Giant Pool of Money radio program

The NPR radio program This American Life aired an update to their "The Giant Pool of Money" program from a year ago (called appropriately, Return To The Giant Pool of Money. The producers did a nice job, I think, on the details of the collapse.

The podcast is available from iTunes, and should be available from the show's website here shortly.

jd

A couple of updates

I realize this blog has been very quiet over the past couple of years. Or rather, I have not posted very much. Despite the enormity of the financial crisis, I don't think there is anything new, or unexpected there. Yes the details of how the latest act began and played out are of some interest, and the jockeying over the possible restructuring is somewhat revealing. But overall, it was all to be expected: more and more extended speculation and risk-taking to seek historically shrinking rates of profit until the precarious structure collapsed, and set the stage for the next act.

One year after poo really hit the fan on Wall Street, it perhaps bears repeating Marx's description of financial crises: they are not the destruction of value, but a powerful (even violent) means of centralizing wealth (CW/Vol. 37, aka Capital Vol. III, p. 468). In this regard, the crisis represents a violent ratcheting up of the polarization of wealth and poverty.

There are a few threads in the recent news that highlight that stood out to me.

First, as Nasser Saber pointed out in his book Speculative Capital, an important element of speculation (Saber defines speculative capital as capital used in arbitrage), taking advantage of price differences in different markets. As speculative capital develops, the arbitrage opportunities shrink, requiring either larger sums to be committed to arbitrage to achieve the same return, or a kind of arms race to get ahead of the arbitrage crowd by shrinking the trading time through faster computers and smarter software. "Flash trading" is a way of exploiting price differences, or soon-to-be price differences by learning of upcoming (measured in milliseconds). [And today, only just today I am sad to say, I discovered Nasser Saber's blog on finance and speculative capital, and so I direct the reader to his blog for any more on speculative capital.] See e.g. NYSE's Fast-Trade Hub Rises Up in New Jersey in the July 30, 2009 Wall Street Journal. It also explains the significance of the theft of Goldman Sachs computer code used to power its trading juggernaut: see The Man Accused of Stealing Goldman's Code.

A second thread has to do with the destruction of value (as opposed to wealth), to wit the cash-for-clunkers program and the subsequent destruction of functioning automobiles to take them permanently off of the market (as automobiles, some value persists as scrap, see a YouTube video Cash for Clunkers: How to destroy an engine for instructions on how you can do this at home -- kids, ask your parents first! The video is sad in a way, and pornographic in the worst sense of the word). And the destruction of the tart cherry crop in Michigan (Bumper Cherry Crop Turns Sour: Tons of Unharvested Fruit Rots Under Government Program to Keep Prices Stable).

jd

Facebook and six degrees of separation

Facebook seems like a rich and obvious testbed for the six-degrees theory. And lo and behold, someone developed a facebook application to determine degrees of separation among facebook users -- see the wikipedia entry for more; and I have added a widget to this page.

I am fascinated right now (for how long who knows) by facebook. Mainly because all of a sudden, various social networks that I have been part of in my peripatetic life are present, and in the present. It's like time has been flattened, rendered 2-d and it's all now. It's as if the various boxes that I have kept different networks of friends in, mainly sorted by time (and where I lived), which also maps to some extent to varied interests, have all been up-ended and they are all flowing together. It also makes for a kind of Wonderful Life moment, because there are a lot of relationships there, with most of the bridges intact or only slightly charred.

Facebook also makes the theory much more, well, present and experienced -- like the difference between seeing a picture of the Golden Gate bridge and seeing the bridge itself. I can feel the various overlapping networks.

I have just installed the facebook Six Degrees app, and I need to play around with it.

