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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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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?