The British Museum, Colonialism, and Science

So first off, this is rather rough; not only in the presentation, but also the ideas. A lot of this is wrong. Also, it is probably harsher than is necessary. But anyway…

I went to the British Museum in London: there is no other way to characterize it than as the scientific product of colonialism. Thousands of artifacts from N. Africa, the Middle East, and China Most, if not all, obtained during military campaigns by “embedded archaeologists,” to parody a phrase. This plunder served (and serves) a double purpose: on the home front to establish the scientific objecthood of the conquered, and on the conquered front to remove the artifacts from the context they help to constitute, to strip the culture of its material reinforcements, in other words, to replace the context of the conquered with a “blank” context. This is not exceptional, but is the usual scientific process of abstraction.

The most striking thing, perhaps, is the removal of statues and friezes from the Greek parthenon. Here is a series of objects designed specifically to be in situ, designed to form a part of a building positioned within a city, within a culture, etc. Instead, the objects are spread throughout several museums in Europe. Each is tagged, cataloged and put in its own niche in a way designed less to recall the original than to provide the least obstructed and most coherent view of the piece itself.

For contrast, in the museum itself we have examples of a different take on artifacts in the form of numerous half-destroyed pieces repurposed at some point in their journey to the museum. Temple blocks sawed in half for building materials, coins sliced for bullion, these have been treated by past cultures as living objects. This tends to strike the modern Westerner as some kind of heretical disregard for history, or the past, but given what I know of these cultures (Roman, Ancient Greek, and certain Semitic cultures in this case) that is extremely doubtful. These cultures tend towards a fascination with the past, but always as a repurposing. For example, philosophical works rarely read in Roman times as indicators into a past period, but usually as a source of insights into present life and philosophical endeavors. The Greeks imitated Egyptian sculpture, but only as a way into creating sculpture, not with any attempt at “authenticity” as a re-creation. What these societies neglected that tends to strike the Westerner as blasphemous is a respect for the sterilized scientific project.

We should know by now the propensity of the colonizer to consider themself neutral in all things, to construct themself as the empty signifier, a ground against which other significations gain meaning. This is strikingly similar to the concept of abstraction, as the process of removing context (“subjectivity”) from an event or object, and seeing it for what it is “in itself”, seeing its “essence”, seeing it “objectively”.

Just as the empty signifier is not actually empty, this context of abstraction, the context of no context, is not actually an absence of context. To exist is to exist in relation: for thought too. To understand what science is, is to understand the way the context of no context functions, its internal relationships and its relationships to other contexts. Thought—always—is translative, is creative, muscular; it changes its object into something that the object is not, but thought can possess. There is no escaping this recontextualizing aspect of thought; even something as simple as direct sight is translation from what is not though into a thought-object.

Note that the context of no context exists in relation to, but distinct from the more general Western culture. A typical Westerner will exist in a “scientific” and “nonscientific” mode simultaneously, code-switching between them as the development of thought and conversation requires. For example, a Christian may believe in god-given morals, yet when sick they might acquiesce to the scientific framework of medicine without really performing any real integration between the two frameworks. Historically speaking, this context of abstraction has to be created within the larger cultural context. The two contexts are linked, codependent, and each useful to the other, however they are simultaneously incompatible; together the context of abstraction and the larger social context exist as the singular cooperating dominant paradigm, but each exists in conflict with the other.

The context of no context is not simply the context of thought of course. It is a particularized, manufactured context. It erases the independence of the object in the name of erasing subjectivity. The object becomes ex situ, which is to say it is translated to the context of the observing-controlling subjectivity, and then the subject is said to be removed because of this translation. To be more specific, the object is translated into dependence, that which can be controlled very finely, and the subject is translated into control, that which acts but is not acted on. This relationship must be established so prophecy can work, which is now as always the criterion of truth.

But simultaneously, this relationship must be hidden, as prophecy also functions to naturalize control, to make it seem irresistible. Only by hiding its aspect of control and appropriation can thought leave behind its attachment to particular human beings who participate in it and become a feature of the external environment.

