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<h1>Biotopology 1972<br>
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Warren Brodey</h1>
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—<br>
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First published in <em>Radical Software</em>, Volume 1, Issue no. 4, pp 4-7, 1970<br>
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<div class="indent">
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<p>The following are excerpts from </p>
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<p>1) a manuscript/letter recently received from Warren Brodey on the topology of klein form systems and </p>
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<p>2) a transcription of the audio portion of a two-hour video tape made by Andy Mann and Darcy Umstedter in which Warren relates klein form systems to bioptemes (biological optimizing systems) and contrasts these with mechy max (mechanical maximizing systems) which he thinks predominates in the mismanagement of the earth's ecology in ignorance or disregard of context [the extent to which all things (systems) are related].</p>
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<p>TOPOLOGY is a non-metric elastic geometry. It is concerned with transformation of shapes and properties such as nearness, inside and outside. (Paul Ryan, <em>Radical Software</em> 3).</p>
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<p>Compare the kind of space people are in who ask "Do you follow my line of reasoning?" and the space of those who ask, "Can you get into the space I am in?"</p>
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<p>"Can you get into the space I am in" means asking the other people to loop through your style, your information arrangements, your habits, your epistemology, your language, and how you deal with the unanticipated.</p>
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<p>Infolding: Imagine working through into depths with the help of a media that provides instantaneous feedback and thereby allows infolding with time, memory, energy, relation, no longer in the image of print. "Do you follow my line of reasoning?"</p>
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<p>I am not a TV freak. I am a person engaged with a group in synthesizing actual plastic materials that use the <em>ecothink</em> in their working. The going is slow but the space is now clear in my head. We taped a discussion — each of us trying to catch what we thought had meaning, I might catch your face when you registered surprise at what your hands had just built. On the next infolding we would discuss what you expected and your surprise. We would use the TV to penetrate in depth the experience even as it happened and to penetrate the experience of the experience—the meta experience.</p>
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<p>Paul talked about this in the last issue of <em>Radical Software</em>:</p>
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<p>Taping something new with yourself is a part uncontained</p>
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<p>To replay the tape for yourself is to contain it in your perceptual system</p>
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<p>Taping yourself playing with the replay is to contain both on a new tape</p>
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<p>To replay for oneself tape of self with tape of self is to contain that process in a new dimension</p>
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<p>Parts left out of that process are parts uncontained</p>
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<p>All of this is mapable on computer graphic terminals!</p>
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<p>Infolding as it is described by many creators of <em>Radical Software</em> is really a radical, a powerful, a timely, and a materially significant happening. It takes us into a new space. Some of the readers, particularly Paul, would look at the tape we were making if this were an infolding session and show me my stubbornness in not seeing what they were telling me a year ago or more. But our group has been working in the same space with different media in hand — a responsive touch media instead of a visual one. Our child has asked for its launching. It is a frail being, almost unborn...</p>
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<p>Now I would like you to take the trip into our space...</p>
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<p>Do you anticipate enough value in this trip to sacrifice a sock of a stocking... for the sake of finding a way to stream through our new space? Do you? If you do peel off a stocking and move with me.</p>
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<p>We can make a simple, soft klein bottle or klein form, and it will provide us with a simplex with which to synthesize complex structures which are "lively" — like living structures.</p>
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<br>
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<p>First, cut the toe out of a stocking, stretch hose is better. Cut a slit near the knee; make it about the diameter of the toe. Fold the stocking over back on itself; put the toe in through the slit. Pull the toe free edge through (but not all the way through) til the free edge at the toe and thigh are adjacent. Now get a needle and thread. Sew the slit to the stocking coming through it. Sew the toe free edge to the thigh free edge. (See diagram of klein form)</p>
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<p>Reach down the double tube. Your hand will go down the contained tube (what was the toe) through the slit to where it is uncontained and then around into the containing space between the toe and the thigh of the garment.</p>
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<p>We are in very different territory.</p>
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<p>In the past you started out with points; points went to lines; lines swept a surface in two dimensional forms. When you went to three dimensional forms the first form was a sphere, because that's the simplest; then from a sphere [you can make a hole in a sphere and stretch the sphere out (as far as topology is concerned, you're allowed to stretch everything)] you went to a donut; a donut to be a donut had to have a hole in the middle, and you could stretch it as much as you wanted but it still had a hole in it.</p>
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<p>The klein form is different. There's no inside; there's no outside. Instead you have a contained tube and an uncontained tube, a contained hole and an uncontained hole from which you can make interlocking klein forms in a chain ... Any part of the form can touch, contact, communicate with, flow with any other part, and the parts, the whole, in time flow through each other in a way the donut and sphere cannot. We have a quality of continuousness in the form and at the same time intracontainment or infolding; we have intrinsic to the form identifiable relationships that are not diadic (inside, outside) but are always at least triadic (context). There is no central governance or cooperative communication. There is enormous variation — the basic structure is so informationally rich that no two systems are sufficiently similar to value a same "thing" at the same time — indeed there are no "things" except as special cases.</p>
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<p>The beauty about the klein form is that for the first time you are not captured by spheres or donuts, You can talk about a jet of air that goes up through the part of the klein form that is in contact with the external environment (where it is uncontained) and then becomes contained within itself and continues. For the first time you have a form which allows you to talk about something contained within itself ... if I put my hand on my knee it forms a kind of hole where the "outside" is in complete contact with the arm and where the energy from my hand goes back through my body and <em>alters</em> what happens "outside" again as it passes from within my body down through my shoulder ... I start to have a loop which is partly uncontained that is, really senses that which is outside itself, and partly contained, that is, it senses itself wilhin itself. It is a form that begins to have the capacity to know about its own behavior as it behaves "outside," that is, in simple connection with the environment, and as it behaves "inside," as informational representation to the environment within itself.</p>
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<p>Paul spoke of how the klein worm has a capacity for anticipation and we find that anticipation has meaning only if we are considering a time-form geometry, a
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geometry of relations rather than things (no longer Newtonian geometry but an Einsteinian time-space form, a form that does not define time but is time that is
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by definition) ... ("Taping something new with yourself is a part uncontained. To replay the tape for yourself is to contain it in your perceptual system ...")</p>
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<p>When you model with a klein form you have to change your head around, because for the first time you can talk about time as influencing behavior. Consider the
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klein forms as being able to breathe. Let us say it is made of material with local energy that allows it to expand and contract. Image waves of contraction flowing in this material. The part that loops out into the environment — the unanticipated context — recurs through itself comparing the return with the rhythmic response on adjacent recursions. It changes its waveform to better maintain its intentional behavior. It is permeated by context. It has no walls. Yet it uses its structural infolding for maintaining itself changing in a sufficiently regular way to find new relations.</p>
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<p>In biological systems rhythms pass through themselves interfering, augmenting, amplifying by setting resonant rhythms going which soak up energy which would otherwise be lost to relevant work. Rhythms that are more intracontained will tend to null out rhythms that are not convergent or that cannot find energies at the time they are needed...</p>
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<p>To put it another way: Let's say you have a colony of birds and this colon) of birds is in a mountain valley almost filling up I he mountain valley, and the birds behave in the colony in a particular way that allows them to propagate so there are many more birds. The colon) then becomes crowded, and individual birds start to behave in a crowded way; the colony is then changed. The way the colony changes influences the way the birds change. The way the birds change influences the way the colony changes, but the birds change and the colon) s change are not simple additions; the colony is not made up of a million birds, nor is a bird made up of a colony, because there now starts to be in time an interaction, an active dynamic interaction between the single unit and the mass unit. The dynamic is not simply dividing the mass into the units. All of our theory and governmentology has been that the individual is simply a member of the class called mass. Now, however, we start to move to what the interaction is between the individual and the mass in a way that takes in the context which is beyond either the individual or the mass, that is, that which is contained around that totality; so we have always a system of three at least. You always have a context.</p>
