Who puts the ‘Representation’ in ‘Representative Government’?

0
November 29, 2009
by in APN

Evidently, there continues to be confusion over whether ‘representative government’ was intended to be the result of the social dynamic or the cause of the social dynamic.

Some representatives, and some leaders of groups of representatives, seem to feel that their job is to ‘direct’ the social dynamic in the manner that the ‘director’ of an orchestra would direct a group of beginner musicians that did not yet have a feel for how the music itself can become the orchestrator of individual and collective dynamical play.  In this mode of ‘representation’ wherein the music itself, through the players becomes the primary source, the ‘director’ becomes the ‘mirroring back’ of the unfolding performance, so as to serve in a support role rather than as some kind of ‘controlling creator’ that must be followed meticulously, even if he takes the music to a place wherein the musicians are no longer inspired to play it.

This is an issue in the politics of nations.   To what degree should the government of/by representatives have those representatives ‘direct’ (centrally-source) or ‘orchestrate’ (mirror back) the social dynamics of the nation?

It is clear that in the time of war, the social collective must become a ‘war machine’ and everyone accepts that this requires ‘centrally-sourced direction’, but in times of peace, this is where new symphonic works emerge from the self-organising dynamics of the collective, where a new collective persona arises that opens up new spatial possibilities for the blossom of never-before-seen creative potentialities.

For those politicians aspiring to use their ‘elected representative’ status to become leader-directors and to personally impose shape on the collective, the wartime mode is preferable, since it gives the leader the power to locally instigate and implement changes of his own preferred architecture. (more…)

Author’s Subtext: Poetry and Pornography

2
November 24, 2009
by in APN

Writing this article was prompted by dialogue with a friend who recalled our earlier dialogues wherein we both agreed that there was no way to speak literally to these foundational issues regarding culture, outside of poetry.  Her note included the following;

“To me inclusionality is a feeling of being in the flow; as you say, it’s the Tao – and the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.  … You or I (I forget which of us it was) once said that poetry was the only thing to get the Tao across – and probably haiku at that.  Because real poetry sidles up on it sideways instead of trying to describe it exactly.  That’s why your images of geese and fish and stormclouds and even cars on the freeway work, and mathematical or other descriptions don’t.”

But, at the same time, poetry can be pretty ambiguous, and even though most people love it, the world of the poetic and the world of rational prose go on unreconciled.

My thought was that there needs to be some ‘reconciliation’ here, (more…)

Poetry and Pornography: Inversion that elicits perversion

2
November 24, 2009
by in APN

What could the link possibly be between ‘poetry’ and ‘pornography’?

Imagine that ten different people were asked to make a movie that portrayed life in a small mountain village.  What variants on this theme might emerge, and why?

‘Life’ is a four-letter word that can take on many different meanings; i.e. we can impute many different meanings to this little choo-choo train of abstract symbols that mean nothing in themselves, with the engine ‘L’ pulling them along and the caboose ‘e’ pulling up the rear.

Should we start the film with a helicopter shot of the morning sun lighting up the peaks of the mountains (majestic classical music in the background, with horns and tympanums, perhaps a soprano voice), the morning light descending down the verdant slopes to lift away the darkness that obscures, to reveal the village nesting comfortably in the mothering embrace of the nurturing landscape.  In this ‘framing’ there is the sense that (more…)

Author’s Subtext – Sociopathic Epidemic

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November 16, 2009
by in APN

The Sociopathic Epidemic –  ‘Author’s Subtext’

There is a problem with the way we ‘present’ social issues in our culture and in our culture’s media, in that the presentations often start ‘in the middle of things’ and treat the middle as a local-system-in-itself.   Can we understand the organism as a local system out of the context of the environment; e.g the storm-cell as a local system out of the context of the fluid-flow of the atmosphere?   The ‘Sociopathy Epidemic’ article invites us focus on a problem WITHIN THE UNITED STATES, as if there were nothing to be gained from opening our inquiry to dynamics in which the US  is at the same time included (the world dynamic, nature).    The problem with ‘limiting our inquiry’ to the notional ‘local system’, as has often been pointed out by the systems sciences, is that it forces us to identify the source of all behaviours (functional or dysfunctional) as originating within the ‘local’ system.   If we inquire into the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ functionality of a university, we will always be able to point to something in its operations that we can credit or blame for good or bad results.  But as Russell Ackoff has pointed out, the system we call ‘university’ is included within the suprasystem of ‘community’ and had we started our inquiry at the level of community, we might have found that there was a problem that associated with the manner in which the ‘subsystem’ (formerly ‘the system’) called ‘university’ co-operates within an interdependent web of subsystems.

So, the author who would like to shift the ‘framing’ of the inquiry so as to look upstream’ from the nominal ‘local system’ has to hunt for some device to do so, and it may not be easy.

In the case of the ‘Sociopathy’ article, the framing is ‘the nation’ (the United States), and the contention of Robin of Berkeley is; (more…)

‘The Sociopathic Epidemic’: Commentary

0
November 14, 2009
by in APN

This newsletter/post is about an article by ‘Robin of Berkeley’ in the ‘American Thinker’ and comments submitted to that website, by yrs trly, from the ‘aboriginal physics’ point of view, a sort of a probe as to whether we could dialogue not just about things that are going wrong, but about potential flaws in the foundations of our Enlightment social architecture.

* * *

Whether we are talking about organismic ‘dis-ease’ or ‘social ‘dis-ease’, one is free to apply the ‘Aboriginal Physics’ view as an alternative to the ‘Enlightenment physics view.

In the following instance, I commented on the article ‘The Sociopathic Epidemic’ in the ‘American Thinker’ website, giving the ‘Aboriginal Physics’ perspective.  First of all, in a condensed one third of a page format (at the bottom of this post).  Since the website did publish it, I submitted for publication, the original comment that I had prepared which was one and a half pages long and using more colloquial language where the ‘underlying physics’ is not so evident.

