3 : stay alert
“The English live with the turmoil of two incompatible passions:
a strange appetite for adventure
and a strange appetite for legality”
Jorge Luis Borges [Chesterton and the Labyrinths of the Detective Story]
( °︡ ͜ʖ °︠ )
In the last chapter I tried to make a well-structured text but I failed miserably mixing concepts and feelings, beyond the pale. It was derived from my lack of idiomatic knowledge, my leaning to the chaos and by living myself on this conflict, until now, too dreadful to dwell on. I walked chuffed through the quicksand of the human condition as a struggle for freedom but no for equality or harmony. It’s not possible to be unaware of the historical experience of the human being neither hold harmless the own lifespan. This tough reminder of the struggle for coexistence between Others by addressing the dimension of present time configured my second shattered chapter.
I also tried to continue one fact from the first chapter, intelligence alike accumulations of information, and bodies. As it happens in modern business enterprises –flexibility, market uncertainty- we have lots of generations entitled to love by an artificial intelligence on data analytics, Tinder, love easily boxed into a folder, followers. Information cheated by an Instagram filter, and vouched by instant messengers. An illusion of multiple relationships, long-distance relations, old and new generations toying with emotions but most of all toying with their own sense. The resoult is less startling afterwards.
According to the domination’s speech modality, Power mould our language turning it a phoney factory of truths. In Spain, there was one very important thing which I learned from; how to proceed from a long dictatorship into a -respectful and tolerant- state of democracy through the murky waters of a cogni-totalitarian regime.
“What is controlled is tolerated, and what is feared is respected, a tolerant society is a society that tends to be dominated and must be repressed. And as such, the electoral fraud game is seen the only option/opinion.”
In Spain I had been taught how easy it is to shift the very forms of organization and struggle of the revolt in one step; invoking the emotional intelligence to prevent a critical and constructive knowledge. I understand language as a text tool. But Power modifies its surface and designs an Orwellian “newspeak”. This surface is what separates us as subjects from the archive that it signifies. We can’t underestimate the value of language and how it strongly refers to us like a solidified datascape. Primarily, during the permanent state of alert of the last 40 years, which has two objectives; legitimize the clustering of wealth and to boycott effective measures to prevent the upcoming ecological catastrophe. The 1970s can be seen in retrospect a transition -from space age to new age- caused by the culture shock of seeing the images of Earth taken from the Moon. This sense of cosmic insignificance is not uncommon neither the culture shock. Gods were developed from this entry point. In recent decades a bemused humanity mutualized his apparent insignificance by blinking screens through and through. So a new standpoint transcends our parochial, and anthropocentric perspective; a new factory of truth. The dissolution of language parallels the shattering of the self into the new age.
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Age of information? Not at all, rather texts-to-be-seen than texts-to-be-read. Anyway, our biggest historical failure has been to not have followed the wording of our dream, neither having built it according to our own measure, to our gauge of the distribution of the sensible.
For after all it is of little value to have built a room of one’s own if we are drown to kill the narrator.
To finish this recap of speed texts and the ordinary regimes of (re)production of truths, I ought to say that feminism; the feminist movement is one of the most important incorporations against Capitalism. It designates to us that the roles of domination are social and cultural constructions that are scholarly, internalized, reproduced and transmitted from generation to generation. However, the ruling feminism only provokes political, linguistic and cultural changes that strengthen capitalism in its restructuring, not attacking what is inherent in it, such as private property and inheritance, or the State and its laws. Patriarchy persuades itself the notion of being rotten and weakened due to the key victories of feminist movements in recent decades. In reality, domestic violence, sexist discrimination, and feminicide just keep going.
THE dynamizing alarm
For first time in the earthling history, capitalism is teetering as well neoliberalism does. Although the inherent capacity of States to put a human face on, allows to lengthen its representation, that face/mask is the nation as cultural identity and its validation into Capital “on the go”. Instead of the reach of the peoples’ heritage; historic and cultural, to stay in a social coexistence. The profitable alarm turned out to be a social matter co-opted by the Nation favouring one direction individualism, placing the vernacular social function in a well-structured honeycomb, whereas, accommodating the human algorithms in motions. This change occurred just a century ago.