Of course, the criticisms of the six-degrees theory (see previous posts) all hold -- in this case, the universe of facebook users is a pretty strong filter. The network of social networks definitely reflects the class and power and other social structures of humanity -- but doesn't that make the theory that much more interesting? Where do social networks jump the class line or the color line or the national line? And those borders are not so hard and fast as before, and weakening all the time as new communication tools (and transportation, although that's old news now?) erode the walls. How the barriers, especially the color and national one, are becoming more and more permeable ("Yes we can!") would be an interesting phenom to map. So not just six-degrees now, but how the degrees are changing over time. The wikipedia entry says that maximum degree of separation is 12 (the average is just under six) -- presumably that maximum will decline over time as the facebook universe expands (or the world gets smaller and flatter as new communication technologies and labor migration and mobility spread).

jd

A test

More on my social networking adventure -- I am trying to figure out some general rules for having my entries on this blog show up on my facebook page. The problem is that (a) the feedback loop is fairly long (how often the facebook apps sweep the RSS feed) and (b) not too well documented and (c) I am not being very scientific about my independent variables and controls -- I get too impatient.

jd

New models

Two articles in yesterday's New York Times highlight some of the changes in the structure of the economy that the evolving Internet makes possible.

One article describes the challenge of online apps (in this case, Zoho) to mega-desktop suites like Microsoft Office. Now apps like Zoho's Writer (which I haven't used) and Google Docs (which I used quite a bit, especially the spreadsheet) are good enough to pose a real alternative to desktop bloats like Word. I remember, maybe 15 years ago, the discussion between centralized apps vs distributed apps (i.e. desktop apps). At the time, Bill Gates defended desktop apps in almost libertarian language -- you controlled your app on your own machine.

Today, I suppose the question of control is still real, and one of the real criticisms of online apps revolves around trust and risk -- can you trust Google, or AdventNet (the makers and hosters of Zoho)? What is they start charging? (Possible?) Are they better about backups etc.? (Probably) What about snoops, government or otherwise? (Who knows?) Could they block access to my documents in the event of some dispute? (Maybe? There's probably something in the terms of agreement I clicked through). All valid questions. The question of trust is a big one, across the Internet (and the economy, and life, too).

What's different in the debate now, I think, is the element of mobility and multiple devices. For example, I have a computer at home, one at work, and a handheld, as well as a couple of other systems I sometimes use, running four different OSs. Having access (not just to read but to manipulate too) to any of my documents from any device is a big deal. And so the convenience factor of the online services starts to outweigh the perceived advantages of desktop apps. (Zoho provides an offline option which could overcome of the desktop advantages.)

I think I am digressing -- the point is that the speed of connections, the ubiquity of connections, the variety of devices, mobility all are shifting the center of gravity back to centralized (who remembers timesharing and terminals?), but this time highly connected systems, upsetting old models. Well nothing new, people have been talking about this for fifteen years and more. But maybe now it is really tipping.

The other article commented on the "iPhone gold rush." Some independent developers are doing quite well writing apps for the iPhone, and selling them through Apple's "app store" for prices starting at 99 cents and going up from there (there are also many free apps too, and many of them quite good, which is a whole other thing, that gift economy thing). With some 30 million iPhones and iPod Touchs out there, and the barrier to entry very low, it is a relatively easy business to get into. For $100 you can sign up with Apple's iPhone development program, you write your app, submit it to Apple, they list it on their app store, and return 70% of sales to you ("Just get yourself an electric guitar and learn how to play"). There is some other network phenomenon at play. Make the cost of attaching to the network low enough, and the cost of communicating with other nodes cheap enough, and interesting things will start to happen. Of course Apple does quite well in the process. It's main role is creating the sandbox for all of the developers to play in, and throwing more sand in the box -- the iPhone OS 3.0 will have a number of new features, including new money-making opportunities for developers in the form of subscription services and in-app upgrades and purchases. See the video of the developer announcement event for more.


jd

Managing my social network tools

I suppose I am late to the game, but I have just recently been exploring some of the Web 2.0 social network tools -- RSS and Google Reader, some of the blogger widgets (mostly playing around with them on my worklife blog, Diigo, Twitter (I'm @jiidavis1), and even facebook. And I have an iPhone now, which adds a whole other dimension to the social networking challenge. The challenge I have been wrestling with is how to make it all work together -- after they are all on the same network. But they do need to be taught (? or rather instructed?) to work together. And there is a definite flow to information I pump into my little menagerie of Web 2.0 social networking machine. The ideal is that I write something once, or identify a link, or upload a picture, and it flows from there to the various fronts of my web presence or groups or communities or whatever.

