Play it again, Yortlebluzzgubbly (2)

There's some really great stuff available as a podcast from the BBC world service.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/


The last 2 episodes of The Forum have been of particularly interest to the intellectual heavyweights (ha!) whose philosophies underpin the activities of the RAC (not that one) who's only official public mouthpeice you are reading now. In the last Forum, Tim Flannery discussed the possible emergence of the super-organism, a new life-form composed of the collaboration of all mankind, solving the global problems he's created (mankind that is, not Tim Flannery) and becoming a planetry consciousness. He states that globalisation could be the beginning of this development and it's certainly worth ruminating on that, particularly as the last blog post approvingly referred to the work of Peter Watkins who slagged off globalisation good and proper. While we're on the subject I'm aware that a line I used in review of his films was lifted directly from the introduction to 'La Commune' I'd linked to. An embarrassing accident that certainly sheds some light on how easy it is to think you've had a clever opinion whereas in fact it's just someone elses you've only just been exposed to and then forgotten. When I say 'you' I mean of course 'me'. You know, that crazy idiot pariah person.

Crazy idiot pariah or not, I'm way ahead of Tim Flannery. Here's a 2006 post from the now defunct EMPIRE OF CRACKERS blog originally titled Play It Agin, Yortlebluzzgubbly, which is of course a quote from Alan Moore's Ballad of Halo Jones. The picture which accompanied this peice is shown here (slightly too big-must fix!) and features characters from the Tartakovsky/McCracken stable:




"
One of the interesting features of life is its tendency to form into more and more complex forms despite irresistible entropy. Like the enemy in our endless dualist world myths that divide the world into chaos and order, evil and good, Ahriman and Ormizhad, physics presents us with a name for the force that causes ordered structures to collapse and diffuse. Perhaps my human brain is too programmed by culture to see it any other way.

BUT the reality behind this is that life uses this constant movement as the source of the energy to build these structures we consume , inhabit and form part of. More and more complex structures develop out of the chaos of these collisions with a kind of ratcheting; every increase in complexity increasing the ability of these structures to accumulate more energy. Of course, being designed by chaos, most structures fail to achieve this objective but they don't last long in the game of course. Accidentally better random forms soon proliferate and find better ways of filling the space and accumulate that energy. Some even work out how to replicate themselves.

Six steps in the history of evolution from non-living forms to intelligent community:

1-Atoms (eg Carbon)
2-Molecules (Amino acids)
3-Complex Molecules (DNA)
4-Cells (Amoebas)
5-Organs/Organisms (Humans)
6-Super-Organisms (Communities)

At the moment, we're between 6 and 7, but what form will 7 take? We've been trying through lots of structures that aint worked or are Homo-Erectus*-like intermediates like city states, empires, nations, monarchies, fascism, communism etc. The United Nations is a hopeful start to a planetry organism but has built into it the inherent weakness of it's own structure, nation states. At its most visible level it is a body for the leaders of humans, or at least, the leaders of artificially-defined areas containing communities of humans. The ratchet effect may not work with such fragile cogs.

The key is voluntary co-operation. If it cannot be obtained find other ways of obtaining it. Ultimately coercion is loosening that ratchet and letting the entropy take us back a few more squares on the big board. (Jesus Koosie! These metaphors are all over the place!) Co-operation exists on every level of life, for example, the Mitochondria in our cells that allow us to use oxygen were originally parasitic organisms that invaded our ancestor cells and well.....love.

Stage 7 is the Empire of Crackers and the germ in the seed has emerged on the continent of North America and is spreading its information round the world on its predecessor's communications systems. The future isn't a military nightmare like Star Trek but an acceptance of the universal truths that what is best for individual is best for the world, that desire is there to help us not command us and that no man should feast while another man starves. I've been accused of having a vision tainted by former communist indoctrination that seeks big truths and big solutions but ain't no-one going to turn me around. I'm going all the way to stage 10 with the little fluffy pink one**and the big stoopid dragon because the universe is love!!!

*This sounds gay. Seriously, it's one of our antecedents.
**This sounds gay. Um it might be but I ain't. Like I care! Don't give me that feminine side crap. Only 1 chromosome is sexual. Therefore I'm 22/23 a woman. So there.
"



I'm well aware there's a lot wrong with that post. For one thing there are 23 pairs of large linear nuclear chromosomes in human cells, though I'm correct in pointing out that only 1 pair differentiates males from females. You get the point. The Zoroastrian truth-god Ormizhad is actually spelled Ahura-Mazda, a confusion in my mind originating from Philip K Dick. As for the 'emerging in the North American Continent' bit, I'd probably be less inclined to include that now, though that was where the internet begun which may be a significant tool in this evolutionary process. It was also where Crackers came from so...er....good. This is still his army! Or her army. Whatever.

