to watch the movements of any body, while in mind is the recollection of an other one dying, and while snow falls heavy on the greenhouse glass outside, and the pipes rush with water somewhere in the house. it’s all too much.

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each others cup but drink not from one cup. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. ― Kahlil Gibran

Between instances of ‘seeing’ someone, it is easy to believe that perhaps we have no ‘contact’ or influence, or other expression of presence on that Other. But this seems not at all true, and is only a perverse influence of a close-to-pure material culture. In the moments, hours, days between the face-to face encounter, I am, first off, already at the effect of our prior encounter. This has changed me, fundamentally. I am elsewise already, as I depart from your immediate presence. It’s not merely a question of persistence of this change: it is far more profound than merely the ‘propagation’ of something with in my Self, being elsewise means that I am change(d). As I draw away, the change persists in the now-transformed Self. This new Self moves along, it is engaging the flow of life in a way that is different than if it had not encountered the Other: you are there. Maybe this is only another framing of memory, but what, indeed, is memory but the persistence of the effects of encounter: an effect of the change that comes from open encounter. Still seems that this could simply be labeled as ‘presence’ as it is a persistent effect of presence, and that (Cartesian) proximity is irrelevant.

This whole scenario reminds of the multi-verse theory of reality, but one question would definitely be, what is the granularity of the splitting off of a new universe? How ‘often’ would it occur — it would have to be an any juncture of change, or so… Which would seem to be asymptotically close to infinite, which I suppose is what string theory suggests, etc., etc.

Vision is a remarkable process by which we are able to interpret an image from light the eyes receive from the objects around us. Although this process depends on the interplay of many different factors (including the optics of the eye, the isomerization of retinal, nerve impulses, and the brain’s ability to reconstruct the image), vision is fundamentally based on the change in the molecular orbitals of retinal that occurs when the molecule absorbs energy in the form of light reflected off of the objects that we see. When visible light hits the chromophore (retinal), a p electron is promoted to a higher-energy orbital, allowing free rotation about the bond between carbon atom 11 and carbon atom 12 of the retinal molecule. About half the time, this rotation leads to the isomerization of retinal when the p electron returns to the lower-energy orbital. When retinal isomerizes, a conformational change in the protein opsin occurs. This conformational change initiates a cascade of biochemical reactions that result in the closing of Na+ channels in the cell membrane. When the Na+ channels are closed, a large potential difference builds up across the plasma membrane, and the potential difference is passed along to an adjoining nerve cell as an electrical impulse. The nerve cell carries this impulse to the brain, where the visual information is interpreted.

or

The retina is lined with many millions of photoreceptor cells that consist of two types: 7 million cones provide color information and sharpness of images, and 120 million rods are extremely sensitive detectors of white light to provide night vision. (The names of these cells come from their respective shapes.) The outer segments (tops) of the rods and cones contain a region filled with membrane-bound discs, which contain proteins bound to the chromophore 11-cis-retinal. (A chromophore is a molecule that can absorb light at a specific wavelength, and thus typically displays a characteristic color.) When visible light hits the chromophore, the chromophore undergoes an isomerization, or change in molecular arrangement, to all-trans-retinal. The new form of retinal does not fit as well into the protein, and so a series of conformational changes in the protein begins. As the protein changes its conformation, it initiates a cascade of biochemical reactions that result in the closing of Na+ channels in the cell membrane. Prior to this event, Na+ ions flow freely into the cell to compensate for the lower potential (more negative charge) which exists inside the cell. When the Na+ channels are closed, however, a large potential difference builds up across the plasma membrane (inside the cell becomes more negative and outside the cell becomes more positive). This potential difference is passed along to an adjoining nerve cell as an electrical impulse at the synaptic terminal, the place where these two cells meet. The nerve cell carries this impulse to the brain, where the visual information is interpreted.

…[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it['s] roots [are] in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.

- Francisco Varela, Cosmos Web Forum letter 12e (1998?)

The pleroma is both beginning and end of the created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma prevadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and the infinite. — C.G. Jung

Jung, C.G. & Jaffé, A., 1965. The Seven Sermons to the Dead. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces. — Georg Simmel

Simmel, G., 1950. The Metropolis & Mental Life. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York, NY: Free Press.

Now attempting the abstract which should have been in last week for the formal Notification of Intention (to submit). Words are reified by applied meanings (to their largely abstract sounds); yet words can be made to have other meanings. Where on this Occam’s razor is the sitting more comfortable? Or is it time to just jump off and risk coming into contact with the blade in the process, but otherwise escaping the challenge of making meaning so ‘simple’ that is ‘acceptable.’ I like to think that I say what I mean, and it just happens sometimes that the meaning is not so common, so I bear mis-understanding as a price for this act of saying. This is a prime example of the lossyness of mediatory carriers. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) has been a constant companion since I realized I had free (university) access to it. I like the Old English and Norsk usage examples which are given for some words going back to the 8th Century or earlier. Thanks to knowing Icelandic! Best of all are the full etymologies which trace the lineage of shifting meaning as attached to these bits of symbolic chicken-scratch. ‘Commonsensical’ meanings are nothing more than the dominant understanding (or lack thereof) of the shifting sands of language. For example, the OED definition of ‘common sense,’ see below, m’gosh!
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What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected – far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other—fatal—moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard, J., 2000. America, London, England: Verso.