࿐
At a glance we should see that only a century ago, the act of writing a letter was a crucial matter of remaining close to people. “The ease possibility of letter-writing must — seen theoretically — have brought into the world a disintegration of souls to the world” wrote Franz Kafka in his last letter to Milena, because it is a contextual conversation with ghosts; and not only with the ghost of the receiver, but also with the own ghosts. In the current state of alert, the ITC (information and communication technologies) often offer things that have already been chewed. Today the collective vertigo is unavoidable by this speed fisting media communication.
꧁꧂
A man who published lavish praises to new-technology in his 1950’s 1960’s was Marshall Mcluham, among his mentors were Edgar Allan Poe and G.K Chesterton whom in turn did before. “The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology — mechanization.” [The medium is the massage] At first glance what I learnt from some old-fashioned techno-globalist clichés about an interconnected world for today’s civilized man perhaps is a sort of consolation, a flair for justice poetic. I guess how easily the wise man thinks about technology, or science, as a consequence or developed product of the human being. Pop-intellect-actualité always is able to depict a longstanding story of achievements and failures but blinkered to see the -line marks of autocracy- upon them. It reminds me the tale of Kafka — once again “Before the Law” … “It receives you when you come and it relinquishes you when you go”. Should I look the door like an extension of my eye? Should I look the mechanic-frame alike an extension of my eye? Should I guess the extension as a soak time? Anyway tools are extensions of us because its conviviality is the output and absolute scale condition of order, or failure. Finally, this warning of catastrophic instability is the Natural Law and designing Freedom.
How -tech- is adapted in an organization -to reinforce the rules of a societary play-game, strengthen the institutional bureaucracy, tighten up the criminal, social, and moral laws- could be read in this painting brought from the book “Structural Stability and Morphogenesis” by Rene Thom.
“We live in straight lines, yet every man is in fact a labyrinth”. Wrote Kafka to his poet friend Janouch.
ˋ ୨୧ ˊ
If we consider the web a second we find swiftly answer to most extents. Man interiorises the frustration but can’t control live. So he creates fictions which controls himself, monotorizing himself. The net system of representative governments is the perfect fraud resting on itself. The man formed gods in his own image. He even tries to conceive a technology formed in his own image, pious cant. The superficial forms are actually inseparable from the way Man is constructed by the world. According conveniently to uphold the hegemony of those in Power the line CAN mutate in beetle CAN mutate in labyrinth CAN mutate in mass CAN mutate into a puppet cat.
The word “alert” comes
from the italian [all’erta] mandatory,
(be+upright).
The reasons for Power to catch the radiance of our eyes is a clinching evidence; the power of men’s beliefs and illusions mainly are greater than their facts, in fact, clog their acts. In fact, the innovation of scientists has always been concerned with the deed and maintenance of routines. Personalities like Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Ingvar Kamprad see themselves as romantic heirs from a humanitarian legacy. Although these rainmakers are only sorcerer’s apprentices, coachers, outstripped executives for the positivist petit-bourgeoisie; mere bureaucrats placed in institutions “on the go” for a deal or a sale.
I take ‘Institution’ to mean an organism “interacting” in its environment, weaving the sheduled lines with the environment to reduce its variety. In the meantime, the techno-bureaucracy (indoors) needn’t interact with people, it’s invariably producing itself, and catering for its controller and expasionist nature; Capitalism. The West World Settler Rules.
⁀➷
The colonization embedded in the regular living is proof that the century nineteenth would probably still be going on today. Priti Patel refused to grant asylum to an 11-year-old girl. The girl, who is thriving at school and only speaks English was brought to the UK in 2012 by her mother, herself a victim of female genital mutilation….* The likely Western superiority is based on self-destructive individual interests…
*voxpoliticalonline — 03-July-2020
The Alarm
From immemorial times the strategy of Power always has been to isolate the individuals, managing his privacy to separate him from his most intimate relationships. In 1887 Albert Parsons –editor and printer of the labour paper The Alarm- was hanged with another three strugglers in an ‘national’ trial. On behalf of these anarchist martyrs the celebration of the international Labour Day had been created.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” said the prosecutor, “convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society”.
The distinctiveness of these institutions was plundering the old poor world and emerging up a new poor world in their own countries to control and use in behalf of a “developing world”.
꧂
World
World
Words …echoed in the mind of K.
Acquainted with the vested rights
Anthropology -western institution– come along as science at the same time capitalism began in the settler stage and -consequently- it required an assorted knowledge of the “strange customs” of those peoples whom Empires tended to submit in the settlements. The vested rights set up moons ago, are rekindled reigniting a dominant frequency; the present widespread colonialism. Nonetheless, old slavery ends but lingered with a clearing cheque.
