dogs without masters

“2312” by Kim Stanley Robinson is a book I'd advise everyone to read. There are some bleak aspect of humanity described, but it provides also a good study of the worst of our society and its capacity for change. One of the interesting analogies not developed enough to my taste in the book is the change from wolf to dog.

Dogs were wolf, until domestication by men. If any of you have seen documentaries on wolves, or read books on them ( I'd advise there Mark Rowland's books – he is a philosopher who has actually lived with wolves), you would know that wolves are more intelligent than any dog we know. Dogs need to be taught, through quite a strong discipline, how to react and be the best they can. Wolves have still an innate intelligence.

We are dogs to our society, and through some weird aspect, through an appeal at laziness that we all, one way or the other, succumb to. The example I have witness, and I know I'm not the only one, is the camera. The analogical to digital camera has brought a weird development. They are essentially the same to us, the support is different. Except that an analogical camera always provided the option to understand the process that was going on. You had a receptor of light, the film, you had a lens that would say at what distance you wanted this light to come, you had a focal that said in what amount of light at the time, and a timing of opening for this focal that said for how long.

That was it, that was simple and everybody could understand it, and make what they wanted of that understanding. You had your camera, and power over that camera. The digital revolution is a funny one. Though we can understand the digital process analogically, it is different in the fact that the changes we make, afterwards, are beyond the our understanding. Photoshop is a software that does not ask us to understand the cartesian coordination system to make changes manually, or even understand the RGB color numbering as a mean to scan the pixels of the image. All the algorithms are provided, and secretly kept, so we actually rent the power to change the picture, as the knowledge is a kept property,

This process of acquisition of knowledge, so the taking on power of our lives, more and more so, and it is the complete domestication of society,that does not happen only in individuals life, but also in the political sphere. The idea that socio-economical problems are phenomena for which answers are more complicated than the actions a government can do is a lie that is slowly coming up due to an invented complexity of the system. The most problematic aspect of this problem of fake complexity is that it slowly destroys the democratic process.

As Weber described it, a government is defined as the organization holding the legitimate use of violence. Bourdieu continued by assigning the government as the maker of the symbolic violence as well. In a democratic society, the population is therefore the decision maker, and anyone who is against that population will be punished ( one of the condition of justice is the fact that any breaking the rules risk a punishment ). The erosion of the democratic process I've mentioned earlier is that governments, and politicians, are losing that capacity to define the symbolic world –

I will quickly mention the United States of America which have clearly lost they democratic capacity when private companies are allowed to present and campaign for their favorite candidate, and the people candidates are not allowed the same financial support for their campaigns -

The media, held most of the time by profit seeking organization, will ascribe the language to use about socio-economical problems, and will define the perspectives and paradigm to hold about the economy. Also, the U.S.A. Being the hegemon, they confirm that language. Hence, a politician wanting to talk another language about these problems will appear as being either utopian or stupid, when there doesn't have to be something wrong in proposing other ways to exchange or produce ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinaleda,_Spain this is an example ).

My point is that we think that the financing of the economies seems complicate, because we have actually assigned a system that is overtly dependent on markets, especially since the implementation of a single currency that doesn't allow much power by the states to control themselves ( http://translate.google.fr/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://blog.mondediplo.net/2013-05-25-Pour-une-monnaie-commune-sans-l-Allemagne-ou-avec&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dpour%2Bune%2Bmonnaie%2Bcommune%2Bsans%2Bl%2527allemagne%26client%3Dubuntu%26channel%3Dfs ).

It seems all overtly complicated. Like unemployment. Unemployment is greatly the result of automation, and the mis-distribution of the investment for population to direct their own business, especially in developing countries. There is a systemic unemployment, and while we look partly to the USA to see how they solve theirs, they have found a solution, criminalize part of the population and send them to private prisons, so you create growth while solving unemployment, and the state goes back to its original feudal prerogative – deciding who is a foe and who is a friend.

Accepting unemployment as unavoidable is a paradigm that governments could accept, if they would take back the power that is theirs – deciding how we talk about ourselves as a society. Unemployed people are partly people incapable of joining the productive forces because they had other worries, but also people capable of joining the productive forces, but with no place for their capacities. And then, a lot of people work for NGOs, and are officially unemployed. So what is a worker, and what is an unemployed is a real societal problem, that is ignored, because governments do not want to change, challenge, the domesticated minds.

Little poetic presentation to an art exhibition

 On the 10th of july opened the summer exhibition of the Karlsruhe ( Germany) Art Academy, and here is a text distributed for the event.

  As the exhibition is now closed, I can present it to you, and offer you to print and distribute it at every art show, as an introduction.

"  You are and have been here confronted to a wide range of contemporary arts. It is probably not your first time and if the world, you with, on and in it, survives reality’s dangers, it will not be your last.

  Why the literally figurative intrusion in your life when surrounded by the conceptually representative? I won’t tell you. I just hope to effectively be a symbiotic parasite to the experience. Like my analogical organic friends, I lack a sense of scale of the world, and might be from another kingdom or realm, and hope to haunt the art and its public with the truth eternally present to all exhibitions and constantly ignored.

