the classic rhythm war

The classic conflict pitches people (mobs, crowds, armies) against money, state and technology. The Former of course deals also with people, money is made through people, and yet registers the point where having had many support one at one point has becomes itself a power independent of what that many actually think. The making the money turns the weilder of the wealth into a man of consequence, man with many behind- and some point somewhere or some how. The silent majority is then set into the schemes of grasping individuals and becomes a power as does the siren voices of greed that infuse it.
States or organs of these states are traditionally playing the same game. A slice through people is specially priveleged and made to matter, we are all expected to beleif in it. and look to it as the source of our freedom. we are only free through it and it alone. Its existence across a mass, gives it its power - our belief makes its demand for reality itself real. we paly national anthems and go dopy. We invent systems that we think set us free as a part in that state.
If the state does not work then traditionally one organ can work and the country hold together- i mean the army. the world is rather full of dysfunctional states and up to dat armies- which both oppress but organize a nation. It is as if there is only a certain amount of westernization allowed to certain nations, and often as not it is spent on the army - ensuring no doubt power for the rulers (or the generals)- but also (and one needs to remember this), creating a single organization that can cope with emergencies in differnent forms.
Finally technology has long been the main bulwark against a folk. Organize correctly, create enough machines doing enough stuff, and you break the power of peoples or unions to resist. technology allows one man to count as many, from the gattling gun onwards.
Traditionally these forces have been enough to ensure a more or less comprehensive defat in the rhythm war for collective organizations. revolutions were only allowed to work if they were check mated into extremism (or immediately lost hemslves in our system). You can revolt we said, but we will ensure the cost is so hight that you will never like what you get.
It is this truth that appear at the moment to question. technology seems no longer the sole presevere of capitalist or sats (you are looking over blown and not good and using it)- it is coming gently round, if but for a moment to support the folk. it allows debates and real discussion. It is important not to be romantic here. Something has changed, but we do not what or for how long - or whether it will really allow that most illusive of political entities the real democracy to flourish. Indeed surely it will not (as that is almost impossible) - but if and when it does not we are going to live the legacy of that failure or partial success, as a new power a new rhythms in the land.
Lets hope we like it tho'...

Tiger and Dragon

Just to remind you all - the battle of who is the legitimate governance in egypt is very much a repeat a laboratry for the the Two Machaevelli - the one of the prince and the other of the discourses. The former puts forward the sates eye view of the state. it floats above the people asa transcendental force, making decisions, and taking action - is a sphere where he interest of the rulers, the interests of government and the 'true desires of the people' for peace and plenty (but not power) are blended into one another. The ruler then argues they always act in the interest of an imaginary (and childlike) folk- whose real material interests they serve. Democracy becomes then a way of turning the people into ungrateful children - whose opinion needs to be courted even as it is despised.
In his second great work Machaevelli considers the far more dangerous topic of immanent democracy. That is a democracy that comes up form the people in the roar of of protest- the crowd that feels its powers to be a god or a mob. In the end he suggests is ifs the people who are the greatest power of the state, and if they are ever woken up, this sleeping tiger of political necessity has a power like no other: they can win unwinnable wars (The french revolutionary wars, the second world war), and achieve impossible things . There is a real resource in the people. And yet it is a dangerous one. Not only are the folk actually unpredictable, but also there time of action, their time for debate is relatively short lived (or at least it is traditionally). All the concerns of the everyday have a habit of crowding in on the crowd, and forcing it back into normality - the government usually just has to wait....
And so in Egypt we have both forces clear and apparent. A government that sees itself as necessarily legitimate, because it governs,a n the people as children. Concessions need to be made, and something (as little as possible) needs to be done in due course, but in the end the role of them as governs need to remain - while the people do not as they conjure up the immanent democracy of the streets. do not share this view point.
A slogathon then develops.
A slogathon which itself is tricky for immanent democracy. Not only will normality start to kick in, and the demands of the everyday make protest tricky- but also and just as important immanent democracy have issues of leaders. I mean the entire point of then is that they have o leaders- ideas quite literally come up from the crowd, and are drafted in conversation. the trouble then is always not having a million viewpoint or one distorted viewpoint. The answer Machaevelli thought to his lay in education (while Spinoza restricted the crowd to thirty). Failing that the transcendental forces will look for leaders in the mob, people or faces who can be taken as leaders in waiting and induced into the realm of government. People who if they became part of governing might by the presence persuade the people to behave again..... And climb back into the box.
the other traditional effect of mass prolonged immanent democracy is of course that within those agiators who confuse the being a mob with being a democracy actually slowly gain power. in the crowd they are the ones who appear to talk sense. Crowds might then easily warp, and change, the mood darken when there demands are not met by government, and in defending their own rights to be that crowd that people, become violent. that is the crowd ends up understanding itself as its own republic, itself as a power with rights to enforce its will - the crowd in short slips into its own unique and aggressive form of transcendental government- with all the Terror that involves (Jacobins in the french revolution moved then from a movement of the streets to an attempt to enforce a rule of virtue, supported by the blade.....)
In short immanent democracy, while beautiful and powerful is traditionally limited and contained for reasons- for if it is let out in absolute form ones tends to go dark and tricky at some point - or else long before that point the government itself imposes its own counter terror on the people (as happned of course in france). Killing far more folk in the effort to burn out the desire to go on the streets.
And yet this is of course not to knock the power of folk, and the crowd. in many way it really ought to be the bet of governance - the one that is fairest and just. The trouble is ensuring i is. This was a problem that confused and occupied and eventually defeated the greatest minds in western political thought - but who knows (and i mean is genuinely) may be that is because the solution needs to be worked out in the streets - and Egypt will show a way on a new type of civilization - well maybe.....