If we look back we could examine the technical progress in the labour world, when the progression of wage incomes was faster than that of productivity– in the late 1960s- we can see how it triggered an extraordinary inflationary process. In addition to an imminent taming, the dependence on rationalization of labour and Taylorization, increasing the size of companies and the concentration of capital. Capital productivity in global terms. Business management was led by expensive hierarchical cadre managers. The first oil shock and the 1974–75 recession allowed employers to develop a series of transformations taking advice from consultants, specialists, and sociologists, the new anthropologists for the new colonialism. Here I need to remark the false split between proceedings and structure. I need to remark the full swing between the micro and the macrostructure.
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For the last 40/50 years we have been witnessing the tournament of the “revolutionary reformism” which acquires a reassuring virtue, to those/these periods, we could call them -clash time- to don’t fall in the perverse myth “clash of civilizations”. New charismatic personalities are elected to control the population. Above all supported by the (unlimited) of the law, I mean; Law is always utopia, (ou-topos_no-place) an ideal myth of the cave. We allow the no-limited divine justice and grace on behalf of the merry saint settler. Prime example, Iran, 1979.
If we go to the technologies used –by the middle-class– in the household production, we can see how the housewife replaced herself the role from supervisor of ‘workers’ to machine-operator. The machine tools were called ‘consumer durables’ and not ‘producer durables’. In the Western Culture the women who didn’t take care of household chores were accused bad women and became a nightmare in the patriarchal imaginary.
If we see the reproductive system are we the men, and not women, who need orgasm to be able to give birth. The female orgasm is much stimulating than the male one. The fear of/to female sexuality leads men to regulate it; avoiding social chaos. As it happens; 200 million women are mutilated throughout the planet, without the possibility of orgasms they will be faithful women to their husbands, viewed from an exclusively economical angle; it is composed also of political, social and judicial elements. The pretty ‘macho’ is harsh, cold, passionately strong but emotionally mutilated. Sexuality is a biological, a natural technique, it actives our imagination and our tipsy dream. Here one must remark corporeal techniques, biological techniques, as methods into communication with the mystic. I suppose it’s the reason because human being lives a very long childhood and the main characteristic is ‘caring’. Here our brain take place for many years until it reaches the maturity necessary and acquire the necessary autonomy and self-awareness. This is a work hardly charted at face value.
Anyway in the UK 77% of the National Health Service are women workers. They are acquainted with death, birth, damage, with smell and bodily fluids. They have always been in charge of healing, assisting the childbirth and laying out dead bodies to be buried. However, women still bearing the myth of being princesses given to a single person –burden- dedicated to a job of fidelity, patience and loyalty, to be at hand, his vulnerable -virginal- loyalty will be rewarded some day.
Under the inquisitorial regime of the new economics each social phenomenon is situated in it. Furthermore since –technique- sharped a new environment serving new economics, the ‘ethic cares’ never mind. Between the barbaric old and the civilized regime ‘ethics cares’ appears on the surface as a withe-washing…
Between the two World Wars the virtuous liberal capitalist discovered the “domestic interior” of economics.
‘‘…to make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.’’ Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944)
*
Today’s modern comforts have been filled global existence, it shall allow to confirm no spaces to act away from surveillance. Likewise, many talks are becoming too weird as result. I received a message just now which says “(I’m) eating at the mo” I asked where was this unknown place and “mo” means moment. This seems that acronyms in UK come out in a long time and I’m a Martian really. Thus at this ‘mo’ I sniff from the microwave a ready meal. I estimate that among my three mates they only cook fresh once a week really. Seeking out the nexus between the ubiquity of our minds (see internet) and our scattered activities, it’s easy to see the cheat; to be sceptical about the world demands, an awkward conjuring in the human race activities afterwards. The construction of an identity is the plough at once individual and social constructivism. When a person lacks exploration in what makes him free in favour of machines or technologies, the history stops and our biography stops abruptly. Another fussy version of –comforts- are the adages of cynical well-off intellectuals. I think in the smug Bernard-Henry Levy or Michel Houellebecq for example. Maybe here one might talk about questions of distance and ‘western’ privilege, media-franchise thinkers. For them any sign of human disgrace is travelled by tragic visions toward hysteria as a rats’ race. Such a trap! Shortened words, shortened thinkers. However, these ‘thinkers’ remind me hamsters on a spinning wheel, always stepping forward but getting nowhere.