What is being destroyed more quickly than the ozone layer is the subtle layer of irony that protects us from the radiation of stupidity. But, conversely, we may also say that the subtle film of stupidity, which protects us from the lethal radiation of intelligence, is also disappearing. We are secreting information at such a rate that it is polluting the higher layers of the mental atmosphere with its non-degradable waste, gradually destroying the kind of atmospheric girdle which protects us from our secrets being totally dispersed into artificial intelligence the way molecules are protected from totally dispersing into space. — Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard, J., 1996. Cool Memories II, 1987-1990, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Veteran Statistics
– There are approximately 25 million veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces alive today (7.5 % are women).
– Some 7.2 million of those veterans are enrolled in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) system; approximately 5.5 million receive health care and 3.4 million receive benefits.
– Since October 2001, approximately 1.6 million members of the Armed Forces have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. As of December 31, 2007, more than 800,000 veterans of these conflicts were eligible for VA health care.
– There are about 37 million dependents (spouses and dependent children) of living veterans and survivors of deceased veterans. Together they represent 20% of the U.S. population.
– Most veterans living today served during times of war. The Vietnam Era veteran, about 7.9 million, is the largest segment of the veteran population.
– There are approximately (as of October 2007) 2,911,900 WWII veterans alive, but they are passing away at a rate of 1,000 per day (approx. total today 2,583,400)
– In 2007, the median age of all living veterans was 60 years old, 61 for men and 47 for women.
– Median ages by period of service: Gulf War, 37 years old; Vietnam War, 60; Korean War, 76; and WW II 84.
– The percentage of the veteran population over 65 is 39.1%.
– Sixty percent (60%) of the nation’s veterans live in urban areas and six states account for about 36% of the total vet population. They are California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio, respectively.
– Veteran Population by Race: White 80.0%; Black 10.9%; Asian/Pacific Islander 1.4%; Hispanic 5.6%; American Indian/Alaska Natives 0.8%; Other 1.3%
– Approximately 150,000 of our nation’s veterans are homeless.

Suicide Rates
– Veterans are more than twice as likely as non-veterans to commit suicide and the “Katz Suicide Study,” dated February 21, 2008, found that suicide rates among veterans are approximately 3 times higher than in the general population.
– The VA’s own data indicate that an average of four to five veterans commit suicide each day.
– A document from the VA Inspector General’s Office, dated May 10, 2007, indicates that the suicide rate among individuals in the VA’s care may be as high as 7.5 times the national average.
– According to internal VA emails, there are approximately 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans seen in VA medical facilities.
– The VA has hired suicide prevention counselors at each of its 153 medical centers to help support the national suicide prevention hotline.

PTSD
– Approximately 300,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – nearly 20% of the returning forces – are likely to suffer from either PTSD or major depression, and these numbers continue to climb.
– An additional 320,000 of the returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan may have experienced traumatic brain injuries during deployment.
– By fiscal year 2005, the VA’s own statistics indicated that PTSD was the fourth most common service-related disability for service members receiving benefits.
– While there is no cure for PTSD, early identification and treatment of PTSD symptoms may lessen the severity of the condition and improve the overall quality of life for veterans suffering from this condition.

Merry New Year, folks! All the best for 2012. The last year of planet Earth, rumor has it…

ai, the scope of life contracts to a point. to a pointed head. while the Chinook blows a gale down from the Flatirons.

Following on to examine the trend in cosmology and unified field theories, Chalmers speculates that conscious experience may be a fundamental feature cosmologically:

“If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component. Toward this end, I propose that conscious experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic.”

This perception of the central nature of consciousness to the cosmological description is more acute than an academic or philosophical matter. Although the scientific description is based exclusively on the objective physical universe, our contact with reality is entirely sine qua non through our subjective conscious experience. From birth to death, we experience only a stream of consciousness through which all our experience of the physical world is gained. All scientific experiments performed on the physical world ultimately become validated by the subjective conscious experience of the experimenters, and the subsequent witnesses to the phenomena and conclusions. — Chris King

King, C., 2006. Quantum Cosmology and the Hard Problem of the Conscious Brain. In J. Tuszynski, ed. The Emerging Physics of Consciousness. New York, NY: Springer.

Descanse em paz. We shared the same birthday…

People treat modern communication media as if they were human, so established principles of interpersonal communication also predict human responses to computers and television. The media equation (media = real life) is an unconscious, automatic response that occurs because our slow-to-evolve brains don’t distinguish between mediated and real life experience. — E. M. Griffin

no time here to do anything but thrash through The Text. first big round of edits done, but a major second round to re-shuffle material, collect thoughts, delete extraneous threads will be arduous.