Of course, for all of these disingenuous aspects, there is obviously also a positive outcome. Thought cannot be a feature of the natural environment, but it can be interpersonal, expansive and inclusive. The context of no context is built to include—but to include whom? The community of gentlemen, the free property holders who make contracts by mutual agreement. These who are to be equal before the human law are also to be equal before the natural law: this is the underpinning agreement of objectivity. And just as equality before the law does not lead to equality in some “factual” sense—whatever that could be—just as equality before the law is the enforcement of inequality, so it is with equality before the natural law. The domination inherent in any knowledge system is reinforced by that system’s objective character. By allowing anyone who goes via the correct channels to participate, the mode of participation is controlled.

We can see this happening in the case of the British museum. By establishing ex situ (i.e. in situ of academia) as the preferred method for studying an object itself, by allowing free academic access to these objects at the museum, but not returning them to their place of origin (or readapting them to be live in a new situation), where they would acquire meaning apart from so-called scientific meaning—by all this, the meaning of the objects is fixed and controlled, the path of scholarship is established with participation “free” and worldwide, but the conclusions pre-established to support Western cultural dominance.

Revolution, Abstraction, and Adolescence

I was looking through an older section of my notebook the other day. Ran across this aphorism:

In many ways, the entire history of philosophy is just a prolonged adolescence. The gap between “what shall I do?” and “this is what I do” is made absolute, dwelled on. The leap is never taken; instead, we enter into the gap, we descend into the canyon and find bizarre rock formations and streams that flow according to laws alien to the surface.

That’s to the point.

It is no accident that philosophy today rides on the back of social thought. It is in the realm of the social that action is precluded.

I just read a friend’s post about dumping pesticides aerially over the entire San Francisco Bay Area. Apparently, they have already been doing this for a year in Santa Cruz and Monterey. I lived there; apparently moved just before they started dumping. Did I know this was on the horizon?—no, I wasn’t notified. The narrative behind this is that there is a certain kind of moth that has the potential to devastate crops. Hasn’t yet, but has the potential. Here’s the point of my excursion to this subject, quoting the SF Chronicle:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture obtained an “emergency exemption from registration” from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that allows the agency to use the pesticide in aerial sprays over California cities. Because of that exemption, the spraying program isn’t subject to state approval, according to representatives of the state Department of Pesticide Regulation.

Now let’s look at this for a second: this is insane. You don’t dump masses of insecticides in populated areas. You don’t dump insecticides indiscriminately over an ecosystem. It’s not wrong or misconceived, it is insane. It is also exactly rational.

Our economic system is the most fragile that has ever existed. There is no room in it for thought of the future, for thought of the individual. It is a dynamo rotating at a speed for which the structure that supports it was never designed. Those who manage it must focus absolutely on its immediate fundamentals or it will bomb and crash. Those fundamentals require a constant proportional increase to our already excessive production levels (see http://umul.freeshell.org/writings/expansion.html). The economy cannot afford to take chances with anything that threatens those levels, and everything will be sacrificed to feed them. That includes moths of course, but also the elderly, children—and also our capacity to choose sanely. The USDA has precluded the choice of the residents involved because it is not a choice: as soon as capitalism is accepted as a necessity there is only one choice: spray the moths, accept collateral damage, accept the possibility of a future ecological catastrophe to defer the economic catastrophe that is around the corner.

There is nothing isolated about this story in the history of capitalism. Every move in the history of capitalism has been in order to transfer the capacity for decision from people to abstractions.

As the ownership of the means of production was divorced from the use of the means of production, the previous system of economic domination of one person over another was given a third term: ownership. One class owned the manufactures, one class worked in them; one class dominated things, one class was dominated by things. In no case was there direct domination of one will over another, rather domination was achieved by subduing the wills of both to an abstract third term—ownership, a term which claimed an absolute rationality, even if an arbitrary one.