★
Stay alert is an absolute awry leitmotiv because people is cornered by commodities in a waiting room.
Whenever -stay alert- made us raw ingredient and contemporaries of a big selfie. I mean; people spent more time trapped in front of a camera than asking about what lens are having agency of our lives, arising indoctrination and naivete self-adulation. In a similar halted vein, something disturbed to Thomas Edison in the early XX century. “We stumble along for a while -in a letter to Henry Ford- trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we’ve got to start to make this world over” –wrote cynically worried about monopolistic economics meanwhile keeping hope in a rational capitalism. He hadn’t the capacity to see the very antagonism between labour and capital. But…
“…the welfare state was transformed from an instrument designed to support the capitalist firm, into an instrument of socialised productivity. From the welfare state to the state as producer; from the mass worker to the socialised worker” (A.Negri-1989)
Anyway commodity, the greater comfort, invaded our existence for good, states, money, technologies, bots, neural networks, advertisings, conspiracy theories, cultural consumption, monogamous heteronormative consumerism, flop loves. But how we can ‘stay alert and control the virus’ of capitalism?
Whenever the brain is glutted by collapses keeps going sluggishly…
…whether brain is the factory of the 21 century. “Brain without organs” as said Deleuze as response to the fordist industrial labour agency, alerted to cannibalistic subservience. Looking at an anatomy-graphic example; on the basis of many studies we find that those who are consuming more meat have a higher overall risk of mortality, cardiovascular and cancer. Annual global production increased from 71 million tonnes in 1960, rising to nearly 337 in 2019. When the world population didn’t even double in number. The chubby brain needs bigger slaughterhouses.
Despite the hindrances we value our lives on function, degree, or expectative of being shared in a “commodity-structure” even the critiques against capitalism have been collected into the “commodity-structure” imperative, as the hungarian Lukács wrote in 1922. Furthermore, the epistemic or political register of the critique of representation; one century later we are in big trouble to face consensual non-monogamy relationships or break out patterns and laws of the patriarchal hierarchy of cupidity. One might claim that an individualistic notion of freedom is a privilege at the expense of others. Is not -the one true love- the form of a clash waiting to erupt from the earliest paradise times? How easy men have learnt to avoid the apple! The warfare state is embedded in crippling social relationships, upsetting a likely effective organization. I’m not claiming here for a sexual revolution but becoming Other, an action of subjectivity turning out multiplicity rather than straight unity and speedup essentialisms; sex/gender, race, mechanisms of exclusivity… to embed in a set of laws vouching for this enslaved moral fact of our times.
✣
But nevertheless, more than ever I’m acquainted with solitude because of the fact I moved to England (pause) and I did it a bit before pandemic. This sort of state is a condition which appealed to me to develop a better self-reliance and less dependence in love in ‘old-fashioned terms’. Another significant confidence gained is the opening power of freedom, I mean; in omnilateral diffusion. I’m rejuvenating the awareness of myself. I’m tired about couples behaving differently due to the fact to be a couple, and furthermore splitting mind from heart. Barauch Spinoza once said –no one knows what a body could do, what is capable of, when not determined by the mind- and I learnt the lesson this year. Rejecting the idea that body and mind, reason and emotion, are split. I can hear accusations of be an extremist by put the finger on the wounds. But this is my perky accommodation throughout the year. To put the finger over the sore spot. I’m not comfortable in a codified area, zoomable.
Again on the question of cogni-totalitarism; is good to hear to the Kenian writer Nguigi wa Thiong’o
“[Colonialism’s] most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world…. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relation to others.”
Into a greater communion with people I no longer allow my heart to be held captive by fear. Patriarchal masculinity compels men to be successful and abide women submissive. I left time ago all those polarised sex roles. Only a couple years ago I had some girls intimidating me, sexual harassment included, at the time in that town “exploded” — in the anarchist mo(ve)ment — a “radical ‘feminist’ wing” spreading upsetting acts of punishments. During a time I considered to move out town because of it. Commodity declined any criticism to separate the wheat from the chaff. Despite the hindrances, shame and cringe, those girls went back to their yoga and chi gung, readings about emasculation and the movement remained as it was. Autonomy is not a state fixed in one institution. It is freely becoming in direct actions for another possible world so on.
