our limits to aspirations (including exact what we meant when we should have no limits). Politicians would then be judged not by the transcendental world they wished in impose upon the body politic but rather according to the realties of these great truth. If the economy stagnates then the politician is doomed, because one transcendental world, the economy, trumps every other. A reality that Obama probably understands rather well…
All of which explains why he is currently in difficulties no doubt – but not why those difficulties have lead to the rise of the rabid right. This fact is caught up by another rather more uncanny account of the transcendental - an account derived ultimately from Hume. Hume suggested that the real problem with arguments based upon passion, is that they carry their own truths. Passion impose upon a mind a glamour or intensity akin to actual reality (and its peculiar vividness), and yet lack realties universality. That is we agree there is theory that thing before us, because reality carries it own inner light (is different from dreams and is collective- we all see it there). We can then agree about the nature of the world. But passions? They are another matter, their light might lead us in many direction even as we feel them, and agree about there nature. We demand something somewhere HAPPENS, demand a change that is really real, and yet quarrel about what that change is. To promise a world that is somehow better, and open up the great myth of change everyone can belief in, and hope for the future, is to loose control of what that hope will be. For each and everything individual will take that hope into their own lives and live it or feel as they chose or more likely as groups them choose. It might then open out on many different sliding worlds, and become the stuff of rhythm wars. So that passions (and unlike perceptions) immediately open out on man worlds – and for us to feel the same thing is not for us to agree about anything. Emotive politics which conjures up the demonic passions is then a very dangerous form of politics for those passions bite back. A move that then warps ones own rhetorical and feeling it inspires so that they become quite different. Ones appeal to a nation and to change, can in the ears of pople who for deep seated (and possibly highly dubious reasons) dislike what one is (and the colour of ones skin); It becomes the a challenge. They must provide a counter vision or feeling – or perhaps better high-jack that sentiment and then portray the raiser of the feeling as the very who was trying to control ones mind (which is not absolutely false). For what else is the devil but the force that raises feelings in us we want, and yet does so in times and place or in a context we cannot countenance. What else is temptations but the inappropriateness of these passions?
But if the transcendental lies a little closer to home- what if it was enclosed within human hearts - Or minds? What if then change was something we all could understand? The trouble immediately is, Kant would suggest that such change is invariably of two very different kinds- o different takes of freedom. One might then understand freedom merely in terms of unloosening the bounds for a life, or one might understand it as something higher and better – the right to rethink what one is. The trouble is both of these two moves remain thoroughly transcendental, as to problematic in the application. To take the first change we might believing. A change which sees us fee ourselves from those forces (understood as government or perhaps economic circumstance) which are holding us back. The trouble is that these forces might be exactly the problem – and getting rid of them is likely to create endless problems not only for others but also for oneself. The appeal then to change or freedom pens out a Mickey mouse world where ranging against the day to day restriction we actually all face (and do so o that we might actually live in a society that is capable of doing stuff – which is government after all), becomes confuses with a wider fear of economic melt down and global shake up. Government becomes then easily blamed and ‘restriction’ seen as the problem, when the real concern is unwarily elsewhere.
However the alternative transcendental position is no less hard to navigate. Even if one can agree on the changes one seeks, on the transcended principle, how can one turn them into practical politics? Or better how can one do so in a world where a lot of people will reject the method (whatever it is) one chooses a fact that really matter as it is the method the means that create the ends (or at least allow for), whatever the transcendently rhetoric might say. We all want clinical excellences and merely get NICE (which is fine, but then is caught in the problem of being a government agency…) We want then one thing and yet once again get the other, and thought transcendental gets swept up on the rhythm war.
But what then happens if one simply gives up of the struggle to impose rhythm – that is if one runs with the immanent laws of rhythm production. A move that is fine is a way and yet always opens one out to a real dilemma. The philosopher Spinoza pointed out we share two quite distinct things. On the one hand there are great ideas which transform everything, running across societies and the world, making thing different – ethics of reasons and freedom, and the cohere to, and live through our live. These immanent constructions are what we are after in the bigger society we seek. And yet even if these forces were all there would be a problem, Spinoza suggests. For while these elements are ultimately compatible then tend to criss cross each other. Truths then break one another or at least transform ones understanding of what each are. One does to them for a simple axis of the known, and a manner of government. One rather simply has to accept that what this axis is and how it changes itself and so evolves throughout time (and so every truth or institution might radically change) reason does not then insulate one against the rhythm war- it merely makes one relaxed about it- but that might not make a state
The problem is worse because running parallel to these forces are much louder and stroppier feels was also share, feelings that then distort their truths and pull their realties towards this or that nosy concern. We start then with a high ethic about reasons and freedom, something nice abstract and say (and so sellable) and end up in competing claims and arrant selfishness which tend to advantage the stroppy and the wealthy. We tend then to give everything to those middle class elbows – and do in the name of freedom. In short the freedom to immanently generate rules transforms back into the ethics to the market place, and the economy - which after all is something at once in both worlds- transcendental and yet immanently create. The only alternative model is to limit the number of free individuals (Spinoza suggested only thirty or so) – individuals that then in their sharing allows all the rest of us to share. Well maybe – but the trouble is that this limit appears in the real world to impose suffering elsewhere (China obviously comes to mind here -).
In short the rhythm way imposes a semi-intractable problem for politics. It becomes rather tricky well to be frank impossible, to define where politics should be, and who it acts upon. It straddles world and rhythms and does not for all its talk of master and nationhood. Which of course catches in the real paradox and it is to government we look for answers in the rhythm war -and yet no government can provide such answers or even leadership – for they are riven as the rest of us. A fact that is likely to matter more and rhythm wars gather apace.
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