Bluff and Egypt

It is a strange game of bluff being fought out in the the arab world - a game that the west has played ever since the end of the cold war, and the belief it gave the west that it was the end to all history. a game that reads the West is that- democracy plus capitalism is the thing and freedom - our one real sword, or at last says it with the one hand- and yet is terrified of the results, the possibilities that freedom might then breed. We want the arabs to have democracy.... quite- well as long as it matches our regional power play- as long as that means the ARE our allies or possibly supplicants or even colonies... And if not we will call you Maoists or terrorists, extremists or Islamists - or any other insult that comes our way.
In this freely used and rolling accusation, we joyfully cobble together a whole sequence of very different movements and protests,. Friends and enemies or potentially rivals , all crush together in a Foucault stigma machine- they are made by us to all be saying the same thing. They are made then into our enemies or at least not our friends, and so we do not have to face the unconvient truth that other democracy might not be like or like our own. Nor that other democracy might have some very pithy and provocative things to say about our power, and its abuses- that is the way we impress them with our might and force our will upon them, and all their doings. Heaven forfend they might make us feel real bad about ourselves and challenge our smug assumption that we are both best and the only option history has if it is going to end nice and neatly. And what is certain we keep the history, and the story of our monopoly of democracy clear simple and sacrosanct.
Better still from our point of view, by creating a single villan for us to tilt at we cobble together mesalliances in other lands, forced oppositions full of utterly incompatible individuals, and bound together in associations that cannot ever really work (or provide sensible opposition let alone government). We create then a force to resist us were moderates and extremist are caught in the same group- and fight. A group where failure is almost certain (as a single policy is a challenge) and the only utterly cogent view is of the 'extremists' (or perhaps purist) anti-western voices - groups that will take over purge out the other elements - and which the west has been over the years rather good at marginalizing (for the maoists onwards -).
or at least the West knows that it is the master of the script in this conflict.
Or at lest it did feel it was - until the Maoist state that got away from script became a world power. China really does destablize, not merely by being their an being an economic powerhouse, but also by proving that one can escape a western paradigm at least once- or at least appear to - and then be free to bank role other resistance movements. OIt is no wonder that the whispering walls of the world economic forum (self-creating-truth-mongers) are looking to China to fail in the medium terms economically at least. When all else fails, our whispering walls -seek to enforce the rigours of western capitalism to humilate a nation.....
And yet in all of this something is being lost- and lost at the very heart of democracy. It makes no sense after all to say that their is only ONE FREEDOM and we all must be forced to accord to it. or rather this statements is or course the single buttress for all tyrant and all oppression. The great creed of the tyrant. Democracy is only different if it actually allows the myriad voices within different cultures also to speak- and accepts that it might have different forms (maybe not simply parliamentary- maybe that is a historical form?) and different was to actually think its own nature (and its links to the worlds it finds itself). That is democracy without the self confidence to revel in the differences of other lands- in itself as different is worth not nothing (in some cases it is better than the alternative, sometimes- but many Pakistanese but beg to differ).
Unless then this other democracy - the one that does not confuse voices and allows for their differnces even articaltes them and follows something where they lead, actually happens, then the system anything but the end of history. it is indeed merely a name for the way the West encourage certain aspect of the Mafia to cease control in certain nations (under a banner of a political manifesto or social movement) . i defined then not power structures so much as ways the West will behave to both nation and rulers, ways of justice and injustice corruption and influence. It defines then not freedom, so much as political strategy. In demanding nations be a democracy - we demand then open to our influencing. WAs such we debase our own notions, warping them into a mere cipher
In short democracy becomes a mere brand- will of glossy shots and great promise, which is actually when to but it all hype, and merely yet another sugary caffine drink to melt you teeth with (but feel modern in the process). It is no wonder then ti is opposed to other brands (Al queada, or moaism ) that are similarly composed.
This yearning to expand democracy (via vulgar vox pop shows, or the National-'IDOL' shows is clearly active in west but aborted (what else is the otherwise dreadfully Tea-party?)- and in the east but suppressed and confused with other movements. the yearning then is their, and the suppression by confusion and trivia real - which raises of course three further questions. First What price democracy unless it is free>? what is the point of it unless it can all this debate? Is anything than oppression (lightish) under a different name. Secondly What exactly is capitalism running from - for tis hands are caught in the suppression. It fears democracy as the other voice the other freedom it doe not master, and fights hard against it - and often, we need if we are really going to peddle our freedom wares, to be aware of that fact. Finally there is a real sense in which the West is having to face down what it is - squalid player of global power politics, apostle for freedom, nor repressed colonalist - it is make up our minds time again (or the world will make them up for us).

a front line

The old (erroeneus) theory of the twin revolutions of modernity (there were so many more) is clearly collapsing. that theory argued that freedom happened twice, once for political freedom, and once for economic, and that these two remain apart until the end of the nineteenth century (the French and the british experience), but were now united in the liberal consensus- and in a front to sweep the world. a theory very much for the world of the post second world war - a theory that gained in smugness after the collapse of the iron curtain, and yet id a theory which is clearly dying, leaving a highly mobile and collapsing front line between these two freedom.
The collapse was perhaps orchestrated intially from out side- two voilent conflicts one for each freedom as destroyed the old consensual border - and re-ignited the conflict between the two erstwhile friends. The first is of course Iraq and the collapse of the myth of America megapower, which died in the Iraqi sun and sand. america looks vulnerable, Its one club military power fraught of defeatable. it looses then the right to be the simple future - as with it the claim to be the end of history, the end where personal and economic freedom incarnate. The Irony is very real here. the alliance of freedoms needed military might(and all that implies) to keep it real!
At the same time China has rediscovered the suppressed forbidden truth that economic and political liberality have nothing to do with each other. one can have a repressive state and yet an economically liberal on and visa versa. The old alliance was a post war creation, sold as an absolute truth, and we are again being forced to remember this fact.
But this external collapse is only half the picture, for a far more complex front line has opened. It was one of the cardinal points of the old alliance that the respective roles of economic and political freedom were clearly mapped out and established. States did not interfere with economic and economic with states: the former was protectionism and led to inefficencies and pointless duplication; the latter was corruption and led to the mafia.
But of course new technologies rather change that. Are after all network sites a democracy or a market place? They have clear elements of both - elements that are not necessary complementary. Political campaigns can arise then from the virtual sphere, and sweep across the political system, forcing change. All the more so as the political system craves these campaigns as that which gives it purpose: They are Youth - they are its sex. And yet these political campaigns are one and the same with economic campaigns that lead to Apps becoming widespread. It additional to this confusion, there is also the fact that it is this very act of democracy (that is mass recommendation, a spreading a word) what ad men want to market to. They want to go viral, They lust after our democratic bits, and wish to use then to sell product. The mobile acts of immanenat democracy have become then an a ad mens wet dream. The entire system is the pockmarked with real campaigns, and stooge campaigns designed to sell product. A picture whose complexity is then doubled up because it must cut across that other line the one between fact and fiction that the internet already buggers up - because as we all know the very act of mass believing or even reading a rumour adds to it its own reality and power. Truth is always social: And the social always finds its own truth: The trouble is that we cannot really ever tell these two things apart.
It the complex virtual kingdom, real sentiment and money mingle, as do political activisim which genuinely can mobile with cod activism which bribes its armies, and they all do so in ways that can not be easily distinguished or thought apart. At the same time another rather different freedom becomes the battle line. for what still united and divides the old allies is the issue of information. it was of course an assumption of the twin revolution model that within reason, information in both systeme was free and true and was so in the same way. But in this old new world of ours that assumption is clearly broken in two directions. Firstly it is very clearly in the rumour mill actual truth does not matte rover much. Rumour is king and out runs everything. free choice has then become based on mass democratic (actual or contrived) rumours. But within these rumours are of course nuggets of truth. Real state power (or antistate powers) becomes then all about controlling these nuggets and stopping them either looking signifcant or making sure they are never found- or in extreme cases ensuring that if they are found a virus comes within them and undermines their effectiveness. Freedom t think becomes then a real battleland - a place of absolute distortions and dangerous suppressions
Secondly and more problematically, the reaction of the two bastions of the old orders are clearly different in verity if not in intention. I mean politicians come a cropper if they believe the rumours (they often do) and feel they have to act upon them, They make then foolish inoperable policies that have no effect and merely junk up the statute book with rubbishy illiberal twaddle -. too much information, or the wrong kind of information makes the politicians life very difficult therefore. they need to judge when to suppress the truth, when to talk of it (and sacrifice it to the rumour mill, and when to attempt to suppress it. while of course in contrast business, which does not need such practical policy is free merely to sell lies and stuff : Rumour becomes marketing. the only problem then are inconvenient truths such as the product does not work too well) these must then be dismissed or drowned in rumours.
It is No wonder then the old alliance is gone. The interests of business and politicians in the virtual world are simply divergent and likely to become increasingly so), and this is a system where the working assumption has always been that they have to operate together (what else is a capitalist democracy?) The trouble the is of course both start to flay around politicians dream of illiberal policies designed to make their lives easier, while business people want greater and great rumour spreading freedoms and need then to counteract the democratic rumour verse that is the internet). A flaying around which is all too visible and lads then to new rumours, rumours where the issue of truth both parts of the old alliance become under deeper and darker scrutiny than ever before. a mistrust that errodes then entire system and leads where exactly.....
now one needs to be a little careful here. There is a sense in which one can say as ever it was ever thus to this set of 'fact'. one always can say that in our system. there always was after all tensions between the two revolutionary armies. that is true state regulation versus business freedom; corruption versus democracy. and yet there was at least a clear stable alliance. It is surely this alliance or perhaps treaty that has collasped, and gradually gently we are going back into the mobile state of war that existed between these two freedom in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. a war that that leads of course to many dark places (empires depressions, world wars) - which the old alliance in part (but only in part petrified. We have to really face up to this movement therefore- as not to - not too attempt to think through new solutions,and to assume there is no problem, or that the problem will solve itself might leads to the very dark history the smug world of the twin revolutionarily allies had promised themselves was a thing of the past.