More than ever before population have become a ‘patient’ so-called; a model of would-be ill. More than ever States drilled population and raw energy in what it should be, tamed in the service of the ‘wary’ social order, and in behalf of a clinical commodity. Medicine business is at stake and the sorcerer handles the State with the sharp decline of citizens. I must repeat a sentence witnessed up lines. “From immemorial times the strategy of Power always has been to isolate the individuals, managing his privacy, to separate him from his most intimate relationships.” In the so-called “primitive” societies, anthropology teach us that medicine was a paramount key of social control as well teach us how and why those societies were based on multiple, on equal exchange and on social consent, instead of an accumulation of power.
Nowadays societies are in permanent physical composition, or decomposition if the steam of accumulation is harder. Twentieth century was awash with new devices. The current century welcomed us with the alarm known as “Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, Y2K bug, the Y2K glitch, or Y2K”. On 2001, the Twin Towers event promoted a decade of alarming fear and entitled administrations to accept awful things as Abu Ghraib. Today is the 75th-year anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. At this point would be interesting to recover the idea that it is not only cruelty that kills but ignorance. With a military sense of humour, the bombs dropped were cheerfully called “Little boy” and “Fat man”, the pilot said very convinced that it was his best work. Before the systematic planning of death, it was necessary to personify the scramble of ignorance that human beings can achieve. It could be better said in Conradian words “heart of darkness” or in Hannah Arendt’s words;
“the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion, he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement”. [The origin of Totalitarianism, 1951.]
Before the end of the nineteenth century the “Empire” had become into “the empire of business”. Biofarmaceutical companies as Novartis or Aventis are direct heirs, and if we look at the leading force in electronic computing is easy to see the roots in the long boom after the WW2. Biotech innovations are already deteriorating in superfluous clinical efficiency. It’s not difficult to understand looking how they spend more on marketing than in research and development. For a deeper understanding. * [The shock of the old] David Edgerton
The impact resulted from the bureaucracy created to protect the State is absolutely embedded into our natural environment. It has evolved from the local common law paving routs to swift subordination. The impact strived in everyday life to contain and channel insurgent masses was therefore achieved. The patient is attuned to the illness from outset. New standards deriving once again from the process of institutional alignment. According to the ‘normal distribution’ each little boy, each fat man, each misty lady belongs to a mass in a tiresome and familiar homogenized setting. The new environment arises the pathological illness that might be termed “presentism”. It means; the trend that affirms that past and future are not part of reality, since the only thing existing is the present. History becomes a myth tightening time, history, becomes mythic. But the mortal ‘patient’ cannot be alone. Nobody…
“no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone” T.S.Elliot.
The modern science research — biology and cybernetics especially — is developed to be in short-term studies forward endless mantra of evolutionism at once doomsday scenario. This is to deny the incidence of established temporal periods when the extrapolation of the future based on the past is both possible and necessary; it is simple to emphasise that the predictability of material processes recurrently breakdowns during events of rapid changes and tragic mantras of extinction. I’m trying to show the tricky peril that we face in thinking…
//
/ Sciences creating perception/// thermo-state /// tiresome
///
Overestimating the power of the present the historical sense is buried by the rise of the great West. Knowledge is a magnificent reality- it says, but inventing a new tradition and avoiding unwanted roots which reckon the native rights and vernacular laws, keeping the warrants of the institutions save. Only the exotic and folkloric is commercialized as a survival commodity as well as a primal reflection.
To reconsider the following postulate is not at all upsetting; manifestation of emotion beyond social and cultural comes from a unique ancestral condition. Darwin said “When the same state of mind is expressed everywhere with remarkable uniformity, the fact is interesting in itself, as it shows a close similarity of physical structure and intellectual state in all races of the human species”. In spite of the “cruel smile” of Asians invoked as a bulwark to support ‘culturalist’ theories, I am in no doubt about which ancestral universality is in steak today. It still developing the mind and the logic of humankind in spite of institutionalized tyrannies. The very perseverance of tragic drama theories must be recognised as emerging from a juggling tradition of agencies with the thresholds of primary perceptions.
