Why be a lord of time when you are already a Criminal?
A Sequence of essays investigating the crimes we commit, and what we might do about it.

Monday, January 3, 2011

mapping causality

Causality is one of those things. We take one example we all know so very well- those wretched snooker balls, and build an entire religion from it. The world suddenly appears full of snooker balls impacting - and the quest for them - the 'science' of certainty; -A cod 'science', which breeds its own athestists (who deny everything abased on its failure) and its innocent acolytes (who cannot reckon probabilities.
The real nature of causality thereby slips away- or is rather drowned beneath this noisy quest for certainity.
Surely if one wanted a quieter and more accurate methodology of the cause, one needs to imagine a series of series that plot out mere contours in a three dimensional landscape. Each series is made (Foucault and Deleuze suggest of a series of linked events. suns rise, or CCTV camera or scientific instruments trace a sequence of shots; or perhaps christmas happens and then happens again and again and ..... These seres the appear to run in one direction,and we assume aka the snooker ball that there is something inevitable about this direction, this line for time(this is Kant) so that the series in moving off one way and one the other - and that there is some current or force making it do so.
So far so easy - But these sequences of events, and their assume currents are caught up in a three dimensional and highly contoured landscape- an landscape that defined not only their interaction with themselves but also their relations with one another. Every series will changes hoe w it looks, and that it does by angle: It will likewise quite possibly have for or less elements within it. Or again two series will from myriad angles appear to meet - but not necessarily from angles or at all times - or again seres that never meet might hook up elsewhere.
But these patterns become even more complex when one realizes the very texture upon which they are drawn is not at all constant. On the contrary it shifts and bubbles away. it pulls series together, sucking them into vortexs , forcing them to converge or bubbles them apart, forcing them to flee headlong. Series are merely mobile contorous of this other dar texture- that we wish to map. The events which series take up and echos, are actually patterns in this texturing, - a fabric which as space and time moves this way or that, captures us in its power or propels us onward - or backward or wherever.
The trouble then being that that we do not all in a sense know this fact. The real trouble is that it takes so much patience to really realize it. It is as easy to realize false or faux textures and patterns as it is to build crazy stupid series. We do it all the time if we do not check our facts - for what else is blind prejudice or east assumptions? Or even cock up or conspiracy theories? ll assume texture and then bend there series to describe that texture, making it lone seem real. Textures make series too simple to distort and to warp - for once the texture has power or is seen as real, once we allow ourselves its reality then everything collapes into easy truth. Impatients becomes prejudice, and prejudice creates its own realties.....
Our problem is then in a sense really one of humility We are not masters of the texture: it is rather only our half guess and always speculatively mapped 'hidden' truth. it is the thing the series ought when left to themselves lead to - the thing we are not initially allowed to assume. The event we need to let the series and not ourselves map.
and yet this line might not be that holdable in actuallity for there are always more that one one texture at play in this process. Namely their are textures in the world or rather that we assume are of the world, but their are also textures in our minds- the textures of our thought process- textures that are as part of the series and anything else. the series we start with in a series always traces a dividing line between these two elements - these two worlds - and does so even as it traces out a contour in either (or both) to the worlds. That it a series in the point something beyond becomes into the mind, and becomes comprehended and conscious - at the same moment we attribute it to that other texture. and yet this divide is hard to maintain - It is so easy to step over that line and look to understand real texture only in terms of mental patters or else to demand that mental patterns conform with reality (The tyrannies of bigotory or utilitarianism).
To trace causes in an impossible series is then to pose a series of question always about what it is you are uncovering what texture what thought and where or how or when - It is the to demand one hours that old copernicus effect and fact in ones own mental texture into the picture as help or more often hinderance- and if one fails to do this and simply assumes causes are ones birthright and the entire picture collapses into characterure and grotesque.
To actually honour the world of causation is terefore very hard,a nd very complex - but then is that the point?

No comments:

Post a Comment