. . . the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. — Machiavelli

Power may be defined, for every society, as resulting from the need to struggle against the entropy that threatens it with disorder. — Georges Balandier

This article/essay by Michael Pollan is an extremely well-framed case-in-point about how a techno-social system (TSS) will — with science leading the way — reconfigure the energy flows (FOOD!) that we are immersed within. And how evolved sub-systems with a Machiavellian stake in the distribution of power in the TSS will fall all over themselves to retain the power they already have, or will develop new ways to siphon the power away from individuals participating in the system. Individual participants, aggregated as “the population” are still the main source of accumulated hierarchic power in the system. Anyone hoping to accumulate a power-base has to, at some level, attract the attention (life-energy/life-time) of that base. The food industry (and its constituent sub-industries) is no exception, nor is the ‘big science’ sector (which has to justify its existence through churning out ‘sensible’ information (nutrition research: always filtered, dumbed-down, by intercessory media voices)) — and neither of these ‘players’ are willing to be ‘regulated’ by the government which subsidizes their existence. Remember all those “drink milk” ads some years back? All the subsidies have gone underground, so is mostly invisible to the undiscerning eye. The consumer only sees the contents of the grocery-store shelves.
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We are thus facing the following strange situation. While all building stones for the [modern scientific] world-picture are furnished by the senses qua organs of the mind, while the world-picture itself is and remains for everyone a construct of his mind and apart from it has no demonstrable existence, the mind itself remains a stranger in this picture, it has no place in it, it can nowhere be found in it. — Schrödinger

Schrodinger, E., 1956. What is Life: & other Scientific Essays, Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor Book. p.216. (pdf copy)

The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country’s hills. — Hank Thoreau

Thoreau, H.D., Walden. Available as ebook.

But we are up against a curious paradox. Something of immense importance to all of us does not find expression in the literary arts. The rational side of man, with its scientific and technological expressions, gets little literary space. It is curious that science and technology have always occupied so small a place in literature. What important literary figure, except Diderot, seriously occupied himself with the problems of technology? This is all the more extraordinary when one considers that literature is supposed to hold the mirror up to life. In life people spend a great deal of time involved in the technology of the period in which they live. They work, and their jobs are connected with technology and the organizations technology engenders. Yet one sees little evidence of this in literature. — Aldous Huxley

I have a little hope to somehow tap into a solution, or, an attack on this issue. The issue did come into my awareness this past spring, in Melbourne, following some conversations with different ‘humanists’ where I realized how poorly they understand the operational paradigms of technology. And, how they look at the world through a literal or metaphoric lens which effects an almost-complete disjunction between the ‘realities’ of the (techno-)social system that they are fully embedded within, and how they imagine that social system operates.

So, today I have to forge a short footnote on the ideas behind “systems theory” for a general and likely unwitting audience. Not easy.

But did turn in a final draft a couple days ago. One hurdle, now 120 days of writerly hell ahead.

deeply dipping into thesis flows. hitting up some big redefinitions of aspects of the continuum. feeling like perhaps this text will have some impact. 120 days to go or so. seems doable, but also some big doing before the end. bunker mode mostly, with very occasional forays out with friends (who are making life in Colorado very livable). well, any day with Longs Peak or the Indian Peaks Wilderness in view is quite good, regardless of the distance. some people, like sculptor Jerry Wingren have the mountains right there, in their front yard. lunch up at at his place with EJ last week was a real treat. EJ is doing the design of Jerry’s new studio (the old one burned in the Fourmile Fire last year). no camera that day, but will go up for an open house later in December, with camera. he does marvelous work.

In the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can actually be transformed into each other. As a matter of fact, if two such particles, moving through space with a very high kinetic energy, collide, then many new elementary particles may be created from the available energy and the old particles may have disappeared in the collision. Such events have been frequently observed and offer the best proof that all particles are made of the same substance: energy. But the resemblance of the modern views to those of Plato and the Pythagoreans can be carried somewhat further. The elementary particles in Plato’s Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms. “All things are numbers” is a sentence attributed to Pythagoras. The only mathematical forms available at that time were such geometric forms as the regular solids or the triangles which form their surface. In modern quantum theory there can be no doubt that the elementary particles will finally also be mathematical forms but of a much more complicated nature. The Greek philosophers thought of static forms and found them in the regular solids. Modern science, however, has from its beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries started from the dynamic problem. The constant element in physics since Newton is not a configuration or a geometrical form, but a dynamic law. The equation of motion holds at all times, it is in this sense eternal, whereas the geometrical forms, like the orbits, are changing. Therefore, the mathematical forms that represent the elementary particles will be solutions of some eternal law of motion for matter. This is a problem which has not yet been solved. — Excerpt from the chapter “Quantum Theory and the Roots of Atomic Science,” pp. 71-72. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1958). Lectures delivered at University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Winter 1955-56.

