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@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@ \chap\nl -Enter cliometrics. If legend, folktale, myth is a form of information and meta-history, featuring un-individualized heroes as variables, then cliometrics is meta-meta-history---the kind that makes it easier to match events up to number-series and can incorporate genetics-as-coded-logic---which itself can be used as a kind of history (as history can be used as a kind of genetics). Each particular person, each event generated becomes a variable in a statistical series. Chosen events in a time series are matched up to chosen sets of self-transmitting individuals. Cliometrics is a sub-branch of those statistical time-series that computer archeologists are so found of retrojecting back to creation in the attempt to make history compatible with logical operations. Cliometrics is quantified history in which people and events are graded along an importance-scale and matches up to a time-scale established by archeology and evolution. Cliometrics, more than any other kind of historiography, is computer-compatible history. +Enter cliometrics. If legend\slash folktale\slash myth is a form of information and meta-history, featuring un-individualized heroes as variables, then cliometrics is meta-meta-history---the kind that makes it easier to match events up to number-series and can incorporate genetics-as-coded-logic---which itself can be used as a kind of history (as history can be used as a kind of genetics). Each particular person, each event generated, becomes a variable in a statistical series. Chosen events in a time series are matched up to chosen sets of self-transmitting individuals. Cliometrics is a sub-branch of those statistical time-series that computer archeologists are so found of retrojecting back to creation in the attempt to make history compatible with logical operations. Cliometrics is quantified history in which people and events are graded along an importance-scale and matched up to a time-scale established by archeology and evolution. Cliometrics, more than any other kind of historiography, is computer-compatible history. -But then, ascent-mythology reenters. All event-clusters on an evolutionary series are in fact fungible. The billions-years-trajectory is mapped onto a short stretch of human history, just as an infinity of natural whole numbers can be, say, mapped onto all the possible fractions between one and two. But like any series, such a construct depends on the measurable regularity of events. Catastrophe, the unexpected, must be integrated, smoothed out. The catastrophe is cut apart into small segments, the compression stretched out and we see that event in regularized, even fragments. Why evolution---which is supposed to move in glacially incremental steps---is matched up to history---which takes place in only a short time---is an obsession---progress, growth, incremental gain---that the 19th century foisted on us. Humans have not changed, not evolved, in all the time they have been on earth. +But then, ascent-mythology reenters. All event-clusters on an evolutionary series are in fact fungible. The billions-years-trajectory is mapped onto a short stretch of human history, just as an infinity of natural whole numbers can be, say, mapped onto all the possible fractions between one and two. But like any series, such a construct depends on the measurable regularity of events. Catastrophe, the unexpected, must be integrated, smoothed out. The catastrophe is cut apart into small segments, the compression stretched out, and we see that event in regularized, even fragments. Why evolution---which is supposed to move in glacially incremental steps---is matched up to history---which takes place in only a short time---is an obsession\ld\ progress, growth, incremental gain\ld\ that the 19\textsuperscript{th} century foisted on us. Humans have not changed, not evolved, in all the time they have been on earth. -Then the proposition that evolution, as applied to humans and their history, is the movement from simple to complex, from less to more, from worse to better, from chaos to order, from primal virus to sub-human to human to angelic to god, doesn't work. Whereas the latest studies are purported to demonstrate that more than fifty percent of the economy is information work, a case can be made that whatever the conditions, peasant, primitive, factory worker, more than fifty percent of the work was \e{always} informational. (Which intrudes a touch of the miraculous, for when, how and with what blinding speed, did humans become the way they are?) +Then the proposition that evolution, as applied to humans and their history, is the movement from simple to complex, from less to more, from worse to better, from chaos to order, from primal virus to sub-human to human to angelic to god\ld\ doesn't work. Whereas the latest studies are purported to demonstrate that more than fifty percent of the economy is information work, a case can be made that whatever the conditions---peasant, primitive, factory worker---more than fifty percent of the work was \e{always} informational.\fnote{Which intrudes a touch of the miraculous, for when, how and with what blinding speed did humans become the way they are?} -The very act of selection, grading and valuation, in order to constitute part of the latest national remembrance-treasury of our enterprise, to make it fit to be good will, it must now be said that these events are convertible into these numbers, these increments. For it is part of the equity, the capitalization placed retroactively into the start up of the enterprise; a set of past events converted into numbered, stored and convertible values. After all, even eventless, invested capital must have some history. In any pool of money, there lurks an implicit collage of time series. +In the very act of selection, grading and valuation, in order to constitute part of the latest national remembrance-treasury of our enterprise, to make it fit to be good will, it must now be said that these events are convertible into these numbers, these increments. For it is part of the equity, the capitalization placed retroactively into the start up of the enterprise; a set of past events converted into numbered, stored and convertible values. After all, even eventless, invested capital must have some history. In any pool of money, there lurks an implicit collage of time series. Now if cliometrics is to have any usefulness, not only must religious history and mythology be quantified and arranged into an accretive time series, but it must be valued. Once quantified they may be translated into other metrical disciplines through a complex series of conversions shuttling back and forth in time. (Although, before this can happen, a rewriting and re-evaluation of the meaning of time itself is required.) @@ -1,27 +1,27 @@ \chap\nl -Starting from an other end, we can look again at the hypothetical annual report and balance sheet of our enterprise, Western Civilization. If we analyze, concretize, qualify, re-view, individualize or personify the bottom line, representing pools of capital, we unfold it to see a variety of sub-enterprises: factories, farms, plantations, mining operations, shipping, workers, slaves, wars, thievery, pieces of drama, the addition of last year's, last century's, last millennium's profits or losses, the whole ensemble of economic activity. These pools of money and near-money (an incredible array of quasi-liquid exchangeables) have different key words, titles, identifiers, instructions and names attached to them, indicating by what rules they may be converted from one form into another: numbers to numbers, numbers to people, people to events, events to a varied range of goods\ld +Starting from another end, we can look again at the hypothetical annual report and balance sheet of our enterprise, Western Civilization. If we analyze, concretize, qualify, re-view, individualize or personify the bottom line, representing pools of capital, we unfold it to see a variety of sub-enterprises: factories, farms, plantations, mining operations, shipping, workers, slaves, wars, thievery, pieces of drama, the addition of last year's, last century's, last millennium's profits or losses, the whole ensemble of economic activity. These pools of money and near-money (an incredible array of quasi-liquid exchangeables) have different key words, titles, identifiers, instructions and names attached to them, indicating by what rules they may be converted from one form into another: numbers to numbers, numbers to people, people to events, events to a varied range of goods\ld But to repersonify, re-invent, decrypt events out of our bottom line puts limits on their exchange potentials by pointing to sets of \e{particular} people, their lives, energy expenditures, products. They are not given to us in the proper language. It is hard to trade a human being (or a ghost) \e{directly} in our society, with its putative commitment to humanist values (each and every human in the world is supposed to be of importance\ld\ but not their work). Yet, the abstracted, refined, distilled, symbolized