My blogs are one of the headwaters, and twitterfeed is supposed to send those updates out to my Twitter (still not sure what the point of Twitters is). My worklife facebook is supposed to pick up my worklife blog updates; and my personal facebook is supposed to pick updates on this blog. My additions to Diigo should show up on my blogs (depending on how I tagged new links), and I can have Diigo send the links to Twitter also. Google Reader should be picking up Twitter, as well as the blog posts, but I can't tell yet if the Twitter RSS is working. My Picassa updates are supposed to show up on the work blog and work facebook. What a contraption.

I imagine this (or did someone imagine this for me, and I am recollecting it?) as accoutrements, constructing a shell or maybe armor or maybe a sensor array of my self. Marshall McLuhan -- technologies are extensions of our bodies...

jd

Inside the Meltdown from Frontline

This is lifted from the always excellent Scout Report of February 27, 2009:

14. Frontline: Inside the Meltdown
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/

The economic situation in the United States is on everyone's minds right
now, and this provocative and thoughtful look into how it all transpired is
offered as part of Frontline's regular programming. As with most Frontline
programs, visitors can watch the full program, and then go back to sections
like "Interviews", "Timeline", and "Analysis". The "Analysis" section is
particularly shrewd, and it contains interviews with key economic players
and policy types including Barney Frank, Sheila Blair, and Chris Dodd.
Visitors can also view an interactive timeline of events related to the
meltdown and even chime in with their own thoughts via the "Join the
Discussion" area. [KMG]

I suppose I should have something to say about this. While the details of how it is playing out are specific, is there anything new in the general schema of all of it that hasn't been written already?

jd

Two novellas from Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield was a remarkable thinker. Two of his fiction pieces have just been re-published in book form. Here's text from an email I received.

Eager Spring (written in 1989) It is OB's last work, an 'eco-novella', very insightful and topical. Most of the book is set in contemporary times, but the final third of this book is a myth-allegory of a young woman and a troubadour who confronts the environmentally damaging hazard of industrialism in Iron Age Britain.

Night Operation (written in 1975) This short book is absolute dynamite - a totally different genre - sci-fi. A great story, quite hard hitting. But, as the introduction explains, it also throws light on OB's friendship with CSL.

Please see the Literary Estate's website for plot overviews and links:

www.owenbarfield.org

(end)

Many of Barfield's non-fiction books (for which he is much better known), long out-of-print, have also been re-printed by The Barfield Press.

jd

Six Degrees of Separation

Science Friday did an interesting program on January 25, 2008 on the validity of the "six degrees of separation" idea put forth by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. The program features skeptic Judith Kleinfeld and Steven Strogatz (author of Sync. The story was prompted by Discover magazine's story, If Osama's Only 6 Degrees Away, Why Can't We Find Him?". Kleinfeld is more interested in the human, anthropological dimension -- why do people sieze on the theory? Why do people want to believe the theory? Strogatz does an admirable job defending the math and the theory. Kleinfeld is good about reminding us that real world networks have certain constraints or laws or conventions that they obey, and when we are dealing w/ social connections that there are historical or political dimensions that we should be cognizant of.

The podcast of the program is available at http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200801256.

jd

The Fortressed World

This is good:

Laboratory for a Fortressed World (from The Nation)

jd

Forms of capital and the human-nature relationship

[Below is a re-working of a section from a paper Speculative capital and the ecosystem of globalization. I've been thinking that forms of capital are key to understanding changes in the human-nature relationship in the capitalist era.]


Forms of capital and the human-nature relationship

Marx explained that Capital is not just forms that wealth takes, but that ultimately it is a social relationship. Money, or wealth, becomes capital when it is applied to its own self-expansion -- money used to make more money if you will. But in that process of self-expansion, capital describes a way that people are organized in the process of production. The social means of production are owned privately, through control of the production process one class accumulates the surplus labor of another class, this accumulated "dead labor" in turn is invested in expanded circuits of production. In the process, capital expands and the power and wealth of the owning class grows along with it, allowing capital, or the class that expresses it, to exert even more control over the production process, and to appropriate more surplus labor.