For revolutionary educators, knowledge exceeds its semiotic end products; it travels intertextually within demarcated systems of intelligibility. Critical knowledge is understood as persistently open, disclosive, incomplete, and open-ended. In this way it remains cautious in the presence of reified social relations and epistemological distortions that occlude the social ontology of knowledge and its processual journey from fact to value. In other words, critical epistemological practice examines not only the content of knowledge, but also its method of production. It seeks to understand how ideological constructions are encoded and administered, how metonymic and synecdochical gestures are performed so as to obscure relations of domination and oppression, how the interpretive and interpellative frameworks by which we organize our sentiments construct ruling stereotypes, and how the governing categories of our everyday discourse render invisible and obscure real social relations of exploitation. — (McLaren, P., 2001. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Politics of Hope: Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies.)

Aside from the monumental use of academic blah-blah-blah here, the idea behind the obscurity is valid. That is, a radical approach to the facilitation of transformative learning requires a deep awareness of more than just a subject. It demands an awareness of how an embodied knowledge of that subject is founded or generated or discovered. This “how” is in many cases far more important than the “what” of knowledge. I describe this “how” as the meta-structures under which the learning is undertaken. It can be a material issue — bricks-and-mortar, the architectural setting — but also, consequent to an energy-based worldview, it is also a critical question of the entire set of flows within which the encounter is taking place. This is far, far more than opening a classroom window for fresh air, or sitting under a tree with a group of students, although the change in the energy ‘content’ of the situation can be quite profoundly altered by small actions on or reactions to the locale. An energy perception drives much deeper into the meta-structures than that, although any awareness is a good starting point. Because the energy content of the situation is most profoundly affected by the presence of the Self and the Others, the entire energy dynamic among participants must also receive this attention and care. This dynamic is more fundamental than ‘merely’ the social — it is expressed in my concept of continuum-of-relation, defined as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. A holistic awareness of this continuum is necessary to optimize the facilitation.

No revolution is possible among people using language as per McLaren!

[F]orce is always experienced through interaction. We become aware of force as it affects us or some object in our perceptual field. When you enter an unfamiliar dark room and bump into the edge of the table, you are experiencing the interactional character of force. When you eat too much the ingested food presses outwards on your taughtly stretched stomach. There is no schema for force that does not involve interaction or potential interaction. (Johnson, Mark. (1987) The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.).

Interaction then, of course, needs energy, for the ‘approach’ to transition in space, or time. It requires one to be ‘at the effect of’ either an internal energy source, or at least sliding down a potential field (gravitational, for example).

Beyond Bin Laden – America and the Strategic Principles of Irregular Warfare

The special forces raid against Osama bin Laden in Abottabad will clearly become the textbook example of how to perfectly execute high-risk military operations in the post-9/11 world. In locating and killing Osama bin Laden on foreign soil America has again demonstrated its peerless capacity at the tactical and operational level. Nevertheless, as the supreme military thinker Sun Tsu taught, “tactics without strategy is simply the noise before defeat,” and it is my firm conviction that the last ten years of this conflict have lacked the strategic guidance that a threat of the magnitude of transnational and transcendentally-informed terrorism demands. — Sebastian L. v. Gorka (more)

The sensual world is a phenomena apprehended imperfectly through our senses, as it suffuses through our entire being. Or is it received perfectly? As energy is characterized by radiant movement (from a source, from a concentration, to a sink), we are suffused with the radiant energy of the world that we are immersed in. We receive, and as a localized system of concentrated energy, we also radiate. In this two-way circulation of energy, we are constantly re-connecting with the larger world around us: inhaling energized particles that arrive in our immediate vicinity; drinking a certain fundamental energy source that we have named water; consuming other quantities of energy from the wider system around us. Reaching with hand, striving with foot to promote necessary and sufficient consumption for the maintenance of body and more than simple survival. We expend our life-energies in organizing the world around us, and for that, we eventually die. Before that instance of transformation, time is spent in seeking to realize procreative potentials so that life will continue in its unbroken line from primordial past to questionable future. And when that time is done, body implodes, trading order for disorder, until we become the radiant heat of interstellar plasma.

If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is — infinite.
For man has closed himself up ’til he sees things
through narrow chinks of his cavern.
– William Blake

and then what?

To continue with our survey of disciplinary evolution: The term “post-disciplinarity” evokes an intellectual universe in which we inhabit the ruins of outmoded disciplinary structures, mediating between our nostalgia for this lost unity and our excitement at the intellectual freedom its demise can offer us. Is the era of post-disciplinarity upon us now? Finally, “trans-disciplinarity” refers to the highest level of integrated study, that which proposes the unity of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives and points toward our potential to think in terms of frameworks, concepts, techniques, and vocabulary that we have not yet imagined. It must be acknowledged, however, that the very notion of “trans-disciplinarity” may strike many of us as chimerical, sinisterly monolithic, or as a ruse for smuggling back in old dreams of objectivity and universal knowledge. Are we then right back where we started, or does our investigation of disciplines and the nature of knowledge maintain our historical perspective? – Julie A. Buckler

Well, so what term to use? A completely new fabrication? A remix, a mash-up. Or just ignore and forget the whole thing about (public) discipline, instead, focusing on internal and self-discipline. That’s all that is important these days. Waning lives, crumbling Empire, who cares what labels people tattoo on each other’s brow. (keep away from m’fucking head, dude!)