value of part of a human, their work---with the rest cast off---can be stored, calculated and traded every day. Modern purification ceremonies. -The coming of high-speed communications, computers and trading programs allows for the movement of keyworded, encrypted bundles of capital across barriers and borders, to be entered as a profit here ina tax haven (a souls bereft of bodies ascend to heaven), a loss in a taxed sub-world: expensive signals of expenses. \e{All} forms of credit are highly abstract, general-purpose information. Otherwise, how could they be moved and interfused? (Citibank, Chase, the Bank for International Settlements, Banco Ambrosiano, the IMF, the Federal Reserve System, etc., all banks and securities houses are information-handling, transactions and communications companies.) Information cannot be too particularized in order to make entries in account books. Generalized, it can be teleported easily through the most complex spaces (where humans cannot be moved), some of which are not so much spaces but representations of spaces, magnetic perturbations, addresses standing for a country, another enterprise, files on a tape or disc, or in flight, entries in an account book. I can transmit six million dollars (how many lives; how many things?) from a U.S. bank to a Japanese bank, which has a branch (a presence, but not a necessarily a facility; a designation) in Panama---move it from a ledger marked \dq{U.S.\slash Chase} to a ledger marked \dq{Panama\slash Bank of Tokyo.} Has the money traveled? What does the question even mean? Yet the U.S., Panama, and Bank of Tokyo behave as if it has. +The coming of high-speed communications, computers and trading programs allows for the movement of keyworded, encrypted bundles of capital across barriers and borders to be entered as profit in a tax haven (as souls bereft of bodies ascend to heaven), a loss in a taxed sub-world: expensive signals of expenses. \e{All} forms of credit are highly abstract, general-purpose information. Otherwise, how could they be moved and interfused?\fnote{Citibank, Chase, the Bank for International Settlements, Banco Ambrosiano, the IMF, the Federal Reserve System, etc., all banks and securities houses are information-handling, transactions and communications companies.} Information cannot be too particularized in order to make entries in account books. Generalized, it can be teleported easily through the most complex spaces (where humans cannot be moved), some of which are not so much spaces but representations of spaces: magnetic perturbations, addresses standing for a country, another enterprise, files on a tape or disc, or in flight, entries in an account book. I can transmit six million dollars (how many lives; how many things?) from a US bank to a Japanese bank which has a branch (a presence, but not a necessarily a facility; a designation) in Panama---move it from a ledger marked \dq{US\slash Chase} to a ledger marked \dq{Panama\slash Bank of Tokyo.} Has the money traveled? What does the question even mean? Yet the US, Panama, and Bank of Tokyo behave as if it has. -If we intone \dq{Russia,} six letters, we have some idea of what that means: the letters, or the sounded word, stands for the space in the file and that space, on tape or disc, matches up to the whole of Russia. (The code-name, the identifier, the recognition-signal, legitimizes the transaction. It must be precise. We cannot say we are sending \dq{Œdipus,} for what does that mean? Or can we?) +If we intone \dq{Russia,} six letters, we have some idea of what that means: the letters, or the sounded word, stand for the space in the file and that space, on tape or disc, matches up to the whole of Russia. (The code-name, the identifier, the recognition-signal, legitimizes the transaction. It must be precise. We cannot say we are sending \dq{Œdipus,} for what does that mean? Or can we?) -At bottom, these forms represent the activities of people in the present, the past, and the future (when capital was\slash is\slash will be stored, built up, accreted). Money contains a past: it is a memory and energy-storage. The labor of old machines (animals, plants, and humans) which once converted sun, soil and seed into food, raw materials into things; all these and more are implicitly represented. The credits are a form of miraculous, non-energetic, energy storage. +At bottom, these forms represent the activities of people in the present, the past, and the future (when capital was\slash is\slash will be stored, built up, accreted). Money contains a past: it is a memory and energy-storage. The labor of old machines (animals, plants, and humans) which once converted sun, soil and seed into food, raw materials into things; all these and more are implicitly represented. The credits are a form of miraculous non-energetic energy storage. -We have reached a fascinating metaphysicality; energy storages which are not contained in material objects\ld\ Wood, coal, oil\ld\ these we can understand. With electricity, things become problematical. Electricity cannot be stored (except in limited ways; batteries). We must produce heat in order to drive the generators. But yet there are abstract, informational, non-heat, non-energized, \e{symbolic} storage devices which nevertheless have the power to drive the energizer of machinery, the human. Money, securities, paper instruments of all kinds, electronic signals\ld\ all these (among others) have this power. But in order to energize they must receive this power, which is purely a symbolizing activity which must take place in the context of a whole social climate which trains people to respond to the energy-stimulating information associated (not in) these devices, these instruments, these fictions. We are talking, in the long run, about belief-systems. +We have reached a fascinating metaphysicality: energy storages which are not contained in material objects. Wood, coal, oil\ld\ these we can understand. With electricity, things become problematic. Electricity cannot be stored (except in limited ways, i.e. batteries). We must produce heat in order to drive the generators. Yet, there are abstract, informational, non-heat, non-energized, \e{symbolic} storage devices which nevertheless have the power to drive the energizer of machinery---the human. Money, securities, paper instruments of all kinds, electronic signals\ld\ all these (among others) have this power. But in order to energize they must receive this power, which is purely a symbolizing activity which must take place in the context of a whole social climate which trains people to respond to the energy-stimulating information associated with (not \e{in}) these devices, these instruments, these fictions. We are talking, in the long run, about belief-systems. -History resides, embedded in each item we touch. A set of ghosts\ld\ remnants and memories of people who worked to produce money, wealth. Looking at a pool of credit, we are not permitted to infer the concrete existences, the lives, the sufferings, the pleasures now, of those pasts, this \e{unspecified} stuff of phantoms. This analysis holds if we believe that capital is a residue, expropriated and stored work-energy, value and time (representing the expenditure of human energy, lives spent in forced labor). Electronic gold is the newest minimalist form. Capital represents a compressed work-and-time series omnipresent in credit and every processed or owned thing. A continuity of real and fictional people. (Why fictional? Information doesn't have to be about real things or people; it only has to be \e{accepted} as real.) A revived theory of spirits. +History resides, embedded in each item we touch. A set of ghosts\ld\ remnants and memories of people who worked to produce money, wealth. Looking at a pool of credit, we are not permitted to infer the concrete existences---the lives, the sufferings, the pleasures now---of those pasts, this \e{unspecified} stuff of phantoms. This analysis holds if we believe that capital is a residue, expropriated and stored work-energy, value and time (representing the expenditure of human energy, lives spent in forced labor). Electronic gold is the newest minimalist form. Capital represents a compressed work-and-time series omnipresent in credit and every processed or owned thing. A continuity of real and fictional people.\fnote{Why fictional? Information doesn't have to be about real things or people; it only has to be \e{accepted} as real.