The Shadow light

We live in the shadow light of so many 'well known events - events that have taken place of mythlogy and God. Events that we cannot query overmuch or question - events that we are told simply are. Without such deep mythologies state and economy would of course transform and quite possible become unstable.
no reason to moan here - after all all cultures are always the same- they all use mythology and legend, well known stories to define their position. And yet of course there is something odd both about our tales, and about our tellers. The tales only work when they claim to be not myth so much as truth- and elsewhere in our thinking we have of course set the truth bar very very high - What else is science? We have then a faith that our myths, particuliarly the ones defining our relations with others ought to be very high. We assume then things are true in the scientific sense that are merely myth- worse than that we assume that ideas defined within our cultural practice (freedom defined by democracy alone as if the two were one and the same) were both universal in application and easy in comprehensions. Problems that are very hard then are made seem easy (and so actually become impossible to solve), and an entire sad history is pulled out.
Worse than that of course if the well known truths are easy to implement those who do not do so are clearly really just very very bad- and so need to be punished (or instructed). It is never the myth that is the trouble, never our worlds, after all- it MUST BE 'em.
What is more our modern myth bringers are clearly a media that have lost all sight of when they are myth spinning and when actually reporting. they are in this of course working in the old storytelling tradition- news and myths are scrambled together- which was fine is a culture which knew and allowed for this fact, but sits oddly in a world where these truths must be treated as if they were by true, by quizzling politicians anyway. All the more so as these myths create a shadow world, of not just well known facts but cod science which apes the real stuff, and provides an on running mythic or moralizing commentary for it. One again in terms of anthropology this kind of mythologizing of the real world in nothing very special- it happens all the time and what else are dreams anyway?) -no the problem sis that we are presented with this hocus pocus as truth (which is never fine).
But the real trouble i think is this- that our society is rather too complex for this kind of shadow light. that is our reality is deep and turbulent, complex and challenging - there is so much more to modernity than their were to other times- more people, more thought, more current. It is then so much easier both to mythologize (and perhaps actually more necessary than ever to do so), but also even more easy to then mistake those myths for turbulent reality. myths becomes the simpler version of what is happening, and starts very quickly in its simplifying way to run the show- it seizes control of the money and guns and becomes what it is all about- and God damn anything and everything else that resists.
It a world of torrid and turbulent reality- it very easily slips into being the plain and simple, truth.
We entire a strange world then where myths ceases being what we fight crusades for, the holy principle to defined, and actually becomes the very battle itself, and its after math, and everything in it. a world where only the shadow light is clear.
Oh help.

pressing that legacy

You can tell we have got time wrong when government or at least political leaders start to obessess about legacy after less than a year in the job. The trouble a guess is the great mythological 'leaders' just prior to the end of the cod war, have set a very high standard. Or perhaps better they ahve shown to an ego what the job might lead to - how one might remember, ad leaders ears prick up. What is more they know that good marketing requires time and constant referal to the product (themselves)- so one needs tog et thinking legacy straight away (all the more so as our crop of young leaders are going to hang around to be in their own legacy, and not retired senile or dead).
but this would be meaningless if the media did not of course cooperate. legacy is the stuff of new print and easy cheap stories. Legacy needs not be investigate or revealed a sham - it is just there- the popular knowledge we all have about what someone did. To write the legacy before the time in government or to connive with writing of it makes good sense for journalist whose new cycles do not allows for proper research or anything- for journalist then who need not stories but easy dog tag mythology instead.
life is so much easier if we all know where we are going.
and yet of course it is always the problem with the mythological as fact. it has no predictive gumption. One cannot then simply predate or demand what will be- that that is the point. Balls up happens in places other that mythology. Wars happen and legacies are gutted or destroyed or strikes are lost.
And yet are the core of what is happening here is something that is not awful. All parties all government state their aims and their goals- of course they do it is what you do when you govern. The mere statement of where you want to go is fine enough.- indeed without such hope democracy is effectively meaningless. But a hope or dream for a possibility to come is no legacy- for one has acknowledge the difference in time between scheming and doing- One has allowed for that difference (the one where what values one have come more to the fore).
Once this important distinction is gone then one enters a strange dark kingdom- suspended between truths and fictions - a realm of pre-history, where journalist and politicians attempt to write do is write the initial draft of the history (and do it before the events have happened). Memories are being written before the action are done to fill them (the celebrity problem) - and in the knowledge that once these history are written they will to a degree (barring disasters) start to bend history in their way, start to warp what is actually occurring i their direction. The history repeats itself into the future. It might change then, but as it attempts to punch as history not hope, it has a power to demand the world listen to it as 'real'.. It does so even when events dispose of it or change it (although not is a way hat is useful- Bliar is hated so much as much as because he was writing his own history as for the war).
But the real trouble is that this pre-writing of history is not the job of politicians, nor government nor even selling government- and its presence wit the confusion of facts and fictions to come actually injures governing as they cloud issues and prevent real decisions being made (one wonders always what it looks like in the fantasy legacy). It plays then to the vanity of the trappings of power and not the reality- the myth of being PM,a myth that is currently governing us all at the moment - a vaccousness we might rue one day.