Similarly for the birth of democracy. In the European feudal era, there was a constant interplay of wills between the monarchs of countries and their vassals, between each vassal and the clergy, between the clergy and its leadership, and between lords and the populace. The distinction during the late medieval period between “tyrant” and “king” speaks to this: regardless of the absence of a formal constitution, power was only seen as unlimited by a few, most of whom finally lost political power through the loss of authority that naturally comes with shirking responsibility. The democratic move was a move against the direct interplay of one power with another to the abstract absolute mediation of power by means of a constitution. We can see this in the earliest democratic move in 1650s England, where the nobles formalized (abstracted) the advisory power they previously held implicitly. A democracy is not rule by people, it is rule by abstraction. Democracy looks at the project of cooperation and coercion in society as the project of determining a set of laws which rule over every aspect of cooperation and coercion, as the process of precluding and determining choice through codification of choice.

Similarly for scientific thought. What began as a radical turn against doctrines and absolutes, what began by supposing that if we demand repeatability and observation as the basis of truth we can no longer be oppressed by a social structure of authority—has ended as a formalization of knowledge (Voltaire’s encyclopedia still alive). Because scientific equipment is only owned by a few, because the idea of empiricism precludes the need for interpretation, truth confronts us as an abstract reified thought, independent of any thinker. This is the long struggle during the 16^th-17^th centuries to develop a technology of written language which excludes the subject, which excludes voice, which could be written by anyone because it claims to be written by no one. This is New Criticism’s disdain for the author, but just as much structuralism’s subsumption of the text as a social artifact.

We have externalized and absolutized our assumptions and relationships and moved into rational slavery. And now we want to get out. We want to move forward, to throw out all the idiocies, for which we know—now—that we should know better. So we turn to philosophy, and ask it: We want to get out, but how should we do it?

But philosophy is no more the solution to adolescence than it is the solution to the problem of social action. The preclusion of the possibility for action has come about through a technique for transposing the site of privilege’s power away from the physical person of the privileged—but this transposition is solidified within the realm of philosophy itself, abstraction. In order to remain ossified, power must continue to demand the reality of the abstraction. Part of that maintenance is the occlusion of the reality of the nonabstracted, the occlusion of the nonphilosophical. Getting out will demand both the nonabstracted and nonphilosophical.

Every time we demand a systemic view of our course of action, we emphasize the reality of abstraction generally, and thus perpetuate the status quo. We emphasize the rift between thought and action, we emphasize that the rift is passed only when thought is actualized in the social, only when action proceeds along socially preconceived lines. What we need is organization and action that is based around community, desire; we need groups organized around mutual support, not an abstract idea of how mutual support will work; we need groups organized around change, not an abstract idea of how change is to be achieved.

This does not preclude the necessity for thought, however. Just as every human decision is influenced by thought, and just as more thought tends to provide a better influence, so it is with social action. The problem is the reification of this need, the need for abstracted codes before action takes place.

In all life, constant necessity for thought is called inability to make a decision—in social action as well. The prominence of ideology, the ossification of abstraction, cannot be solved in the realm of pure thought. In all other life, action has come before experience, before understanding. So too, social transformative action must come before we have the full wisdom of experience, which we will only have when the revolution is over.

Eight Poems – Solstice 2007

I made this book for my niece Azalea, who is 2. Clearly, I have been thinking about Blake a lot, though apparently not enough to have his genius start affecting me.

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No Title

I’m going to have the old ideas all over again.

I’m going to hunt through African savannas for the lion of love

And reveal it in a new zoo.

I’m going to wave my hands through the air until I touch the secret thread of brotherhood,

Sewn meanderingly through our habits.

Listen, I’ve found it again:

I am a rider in the grass,

And the wind blows my long cloak back

And it is made of a thousand bodies

Of family, friends, lovers,

Woven.

Poets, painters, and you, reader;

For 20 seconds you’ll be my tide as I crest the wave,

Until tumbling under I’ll heave-ho and hoist you up in turn.

My ancestors laid too long, cooled too much to blast the furnace,

But I am living, a molten polydoppelgänger,

A voodoo doll made with a billion hairs

And I can feel you squirm in me when I trampoline onwards.