} A revived theory of spirits. But when we come to the creation of credit---as the material representation of embedded value, gold, gems, declines in importance---by banks (real banks, or fraudulent shell-game banks, and all the interest-leveraging games they play, lending five, ten, twenty, a hundred times their assets; national treasuries with their printing presses running full-time, account-book manipulations), we have arrived at the manufacture of value out of nothing. If credit, value are linked to people (genetic series: or their residues, for they continue to work when dead) and the lives they once lived, or might have lived, then inflationary cycles create even more fictional people, fictional lives which impinge upon and crowd the living. These humans and their energies seem to be drawn out of the \e{future} (looking at interest as a price based on usage and future realization, as expressed in money and time, which is to say energy-expenditure---labor---to be realized) and become another way of birthing fictional people and enterprises. Hence, in this world all the forms of credit (information), if convertible to the lives of populations, create \e{population pressures} on a limited environment, recrowding the past, or emptying the future. They, these \e{pre-spirits}, impinge on the economy and on daily life and the psyche. Fantastical? -If dreams and myths have an effect on the lives of people, it is clear that metadreams and metamyths also have an effect.\fnote{What's a metadream? The purest form is capital, information without specification. To take another example from other realms of discourse; the score of a psychological test, which converts psychic states into numbers. This involves the pricing of the tests plus the start-up costs for developing the tests, getting people to believe in its validity, and the investment in the formation of some psyche or intelligence-testing company, and the sales of such test, and so forth. None of this mentions cohorts of theoreticians who develop the background theories of human nature. What are we left with? A disembodied and quantified psyche.} Such manipulations violate the first law of thermodynamics, creating energy out of nothing or the future. You can violate the laws of nature, at least for a while, if you put enough money into it\ld\ So said the physicist, I.I. Rabi, clearly identifying money and energy as one. +If dreams and myths have an effect on the lives of people, it is clear that metadreams and metamyths also have an effect.\fnote{What's a metadream? The purest form is capital, information without specification. To take another example from other realms of discourse; the score of a psychological test, which converts psychic states into numbers. This involves the pricing of the tests plus the start-up costs for developing the tests, getting people to believe in its validity, and the investment in the formation of some psyche or intelligence-testing company, and the sales of such test, and so forth. None of this mentions cohorts of theoreticians who develop the background theories of human nature. What are we left with? A disembodied and quantified psyche.} Such manipulations violate the first law of thermodynamics, creating energy out of nothing or the future. You can violate the laws of nature, at least for a while, if you put enough money into it\ld\ so said the physicist, I.I. Rabi, clearly identifying money and energy as one. -These labor\slash life\slash time\slash suffering residues, these generalized phantoms are peculiar ones. They have no meaning until the underwriters of an enterprise assign a value, a meaning to them. Assigning a value (and raising money against it) requires an act of confidence and the general acceptance of that assignation (which itself must be sold) is what constitutes the general act of faith in certain people's notions of present, past, the invisible, the future. Credit, \e{credo}. You can invest in it, you can bank on it, you can buy a piece of the faith and people will be moved by it. By what? By this long series of conversions, metamorphoses, transubstantiations and appearances out of pure space, dyings and rebirths, incorporating a kind of serial cannibalism among its many charms. These acts of faith in the modern, rational age, are not merely cool and detached. They are attended by great excitations, curious passions and lusts, unseemly fights for status, murders, massacres, tortures, annihilations of populations, pomp, circumstance, exchanges of gifts, drink, drugs, bribes, kickbacks, display, ostentation, treachery, thievery, and so forth. +These labor\slash life\slash time\slash suffering residues, these generalized phantoms are peculiar ones. They have no meaning until the underwriters of an enterprise assign a value, a meaning to them. Assigning a value (and raising money against it) requires an act of confidence and the general acceptance of that assignation (which itself must be sold) is what constitutes the general act of faith in certain people's notions of present, past, the invisible, the future. Credit, \e{credo}. You can invest in it, you can bank on it, you can buy a piece of the faith and people will be moved by it. By what? By this long series of conversions, metamorphoses, transubstantiations and appearances out of pure space, dyings and rebirths, incorporating a kind of serial cannibalism among its many charms. These acts of faith in the modern rational age are not merely cool and detached. They are attended by great excitations, curious passions and lusts, unseemly fights for status, murders, massacres, tortures, annihilations of populations, pomp, circumstance, exchanges of gifts, drink, drugs, bribes, kickbacks, display, ostentation, treachery, thievery\ld\ and so forth. -Massed and abstracted capital represents not only a history but populations and their biographies. Economic archeology: capitalist historians, pushing progress, are counter- intelligence archeologists. They rewrite their history to deny that the suffering of populations ever took place, just as we deny the spirit world of \dq{primitives} and their reverence for ancestors. We don't revere ancestors; we revere ancestry: inheritance, not inheritors. +Massed and abstracted capital represents not only a history but populations and their biographies. Economic archeology: capitalist historians, pushing progress, are counter-intelligence archeologists. They rewrite their history to deny that the suffering of populations ever took place, just as we deny the spirit world of \dq{primitives} and their reverence for ancestors. We don't revere ancestors; we revere ancestry: inheritance, not inheritors. -If you averaged out capital buildup per person per life, established historians, rewriting history, tell us that things were becoming better and better during the industrial revolution. Concentration of wealth is ignored. The invention of a class perspective created an oppositional classification, revealing one population's misery. But even Marx accepted these constructs; the evolutionary inevitable. He only wanted to change direction once these \dq{necessary} sacrifices had been made. Both Marxists and capitalists have played the same kind of game. They didn't challenge the basic, agreed-upon, evolutionary-schemata, the concept of capital itself. +If you averaged out capital buildup per person per life, established historians, rewriting history, tell us that things were becoming better and better during the industrial revolution. Concentration of wealth is ignored. The invention of a class perspective created an oppositional classification, revealing one population's misery. But even Marx accepted these constructs; the evolutionary inevitable. He only wanted to change direction once these \dq{necessary} sacrifices had been made. Both Marxists and capitalists have played the same kind of game. They didn't challenge the basic, agreed-upon, evolutionary-schemata: the concept of capital itself.
\ No newline at end of file @@ -1,33 +1,33 @@ \chap\nl -If one could invent (or draw out of some infinite account) values created by populations yet to be born---fictional people, which might include robots and simulations---those populations have a real effect on our present. What \e{space} do they live in? If they're fictional, how can we feel their presence here and now? Or if they are far away, even in the future, how can we feel their impingement, as if they were next to us? They exert mysterious influences through myths and interest rates, like the gravitational perturbations coming at us from past and future, annunciating the presence of an unseen planet or star. We search for them. They can be found by indirect methods; relating population to space, converting the numbers of those-yet-to-suffer into space time and people. This is done by the art of studying population pressures in the present, for new populations are being unleashed upon our planet, teleported to us, backward in time, emerging through the central processing units of financial institutions. +If one could invent (or draw out of some infinite account) values created by populations yet to be born---fictional people, which might include robots and simulations---those populations have a real effect on our present. What \e{space} do they live in? If they're fictional, how can we feel their presence here and now? Or if they are far away, even in the future, how can we feel their impingement, as if they were next to us? They exert mysterious influences through myths and interest rates, like the gravitational perturbations coming at us from past and future, annunciating the presence of an unseen planet or star. We search for them. They can be found by indirect methods; relating population to space, converting the numbers of those-yet-to-suffer into space, time and people. This is done by the art of studying population