The many worlds or the modern theodicy

Hang two worlds - there are so many- josseling around - worlds we are citizens of, and move freely between- worlds we force to coagulate and separate. These world might be neatly arranged into some kin form some kind a Pyramid, with a
At their apex lies the odd actual world. This is a strange complex place of its own- for it cobbles together both individual minds, the truth we know and the ones we guess about other minds, memory, and events - all lie together in this world. truths are then created socially, and believes, but always tested and transformed by events- events that mind their meaning in the fabrics they erupt into. a world where no human can feel themselves unimportant (they are at every one time their own local centre) and yet at the same time they are aware that their center in shifts across time, and changes where it is (they change), or again that evens and other ensure that where they thought the wold was centred is never simple, and never exactly where they might have thought it was. A world of a wandering centred- and myriad perspectives. we know that others are on their same journey - moving around heir own perspectives, findling their own realities - finding their own truths, which refract into our own truths, our own current point of view.
The square based pyramid has then four faces, faces that meet at the edge, and which if you could look at then from outside would imply then were other mirror world to our own (or many)where the orders, the events and possibly even the humans are different. and yet those worlds are of course hidden -only the edges are visible, with faces that form distinctive pairs.
to the north and the east are faces that appear to open out onto the worlds of reality as it might be lived by objects themselves. The great north face then patterns this other world in terms of sciences - with the most fundamental physics lost at the bottom of the pyramid hidden from perspective - while layers and layers of separate worlds are built up upon these truth. Each such world, each ayer of building is complex and complete in themselves, each their own world, once certain assumptions are given, once relation between it and the world earlier are established.A face is the formed of hidden reality- of this of the world to be known.
As the face gets closer and closer to the real human world it will of course change a little. it clearly starts to reflect up also reach into that world. Yo can see clearly lines running up into the apex creating disturbance. More than that there are clear affinities between what is happening in the real humans world at the top and the eddies and changes on the face below. the latter describes to a degree the former - is supports that human world and clearly makes somethnin in possible, and yet as it does so, the human lines run into that face. Once these lines are seen they seem to run further than one might think down the face, towards that fundamental level. One starts then to look for links between circles of physics and the conscious minds(this link in then one of the edges).
The Each face is an odd one- for ti s made of events big and small, linked and unlinked - events of the world. these events as the some up towards the real world start to form order chains, changing whose top most slice then mirrors the human worlds exactly one almost cannot tell the two apart. One might be at the apex on that last world. And yet the face is so distinct. for once one is the world of events, ones eye naturally slides down to other things the same events might have created, other worlds one is already in (these tend to lie to the south on this face) and other links or loops between these same events (which lie to a degree to the north). The of the face seems to be the most chaotic- many events many world see, to meet, as other events stream in, ones and consequences that never happened, dark world or other worlds, worlds of noting or worlds of possibility. the existing a huge affinity (bit no identity) between this choasmosis of worlds and the world of the fundamental layers of science. Both are a chaos of possibility and other worlds. The edge between the two being compose of endless experiences (on the science side), and their ramification (on the events) a world of dates and local legends, which span into their respective faces, creating eddies and possibilites.
To the south and West lie the human worlds. The West face, is the world of Humanity that capital 'H'. The worlds of morality and ethics. It joins science on an edge in which human conscious and conscience seem to demand a reality in the scientific faces or at least pitch it is own problem. This is then the world the top point claims to honor and respect- the world of perfectable societies and social systems. A world with its foundation in legend, which lie at the bottom, and somehow allow this face to appear distinct from science and give all that follows into shining character. Above this fundamental assumptions worlds of morality and ethics lies. and yet and yet there is something wrong with this world, once you get beyond it pointillistic order. if you look at the pictures in them, they are often disturbed and change lights appear to play through them. The fact image might if one changes the angle actually transform and become rather draker. annthe mor so if one runs eyes not from top to the bottom but say from the bottom to the top or diagonally. The worlds then that might from one angle look like a succession of perfections, would also else where appear dark suppression and near fantasy. there is then a real feeling that things might not be as one thought they were- or how one thought they where. Maybe the moral order- maybe the humanity a mere trick of the light? All the more so as edge of this Western world meets with the north shadow axis of the pyramid.
the northern shadow face is the world of rumour- they other world where distortion of reality always appear as the truth. A world that sets of from the top, and the human worlds which is only distorts a little in the reporting, and yet very soon the echoes of those rumours have grown and changes,into something very different, very weird or threatening or just plain odd. ranging across this world are then the worlds we think we live in- the ones other tell us about, the rumours we almost belief. a world that is utterly disturbed by the same kind of score lines that pock mark the world of bright humanity. The two worlds appear then in a sense to reflection of the other. and yet there is a clear difference. The Western face imposes its order upon the face. The order is appearance, the disruption then is hidden and yet their. this face by contrast appears all disruption, all rumours, and yet across this rumour are clearly half orders appears, across the scores one sees a near structure. A structure that is never simply imposed - and yet might well be judged. so much so that the Base of this pyramid appears an ordered world where these rumours are worked out and all the grinding around create their own reality. There might then be a real order somewhere in this face- and yet all is chaos and grinding folly. one gets the impression that near the top are lies, distortions of real problems.
We live then less in the one world or the two, but the shiftings perspectives of a pyramid whose faces create very many worlds many possible ways to see this one and to change with it- man options. And the danger we all face is never knowing quite where we are.

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?

that pestulential light again

What is the world but a massive insect eye - where the same image is caught in a six billion different lenses, and composed across the differences tat the see?\ a world reflect - and refracted into tit bit, gossip, well known facts, gathering tales and social passions. A world full of its own optical illusion and distortions, its own believes and problems.
what else do we man by big phrase such as the world but this fact- what else but this collectivasion through language and intuition through dreams perhaps into soemthing akin to the mind.
and and yet - the trouble is that mind even in allegory is mad, really really mad - for it lacks the checks and a balances that create and infuse the finite- it lacks then the external rhythms that are simply imposed on its from an fixed and known outside. The mad world of our collective mind, no ability to tell virtual, created in the storm of gossip and the act of telling from actual events. the two are one. as no doubt they are in all our minds to a degree- but only to a degree. its answer is of course to create dark demons patorl its borders- figures, be they a mysteries hidden ENEMY or a missed conspiracy, or the idea of a environment destroyed or a God - js but something beyond the rumour, something. IT could all be about, - a dream perhaps?
These visions are curious affairs- real demons, that one does not know whether the are inside or out. Dark demons are then thought up, theorizes, they theory enters the mind and new demon, a new half outside,half inside world is created in the added refraction.
For what is the name of a demon but legion?
Philosophy spilts into political economy, which spilt is into politics, business and economy which which again and again. The new formations then partially, at times coagulating and then splitting again into new forms, in a and endless procession of new amorphous externals -in a mind quite mad.
But it is mad in another sense to. For our collective mind is like the most repressed and emotionally illiterate of humans. it cannot feel what and where ti should, but rather will endless loose and misplaced feelings: worries about jobs slip into racism, and worries about death into new agism or hysteria about the medical profession. Nothing is ever felt as it seems. Nothing is ever quite right or proper in this mind of ours.
And yet of course the feeling here are always indulged (and this is really part of why they are never what they seem): A good social feeling creates its own world - carries it with it if you like. the world it builds, and then lives in (and the demons that are the obverse of this feeling).We live then in a world of rehoused collective feelings: Feelings that forever become their own reality - their own truth, irrespective of the effects of that truth or wider reality or even other parts of the mind.
The very act of sharing the feeling leads to the demand of these parts of the mind to be special- too really really matter more than the rest - to be their own little distorted demon haunted world -
Finally the networks creating and informing this collective mind are very wobbly. The rules about what get listen to and what ignored are rather mobile and indistinct. Many thing that should perhaps matter in our sane moments get lost, while innanities spread. We end up in this chaos looking to a few pillars of sense- a few censors or believes merchants to short though the hubbub of possible important dreams and fact. The rules then for bleeding a story across the world are either hidden or merely random - and live in the consequence of that fact. The result of course is that the things that are built up into a collective minds are only a very very small part of all that is going on. There are always other truths out there- in the drivel and the gold. The mind exists then of a small part of its own register- it needs to ignore so very very much, and has no clear fixed way to do it. It might notice the trivial or it might ignore gold - without a rhyme or reason.
The world then has slipped from the nice straight forward, if vindictive and petty, idea of God into the spider eyes of man and all his demons good and bad - and our problem is ow how to live with the impure insanity that necessarily follows...