ALPHANUMERIC
Character set including both letters and numerals and usually other characters. (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
CONTROL CODE
A fixed length machine encoding of a control code name.
CONTROL CODE NAME
The English alphanumeric expression of security classification and any need-to-know restrictions for an entity of data or program,
CONTROL MODE
Mode in which a processor can execute the full set of operation codes,
DATA BASE
The store of information records being maintained’ for users; includes programs as well.
DESCRIPTOR
Instruction for input/output control processor execution,
ELECTRONIC DATA PROCESSING (EDP)
Data processing by equipment predominantly electronic.
ENTITY
A string of bits, characters, or words having an associated control code.
EXECUTIVE CONTROL PROGRAM (ECP)
Program mat controls the secure execution of user programs by assigning hardware and performing security related operations.
FAIL SAFE
Program or processing operation terminates automatically whenever proper responses to positive checks are not received.
FILE
A related information grouping, e, g, logical records, card images, etc.
FLAG BIT
A bit contained in memory words and used for control purposes rather than actual user processing.
FORMATTED FILE SYSTEM
An information storage and retrieval system using a file design having fixed, periodic, and variable parts.
INPUT/OUTPUT CONTROL PROCESSOR (IOCP)
A limited purpose processor serving as intermediary between main memory and terminal units.
LOGICAL RECORD
A group of related items stored in one or more related physical records, depending upon length.
MODE
Processor condition as determined by state of a redundant set of flip-flops.
MULTIPROCESSING
Executing one or more programs simultaneously on more than one processor.
MULTIPROGRAMMING
Executing more than one program, time interleaved.
OBJECT
A contiguous string of instructions, data, or working storage required by a program.
ON-LINE
A terminal unit having direct connection with a unit buffer in the input/output control processor.
PERIPHERAL UNIT
Any type of input/output equipment connected with a unit buffer in the input/output control processor.
PHYSICAL RECORD
The smallest directly addressable portion of the data base.
PRIVILEGED INSTRUCTION
One executable by a processor only in control mode.
PROGRAM REFERENCE TABLE
Contains the name and/or descriptor for each object referenced by a program, and the base address and memory bounds for objects in high-speed memory.
SECURITY LEVEL
The maximum security classification authorized for information handled by an equipment, as determined by the equipment characteristics or its location.
TERMINAL UNIT
An input or output device in a work station.
THIN-THREAD ANALYSIS
Description of complex system operation or theory by following a single line, step-by-step, from start to finish, ignoring the
secondary branches or ideas involved.
USER
Any authorized equipment operator, maintenance person, or intelligence research analyst. The system supervisor (or supervisors) is an authorizer as well as user.
USER’S CONTROL PROFILE
Completely describes each user’s access authorization for information in the system in terms of control code lists by access type (read only or read and write). It also includes the user’s key pattern information for identification plus authentication information for validating that the user really is who the user’s key pattern indicate.
he is.
USER’S KEY
A physical card or key unique to a user which must be present in the user’s key pattern generator at a work station to permit information
flow with any terminal unit in that work station.
USER’S KEY PATTERN
An electrical logical bit pattern resulting from the user’s key pattern generator at a work station which initiates user identification
and is required for information interchange with any terminal unit in that work station for that user.
USER’S KEY PATTERN GENERATOR
A transducer from user’s key to user’s key pattern.
USER MODE
Mode in which a processor can execute only a partial set of operation codes; excluded are the privileged instructions.
WORK STATION
A separate, physically secure, area with its own user’s key pattern generator in which the terminal units can be operated by only one user at a time.

– SECURITY TECHNIQUES FOR EDP OF MULTILEVEL CLASSIFIED INFORMATION (RADC-TR-65-415)

We conclude that economic liberalization and other policies that promote gross national product growth are not substitutes for environmental policy. On the contrary, it may well be desirable that they are accompanied by stricter policy reforms. Of particular importance is the need for reforms that would improve the signals that are received by resource users. Environmental damages, including loss of ecological resilience, often occur abruptly. They are frequently not reversible. But abrupt changes can seldom be anticipated from systems of signals that are typically received by decision-makers in the world today. Moreover, the signals that do exist are often not observed, or are wrongly interpreted, or are not part of the incentive structure of societies. This is due to ignorance about the dynamic effects of changes in ecosystem variables (for example, thresholds, buffering capacity, and loss of resilience) and to the presence of institutional impediments, such as lack of well-defined property rights. — Kenneth Arrow, et al. here

I must create a system,
Or be enslaved by another Man’s;
I will not Reason and Compare,
My business is to Create.
- William Blake

To design systems that work correctly we often need to understand and correct how they can go wrong — Dan Goldin, NASA Administrator, 2000

Framing (of) the Flow: re-distribution and the occupation of Wall Street.