pressures in the present, for new populations are being unleashed upon our planet, teleported to us, backward in time, emerging through the central processing units of financial institutions. -Segmented demographics (studies of populations in abstracted, discontiguous home territories, stacked up, perceived, recorded, retrievable, quite as if they were in some mass memory; memorialized particle-clusters, when networked, make their territories contiguous, while lack of communications-access makes the land of the poor quite separated) allow us to play new games with the location of populations, to move them from place to place, even into invented countries. For example the Nielsen rating's {\bf A} country, {\bf B} country, {\bf C} country. (There is a {\bf D} country but that is discounted. Dante also had an {\bf A}, {\bf B}, and {\bf C} country and, although he didn't write about it, a {\bf D} country; for Dante never wrote about the poor and the ordinary.) People in {\bf A} country can be scattered all over the world; they don't even have to live in proximity. +Segmented demographics\fnote{Studies of populations in abstracted, discontiguous home territories; stacked up, perceived, recorded, retrievable, quite as if they were in some mass memory; memorialized particle-clusters, when networked, make their territories contiguous while lack of communications-access makes the land of the poor quite separated} allow us to play new games with the location of populations, to move them from place to place, even into invented countries. For example the Nielsen rating's {\bf A} country, {\bf B} country, {\bf C} country.\fnote{There is a {\bf D} country but that is discounted. Dante also had an {\bf A}, {\bf B}, and {\bf C} country and, although he didn't write about it, a {\bf D} country; for Dante never wrote about the poor and the ordinary.} People in {\bf A} country can be scattered all over the world; they don't even have to live in proximity. -How were these populations get into these demographies? If we have totalled up real people---hungering, sweating, copulating---then we need real geography, at least at some point in time\ld\ perhaps in the past. With the advent of the need for targeted, reachable populations, demographic regions were invented, related, classified, archtypalized along buying\slash class\slash income\slash taste\slash interest\slash communication lines. We see continents dissolve into an archipelago. (Dante preferred to stack them in cones and concentric, high-velocity circles.) All nations have---at least as far as some of their populations who live in transnational space---dissolved. +How were these populations put into these demographies? If we have totalled up real people---hungering, sweating, copulating---then we need real geography, at least at some point in time\ld\ perhaps in the past. With the advent of the need for targeted, reachable populations, demographic regions were invented, related, classified, archtypalized along buying\slash class\slash income\slash taste\slash interest\slash communication lines. We see continents dissolve into an archipelago.\fnote{Dante preferred to stack them in cones and concentric, high-velocity circles.} All nations have---at least as far as some of their populations who live in transnational space---dissolved. -Corporations transcend boundaries. Financial institutions hurl money across timespace. Pools of wealth flee the constraints of national taxation. Russian and Americans bank in off-shore havens. The French and Germans invest in Russia and the U.S. I.G. Farben, Dupont, Imperial Chemical and Mitsui had an explosives cartel throughout the Second World War. What does nationspace mean to them? They live in Paradiso. They absorb the energies of dead Germans, Americans, British, Japanese. This subset of French, German, etc., constitute a cultural homogeneity. +Corporations transcend boundaries. Financial institutions hurl money across timespace. Pools of wealth flee the constraints of national taxation. Russian and Americans bank in off-shore havens. The French and Germans invest in Russia and the US. IG Farben, Dupont, Imperial Chemical and Mitsui had an explosives cartel throughout the Second World War. What does nationspace mean to them? They live in Paradiso. They absorb the energies of dead Germans, Americans, British, Japanese. This subset of French, German, etc., constitute a cultural homogeneity. Such an approach generates endless lists for direct-mail and political polling, possibly electro-politics. One could even poll \e{the compilations of taste-lists} (which would contain significant sociological, psychological and bio-medical data simulating humans), a thing the computer does very well. The information age becomes more scholastic and magical. Given these geographies---these weird topologies inhabited by real and fictional populations---questions are raised: are we merely playing an intellectual game, or do these fictional people have some substance? Do they have a history? How were these list-populations generated? -In his extremely information-oriented, mechanistic, Laplacian \e{Sociobiology} (genetics perceived not only as information, but as the motivators of every human act), E.O. Wilson proposes the notion of the feeding capacity of an environment, a region, a land, a territory, in relation to the population of animals, or humans. The relationship is called the density-dependence ratio. The amount of grass to cows, cows to humans, for example, in a set amount of geography. This limits the feeding capacity of cows and humans. If one factors \e{perceived need} the ratio changes in a non-rational way. When class, and all that term entails (culture, for instance), one must erect a set of density-dependence equations and ratios for hierarchies of populations, relating masses of fictional capital to fictional populations to real populations, since capital needs to feed and be fed\ld\ and all of these to assigned to certain confined spaces, which constitutes mass. We are beginning to talk about frame-references of space, energy, time, money, genetics (both real and invented). +In his extremely information-oriented, mechanistic, Laplacian \booktitle{Sociobiology} (genetics perceived not only as information, but as the motivators of every human act), E.O. Wilson proposes the notion of the feeding capacity of an environment, a region, a land, a territory, in relation to the population of animals, or humans. The relationship is called the density-dependence ratio. The amount of grass to cows and cows to humans, for example, in a set amount of geography. This limits the feeding capacity of cows and humans. If one factors \e{perceived need}, the ratio changes in a non-rational way. With class, and all that the term entails (culture, for instance), one must erect a set of density-dependence equations and ratios for hierarchies of populations, relating masses of fictional capital to fictional populations to real populations, since capital needs to feed and be fed\ld\ and all of these are to be assigned to certain confined spaces, which constitutes mass. We are beginning to talk about frame-references of space, energy, time, money, genetics (both real and invented). -Grass converts sunlight; cows convert grass; humans convert cows by ingesting and transforming them. Commodity brokers, grain companies, agribusinesses, food-processors, chemical companies (for preservatives and fertilizers), refrigeration specialists, distributors, railroads, truckers and unions, politicians and bankers\ld\ intervene between humans and their eating, separating mouth from food, by inventing multiplexed and involuted distances which are a function of pricing through two kinds of intersecting transportation systems: physical transportation of goods and transportation of money, invoices\ld\ The complexities of credit and time, in all of their forms---commodities, options, future, indices---creates conversionary mediation-complexes and lengthens distance. The need of a loan in some distant place creates a shortage of liquidity on the local land, a sort of drought, symbolically and effectively equivalent to a plague of grasshoppers. +Grass converts sunlight; cows convert grass; humans convert cows by ingesting and transforming them. Commodity brokers, grain companies, agribusinesses, food-processors, chemical companies (for preservatives and fertilizers), refrigeration specialists, distributors, railroads, truckers and unions, politicians and bankers\ld\ intervene between humans and their eating, separating mouth from food, by inventing multiplexed and involuted distances which are a function of pricing through two kinds of intersecting transportation systems: physical transportation of goods and transportation of money, invoices\ld\ The complexities of credit and time, in all of their forms---commodities, options, future, indices---create conversionary mediation-complexes and lengthens distance. The need of a loan in some distant place creates a shortage of liquidity on the local land; a sort of drought, symbolically and effectively equivalent to a plague of grasshoppers. The more capital there is, the more population. A