 I would like to remind you that you will forget most of what you’ve seen, and yet will in the future be reminded of a room that you don’t remember now; will in the future forgotten rooms you will have been used to remember, and never know. And this says it all.

 It shows that beyond your appreciation of what is beautiful or intelligent, beyond your emotional consciously repressed reaction and your grin to what is ironically pathetic to you, beyond what you find is original and what expectedly follows the history of art as you know, beyond your humble restrain to add unto others art your art and your arrogance not say anything, there is an army of artists feeling like you ever do.

  They have exposed here all the insecurities that a life with an end presents. They have shouted as they could that there is a life, there was a life, and there will hopefully be a life. And all will deny it is only that, and life has never been only that. Life could have been the lack of choice, society’s usual subjugation of the physical world through work by workers subjugated by the physics of the social world.

  Instead, artists have chosen to show what we see in the opposite sex, the same-sex, anyway the object of our fantasy: what we need for life but can’t live with. The struggle to ask without words wither we deserve love or ought to take the choice we always have.

 And they will do it by immersing you in other powerlessly magic realities, by representing what they hear in the woods where once upon a time all the trees have fallen; by building the sculptures ancient Greeks were never ordered to liberate out of the marble for fear of the disorder of the mind information of a new kind creates; for all the new media you’ve seen here just hint at what we all have yet to learn.

  So be nice to them, they have searched here for guides who have proven themselves through age and recognition by chance. Guides who have mastered them or abandoned them, but will always stay guides that could not let them free, for their best or their worst. They are a community of the now, a ‘we, the people’ to whom the injunction of the artist for art sake lets only the future historians create a movement, this nostalgic solidarity of the art. They search now for a wider public, a public that won’t doubt that talking to them, telling them they have to continue, for everybody’s sake and for themselves, is the thing to do. 

 A public that will remember them; so all can one day be reminded they have forgotten.  ¨                                                         

Sociology and Science-fiction: Beyond Social Forecasting an analysis of The Culture saga of Iain M. Banks

Science-fiction is a genre that has appeared mainly in the 19^th century. The first famous novel to have extrapolate from science developments to make a story was probably Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein. The modern Prometheus'. It is associated more with the Enlightenment that with the industrial society as can be considered as a warning to the quests of science. It is the subtitle of the book that sets the moral of the story as it references an ancient Greek myth of a titan rebelling against the gods to give man a fair chance but got punished as he did not give a political sense supposed to come with the knowledge of the fire he gave to humanity.

We then observes the science-fiction of the industrial society, the one grounded in sciences and all its possibilities. The genre hosted stories suppose to scare its readers, like the Robert Louis Stevenson “Strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hide” or to fascinate them and make them dreams, such as most of Jules Vernes stories. In the case of Jules Vernes, there was as well a will to educate its readers to what to expect and why not fear sciences. It is so not surprising that a lot of the inventions in his stories came to be true, such as the submarine. Jules Vernes is also associated with the beginning of Universal exhibitions. The places where the promises of the industrial ages where illustrated.

The English-speaking countries saw the real rise of science-fiction as a real genre in the beginning of the 20^th century on. The only known attempt at legitimizing science-fiction in French literature was the donation of the first 'Prix Goncourt' to John Antoine Nau's 'Force ennemie'. The stigma of science-fiction then appeared in France just before the 2^nd Word War and this author is now only remembered by a few. The appearance of such a stigma could be due to the French educational system which was and still is very elitist and creates antagonisms between empirical sciences and human sciences. The elites educated in literature would then snob anything scientific and the stigma would then be trickled down to the populations. The only two notable works that escaped the stigma was the apocalyptic 'Ravage' by Barjavel and Pierre Boulles' 'Planet of the Apes'.

   

 Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor challenger stories, H.G. Wells' 'War of the Worlds' , Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World', H.P. Lovecraft's 'Colour Fallen from the Sky' are all proofs that science-fiction became a legitimate style in English-speaking countries. It would be interesting to see what made science-fiction a genre more accepted genre in the United- Kingdom and in the United States of America early on when it took so long to loose its stigma in the academical world in other developed countries.

  

 There are then until the 80's three giants of science-fiction appeared: Philipp K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert ( I've latter discovered after writing this essay (2009) about Heinlein) . The latter two will be the most relevant for this essay as they have created important sagas that have left traces for ever on literature. Frank Herbert wrote the Dune saga. It is set only one big planet of sand, even though some people do travel between planets. The theme running through his saga is the question of control and religion.

  The Asimov's Foundation saga is maybe more interesting to study. It is set in a future where humanity is scattered around the universe, where the planet of our origin is lost and where five important forces are in secret conflict to put a direction to humanity. The forces are humanity in its general chaotic behaviour as we can observe it in our history, the first foundation society which looked at develop technologically only, the second foundation that looked at developing a real understanding of the human psyche, the Mule who is a human monster undoing all predictions and finally a planet called Gaia which is an integrated psychic system on its own.

  For a decade between 1985 and 1995, these giants have been replaced by one author. William Gibson is the most important writer for the sub-genre of cyberpunk novels. He is the inventor of the neologism 'cyberspace'. He wrote about the pharmacology, as defined by Bernard Stiglier, of immersing cybernetic systems and the cyborgification of humanity. He is also the one who acknowledge Iain M. Banks as his up-coming counter-point in quality in innovation for science-fiction.

