Saturday, May 01, 2004

On connections, here is an excerpt from A. H. Hatto's notes on Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, written circa 1200 CE, describing the literary-Arthurian romantic-chivalric-feudal world of Wolfram : "According to Wolfram, the fundamental two-way bond of rights and obligations between God and Man, lord and vassal, man and wife, parents and children, kinsman and kinsman, Knight-servitor and Lady, was triuwe -- 'steadfast love'... Another aspect of the two-way bond, this time nearer to economic activity, was the recipricocity of service and reward: service here on earth, reward in Heaven; service out on campaigns, bounty back at court; service for a lady out on the tourneying field, her favour if possible in bed..." (Penguin Classics, p 437).

Networks as a diagnostic tool, viewing in this case literature, a tale, as bundles connections in motion through space and time, developing and changing. The tale is a network that can be understood by understanding the quality of the connections within the tale.

jd
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jd said...
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12:09 PM
jd said...

Looking over this post, one thing I would like to add:

Economies are networks. Different modes of production, or economic systems, obey different law systems; that is, the necessary connections between the people within the economy differ from, say, a hunting-gathering system and an industrial capitalist economy. These connections comprise the "productive relations" of the mode of production.

In the text cited above, Hatto outlines a variety of kinds connections within the feudal economy.

Here's an excerpt from another thing I wrote up a while ago regarding globalization, and the process of destruction of social/productive relations that takes place when qualitatively new technologies (through which the production relations are mediated) are introduced:

"The result of introducing 'labor-replacing' technology is a deeper process of destruction, of "the job" and its implication of a social contract, and from the job, a wider network of social relations: worker-to-worker and worker-to-employer (via the attack on trade unions); worker-to-family (as more household members are driven into non-domestic work); worker-to-nature (via the destruction of the environment); worker-to-community (via the criminalization and imprisonment of broad sections of society); worker-to-homeland (via the dislocation of millions of workers, turned into migrant labor, as industrialized, computerized, bio-engineered and world-marketed agriculture has destroyed the base of traditional peasant and small-farm life); worker-to-commons (via the privatization of public space, now demarcated by tollbooths and turnstiles), and worker-to-self (via the evaporation of privacy as each moment is surveilled, recorded, commodified)." Re-thinking Globalization

12:12 PM

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