small, capital-intensive population consuming vast amounts of capital-intensive food with the aid of technology becomes equivalent to a huge population, crowding out the living from earthly space by the reproduction of hungering ghosts. No wonder the ancients fed ghosts, spirits, gods. And given cliometrics, demographics and the density-dependence equations, considerations of capital, telematic acceleration, surely we can find these antecedent considerations somewhere in our ancient texts. -We could estimate the amount of food, perhaps in calories, required to feed each individual, averaging consumption, and set a provisional standard for existence. But this is mere munch-democracy. It's not the way things work. Given real considerations of power and concentration, much capital never even reaches the earth, but remains in perpetual transit in the empyrean, going from countryless account to countryless account, money being invested in money (which embodies time) for high interest rates and other profitable instrumentalities, passing through odd logic gates and mythic addresses. Some populations not only eat for themselves, but for whole hordes. The bankers have, in fact, invented hyperspace concurrently with the physicists and have their own white and black holes. In short, relatively, we are speaking of gods. All they lack is actual, as against relative, immortality. +We could estimate the amount of food, perhaps in calories, required to feed each individual, averaging consumption, and set a provisional standard for existence. But this is mere munch-democracy. It's not the way things work. Given real considerations of power and concentration, much capital never even reaches the earth, but remains in perpetual transit in the empyrean, going from countryless account to countryless account, money being invested in money (which embodies time) for high interest rates and other profitable instrumentalities, passing through odd logic gates and mythic addresses. Some populations not only eat for themselves, but for whole hordes. The bankers have, in fact, invented hyperspace concurrently with the physicists and have their own white and black holes. In short, relatively, we are speaking of \e{gods}. All they lack is actual, as against relative, immortality. -Wanting to know what his population is all about (consider a heaven or hell, full of ghosts, phantoms, spirits; the dead and their claims upon the living; the exploitation of the dead) we can, by decoding, assign characteristics to this population. We can resurrect the dead, or the unborn, though not, unfortunately, with their bodies intact. We can write histories. Suppose the recorders of life, the gossip columnists, the journalists, sat down and looked, along with the poet, novelist and biographer, over the bottom line of our enterprise's balance sheet, instead of looking at the illusory world around them. If our premise is right, why couldn't they construct (or deconstruct) a novel, a history, a biography from the numbers? How? +Wanting to know what his population is all about (consider a heaven or hell, full of ghosts, phantoms, spirits; the dead and their claims upon the living; the exploitation of the dead) we can, by decoding, assign characteristics to this population. We can resurrect the dead, or the unborn, though not, unfortunately, with their bodies intact. We can write histories. Suppose the recorders of life---the gossip columnists, the journalists---sat down and looked---along with the poet, novelist and biographer---over the bottom line of our enterprise's balance sheet, instead of looking at the illusory world around them. If our premise is right, why couldn't they construct (or deconstruct) a novel, a history, a biography from the numbers? How? -For example, one could use psychological, medical testing and diagnosis, to record and store up the signs of the living. We can get readings on medical machines: lie-detectors, EEG's, EKG's, stress-analyzers, voice prints, PET scanners, CAT scanners, NMR machines, varieties of brain scanners, and other kinds of instrumentation. We can create electronic simulations that fluctuate, as if alive. We can store those records electronically (at a price). We can establish a constant link between body and record (itself fragile, almost \dq{alive}) so that as the body changes, the record changes. Each change alerts the medical monitoring machine to take action. The record becomes an analogue of the body. If the development of medicine has been correct (problematical) and the translations of bodily qualities into signs, numbers and waves is correct, and the instrumentation is correct, the simulation begins to approach autonomy (as long as the electricity is on; doubtful in these days). Now presumably this body-to-record-and-recorder can be reversed, so that when the records change (the simulation is given a disease and then transmits it to the body), the state of the body changes. We can invent whole library-demographics of electronically simulated bodies. We can also put them in synch with the state of the world's economy. So that a change in the numbers in a complex of account sheets would change the health of the simulated population and the health of the simulated population would affect the health of the world\ld\ And, indeed, isn't that what happens in the case of the sacred king? Œdipus? +For example, one could use psychological\slash medical testing and diagnosis to record and store up the signs of the living. We can get readings on medical machines: lie-detectors, EEGs, EKGs, stress-analyzers, voice prints, PET scanners, CAT scanners, NMR machines, varieties of brain scanners and other kinds of instrumentation. We can create electronic simulations that fluctuate, as if alive. We can store those records electronically (at a price). We can establish a constant link between body and record (itself fragile, almost \dq{alive}) so that as the body changes, the record changes. Each change alerts the medical monitoring machine to take action. The record becomes an analogue of the body. If the development of medicine has been correct (problematical) and the translations of bodily qualities into signs, numbers and waves is correct, and the instrumentation is correct, the simulation begins to approach autonomy (as long as the electricity is on; doubtful in these days). Now presumably this body-to-record-and-recorder can be reversed, so that when the records change (the simulation is given a disease and then transmits it to the body), the state of the body changes. We can invent whole library-demographics of electronically simulated bodies. We can also put them in sync with the state of the world's economy, so that a change in the numbers in a complex of account sheets would change the health of the simulated population, and the health of the simulated population would affect the health of the world\ld\ and, indeed, isn't that what happens in the case of the sacred king? Œdipus? -We can abstract and average out the readings; we can even feed back pre-recorded physiological data into this ghost population and give it life. We can appropriate the stored-up work-effort of the sports athlete, the assembly-line athlete, the drug-consuming athlete, the neurosis-athlete (who struggles to produce new records in psychosis: anguish indices). Why, pain itself can be telemetered on different scales, even stored electronically in these computerized telemedical systems and transmitted, when needed, through wire or satellite, broadcast to far distant places. After all, the electrical \e{instruction} to a prod applied to the genitalia doesn't have to be administered directly by a finger pushing the button that turns on the juice, button connected to finger connected to person in the same room with the tortured. The amounts of current can be calculated from far away (assessed by previous testings) and be transmitted by satellite to some banana republic, just as money (compressed and massed lives, sufferings) is transmitted every day through SWIFT. +We can abstract and average out the readings; we can even feed back pre-recorded physiological data into this ghost population and give it life. We can appropriate the stored-up work-effort of the sports athlete, the assembly-line athlete, the drug-consuming athlete, the neurosis-athlete (who struggles to produce new records in psychosis: anguish indices). Why, pain itself can be telemetered on different scales, even stored electronically in these computerized telemedical systems and transmitted, when needed, through wire or satellite, broadcast to far distant places. After all, the electrical \e{instruction} to a prod applied to the genitalia doesn't have to be administered directly by a finger pushing the button that turns on the juice---button connected to finger connected to person in the same room with the tortured. The amounts of current can be calculated from far away (assessed by previous testings) and be transmitted by satellite to some banana republic, just as money (compressed and massed lives, sufferings) is transmitted every day through SWIFT. We can even poll the indicators to find out the wishes of this phantom