Dialogia and Dialectic

The following exchange, taken from a discussion in the anarchistnews.org forum entitled ‘The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011)’ gets into the discussion of the difference between ‘dialogia’ and ‘dialectic’.  My view is that ‘dialogia’ is the concensus-seeking approach in physical reality while ‘dialectic’ is the concensus-seeking approach in conceptual reality.

Nietzsche would say that ‘dialogia’ associates with positive affirmation while ‘dialectic’ is based on negation.

I will give an example.

On the Island I live on, there is an initiative called the Pender Community Transition (PCT)  initiative which is a non-governed organization that seeks to stimulate activities that can contribute to ‘sustainable community’; i.e. to greater mutual aid and resilience to whatever unfolds.  There is a lot of interest in energy-conservation, renewable energy resource development, and a great many ‘green’ activities and ideas across the spectrum of improving our habitat-inhabitant relations.

Many people, and I would guess a strong majority, believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and are thus active in programs that seek to reduce carbon emissions.   On this issue, I am in the minority that doesn’t believe in the CO2 greenhouse gas causes rising global temperatures model.  I have personally investigated various researches into it and have had email discussions with climate scientists (e.g. ‘dissidents’).  As far as my participation in PCT, this does not bother me since there is plenty to participate in and think about, and I simply don’t bother with those initiatives that centre on CO2 reduction; e.g. there are initiatives that orient to firewood as a renewable energy resource.  There is a continuing evolution of activity which is characterized by ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence predominating over inside-outward asserting action.   This, I would compare to ‘physical reality’, to the way that nature works, and I would further compare it to ‘dialogia’.

One of the speakers at yesterday’s ‘Energy Day’ sponsored by the PCT identifies as a goal for all of the people on the globe to work towards “a full Democratic World Government” which will have the power to impose global controls on CO2 emission.  Democratic government employs a ‘dialectic’  process which extracts a synthesis from thesis and antithesis.  This is commonly done by ‘majority vote’.  The majority voting process currently will support the ‘belief in AGW’ and while PCT is a non-governed democratic organization, what is commonly referred to as ‘democratic government’ is the model of the Democratic State which uses the dialectic process to propose intellectual theses and antitheses,  force closure and impose the intellectual theory (e.g. CO2 emissions reduction) on all participants.  There is suggestion, as mentioned in the body of essay to which this is an appendix, that the majority corresponds to ‘superior enlightenment’ and those who are in the ‘more enlightened group’ see it as their duty to impose on the ‘less enlightened’ [=minority], on themselves and everyone, their ‘more enlightened intellectual theories’.   This dialectic process, as Nietzsche says, gives one an identity of ‘self’ based on negation, rather than a life affirming sense of self.

If the PCT were to become a democratic organization based on dialectic, analogous to the ‘Democratic State’, the experience of participation would be very different.  There would be no opportunity for everyone to rally around the ‘mutual aid’  initiatives that energize them as the issues and intellectual theoretical program proposals would be debated with the aim of reaching closure and imposing the resolution as to the most enlightened intellectual-theoretic program back down on all of the participants.  Much of the positive, life-affirming energy in the diversity of proposals would be suffocated in the process.

This is the difference I see between the dialogic and dialectic processes.  I would not be a member of the PCT if it were a democratic organization using ‘dialectic’ rather than ‘dialogic’ process.  In this example, I would not be in the more-enlightened group on AGW [i.e. the majority] imposing their ‘more-enlightened views’ on all participants, including myself and much of what I was interested in would be purged from the group’s activity and considered ‘heretical’.

Dialectic process vs. dialogic process

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In a dialectic process describing the interaction and resolution between multiple paradigms or ideologies, one putative solution establishes primacy over the others. The goal of a dialectic process is to merge point and counterpoint (thesis and antithesis) into a compromise or other state of agreement via conflict and tension (synthesis). “Synthesis that evolves from the opposition between thesis and antithesis.” (Eisenstein, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form” 23). Examples of dialectic process can be found in Plato’s Republic.

In a dialogic process, various approaches coexist and are comparatively existential and relativistic in their interaction. Here, each ideology can hold more salience in particular circumstances. Changes can be made within these ideologies if a strategy does not have the desired effect. An example of the dialogic process can be found in Nozick’s, Anarchy, State and Utopia.