I love you because I am you.

All my little schematic struggles are repeated outward echoing.

Hephaestus works the furnace with brawny arms.

He chews lead and burns his eyes

He sings with the hammer, and cries

Each is given their own lead tear to carry.

And the copper on each face is acid-etched; I can read it plainly.

Reach out your fingers and touch me,

You’ll see me shudder like a blade of beach grass

And pale away before the wind

Of your slow breath,

Your warm breath;

We dance as fire nymphs lost in a general flame.

Nudibranchs helixing seaweed

My water eyes receive you like a ship.

Hands are rocks;

The stone titan laid on the ocean floor,

Hands break into sand

Swirling sandsnakes

Rippling current dunes

Kelp is anchored to the heart

A small brown fish lives in the soil.

Sipping on green-bottled 40s…

For Justin Beard 1980-2007

Sipping on green-bottled 40s of Mickey’s under an old pine tree in the back of your house

An old tree that had come to this side through a veil of light mist.

Everything was so determinate in those days before the apocalypse,

Seven-years curses and nine-circled wisdom,

Months that branched from the trunk of a tree and sprouted leaves,

Not this interminable nowhere lava flow.

“Maybe we’re living in the infinity of our last thought”

—And a sip on the 40—

“Maybe we’re just lost stars trying to find a way to shoot out trails in the sky”

“Yeah, or maybe we’re trails of light shooting back into stars”

—And a sip—

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

My body is Pangea, floating in a black feary sea

And it is being torn apart.

We spent most of the night waiting for the moon,

The crescent moon was wholly yours, it was your sickle,

Your hand-scythe to harvest the foxtail,

To save it for a better age.

We sat in our cocoons of grass and set the green bottles against the sky,

Where the malt bubbles floated up underneath the milky way and mingled with the stars.

I told you the truth was coming out, it was leaking like pine sap, it was sticking to my fingers,

But you were a jester in love with the truth; to you it was the pine needles you brushed by, which touched you with a dew

That rolled off your skin.

Antarctica floated off long ago, as did Australia.

Slowly Europe, Africa, and Asia floated off and made me an unwilling New World.

Daily the earth breaks between Columbia and Panama, and brothers will float apart.

But little did I know you were to be ill-fated Atlantis,

Swallowed up into that hole of waters and wiped clean from our perpetual drift.

I miss you, but don’t come back yet, not here.

I don’t want to see you go through the whole progression again,

I don’t want to see you start as a moon-scythe reaper

Hoisting a bushel of foxtail,

And end up stiff-backed from carrying wood and gold.

I don’t want to see them make fun of you

Because you can’t pick up their illusions,

Because you don’t know how to weave dust into your eyes.

I love you, but go somewhere else, not here.

Tonight I’m traveling three hundred miles to find a foxtail field with an old pine tree in it,

And I’ll sit there on the ground

And tip my green bottle until the last drop spills.

Light Drifts

Sunlight drifts; you think it doesn’t but it does.
Chamomile beach days under soft winter skies:
They drift to me now and again, ever since they’ve been unmoored.
Sometimes I wish I was a puddle on the sidewalk,
Where you walk everyday
I’d come up past the rim of your shoes
And touch your toes.
Just enough to tickle.
Just enough to say hi.

There’s a sun-star in your heart; I know ’cause I’ve seen it there.
I saw it when you were a rock mama, or a flowered-hair princess.
When you weighted your love on me, even when you lied.
I know it’s still there, burning bright.
Stoke the fires for me, let the Red Indian engine hum.
Let it carry you off to your everywhere.

Exactly like the wind didn’t blow before
On the flowered chamomile cliffs, under the eternal sun
Where afternoons weren’t interested in evenings
Thunder sounds big, and lightning’s bright
But that day I put my heart
Under the cupped shell of a chiton
Who held it forever.

All those moments in the eternal are brief
Like a sunflower sprouted in November.
But you gave me a little case of them,
And I’ll carry it.