population. In fact no one has to poll real people, just query the taste and market-cluster data-banks containing the repository of psychosocial desires and physiological indicators. It is already clear that voting electronically can be like ballot-box stuffing, using votes of the dead, since the powerful make the powerless a transmitter and talk only to themselves. If a big stockholder votes his shares, why can't he vote his ghosts? -When we move into these realms of abstraction, we can play any game we want with the indicators, the concepts, the \dq{stand-fors,} just as long as there is consensual agreement to credit, honor, have faith in these acts. And this is what's happening. +When we move into these realms of abstraction, we can play any game we want with the indicators, the concepts, the \dq{stand-fors,} just as long as there is consensual agreement to credit, honor and have faith in these acts. And this is what's happening. -In Kabbalistic thought, the elements of a language, ordered one way, reveals one world. Ordered another way, a completely different world with different laws emerges. Language precedes things and humans in gnostic thought. Even history itself can be restructured (along with geography) in interesting ways. Events in \e{Œdipus} can be placed next to the events in Joseph's Egypt (since they are about agricultural disaster), even made concurrent with a cash-flow crisis in the U.S., and related to the collectivization period in the Soviet Union, and to link them up we have the marriage of IBM, Comsat General and Aetna into Satellite Business Systems linked by Systems Network Architecture. After all, wasn't it Delphi's and Joseph's monopolization of knowledge that caused all the trouble?
\ No newline at end of file +In Kabbalistic thought, the elements of a language, ordered one way, reveals one world. Ordered another way, a completely different world with different laws emerges. Language precedes things and humans in gnostic thought. Even history itself can be restructured (along with geography) in interesting ways. Events in \booktitle{Œdipus} can be placed next to the events in Joseph's Egypt (since they are about agricultural disaster), even made concurrent with a cash-flow crisis in the US, and related to the collectivization period in the Soviet Union; and to link them up we have the marriage of IBM, Comsat General and Aetna into Satellite Business Systems linked by Systems Network Architecture. After all, wasn't it Delphi's and Joseph's monopolization of knowledge that caused all the trouble?
\ No newline at end of file @@ -1,37 +1,35 @@ -\chapter{} +\chap\nl -Why raise these questions? To challenge an obsessional mode of thought which annunciates itself as new and seems to become more rational every day, but which is a capital intensive, ghost-haunted complex, stealing thought and memory away to hoard it. To attack a long and endless, even boring set of preoccupations; theme and variation on a few original musical phrases; a casting out, an obliteration of cacaphonies. But do the original themes tell us anything of real social behavior of the message-senders, the people who generated them? Can we really seperate passion from ideas? Even the ambition to succeed can distort ideas. After all, how do the preoccupations and passions (to say nothing of the confrontation with, or the bowing to power) enter the idea-stream? After all, people have killed one another to preserve their ideas. +Why raise these questions? To challenge an obsessional mode of thought which annunciates itself as new and seems to become more rational every day\ld\ but which is a capital intensive, ghost-haunted complex, stealing thought and memory away to hoard it. To attack a long and endless, even boring set of preoccupations; theme and variation on a few original musical phrases; a casting out, an obliteration of cacophonies. But do the original themes tell us anything of the real social behavior of the message-senders, the people who generated them? Can we really separate passion from ideas? Even the ambition to succeed can distort ideas. After all, how do the preoccupations and passions (to say nothing of the confrontation with, or the bowing to power) enter the idea-stream? Certainly, people have killed one another to preserve their ideas. -What would happen if we altered the memory-references to, say, the ancient Greeks, and their culture (sculpture, philosophy, logic, myth, history)? What if we included the practical, day-to-day thought and considerations of power? This disruption of the sequence, described as a progressive and ascendant evolutionary movement from the simple to the complex would ripple back up again to the present, causing glitches and noise in the pipelines. +What would happen if we altered the memory-references to---say---the ancient Greeks, and their culture (sculpture, philosophy, logic, myth, history)? What if we included the practical, day-to-day thought and considerations of power? This disruption of the sequence, described as a progressive and ascendant evolutionary movement from the simple to the complex, would ripple back up again to the present, causing glitches and noise in the pipelines. -When Marx said that the philosophers had only talked, never done anything, he was wrong. They indeed did something, for the propagation of messages requires a climate of belief which they generated. Marx himself refused to let go of any of this past, merely rewriting the perspective. +When Marx said that the philosophers had only talked, and never done anything, he was wrong. They indeed did something, for the propagation of messages requires a climate of belief which they generated. Marx himself refused to let go of any of this past, merely rewriting the perspective. -Consider: Socrates never answers Thrasymachus satisfactorily, in that order-obsessed schema, \booktitle{The Republic}. If philosophy is a sequence, each succeeder building on each preceder, then philosophy never got off the ground. We still wait for a response to that question: power is justice. What followed is nonsense. On the other hand, the merchants and politicians, the soldiers listened carefully to Thrasymachus. +Consider: Socrates never answers Thrasymachus satisfactorily, in that order-obsessed schema, \booktitle{The Republic}. If philosophy is a sequence, each succeeder building on each preceeder, then philosophy never got off the ground. We still wait for a response to that question: power is justice. What followed is nonsense. On the other hand, the merchants, politicians and soldiers listened carefully to Thrasymachus. -And does it mean anything at all that the great themes sounded by the Athenian playwrights and philsophers, and upon which the great symphony of western thought is composed, were all homosexuals, but nevertheless required to mate with women and replicate? Is there a hidden content, a secret sexual message in philosophy, a movement toward body-purified thought? This has bearing on the question of heterosexual reproduction, the desire to escape the tyranny of Grand Design-serving matings. A homosexual population generally doesn't replicate; it must recruit. Will it put artificial reproduction on the agenda? Do dreams of non-heterosexual reproduction lead to designs for immortality and eternal youth...a longing for transcendance, a covert desire to escape the decayable body? +And does it mean anything at all that the great themes sounded by the Athenian playwrights and philosophers, and upon which the great symphony of western thought is composed, were all written by homosexuals who were nevertheless required to mate with women and replicate? Is there a hidden content, a secret sexual message in philosophy, a movement toward body-purified thought? This has bearing on the question of heterosexual reproduction, the desire to escape the tyranny of Grand Design-serving matings. A homosexual population generally doesn't replicate; it must recruit. Will it put artificial reproduction on the agenda? Do dreams of non-heterosexual reproduction lead to designs for immortality and eternal youth\ld\ a longing for transcendence, a covert desire to escape the decayable body? -In both \booktitle{The Divine Comedy} and \booktitle{Faust} there is a seeking to find a route to escape the bodily and heterosexual mode of reproduction, to seperate the erotic from the reproductive, which begins to lead to algeny. Faust turns his back on earthly marriage and love, to mate with a \enquote{female} principle in heaven, seeking and using knowledge and deeds in his journey. Dante glimpses Paradiso, seeing shining intelligence and bodiless love. As light\slash love\slash intelligence radiates into space, it sinks into the blackness of body, matter and sin. Divine love and knowledge are a metaphor sent down the ages. Alchemical wisdom. But in the past, there were no major idea-and-body-replicating devices to carry down the notions of hermeticists, gnostics, Kaballists, magicians. Heterosexuality was necessary. How to escape this trap? Later, John Von Neuman dreams of machines, gathering knowledge, becoming autonomous, reproducing. +In both \booktitle{The Divine Comedy} and \booktitle{Faust} there is a seeking to find a route to escape the bodily and heterosexual mode of reproduction, to separate the erotic from the reproductive; which begins to lead to algeny. Faust turns his back on earthly marriage and love, to mate with a \dq{female} principle in heaven, seeking and using knowledge and deeds in his journey. Dante glimpses Paradiso, seeing shining intelligence and bodiless love. As light\slash love\slash intelligence radiates into space, it sinks into the blackness of body\slash matter\slash sin. Divine love and knowledge are a metaphor sent down the ages\ld\ alchemical wisdom. But in the past, there were no major idea-and-body-replicating devices to carry down the notions of hermeticists, gnostics, Kabbalists, magicians. Heterosexuality was necessary. How to escape this trap? Later, John von Neumann dreams of machines, gathering knowledge, becoming autonomous, reproducing. -To understand the present one must look over this long series of \emph{regularized} events, saying in each case, \textquote{this time is like that time} or \textquote{this time is not like that time.