<nettime> monthly posting; Graeber and Wengrow's DoE; book MS

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

Hi all,

The new moderation team has kindly agreed to allow me to post again.  My approach will be to post only once a month, like the moon, of course with moderate word count, tone, collegiality, and topicality.  I'm very glad the list is continuing and want to avoid any posting behavior that causes upset, so please feel free to contact me directly with any concerns.  If the community feels it would be better for me to just read the archive evermore I am completely respectful of and OK with that.

Later today my book club, just your basic gaggle of alums from the same college, is going to discuss Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything.  I've found it very interesting, for example with its concept of kairos echoing Tokarczuk's 2022 essay "Ognosia," and its network style of history based on diversity, nonlinearity, stops and starts, cycles and non-cycles, makes a lot of sense.  The "indigenous critique" hypothesis still has great value I'd say though one would guess that some conservative school districts might wish to ban said hypothesis on grounds of reverse racism: "What do you mean we didn't invent democracy?"  It's a longish book about which a lot can be said, and I'm no expert on archaeology or anthropology, but I plan to argue before the club in favor of its "wider realm of possibility" in both past and present times.  Its discussion of Chavin de Huantar is one example I found especially relevant.

I also appreciate that the book does not jump to recommending rash actions or any easy fix, but rather with calm urgency suggests something like "pay attention to evidence and imagination."  My personal sense is that extreme panic on the part of moderates, centrists, the left, and the center-left is more likely to cause missteps in 2024 than triumphant breakthroughs.  Remember the agent provacateur, the troll, and the wolf in sheep's clothing are all still part of the cyber age.  This reserve is only my predilection, I admit, and I might be wrong.  But making it look like the other guy started it is nothing new.  If repeating the 1900's exactly year-to-year isn't the greatest plan, what might be better?

One question I have for the DoE hypothesis is whether "hybrid" solutions can work sufficiently well to bring about or at least move forward the more creative, more free, more adaptive culture it deems to have been sidelined.  It seems to me they can.  Yes many populist pols and their libertarian oligarch donors trumpet 1930's rhetoric these days, of the ugliest far-right sort, and plot and undertake nefarious deeds; but a great many people have no wish to replay that particular oldie and computer simulations agree it would be not a picnic but on the contrary no picnic.  Could large tech, while profitably harvesting our brains with sticky intelligence, also tolerate a green energy transition?  Maybe.  Can a weird, somewhat deranged US polity manage despite its derangement some degree of peaceful coexistence, or heaven forbid mature cooperation, with China on climate, AI, biodiversity, et al?  The DoE thesis of possibility suggests "maybe we will."  The history of even this decade is n
 ot yet written in stone much less that of the century.  I have wondered, when the DoE asks "where we went wrong," how wrong did we go, how unfree are we today, and how much is controlled by our own chosen habit rather than any monarchic coercion?

Suppose for example a downturn in the Chinese economy prompts a thaw in search of cooperative soft landings.  It's certainly possible, even achievable, even plausible.  Such a plan could infuse other hostile zones with a newly temperate breeze.  One can't say for certain.  The peace dividend, should there be one, might be spent on climate to some effect.  What kinds of risk profiles suit the various opportunities?  To adapt well, we must adapt well.

Tokarczuk's "Ognosia" offers as helpful a plan as any, if one can call spontaneous network phenomena a plan, on the level of literature.  She often quotes Blake, whose 1788 new-media print-work All Religions Are One argued "As the true method of knowledge is experiment the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of."  Also in 1788 Hamilton, in the Federalist 85, quoted Hume regarding constitutions: "To balance a large state or society Usays hee, whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it. The judgments of many must unite in the work; experience must guide their labor; time must bring it to perfection, and the feeling of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they INEVITABLY fall into in their first trials and experiments."  (From "The Rise of Arts and Sciences.")  Then a dutiful sea
 rch (whether human or by GPT) for "experience" might find gems like Pater's The Renaissance (pinnacle of ekphrasis nonpareil), or Dewey's Art as Experience, Montaigne's final essay, Anil Seth's new brain science, Roger Bacon, Nicolaus Cusanus, even Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale.  Might not the West, somewhat the subject of this list, find a mirror in this word or search?  By DoE's thesis of imaginative species-being yes: a mirror can be anything.

What if changing one field value, that is, assigning one possible value to a key variable in quantum fashion, illuminates other parts of the equation, field, or fabric?  It sometimes can't hurt to try, and many world people have used the word "experience" in a charged fashion over the millennia, even arguably back to the birth of modern European political talk in the form of Machiavelli's Il Principe.  (Machiavelli interpreted esperienza, or experientia, Italian and Latin for experience and experiment, i.e. the arts and sciences, one way, whereas Dante and Leonardo did so another.)  What if "rescuing" a variable field-value from the past a la Benjamin need not throw shrapnel in its burst but might instead show its transformative power in a sprout, bloom, or pollination?  This is, after all, how nature has often worked and maybe we can learn something from seeds and flowers.  What if La Joconde, not so very unlike Kiefer's 2007 Louvrean Athanor, means Experience just like the Statue o
 f Liberty means Liberty and a statue of the Buddha means meditation?  This has never before been proposed much less discussed, and as Leonardo said pictures can sometimes convey what words can't because people who speak different languages can all see them.  He also wrote that Esperienza is "the common mother of all the sciences and arts," "the interpreter between humans and nature," and "the one true maestra."

If the group wishes I'll be happy to either reply to replies on these ruminations or just listen, even if to silence.  Off-list queries and replies are of course welcome.  If anyone wishes to read something in the public sphere about my meanderings herein my blog link is below, and if a PDF collection of said blog plus some extra essays would be of interest I'll be happy to send a copy.

All best regards for the holidays and new year,

Max Herman
The Mindful Mona Lisa
Leonardo.info/blog

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https://www.cyark.org/projects/chavn-de-huntar/overview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Religions_are_One

https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-81-85

https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-06/ognosia-olga-tokarczuk-jennifer-croft/

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