While capital is ultimately a social relationship, this relationship is expressed in the forms the dead labor takes: money capital, productive capital, industrial capital, merchant capital, and so on, depending on the role that it plays at different moments or stations of the circuit of capital. Likewise, capital takes different and new forms over time, as the means of production develop, the circuits of capital expand, the capitalist system matures, as the credit system deepens and becomes more complex, etc. For example, the forms that capital could take in the early days of mercantilism or agricultural capitalism are different than the forms that capital can take in the age of steam power or in the age of electronics.

The economy describes the overall interaction of humans and the environment in production and reproduction processes. The environment is the beginning-and-end of production, the original source of material and wealth, the economy is just a process of rearranging the environment. [One could cite Marx here I think, but is it necessary?] If we think of forms of capital as structures through which economic activity takes place, it follows that they are the means through which we interact with the environment -- the forms of capital also signify aspects of the human-nature relationship. Capital structures imply a particular relationship to the world.

Forms of capital -- as structures through which people interact with the environment -- I suppose these are really a subset of forms of property. Property relations also describe a particular relationship to the world. Once things become titled (in the legal sense, or deeded), i.e. owned, they also become "things", so to does the world, the environment. [Here Marx's lead-in to the discussion of the fetishization of commodities in Capital Vol I, Chapter I is relevant.] I think there are a number of writings that celebrate e.g. native American relationships and other original communist forms of social organization and (non)property to the environment.

Whether these things are held in common, shared, or bought and sold, or bought and sold on credit, or bought and sold -- not the things themselves, but as abstract pieces or shares, or not the shares, but the movement in price of the shares, and so on -- these qualities or degrees of relationship are mediated by social relations, and in the case of private ownership, at least in the "modern era", say from 1750 or so on, by capital structures. A worker, a family, even an enterprise interacts with and is integrated into the economy through capital forms which in turn will affect production or laboring, and through that the environment. Alienation to the economy (and the environment) is shaped by these capital forms.

For example, to take a current example with the so-called "housing bubble", a mortgage, which presumes a relatively developed financial system, allows a worker to acquire a home with "just" the down payment, but also requires the ongoing acquisition of cash to pay principle and interest; binding the worker into cash economy, i.e. commodity exchange. That mortgage can then be pooled with mortgages of other homeowner, and sold in the financial markets, attracting more capital for lending, reducing the cost of money (interest). This securitization allows mortgages to be extended to more borrowers, which feeds a housing boom (and allows more risk in economy). The expanded credit expands the market for new home construction, leading to urban sprawl, and with limited or non-existent mass transit, to the need for more cars and highways and fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gases; also habitat loss, which contributes to species loss; also consumption of forest products and minerals; and so on. There is no getting away from the environment.

Grain futures provide another example. They function in a similar way to credit, allowing an expansion of economy. But as Cronon (1991) points out, the grain futures requires at the same time an anonymization of nature, where the individual wheat plant tended by the individual farmer disappears as individual and is merged with the grain from other farms into carloads of a class of wheat. The capital structures facilitate a different degree of alienation from agriculture and nature. Cronon's analysis shows how this change is reflection of necessary changes in the production/transportation process if the economy is to take advantage of what rail technology makes possible.

So capital structures can be an entry point for understanding the changing relationship to the environment. And inasmuch as the development of capital structures moves in a stage-wise fashion, in dialectical tandem with the development of the means of production and especially the means of communication and finance, they become another entry point for understanding how particular environmental forms or structures or relationships emerge at different stages of capitalism.

Next: speculative capital and the ecosystem of globalization

jd

Slippage

Two items in the April 23, 2007 Wall Street Journal that, taken together, suggest the United States' slippage as unipolar world power:

First, the price of West Texas crude oil -- long a standard for gauging the price of oil, has drifted further and further from the price of other, similar, grades of crude oil, leading some "market participants", quoted by reporter Ann Davis, to call West Texas crude "a broken benchmark". As a standard, traders used contracts for the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) to hedge against overall fluctuations in oil prices. If that price no longer reflects world prices (e.g., oil of comparable grade from the North Sea, or Middle East oil), then its value as a hedging device wanes. Part of the price disparity is due to temporary factors that have created a glut of oil at the delivery point used to measure the oil price -- a terminal in Cushing, Oklahoma -- which, over time, should be corrected, and the price come closer to the overall world price. But Middle East production is some 20 times West Texas production (per the article, "West Texas Oil Falters in Its Role As a Benchmark"), and so the West Texas oil trading contracts do have the same meaning as a proposed new benchmark for Middle East oil, to be traded on the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (as opposed to the New York Mercantile Exchange, or NYMEX, where the WTI contracts are traded). It should be noted that NYMEX is part of the joint venture that has formed the Dubai exchange.