} To regularize events is to force similarities on these happenings. This is possible only if time-segments are everywhen the same. It is disconcerting to think that each individual in history was unique, singular, unrepeated and unrepeatable. How can you retrieve their thought? How can you resurrect? +To understand the present one must look over this long series of \e{regularized} events, saying in each case, \dq{this time is like that time} or \dq{this time is not like that time.} To regularize events is to force similarities on these happenings. This is possible only if time-segments are everywhen the same. It is disconcerting to think that each individual in history was unique, singular, unrepeated and unrepeatable. How can you retrieve their thought? How can you resurrect? -Modern, rational thought requires even greater precision, since we think, and replicate thought through this \emph{capital-intensive} mode, one which cannot handle true singularities. Order, repeatability, similarity, pattern, structure, identity is introduced into past sequences, otherwise how can there be such a thing as a series? Consider the search for missing links (a medieval, logical technique left over from the invention of the Great Chain of Being) in order to smooth out the series of evolution, to eliminate great and cataclysmic jumps. If we allow these ruptures, we leave room for the reintroduction of the divine, the inexplicable, wild and truly random chance. Evolutionary frauds, counterfeit artifacts, faked documents are manufactured and inserted in the attempt to create legitimizing historical series where there were none before, or at least no record of any. How much easier this is to do with the computer as it projects, constructs, simulates to fill the unfillable gaps. If we cannot think without the aid of the computer, then thought itself is capitalized. +Modern, rational thought requires even greater precision; since we think and replicate thought through this \e{capital-intensive} mode, one which cannot handle true singularities. Order, repeatability, similarity, pattern, structure, identity is introduced into past sequences\ld\ otherwise, how can there be such a thing as a series? Consider the search for missing links (a medieval, logical technique left over from the invention of the Great Chain of Being) in order to smooth out the series of evolution, to eliminate great and cataclysmic jumps. If we allow these ruptures, we leave room for the reintroduction of the divine, the inexplicable, wild and truly random \e{chance.} Evolutionary frauds, counterfeit artifacts, faked documents are manufactured and inserted in the attempt to create legitimizing historical series where there were none before\ld\ or at least no record of any. How much easier this is to do with the computer as it projects, constructs, simulates to fill the unfillable gaps? If we cannot think without the aid of the computer, then thought itself is capitalized. -There are several kinds of capital (or value) here. One involves the accretion of knowledge. Another can be likened to the yet-to-be-valued good will of an ongoing enterprise. Good will is an intangible, but it can be quantified and entered into the account books of an enterprise, then bought and sold. A third kind is more mundane: energy ingathered and stored up as wealth, credit, money, which is information. A fourth kind is the good antecedants, the precedants, the legitimizing \enquote{genes.} A fifth kind is structure; the orderly arrangement of timed events into a sequence of inevitability: critical-path operations, program evaluation and review technique, scheduling ... one kind of chronology as against other and disruptive chronologies. All together, they constitute the strategic program for running the modern enterprise, the extended \booktitle{Talmud} of western civilization. +There are several kinds of capital (or value) here. One involves the accretion of knowledge. Another can be likened to the yet-to-be-valued good will of an ongoing enterprise. Good will is an intangible, but it can be quantified and entered into the account books of an enterprise, then bought and sold. A third kind is more mundane: energy ingathered and stored up as wealth, credit, money, which is information. A fourth kind is the good antecedents, the precedents, the legitimizing \dq{genes.} A fifth kind is structure; the orderly arrangement of timed events into a sequence of inevitability: critical-path operations, program evaluation and review technique, scheduling\ld\ one kind of chronology as against other and disruptive chronologies. All together, they constitute the strategic program for running the modern enterprise, the extended \booktitle{Talmud} of western civilization. -Whatever really happened in \booktitle{Oedipus} and in the Joseph story is suppressed. The making of the sequence requires rewriting the elements long after the facts, if there were any. These tales are supposed to be exemplary, instructional, fragments of an algorithm. The enterprise must be saved from disruptive thought, from noise, and requires, first and foremost, the storage of a transmittable message. It is in that sense that this sampling of literary\slash mythic works mentioned here are an intrinsic part of the good will of this capital-intensive enterprise called Western Civilization. +Whatever really happened in \booktitle{Œdipus} and in the Joseph story is suppressed. The making of the sequence requires rewriting the elements long after the facts, if there were any. These tales are supposed to be exemplary, instructional, fragments of an algorithm. The enterprise must be saved from disruptive thought, from noise, and requires, first and foremost, the storage of a transmittable message. It is in that sense that this sampling of literary\slash mythic works mentioned here are an intrinsic part of the good will of this capital-intensive enterprise called Western Civilization. -Now, the chief operating executive in Thebes, a subsidiary of a diversified banking and religious consortium called Delphi (also a data bank and intelligence-gathering operation) was called a king. Oedipus. The king has broken the rules; he's an anamoly. In order to prevent the enterprise's demise, Oedipus must be deposed, the management changed to demonstrate that the enterprise continues under the aegis of fate (what \enquote{appears} to be an inevitable series) rather than individuls. The board of directors meets at the shrine of Delphi; it is they who plan Oedipus's deposal, implying retroactively that not only was it fated, but the cause of the crisis lay in Oedipus's very genes (as later Eliot will re-sound this theme, using the key word, \enquote{Tiresias,} to express the barrenness and sterility of modern life). The board are kingmakers. At the same time, this ruling elite, in order to restructure the trajectory, also plan a meta-demise, a long-range, exemplary message which will be transmitted down the ages, a program-scenario for the sacrifice of kings, managers, chief executive officers to maintain order and sequence. This is to be celebrated thousands of times. +Now, the chief operating executive in Thebes, a subsidiary of a diversified banking and religious consortium called Delphi (also a data bank and intelligence-gathering operation), was called a king: Œdipus. The king has broken the rules; he's an anomaly. In order to prevent the enterprise's demise, Œdipus must be deposed, the management changed to demonstrate that the enterprise continues under the ægis of fate (what \dq{appears} to be an inevitable series) rather than individuals. The board of directors meets at the shrine of Delphi; it is they who plan Œdipus's deposal, implying retroactively that not only was it fated, but the cause of the crisis lay in Œdipus's very genes.\fnote{As later Eliot will re-sound this theme, using the key word, \dq{Tiresias,} to express the barrenness and sterility of modern life.