A brutal dilemma

It is one of the odd, sad things about being a human - we dont's half belief in our ability and right to see into the future. We forever confuse desire with truth, hope for actuality, impossibility for probability . What is more there really odd thing about this tendency is that we do it more when we we only half half a thing, and less when we know more. Take a group of people or a hal understood policies or glitzy product, and we give you a fantasy.
All of which is fine, but of course the real rub here is that society is pitched a little in the real and a lot in the fantasy - and where before that fantasy used to be all about the State or a God, it is now all about products, and sham politics. The problem then being that this move to a religion of stuff creates an actual tension with genuine reality. For without a box called Not normal actuality, the worlds of fanatasy and reality merge and fuse - a merging that is always haighly problematic as mere belif creates its own other shadow realities.
Politics becomes then almost entirely a shadow game where one attacks made up stories and virtualites, based of single examples and urban myths (the politics of witch burning is what wins general elections), while economics becomes dream of the never never crossed with moment of absolute brutal reality. The entire process is then infused with a myth of freedom and chose. we are told hat we can chose can change government and are in some some of control. Indeed in a senese this claim is critical to the system. Once it was made (say two hundred years ago or so) once freedom became what the system had to be about, then as freedom parsay is actually a contradiction in terms in a complex society, the argument had to turn of fantasy. we might then not all be free in realty, or might have in spite of that freedom radicially different chances in life and different abilities to influence our world, but that need not matter if in the shared reality we all live in we are free.
A politics of freedom and fantasy clearly run together- and look for those freedom issues to incarnate and agitate around - and societies are tuning on the way they are delivering the current collective fantasy - and how. The rule being that at some point or other the fantasy shops and the fantasy engine gets going: The unglamourous mass production or unscrupulous world of finance,of maniptualtve sphere of advertising cut and ret the fantasy: There aim not to manage or direct so much as endlessly produce in the shadows. .. They do not pull the string, but rather mange them, We live them in a society where glizty fame is the gaol, and its production must remain of camera.
Except that this getting is getting tricky. The system is a little too complex at the moment. There are too many glitzy and too much production. So much so that it is being at times all too visible, Banks and the environment, secretes and media lies, all are more visible than have been in a world where everyone in a sense does some production (what else is facebook/blogs but a fame machine, where we are all also producers). The dirt and the realties that infuse our loud demand for fantasy as raining on our party. This is a complex crisis as it is very plain that new dark fanatsies are build built to cope with this dissolutionment- fantasies about living in difficult times and needing to punish ourselves and others more. There is no simple revolution here- and no necessary productive crisis - but rather a darken of the fantasy just when one thinks it might ends or change or become something different .
Leading to the double of the left, how to stop this dark fantasy destroying too much of what actually we value, but also at the same time how to try to find other voices than fantasy and this production - how to use its revealing to be production. But the brutual dilemma is that these to run counter to each other. revel so much truth and the fanatasy goes very dark very quickly: Reveal none or hide the production process and nothing changes. The Left whose future depends on then revealing the destructive production of fake fantasies in order to critique capitalism at all, finds its caught, in either supporting the dream or ruining and possibly leading the way to nightmare (as has happened so often before) -a very brutal choice....

Judicial Murder

Well we do not kill any more- but the great lesson of society - that at some point one individual has to be sacrificed very publicly and possibly grizzily - to serve as a reminder or a threat for the rest of us. It keeps us all behaving. ore that than it forms the limit at which a state can burn itself on otherwise inchoate forces that surround it and genuinely threaten it. what else was a witch trial but the sate showing its power at a time of anarchy (thirty years war)?
The witch of the cosmic version of the conflict that ranging between sates. sates were fighting points confessional struggles in protracted series of violent and disruptive wars - wars that risked anarchy really spreading peasent revolution and the rest). A good witch trial sopped all that - all the fear all the hatred could be worked in a grizzly passio na paly where the shere desperation of the times could be expressed in terms of a voilent conflict of god and devil and in the struggle of neighbours. The connection was not direct so much as inhabited. witch trial always around made sense in the desperate time. A sense then that also burned the power of the judges on the minds of individuals and set limit to anarchy (or rather caught within a certain conflict).
in short even states really do not like chaotic forces. or better they like only the one - the officially sanctioned force the Market. This the one they have been forced to accept and (and actually partially created - fosture/foisture on humanity). The Free market is then a chaotic force that the state runs with and merges with - the two feeding each other - and so expanding to devour otherpossible threats. The free press has been devoured by the freemarket (that is global new organization).
This relationship was of course bought in blood - and written in part across a series of conflict from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth that saw the rise of the market as the force of globalization of the times ( a struggle that included of course the witch trials).
The point of course being that the state (or market) now do not want other chaotic forces coming along. they will take extreme measures: They have then been looking for a long time for a good public judical murder (well after fear failed). a murder to make sure we all behave online and do not do anything too radical (this even as they trumpet the freedom on the internet- by of which of course they mean the rights of the market to use it). What better then then the jucidal slaughter of a sight that sells tittle tattle (and that actually has said nothing one one not assume to the be the case- America has actually come across as a sane super power). No matter. A case like this becomes then a defining point - a state is burning it power- forcing the new powers to conform and behave o the old model. making itself felt.
It is of course right to do so (well from it point of view). The Internet is potentially as disruptive as the free market or the anarchy of peasent rebellion. The only question is - is the freedom on the internet actually powerful in bedded enough to survive as the free market survived the attacks of the state- it was too useful to crush? - or will it buckle and conform in the face of state power - as google has done in China but of course now (when the boot is on the other foot) in America Or what is far more likely will the state and free market attempt to devour it as they have devoured all other freedoms: that is will they comprehend it in their structure (verbal and conceptual) and so prevent it having any other life. This is a legal but also a conceptual battle. the question is then can the state-market model absorb the internet within its existing language and concepts: Watch then for the deployment by the state and the media of the arguments of identity, personal freedom and responsiblity - and all the language commericalism here, and the way via apps via the music industry it becomes the language of the 'other-net')

Make then no mistake- this a is a real conflict for our times.
so where do you line up?

the coagulation of corruption.

