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Information Age?

This essay makes good sense to me, digitalisation will not of itself foster feminism, liberation, equality or revolution.  However there is something missing in this piece too.  What IS the impact of the information … er, revolution?  is there a shift in the relationships of production?  Is whatever it is significant at all when it comes to a Marxist conception of history.  Has anyone really examined this fully, I bet they have. 

It is important to be able to see all of history as a history of class struggle, makes sense to me.  Of course there is ajso a history of the relationships of reproduction (perhaps what the essay below is about.) And there are cultural forces, racial, religious and generational forces.  The art is to be able to see what, at any time is “primary”.  Even if the history if information from language to the Internet is not “primary” what is its nature?  The distribution of the means of information, the ability to have mass peer to peer communication… what does it all mean. 

Interesting (see previous post) where Trotsky notes that the revolution in Russia was won by the group that had dialectical materialism, not just bombs.  It is important to get all this right.

Class, the Digital, and (Immaterial) Feminism:

Immaterial feminisms have emerged as part of the digital movements of “new economy” and “network society” in order to help capital eliminate old ideological fetters of gender that stand in the way of the expansion of capitalist production and the intensification of the exploitation of labor for profit. By “immaterial feminisms” I mean the network of feminisms—from “cyberfeminism,” to feminist theories of “immaterial labor,” “(im)materiality,” and “new materiality,” to “network feminisms,” “digital feminism” and “technofeminism”—which, as a species of new economy theory, ideologically displace the relation of gender to class, labor, exploitation, and the social relations of production in capitalism by positing a constitutive change in the wage-labor/capital relation brought on by the innovations of “new technologies,” the growth of the service industries and of “knowledge work” (i.e., “immaterial labor”). This is another way of saying that the role of immaterial feminisms in history is to represent as “radical,” “innovative” and as “progress” for women toward human freedom what capital is economically compelled to do to temporarily stave off declines in profit.

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Red Green?

Trotsky’s Views On Dialectical Materialism:

Pragmatism, empiricism, is the greatest curse of American thought.

I have added the tags “emergence, coherence” to this post as the “dialectics” in materialism foreshadows these conceptions. It is so unfashionable to see a big picture, it is in the ruling class interest to obscure that there is a big picture, or to make it appear that it is a static one, “human nature”, “reality”. Dynamic processes are not discovered through looking at the trees, one must see the woods.

Dialectical materialism gets a lot right when it comes to seeing the big picture. Much of the language is dated and some of the science was current at the time, but has been superseded (as one would expect in a dynamic world).

I’ve found the work of John Bellamy Foster was able to re-kindle a sense of the value of dialectical materialism – or to put it another way: ecology.

Marx’s Ecology – Monthly Review Press:

MARX’S ECOLOGY Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster

More from him here:

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrmarxistecology.php



http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm

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Blargh

The earlier unnamed black images were surprisingly unconsciously reflective of the Christchurch earthquake, it seems obvious now. This simple doodle with paint, completed in the week after the earthquake, equally unconsciously, in retrospect, is exactly what post earthquake tiredness and malaise was like for me. I heard many people say they were tired, and felt like zombies, even, especially if there was no major damage or fear.

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Language of life

NVC Non-Violent Communication, how to identify needs in self and others and how to speak without shaming, blaming and criticising is one of the four or five disciplines that I’d like everyone in the world to know how to do.

Language is important, but as Moreno said:

The analysis of language, useful as it is in itself. does not lead to any change in behavior. It has to be followed up by methods of action learning which train the pupil to think and act below and beyond the boundaries of language.

That’s why I think there are four or five disciplines, but none of them sufficient alone.

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Quantum jazz biology

The radical democracy of organisms « Future Primitive Podcasts:

Mae-Wan speaks with Joanna about “quantum jazz biology”, the transition phase we are experiencing, the organic revolution, science/art/life…

Listen to the audio.

