<nettime> Happy 250: Orwell and the Living Curse of Specialization

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Two hundred and fifty is not a "whole" kind of number.  It's more like a quarter: twenty-five cents, the first quadrant, halfway to halftime.  Sadly both right and left in the US believe the system is terribly hopeless and must be either torn down or allowed to fall as quickly as possible.  It's not a happy, peaceful, united birthday party for the nation, like the bicentennial kind of was.  It's closer to total breakdown, where the monied interest hates voting and the voting interest hates money.  We couldn't even get to the first break in play before falling irretrievably behind.

This is part numerology and part reality.  The roaring success, the infinite aspirations of the founders have not yet materialized.  Yes there has been a supergrowth of machines and production, but the ruination said industry has caused as its fundamental cost has been at least as great.  The planet is rapidly running out of the basics: water, safe air, soil, and livable temperature (that is to say, earth, air, fire, and water are elementally out of balance).  All plants and all animals are in severe danger.  Today's mercury is off the charts, and even the hope to study how to maybe address it is illegal, literally: Drumpf's DoJ will attack you viciously if you even suggest trying to research positive solutions.  Peace on earth and good will toward men?  Don't be absurd.

To use a financial term, the whole world, which can mean "the whole planet" or "everything human," has gone upside down.  The negative trendlines have overtaken the positive and are only getting worse.

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At such a dystopian moment we would do well to remember Orwell, who warned us about "1984," the flip of 1948 which marked Churchill's Iron Curtain speech and the start of the First Cold War.  Maybe 2026 is the real flip, because it's the real start of the Second Cold War.  Except this time it's worse.  The damage of Cold War One, which has almost crashed the planet already, is now primed for a second act, barely different from the first, which will certainly doom everything that hasn't already been doomed.

What has been the great curse to put us here?  In a word, specialization.  We got so good at making machines we forgot how to do everything else.  And to make matters worse, each of us only knows how to make our meager personal part of the machine -- each to their own little gear, swivel, axle, or bearing.  Call it the banality of maladaptation.

Even words have been no exception to this curse.  Orwell wrote a lot about writing, how it gets automated like a copy machine and floods out the "something else" that the planet and humanity cannot survive without.  What that lost redemptive capacity is should come as no surprise: the ability to write, speak, and think honestly with agency rather than as a mechanical program.  There's no mystery to it at all, none in the slightest, which renders it paradoxically almost invisible.

Mark Twain spoke of it when he said "corn-pone opinions."  People's words too often come from where we get our cornbread, or where we think we get it.  Are you southern?  Talk pro-southern talk.  Northern?  Pro-northern.  Like every group mammal, humans know full well on which side our bread is buttered.  We start learning our roles from the second we are born, and stick to them as long as we possibly can.

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But, but, but: when you have the capacity to mechanize the literal universe you must learn something additional beyond the kind of talk that keeps your cornbread coming in.  You have to be able to talk about the whole picture, the whole universe, the ball of wax, and do so responsibly since your actions are enough to affect that whole for good or ill and thus to destroy or preserve it.  You have to, as it were, learn or re-learn how to speak without specialization.  By you I mean the species, and that means you.

The word for this is, and has always been, poetry.  As Shelley wrote better than I ever could, in his "Defense of Poetry," true imaginative expression (which includes all arts, verbal and otherwise) unifies rather than specializes and is therefore the unacknowledged legislator of the world.  It is the cure for Orwell's curse.  We can be certain, and we don't even have to re-write it.  It's available free at Gutenberg.

You might object: "no, it's not poetry but crown, clergy, techne, and war that rule events."  Sure they can control some things, some of the time, but they do so generally by destruction, deadening, and nullification.  These are the specialization which, along with all their infinite subspecialization, have failed to constrain humanity's power to destroy the planet.

Not a Shelley fan?  Try Blake: he agreed poetry was the "all" kind of writing that could pull our fat out of the fire.  And there are more than English voices too, Tokarczuk's "Ognosia" for example, and Gao Xingjian's "Soul Mountain."  Every language has their own.