It is one of those games we all play: an irregular verb - I compete, you bribe they are corrupt. Corruptions is almost the necessarily consequence when one model of possible political future becomes the only model, and is impose willy nilly across the world. States like Afghanistan have never worked (why should it have to be one- it never as?) - and all that is likely to hold the hodgepodge of interests together are web of wide scale corruption - so that the corruption actually becomes the sate, and every one knows it. It is after all an old problem in philosophy - One invent rules that appear perfect (or not)- and then discovers the problem about rules is that they create a game, that might not by playable or that if it will will be also played to intern rules, to the rules minds make of the rules they are given. rules external fixed thing, even the ten commandments (which is surely the idealists model here) simply do not have to be followed- or if they are the following itself might be highly problematic and complex. to follow a rule is never simple. Likewise to break a rule is never simple either. Rules are not simply there to brea- one might break one rule to mend another- or to keep the spirit of the whole thing... The entire edifice of laws then turns on interruptation, corruption or lawyers - how else could it be different?
lopped into this fact are then several others. firstly once one has a rules one needs a person to enforce it or regulate it or at least note when it has been broken. in the perfect rule state that person is of course oneself. And yet Rules are often rather technical affairs, and so highly complex to enforce - and oneself rather biddable and possibly open to suggestions: Or again rules are very often about articulating complex relations on has with others, relations which would normally be pitched in other (in more violent or passionate ways)- and rules form merely a part of that pitching (and not necessarily a big part). Or finally many if not all rules are parachuted in from God knows where- are the result of some stitch up at sometimes between global powers, and make little sense in local situation or in other peoples cultural traditions. There is no reason to follow them all the more this is the care when the external powers themselves do not follow (or perhaps police) there own rules. Or (as is often the case) e they are too greedy, or maybe they do not care enough. to monitor what there own people are doing. Maybe they have invented the rules in another context, or as a reflection of their own power (and so nothing to do with other nations) - the permutation go on and on- but the upshot is the same the world is full of bodies of rules defined at one time and in one (all too political context, and which has almost no value or universal application.
In short the idea that rules are internal affairs collapses leaving one with the bodies that are meant to enforce these rules impartially as the answer. At which point of course one hits the deep problem with external rules themselves. They need to be enforced as a world within the world. Everything will have then to be comprehended within the rule book and in terms of it The rich complexity of life is then lost within a few targets and half jotted mantras. The result is the then pure nonsense - as rules become applied nilly willy or wherever and however: - a world where they simply be any simple answer.
This is of course the Genius of case law Case law allows rules to be applied, and then for everyone to watch and think about the application and change their practice. Law becomes then a living tradition - for everyone to know. and yet keeping this case law free from the influences needs a lot of hate and jealousy, and all directed at the same place. That is you need rivals struggling with each other, rivals who are determined to honour the tradition but critique one another. The trouble of course is that the manufacture of such a system of rivals in a bitter struggle according to certain rules is almost by definition a product of cultural tradition. That is what cultures (with the exams and the colleges, and their port and high tables) do. To try to impose it elsewhere is then always tricky, as local customs will move the rules elsewhere- : Or actually and far more tragically the mere fact that one is imposing a rule from without is enough to undermine the application of the rule kit itself. Everyone is liable to self-consciously apply the rules, and wire that self-consciousness into their application- a fact that actually breeds corrpution as people cease to live the part.
Rules then corrupt as they wander across the globe- and do so naturally, as local practice adapt as they adopt, the rules. more than that they are adopted self-consciously, an adoption that disrupts culture making different people powerful, and creating a hybrid of local custom and self conscious rule kit. To navigate this senseless union becomes always then tricky. one need to knows That is exactly what rule as are being applied where (local or international or hybrid). At which point another dynamic kicks in. for once the rules cannot make sense then it really becomes about who one knows...
and other dynamics then get working. Firstly the original enforces of the rule are not innocent here. they have after all taken rules from one of their domains and applied then across all the rest. It does not wrk for them either - they will the be just as generate transgressor - only their corruption will be mingle with genuine hypocrisy as well, as they focus one where the rules work and not and the money making areas where they do not... At the same time the actual problem will not be understood by the western powers who rail against the corruption while aiding its creation and of course to do business at all conniving with it. An ideology of the end of history and the triumph of the west is so strong strong, and so imperial, that any other world or voice always gets itself lost in the process.
At which point of course the world divides into a very complex sequence of patchworks, some Western rules are applied sometimes and some local, and between rule endless little acts of bribery and corruption. Acts the West joins in one and uses of course for their own benefit (although in this case they are of course absorbed under the expenses of big business). A complexity that is then reflected in business big and small and the way it these fragments of law allow to make (or lose) money. the very fragmentation of the sate becomes then the system itself (and oddly stable)
Corruption then is not really any criminal so much as the failure of one system to universalize across all domains an the across the world. does this really surprise us? What really? and are we sure that in condemning i we are not merely also critiquing other cultures form not being like us? Questions we need remember in the rhythm war - even when we condemn regime that certainly are corrupt and d enforce unjust rules on their people, regime - that and do indeed include ourselves once we are removed from the comfort zone of our western identity....

Leaks or history

It is a matter of rhythm which you say of corse. that is there the politics of war and diplomacy, necessarily two faced, if what keeps peace, or whether everyone actually knowing that people are not daffy, they have realized Cameron is ligtweight, China might not care for North Korea, and Saudi Arabia does not like the Shiite republic. A force has temporarily the face that states put up to the world, the rhythms that being a state, with is dynamics of nationalism - and hypocracies of commerce and democracy, but whtehr the icebergs of the states shatter into violence is another matter. It rathe depends one exactly where one thinks hmanity likes to pitch its political power. I mean states are the successor to Gods, and are so fairly deliberately. They see themselves and their action a semi-divine entity. that s beyond good and evil or simple comprehension - and certainly beyond emotion this entire edifice of global politics has then an element of Olympus about ti. Great god struggle across the face of the world. they set up alliances, pour in resources for a while: they even have special favourites - and all the while they have the same needy relationship with their humans. for they need to be worshipped to be a all - and the same dependence on chance (and oil). the same need that is to confuse themselves with the world of men
The deep rhythmic accord here is no doubt not chance. Why else do the ruling classes laud the classics so highly: In the d they see the template for the states.
And yet this quasi-divine sate has clearly come under rather a lot of pressure recently. Firstly from these kind of leaks- the moment that we realize (if we actually ever doubted it) that we are governed by humans after all. Secondly of course there have been those other leaks thats how exactly how corrupt the entire state is and how inefficent. It is less a divine body and more merely a way to have individuals on the make. The self appointed divine state is clearly under threat - from as it were an internal cancer, which corrodes their apparent power and their rights to command worship. N owonder sates call foul, and sar to use whatever they have to stop or limit leaks- any God would do as much.
But what we are left with is strange question.
in the end is democracy actually realizable and worthwhile. that is do we want these successor to God ruling the world as they do now? Our chance of the divine in the sate? Or do we want to pitch the pretensions of these Cod divinities? aand hw if they dies on us, how do we replace these Leviaithans without resorting to Behemoths of chaos? What is the world with out sham divinity really like? a world Hobbes knew and feared....A world that might now be different, might be better, but do you want to take the risk? Or do you want to pretend to yourself that you do, and yet not really? thatat is do you want merely to cricitise the sate or the gods without declaring them dead.
But if this last is true what does one do when the Gods wreak vengance to restore honour? Are we going to stand ? Or attempt to say something and so risk being caught up in the tempest of forces. The point being of course if enough of us say something (or even more laugh) at some point whether we say will stick - it will be something the God are listening to.
That is if we criticise Gods for Duck houses and not for the size of their claims (Cameron was actually the most greedy politics of the last parliament in terms of money paid)- then that critique sticks in the minds of our Gods, and they ensure we cannot make it again - one way or other (and will warp an entire system just to ensure that fact - the rules of nature or sense suspended for our foolish query). Do we want then to critique knowing that is the case. that is that what sticks is not sense but chaotic power to reverberate the powers of the gods themselves.
The death of God, Death of man and the Death of the the state, are three agonies crystalized together- a death agony that will one way or other reverberate through time; The screams of the dying forms the rhythm war itself.