Second, the article "An Unrelated Story: U.S., Global Stock Markets Increasingly Take Separate Paths" describes how the U.S. stock indexes have been trailing important stock indexes in other markets. The Dow Jones World Index is up 8.5% this year, while the S&P 500 is up "only" 3.9%. This de-coupling would suggest that the U.S. economy is no longer the big dog, with the other national economies following in tandem. Instead, these other national economies are beginning to show their independence. Half of the world's stock market capitalization -- the value of the shares traded on those markets -- is overseas now, according to one fund manager quoted in the article.

Perhaps a better indicator is the value of the U.S. dollar, which according to the April 28 WSJ, is at its lowest point ever against the Euro. Compared with the Federal Reserves Trade-Weighted Index, the dollar is at its lowest point since it created the index in 1973 (although not as low as it was in 2004 if inflation is taken into account).

jd

Biofuels

George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist, has written a powerful indictment of the disasters that occur when environmental "solutions" are forced through the sieve of our capitalist economy. His March 27 column, "If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuel" catalogs the destruction that is taking place as venture capitalists, hedge funds, agribusiness, and their paid lap-dogs in government push fuels derived from plants as the solution to what? Not global warming, although ethanol and bio-diesel may have a net lighter impact (although Monbiot cites some figures that suggest that some biofuels will contribute more to climate change than our friend oil). No, the driving force is our heavy consumption of (or as George Bush says, "addiction to") oil.

The economic and environmental dislocation following the investment in plant-based fuels has occurred rapidly, and highlights the interconnections within the economy. Nothing can happen without disturbing other things. The overall price of energy -- in particular oil -- rises, making other fuel sources more economical. As ethanol plants sprout across the Midwest, the demand for corn rises, causing corn prices to nearly double. But now, the ethanol distilleries are competing with food producers, so the price of corn-based foods -- everything from tortillas to pork to soda pop -- is affected. In the U.S., the grocery price increases may be diffused for a while, but in countries like Mexico, where tortillas are a food staple, people have rioted in protest of the increases.

Palm trees are another source of biofuel, where the oil is used to make bio-diesel. The demand for palm oil has resulted in the clearing of forests and replacement with palm tree plantations, to such an extent that it is now considered the biggest source of deforestation in southeast Asia. Monbiot cites figures that say that palm oil plantations are destroying 0.7 percent of the Malaysian rainforest each year; he cites a UN report that says that 98 percent of the Indonesian rainforest will be gone or degraded by 2022 -- fifteen years from now. The rainforest in Brazil is also under pressure from fuel plantations. In the U.S., farmers now have an incentive to bring fallow or marginal land (marginal in agricultural terms) into production -- i.e., habitat destruction.

(This is another example of the "ecosystem of globalization" -- the transformation of wild or natural or diversely complex habitats into managed plantations. We still have an environment, but instead of the rich mix of plants and animals in, say, the Malaysian rainforest, we will have rows and rows of monoculture.)

The solution, voiced from many quarters, is not finding new sources of fuel, but finding ways to reduce demand, through more efficient vehicles, conservation, a shift in consciousness. Biofuels represent a great capitalism solution to the peak oil problem -- at first glance everyone has their cake and can eat it too -- but it is quickly becoming apparent that biofuels are no magic fix. If anything, they are clarifying the limits of being able to solve the environmental crises within the context of capitalism.

jd

Environmental discourse

I have this sense about environmental discourse that treats capitalism as antagonistic to the environment, as "the enemy of nature". Well the "environment" and "nature" are two very different things, so it would be a mistake for me to conflate the two of them. "Nature" is a particular way of relating to the physical and living world around us, the environment. But the two are often conflated along with other conceptions of the world around us, like "wilderness".