Gatherings

from the web.

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This video inspired me to write my last post. There goes the planet…

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Playboy, February 1966.Dylan on how he chose his career:

Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain’t so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

Bob Dylan kicks ass.

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Science as Dogma: a Call for Temperance in Empiricism

A recent article in the New York Times, “Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?” (really long, read mine first or you’ll get bored and go away), discusses the track record of statistics-based findings in the arena of Health. It’s not a good track record by any means.

The basic issue is that, although a statistical figure will determine the probability of a selection (e.g. what is the probability that I select a king from a certain set of cards), statistics cannot determine the probability of an action’s consequences. A statistics-based approach claims: if a causes b, then I should find a correlation between a and b in a specific population; I find a correlation between a and b in a population, therefore a causes b. The error in reasoning should be obvious: just because you know that people with AIDS generally die before age 50, and somebody died before 50, you can’t conclude that they had AIDS.

The solution upheld by the so-called “scientific method” is to subject this idea to a “controlled experiment”, i.e. if in the absence of other factors, I randomly alter a, and b is observed to correspond, then I can reasonably conclude that a causes b. But it gets more complicated when we look at what this phrase “in the absence of other factors” means. What we’re testing is a hypothesis, and the other factors are, voiced or unvoiced, essentially other hypotheses. In the final analysis, you do not in fact only have to do one trial, but one trial for each hypothesis. The probability that “a causes b” is correct is tempered by the probabilities that “c causes b”, “d causes b”, etc. are correct. When we are dealing with a system with a nearly infinite number of competing hypotheses, the probability that any one of them is correct is usually nearly zero.

Factor that in with the difficulty in performing an experiment in the first place. Note that an experiment cannot merely observe its environment, it must alter that environment. When the “environment” is humans, and the experiment is about what gives them cancer, what we’re really talking about is intentionally giving people cancer. Needless to say, this experiment will never be performed.

But wait a minute, we’ve heard all this stuff before, but it’s just a bunch of wind, because science “works”, doesn’t it? Well, no, not really. That’s what this NY Times article is saying: in the track record of epidemiology, which focuses on extrapolating causes from studying populations, without experiments—here, according to the article, we find less than ten successes. That is, less than 10 cases where first a population was studied, then statistical correlations were noted, then an experiment bore out the extrapolated cause-and-effect relationship. You may as well test hypotheses by tossing coins. The track record on extrapolations where an experiment actually was done is considerably better, but also not without its pitfalls and reversals.

So what does this mean? In any system where there is a complexity or overdetermination of causes, an unclear relationship between cause and effect, a feedback mechanism between effects and causes, etc.—in this system, it will be impossible to use purely “empirical” (i.e. statistical) methods of scientific study to reliably test a hypothesis. Furthermore, every experiment involves an action, and it is an assumption of the experiment, of the whole process of experimentation, that that action can be performed. In short, the idea of experiment depends on a realm of action which we have no cares over except the care of knowledge.

Where does this level of complexity reach the threshold? Where do we find ourselves in care-charged realms of action? To the already mentioned biology, we can add in economics, politics, psychology, sociology, etc. In short, statistics works great, gives us limitless knowledge, unless you want to understand how your body works or how your mind works, or how your society works. But you didn’t care about that, did you? Interestingly, economic and political science have eschewed purely empirical methods from the start, in favor of more deductive reasoning. Starting from a few solid bases, such as a description of abstract capitalist man (homo economicus), economy builds up a descriptive system which is powerfully accurate. Of course, it is extremely wobbly, because, guess what, we’re not all abstract capitalist men.