The three rhythms

The dark saga of hope and dissolution that is modern capitalism - is clearly a saga in three acts - were each act each rhythms ossicalted between one inviduals mind and many minds: it is in me but also you and they...
The first act is the rules of the future - the world of endless prosperity we are surely all nearly about to have. This is a world which occupies many levels. there is confidence in far flung futures in the stars or global or envirnmental melt down - futures that then trickle back into or day o day futures, into what be believe is happening now. Our own confidence is then also always also a world of the future- a looking to the future we believe in... years, in the here and now. It is a truism that science fiction is always written about the present- but it is also the case that the present is always re-writting itself in it own future possibility.
The future is a world which is gloriously complex and complicated. No policy is every simple: it rather in its aspiration, and its fears plays across an entire register of the future and different possible futures to come. In acing then for the future one act in the here and now but with an eye of perceived threats, or joys or merely events. The future is then never simply resovable into a here or now. Forcasting the future is then complex as the forecast itself brings with it a time that is not directly realized - a time of myriad options, and are necessarily to be thought.
The second great rhythm is that of the past line, a great trend lien that collapes all the myriad of possible futures into a sequence of frozen events, and then allows judgement calls to be made and implication read in the light of those events. A move that then endless judges the remain of possibilities sorting out those that were mere dream or wild speculation from more possible realties (a distinction that it is all too easy to lose. a past that has of course its own deep resonances,differnet connection can be drawn between the same basic events alone pas lines, longterm trends and short terms trends can then be seen, as can gradual evolution or quick revolutions.
The past then is what ever politician fears- for they know that it is the impossible line in which they will be judged. A line made all the more difficult because how it is judges is in the light of the fact that it is always of the past. That is the judgement is always made in another time which reflects back upon itself and how it got there - looking to events then as if they were a narrative - and judging the judgement calls according to that narrative of that other time.
Finally there are the rhythms of the present. A here an now in which we actually live day of day. tis world is distinct again(and no more real). it is the world were events must fall or remain forever a mere fear or possibility. It is then the domain that when they do fall they always fall in a tranformationary experience and change everything. But do not happen the place in which then become mere myths and drift of into the kingdoms of possible delusions. More importantly it is the humdrum of everyday little choice free from pic pictures a humdrum that quiet builds it own world across its interaction: A world where its normality becomes then itself an impress.
A schemata then that is fundamental Heideggerian emerges. and yet with this partial difference. What Heidegger calls the Augenblick- the moment of revolution that takes you in the present from the future to the past, is a little bit more diverse and complex that that. for the Augenblick the point where one rhythm changes into another is not fixed - it is not one place one falling into - but it rather a complex transtion where many jumps of tense are possible.
In all these switches there are three or four basic methods. Firstly there are passions that lodge themsevles in one tense as they look into another. desire then lodges itself into both or either the pastor the presennts and erodes or moves towards the future. It then assumes a future is possible and translated directly or indirectly into another tense opening up possibilities in the past or the present, making things feel more real. The Greed of a property speculation is then written in the langauge of desire as it looks to an open future, and attempts to treat that open future as if it could be realized right here in the trends of he past or the wealth of the present. Desire might be defined then in this diagonal line drawn towards the future.
Secondly it is clearly possible that the rhythms of each each tense do invert from time to time. the future then translates into the past as mere empty dream and delusions - while the past becomes future as a tyranny of what must be done an no choice about it.A recession or depression swaps or a metalevel past for future. likewise it is very easily for the [resent to move into the future - and restrict possibilty (we must manages what we have), whole the futures tumbles into the present as some species of paranioa (the handcart to take us to hell). The past then swaps into the past as absolute tradition, and the past into the present as limited resources etc. Each tense need not its position as a tense, it can impose a different rhythm elsewhere- and will do so.
Thirdly it is clear that in all these rhythms wars we expect individuals to navigate us paths between these unreconcilliable rhythms. There role is then to map an impossible line looping up tenses defining point they tumble and change into one another. An exalted position we do not actually allow to most leaders of course (although we all dream we could and do if the right leader comes alone). Leaders then are meant to actually make the impossible possible and end the rhythm war - except of course we would actually for all our demands) never allow this to happen. a a paradox that has its own rhythm.
Finally between rhythm there lies endless domains of possible analysis and thought. we can create figures to capture them, or discipline to understand them. The future can be made real to the past and visa versa. New languages of translation of rhythms open out to us all - and in their constellations we are caught and defined or rethrown.

We caught in the the rhythms war of unreconcillable tenses whose endless conjunctions creates new possibilities rather than resolutions: A world which is rich, diverse, productive, and yet never simple....