These two distinctions are observed in studies of personal identity, national identity and group identity.

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) introduced the concept of dialectic process to explain the progression of ideas.

M.M. Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and Literary Critic has been credited with introducing the Dialogical process in Philosophy.

In summarizing this introduction to the following discussion on ‘dialogic and dialectic’ process, I would say that the dialogic process  is well adapted to physical reality while dialectic process is well adapted to conceptual reality.

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gary kamiya makes some

emileTue, 2011-11-08 23:17

gary kamiya makes some excellent points, not only in his critique of the san francisco city administration, but in squashing the notion that a ‘situationist meme’ is igniting the current wave of protest. kamiya says;

“One does the Situationists no favors by taking their ravings literally. Strip away the crazy-Marxist, quasi-religious claim that under capitalism “spectacle” has completely replaced reality . . . and what is left is a smaller, but legitimate, insight about the insidious power of media to shape consciousness in the modern age.”

the author seems to disagree, which would imply that he is sticking with the view that people are ‘rising up’ because a ‘meme’ that most of us do not even understand has burrowed into our minds is now animating our individual and collective action like micro-svengali’s giving us unsuspecting masses, our trilby voice.

the notion of a ‘meme’ is the same sort of darwinist fiction that associates with ‘genes’. it provides a [purported] means of explaining anything/everything in one-sided, inside-outward driving deterministic contructivist terms. it is like Aristotelian telos, a priori knowledge in acorns and organisms in general that inform them in advance of ‘what they are going to be when they grow up’; i.e. oak trees, … so that we don’t even have to mention outside-inward environmental orchestrating influence.

well, nietzsche and lamarck are smiling because now we have ‘epigenetics’ which trumps ‘genetics’ and explains that outside-inward environmental influences predominate over inside-outward genetic determinism.

now we need an ‘epimemetics’ to put the same fictional notion of ‘memes’ in its place. when the top layer of an authoritarian social system sucks all the wealth out of the body of the system into the top layer and when general services are thus starved and the authorities launch austerity programs that squeeze and do injury to those at the bottom, the emergence of protest doesn’t require a ‘meme’ as causal agency. the red tide blooms when the environmental conditions orchestrate its blooming.

kalle lasn’s romanticizing of intellectualisms, by way of ‘the meme concept’ is like saying that the ‘V’ flying formation concept is a meme passed on from generation to generation of wildgeese. anything to stick to the inside-outward deterministic-constructivist model of causation. of course, anyone who has ridden a motorcycle in a group, will understand that ‘pressure organizes’ from the outside-inwards, and the ‘V’ formation is not inside-outward driven by an intellectual meme but orchestrated by pressure-hydro-dynamics that the group is included in.

the author seems to be afflicted with the same superstition as kalle lasn; i.e.;

The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme — a very powerful idea — and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.

everywhere one looks in the globally dominating, Western-culture permeated society one finds people trying to force-fit a ‘causal model’ into the explaining of emergent phenomena. that is because western logic flat does not allow outside-inward orchestrating influence [western ‘is’ or ‘is not’ logic-of-the-excluded-middle is a crude tool for dealing with the fluid continuum of nature].

béchamp and pasteur’s offering a logic-of-the-included-middle; e.g. ‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ (the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything) continues to be ignored by Western medicine and western biological science.

if we were to pick up on it, we wouldn’t think of having to use guy debord’s ‘meme’ to explain the pulsating of rebellion all around the globe, as Nobel laureate in medicine Albert Szent-Györgyi (for vitamin C) demonstrated, the flourishing of ‘pathogens’ [normally innocuous microbes] is orchestrated outside-inwardly by the condition of the terrain; i.e. the ‘occupy’ eruptions are the RESULT of illness (imbalance in the terrain) rather than the CAUSE of illness.

there is no mysterious ‘virus’ or ‘meme’ infecting the brain of your normally friendly john q. indignado and transforming him into an evil attack dog. his transformation is the RESULT of evil works rather than the CAUSE of them.

culturally embedded darwinist thinking (darwinism sees everything that evolve as being magically inside-outward driven from out of nowhere as in ‘Genesis’), is what keeps us in the authoritarian slave camp, as F.N. has said [screamed?]. kalle lasn and the author of this article, insofar as they promote the meme concept, help to keep it that way.