* *
As far as I’m concerned, I started this book with the slight smile of my boss painted in mind. “Go home Daniel, go”. Stay at home, stay alert. I hadn’t taken sufficient account to my fever because I felt myself in a mosaic of nonsense. As a result, I literally divorced mind from existence and thinking from feeling. As a bid for total stasis and wilful blindness I overcame the illness isolated in a total upsetting nowness. News ruled by a clueless Government, a population divided between oblivious to the virus and the others, –mostly teleworkers- panicked and frightened about the present time. Susceptible individuals prompted into a tinder box becoming insensitive to engagement. It seems people only needs in the room Wi-Fi and a chamber pot. No matter what kind of restrictions, regulations, traffic rules, taxes, or unhealthy legislation have been introduced.
Not at all the economic growth within the framework of hypes explains the motions and sedentary behaviours of population, there’s a much abysmal phenomenon, and it, -the social transformation- is the rigid line or threshold splitting public/private, economics/society… Visible dialectical materialisms to encounter easily the predicament of whom hold nature with contempt.
Why scientists find so compelling precepts becoming them concepts? It seems completely stupid (see book “two cheers for anarchism” James C. Scott) to believe in “red light removal” can changes the world. I’m a bit tired about all these old anthropologists who are attracted to anarchism theories. They have very good studies about the peoples of Zomie or other communities lacking a government indeed. But I drop dead by boredom when I read the spontaneous anecdotes of these anthropologists ‘embracing anarchism’. Academicians after all repeating the same fact since the nineteenth century over and over, testing their “truths” via dialectical materialism. Haven’t they take enough account to the cognitive capitalistic project?
I always distrusted in those good philosophers who write things like “Critical thinking is, on the contrary, a rigorously materialistic exercise: thinking of the whole through the parts, discrediting power, conceiving truth as a complex field of forces. It is what we need most now”. A. F-S. This reminds me the perpetual race of Achilles and the tortoise. Men are rigorously obsessed by rules. Human finitude is a dreary fact. So he is obsessed to gauge the whole -patchy- shebang round him but to refuse what himself is. Perhaps this drab source of all facts as parts is fundamental to understand the “race”, and how “that” point, is never reached or materialized. Man is the result of his own history; and this is the axis of its self-levelling range.
«There is only one way of looking at things,
which is see them in their entirety ».
John Ruskin
Sancho Panza asserts in “The Quixote”, that “each one is the son of his works; and under being a man I can become a pope ». Only the merits you get mind, at least, to be recognizable.
In his [The Order of Things] in the section titled “The Retreat and Return of the Origin” Foucault describes man as “cut off from the origin that would make him contemporaneous with his own existence”.
Mutatis mutandis the “origin” of men vanish in rear-view outlooks while the song goes round and round banging up the riders in a cell. The square one is often forgotten in a traffic intersection or roundabout.
Moreover, I’m stuck in the middle of this book. Retrieving from my memory references as a prankish mad gambler. I‘m messing around trivial criticisms judging mental health across tamed civil societies; accumulating evidence for what?. Instead, I will put all my writings aside for some time. I must go to square one and polish my text. I reckon that my English is not skilled enough to adventures. It’s not legal enough to intimate with the english-reader.
To finish I will bring a quote from a book that I started to read after the intersection of Hanoi. I started this chapter spoken “negatively” about him so I bought a new book “The media and Formal Cause”. Marshall McLuhan. Nevertheless, I’m strongly beguiled with this book of his.
Chapter 3. [Formal causality in Chesterton]
The style is the response of the artist to his audience and its needs. Chesterton’s style was playful in an age that was very earnest, and his perceptions and thoughts were paradoxical or multifaceted in a time that was full of intense specialism in politics and economics and religion.
[ . . . ] Perhaps, before moving on, I should pause to indicate why Western philosophers and scholars may have shirked consideration of formal causality in the study of the arts and sciences. Since scarcely anybody has studied the audience of any writer from Plauto to the present, there most surely be both a profound and a simple reason for so vast and consistent an omission. I suggest that the reason is to be found in the visual bias of Western man. Visual man is typically concerned with the lineal and the connected and the logical. Visual order has regard to figure and not to ground. The audience is always the hidden ground rather than the figure on any discourse. The ground is discontinuous, murky and dynamic, whereas the figure tends to be clear and distinct and static. However, without the interplay of figure and ground, no art or knowledge is possible. It might even be argued that the abrupt and the bumpy and grotesquely sprockety contours of Chesterton’s prose are very much a response of his sensitivity to a perverse and misbegotten public that he earnestly but good-naturedly was determined to redeem from its banalities.”