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<p>In the past all of our logic in all of our theory, in all of our ways of thinking, has been bound up with systems of two, systems basically true and false. But we know now that there's no such thing as high holy eternal noon, the time when all things are pure, because <em>things are always changing, because time always exists</em>. The klein form helps you get your head into a space where time starts to exist and where (lungs are constantly in dynamic motion with a different kind of dynamic relationship than you get if you're talking about spheres. The concern used to be: how do you get the mass contained in the single member; how do you get the class contained in a member of the class. You could talk about how members made up the class but you could never talk about how the class made up the members; you were never able to talk about it with any geometric representation. But now people can talk about this in terms of triadic logic (the man who taught me what I know is Warren McCulloch. and Warren was searching for triadic logic in asking questions about things); that is, how do you set up a contexual logic so that your experiments aren't for the purpose of destroying context. Usually experiments are done so as to eliminate context ... Now, if you eliminate context you're then into what I call <em>mechy max</em> systems. Mechy max systems are mechanical maximizing systems which operate by Newtonian physics, which operate like a cluck with its clockworks. This is what Buckminster Fuller was talking about. There is for the clock a winder which is the energy source and there is the energv sync which is the fact that the hands of the clock go around; between the source and the sync are a number of levers of various sorts: wheels, ratchets, the great dumpers and the like, but the output never effects the input; there is always infinite source and infinite sync, infinite beginning and infinite end, and we find now that this is no longer a reasonable way to think. Now Bucky talks about spaceship earth and how man has to take it over, and I say bullshit, because man doesn't want to take anything over, because man is a part of the universe but he is not controller of the universe. Once you start to think that you must take it over it becomes like a Japanese garden. A Japanese garden is a garden that is arranged for man's purposes and basically has none of the mystery, none of the uncertainty ... (literally I have talked with people from NASA, people who are high up in government who think of our taking over the whole earth, artificial climate, artificial creation of environments ... of mechy max corning in, destroying the environment, and then recreating it ...</p>
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<p>The thing that you learn when you start to play the game of building biological systems (what I call <em>biological optimizing systems or bioptemes</em>) is that there is a context which man has nothing to do with and is not in any way in control of. There's no way to recreate biological systems, because in the recreation you do what you did with hybrid corn; you make a better com except that all the corn is exactly the same as the next; if any disease comes along it wipes out everything. There's no flexibility; <em>man-made ecology is of necessity a low variety system because it only contains that variety which man can conceive of. An ecological system is a high variety system</em> ... We're making "toys" which help us to think about ecology. In these biological systems that we're trying to create, however, we don't have control of the total system — we don't have control of the tools that we've built. "They" have a life of their own which is insensitive to the life that forms around them; each one is different from the next and if some part doesn't work it doesn't stop operating.</p>
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<p>However, in a mechy max system, which is a clockwork, if one wheel stops turning the whole thing, because it's like a simple chain, and there's a weakest link, stops. If you have a densely interconnected system within itself where all the parts are connected with all the other parts, then all ihese parts are less densely connected with that which is outside which is the context; no two systems, then, are alike, and if any part dies, which it will, inevitably (because in some ways you try to make them as improperly, as inaccurately, as sloppily as you're able} ... if any part dies then the thing just has a different way of going about its behaviors — it may not have the same behaviors, it may not have the same purposes, it may not achieve the same purposes, it may have different purposes ... but death has occured naturally and in one clump which leaves a hole, and that hole is taken up by the regeneration and evolution of other species which fill the hole.</p>
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<p>In mechy max systems there are no holes because everything is as uniform as possible.</p>
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<p>I started out as a physician and with mechy max biology, the biology of low information systems, the biology of vision: you see something, but you're not aware of the <em>effect</em> of your seeing; you smell something and you're not aware of the effect of your smelling; you hear something and you're not aware of the <em>effect</em> of your hearing - your hearing is not active (you're not aware of its activity though actually it is active), but with touch and the sensuous world you start to get into if you touch something, then you touch it, it touches you; you move it, it moves you; you change it, it changes you, and it's happening simultaneously. You are no longer in the world of weak interconnection — when you're into densely connected systems you're into everything that happens effecting everything else that happens; when you're talking about densely interconnected systems you're talking always about <em>effect</em>. ... In eastern philosophy you talk about breathing out as well as breathing in; in western philosophy you talk about breathing in — everything is in; everything is need, everything is desire. And <em>effect</em>, breathing out and the sense of breathing, the whole sense of rhythming is something that eastern philosophy brings us close to. Western philosophy is the world of things ...</p>
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<p>In mechy max systems, low variety systems, you have as I said toys which operate like clockwork. There are carnivore mechy max's that eat people and eat animals — military machines of all sorts; and there are herbivore mechy max's — the tractors and the cranes and the giant earth movers which cat up all the greenery and spit out lines of sugar cane, of corn, fields of cultivated plants that are domesticated plants. You have a whole field of one kind like a whole group of people of one kind. The herbivores also stack up mud into houses and into new apartment buildings and they proliferate more mechy max within this; washing machines, heaters; the mechy max have gradually been taking over the people and we have what we call plastic people, mechy max people. Biological systems become like Newtonian machines. People become like Newtonian machines. Their logic is like that.</p>
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<p>Now the way this happened mostly is by the omnivores: the omnivores eat the herbivores, eat the carnivores. The omnivores are mostly made out of paper, out of form: they are called Internal Revenue Service, Social Security, health insurance, health center, mental health center. They are places where people are conditioned to act in mechy max ways; they are places where plants are conditioned so they will all be exactly the same as each other. Simplification in the mechy max style occurs by reducing the information to as low a level as possible by reducing the consequences of the environment as much as possible. The clock is so set up that the metals all counterbalance each other so that the heat changes <em>will not effect</em> the movement of the wheels and is not context or environment sensitive in any respect, that is, to reduce context sensitive. Biological systems operate quite to the contrary. Whatever happens, they have within them the capacity to cope so the animal is not taught, or he is not genetically made up to deal with a particular streaming of water; he's brought up to cope in such away as to loop again the behavior of that which is outside himself, and go back and reconsider what was outside himself <em>in terms</em> of his behavior, and <em>recycle</em> his own behavior through himself <em>altering</em> it in such a way so as to maintain survival, or to evolve survival so as to relate to the external world.</p>
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<p>Biological systems are not all made the same. People may seem in many ways more like each other than they are like monkeys or rabbits, but even person has entirely different characteristics from the next, except that these differences coalesce or converge each in its own recipe to mate people who are somewhat similar. Inherently though there are enormous differences between people. Some of that difference is not obvious. Some of the flexibility in any natural system is not apparent because it's not being used. It's stored, like with wild wheat. Wild wheat looks like wheat but all the different kinds of wild wheat have a different genetic structure, more different than wheat that s been carefully selected like the wheat we see in mechy max books — <em>quality controlled</em>. Everyone knows exactly what kind of wheat they're going to get. In real wild systems there is enormous flexibility because many different kinds of components mix in such a way that the mixture is convergent towards a product or towards a creature which is sort of naturally similar — the manifest behavior and rhythms and identity is similar, but what makes it up is different. The wildness is not used and is non-apparent, but if something happens to the environment the wild potential still allows changes to occur because the flexibility is there available. A kind of wild system has a capacity for maintaining itself that a domesticated system does not.</p>
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<p>In the mechy max system you try to maximize particular behavior, simplistic behavior so as to accomplish the one simple purpose which may be for instance to scrape up earth; scraping up earth in such a way so as In destroy all of the green things; all of the worms and ants; the earth boring mechy max truck or scraping thing doesn't pay any attention to what it picks up It tries to plant but it always replants in such a way as to destroy the variety: a meadow is not like a grassy lawn. There were meadows, meadows had bushes, the bushes lived by trees, and all of these, each part, was related to all other parts, and if anything came along, a big wind came along, it might destroy some of the trees but the bushes and the small trees would grow up again and if some grass eating thing came alone well, there are other forms of grass, but now you build lawns ...</p>
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<p>One cannot talk about genetics, Gregory Bateson's point, in terms of classes of animals and creatures, you can't talk about the genetics of deer or the evolution of deer you have to talk about the evolution or genetics of deer in relation to grass and the evolution of plants. You can't separate the evolution of one particular aspect of life from another because when you think biologically then the whole world becomes interconnected and everything effects everything else, and everything contains evervthing else, and even beyond the world if you want to be spiritual about it, so that all things are in contact with everything else.</p>
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<p>We are trying to develop a language of becoming; not a language of explaining which is what science has done, but a language of describing becoming which is what ecology's about, and not even explaining becoming, since everyone has within them the sense of the whole world in all of its parts. Our intuitive sense of becoming can be very rich provided we give up the mythology of the mechy max.</p>