“the notion of a ‘meme’ is

anon – Thu, 2011-11-10 09:24

“the notion of a ‘meme’ is the same sort of darwinist fiction that associates with ‘genes’. it provides a [purported] means of explaining anything/everything in one-sided, inside-outward driving deterministic contructivist terms. it is like Aristotelian telos, a priori knowledge in acorns and organisms in general that inform them in advance of ‘what they are going to be when they grow up’; i.e. oak trees, … so that we don’t even have to mention outside-inward environmental orchestrating influence.”

Telos always-already lies outside the given X, it is never immanent within it. Reread Aristotle. And Kant, for that matter, since a priori concerns the subjective conditions for a given X and so also lie outside that X.

“béchamp and pasteur’s offering a logic-of-the-included-middle; e.g. ‘le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout’ (the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything) continues to be ignored by Western medicine and western biological science.”

Because it’s impossible in actuality it include the middle, and what you’ve offered here goes no way to disprove that thesis.

Emile, I think your theories are intriguing. I wish you would put more effort into them and less into intellectual posturing.

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I’ll grant you that the

emile Thu, 2011-11-10 12:00

I’ll grant you that the authors of philosophical concepts have had their works vulgarized and what is commonly understood may not be what they originally intended, but my interest and focus is on the social dynamic-as-it-actually-is, and it is informed by the post-vulgarization version of philosophical concepts. Hence we are taught that the acorn contains within it all of the INFORMATION necessary for it [its ‘soul’?] to engineer its own development in an inside-outward asserting manner.

This sort of ‘fictional’ understanding is another brick in the wall that has us think of ourselves as ‘material things’ that are ‘disconnected’ from the world in contradiction to modern physics. It is the basis for Marxism which comes along and pops consciousness into our material body after-the-fact [the matter organizes itself first, creates a CNS which then takes over the organizing … takes over from what?] and makes ‘mind’ into the product of matter, contrary to those who would see ‘consciousness’ as immanent in the world (the aboriginal culture, quantum physicists such as Bohm and Schroedinger etc.).

Other vulgarizations of science include the notion that ‘the earth revolves around the sun’ and ‘the earth rotates around its own axis’ and the work of Galileo in this regard. As Poincare points out in ‘Science and Method’, Galileo’s concluding that the Copernican heliocentric model was ‘more truthful’ was based on Galileo’s finding that if we assumed the earth did not move, then we had to assume that it was a coincidence that every one of the distant stars in the sky had a small component to their movement (aberration) that had exactly the same period, 365.25 days for every one of the stars. the more reasonable alternative was that this period, rather than coming from ‘their movement’, had to do with the manner of movement of the earth within the celestial dynamic, a view which ‘fit’ with the heliocentric model; i.e. the heliocentric model is not ‘the truth’, it is a ‘local system model’ that fits the observations somewhat better, but it is a model that does not ‘hang together’ in such a neat form if we acknowledge the overall interdependencies in an expanding universe where 95% of the matter is dark, invisible matter and where gravity is ‘everywhere at the same time’, and where the influence of comets that are not comprehended in the solar system model, nevertheless influence its dynamics, now from near and now from far.

So, my point is that the world view of the public, as established and infused by the culture (aboriginal culture world-views differ radically from our globally dominating Western culture’s world view).

Ask the man on the street whether the acorn owes its ability to become an oak tree to internal information [Aristotelian final cause] and 99 times out of a hundred, he will give the answer that his culture and educators [brainwashers] gave to him, ‘yes’.

The one man who said ‘no’, might have been persuaded by his own experience that we can’t just regard the environment as passive reservoir to put our input-sucking pipe into and our output-discharging pipe into, and assume it that the reservoir is infinite in capacity. That man might think;…. hmmm, if it is a finite resource, then we can’t really distinguish it from ourselves since the instant we draw from it or discharge into it, we are changed and it is changed in a reciprocal complementary way. Hmmm, this would mean that ‘the organism is the environment’, … or the habitat and the inhabitant are in conjugate relation. And if this man knew some modern physics, he would say; … hmmm, this agrees with modern physics and with Mach’s principle; “the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.” And, that is why F. David Peat wrote ‘Blackfoot Physics’ because modern physics is a layover to the aboriginal belief that “the mind does not live in the material body”,… “the material body lives in the mind”, which is a direct contradiction to Marxist and Capitalist thought, which believes that the ‘mind’ is a product of the ‘material body’, … exactly when our individual ‘minds’or ‘souls’,… uhhh …. ’emerge’, is much debated by pro-lifers and pro-choicers.