One can certainly make a case of capitalism as "the enemy of nature". If, say, "nature" means something we participate in, respect, see as living, as part of us, etc. -- really, a spiritual conception of the world around us -- then capitalism is antithetical. Capitalism is an economic system based on the transformation of the world into quantities, economic units, in Marxist terms, Values. A world reduced to raw material and commodities, inputs and outputs, is the opposite of a world with which we can converse, embrace, experience in a qualitative way.

But this spiritual opposition I suspect is not what is generally meant by capitalism as the enemy of nature. The implication is that capitalism will destroy not just nature, but the environment. And so the philosophical or spiritual leap to seeing the world as "nature" isn't made. The "enemy of nature" will destroy world we live in, and end life. "Nature", or the environment is left as part of a narrative that we get trapped in -- I'm thinking of Carolyn Merchant's Reinventing Eden here. In the ascensionist narrative, we are coming out of a wilderness and creating a new Eden -- this I suppose might be the capitalist narrative, where Eden is associated with the maximization of commodity production and profit. The declensionist narrative sees us falling still, from a primeval Paradise into an industrial wasteland, and we must act to stop the fall and restore Eden. Or something like that. Merchant saw these narratives as trapping us into narrow binaries and linear plots, false and/or constrained choices as it were. She proposes the alternative of complexity and dynamism, of multiple voices and partnership with the environment -- a way of reaching nature?

Well I have digressed. I think the environmental movement runs a risk in posing capitalism as the enemy of the environment. because as capitalism adjusts itself, as it surely will, to ensure the continued conditions of its reproduction, it will create a split within the environmental movement, or exacerbate the one perhaps already there. As a class, capitalists will take the necessary steps to ensure that accommodations are made to preserve capitalism. This may mean the preservation of some habitats, not because they have intrinsic value, but because they are repositories of unique genetic sequences that can be harvested or perhaps because they can be commodified as sites of eco-tourism or perhaps they are recognized as necessary carbon sinks to allow carbon-based production elsewhere. Or polar bears as a species deserve to be protected, not because they are majestic creatures, but because they have some economic value as a public relations symbol or cartoon characters or stuff-toy. And then the movement is faced with a real Sophie's Choice of which part of the planet to abandon to extinction.

Capitalism is not the enemy of the environment, but it is the enemy of nature. Where nature is something to struggle for, to achieve and embrace.

-- jd

2007 State of the Universe Address

This is pretty good:

Swami Beyondananda’s 2007 State of the Universe Address

jd

Green capitalism

"Green capitalism" describes a kind of shift in capitalist thinking, a somewhat forward-thinking by a sector of capitalists about the limits of environmental destruction. The environment is a part of the conditions of production. Production, and hence the expropriation of surplus value cannot take place without an environment that can provide the wherewithal for production to take place, whether that is clean air, clean water, dry land, or relatively stable weather.

The recent push by some major corporations to manage the solutions to climate change indicates this broader awareness. The rhetoric is couched in terms of "saving the planet", but I think deep-down the apparent change of heart has more to do with the problem of continuing to make money under changing objective conditions.

Well it's more complicated than that certainly -- the real possibility of some sort of social rebellion around environmental destruction, could force political changes before the full force of, say, climate change, hits business. So business is attempting to get ahead of the wave, and manage it somehow. Hence a renewed interest in Kyoto-like non-solutions like cap-and-trade markets and interest in renewable fuels like ethanol that is creating havoc within agricultural markets. Anything but, heaven forbid, consider cutting consumption.

Anyway, there is a section of the environmental movement more than happy to sidle up next to this green wing of capitalism -- they never saw anything inherent in capitalism that eats away and destroys a healthy relationship with nature (and by this I mean one that sees nature as more than a machine to be tinkered with).