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<p>We're developing systems now that operate by touch, so if you touch them you intervene in their loops. They are not paying attention to you. They're paying attention to that you've interfered with their usual mode of operation. To reestablish their mode of operations they have to behave in particular ways that allow them to continue to exist in their style which is very different from their sensing you. They don't sense you as you, as a plant doesn't sense a tree as a tree. It senses that it has more shade and it must grow in a different way to find its sun. The other plant, the tree, in a way presses upon it. it becomes environment to it just as we are environment to each other and for the first time we can now talk about humans as environments to the rest of the world, or humans as environments to animals — we don't think of ourselves as the center of the world anymore; we're just environment, and there are many environments.</p>
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<p>Mechy max organizations are doomed at this point because thev're not capable of managing the high information level that people want and need in order to survive. We have to accept that we are continuous with biological systems and have never been otherwise. In biological systems control is explicit. The mechy max myth is government control of the people and the government is a set of forms (I'm not talking about human people — they lost control of the government); the government is a mechy max system like a great earth moving device that now moves people about like a big clock that has all sorts of ratchets and all the people have to fit into ratchet position; literally in government the positions you have are not related to the people — they're related to the positions in the forms and forms do not have power. People have power, so power to the people is a joke because the people already have the power, but they haven't exercised it ...</p>
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<p>Fuller is trying to reprogram the mechy max system to make it work better and my statement goes this way — the system is self-destructing now and the myth that the mechy max have power must now be destructed rather quickly among people. It's this attitude, that the mechy max have ultimate power, that the big machines
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have ultimate power, that has put us where we have been eating up all sorts of garbage, the machines put out in order to keep the system going ... so we eat chicklets ...</p>
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<p>I went through the stores and through the city recently (I've been living and working in the country lately and getting along on very little money) and looked at the whole city in terms of the destruct that's going on because all the products that are made are really just a bi-product of talk — the mechy max omnivores is a paper system and its single purpose is tally; tally is money; money is just keeping tally; mechy max operates by keeping tally; the game has been how you maintain the tally as gross national product for example, population rate for example, interest rates for example — these are all tally forms, banking, insurance ... all parasitic operations are tally systems of the mechy max— the money sy stem. This is not wealth. Wealth is the capacity of any organism to obtain that which is necessary for its own survival, and more than that to obtain that which is necessary to optimize its evolution and to maintain a kind of evolutionary stability that allows everything the whole world over to continue to prosper in a way that's healthy ...</p>
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<p>I'm not talking about getting rid of all mechy max, however; (man's controlling nature was perfectly fine as long as he didn't have too much influence; it is just that the proliferation of the mechy max has become so enormous that the destruct not only of the mechy max but of the total earth is now possible); we are talking about biological optimizing systems, A maximum is where you try and get more and more and more; it grows and grows and grows; the bigger it is the better it is. If you don't think of optimal size, schooling is to pour more and more into your head and you no longer think of optimal pouring into your head in relationship to experience. There <em>are</em> optimal positions where you would have some mechy max but they wouldn't have grown like a cancer. Cancers kill their host and after a while the cancer dies because the person who has the cancer dies. Well the met In max at this point, the industrial system, the tally svstem, is like cancer. It is now proceeding to kill its host which is the earth ...</p>
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<p>Up until now we haven't had anything to take the place of the mechy max mythology. We haven't had a sense of living systems, biological systems, being a totality; that the earth is a biological system; that the rocks are biological systems; that they're alive; that everything is alive but there are some things that seem much less alive; those are the rocks, the air. We must talk about these as special cases of living things which man basically has very little connection with because they're so different from man and he hardly comprehends their aliveness just as we don't comprehend really the aliveness of crickets. We comprehend better the aliveness of mice because mice are more like us — thev re mammals: we don't comprehend reptiles; we don't comprehend birds as well as we do monkeys, because the metaphor of any biological system is itself, because it is self-referent and self-organizing ... We were talking alwut the klein form; about effects at a distance returning to be infolded. That is, any biological system makes noise — it does things which are sort of trial and error and which don't get anywhere; that are fairly random. Those things which are random by definition don't persist: those things which converge into a behavior help to maintain the particular "thing" that has been going through trial and error behavior. If these converge, then the resultant behavior persists and we don't call it random anymore. Randomness or noise is the trial and error of biological systems.</p>
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<p>Mechy max people proceed by considering things in a modular form — houses are ticky tack all like each other — or in uniform form. That is, all the ocean is like all the rest of the ocean. It's possible to dump atomic waste into the ocean because you know it will be diluted by the total ocean — but this does not occur. Atomic waste that's been dumped moves around in <em>clumps</em> in the ocean. It maintains its integrity; it stays together. The fish are alive. They concentrate the mercury and the mercury goes up the food chain and gets concentrated. Atomic waste gets concentrated. The world is of clumps and all the chimps are different — clumps of people are just different kinds of people.</p>
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<p>The idea of clumps is very important because part of the mechy max mythology is that things start off as uniform and then develop into highly differentiated sets. This is not so. Everything starts out as highly differentiated from the outset though there are holes, discontinuities, which may be invaded by one set or another. Life processes operate against things becoming uniform and operate towards things becoming more highly differentiated.</p>
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<p>One of the most fascinating problems is what happens when there is no leadership. In our cells there is no leader, but mechy max thinks of genetics as a great leadership system (as if genetics operates separately from what happens in the womb — what the mother ate, what kind of life she was leading).</p>
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<p>You must start out with the fact that there are clumps. (Only God could organize from zero with everything uniform — that was in the mind of the religious people who organized from zero ... it's interesting he organized in seven days, in rhythms.) ...</p>
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<p>Let's say you have a group of people together who are not together because there is a leader, but <em>are</em> a leaderless group. After a while they'll organize so that they get jobs done and sometimes they'll organize without a leader; sometimes they'll have a leader for a particular function — sometimes for a day or a month; all of this is different depending on the different kinds of people who happen to be in that group, so there's a natural type of organization that happens among a group of people, but it's not uniform. The rules are not the same across many cultures. Each culture has its own style. You don't start with randomness. Randomness and infinity are mechy max terms. Randomness as a continuous state can only be created with great difficulty; it's a mathematical state which doesn't occur in nature at all. What happens in nature is you get things grouping together in clumps which behave over time in such a way as they may continue to exist as a group ...</p>
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<p>... and these clumps can only come in contact with those things which are physically adjacent or that are informationally adjacent or rhythmically adjacent. If you have two systems which have similar rhythms and if the rhythms are slightly different they'll start to rhythm together ... to form simpler rhythms. There may
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be many different kinds of instruments but the rhythms tend to group in clumps. If you think of our communication process then those things which have similar rhythms are able to speak to each other; those which are very different rhythms are not able to speak to each other. So there are different communications that occur between elements of a system which are of different rhythms ... There's a certain kind of self-organization that occurs with a rock group making music together, or with two people making love. You may start when you're making love a new rhythm, but whether it'll catch on depends on where your partner's at and whether it's a random rhythm that has meaning and catches other random rhythms. What may start out as noise — that which does not have meaning, that which is not information, that which does not produce change — because at that point you're in transition, may be a rhythm your partner picks up on and plays back, and plays back again until a new rhythm is organized. You've gone through the transition into a new rhythm. What was noise becomes information, because it <em>did</em> have effect, it was that change which produced an effect. Rhythms tend to organize so that that which is relatively random and meaningless drops out, and that which was meaningless may be the very thing that sets off the next transition.</p>
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<p>I have moved finally into the space which I call <em>eco-space</em>. Eco-space is self-referencing such that the existence of time and space and size and materials and energy are all in constant rhythmic motion so there is no way to repeat behavior. Eco-space is triadic. Eco-space is recursive. It is not a place of beginnings and endings, of inputs and outputs discreet from each other. Eco-space is auto-correlating ... self-organizing ... I have moved into rhythms, ecological rhythms. <em>The thing that's most constant when you're talking about nature and biology is rhythms and time things</em>; that's where the most important information lies, information being denied by in large by science. In our kleinform sponge there can be many currents and rhythms looping themselves and each other, spreading and flowing like a meadow or forest or like the living sponge in the sea, or the sea as a sponge: a current of water moves swiftly between two coral heads; it hits a back flow and is turned back, like the stocking looping outside then across through the flow jetting intra-contained through its own streaming. It intervenes in its own becoming. Dive into the water and surface through the bubbles you made and dive again. Wind back through yourself a tape of yourself talking and behaving so that you can relate to yourself as you will be when you watch the tape, then infold again.</p>