A closer look at protocol and flow: the guiding of energies that is applied by protocol, how protocol affects flow, and, finally, how flow affects the distribution of energy and power in a system.

Re-distribution arrives: a media blurb in the face of the ruling class, framing their stupid public squabbles that now merely parrot vacuous resonances of “Let them eat cake.”

Any techno-social system (TSS) is fundamentally comprised of a set of pathways along which ‘naturally’ occurring energy (re)sources are directed ostensibly for the overall good of that system. (note: not necessarily for the good of each individual participant in that system!) The imposition of these directed pathways suggests that the resulting distribution of the energies flowing from those sources is not uniform: there are concentrations of energy (power!) and consequently there are regions of energy (order!) deficit. (note: the flows are not merely defined by spatial and temporal frames of reference!) These inequities are present from the moment that ‘naturally’ occurring flows are re-directed in service of the techno-social system. It is largely because of the specific nature of the imposed protocols which (re)direct the flows that the distributions of energy are consequently imbalanced. (At the same time it is important to remember that energy/power is not distributed evenly at any scale!)
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I spent an uncomfortable evening with Kittler and a handful of Austrians at a restaurant in Linz back in 1998. It was uncomfortable because of the language gap. My German was worse than his English. He states elsewhere in the interview by John Armitage (excerpted below) how shy he is, and that goes a long way to explaining the dis-comfort. I ended up talking mostly with his American-born assistant before cashing in early to get some sleep — I had to catch a sunrise train from Linz on to Copenhagen.

JA: Virilio argues that war is his ‘laboratory’ and for you too war, it seems, is the ‘mother of all technologies’. Yet, unlike Virilio, you are deeply concerned with war as an international mechanism of technology transfer. What, for you, is the significance of, for example, the transfer of technologies such as Nazi Germany’s V2 rocket programme to America after the Second World War?

FK: What I can tell you is that I believe that war is at least the mother of all high-speed information and communications technologies. Like Pynchon, I am very interested in the topic of technology transfer. The key question for me is, what technologies or which kinds of technology transfer gave rise to the contemporary American Empire? Obviously, the first source of the American Empire is the British Empire which was originally driven by a coal-based fleet system but which has, since the Second World War, been transformed into an oil-based system founded on air power. Naturally, the second source is Nazi Germany, which made great strides in the technological development not merely of the V2 rocket but also of the tank. For instance, by 1939, Nazi Germany was the only country in the world that had a radio in every one of its army’s tanks. Otherwise the Blitzkrieg simply would not have been possible. Of course, it did not take long for the Americans to adopt this idea and by the end of 1942 there were radios in US tanks. But, as we have discussed before, war also has a way of transferring its language too, as when today’s high-technology businesses in particular speak of ‘logistics’, ‘strategy’ and even of ‘duty officers’, terms which all arise from the military-industrial complex. It is for these and other reasons that I think that US President Dwight Eisenhower spoke brilliantly when he coined the term military-industrial complex, for he saw immediately the connections between war, technology and commerce. However, it is difficult for us Europeans to investigate American military and techno-scientific history, a subject that has been well researched by the Americans themselves, as acquiring even declassified documents on the Second World War, and so on is still very hard, as I know from long experience. Yet I must confess that I cannot stand on American soil with much pleasure. In fact, my antipathy to America is one of the main reasons why I often avoid talking about the military-industrial complex since for me to talk about the devil is to talk with the devil. As a good friend of mine said to me lately, we in Germany should not say a word about America’s war on Iraq or speak any longer of the seemingly endless necessity of reforming Germany. We should not so much forget all this as not talk about it. Instead, we should focus on changing ourselves and speak about other things. So I asked him what we should discuss as an alternative and he answered that we should talk about love in Europe.

from Theory Culture Society 2006 23:17

and another piece on Kittler by Tom McCarthy . . . good for the personality profile.

and a long reverie by former student Eugen Leitl . . .

Etymology: < post-classical Latin analysis act of resolving (something) into its elements (13th cent. in British and continental sources) < ancient Greek ἀνάλυσις action of loosing or releasing, fact of dissolving, resolution of a problem, in Hellenistic Greek also solution of a problem < ἀναλύειν to unloose, undo ( < ἀνά- ana- prefix + λύειν to loose: see lysis* n.) + -σις -sis suffix. Compare French analyse critical study of a work (a1630), method of resolution and demonstration in mathematics (1637), method of reflection and exposition in philosophy (1637), method which employs deductive reasoning to establish the nature, structure, and essential features of something, starting from its constituent parts (1690), summary (end of the 17th cent.), chemical analysis (1726), grammatical analysis (1775), Italian analisi (1598 in Florio; subsequently from 1669), Spanish análisis (a1621), German Analysis (probably 15th cent.), Analyse (18th cent.).

* ‘A plinth or step above the cornice of the podium of ancient temples, which surrounded or embraced the stylobate**’ (Gwilt Archit. 1842).