And by the way, this notion that the inhabitant and habitat are in a conjugate relation, that fits with our life experience, and which is supported by modern physics and by aboriginal, buddhist, taoist and vedic culture world views, … is what Nietzsche sees as going on as well, and likewise for Lamarck and Rolph and Roux and all the anti-Darwinists, who see in the experiential/observational data that the unfolding world is like a “flow, wherein outside-inward nurturing influence predominates over inside-outward production influence. Which means that, BY DEFINITION, there is no ‘struggle’ between the ‘organism’ and his ‘environment’ because the organism is the environment; i.e. the world dynamic is characterized by ‘conjugate habitat-inhabitant relational dynamics’, as in a ‘fluid dynamic’ which in turn fits with the notion of relativity, where ‘material bodies’ are ‘ripple structures in the energy-charged spatial plenum’ (Bohm, Schroedinger et al).

Now, the biological sciences came up with this idea that the ‘organism’ and the ‘environment’ [‘terrain’] were mutually exclusive quite a while ago (how about two millennia ago) and have never since modified or abandoned this mutually exclusive relation of organism and environment, not even when relativity came along, and quantum physics in the early 1900s. So where did we get today’s understanding of an ‘organism’, … it’s pretty important because we build our impression of our self and others dependently upon it, and there is a big difference between how some cultures do it [‘mitakuye oyasin’, we are all related] and how our globally dominant Western capitalist/authoritarian culture does it;

Aristotle’s History of Animals classified organisms in relation to a hierarchical “Ladder of Life” (scala naturae), placing them according to complexity of structure and function so that higher organisms showed greater vitality and ability to move.

Aristotle believed that intellectual purposes, i.e., final causes, guided all natural processes. Such a teleological view gave Aristotle cause to justify his observed data as an expression of formal design. Noting that “no animal has, at the same time, both tusks and horns,” and “a single-hooved animal with two horns I have never seen,” Aristotle suggested that Nature, giving no animal both horns and tusks, was staving off vanity, and giving creatures faculties only to such a degree as they are necessary. Noting that ruminants had multiple stomachs and weak teeth, he supposed the first was to compensate for the latter, with Nature trying to preserve a type of balance.

In a similar fashion, Aristotle believed that creatures were arranged in a graded scale of perfection rising from plants on up to man, the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being. His system had eleven grades, arranged according “to the degree to which they are infected with potentiality”, expressed in their form at birth. The highest animals laid warm and wet creatures alive, the lowest bore theirs cold, dry, and in thick eggs.


Aristotle also held that the level of a creature’s perfection was reflected in its form, but not preordained by that form. Ideas like this, and his ideas about souls, are not regarded as science at all in modern times. —Wikipedia

Anyone game for changing our concept of our ‘self’ which hasn’t basically changed, in regard to ‘habitat’ – ‘inhabitant’ relation (mutual exclusion and therefore dialectic opposition/struggle, innate self-other conflict), … since Aristotle?

Nietzsche was game and his view, which puts ‘self’ and ‘other’ into a conjugate relation (logic of the included middle rather than logic of the excluded middle) is, as a result, ‘anti-dialectic’.

“Deleuze emphasized in his early book on Nietzsche the incompatibility of dialectics and Nietzschean philosophizing, the underlying and overwhelming antidialectic of Nietzsche’s philosophy…. The antidialectical Nietzsche versus Marx is the point of reference of French—and not only French—philosophical postmodernism” – András Gedö

Now, Nietzsche’s view of the world contradicts the logic of the excluded middle, but like you say;

”what you’ve [Nietzsche has, Béchamp and Pasteur have] offered here goes no way to disprove that thesis.