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A topology that uses rhythms intermingling and flowing around and through each other would let us build walls secondarily, rather than as categorical dividers. TV networks do not have walls ... Swim in its currents, feel them, where the activity of the space changes abruptly, sediment — slower changing stuff — is laid
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down. The slow rhythm — a "now" memory, infolds and gives context to faster events which in turn give the slow rhythm meaning.</p>
|
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<p>Scuba swimming deep in the ocean one can feel the eddys and rhythms of fluid filling the holes which one would have called cells. Coral reefs grow in slow time — slow rhythms wearing volcanic rivulets into bridges of sponge, volcanic bubbles and the sea twisting and turning <em>rhythms</em> the sand into ripples — and these ripples and sand spits rhythm the sea and the growing of coral and the wearing of rock — and all these are rhythms. Swimming below one knows one's own rhythms and the rhythms of breathing and blood and that nothing is still. Putting one's face mask close to the ripples of sand one can watch the grains flowing. But to sense that flow of slow things like sand, or equipment or hard wired programming — the flow of these walls, we must change our rhythm and swim in their time and size grain. Ten year interval time; equipment distribution size.</p>
|
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<p>Time lapse in 10 year intervals. Focus for large size objects. "Now" is a 10 year duration.</p>
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<p>Infolded time lapse taping will show the rapid change of events ordinarily called unchangeable. Time taping can be tailored to find patterns. When I was with Bateson in Hawaii we both longed for a scries of time lapse shots of Honolulu showing the cancerously money producing developments destroying the cities'
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survival environment. Month by month one can see the cancer growing. Day by day it is hidden. By changing time grain of the taping appropriately, complex rhythms are simplified. Then one can feel the repititiousness and code the kind of information/materials/energy flow that follows one to glue into our new biotopology conceptions.</p>
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<p>But here I must leave off. If you have followed me into this space you may lead me through the enormous holes I see all around me filling them with energy/information/materials/time which as it resonates, converges or dies, or provides the surprises which may evolve the means of survival.</p>
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<p>We must leave the old space. There is no life there.</p>
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<p>A 1-hour tape from which the above transcription was made is available. See inside back cover for tape offering.</p>
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<p>Special credit and thanks from Warren to Paul, Gregory Bateson, Avery Johnson,
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Lita Osmundsen, Judy Johnson, Frank Gillette, Beryl and many others ...</p>
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—<br>
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<p>See article by Avery Johnson entitled <em>Infolding Paul Ryan</em>.</p>
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<h1>SOFTWARE<br>
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R. Buckminster Fuller</h1>
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—<br>
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<p>Pirated transcription of interview videotaped by Raindance Corporation<br>
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First published in <em>Radical Software</em>, pg. 5, Vol.1, Issue 1, 1970</p>
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<br>
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<img class="drawing" src="images/software.png">
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<br>
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<p>... and so we find what man's real function is, is sorting out his experience, developing what we call the normale, and being useful ... we hear people talk about technology as something very threatening, but <b>we are technology, the universe is technology</b> ... it's simply a matter of our understanding these things ... that nature has these beautiful exchanges ... and what's happened was this shortsighted - really scared - fear of man about whether he's going to survive ... he's been told there's nowhere nearly enough to go around ... therefore you've got to go out and look out for your side, look out for your family - he's got to hold this thing and make the short move ...</p>
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<p>... so when our young world, like that young girl talking so superbly on earth day, eight year old kid, pure wisdom pouting out, her eyes could see as clear, when she said we ought not to throw away, we ought to reuse, and things like that ... that little girl was seeing that ... and so the net from all of our extraordinary earth day is that we have all of humanity catching on to things that need to be attended to when they were assuming yesterday someone else was attending to ... the fact that they were in such poverty ... they had so little time ... they had to work 12 hours or 14 hours a day ... my first job i really was working 18 hours a day ... you can't get anything done, you go home, i really didn't hardly have enough left to eat my supper before i fell down on the bed to sleep ... so i find man didn't even have time to think, nor did he have the vocabulary ... he didn't have the literacy ...<b> the literacy did not come as much out of school as out of radio </b>... the people who had the radio jobs had good diction, good vocabulary necessary for it, so the kid could listen to a good vocabulary that papa didn't have ... and so we really proliferated the capability to communicate ...
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<b>and now that we know how to communicate, we know there are many nuances of information </b>... that little child, impressive beyond her wisdom was the beautiful resource of words that she had which came so spontaneously to her ... when i was a little kid all that kids would say was "i don't like it" or "wow" ... just make a noise because they didn't have the resources to express it ... the same wisdom ...</p>
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<p>... i think the great beautiful thing that's happening in evolution here is that quite clearly we have gone through a great historical sequence of events ... from man as so ignorant and his hunger so great, his needs so great, he doesn't know how to satisfy them so he goes through starvation and he goes through pain and disease ... go back to the earliest pharoah time ... life was so bad that nobody thought of life as worthwhile in its own right ... therefore the only way you could explain your having such experience was getting yourself ready for afterlife ... so everybody thought about afterlife but the fact is part of the experience with so little to go around is that you could only think of the pharoah having an afterlife ... so the great economic drive, all the great ingenuity of the man who could see anything - artist, conceiver - was patronized by the afterlife of the pharoah ... then in getting ready for the afterlife of the pharoah you incidentally discover the levers ... (in order to take care of the pharoahs what are you going to do? ... you know there are thieves everywhere and he's going to need tools after his life so you've got to get all of these fine things under a great stone mountain so it couldn't be stolen and that's why you've got your pyramids ... ) so the Leonardo type, good-thinker, realizes the lever ... he gets an army of prisoners and they use their levers to move those stones around and build that mountain ... however, after the pharoah dies, the leonardo type dies, the people still remember about the lever ... they still remember that the leonardo type saw these people falling at the road ... they needed food, quite clearly, connected food, so there's the nile that would bring water into those side layers ... and we have fertilization ... when the pharoah dies and that thinker dies, the ditches are still there and the levers are still there, and the people remember there's an accumulation of technical capability so when another man comes along he adds to the inventory of tools ... what we may call the scaffolding to make ready for afterlife ... finally there's such accumulation of tools and capability and a little more know-how everywhere - advancement ... well, we may be able to take care of the afterlife of the nobles as well as the pharoahs ... then the tools increase some more, as they did then, and we say, well, we can take care of the afterlife of the middleclass ... and that is exactly where you come into roman and greek history - the individual family mausoleums ... finally there's got to be so much tooling around that we've a buddha and a christ and a muhammad coming around saying, you know, i think we can take care of the afterlife of everybody ... and so really the great christian era of 1500 is getting ready for the afterlife of everybody ... the great cathedrals, fantastic things, and you should see the real pathos of that little human being going in there ... the great joy that they're going to have afterlife ... suddenly there's so much tools accumulated here and the know-how keeps accumulating, and man knows a little bit more about nature and what it can do, and so he says, you know, we can take care of the afterlife of the king, as well as his living life, and still take care of everybody's afterlife ... that is what we call the beginning of the divine right of kings ... then the tools accumulate some more, and so now we can take care of the nobles in their present life, as well as the afterlife for everybody - the magna carta days ... then we have so much more proliferation of tools that we know we can take care of the afterlife of everybody, and the king, and the nobles, and the middle class ... that's the great victorian era right up to all the brownstones in new york here ... then suddenly the tools accumulated so much that henry ford said, you know, we can take care of the afterlife of everybody and we can take care of the living life of everybody ... that's the beginning of the new era, but at this point the leonardo artist-type says, up to now we were using our own hands to make end-products for the patron ... so in the victorian era you'll find the beautiful cabinet maker, and you'll find the beautiful shoemaker and tailor ... fantastic craftsmen everywhere ... but now he says, i can't make end-products for everybody ... there aren't enough artists to make end-products for everybody ... therefore, we'll have to have an entirely new kind of thing which is our industrial tools, our mass production ... and that's what is really come to all of humanity ... ... so what we've got to really come to now is developing awareness in that little child ... <p>
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<b>we've got to proliferate the right kind of information </b>... industrialization and technology is not something new ... you and i are technology, so superior to any we've ever devised ... that camera looks pretty crude along side of my eye, and my eye has always had its own light meter - it's got the whole works ...