I don’t know if they will publish this longer comment, but if they do, I will report that in a comment here on the Aboriginal Physics website.

That being said, the following speaks for itself if one first reads the American Thinker article ‘The Sociopathic Epidemic’

http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/467981.html

The following is the one and a half page comment version as was submitted for publication

* * *

Preview: This is how your message will appear in the forum.

Re: The Sociopathic Epidemic

Posted by: emile

Date: 11/14/2009 08:36PM

… what emile is saying in regard to the dynamo model of social dynamics can be translated as follows; (more…)

Author’s Subtext. . . . . APN #1

0
November 4, 2009
by in APN

Pandemic Preemption – ‘Author’s Subtext’ [see footnote in ‘Introduction’]

Contributors; Ted Lumley

In writing this first newsletter (APN #1, Pandemic Pre-emption)  on the ‘H1N1 swine flu pandemic’, I wanted to try to deepen the view of ‘what is actually going on’, to capture how the sense of ‘being a participant in evolution’ (a ‘strand in the web of life’) does important things for us and for the way we engage with/in the world, that are absent when we opt for the sense of ‘being in control’, as associates with dealing in ‘representations’ and the ‘causal model’.

The remarks on community ‘seen’ as the ‘wild desert flower’ that spontaneously self-organises, rather than the community ‘seen’ as something ‘deliberately constructed’ as it may appear in ‘representations’, tries to infuse the sense that the relationship between ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabitant’ can be ‘seen’ in two ways; in an ‘aboriginal/medieval’ way and an Enlightenment – representation way.

The approach attempted has been to infuse, by way of a ‘background awareness’, the sense that there is indeed a conjugate relationship between ‘inhabitants’ and ‘habitat’ (‘terrain’).   In the viewfield of a notional long-term observer (the ‘eyes of the continuing evolutionary process’), the flow of people in and out of the oasis is relentless and so the occupants of the dwellings around the oasis are ceaselessly being replaced, not only by the immigration-emigration flow but by the birth-death flow, so that the dwellings (that we can capture as photographic representations) can be understood as a kind of ‘scale’ that develops along the periphery of the flow, in the manner that a silt-loaded river in the delta dumps out the material to build its own banks.  (more…)

Pandemic Pre-emption APN#1

0
November 4, 2009
by in APN

Perhaps nothing pre-empts minority views as effectively as the threat of a global catastrophe that appears to be avertable, if and only if everyone ‘gets on board’ the effort to ‘cut it off at the pass’.  For example, if one believes that getting vaccinated will attenuate the spread of H1N1 to the point that it never reaches ‘critical mass’, then it becomes a ‘moral imperative’ for everyone to get vaccinated and, figuratively speaking, lower the lead rods into the about-to-go-supercritical nuclear core of global society.

Managing a pandemic counter-defensive requires a concerted effort by the media to mobilize the masses, and there is no time, under these circumstances, to open the media channels to hear out the ‘minority views’ which question a runaway logic that may be more effective in provoking pandemonium than countering pandemic.  (more…)

Introduction:

7
November 2, 2009
by in APN

‘Aboriginal Physics’connotes our pre-Enlightenment/Medieval understanding of the ceaselessly unfolding ‘fluid’ world in which we formerly saw ourselves and all things as being included.  The Enlightenment brought with it a different way of ‘seeing’ things — ‘seeing’ the world not by the flow itself, but by way of ‘representations’ that ‘froze” the flowing dynamical forms of nature; representations such as maps, diagrams and later ‘photographs’, whereas aboriginal or medieval ‘physics’ – an implicit rather than explicit field of study – saw ‘dynamics’ as a fluid-unfolding wherein the persisting patterns-in-the-flow were not yet given static ‘local’ form as frozen ‘representations’.  A storm-cell in the flow of the atmosphere in medieval times was still ‘seen’ in terms of ‘the flow that was always there’ that spawned ‘swirlings’ within itself, while in Enlightenment representation, the same storm-cell came to be ‘seen’ as a ‘local system’ with ‘its own local agency’.

Something radical happened to our manner of ‘seeing’ and understanding in the transition from the Aboriginal/Medieval worldview to the Enlightenment worldview, the notional ‘parentage’ of ’cause’ and ‘result’ was inverted.   In our ‘Enlightenment’ way of ‘seeing’, changes in the habitat are understood as being ’caused’ by the actions and interactions of ‘local’ objects/organisms/systems (the ‘inhabitants’), but in the Aboriginal/Medieval way of ‘seeing’, the APPARENTLY ‘local’ objects/organisms/systems  (‘inhabitants’) were understood as being both animated by, and created by, the changes in the habitat.  Today, many people would say that ‘storm-cells’ in the flow of the atmosphere ‘stir up’ (’cause’ change in the flow of) the atmosphere, but the fact is that it is the changes in the flow that not only animate the behaviour of the included cells, but create those cells.   Similarly, we may see the Colorado river as the cause of that huge ‘irregularity’ in the terrain we call the ‘Grand Canyon’, but the fact is that the Colorado river, like any other river, is the ‘result’ of irregularities in the terrain, … and we may see the trouble-makers in the streets of Paris in the summer of 1789 as the cause of irregularities in the social terrain, but the fact is that the trouble-makers were the ‘result’ of irregularities in the social terrain.

This inversion in the direction of sourcing or  ‘parental relation’ of habitat-dynamics and inhabitant-dynamics, accompanied by the reduction of the reciprocal habitat-inhabitat relation to a one-sided inhabitant-causal view, has permeated Western Enlightenment-perception generally. (more…)

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