Transcending specialization starts with you.  Look at how you have specialized, how you have been coopted, where the shackles rub you raw.  You'll know right away once you look.  There are some things "you just can't talk about" because "of who you are."  This is most often, for people not in poverty, professional etiquette.  Then it's interpersonal stuff -- what would your friends think.  For those in poverty, the chains are heavier and cut deeper: local street violence, religious warfare, brutal law enforcement administered without rhyme or reason.  All these chains make poetry even more impossible.  And so the abyss beckons, the banality of all evil, and we fall, we fall, we fall....

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Yet all of this, these word-stories and word-pictures, are like dreams.  In one moment you can awake and do different.  As Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language":  "If you simplify your English [or whatever language], you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects.... One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits."

Like Bartleby, the copy-maker of Wall-Street, you can simply say "I prefer not to."  Or like the Buddha: just sit and breathe.  One breath, one sentence, and you're there.  Where?  Everywhere!  You've gone back to yourself, you've found your original substance, you have left the prison of your specialization, simply by one simple waking moment.

This is the moment we can celebrate at 250 plus or minus 0.000001 years old.  The best of times, and the worst of times; the start of the wake-up which by the half could have us back on track, but only if we try: a stable arch, as one might put it, where two weaknesses leaning against each other make a strength.  All cultures have them.

True sustainability doesn't last just a hundred years.  That's a drop in the bucket, one apple in a bushel.  Sustainable is a thousand years: 2776.  At point zero of Q1 we learn to stop the destruction and qualitatively revise the adaptation; we turn aside from the abyss; we start to tack away from it perhaps even at the last possible instant, a tangent at the event horizon.  Even that is good enough.  Then we start Q2 by gaining distance from dystopia.  By Q3 we are out of the negative and start half-arch 1 of the good, and with Q4 we make the stable half-arch 2.  Then do it again.

Yes we are all tired, Mancini, but we can take one breath.  And if you can take one breath, you can write a poem, even a birthday poem.  And even just one poem can turn the tide.

Experience: it
doesn't specialize, doesn't
have to even try.

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Of course, today's headlines confirm that SCOTUS is not going to bring US democracy levels back from the 1950's any time soon.  They hold the levers and, by God, they're going to use them.  They are truly cementing, with abundant help from their demagogue of infinite sleaze, the severe democracy reduction plan.  How much will they let their side lose near-term?  Maybe the House, probably not the Senate, and probably not the next presidency — they trust the people that little.  Red Fort Blue Fort.

Where voting has been diluted this far this fast, and democratic institutions reduced to rubble for the foreseeable future, the voices of dissent need a major novel to aid the cause of peaceful protest.  Think Paine or Twain.

Such a novel doesn't have to be especially good, and certainly not perfect, but it must address the Second Cold War newly announced with China and set forth ways to minimize the duration and damage.  It can't avoid the 1978 Truth Criterion Controversy or "Sparks" by Ian Johnson.  It must also speed the transition of philosophy, the love of wisdom so to speak, both Eastern and Western to a center of gravity understood as Experience (see Lakoff and Varela, or Benjamin re Kant) not the specializations of Reason (rationality) and Authority (power), history's two clenched fists which still dominated all 20th c. phil.  There will be much confusion and groping in the dark, but Jay's "Magical Nominalism" (2025) will get us started especially if boosted by his "Songs of Experience" (2005).

This new narrative, part imaginary and part fact, cannot look to Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche -- triple bane of the nineteen-hundreds -- but may consider Jung, Pater, and Tokarczuk.  Nor can it be a novel of the post-tribane either, which is fully Bannonized.  How could "voting is a fiction" not have been stolen by the far right?

Rather magical nominalism, which wasn't born yesterday, and Varelian cybernetics of experience neuronal and otherwise, along with mindful poetry and despecialized experience must inspire this new novel.  Maybe you can write it, or one of your students or friends, or even a novel-writing computer program (though that's not really writing, is it, after all).  I wrote a version I could send you free if you're desperate.

It must be a comedy, so people can see what sustainability looks like.

Plus meditate, today, as a reminder of what non-specialization really is, and celebrate Mindfulness Day on July 12 as best you can.


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