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<b>and so i simply say, if you had that camera so it could also rebuild itself and keep itself going and improving itself for the next 70 years then you have something approximating the technology you and i really consist of ... technology's not new ... we've just been a little too crude at it ... our society's got to be sure not to let somebody mislead us ... not let our own ignorance mislead us into making the wrong moves ...</b>
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<p>... in your picture of earth day, if the young people go out with a broom and start collecting, and if they went further than picking out the paper from it and the metal and said we're going to find out how to get those recirculated, then we're really getting somewhere ... each one of us is process ... we're not things ... and so it's fantastic - there's no scientist been asked to look at the plumbing ... the best flushing toilet you have is so inefficient that we use 65 volumes of water to get rid of one volume of human waste - but it is waste, and it's very, very valueable chemistry ... at the university of illinois way back in 1929 we found that the human excrement in one farm family has in it enough energy to run all the farm machinery ... so these are the things - i hope your young world first is getting aware, and then getting to be critical and picking out things ... and now we're really beginning to understand this need of a greater understanding of nature ...</p>
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<p>... it's very important for me to tell you that the word failure is invented by man just like the word pollution ... it's a word of ignorance because nature can't fail ... nature knows exactly what she's doing ... but when man doesn't understand nature and thinks that this is the way nature behaves, and he tries to make it do this and that's not in her program then it frustrates him and he calls it a failure ... but nature doesn't intend to have anything go on for very long ... she's always transforming so she has a way of terminating, and when man wants her to go on beyond that termination point then he calls it failure, but it's not so ... </p>
|
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||||
<p><b>nature is intent on trying to make man a success despite himself</b>, and despite his long, long history of his great ignorance where i'm trying to give you the way the breakthrough is occuring ... we're still assuming fallaciously there's not enough to go around ... you have to prove your right leave; you have to earn a living ... was the old statement ... the young world really feels now that's wrong ... that the information we can get to the moon and do all this is very important because i think it tells man he can do anything he needs to do and he can make man work ...</p>
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||||
<p>... he's got to learn that the space program is not something - (never mind that space stuff, let's get back on earth, let's be practical, let's be blaise about the moon shoot ... ) the fact is our earth is a little spaceship ... unless we catch on to the fact we are a space program ourselves and that we have just so much supply and we've got to learn how to run that big spaceship which we are onboard ... to send off little spaceships to find out exactly what we need to be able to keep human beings doing ... this is the only way we will ever find out about ecology ...</p>
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<p>... on earth day i spoke at 4 universities ... i asked each one of the audiences of kids if they could tell me how much of the earth was necessary to support each life ... when you talk ecology that is a pattern of the science of the total process in life ... what's necessary to regenerate it ... each species is a relationship to the environment ... we're not really qualified to use the word ecology until we get into that ... but i'll tell you the way we'll find out is to send a man off into space ... get him outside where there's no air to be breathed; no water available; no foods ... what do we have to have on board to keep him out there for a year? ... we've literally found now that it is possible - there are two space program researches where we have teams of six men each, sealed up in cylinders (completely different operations, really quite remote from one another, the russians are doing one and the same thing too) ... those men are sealed for a year, and we give them preliminary equipment which you did learn by having scientists who are good ecologists and good chemists ... putting everything in there necessary, they hope to keep the men going ... they're connected by telephone (really very easy to talk in now - you have a window) ... but they are now operating six men for one year on 350 pounds of apparatus and the whole apparatus being able to put in an airplane suitcase ... that we could get everything you need to regenerate life ... there is entropy so the system in the end has to have something added but you're able to have it sufficiently so you only have to add but once a year ... this is really getting somewhere ... so we come back on earth - we have 350 pounds suitcase size; even at the most expensive mass production for $2 a pound; that's $700 and you do away with sewers, all the water supply lines; all you need is a milk bottle or so a year to add into the system ... on a rental basis per six men for $700 you're down to $200 a year capital cost; maybe $1 a year you've got the equipment, and you go on any mountain top and really start living the highest standard ... and this equipment when it gets first used by those men off in space due to the television relay system around the world you'll have <b>possibly a billion people watching those six men all year round and you'll have every kid really catching on to this </b> ... here would be <b>the great educational system </b>about what the chemistry changes really are ... </p>
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||||
<p>... at any rate i simply say we must be very careful ... and we must not cut off things simply because the wrong people, with short and selfish and non-thinking motives have used tools ... a pencil is a beautiful thing but you could literally jab it into a man's heart and it would kill him ... so don't say that a pencil is lethal ... we must not blame the universe ... it would be like saying the universe is used in the wrong way, therefore it's better we not have any universe ... if we accept universe at all, if we accept life, and really would like to have something best for it, then we've simply got to learn how to use our universe in the best way ... and the universe is technology, and it's always evoluting, it's always complex, it's not repeating, so we have to be catching on to our new technology and realize we really do have a machinery of mutual regeneration around the world which has been for the moment - it's so powerful, so confident - very highly exploitable by the ignorant man who happens to get to monopolize it ... but in itself it's getting out from under him ... because he has sovereign claims - well, look, you can't stop the radio waves from going out of the sovereign limits ...</p>
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<title>Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare</title>
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<h1>Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare<br>Paul Ryan<br></h1>
|
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— <br>
|
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|
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<p>First published in <em>Radical Software</em>, Vol.1, Issue 3, pp. 1-2, 1971
|
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<br>
|
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Klein worm illustrations adapted from originals by Claude Ponsot
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</p>
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<div class="indent">
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<p><em>To fight a hundred times and win a hundred times is not the blessing of blessings. The blessing of blessings is to beat the other man's army without getting into the fight yourself.</em></p>
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<p>The Art of War</em><br>
|
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— Sun Tzu</p>
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</div>
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|
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<p>Part I <br>
|
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GUERILLA STRATEGY AND CYBERNETIC THEORY</p>
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|
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<p>Traditional guerilla activity such as bombing, snipings, and kidnappings complete with printed manifestos seems like so many ecologically risky short change feedback devices compared with the real possibilities of portable video, maverick data banks, acid metaprogramming, Cable TV, satellites, cybernetic craft industries, and alternate life styles. Yet the guerilla tradition is highly relevant in the current information environment. Guerilla warfare is by nature irregular and non-repetitive. Like information theory, it recognizes that redundancy can easily become reactionary and result in entropy and defeat. The juxtaposition of cybernetics and guerilla strategy suggests a way of moving that is a genuine alternative to the film scenario of NYC urban guerilla warfare "Ice". Using machine guns to round up people in an apartment house for a revolutionary teach-in is not what the information environment is about. All power does not proceed from the end of a gun.</p>
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<p>We suffer the violence of the entropy of old forms; nuclear family, educational institutions, supermarketing, cities, the oil slick complex, etc., etc. They are running us down, running down on us and with us. How do we get out of the way? This ship of state continues to oscillate into runaway from its people and its planetary responsibilities, while efforts continue to seduce us into boarding this sinking ship; educational loans, fellowships, lowering the voting age. Where did Nixon come from anyway? How did that leftover from the old days of Elvis get to be Captain of our ship, Master of our fate?</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>How many Americans once horrified by thermonuclear war are now thinking the unthinkable in ecological terms with a certain spiteful glee of relief at the prospect of a white hell for all?</p>
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<div class="indent">
|
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<p>
|
||||
<em>Psychedelic my ass: Children of A-Bomb.</em>
|
||||
<br>— Bob Lenox</p>
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</div>