** A continuous basement upon which a row of columns is supported.

hmmm, wow! The “systems analyst” takes on an entirely different appearance and role! To loosen, release the solidity of social construct.

If used in numbers, atomic bombs not only can nullify any nation’s military effort, but can demolish its social and economic structure and prevent their re-establishment for long periods of time. With such weapons, especially if employed in conjunction with other weapons of mass destruction such as pathogenic bacteria, it is quite possible to depopulate vast areas of the earth’s surface, leaving only vestigal remnants of man’s material works. — Report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Operations Crossroads, 30 June 1947

“If the profession of an engineer were not based upon exact science,” he said, “I might tremble for the result, in view of the immensely of the interests dependent on my success. But every atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home among the crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the fifteen hundred leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the river — its scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and deposits — is controlled by law as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer need only to be insured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the results he aims at.” James B. Eads, engineer, quoted in “Atchafalaya” by John McPhee

versus

“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver — not aloud but to himself — that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.” — Mark Twain in “Life on the Mississippi” quoted in “Atchafalaya” by John McPhee

from The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya — John McPhee, 23 February 1987 in The New Yorker.

and this from Bill Gammage in a precursor of his recent book “The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia” (Allen & Unwin, 2011)

I suggest that people turned to crops, herds and stores to protect them from other people. The reason farmers stepped onto the road to civilisation was military.

Aborigines ensured that usually they had plenty of food by controlling their population and by maximizing their resources. But their truly great achievement lay in how they protected their resources — not by military force, but by religious sanction. Even under extreme duress Aborigines rarely took food that was not theirs. That may have been so in early Europe and elsewhere too — most societies attempt to sanctify property. If so, it broke down. Farmers were led to protect their food, thus lost the predictability and security that widely dispersed resources gave hunter-gatherers, and thus had to work hard and make hard work a virtue. Work, sedentism and storing generate individual and collective strivings for surplus, for wealth. That is the road Europeans took, and Aborigines avoided. In August 1770 James Cook could not have known whether Aborigines were ‘far more happier’ than Europeans, but he was right to see that they were content in ‘all the necessarys of Life’, which we Europeans, ever restless for more, can never be. — Bill Gammage, 2005

Again in a situation with a friend, helping purge and order an overwhelming abundance of stuff. The developed world is drowning in its own excess accumulation of stuff. Between direct body consumption as manifest in the wide-spread epidemic of obesity and the external accumulation of stuff, there is little room for living. A moment spent managing stuff is a moment of life lost forever.

To maintain a system of stuff takes energy. Else disorder of all that vibrating stuff become a field of chaos for the embodied human to simply sink into the midst of. Life becomes dominated by either the life-time required to maintain the order of the stuff, or the increased disorder that becomes a distorting filter enveloping the once-clear senses.

Purge some and apply order to the remaining stuff. Mostly purge — duplicate stuff, triplicate stuff, quadruplicate stuff — less stuff is more life. Stuff impedes our full experience of life, it drags us down into lackluster, overwhelmed, and subordinate be-ing (or even less to mere consumer). Finding a balance is tough when immersed in the (absolutely pathological) ‘normative’ behavior of the developed world.
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THE DEVIL: And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man’s wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady’s bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man’s industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvelous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery saying –”Ask no questions and you will be told no lies.” — George Bernard Shaw, The Devil speaking in “Don Juan in Hell,” Act III of “Man and Superman,” 1902

It has been pointed out by Boltzmann that the fundamental object of contention in the life-struggle, in the evolution of the organic world, is available energy. In accord with this observation is the principle that, in the struggle for existence, the advantage must go to those organisms whose energy-capturing devices are most efficient in directing available energy into channels favorable to the preservation of the species. — Alfred Lotka in “Contribution to the Energetics of Evolution“

Back to basics, with Howard Odum’s rewrite of his 1971 classic on energy and social systems. At this point, it should be required reading for anyone undertaking an undergrad liberal arts degree, and anyone who might be unclear and consequently confused/concerned about the contemporary dynamics of human and ‘natural’ systems. The principles outlined together form a powerful model for understanding the contemporary global social/ecological mess. He approaches evolution, religion, economics, social systems, cosmology, and numerous other concepts with a fresh and thoroughly-researched point of view. He has done (he did, he passed away in 2002) what I would like to do with my thesis, but given that a book like this is the result of 30+ years of rigorous scientific research (both in the field and across numerous disciplines), combined with readable writing skills, I should have started years ago. The fact that I get everything he writes says something, and even that I can make several crucial additions to his world-view (relating to the dynamics of human presence and encounter, media, and creative action), gives me some small hope.

Acquiring these holistic views, given the education system that I participated in, was impossible because these ideas and their implications were simply not taught. Although I got some thermodynamics, there was no applied conceptual grounding or ‘big picture,’ but rather only simplistic problem-solving-in-a-bubble for the engineer. And the visionary, conceptual overview was ignored. (Well, with the singular exception of several courses with Gene Woolsey, the flamboyant Don of applied systems analysis at Mines — his courses were challenging, and definitely real-world in their execution and subject material.) Otherwise, disciplines were/are self-limited and self-censored by the whole discipline-specific and hermetic peer-review publishing system. Etc., etc. I could rant, maybe I already am. But only the fact that I have, on my own, read widely from a spectrum of sources across arts and science, western and eastern, that brought me to this point. The weak link is the writing style. I have no trouble teaching these topics, but making acceptable textual presentations is a hopeless prospect. Old dog, old tricks.