} The board are kingmakers. At the same time, this ruling elite, in order to restructure the trajectory, also plan a meta-demise, a long-range, exemplary message which will be transmitted down the ages, a program-scenario for the sacrifice of kings, managers, chief executive officers to maintain order and sequence. This is to be celebrated thousands of times. -What if \emph{all} the characters in \booktitle{Oedipus} were disgusting, then why bother to preserve that memory? But in fact, that's what they were: greedy, grasping, selfish, monstrous, in \emph{no} way noble, and in that sense archetypical. +What if \e{all} the characters in \booktitle{Œdipus} were disgusting, then why bother to preserve that memory? But in fact, that's what they were: greedy, grasping, selfish, monstrous, in \e{no} way noble, and in that sense archetypical. -If we are dealing with no more than a revisionist, mythic history of a political struggle, then the classical Freudian interpretation --- indeed the whole Freudian industry, which needs one interpretation and not others --- loses this stored-up good will. The credibility of one of the foundations of our enterprise goes down the drain. In one version, Oedipus is a hero; Jocasta is not his mother. In another we see the story of a coup against Oedipus. In a third, it is Jocasta who ordered Laius slain. In a fourth we see that indiscriminate sexual behavior, including casual incest, is everyday behavior in royal families. In a fifth we see the play as the celebration of the coup from the point of view of Athens; the defeat of Delphi and the assumption of control by Athens as it struggles to establish hegemony. Ina sixth, we see Oedipus trying to replicate himself through incest. If Oedipus is not exemplary, then good will is devalued. Oedipus could just as soon be Boss Tweed. +If we are dealing with no more than a revisionist, mythic history of a political struggle, then the classical Freudian interpretation---indeed the whole Freudian industry, which needs one interpretation and not others---loses this stored-up good will. The credibility of one of the foundations of our enterprise goes down the drain. In one version, Œdipus is a hero; Jocasta is not his mother. In another we see the story of a coup against Œdipus. In a third, it is Jocasta who ordered Laius slain. In a fourth we see that indiscriminate sexual behavior, including casual incest, is everyday behavior in royal families. In a fifth we see the play as the celebration of the coup from the point of view of Athens; the defeat of Delphi and the assumption of control by Athens as it struggles to establish hegemony. In a sixth, we see Œdipus trying to replicate himself through incest. If Œdipus is not exemplary, then good will is devalued. Œdipus could just as soon be Boss Tweed. -One could make a communications flowchart of these paramemories, trace how this good will was transmitted down through the ages by humans who acted as recievers, repeaters, relays, enhancers, gates, transformers, noise-eliminators, interpolaters, adders, switches, coders and decoders, error-correctors. They recieved and sent these stories down by voice, in writing, or by use of rites, chants, liturgies, ceremonies, dramas, storing them in any variety of devices. From time to time they were retrieved to be used as guidelines to correct present and future behavior. At the same time, humans themselves, as biological creatures, also transmitted a different kind of information and memory: genetic messages. Alongside these two streams, treasures, credit, good will, capital was sent. The memory of a memory: one, events; the second, biology; the third, capital. Built in was an adjustable, timesequencing rescheduler for calender reform. None of the tracks can exist without the other. +One could make a communications flowchart of these paramemories, trace how this good will was transmitted down through the ages by humans who acted as receivers, repeaters, relays, enhancers, gates, transformers, noise-eliminators, interpolators, adders, switches, coders and decoders, error-correctors. They received and sent these stories down by voice, in writing, or by use of rites, chants, liturgies, ceremonies, dramas---storing them in any variety of devices. From time to time, they were retrieved to be used as guidelines to correct present and future behavior. At the same time, humans themselves, as biological creatures, also transmitted a different kind of information and memory: genetic messages. Alongside these two streams, treasures, credit, good will, capital was sent. The memory of a memory: one, events; the second, biology; the third, capital. Built in was an adjustable, time-sequencing rescheduler for calender reform. None of the tracks can exist without the other. -All forms of knowledge intertwine to pass down a climate of opinion, a meta-environment, which becomes part of the present percieved \emph{physical} environment. Indeed, as futurists --- equipment-sellers all --- talk about the next evolutionary step into the information age --- which is also a whole environment --- and annunciate this adaptation to this new climate, \emph{property} seems to become less physical and more ephemeral. The burden of our argument becomes clearer: inheritance. +All forms of knowledge intertwine to pass down a climate of opinion, a meta-environment, which becomes part of the present perceived \e{physical} environment. Indeed, as futurists---equipment-sellers all---talk about the next evolutionary step into the information age---which is also a whole environment---and annunciate this adaptation to this new climate, \e{property} seems to become less physical and more ephemeral. The burden of our argument becomes clearer: inheritance.\fnote{For example: the one subject, the true, corporate---or embodied---\dq{hero} of all of Dickens's works is Inheritance. His characters are always involved with claims on Inheritance. Inheritance as meta-genetics, manifests itself into shells called humans, or characters. The role of Dickensian characters is to move Inheritance through history. Each one of Dickens's novels involves a search for a programming error, which, when corrected, allows for the continuity of inheritance outside of the fates of the characters involved. To use inheritance self-indulgently is to descend into sin.} -(For example: the one subject, the true, corporate --- or embodied --- \enquote{hero} of all of Dickens's works is Inheritance. His characters are always involved with claims on Inheritance. Inheritance as meta-genetics, manifests itself into shells called humans, or characters. The role of Dickensian characters is to move Inheritance through history. Each one of Dickens's novels involves a search for a programming error, which, when corrected, allows for the continuity of inheritance outside of the fates of the characters involved. To use inheritance self-indulgently is to descend into sin.) +The newest version of these old inheritance stories is sociobiology, a kind of biodeterministic Calvinism. Into the observation of nature are inserted these birth-mythologies and breeding-and-replication logics of ancient Israel, Greece, Egypt, Rome, and the consanguinity-obsessed Middle Ages. The carrying down of these treasures---saved from the ruins of shattered civilizations---finds its way into modern myths of adaptability and evolution, even within the present twenty year span. To this theme is added inevitable causality. -The newest version of these old inheritance stories is sociobiology, a kind of biodeterministic Calvinism. Into the observation of nature are inserted these birth-mythologies and breeding-and-replication logics of ancient Israel, Greece, Egypt, Rome, and the consanguinity-obsessed Middle Ages. The carrying down of these treasures, saved from the ruins of shattered civilizations, finds its way into modern myths of adaptability and evolution, even within the present twenty year span. To this theme is added inevitable causality. - -As an asset to Western Civilization, what kinds of valuation can be placed on these long gone events? How can they be calculated into the asset picture? One must begin by reviewing, assessing, quantifying and valuing these intangibles, these pools of good will. How do these carry-forwards contribute to the development of rational calculation in its newest, computer-assisted modes, translated into assets and liabilities? What distortions, mythologies, religious superstitions have crept in and how did they get there? Or, since everything can be informationalized (if specified) and assigned a currency value, does it matter? +As an asset to Western Civilization, what kinds of valuation can be placed on these long gone events? How can they be calculated into the asset picture? One must begin by reviewing, assessing, quantifying and valuing these intangibles, these pools of good will. How do these carry-forwards contribute to the development of rational calculation in its newest computer-assisted modes, translated into assets and liabilities? What distortions, mythologies, religious superstitions have crept in and how did they get there? Or, since everything can be informationalized (if specified) and assigned a currency value, does it matter?
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