   

 Iain M. Banks most important saga is called The Culture. To set the Culture, it is a civilization which exist in the entire universe. It is stated that it is one of the most advanced civilization in the universe, the assumption being that there are millions of civilizations. It is partly humanoid but the choice is left to all its citizen to chose and change whenever their body. The other members of the civilization are all the robotic sentient beings. Since all the biological members live either on constructed planet controlled by such sentient beings or on sentient ships, these beings are the one making all the decisions. The level of technology of the civilization give them an infinite amount of energy and material resources, so it is equally distributed to all the citizens. The machines do all the needed work, what is left for the citizens is to enjoy their life, to be ethnographers of lesser civilization or ambassadors. The story-lines are then most of the time around citizen in quest for adventure sent by the sentient machines to do some spy work supposed to help a lesser civilization.

After such an introduction on the history of a genre, the methodology use for this essay will be outline and then put to practice. The subject of study will be The Culture saga, and more than the piece of literature that it is, it will be the society described which will be studied. It will be a form of discourse inter-textual analysis (Jaworski and Coupland, 1999;Coulthard and Sinclair,1975) that will provided at first. The theme of the first research will be centred around utopia and how they are always relative in the good they represents, depending on the time and country of their origins. The second analysis will be an attempt at using sociological heuristic devices to analyse a fiction. It is a paradigm in cultural studies that has not yet made its marks. Jean Baudrillard did use his own analytical framework to study films (1994) and psychoanalysis, though its heuristic devices were meant to study the human psyche, is now used to study different media and even politics (Zizek,1989). Some sociologists might think it is a futile attempt but as the philosopher Mark Rowland has outlined (2003), science-fiction is a great tool as it is a mirror to humanity. A distorted mirror at that which helps us reflect on how our society is or might be. It is why most of the socially conscious authors of the beginning of the 20^th century looked at this genre to outline what to fear in their changing society. The result of the second analysis will show that the different sociologist who explained through grand theories problem of inequality in our society were grounded in a modern society and we can imagine the variables that make such inequalities.

The first analysis will be on the question of utopia and dystopia in literature. Utopia are possible a sub-genre of science-fiction appeared before the genre. It has started with Plato's 'Republic', to Tomas More 'Utopia', adding Rabelais 'Gargantua' to the list and the 20^th century saw the rise of dystopia like 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin, '1984' by George Orwell, 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley and adding to that for reasons explained later 'I am legend' by Richard Matheson.

 Utopia are important in our literature and in our history of philosophy as they set the dreams and fears of a given society at a time. Plato was disillusioned by the death of his master condemned by the bourgeoisie of his time for disturbing the peace of mind of the populations. Plato set himself then to set a society that would be perfect, in his mind. Hannah Arendt, after World War two noted that Plato was probably the first to imagine a totalitarian society, as the only his will was important in this imagined society. This then set the question of what makes an imagined society a utopia or a dystopia.

 I would argue that most utopia are dystopia and all dystopia are certainly utopia. All the utopia tend to look at a final society, a society without history, as nothing need to change any more. In Gargantua, Rabelais write about a peaceful society living in the invented Abbey of Theleme. It is a place where the youth can develop themselves freely out of the constraint of a strict education. It is a real dystopia for all the slaves that are suppose to provide for their needs but Rabelais made sure that it is not an important theme in writing this society.

  'We' is probably the only real dystopia of an over-controlled society where freedom does not exist and humanity is transformed into a big production machine. It is Jeremy Bentham pan-opticon brought to the level of all society. Only if society would deserve such a treatment by a being knowing better would this fate be an ethical one, like we consider the fate of all our farming animals. It is a story that has probably inspired a lot '1984'. The question now rises that if every utopia are really dystopia, could all dystopia be utopia ?

 '1984' see a small part of the population having to work for the party, so the rest of the population can live without worries. The party members take care of all the state affairs but to be sure that society does not get disturbed by anyone looking to make some troubles, all the party members are constantly under surveillance. It is the sacrifice of a few for the good of all the rest. Then come a man of the party who discovers a little bit of freedom and do not have moderation with this newly acquired sense of freedom in breaking the system.

  The question of utopia and dystopia is even more relevant in 'Brave New World'. The people in there are just happy to be where they are at, they have drugs so life anxiety is entirely non-existent and they are all free to consumes all the products they want. Even if there is a caste system, the genetically engineered and drugged humanity do not feel it is unfair. More than that, it could also be noted that they do not live the disciplined sexual repression of our society. They do not live the lies of a life under a religious code. It is all in all a perfect Parsonian ordered society.

  So why would 'I am legend' be considered a utopia? Well if the dystopia mentioned early have something in common, it is that there is always the need of an individual looking at having its own outlook on society being a good reason to seek the end of the given society. The societies are always anchored in their own way. That is maybe why 'I am Legend' is maybe a real utopia. The hero is the individualist man that we can see in all these stories. The difference is that he is the last human on earth, the rest of the population has been transformed in wild vampires. In the end of the book, we learn though that some vampires are more controlled than was assumed and they do try to build their own new society and that the will and desires of this lonely human, outsiders are infringing the freedom of that society.