The science here and the politics might be a bit dubious, but for all that there is a lot here to take on board, I can see how it relates to group work and couple work.

The environment impacts on the Genome

The social anarchy of nature

Quantum Phases and Quantum Coherence:

Quantum coherence implies all that and more. Think of a gathering of consummate musicians playing jazz together (‘quantum jazz’) where every single player is freely improvising from moment to moment and yet keeping in tune and in rhythm with the spontaneity of the whole. It is a special kind of wholeness that maximizes both local freedom and global cohesion.

I wrote the post about art before I heard this! It is a scarily synchronistic!

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What Is Life?

What Is Life? – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

What Is Life? is a 1944 non-fiction science book written for the lay reader by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. The lectures attracted an audience of about 400, who were warned “that the subject-matter was a difficult one and that the lectures could not be termed popular, even though the physicist’s most dreaded weapon, mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized.”[1] Schrödinger’s lecture focused on one important question: “how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?”[1]

In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an “aperiodic crystal” that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. In the 1950s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the genetic molecule. Although the existence of DNA had been known since 1869, its role in reproduction and its helical shape were still unknown at the time of Schrödinger’s lecture. In retrospect, Schrödinger’s aperiodic crystal can be viewed as a well-reasoned theoretical prediction of what biologists should have been looking for during their search for genetic material. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, credited Schrödinger’s book with presenting an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information would work, and acknowledged the book as a source of inspiration for his initial research.[2]

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Revolutionary Art

Statements and actions for a cause or revolutionary change are needed, but not art.  Art can be revolutionary even while its creators are reactionary in their words.  Art is art because it expresses something of the unconscious.

I make politically trivial sketches, Thousand Sketches, (Like the image above) but I think they are ok, even somewhat progressive.  I think it is because they are steps on a path into my own unconscious and that is the collective ethos, zeitgeist, at the same time.   I don’t know how deep I go.  I let the pen do the work, stuff comes  unbidden, I trust my life has its roots in the culture and thus something of the culture will emerge.

It is a struggle not to judge it as crap. It is as a result of my scribbling that I discovered an affinity with the abstract expressionists, who do not rank high on the political awareness scale, but I think their roots (check out Mark Toby) in calligraphy and the spontaneity of the body (Pollock’s dance as he paints) may be a way to tune into zeitgeist.  It had to do that or it would not even have been capable of being exploited by the art world.

Pollock’s statement “I am nature” makes sense to me.  He does not need to look at the world and then paint it, he is nature.  Social and political dimensions don’t need to be painted from the outside, they will emerge… with luck through spontaneity, ie the absence of fear and judgement.  They will not be pure expressions of one class, art is too specific for that. Art is a slice of time & specific contradictions under a microscope, a probe into what is going on.  The interpretation of the data is important, but before interpretation is possible it has to be mined.

These thoughts came up well before finishing this item on Reading the Maps:

Reading the Maps: Alan Brunton and the dream of a revolutionary art:

In a country where the Greens are considered a far left party, and where socialism is presently regarded as an alien political tradition, how can any coherent political programme hope to be popular, or even comprehensible, without being, from a radical left-wing perspective, ‘cowardly’? And in a country where large numbers of people still expect poetry to rhyme, and still consider any visual art movement more recent than Impressionism to be an elitist fraud, how can any self-respecting artist disavow incomprehensibility? Could, say, Colin McCahon or Rita Angus have created their masterpieces without daring to be, for a large segment of the population, incomprehensible?

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Epochs and eras

I was just thinking this was an era of modularity when this tweet arrived. Similar idea, summed up with the notion of: small pieces loosely joined. An example wld be “motornet” not public rail or buses, and it is much the same in the world of ideas. We have Twitter and Facebook not another Karl Marx.

ajnabee (@ajnabee) 28/10/10 10:23 AM http://tumblr.com/xs9ng0h8c

“The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skin.”

—Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”

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