Now going back to Flannery v Watkins globalisation- good or shit debate, I'll try and sort this out as best I can now. Globalisation is obviously a necessary process in the formation of the coming super-organism but it is a globalisation of univeral self-interested solidarity rather than the existing model of a global free-for-all that increases the rate at which all aspects of human life is commoditized. Free trade between humans and their associations must be the basis of the enlightened world-community (communism, I'm guessing, comes much later when the term no longer means what it does now) but in no sense is the current globalised world market 'free trade'. Free associations of humans are normally stamped down by the arbitrary, hierachical and immoral associations like nation states and multi-national corporations, which may be reasonably successful systems of control, manufacture and distribution but exist merely to perpetuate themselves and will seek to abort the coming super-organism as a function of their own survival consciously or unconsciously by their actions. Yes that makes it all clear. Um. As for the justified concern that globalisation is creating a global monoculture where the diversity of human and non-human systems is being eradicated, this I believe also a result of the flawed competitive national-capitalist model whereby all human communities are forced to follow a uniform developmental strategy with a fixed single outcome. Within the coming super-organism where co-operation rather than competition resumes it's place as the predominant evolutionary driver, a diversity of form benefits all componants of the super-organism and this era will begin to see more interesting forms of life develop where the divisions between male and female, human and animal, material and spiritual will be questions of day to day life choices rather than the oppressive monoliths they are at this time.

Participation and complicity

Oh yeh, incidently, we're at war again. What? How did that happen? No wonder I'm having some kind of pathetic emotional breakdown! Hopefully the military action begun today in Libya will conclude pretty sharpish one way or other. Perhaps a temporary partition between the government of Libya and a UN-administered mandate until public participation can began in either or both bits of Libya. There's been some worrying talk among politicians today about no longer tolerating a rogue state just south of Europe. Well I'm sorry but that's not our business. Perhaps some Libyans do support the current regime but we know some don't and in a localised area they're supposedly under UN protection whatever that means. I'd still rather have seen the Idi Amin solution, whereby the neighbours intervene to restore stability to their borders but given both Tunisia and Egypt are both undergoing dramatic political changes themselves, it wasn't very likely.

It must feel pretty nice for PM Cammers (soon to be Cammo?) to be attacking a regime so publicly courted by the previous government, Blair's especially. Will this international coalition go on to support the democratic rights of all the oppressed in the middle east? The unrepresented majority in the Kingdoms of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia etc and the Republics of Yemen and Syria? How about the Palestinians? Hamas in Gaza responded to an Israeli assassination bombing with an attack of dozens of rockets today. Which side does our coalition believe is the aggressor in this case?

Wattoo-Wattoo never used violence to solve problems. Hence the picture. See.

I hope at the end of all this we at least find out whether Al Megrahi really did carry out the Lockerbie bombing as the evidence against him did look pretty weak. That silly trade-off where we pretended we felt sorry for a dying man really didn't clear anything up. I'm all for releasing terminally ill people from prison but it would have been nice to have had to have gone through the evidence again in a court before releasing what may have been a mass murderer.

Anyway I promised to talk about The Monoform. I think it's best left to be described by radical film-maker Peter Watkins, where I'm getting all this shit from:
http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7PfaY9B27s

The second one, from 2001, is his introduction to La Commune which is an extraordinary film. A probably incomplete version in about 20-30 parts was available on YouTube till fairly recently and it really was an engaging peice of work. The enthusiasm of the participants (it seems wrong to call them actors) was so evident that at times it really felt as if you were watching live, current events. Something it shares with another classic Peter Watkins film 'Culloden' from the mid sixties and its contemporary, the masterpeice 'Battle of Algiers' which is actually a fictional film but filmed in a very similar style.

Anyway one of things I was very impressed with in this film introduction was how Watkins is aware of the paradoxes of his own position whilst being utterly certain that he's right. Most people on a the screen telling what you should think try to intimidate you with dogmatic authority but his own informal almost improvised style invites you to participate and ponder ourselves whether we're having our consciousness fragmented to keep us feeding (with junk food and junk information) or whether the media trend he's flagged up, and let's not for a moment deny he's onto something, is actually a symptom of our late-industrial highly captalised interconnected civilisation. Is the monoform just a highly-sucessful meme co-evolving with the mass-information-culture?

Personally I think that the Monoform has got a bit boring. It's totally ruined BBC2 for one thing and I'd love to see a diversity of informational culture. I'd like to think that new forms of participation are evolving in the rich primordial sea of the internet. It's all dependent on our own sense of responsibility for our own lives and the life around us. We have to face up to what we are including recognising our complicity in the suffering of others whether it be from the weapons being used in our name or the raw materials clawed out of the ground by slaves for our talky-magic boxes. Possibly including the one you're reading this on.

More likely you're reading this on the screen I'm looking at right now. Hello! Don't go nuts, you.

It's late. Better stop.

*********

It was too late and I'd long stopped making any sense. It's now Sunday night going into Monday morning at the end of this odd weekend. I don't feel I really got to grips with the enormity of this 'Monoform' stuff. Once you start looking for it it becomes ubiquitously apparent. Perhaps that's just because of the looking? What is communication? What happens when it fails? I think we're seeing it all the time.