  So where is The Culture in that series of text ? The Culture is a self-declared perfect society. The only change that we observe throughout the sage are technological discoveries, but there are no changes in nature in this society. Everybody is free to do as they wish. Nothing is condemned to the extent that if a citizen manage to kill another one, the worst he can expect is being ignored by other citizens but he will still have all his rights. Everybody is under the sentient machines surveillance, except if they ask not to, and they do not really care about it as they cannot be obliged to do anything. A machine did in 'The player of games' blackmail a citizen, threatening to ruin his reputation by demonstrating that the citizen cheated. The citizen did cheat and by obeying the blackmail, his crime went unnoticed, but the game was not an important one.

 Everybody in The Culture is an individual. Even the sentient machines are individuals, who get to partly construct their own operating-system and name themselves. There are groups also within the culture which rebel against some ways of the culture, but they are integrated and live the way they do. All the views and all the ways are accepted and there is always some place to satisfy someone desires. It is a society that is beyond a utopia or a dystopia. I will use important sociological theories now to study The Culture and see how it radically opposed to most societies in our history.

Will have to start with Marx. Marx established that the industrial society could be solely studied if we took as an object of study commodities. The first step-would be to to understand how commodities are produced and distributed, and then understand how the commodities are valued. Both these researches would outline a system in a given system (Zizek,1989). We are confronted here with a overproduction of commodities, but unlike the prediction of 'Das Kapital' volume one, there is no under-consumption created since everything is free. Commodities have no values as there is an infinite offer. There is no working class but the sentient machines which do more than one task while enjoying looking at life at the same time. The citizens have no class and further more, it followed the Marx slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

 Observing therefore that Marx is “outdated” for The Culture, we can turn to Weber. Sentient machines provide the form of instrumental rationality at its best. There is though not much bureaucracy attached with them as we do not see much rules. The machines hold the monopole of instrumental rationality in the sense that they are the one to calculate the values of most actions. What they have noted is what we start to understand is that instrumental rationality does not exist in an infinite system and has been only an excuse for ideological actions (Damasio, 1995). This is where we might observe an inconsistency in The Culture. There is a status system in the Sentient machines. The bigger the ship or the Orbital ( the constructed habitations), the more respected their point of views. They have a higher processing power and their opinion is considered more than any others but even among the most intelligent beings, there are dissenting opinions.

If there are no rules, where is Durkheim's anomie? Well there are still social norms. There is such a multitude of societies within The Culture that there are always social norms in a given sub-group. The example of the player scared of being blackmail shows that anomie does not exist and that most citizens find a place where they feel free in their wills and do not find social norms too constrictive either. This where Durkheim shows the lack in his heuristic paradigm, he did not consider much the effect of the lack of regulations in a given society, just the lack of social norms.

So it is a post-industrial society close to Bell (1974)works. The problem is that as stated earlier, there is no industry. Knowledge accumulation is the most important practice in The Culture. They have a central hub where all the knowledge is shared for everybody. Their definition of knowledge is also important as they understand that there is always a paradox of the observer. The problem is that Bell's analysis was still material and considered an economy, which is entirely absent here.

What is very present in this society and the theories that do enlighten us a little bit to a process inherent in The Culture is the process of individualization (Beck,1992;Bauman,2000;Giddens,1991) The communities we observe are communities of practice (McDermott et al. 2002) that bring in individuals only. It is not consumerism that makes the individualist process as you would need an economy to create real consumerism. It is rather the saturation of information provided to everybody. Information has no exchange value but absorbed in different ways will create different identities. Individuals in The Culture are also not embodied in a fixed body. The self is managed (Goffman, 1959) but not for the reasoned outline by Goffman. What is observed in the question of the management of the self is more accounted to free will as defined by Hegel:

“The Will is Free only when it does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself (as long as it does so, it is dependent), but wills itself alone – wills the Will. This is the absolute Will – the volition to be free.” (1991, p.442).

References

• Banks,I.M. The Culture Novels. London: Orbit Press
• Coulthar,R.M. And Sinclair,J.(1975) Towards an Analysis of Discourse. London: Oxford University Press
• Coupland,N. And Jaworski,A.(1999) The Discourse Reader. London: Routledge
• Baudrillard,J.(1994) Simulations and Simulacra. Michigan: Michigan University Press
• Bauman, Z.(2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press
• Bell, D.(1974) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Harper Colophon Books
• Beck, U.(1992) Risk Society. SAGE Publications
• Damasio,A. (1995) L'Erreur de Descartes : la raison des émotions. Paris: Odile Jacob
• Giddens, A.(1991) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press
• Goffman,E.(1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New-York: Anchor Books
• Hegel,G. (1991) The history of philosophy. New-York: Dovers Publications
• McDermott et al. (2002) Cultivating Communities of Practice Harvard: Harvard Business Press
• Rowland,M.(2003) The philosopher at the end of the universe. London: Ebury Press

World War Z on a couch

I never know to what extent are films and books analysis going beyond the intention, but intentions are never the only things at play. Hence, I'm going to develop quickly here a study of “ World War Z”. It is only a study of the film as I have not read the book.