Fine, the dialectic that is set up by mutual exclusion is the very foundation of Marxism and Capitalism and Authoritarianism, and so we should just sit back and ponder our navals for a few more millennia if we can’t actually prove that the organism and the environment are NOT mutually exclusive? even while modern physics is implying that no two things in the universe are mutually exclusive?

there is a good reason why neither mutual exclusion nor mutual inclusion can be proved, and it is because it concerns how we personally deal with ‘infinity’ and people do split on this as Henri Poincaré discusses in his Dernières Pensées, Ch. V, ‘Les Mathematiques et la Logique’. It pivots around how much reality we impute to our word concepts; e.g. how would you answer ‘do people live in the state’ or is it instead that ‘the state lives in the people’? in our capitalist, authoritarian world, people have bought into the former ‘belief’ system which imputes ‘being’ to words like ‘state’, that we ‘make up’.

all of this reflects back on how we see ourselves in relation to the world and to others. the capitalist and marxist world views which see the organism as a local independent material system which ‘grows a consciousness of its own’ [which will take over its organization after it is sufficiently materially organized?!?!]and is entirely inside-outward asserting, which puts it into a dialectic relationship with ‘one’ and ‘other’ and/or with ‘the environment’.

if we wait for the proof that this dialectic is giving us a screwed up world-view that in turn produces a fucking nasty, oppressive authoritarian overlordship [and a dictatorship of the proletariat is just the same hell in another form], we will be waiting for, what else, an ‘infinity’.

“and what is left is a

anon – Thu, 2011-11-10 23:11


“and what is left is a smaller, but legitimate, insight about the insidious power of media to shape consciousness in the modern age.”

I think that insight goes back to at least the Catholic Church who invented to term “propaganda (de fide)” and continued at least up until the time of Dubord through at least two world wars, a few revolutions, and the widespread use of propaganda in radio, film, books, cartoons, music and in person.

Religious propaganda, Public Relations, advertising, so-called ‘mass’ psychology, psychological warfare and other fields essentially are built around this non-unique insight and pre-date the Situationists by decades if not centuries.

The Romans understood the need for psychologically manipulating the masses and the grand arenas in which animals, foreign soldiers and criminals were executed was said to be a means by which the state was bolstered.

So, we’re supposed to think this is ‘new’ because of TV, newspapers, radio, movies and now the internet?

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i think that what the

emile Fri, 2011-11-11 15:19

i think that what the situationists discovered is what mikhail bakhtin discovered that language can be used in either a ‘dialogic’ or ‘dialectic’ sense, and this ties also to ‘the logic of the included middle’ and nietzsche’s anti-darwinism.

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ok, tl;dr’s, this would be a good time for you to bail out. feel free, though, to make your uninformed comments after the fact, as usual.

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if one watch karen kurczynski’s ‘red herring’ you-tube presentation, ‘Red Herring’ re the Situationist Times, at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3572552265648435650 she gets into this topic and it, in turn, bridges into morphology and topology (the webs of spatial relations amongst things).

the art form of the ‘Situationist Times’ attempted to break out of the ‘dialectic’ format by presenting, visually and with text, many things out of context [irrationally/artistically], so that you, the viewer, could discover new, meaningful ways to relationally assemble them; i.e. so that you would not be ‘led down the dialectic garden path’.

this is probably the insight about media presentations that kamiya is talking about; i.e. that dialectic is the usual ‘tactic’ in media commentary, and thus we should recognize how we are being tricked.
in mikhail bakhtin’s terms;

Dialogism cannot be resolved . . . . Dialectics, according to Bakhtin, are monological”. Indeed, in a notebook from his later period, Bakhtin contrasts dialogics with the Marxist sense of dialectic:

”Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness — and that’s how you get dialectics.” Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Speech Genres’ (1986)

ok, this ‘monologic’ problem with ‘dialectic’ is why nietzschean philosophy is called ‘anti-dialectic’.

‘dialogue’ in bakhtin’s terms is continually ‘opening’, it does not progress to closure [perfection or truth] as dialectic does. you can think of it like the continually transforming biosphere of the earth, the job is not finished when Darwin’s ‘favoured races’ have been perfected and are now ‘a wrap’, as in the manner Sarkozy thinks of the French culture and also those Norwegians and Americans and other ‘anti-immigrationists’ who want to protect their culture against ‘contamination’ like girls wearing hijabs instead of showing lots of tits and ass as we worked so long and hard for in the perfecting of our Western culture.

this ‘opening’ versus ‘closure’ is the same for nietzschean and lamarckian evolution as contrasted with darwinism.

monologic is what we would get from starting with one thing that is already there, and following ‘it’ as in a species like salmon and ‘its struggle to survive’ seen as a habitat-inhabitant dialectic. when we start with the salmon, we are in monologic mode, in the mode of one abstract consciousness, and we must consider how the fish is going to acquire the nurturance it needs to survive, and to understand who its predators and competitors are, which will influence its ‘struggle for survival’.

in nietzsche’s view, this darwinist dialectic [competition-based] view is bullshit.