One thing I certainly liked about the introduction film, though which the film-maker critisised himself for was the simplicity and honesty of the talking-head monologue. The best playwrights have always made use of this, of re-personalising communication. Today information exchange is often devoid of emotional context and is vulnerable to catastrophic misunderstanding. I suppose it's better for those who are classified as having autistic spectrum disorders and I've encounterd many on the internet who thrive communicating in a way that is less ambigious. I wonder if labelling them as disordered is really that useful. They certainly present divergent cognitive models and it may be in some conceptial environments those models may work better.

Anyway I'm rambling again. So much to say. To nobody. Who cares? I'm reading this back and smiling at my shortcomings. Maybe I'll try the monologue myself. After all I can't fail to participate with this captive audience. I think he thinks I'm mental. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong. Maybe both. Who cares? Everyone else just dismisses it or medicalises it. Fucking idiots.

I never got round to saying how much I've missed the Biography of Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore since the library got it back. Some fucker requested it! I've got him back though by requesting it myself again. Now he'll face dissappointment when he comes to renew it. There's no way he (or she)will finish it all, not if he's got a job anyway. There's too much information. Here's a little nugget I never knew: Palestine only has the name because Emperor Hadrian renamed it that after the Jewish revolts of the first century in a failed attempt to eradicate the people and the faith. The name refers to the Philistines (Goliath & co) who, centuries before, had been the major competitors to the tribes that were to become Judeans and Israelis. Also our old pal Arthur Koestler was wrong about the modern jews being the Khazars. DNA doesn't lie (Unless it's being used by the cops). The modern jews are the ancient jews and we've got to bear that in mind when we impose a settlement on those troublesome cuties.

Oh well back to the dog-shit again tomorrow. Great! I probably think I deserve it on some level. Last week I snapped and wrote PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG in algae-remover on the paving slabs near a really bad bit. Sadly the algae was thicker in some places than others so i expect the only legible bits will say CLEAN YO DOG which might not convey exactly the right message. Next time I'll go for PLEASE FLING YOUR DOG'S BROWN EGGS DIRECTLY INTO THE GARDENER'S EYES AS HE'S A PREPOSTEROUS JERK AND WOULD RATHER GO BLIND THAN SEE ANY MORE OF YOUR UGLY PROLETARIAN FACES AND YOUR IDENTIKIT BULL TERRIER DOGS ALL WITH SOME KIND OF DISGUSTING BOWELL CONDITION APPARENTLY. If there's enough algae killer.

Ouch!

Last night I had this terrible dream where everyone I've hurt one way or other showed up and pilloried me like poor Bobby Davro. Several times I woke up filled with self-loathing and the impotent regret of knowing it's way too late to even meaningfully say sorry for all the stupid and cruel things I've said and done. Often without malicious intent but that's hardly an excuse is it? Being unpleasant through carelessness is arguably worse. I normally work quite hard at blocking this stuff out as it doesn't help one in the daily fight for survival but late on a Friday night when I'm tired and alone, my conscience has the free run to give me the kicking I deserve. I can't remember everyone who was there in these dreams and they didn't all make a lot of sense but I got the point al-right.

Shit!

What can you do? Probably not a lot. Try not to get entangled in anybody else's life too much and help those who can genuinely make the world better. Mur at Escape Pod suggested donating to Doctors Without Borders ( Medecins Sans Frontieres) in response to the awful triple tragedy that's recently happened in Japan and that's the sort of thing that puts Mr Conscience back in his box. Do that! Try to alleviate some suffering instead of causing it.

I had kind of thought that I might start improving me with this crazy project to beautify the inner city with lush green growth and colourful flowers but I've mostly just ended up getting all frustrated with vandalism and dog-shit. In reality it's gangster-territory and pleasant gardens are not particularly gangstery as it sends out all the wrong messages to all the other rival gangs. Back to the drawing board.

I do have these pretty useless visions of a future society where artificial and destructive divisions between conscious lifeforms are abolished and all pain and bad programming is eased by mutual love and understanding but my civilisation and I are so far from this that I might just as well just stop going on about it. After all, isn't it just selfish and egotistical to impose my version of this hackneyed utopia on an internet already too full of junk information? Seeing as I'm very likely to be the only person reading this cak I might as well have just put my whimsical fantasies about ancient feuding demi-gods and invented dragon religions etc on some paper or a private file and keep it to myself.

Hmmmmm....

Look Koo-Koo or whatever you're calling yourself today, you're not so bad that you've got to give up altogether. Don't do that. There's too much to do and there's those remaining hapless idiots who still like you to be cared for. They're getting quite thin on the ground and most likely they'll all be dead before you, so you can make sure to see them off OK before doing what has to be done. Keep smiling through no matter how bad it gets. Like that nice Mr Bowie says, things that happened in the past might only have happened in your head. You just keep grooving with your plant and animal friends and I'll do what I can this end to keep those intrusive thoughts from rendering us frozen with guilt like last night. Deal? Good.

Next time on The RAC blog: The Monoform. Until then watch this. It's the new vid from Gabbroboccia who's another one of those hapless idiots. He'd better not have started on my cake the greedy fucker.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Q-dX-Z_Ro