Psychology started from deductive methods such as this, but contemporary Psychology and Sociology are puzzling in their outright acceptance of statistical methodology. In the question of how whole societies function, it is clear that there is no possible way of making an experiment, if for no other reason than the ridiculous idea of a “control society”, in which nothing was altered. In the case of the psyche, clearly a case should be made that the degree of complexity is such that all but the simplest hypotheses cannot be asserted to be true via statistical experiment (each competing hypothesis—and just give me time and I will make a hundred—unless it is proven false with 100% confidence, will drive down the probability that the first hypothesis is true). When studying mass psychosis and psychological epidemics, clearly for the majority of interesting hypothesis and subject areas, experiment is not possible. Those that have occurred in the past (e.g. the famous Stanford Prison Experiment) are of questionable scientific validity (they tend to vary across cultures (indicating cultural factors which remain unexplained), they involve too small and non-diverse regions of a population, there is no clear hypothesis being tested, alternate hypotheses are not even attempted to be ruled out, etc.), and are nonetheless unrepeatable at present, for both ethical and practical reasons.

Though in the absence of a coherent methodology a recourse to scientific methodology borrowed largely from physics may be justified, and though no doubt statistical studies provide data of both interest and consequence to any person in a given field, the blinders to all other methodological insights (e.g. Freud in current psychology) and the constant assertion of the results of this tenuous application of statistical methodology as “facts”, can be called nothing other than a dogmatic belief in the scientific method, a belief which is not justified by the parameters and mathematical justifications the scientific method itself entails, not to mention questions about the application of a method of numerical measures to subject areas which are not strictly numerically measurable.

In short, the so-called “scientific method” is clearly not universally applicable; we need another methodology to handle the cases of complex, care-charged systems such as health, sociology, psychology, economics, and politics. Far from the social sciences needing to take a cue from the health sciences, it appears that health sciences need to take a cue from the social sciences.

The tendency in those departments which embrace a non-statistical approach is to turn their attention instead to a system of strict deductive reasoning. While it is clear that this has some value, it also has a tendency to become ensconced in pre-established concepts (the starting points and the joints of the deductive movement), like the so-called homo economicus, hence the development and popularity of dialectical reasoning and the otherwise inexplicable foray of the Literature department into these fields. It should be noted however, that despite all the appearances of producing useful theories, which one should not doubt that these methods do, this deductive/dialectical method fails to be the same sort of knowledge-producing workhouse for these subjects as experimental/statistical reasoning is for physics and chemistry. What is too often missing from this deductive realm is actual empirical observation, not in the sense of statistical data, but in the sense of some sort of attachment to the world, specifically as a moving place. Here again, strangely enough, we find Literature participating and lending certain concepts, though not any more so than Psychology outside of the mainstream: (subjective) experience and intuition are valid lenses, or at least among the most valid we have today, provided they are interrogated for bias.

Putting forth experience and intuition as serious components of methodology in a time of mass cross-culturalization on the one hand and inundation with statistical-unity-as-truth on the other may seem kind of messy, or ignorant. However, all of our greatest actual successes in the realm of psychology have come from extrapolation of experience, and our greatest held truths about ethics, action, and the general problems of living come from literature, again an extrapolation of experience. Economic truth, meanwhile, wreaks havoc precisely to the extent that it relies on homo economicus and not an experienced understanding of actual human beings as creatures with supereconomic needs. What do we judge a methodology by if not the results?

In the 11th century, mainstream thought more or less considered Roger Bacon to be an idiot, who would never produce any real knowledge. But despite a lack of methodological justification, he preceded in the way which was most obvious to him. 8 centuries later, the science of statistics vindicated him. In much the same way, we don’t need a philosophico-mathematical justification to say that the statistical fetishism of scientific thought should be tempered by turning more towards dialectical interrogation of the concepts involved (what does it mean to be healthy? This is less obvious than it appears.), a place for deductive reasoning, and room for experiential truth as a component. We can be justified in our results.

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Yeah, this one’s definitely not poetry. Go figure…

Dissonance

“…a kind of dissonance prevails. There is the person you knew before, and there is the person you know now. And they are not the same person. So that, when you think about them, it is only as a way of understanding what you have lost, what you will never have again. You become wed to the dross of memory, a person who lies alone in bed and thinks about what has already happened.”

–Steve Almond

What’s a writer supposed to do when someone else has already hit the nail on the head?

Aphorism

The spirit drips the blood of the body as it runs away from the grave.