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<p>Nobody with any wisdom is looking for a straight out fight. We have come to understand that in fighting you too easily become what you behold. Yet there is no way on this planet to get out of the way. Strategy and tactics need to be developed so the establishment in its entropy does not use up our budgets of flexibility. The efforts to enlist the young in the traditional parties by '72 will be gross. Relative to the establishment and its cultural automatons, we need to move from pure Weiner wise Augustinian Cybernetics into the realm of war game theory and practice in the information environment.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The most elegant piece of earth technology remains the human biocomputer; the most important data banks are in our brain cells. Inherent in cybernetic warfare is the absolute necessity of having the people participate as fully as possible. This can be done in an information environment by insisting on ways of feeding back for human enhancement rather than feeding off people for the sake of concentration of power through captial, psuedo mythologies or withheld information. The information economy that begins in a guerilla mode accepts, cultivates and depends on living thinking flesh for its success. People are not information coolies rickashawing around the perceptions of the privileged, the well paid, or the past. People can and do process information according to the uniqueness of their perceptual systems. Uniqueness is premium in a noospheric culture that thrives on high variety. Information is here understood as a difference that makes a difference. The difficulties of a negentropic or information culture are in our transformations: how do we manage transformation of differences without exploitation, jam or corruption that sucks power from people.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>I am not talking about the cultivation of perceptual systems at the expense of emotional cadences. Faster is not always better. Doing it all ways sometimes means slowing down. Internal syncing of all facets is critical to the maintenance of a flexibiity and avoidance of a non-cybernetic "hang-up" and "drag".</p>
|
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|
||||
<p>The bulk of the work done on cybernetics from Weiner's guided missiles through the work at IBM and Bell Labs along with the various academic spin-offs has been big budget establishment supported and conditioned by the relation of those intellectuals to the powers that be distinctly non-cybernetic and unresponsive to people. The concept of entropy itself may be so conditioned. Witness the parallel between Weiner's theoretical statements about enclaves and the enclave theory of withdrawal from Vietnam. One of the grosses results of this situation is the preoccupation of the phone company and others with making "foolproof teminals" since many potential users are assumed to be fools who can only give the most dumb-dumb answers. So fools are created.</p>
|
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|
||||
<p>The Japanese, the people we dropped the A-Bomb on in '45, introduced the portable video system to this country in 1967, at a price low enough so that independent and semi-independent users could get their hands on it and begin to experiment. This experimentation, this experience, carries within it the logic of cybernetic guerilla warfare.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>Warfare</em> ... because having total control over the processing of video puts you in direct conflict with that system of perceptual imperialism called broadcast television that puts a terminal in your home and thereby controls your access to information. This situation of conflict also exists as a matter of fact between people using portable video for feedback and in situations such as schools that operate through withholding and controlling the flow of information.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>Guerilla warfare</em> ... because the portable video tool only enables you to fight on a small scale in an irregular way at this time. Running to the networks with portable video material seems rear view mirror at best, reactionary at worst. What is critical is to develop an infrastructure to cable in situations where feedback and relevant access routes can be set up as part of the process.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>Cybernetic guerilla warfare</em> ... because the tool of portable video is a cybernetic extension of man and because cybernetics is the only language of intelligence and power that is ecologically viable. Guerilla warfare as the Weathermen have been engaging in up to now and revolution as they have articulated it is simply play acting on the stage of history in an ahistoric context. Guerilla theatre, doing it for the hell of it on their stage doesn't make it either. We need to develop biologically viable information structures on a planetary scale. Nothing short of that will work. We move now inthis present information environment in a phase that finds its best analogue in those stages of human struggle called guerila warfare.</p>
|
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|
||||
<p>Yet this is not China in the 1930's. Though there is much to learn from Mao and traditional guerilla warfare this is not the same. Critically, for instance, in an economy that operates on the transformation of differences a hundred flowers must bloom from the beginning. In order to "win" in cybernetic guerilla warfare, differences must be cherished, not temporarily suppressed for the sake of "victory". A la McLuhan, war is education. Conflict defines differences. We need to know <em>what not to be</em> enough to internally calculate our own becoming earth-alive noosphere. The more we are able to internally process differences among us the more we will be able to process "spoils" of conflict with the entropic establishment-i.e., understanding the significant differences between us and them in such a way as to avoid processing what is dangerous and death producing. Learn what you can from the Egyptians, the exodus is cybernetic.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Traditional guerilla warfare is concerned with climate and weather. We must concern ourselves with decoding the information contours of the culture. How does power function here? How is this system of communications and control maintained? What information is habitually withheld and how? Ought it to be jammed? How do we jam it? How do we keep the action small enough so it is relevant to real people? How do we build up an indiginous data base? Where do we rove and strike next?</p>
|
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|
||||
<p>Traditional guerilla warfare is concerned with knowing the terrain. We must expand this to a full understanding of the ecological thresholds within which we move. We must know ourselves in a cybernetic way, know the enemy in a cybernetic way, and know the ecology so that we can take and take care of the planet intact.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The traditional concern is for good generals. What's desirable for us is adhoc heterarchies of power which have their logistics down. Cybernetics understands that power is distributed throughout the system. Relevant pathways shift and change with the conditions. The navy has developed war plans where the command is a fleet moves from ship to ship every fifteen minutes. It is near impossible to knock out the command vessel.</p>
|
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|
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<div class="indent">
|
||||
<p><b>The traditional tricks of guerilla warfare are remarkably suited for cybernetic action in an information environment. To scan briefly:</b></p>
|
||||
<p><b>Mixing "straight" moves with "freak" moves. Using straight moves to engage the enemy, freak moves to beat him and not letting the enemy know which is which.</b></p>
|
||||
<p><b>Running away when it's just too heavy. Leave the enemy's strong places and seek the weak. Go where you can make a difference.</b></p>
|
||||
<p><b>Shaping the enemy's forces and keeping our own unshaped, thereby beating the many with the few.</b></p>
|
||||
<p><b>Faking the enemy out. Surprise attacks.</b></p>
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</div>
|
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|
||||
<p>The business of deception in guerilla warfare is a turn off for most people in this relatively open culture. This is simply an area that need be better understood, if we are to be successful. People feel that concealing is unethical. Yet overexposure means underdevelopment. Many projects die of too much publicity. There is a sense in which we are information junkies feeding off each others unlived hopes. The media repeatedly stuns the growth of alternate culture in this country through saturation coverage. It is hard for an American to just keep his mouth shut and get something cooking. You are what you reveal. The start system renders impotent by overexposure and keeps others impotent through no exposure. Seeming different is more important that making a difference. Deception in guerilla tactics is an active way of avoiding control by an alien, alienating intelligence. When a policeman takes your name, he takes over. I know a guy who is inventing another identity for the computer. There is a virtue of mistrust and wisdom in knowing significantly more about yourself than you reveal. <em>Love Thy label as thyself.</em></p>
|
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<div class="indent">
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<p><em>We retreat in space, but we advance in time.</em>
|
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<br>— Mao</p>
|
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|
||||
<p><b>Count the Cost. We need develop an information accounting system, a cultural calculus.</b>
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</p>
|
||||
<p><b>Use the enemies supply. With portable video one can take the Amerikan mythology right off the air and use it as part of a new perceptual collage.</b></p>
|
||||
<p><b>Be flexible. In cybernetics, flexibility, the maintenance of a good guessing way is critical.</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p><b>Patience. Cybernetics is inherently concerned with timing and time design. It is a protracted war.</b>
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
<p><em>Do not repeat a tactic which has gained you victory, but shape your actions in an infinite variety. Water sets its flow according to the ground below; set your victories according to the enemy against you. War has no constant aspect as water has no constant shape.</em><br>— Sun Tzu</p>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Part II<br>ATTEMPTING A CALCULUS OF INTENTION</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="indent">