There are two elements I have perceived from this film. The first part of the study, is influenced by the fact I have followed some seminars by Laurence Rickels, for three years now. I have also read Sigmund Freud and Slavoj Zizek, who are the other psychoanalysts of films and literature that have influenced a bit my understanding of the film.

Brad Pitt suffers from the abandonment as a father figure. He has been asked to quit his job, and feels in such a way castrated. I'm hypothesizing that the decision to stop being a father ( but a stay at home “ mother” figure) came some time after the death of his father, so he feels guilty – quitting his job was like killing his father. This ambivalence of feeling – wishing to be a man without killing the father – can only be resolved in one way, says Freud. The only way to redeem this neurotic stage is to kill himself, like Jesus did, so he can accept himself as a father, having punished himself. Ok, it might not be clear at first.

Let's try again. There is one taboo in society: do not try to be your father. Your father is all powerful and knows best, also he gets all the girls in town. We do though have to kill our father to accept ourselves as we are. Comes the tricky bit: if we kill our father, we are run by guilt, we know it's bad because things might run amok ( check the definition) – and if things run amok, our brothers might want to kill us, and so will our sons. So we have to feel better, hence we sacrifice ourselves, to feel better, to feel redeemed. Weird, I know, but it somehow works, for psychoanalysts and Christians.

Boom ! First part is done and explained.


But wait, the best part is yet here. Though we can have the psychoanalytical reading set on the protagonist, the protagonist might just be the personification of a societal observation.

What does it mean ? I'm not entirely sure. The film has clearly been financed by the U.S. Defense department, and this guys know what to do in films. So, what can we learn from their message ?

One: dictatorships are the best. Indeed, if we observe where the zombies emerged from, we understand that democracies are prone to zombyfication: India, South Korea, United States ( yeah, I know, hardly a democracy – except in the eyes of the american public). But let's see the countries that escape zombyfication... The first one, on top of the list, is North Korea. North Korea is the only country to have no zombie at all because they have, in 24 hours, taken out all the teeth of everybody.

Ok, that does make sense. The problematic sub-text of the film is Israel. Israel has a government that for the last decade, didn't recognize the right for self-determination of the Palestinian people and has grab their lands. Israel has been condemned for that, but somehow, in the film, that's what makes Israel a strong country: their capacity to make walls. Their capacity to reject a part of humanity is what keep them alive for some time in the film – also they have a highly effective intelligent agency, we're told again in the film. The interesting bit though is that once Israel decides to accept Palestinians and protect them, the celebration for that peace is the cause for the zombyfication. Zombies arrive just at the moment of peace celebration....

Which made me wonder about the last country ( not counting the Belorussian plane that saves our hero). The United Kingdom is the country that saves the world. Is is an undemocratic country ? Well, it is interesting to ask. The undemocratic technie that saves the world, in the film, is what the U.K. Is best at at the moment : Surveillance ! The film projects most of the part in the United Kingdom through CCTVs. The cameras are finally useful as they let know everybody were the zombies are and what to do against them.

Ok, so the Department of Defense prefers that there is no trias politica principles. No balance of power and no accountability to the people, because it tends to slow us down. And that is where I'm stuck. Ok, we become Zombies when we want what is right. To get rid of zombies, we have to kill ourselves, we have to transform ourselves, to become effective at killing zombies. I do not understand what the Department of Defense asks of us through the psychoanalytical self-sacrifice. Do they understand democracies, as killing the King to become our own Kings, give us ambivalent feelings - and they do as we want problems to be solved faster but with justice - ?

I wonder what they ask of us. Our neurotic hero has to lose his family to realize that he really wants to be father and that he cannot be run by his sense of guilt ( that made him loose his libido). Have we lost our libido through democracy, or through the fact that we do not believe in it anymore ? What does it mean to kill ourselves in this sense – and for what ? Do they want us to choose for ourselves, or is there an intention ? I'm just not sure.

Old man's ramble

So I'll try again writing a blog, slightly political, slightly sociological, slightly entertaining. I'll try. I'm making the commitment to my small small readership, once a year.

The whole question is what to start with. And I came up with an idea. I don't know if you've other articles, but I came upon a realization. As we all know, we have an unfair economical system that does not promote wealth redistribution even if it is in the interest of society as a whole, so all its actors, even the one benefiting of the economical system. Some smart business man are aware of that, and we ought to give them credit more often than we do, they are saving it for the others, blinded by their inheritance. 

We have an economical system that does not in general promote its perpetuity, or societies, or most of enterprises. Indeed, a company that sells well its product, that is reasonably in the products it provides, would have sold at some point to everybody a product that last and at some point, that company will have serve its purpose, and will have to dismantle. Now, that ought to be normal. It is normal. Except that we do not easily accept it, and it is mainly because of vested interests. We are blinds to the normal need for change and evolution. Companies ought probably to think about their end, and I think it was the idea behind having a mandatory amount of money in a bank, to prepare for the end. The workers are not happy when this happen,and it is because the average expectancy of humans has outgrown the life-expectancy of most economical enterprises. We are not told that.