“Nietzsche’s long campaign against Darwin, then, is both a critique of the dominant view of nature and of the culture in which it originated. Nietzsche locates the primary motor of evolution in an active creative force inherent in nature itself: “The influence of ‘external circumstances is exaggerated by Darwin to a ridiculous extent: the essential thing in the vital process is precisely the tremendous shaping force which creates forms from within and which utilizes, exploits the ‘external circumstances’” This force, of course, is what Nietzsche calls the “will to power.” Nor is Nature frugal, as Darwin supposed: organisms do not fight amongst themselves for scraps of food like guttersnipes of the urban proletariat – here Nietzsche claims to catch the whiff of the musty air of English overcrowding” wafting around Darwin’s theory. Anyway, in such an unseemly struggle, it is not the fittest, the strongest, the remarkable individuals who prevail, but the rabble, the herd, the weak – through sheer weight of numbers.” -‘Nietzsche and Evolutionary Theory’, Gregory Moore

so, what did nietzsche think was ‘the way evolution works’?

“Nietzsche thought that the principle of the struggle for existence was not so much false as unimportant. Hence his final formulation: … “will to power” rather than “will to live,” “augmentation” rather than “preservation,”, “nutrition” rather than “competition,”, Lamarckism rather than Darwinism.”

to understand this in nietzsche’s context, one has to think in ‘spatial’ terms (ties back to morphology and topology in the discussion of the ‘Situationist Times’ etc.). that is, ‘NUTRITION AS A QUALITY OF THE LIVING SPACE’ is what is found in the habitat [the living space] and is an ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence, whereas ‘COMPETITION’ for food’ says nothing about ‘space’, it is a logical concept involving an internal force within an ‘organism’ that is explaining ‘its behaviour’ in an inside-outward asserting sense.

nietzsche’s view can be expressed as; ‘if the salmon are prospering’, it is firstly because of the proliferation of nutritious plankton, … while competition is ‘not so much false as unimportant [a secondary view]’. as with the views of Lamarck, Rolph and Roux, for nietzsche; “evolution is a process of flow in which the outside-inward flow of NUTRITION predominates over the inside-outward flow of deterministic [RE-]PRODUCTION (assertive/competitive achievement of the organism). nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ is the outside-inward induced desire to ‘take in as much we can’ of the world we are included in, to continually transcend ourselves through our experiential engaging.

just as epigenetics has shown that ‘genetics’ is not so much false as it is a ‘secondary view’; i.e. the development of stem cells with the identical DNA is over-ridingly influenced by the nutrition in the space they are situationally included in (e.g. in the different nutritive solutions in three different Petri dishes, the same cells will develop into ‘fat’, ‘muscle’ and ‘bone’ cells, respectively.)

so, our practice of focusing on the ‘assertive agent’, whether it be the ‘gene’ or the ‘organism’, is ‘monological’. there is no way to get to the picture of the ecosystem in which outside-inward flow of nurturance predominates over the inside-outward asserting behaviour of the participating organisms; i.e. the view that gives innately larger context to the monologic view in terms of ‘what the asserting organism does’; i.e. which takes into account the sun’s irradiance that is nurturance to the phyto-plankton, and the phyto-plankton which is nurturance to the plankton and the plankton which is nurturance to the salmon etc. etc.

as the mass extinctions in the geologic record shows, ‘ecosystems’ or ‘relational webs’ are more fundamental to evolution than individual species and their powers of inside-outward asserting.

our culture’s monologic focus has us producing weed-killer-resistant sugar beets which, in england, is leading to the extinction of the skylark that depends on ‘Chenopodium album’ seed for its nourishment (Chenopodium album is ‘a weed’ to us, but it is the primary foodcrop of the skylark). so much for our monological thinking.