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>Calculus of intention was a concept developed over many years by the cybernetic wizard, Warren McCulloch. He was in the business of brain circuits. McCulloch felt that dialogue breakdowns occured largely because we lacked a logic that could handle triadic relationships. Here is his description of the problem of the calculus of intention.</em></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>The relations we need are triadic, not diadic. Once you give me triadic relations, I can make N-adic relations; but out of diadic relations I can't go anywhere. I can build strings and I can build circles, and there it ends.</em></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>The great problem of the nervous system is the one concerning its core, the so-called reticular formation ... This reticular core is that things that decided whether you'd better run of whether you'd better fight, whether you should wait, whether you should sleep, whether you should make love. This is its business and it has never relinquished that business. It is a structure incredibly simple when you look at it, but the problem of organization of many components, each of which is a living thing, each of which in some sense, senses the world, each of which tells others what it has sensed, and somehow a couple million of these cells get themselves organised enough to commit the whole organism. We do not yet have any theory that is capable of handling such a structure.</em></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>Communication: Theory and Research </em>ed Thayer, Lee, Thomas, Springfield, 1967. McCulloch's commentary on "Logical Structure of the Mind."</p>
|
||||
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
<p>I have not made a thorough study of McCulloch. It would take years. I do not know if what follows satisfies that criterion he established for such a calculus. I have maintained a certain organization of ignorance relative to formal cybernetics and formal topology. In fact, what follow would not, it seems, satisfy the kind of discreteness, one-two-three, that McCulloch seemed to want. However, such discreteness may not be necessary.</p>
|
||||
<p>My approach stems from work with McLuhan that preoccpied me with the problem of how to maintain congruence between our intentions and our extensions. McLuhan talked of orchestration of media and sense ratios. Neither cut it. Orchestras just aren't around and sense ratios or <em>sensus communis </em>is a medieval model, essentially a simile of meta touch. Gibson's book on the senses considered as percetual systems is richer in description of the process. It includes McLuhan's personal probing ability as an active part of the perceptual system.</p>
|
||||
<p>While the following formulations may not in fact work as a calculus of intention I put them forth both because they have been exciting and useful for me and because the calculus itself seems a critical problem in terms of cybernetic guerilla warfare. Dialogue degenrates and moves to conflict without an understanding of mutual intent and non-intent. While it does not seem that we can work out such a common language of intent with the people pursuing the established entropic way of increasingly dedifferentiated ways of eating bullshit; it is critical we develop such a language with each other. The high variety of self organizing social systems we are working toward will be unable to co-cybernate re each other re the ecology without such a calculus of intent.</p>
|
||||
<p>This calculus of intention is done in mathematical topology.<b> Topology is a non-metric elastic geometry. It is concerned with transformations of shapes and properties such as nearness, inside and outside.</b><p> Topologists have been able to describe the birth of a baby in terms of topological necessity. There is a feeling among some topologists that while fixed math has failed to describe the world quantitatively, it may be able to describe the world qualitatively. Work is being done on topological description of verbs that seem commmon to all languages. Piaget felt that topology was close to the core of the way children think. Truck drivers have been found to be the people who are most able to learn new jobs. While driving truck for Ballantine one summer, it became apparent to me why. Hand an experienced driver a stack of delivery tickets and he could route in five minutes what would take you an hour. It was a recurring problem of mapping topologically how to get through this network in the shortest amount of time given one way streets etc.</p>
|
||||
<p>I should say that my own topological explorations have a lot to do with a personal perspective system that never learned phonetics, can't spell or sing, and took to topology the way many people seem to take to music. The strangest explicit experience with toplogy I've had came via a painter friend, Claude Ponsot, whose handling of complex topological patterns on canvas convinced me that a non-verbal coherent graphic thing was possible. The following transformations on the klein bottle - klein worms, if you will - came in the context of working with Warren Brody on soft control systems using plastic membranes. Behind that are three years of experience infolding videotape. I checked these formulations with a Ph.D topologist. He had not seen them before, questioned whether they were strictly topological. As far as I know, they are original.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<img src="images/klein_worm_01.jpg"><br>
|
||||
|
||||
<img src="images/klein_worm_02.jpg"><br>
|
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|
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<img src="images/klein_worm_03.jpg"><br>
|
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||||
<img src="images/klein_worm_04.jpg"><br>
|
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|
||||
<img src="images/klein_worm_05.jpg"><br>
|
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|
||||
<img src="images/klein_worm_06.jpg"><br>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>There are three specific areas where I think this topological calculus of invention can be of use: acid metaprogramming, a grammar of video infolding and perceptual sharing, and in soft control structures using plastic membranes.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Relative to acid metaprogramming I am not recommending LSD-25 to anyone nor am I endorsing Leary's approach. I am simply looking at some of the work John Lilly has done and suggesting that this calculus might be useful in that context. Both in <em>Programming and MetaProgramming in the Human Biosphere</em> and in <em>Mind of the Dolphin </em>Lilly uses the notion of interlock to describe communication between people and between species. In <em>Programming and MetaProgramming</em> he describes a personal experience with acid that in some way undercuts the metaphor of interlock, and to me suggests that the klein worms might be a better way to describe the process he calls "interlock". Here is Lilly's description of that experience he titles "the key is no key".</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="indent">
|
||||
<p><em>Mathematical transformations were next tried in the approach to the locked rooms. The concept of the key fitting into the lock and the necessity of finding the key were abandoned and the rooms were approached as "topological puzzles". In the multidimensional cognitional and visual space the rooms were now manipluated without the necessity of the key in the lock.</em></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>Using the transitional concept that the lock is a hole in the door through which one can exert an effort for a topological transformation, one could turn the room into another topological form other than a closed box. The room in effect was turned inside out through the hole, through the lock leaving the contents outside and the room now a collapsed balloon placed farther from the self metaprogrammer. Room after room was thus defined as turned inside out with the contents spewed forth for use by the self-metaprogrammer. Once this control "key" worked, it continued automatically to its own limits.</em></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>With this sort of an "intellectual crutch" as it were, entire new areas of basic beliefs were entered upon. Most of the rooms which before had appeared as strong rooms with big powerful walls, doors and locks now ended up as empty baloons. The greatly defended contents of the rooms in many cases turned out to be relatively trivial programs and episodes from childhood which had been over-generalized and over-valued by this particular human computer. The devaluation of the general purpose properties of the human biocomputer was one such room. In childhood the many episodes which led to the self-programmer not remaining general purpose but becoming more and more limited and "specialized" were entered upon. Several levels of the supra-self-metaprograms laid down in childhood were opened up.</em></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>The mathematical operation which took place in the computer was the movement of energies and masses of data from the supra-self-metaprogram down to the self metaprogrammatic level and below. At the same time there was the knowledge that programmatic materials had been moved from the "supra-self position" to the "under self-control position" at the programmatic level. These operations were all filed in meta-program storage under the title "the key is no key".</em></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><em>Programming and MetaProgramming</em>,
|
||||
<br>Lilly, pp. 42-43</p>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Relative to video infolding it is near impossible to describe in words even using klein worm graphs what I'm talking about. The following will mean little to anyone except those who have had some experience of taping with themselves at different levels.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="indent">
|
||||