Indeed, between the reality of capitalism and the theory of capitalism, we can find a universe. Anyway, capitalism as it is is about keeping an advantage on everybody else, by mean of control of the land, of the media and of the political landscape. It's about an oligarchy that provides nothing fair,and keeping that advantage constantly. That's where Marx was probably the most right, alienation is a necessary by-product of a mode of wealth distribution based on private property. We are, entrepreneurs as well as workers, alienated from everything. The only times labor laws were put in place, in most countries, it was because either the populations were too educated for their own good, and sacrifices were made by the owners of means of productions to prevent a good revolution, or because the big companies wanted to make investments, but to keep their advantages, they would require all their competitors to do the same. This is what happened with most welfare or mandatory insurances schemes: keeping the advantage by uniforming the procedures.

A fair competition is non-existent. It is in theory possible, if we adopt a total
transparent society, but we are very far away from that. As much as we can still consider, and we will have to or fall in a dark age, that we can reshape our economical system ( limiting the use of limited first-hand goods ( and redistributing first to the region holding these goods) – eliminating everybody's debt – having a different economy for life ( as it is – so the enjoyment of culture) – an ownership of material products by societies ), we are far away from considering total transparency as another need for keeping human society going on. Total transparency seems to be an invasion of our private life, but more than the fascistic idea that people who have nothing to hide do not hide anything, I think that there is something wrong with society when we feel like hiding.

For example, someone prosecuted for a crime will try to hide it, for shame and knowing that most of us will judge him. How can people who are condemned are supposed to reintegrate society when they hold a stigma. I think that there is indeed something stigmatic in secrets. We also know that secrets only exist for the powerful. There is a very clear example in the news this week: the PRISM scandal is only relevant when put next to the Bradley Manning prosecution. The U.S.A. Are allowed to uncover everybody's secret conversations around the world, but the world is not allowed to know what the U.S.A. did wrong ( shooting journalists, torturing people in private prisons, supporting dictators and telling their diplomats to keep rubbing on their good side, fueling military-coup against socialist leaders...). Even for rich people, the fiscal audits from most European countries are actually limited in their research when auditing the fiscal revenues. Other than it is still legal, to some extent, to have off-shore accounts ( rich people have the right to pay taxes anywhere they want, as they pay handsomely lawyers who research what are the loopholes in every tax code)

Of course, total transparency is impossible at the moment. The wealth injustice, the conservative spirit touched by everyone, the frustrating mediascape, leads us to be incomplete being capable of all freudian pathologies. We are not sincere with ourselves, me least of all. Total transparency would require that we get rid of some constants in our constitution ( all around the world, everybody think they are slightly better than the average...), like our need for consistency, which prevents us from accepting change, especially in ourselves, or our need for a positive self-image, which explains why there is no Joker around the world ( no one I've ever met would consider themselves a bad person).

Anyway, I'm back, I'll try to be there as often as possible, with rambles and constructed thoughts. We'll see how it goes. By the way, calling on readers, if you have a theme you'd like me to express my opinion on, I'll gladly do !

  The next article will probably be on badly paid jobs we can't relocate,  language and what it shows about societies, and any thing that passes through my head at the time 

Top 5 Graphic Novels

Back to culture and personal reviews. At this point in my life, I would like to make a desert island, all time favourite top 5 graphic novels ( comic series). I do not know if I should start by explaining first the value of graphic novels and their history. I think I will just remind that they used to be the stuff of the children and the working class for a very very longtime, after they were the invention of the print ( before that they were the stuff to educate as well but a fringe of the population). It is the twentieth century I think that they became the stuff of adults, when people who grew up with them got accustomed with them, as well as the ones with the development of pornographic graphic novels. They will never completely be lost, but they were quickly overcome by the internet and animated films, so I might be in the perfect generation to judge the perfect graphic novels for adults.

Well, now the I have quickly establish their history, that I have legitimised also my taste through my age ( which I'll agree is a shaky excuse, but not much of you will have better ones). I will present my top 5:

1 - Hellblazer.

2 - Sandman.

3 - Preacher.

4 – Transmetropolitan.

5 – Planetary.

Some have more than one writer and graphic artist, so the title of the series will be enough for now.

Hellblazer tells the story of John Constantine. He is an Englishman from Liverpool originally, but has been adopted by London. He comes from the working class, which gives him a leftist fibre I really appreciate. It is an ongoing comics, that will probably follow the fate of all the famous super-heroes, it will last and last and your children might read it as well, and then it will restart again and so on. The particularity though is that Constantine is not a super-hero. He does not have the stuff of heroes. He is a coward who feels oblige sometimes to save the world, but would rather let other people die, and only when cornered does he do something, or at least that what he was when I discovered him. Before that, he was an arrogant bastard who thought he could do good, but then ended up killing his friends. He is bitter because of his life and because of the world. He might have some powers, as a self-proclaimed magician. We do know though what are magicians, yet we keep going to their shows. It's now been almost 30 years that Hellblazer comes monthly out, and it goes in depth in defining the psyche of a man who has lost his twin at birth, like Philip K. Dick, and like the author has developed a lucid way to explain and distort reality.