so, as nietzsche contended, and as every parent knows, the nurturing quality of the living space/habitat is going to have a predominating influence on the developing, assertive behaviours of the inhabitants (young ones) growing up within it. in the beginning, there was energy-charged, nutritious space with its outside-inward orchestrating influence on the organizing of material flow-features within it [as with convection cells arising within flow-fields]. of course we can work the problem backwards and start by selecting out one of the local material systems that are ‘already there’ like the salmon or like the gene and try to explain it in terms of the inside-outward asserting of the gene or organism, but as nietzsche contended, this is not so much false as unimportant [a secondary view or ‘fiction’ that lacks real-world relevance]. the outside-inward flow of nurturance he [and lamarck, rolph, roux] see as the predominating influence.

so, what the situationists like karen kurczynski are talking about is the recognition that politics and advertising in the media is ‘monologic’ and ‘dialectic’ and leading to ‘closure’, … buy this and this will satisfy what is missing in your life, … or elect me and i will satisfy what you are missing in your life,… but the more comprehensive picture is in terms of the outside-inward flow of nurturance, the opening of spatial possibility-to-do; i.e. the walls and fences reducing your possibility-to-do, reducing the outside-inward flow of nurturance to you, is the flip side of you buying from corporate suppliers who are, as a result, garnering more power to put up more walls and fences to control the common living space we all share inclusion in, and to control and further commoditize labour and natural resources, the ‘spatially distributed nurturances’ that are the basic means of production.

so, bakhtin and the situationists (sounds like a postmodern rock group) contribute the insight as to the manner in which the media influences, and my view is that they are right about that, that the news reports are always ‘monologic’ and therefer ‘dialectic’ (setting things into polar win/lose competition suggestive of continuing revolution) and arguing for a particular deterministic constructivist solution. the Situationist Times was an attempt at a dialectic-transcending ‘dialogic communication’, irrational/artistic communication which is not simply ‘chaos’ but which presents many different things at the same time [‘polyglossia’] so that one has to use ‘relational understanding’ in order to make sense of it, a sense, if it comes via the coherency of connective confluence, that will be far more comprehensive than individual monologic-dialectic assertions.

this effort by situationists corresponds to how one has to shift gears to think in terms of relational space (non-euclidian space) from the euclidian space standard, the latter enabling the over-simplistic deterministic constructivist ‘build’. that is, you can’t build an ecosystem ‘from the parts’ because, in an ecosystem, outside-inward orchestrating/nurturing influence predominates over inside-outward asserting deterministic constructivism.

we are all perfectly capable of doing this gear-shifting and it is how we get insights all the time, without having to ‘work at it’. einstein puts this shift from euclidian into non-euclidian thinking mode as follows;

“ First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical [spatial-relational] theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To “visualize” a theory therefore means to bring to mind that abundance of sensible experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement. In the present case we have to ask ourselves how we can represent that behavior of solid bodies with respect to their mutual disposition (contact) that corresponds to the theory of a finite universe.

einstein goes on to say that our normal assumption is that space is euclidian which means that “we might lay any number of bodies of equal sizes side by side without ever filling space” but that the space on the surface of a sphere is finite and as we try to expand our ‘property holdings’ we run into mirror-back-pressure or ‘reciprocal compression’ of the type that converts spherical cells to hexagonal cells in the social dynamics of bees. a ‘wave-space’ dynamic that is not possible in the abstract infinite space of euclidian geometry which is incapable of reciprocal compression because the assertings of inhabitants within it, never reach the limits of it that source reciprocal compression;

“But as the construction progresses [expansion of the number of space-taking bodies represented by circular disks] it becomes more and more patent that the arrangement of the discs in the manner indicated, without interruption, is not possible, as it should be possible by the Euclidean geometry of the plane. In this way creatures which cannot leave the spherical surface, and cannot even peep out from the spherical surface into three-dimensional space, might discover, merely by experimenting with discs, that their two-dimensional “space” is not Euclidean, but spherical space.

of course, relativity suggests that many of the properties of physical space that we experience cannot be captured in terms of solid bodies asserting in euclidian space, and thus ‘non-euclidian spherical space’ is needed to express ‘relativity’ in ‘general relativity’.

ok, just to summarize for the tl;drs;

1. the situationists in the ‘Situationist Times’ tried to use ‘polyglossia’ to avoid monologic/dialectic representation that is the common media representation which traps the mind and constrains it to ‘inside-outward asserting deterministic-constructivist thinking’, as in Capitalism and Marxism etc. so this was their ‘contribution’ to understanding media influence (and one can forget about the spectacle bullshit which is over-intellectualized hype that reduces to this one insight on the manner of media influence).