Towards an Archy for the Internet

Just as we have given up on the ideal of the ancient Greek practice of having very many different states, each with their own unique constitution (for we all ought to be democracies now, even if many of us are actually oligarchies and tyrannies) - alone comes the internet- which clearly re-invents this multiplicity.
What after all are the 'great' dominant site (The Wikipedia, Google, Facebook etc) but an an ...Archy ;As is certain constitution, which loops individuals up one with the other and defines their relationships with each other.
Our Friendships our commerical actions, our every life history or family find their echo and are articulated upon the internet and different ways. It then echoes as a refrain what we do and articulates it in different ways.
A fact that is of course challenging to the status quo of our minds. What does it mean after all to be able after twenty years or so to refine our past, with its friends or music? what does it mean to be able to have world to flirt with? And how we live i world were one really can buy globally - what are ones loyalityes? Each great-site actually poses a question or perhaps runs an experiment, where in an action we are caught up changing or challenging our natures. We need be as we were, and the internet is how we change (although where this leads, butter, moth or merely perpetual puppea is never clear). A great pan-hellenic Experiment of the what the mind might be in new and shifting context - is being poured across these differing Archies.
Each archy puts in play and shares in differing our images. our talent, and ambitions but also our memories and feelings. more than that memory and feelings are incited to be shared. we become then a thing that bleeds across its own sharing- that that is invent or thinking about new feelings to share, and dreams of those feeling or talents actually resonating into others. we become a strange poet or prostitute of souls, articulating our bits (real or imagined) in the hope others might use them - and we turn ourselves into a celebof this or that constitution,
Here need a little caution, for there are other subtler element here. the networks that are created by the internet reflects also the global situation and bars of language and nation. A world where these bars need not be is opened up, but not necessarily inhabited (as yet or perhaps at all). their is clearly then a silent geography also in the internet- defining. our old way of thinking has not dies, is merely conjured anew in a slippery different landscape, where it need not be. and yet as that landscape echoes its actually usage and develops accordingly, it is likely enough that echoes of this nationism in relfection will linger for a long time.
More that that in a sense each of these great sites - are not just another clever application, but also actually define what the internet is for. Google or Facebook then defined actual use of the thing and carry on defining it. The point bring their are no clear rules about what the internet is for or even what it is: It is defined only in the way people use it (as library or marketplace or meat market or Porn library). In the best tradition of greece then, each of the great-sites are not merely a constitution, ways of looping people together, but also provide a template for a political type - and Archy. This template is at once unique to that site, but also but there- other sites might well look on it, and how it allowed change to seeps across the net , and react.
There is then that ancient greek feeling of possibility New sites emerge, and with it new uses, and we look always to the next site, the new constitution, the perfect program perhaps, and debate what it should be and how it will link individuals - the constitutions it will invent.
But as with the best Greek constitutions there are extra rules, defining how these sites operate (what they expect from their citizens) and how they compete. Sites will then not merely be about sharing between folk, but also must have some means of making those folk pay. Thy will then define in their means of sharing, a second stream, a means of wealth generation (or if they do not that itself is an issue). The idealism of the constitution is then tinged with the fact that the manner individuals are looped, the new way they might share anything or more often nothing in particular, must at some point itself be a money making opportunity: be that directly or indirectly- apps or Ads - what we do or what is done to us....
The Internet then is in the process of rethrowing something in our minds, and trying (and only partially slicing to pry open that something, and render it lucid to capitalism and making money. Likewise it is clear that the state has to recover itself in the internet, and find new ways to be important - to make us all safe or tax us or whatever. The Internet actually challenges the Post-Elightenment Capitalist-National consensus about what, who and how individual actually is. As persia rallied agianst greece then the government looks in fear at the internet. Finally in this list of old powers their are the exciting merchants of information (real or imagined)- the news-organization and publishers, who need to find ways of either fitting into some if not all of these constitutions (and even becoming an Archies in their own right)... Or else to must cosy up to internet companies in some manner, offering them something or else (finally) learning to do with out.
No wonder then the state lumbers about trying to make us fear for our very identity - and the capitalist bandwagon attempts to impose the Laws of copy write onto the new terrian. It has to - for an issue of survival of the old system in these new Archies.
but as they link together individuals, and so intent constitution each of the great-sites, become to a degree clonable. That is they learn from each other- and from the progression of sites. Here there is a clear odd enough process in play. for great-sites live and die by their twin abilities constantly define new ways of sharing information and looping individuals together or else being the dominant way by being the best or at leas the one everyone continues to use).
Great-sites then become established around one thing they do - and then clone there own principle, in the knowledge that others will be also cloning it, and bleed it across the internet: a search design, becomes a developer of ready to hand application, and then becomes a phone maker. The point being that the constitution are then open affairs - elements can be borrowed or lent- aspects developed. Sharing is never simple - it has many faces - and everyone can share (and is ever great-site will borrow elements of each other and attempt to make them their own, while diversifying what they do).
At the same time there is a real mass logic here. Certain application only work when very many people share them. more than that mass phenomena start to exist across the folk caught up together- sites generate then their own manner, their lifes as people join them. they further differentiate then in this sharing (and develop) Sites then that do not have the critical mass, however wonderful they might be simply loose out.
Their is a wonderful Pelopennsian total war being waged by the great sites of the internet. each have to continue expanding both what they do and who uses them in order that they survive: That is in order that other sites do not merely strip them of their constitution (and is clone their way to link individuals), and then run off with their citizens.
Running across these constitutions is another silent factor - an issue of landscape - the internet is defined by its codes and its neutralities. It only exists as it does as long as the number do not run out, and the freedom of what can be said and shared, but also how it is are preserved. Alter these and you have really changed the landscape for the net- changed what it is and what it will do and how it then evolve (which is not necessarily a bad thing). The Internet like Greece is caught up in the landscape that allowed it to be possible, change that landscape and everything might slip.
In Short i these days of ours, ti s clear the Internet is fast becoming to topic of interest in the fat world at least- as massive social experiment, what many up into it and actually quietly challenges many many things. the question will be then will this challenge be sustained, or will ancient Persia or merely the Rule of Empire prevail once again? And will the shifting archies themselves stablize into a number of shared established Aristoltian forms (he has six) - or wil lthe anrachy continue for the forseebale future at least.

The meridian Line

We all have them - or perhaps half a dozen of them.
that all nice- collective- Meridian line- that we think defines or ought to define normality.
It is the line that everyone ought to follow- that everyone would follow if we were not being led astray by...
The shifting complexity of the world, becomes rather easily resolved into a handful of collective viewpoint.
Further thought becomes unecessary -
It also goes without saying that such line in the shifting sand are necessary volatile and collective.
They need to be collective in that it is in the sharing the viewpoint - or at least in the imagination of another in ones head, in their reality in oneself - that the lines gathers its power and meaning - and passions.
It also follows that these meridians are divisive- and that is the point: that is they define a norm, which is of course not share in the welter of being. The norm becomes then a standard to rally to, and otherwise bewildering complexity and oddity or perhaps merely the press of possibility is rationalized and contained in quiet or stroppy loathing.
Us against the world - hey!

The trouble is then that Meridian are the stuff of gangs -a collective piece of certainty- and gangs sell newspapers, and create politics.
All of which is fine - what else is a nation ? what else have they ever been (for good or evil)? What else are the traditional lines of left and right, but a making sense and creation of very basic meridian lines.
How else are you going to have a state?
There is nothing wrong with meridians in themselves (beyond the fostering of gross but necessary simplification).
That is not really the trouble,
The problem is rather that there is a threefold complexity clearly emerging the rules and meridians.

1) Firstly the old meridians lines, which kept the world simple have spilt and become endlessly more complicate. We simply have then dozens of meridians, all quietly opposed, and gently or loudly loathing one another.
2) Meridians are becoming self consciously very stroppy - in the best evangelical way. This is a mixed curse. In times before when a median was easily dominant it was quietly oppressive. Racism, for example in all its forms simply was everywhere- and so it did not need to fight its corner: The only warrior meridians were self conscious minorities - who certainly fought and converted, and aimed to be the majority few. Meridians used to tend to be powerful - and quiet (or ill or good) affairs. In the current situation all meridians are under threat, and feel they need to make a fuss - as they always feel like those religious or social minorities. Our meridian lines have become the the battle ground for self appointed minorities - as we are all the rebels now.
3) And yet at the same time- we lie is a society where the appeal is always to the old logic of democracy, and the majority having sway. Each meridian line then needs to make its pitch as the majority- as - the consensus. It will look then for ways to prove that it does hold such sway -and will rationalize set backs in terms of paranioa, and conspiracy.
Meridians then wage war as if they were a minority, and yet do so in the guize and name of the majority.
They want it all ways .
The trouble of course that these self appointed minority are becoming powers because the old simply meridians have shattered. Governments simple assumptions then that the support is out there, has slipped, and the new meridian lines matter.
All of which raises the deep question of whether one can really govern in the name of a handful of meridian lines, and their violently oppositions? It might well not be possible- it is surely hardly desirable. And if one cannot what will follow not merely politically, but all our sanity. the point after all of these lines in the sand was not initially political so much as personal -they are how the locate ourselves in the choasmsos of modernity..
A rhythm war based of meridian lines, and their willful incomprehension of other point of view, is not the wisest of moves, and yet it appears to be where we are heading.

Here or there - the Rhythm war:

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.