Sandman is the acclaimed work of Neil Gaiman. Sandman tells the story of Dream, one of the 7 eternals ( Destiny, Destruction, Delight ( who became Delirium), Despair, Desire and Death are his siblings). Eternals have realm, which interact with reality, and actually give reality its movements. Neil Gaiman plays in these novels with the mythologies we had through our history and still the one we have nowadays. It is full of reference and it imagines the personal histories behind the myths and what are the emotions that gods have, towards humans and themselves. Sandman is a great creation on the subject of imagination, as it is what dreams are for.

Preacher was the comic book that got me to serious adult comic books. Before encountering preacher, I was a marvel super-hero follower and a Mad magazine reader. Preacher got me to believe that graphic novels can really be smart adult entertainment. Why ? Well Preacher is about a preacher with an alcohol problem, a hit-man girlfriend and has a drug addicted irish vampire as a best friend. It is a very smart graphic novels as I said... Preacher is a very american graphic novel, as our Preacher goes through the U.S.A. To find God and get this last one – very interesting minor caracter – to explain why he has quit on his creation. Preacher illustrates Bill Hicks perspective on the USA: it is a country filled with the worst of humanity, and yet keeps a good aspiration to be the best it can – even if it fails.

Transmetropolitan's protagonist has the best name in the history of fiction: “ Spider Jerusalem”. I don't know where the name came from. It is set in a not-too-distant future, in a big city. The city represents the world, or is the centre of the world. Well it only represents it, it is actually New-York as it was, so the lighthouse of the world. In this city, everybody is hyper-connected and Spider Jerusalem used to be a famous journalist. And after some years in the wild, he is back and the world is not better. Spider Jerusalem is moved by only one thing: the Truth. It is a hero who knows what he wants, and he will do anything – armed with a bowel setting movement gun – to get it. And people read him, so he gets enemies. He represents the fourth branch of power as it should be. He is the hero that societies could have.

Planetary, finally, is the comic book on comic books. Every parts of this story is an adaptation of another comics of the 20th century. I have not read enough comic books to know where does everything comes from, but it is impossible not to see that it is all about comic books. All the old ones appear, like Tarzan and the masked cowboy, the enemies are the Fantastic Four and every body appears, even the ones I've just mentioned ( and maybe that's why I've put it up in my top 5 – John Constantine is transformed into Spider Jerusalem). I'm still trying to get my head around it, as I do not yet have resolved everything, but if one day you think you have accumulated enough knowledge about this art, this is the last graphic novels to read.

For any adults ( over 16) ready to discover interesting graphic novels, other than these, try V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Promethea and Swanpthing ( all by Alan Moore if I remember correctly), Sin City, Goddess, Lucifer, The Sandman theatre, Hit-man, Y the last man, or go ask your local comic book store.  

Eunuchs of the World

Back for a quick self-reflective study of my knowledge. It is not epistemology as I do not concentrate on the value of my knowledge, though I do doubt it sometimes, so I take back what I said, there is a bit of epistemology. Doubt is the foundation of knowledge. Anyway, it has been a long time I have written to be read, and not written to make sense of what I think I think, so it might take time to get into the careful balance of humour and seriousness. Seriousness and humour are just opposite sides of the same coin: a paradox born from the contradiction of our perception of the world, our expectation of the world, and the reality of the world as we perceive it.

I will not go for too much psychology, no matter how interesting that knowledge can be, pathologies of the psyche are too rare compared to the pathologies of our societies. Of course, both were born quite early into our civilisation (whether the personal development through language and the recognition of the Other or the societal development of information sharing and the confrontation with other perspectives). I will go into the realm of what I think is political philosophy, but as you, smart audience, know, no intellectual realm has borders like North Korea.

Let's just start with the birth of societies, as I have finished reading “ Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond, who points out the chance of we, Eurasian, born on a continent with an East-West axis, where the weather is relatively equivalent, compared to all the other continents. This indeed means that transport and exchange are easier, as in order to go from one part of the continent to the other we did not need to go through much deserts or oceans, compared to the populations living on other continents. At that, we had the luck of having easily domesticable animals, and crops that provide enough nutrients and are easy to farm, so agriculture became the biggest advantage.

Agriculture was and still is the greatest thing that happened to man-kind, as it has provided us with a surplus in energy, and saved us time, meaning that we got to work on other things. I do not yet have the correct education in physics to understand the full consequences and relationship between energy and time, or space for that matter. Knowing though what I don't know makes me even more curious. Anyway, agriculture brought more people with more free time capable of working on much more, giving us technology and complex societies. It was though because of the spatial advantage that some cultures got to develop faster than others, and when confronted with these others, determined who would be the master and who would be the slave.

Here, we will have a little bit of time for a philosophical stage whisper. I am telling you quickly how master/slave relations were understood by Hegel and then by Marx, because it is always something interesting to keep in mind. A man meets an other man and it is a traumatising experience, because both of them thought that they were the centre of the world. So they had to fight, to affirm their uniqueness. Two possible outcomes. Outcome A, one wins, the other dies, end of the story. Outcome B, one wins, the other accepts that the winner gets to give the orders. So we have a winner Master and a loser Slave. Master needs Slave constantly, because S determines who M is. Without S, M is nothing now, while S is like he was before, except that there is now a meaning in his life: receiving orders. Of course, receiving orders means that there are imperatives, things that he can't have and as Groucho remarks, that's how desire was born because “ I'd never WANT to belong to a club that would accept me as a member”.