What am I supposed to do in a group of militants who expect me to leave in the cloakroom, I won’t say a few ideas — for my ideas would have led me to join the group — but the dreams and desires which never leave me, the wish to live authentically and without restraint? What’s the use of exchanging one isolation, one monotony, one lie for another? When the illusion of real change has been exposed, a mere change of illusion becomes intolerable. But present conditions are precisely these: the economy cannot stop making us consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. We find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen in the empty space behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks.

People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them. — Raoul Vaneigem (The Revolution of Everyday Life)

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy. — Vaclav Havel

you have stumbled upon a slowly evolving mediated space which is the next online evolution of the original neoscenes archive and network presence. it has subsumed the entire neoscenes travelog which began back in 1995. it rolled over to a frames-based site in 1999, and then to a php-based site in 2004, and now onto WordPress as of 2009. later in 2011-2, it will also extend greatly that time span with images, audio, and video from the long-standing off-line neoscenes archive. what’s this 1961-1962 “50 years on” material? it is one dimension of the use of the (b)log as the accompaniment of the text of my Ph.D. thesis which touches on many of the topics surfaced here combined with my creative media practice. there is an evolving ‘about‘ page which will soon contain more background on the whole project.
******
NEW FROM THE ARCHIVE
slowly starting to upload documents of performances like Open Air Radio Barcelona and DEAF03 – Interfacing / Radiotopia / Keyworx. also in the process of figuring out how to add the thousands of scanned black&white negatives that cover a period of time from 1976 through 2000 when I quit wet darkroom work. (a few (88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95) of the 4000+ portraits that will eventually migrate to these pages). and hope to include many documents like this over the next months to enrich the overall blog experience, so stay-tuned here for new announcements. of course, there are always new field recordings for the aporee maps project.

The key program of a surviving pattern of nature and man is a subsystem of religious teaching which follows the laws of the energy ethic…. We can teach the energy truths through general science in the schools and teach the love of system and its requirements of us in the changing churches. System survival makes right and the energy commandments guide the system to survival. — Howard T. Odum

Hmmm, this quoted from Odum’s 1971 Environment, Power, and Society which outlined a radical take on the relationship between humans and the natural system of energy flows they were a part of. A bit dogmatic, though out of context in that regard. But in the context of science and, for example, climate change, it might be worth it for humans to get some scientific religion. Then again, maybe it’s all dogma and the processes that thermodynamics seeks to circumscribe will be the ruling factor: they will be, unless there is an intervention by forces beyond anything that science has framed. This is possible at any time, but seems unlikely. Who wants to depend on the unlikely and improbable as a policy driver?

the day after the ascent of a 14,000+ footer (Grays Peak, near Silverplume), no sore-ness. remarkable, considering the intensity of the cardio work that such an effort entails. heart-throb rising from chest to throat to head as altitude is gained.

heading back into deep work on the thesis after a string of field research expeditions and dislocations. the gathering of material is continuous, as is the (plodding) process of getting archive material up (see new (old) stuff)

then, back to work.

So human social organizations constantly reconstitute themselves through a flow of members and other adjunct materials, information, and energy. Many of these are selectively favored through a continuing expansion or effort to expand above their original size. Such organizations may reach a point at which further expansion is blocked, and budding off is the only alternative to continue. The blockage may be due to internal structural problems, such as a Marxian internal contradiction, or the appearance of revolutions, and so on; or, to external constraints–such as furious neighboring states, or a strongly competitive market enterprise. — Richard Adams

I would suggest that the enumerated items — members, materials, information, and energy — may be re-categorized into energy, and the embodied and surrounding protocols (flow pathways accumulated through shared (social) information). Materials should be ignored in the sense that they are ultimately manifestations of energy: traditionalists are be encouraged to consider that the concept of ‘things’ and of static ‘materials’ are merely convenient constructs to be transcended or shed in the stead of energy and flow…

Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Ta… impossible, when writing, to accede, to yield tradition to this, eh?

I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one and now to the other system of lines; and that then this system remains visible alone for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes. This happens, for example, whenever I try to count the lines first of one and then of the other system. … But it is extremely hard to chain the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless we associate with our looking some distinct purpose which keeps the activity of the attention perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting the lines, comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, persistent for any length of time, is under no circumstances attainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we most seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.

This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; but one without training cannot so easily execute the intention of making them converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that of looking at a near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadily fixed on a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interest in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relation of attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediate control. — Hermann von Helmholtz, “Psychologische Optiks,” as quoted in William James, “The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1″

What bugs me is that stupid little black dot in the picture …