This accommodation came to light last week in the deal struck by the Environmental Defense (formerly Environmental Defense Fund) and National Resources Defense Council that blessed the buyout of the controversial utility TXU by the firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The two environmental groups are highlighting how they extracted support from the utility for climate change legislation and to cancel planned coal-fired power plants. As David Wessel wrote in a March 1 Wall Street Journal column, it's a "business-friendly, market-loving strain of environmentalism". But Saturday's WSJ reported that the two organizations had been "snookered" by the utility, that the so-called concessions had been planned anyway, and that big loopholes in the terms of the agreement would allow the utility to proceed with the scrapped coal-fired plants anyway. (See "Environmentalist Groups Feud Over Terms of the TXU Buyout", p. A1

As Saturday's article notes, "[I]t can be difficult to determine who is empowered to speak for the environmental movement." But as last week's deal indicates, the idea of an "environmental movement" is a fuzzy, ill-formed one at best. As green capitalism matures, which it is quickly doing, the "movement" as such will need to come to terms, in a much deeper way than has been necessary up till now, on how it wants to relate to capitalism, what capitalism needs, and what environmentalists want. What kind of world.

jd

KFC

Here's some YouTube video of the frolicking rats at the Greenwich Village KFC:

Frolicking rat video

Why am I fascinated by this? Maybe it is the element of insurgent nature, the way that nature asserts itself, always ready to reclaim the city. And there it is on display, through the plate glass window. Not a zoo of captured and subdued exotica, but wily rodent mardi gras, in full view.

jd

Evolution of consciousness bits

Some evolution of consciousness bits:

-- Silly me. I finished a fairly long project, Globalization, Romanticism and Owen Barfield, which, among other things, is a look at globalization in the context of Owen Barfield's work on the evolution of consciousness. And thinking oh what novelty, only to find out that over the past thirty years plus there has been quite a lot of work done on the evolution of consciousness -- Jean Gebser, Erich Neumann, Ken Wilber, William Irwin Thompson are some key names. From what I have read since then, I don't think Gebser, Neumann, Wilber or Thompson brought/bring the same perspective or feel for the topic that Barfield did.

-- William Irwin Thompson has sympathetic instructions on how to read Rudolf Steiner in his book Coming Into Being (St. Martin's Press, 1996). Literalism is a kind of death. Steiner repeatedly emphasized the difficulty of putting his experiences into images and words in order to communicate them. One must of course not make the mistake of then taking Thompson's translation of Steiner's evolution ideas too literally either. The main point I think is that Steiner's material must be approached not rigidly and literally but flexibly and with an open mind -- poetically, imaginatively.

-- I did a paper/article several months back on using Goethe's scientific approach (shaped via an exercise that Rudolf Steiner described) to investigate human artifacts (paper is Talking with history: Using Goethe's scientific approach with human artifacts). Mainly I was fascinated with all of the connections that come together in a simple artifact, and at so many levels -- physical, social, economic, historical, creative, which all taken together amounts to a spiritual experience.

And now I am reading Gary Lachman's book A Secret History of Consciousness (Lindisfarne Books, 2003), a very readable overview of work by different people (including Steiner, Barfield and Gebser). Lachman describes an experience that P. D. Ouspensky had:

During his experiments, he took a break on his sofa, smoking a cigarette. Flicking the ash, he looked with wonder at his ashtray. Suddenly he saw this humble object as the center of a vast radiating web of meanings and relations. In a rush of recognition, everything to do with the ashtray flooded his consciousness. Who had made it, its use the material from which it was made, the history of tobacco, the whole long development of humankind's ability to mold its environment. Fire, flame, and the match he had just struck: each seemed a hitherto unopened window on the world, through which he now looked with wonder and amazement. (p 44)

Silly me.

-- Jean Gebser, in his The Ever-Present Origin (Ohio University Press, 1985), breaks the evolution of consciousness into three broad periods: before perspective ("unperspectival"), perspective or "perspectival", and post-perspective or "aperspectival", a period we are entering now (and have been for a several decades). So the discovery of perspective in the period from the 13th to the 16th centuries, which also corresponds to the beginning of Scientific Revolution, and a general shift in the way that people, in Europe at least, viewed the world. The discovery of space, the space between things, the separation of things and in particular the viewer and the viewed were all part of this shift.