The birth of desire is the result of an order given, by the father or the social authority. That's how History started. Indeed, the M would never want any change, does not have any desire, he is the content father who just needs to perpetuate how society is. On the other hand, the S is the worker, the one who has to accept the situation with frustration – this latter feeling being transformed, sublime into production surplus of the cultural or intellectual order, when it is not of the political order.

Hegel and Marx thought that it were the total Slaves who made history, Hegel thought it happened in the realm of ideologies, Marx in the realm of economies and I go for the poor compromise of not knowing the causality and doubting there is a one way causality. I say “total”Slaves, because there are a hierarchy of Slaves: the priest, the politicians, the lawyers, the soldiers and so on until the lowest of the law. It is not economic relations that always change the ideologies, it is not always the ideologies that change the economic relations. Change is just what you get when the slaves have learnt much and the Masters forgot how they won.

Domination as the little story has undergone here happens only under universalisation of a field, a realm, or an order. What I mean is that you cannot have an asymmetric relationship if it does not occur in the same frame of understanding. For example, and here we are using an example from Bourdieu, let's say I want to compare the size of my reproductive organ with the one of my neighbour. I tell him mine is 31 centimetres long, and he tells me his is 12 inches long. We do not use the same measures so we can't compare, he and I will never know who is the master and who is the slave. Now, let's say that I am a legitimised authority, I tell my neighbour that we can only use centimetres. It gets to be a different relationship. It is accepted by him and I who the winner will be, because we have agreed on a frame.

I mention in passing the process of universalisation, because it is an ambiguous process of domination, and pacifications of conflict. Why do conflicts get less violent when everybody agrees on what are the terms of the fight ? Well because it accepts a common ground. Of course, usually, the common ground works mostly in favour of the one who ascertain his domination in an other field. For example, I am the master of the armies, I will put everybody under the influence of a religion we shall all believe in. The master of the armies therefore established the universalisation of the cultural context. It is then in these fields that domination will be recognised and that rebellious production, the sublimation of the frustration and the creation of the desires, will be born.

The ambiguity of the universalisation process is that one of the dominant forces of universalisation, of setting legitimate fields of hierarchy, is the State. The State will state rules, nominate, and act in an accepted way. Whether we like it or not, we abide by the State rules, and this because the State is our legitimate authority. Now, we are getting in the thick of it. There is of course an idealised power called the State, which will establish a lot of fields and the rules of games of these fields, under which people play the different games of social life. The State in itself is though a field where we find rules of games and people playing to get on top.

From there on, different fields will bring on different elements with different interests, mainly keeping the status of Master. Hence, when we see positive change within society, looking back retrospectively, two sorts of groups are the elements of these changes. The first one is the group of particular slaves, which have taken the oppression to an unsustainable point, where antagonistic forces meet. Of course, this type of group will create a problem, as Badiou notifies, since they might only demand change for their own private interests, and not a change in depth of the order of things within a given society.

Normally, a slave-group that asks for change which might not consider the others does so because their field of oppression is not shared by others oppressed in a different way. The petite bourgeoisie in Russia which saw its political capital stample on asked for a revolution, but the political field capital was not shared with the peasants, hence the economical oppression ( USSR was about economical oppression more than it was about political oppression, as is the case in China now – the instruments of productions were not shared but concentrated among the few bureaucrats coming from the small revolutionary bourgeoisie- Yougoslavia was about political oppression) of most of the population.

The second type of revolution, or actual societal change with a deep impact within history comes from the people living outside the realm of the Master/Slave relationship, in the societal level and not the psychological one. They are not oppressed and they are not oppressing, there interests are only out of empathy, a quality easily suppressed by enslavement into a relation. Of course, these people ask for change on a global level, and are heard with a very long delay.

The religious figures are among these types and usually people with no powers commemorate by history but yet that we can't follow because we still feel trapped. I call them the Eunuchs, as their motives are solely the interests of humanity at large. They are the ones who consider everybody. Ghandi for example did not only defend against the oppression of the external forces, but also the internal oppression of Indian societies. Of course, what I say here as been proven by history, wether in Egypt or in China, sometimes they had Eunuchs to direct the administration and nobles have overthrown them when their private interests where at risks.

The Eunuchs are the ones to save our world, as they are outside any Master/Slave relationship of any kind, but can see them all. They would, I guess, defend the sanctions upon Greece for not adhering to an individualist capitalistic ethos, but would also remind the Greeks that if they would want really a fair Earth, their standards would have to go down anyway so that the Wallensteinian periphery ( “The South”) get to be defended as well against the oppressors that Europeans are.

The Eunuchs are the real Marxist proletarians, because Marx has ignored ideology, he could foresee that the proletarians would fight between themselves and between nations before fighting against their oppressors, that is my point I think. .

Thanks for reading