2. the nietzschean/lamarckian view of evolution corresponds to the evolution of understanding, in moving from ‘dialectic’ to ‘dialogia’, from convergent deterministic constructivism to ever-opening outside-inward orchestration. let’s say you live on the surface of a sphere [hey, that’s right, we do live on the surface of sphere] so that if everyone on the sphere pushed inside-outwards or if the space were crowded and everyone went from skinny to obese, there would be a mirrored-back ‘reciprocal compression’, an outside-inward influence that predominates over the inside-outward asserting influence;

“As Buffon suggested. “If you fill a dish with peas or any other cylindrical bean, pour as much water into it as the space between the beans will allow, close it carefully and then boil the water, you will find that all these cylinders have become six-sided columns. And the reason is evident, being indeed purely mechanical; each of the cylindrical beans tends, as it swells, to occupy the utmost possible space within a given space; wherefore it follows that the reciprocal compression compels them all to become hexagonal.”- Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘The Life of the Bee’

3. the darwinist view of evolution is monologic/dialectic; i.e. it is purely inside-outward asserting as corresponds with the euclidian space based view, where there is no ‘reciprocal compression’ and where we THINK we can understand dynamics in the one-side terms of purely inside-outward asserting deterministic constructivism, e.g. as in genetic determinism where we think in terms of the genes determining the development of form, behaviour and organization, without attributing to the habitat anything but a supply of resources and a space to manipulate and into which to jettison discharge. of course, this assumes that the causal agent, the organism, or the gene (the source of the deterministic constructivism) has a God-like power of ‘first-cause’ within itself, like a powerboat. the lamarckian/nietzschean view is that space is the source of nutrition/nurturance/power and that the organism or cell is like the sailboat in that it derives its power and steerage from the dynamics of the living space it is situationally included in.

4. the above three points also address, implicitly, the contention over which is more appropriate logic for inquiry into our real life experience; ‘the logic of the excluded middle [medium]’ or ‘logic of the included middle [medium]’. if we exclude the medium, we see the organism as a local, independent material being or ‘machine’ that draws in inputs, deterministically constructs stuff and discharges outputs; i.e. we start from the asserting system as if it were acting/interacting with other such systems in a passive [euclidian] operating space. if we include the medium, it becomes the mediating space and we get the view wherein the medium is the flow, like the atmosphere wherein the outside-inward orchestrating influence predominates over the inside-outward asserting influence; i.e. the storm-cells are convection cells that are orchestrated by the flow, and which are participants in evolving the space they are included in, but they are like sailboats rather than self-propelling powerboats and they are not first-cause drivers of evolution [they are not first-cause deterministic constructors of evolution]. this agrees with Mach’s principle wherein “the dynamics of the habitat/flow are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants/cells at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants/cells are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat/flow. evolution is thus by spatial-relational transformation rather than by deterministic constructivism.

5. the ‘occupy’ initiative is, DECEPTIVELY, not a threat to Darwinist/Euclidian thinkers who think in terms of dialectics, because, while there are many small occupy initiatives, nowhere do the initiatives reach a size to challenge the local authoritarian machinery. but in Lamarckian/Nietzschean terms, spatial relational orchestrating predominates over [‘trumps’] inside-outward asserting machinery, thus a multiplicity of small non-governed community initiatives which merely ‘opt out’ of the normally required inside-outward determined goose-stepping constructivism, could subsume the latter without every having to overthrow them in a dialectic revolution. that is, they could ‘condition the habitat dynamic’ which is at the same time ‘conditioning the dynamic of the inhabitants’ so that the dynamics of the inhabitants transform into a non-governed community dynamic. that’s the advantage of sharing inclusion in a living space that is radically unlike the euclidian space which is foundational to the thinking that authoritarianism is based on.

Return to main essay; ‘The Followers of the Democratic State”

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