It was around this time that lace was first introduced; and here we see that even the fabric could no longer serve merely as a surface, but had to be broken open, as it were, to reveal the visibility of the background or substratum. (p 22)

The word "network", in the Oxford English Dictionary, has one of its earliest usages in connection to the making of lace. I am not sure what to make of that. Seeing networks required stepping-back from the world, abstracting it into nodes, "sectoring" it as Gebser might say. But I also think there is something new, perhaps "aperspectival" (not sure -- haven't gotten that far in the book!) in thinking about networks today. Perhaps the new thing happens when the network isn't see as just a map of nodes and links, but as a process of interactions.

-- Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko is a good read. I don't know that the basic good vs. evil thing holds up well when he tries to put it in the context of world history, and there is a certain endlessness to a struggle that seems to go nowhere. But I did like the basic thread that runs through it that those idle thoughts, the under-the-breath curses when cut-off or done wrong in the parking lot are actual, real curses that affect both the recipient and the world. A cautionary tale to promote right-thinking...

jd

Globalization, Romanticism, and Owen Barfield

Here’s a link (below) to a paper that I did that looks at the idea of a corresponding consciousness globalization to globalization. This consciousness that has been maturing for three hundred years under the general term "modernization," and the process has not matured uncontested. The Romantic Movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries provided an alternative consciousness with the possibility of alternative futures. Romanticism as an alternative consciousness can be seen not just as a historically specific event, but as an unfinished project. The work of Owen Barfield, the English philosopher, writer and poet, provides a framework for examining Romanticism, globalization and consciousness in the broader context of the evolution of consciousness. Within Barfield's structure, Romanticism constitutes a practical vehicle for evolving beyond the consciousness of globalization.

Globalization, Romanticism, and Owen Barfield

jd

Idea for a political organism

First the name. The tentative name is "Romantic Union". Well it is tentative. The mission of the organism is to restore the unity of the world, of subject and object.

We are trying to restore the Union: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Or "A long long time ago, our species brought forth on this planet, a new consciousness, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that consciousness, or any consciousness so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." (???)

Our field of activity is both in the mind, and in the world. Does that sort of violate our mission by assuming the duality? How about -- to people who see the world as a duality of subject and object, interior and exterior, it will appear like we have two sides to our task? Hmmm. Already this is getting complicated. But we bugger on...

Imagination is the first tool to be taken up in this task. We will use exact sensorial imagination to develop this tool. Goethe shows the way in this respect. Trust in this imagination, our intuitive powers will guide our work. Imagination can break the mind-forged manacles.

Our imagination reveals us as part of nature in profoundly deep ways that we have forgotten; we participate through our directed imagination in the ongoing creation, the eternally becoming of the world. The world, the planet is allowed to be whole again.

In economics we are communist: from each according to ability (no shirkers!); to each according to need. Difficult to imagine anything except food when one is starving or freezing or sick. Need to get to work on that one, right away.

Imagination can help us break the chains of property, but we might get some extra resistance on that one.

In structure, we are not network -- too schematic. We are not organization -- too mechanical. An organism though -- that's the thing. Interconnected, dynamic, in motion, alive. Various organs conscious of what needs to be done because we are part of the organism, it's in the -- can't really say DNA, too mechanical -- the soul? the urphänomen? Tied together by a shared vision, program, and understanding of mission. But a remarkable degree of independence and at the same time, cohesion and coherence.

We recognize that we live in a mighty web of relationships with other people, through the work and play we do and the things we enjoy. We reject the fetish of things as things, we embrace them as products of fellow human beings striving, laboring, creating. We share that with each other; we are mutually dependent on each other. So likewise we reject the notion of intellectual "property". We should have gotten that out of our system in the romper room. No one ever had an idea by him or herself.

We embrace science, but don't stop there. Science can be deepened, extended, made whole. We embrace a new empiricism that allows us to grow new organs of perception.

We embrace technology, but don't allow it to turn us into machines. We know what it is and what it isn't and aren't fooled.

We embrace sensuousness, feeling, creativity, active play. We know if we attend to nature -- we study a flower, we stare at clouds, we feel raindrops -- an awareness or knowing arises; there is something real in that. We embrace the felt change in consciousness when we read a poem, and know there is something real to that. We know, or have known, or want to know, what it means to love and be in love and be loved. We recognize the reality of that. We embrace that reality.

What else? Maybe a good closing line, like, "We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win." I don't know -- what do you think?