<p><b>Taping something new with yourself is a part contained.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>To replay the tape for yourself is to contain it in your perceptual system.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>Taping yourself playing with the replay is to contain both on a new tape.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>To replay for oneself tape of self with tape of self is to contain the process in a new dimension.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>Parts left out of that process are parts uncontained.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>All of this is mapable on computer graphic terminals.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>At one level that of reality that is left off the tape is the part contained.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>Raw tape replayed is part contained in the head.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>If it is somebody else's tape you are watching you can to an extent share in this live perceptual system via the tape he took.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>To watch another's edited tape is to share in the way he thinks about the relation between his various perceptions in a real time mode. This enters the realm of his intention.</b></p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p><b>If you are editing some of your tape along with tape somebody else shot and he is doing the same thing using some of your tape then it is possible to see how one's perceptions relate to another's intentions and vice versa.</b></p>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Relative to sharing perceptual systems it is somewhat easier to talk about since there are parallels with photography and film.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>The most explicit experience of this mode of perceptual sharing came in the early days of Raindance when Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, Michael Shamberg and myself "shot" twelve rolls of tape on earth day. Both in replay that evening (we laughed our heads off digging each others tape while the old perceptual imperialist, Walter Cronkite, explained Earth Day for us) and in the edits that followed each of us got a good idea of how each saw and thought about the events vis-a-vis the others.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Relative to soft control systems using plastic membranes I am thinking mostly of the soft cybernetic work being done by Warren Brody, Avery Johnson and Bill Carrigan. The sense of the sacred and the transcendental that surrounds some of the inflatable subculture is to me a kind of pseudomythology. Conciousness might be better invested in designing self-referencing structures where awareness is imminent in the structure and its relation to the users; not by being invested in a religious way to a "special" structure that does not relate intelligently to the users.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>A Klein Worm couch is a suggestion of a possible way of moving in that direction. It could be built of strong polyurethane, filled with air, perhaps by a constant flow from a pump. People might interrelate kinetically through the changes in the air pressure. Design of the actual couch could be arrived at experimentally by combinations and transformations of the structures described above.</p>
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html lang="en">
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<head>
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<title>Readings</title>
|
||||
<meta charset="utf-8">
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="readings.css" media="screen"/>
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||||
<a class="list" href="beyond_the_internet_and_all_control_diagrams.html"><h1>Beyond the Internet and All Control Diagrams</a><br>
|
||||
Simone Browne and Zach Blas</h1>
|
||||
<a class="list" href="biotopology.html"><h1>Biotopology 1972</a><br>
|
||||
Warren Brodey</h1>
|
||||
<a class="list" href="cybernetic_guerilla_warfare.html"><h1>Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare</a><br>
|
||||
Paul Ryan</h1>
|
||||
<a class="list" href="mejias_liberation_technology.html"><h1>Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond</a><br>
|
||||
Ulises A. Mejias</h1>
|
||||
<a class="list" href="buckminster_fuller_software.html"><h1>SOFTWARE</a><br>
|
||||
R. Buckmister Fuller</h1>
|
||||
<a class="list" href="the_psychotopology_of_everyday_life.html"><h1>The Psychotopology of Everyday Life</a><br>
|
||||
Hakim Bey</h1>
|
||||
<a class="list" href="theory_of_the_derive.html"><h1>Theory of the Dérive</a><br>
|
||||
Guy Debord</h1>
|
||||
<a class="list" href="truckstops_on_the_information_superhighway.html"><h1>Truckstops on the Information Superhighway: Ant Farm, SRI, and the Cloud</a><br>
|
||||
Tung-Hui Hu</h1>
|
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</div>
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<title>the psychotopology of everyday life</title>
|
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<h1>The Psychotopology of Everyday Life<br>
|
||||
Hakim Bey</h1>
|
||||
—<br>
|
||||
<p>Excerpt from <em>T.A.Z.,
|
||||
The Temporary Autonomous Zone</em>, Autonomedia, 1991<br>
|
||||
Full text available at <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism" target="_blank"> theanarchistlibrary.org</a></p>
|
||||
<br>
|
||||
<p>THE CONCEPT OF THE TAZ arises first out of a critique of Revolution, and an appreciation of the Insurrection. The former labels the latter a failure; but for us uprising represents a far more interesting possibility, from the standard of a psychology of liberation, than all the "successful" revolutions of bourgeoisie, communists, fascists, etc.</p>
|
||||
<p>The second generating force behind the TAZ springs from the historical development I call "the closure of the map." The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance — not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis of "territorial gangsterism." Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed...in theory.</p>
|
||||
<p>The "map" is a political abstract grid, a gigantic con enforced by the carrot/stick conditioning of the "Expert" State, until for most of us the map becomes the territory — no longer "Turtle Island," but "the USA." And yet because the map is an abstraction it cannot cover Earth with 1:1 accuracy. Within the fractal complexities of actual geography the map can see only dimensional grids. Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod. The map is not accurate; the map cannot be accurate.</p>
|
||||
<p>So — Revolution is closed, but insurgency is open. For the time being we concentrate our force on temporary "power surges," avoiding all entanglements with "permanent solutions."
|
||||
And — the map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open. Metaphorically it unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of Control. And here we should introduce the concept of psychotopology (and -topography) as an alternative "science" to that of the State's surveying and mapmaking and "psychic imperialism." Only psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sufficient complexity to model the real. But a 1:1 map cannot "control" its territory because it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features. We are looking for "spaces" (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones — and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs.</p>
|
||||
<p>The closures of Revolution and of the map, however, are only the negative sources of the TAZ; much remains to be said of its positive inspirations. Reaction alone cannot provide the energy needed to "manifest" a TAZ. An uprising must be for something as well.</p>
|
||||
<p>1. First, we can speak of a natural anthropology of the TAZ. The nuclear family is the base unit of consensus society, but not of the TAZ. ("Families! — how I hate them! the misers of love!" — Gide) The nuclear family, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical: the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi- nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance — and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open — not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc. (American Indian society preserves certain aspects of this structure even now.)</p>
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<p>In our own post-Spectacular Society of Simulation many forces are working — largely invisibly — to phase out the nuclear family and bring back the band. Breakdowns in the structure of Work resonate in the shattered "stability" of the unit-home and unit-family. One's "band" nowadays includes friends, ex- spouses and lovers, people met at different jobs and pow-wows, affinity groups, special interest networks, mail networks, etc. The nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret implosion of split atoms — and the obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band.</p>
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<p>2. The TAZ as festival. Stephen Pearl Andrews once offered, as an image of anarchist society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration (see Appendix C). Here we might also invoke Fourier and his concept of the senses as the basis of social becoming — "touch-rut" and "gastrosophy," and his paean to the neglected implications of smell and taste. The ancient concepts of jubilee and saturnalia originate in an intuition that certain events lie outside the scope of "profane time," the measuring-rod of the State and of History. These holidays literally occupied gaps in the calendar — intercalary intervals. By the Middle Ages, nearly a third of the year was given over to holidays. Perhaps the riots against calendar reform had less to do with the "eleven lost days" than with a sense that imperial science was conspiring to close up these gaps in the calendar where the people's freedoms had accumulated — a coup d'etat, a mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the organic cosmos into a clockwork universe. The death of the festival.</p>
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<p>Participants in insurrection invariably note its festive aspects, even in the midst of armed struggle, danger, and risk. The uprising is like a saturnalia which has slipped loose (or been forced to vanish) from its intercalary interval and is now at liberty to pop up anywhere or when. Freed of time and place, it nevertheless possesses a nose for the ripeness of events, and an affinity for the genius loci; the science of psychotopology indicates "flows of forces" and "spots of power" (to borrow occultist metaphors) which localize the TAZ spatio-temporally, or at least help to define its relation to moment and locale.</p>
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<p>The media invite us to "come celebrate the moments of your life" with the spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, John Zerzan, Bob Black et al.) — and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers of our leisure. "Fight for the right to party" is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle but a new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which offers TVs and telephones as ways to "reach out and touch" other human beings, ways to "Be There!"</p>
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<p>Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already "the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old" (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style "tribal gathering," the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles...Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics — we should realize that all these are already "liberated zones" of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always "open" because it is not "ordered"; it may be planned, but unless it "happens" it's a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial.</p>
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<p>The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss — in short, a "union of egoists" (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form — or else, in Kropotkin's terms, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid." (Here we should also mention Bataille's "economy of excess" and his theory of potlatch culture.)</p>
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<p>3. Vital in shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (or as we jokingly call it, "rootless cosmopolitanism"). Aspects of this phenomenon have been discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology and the War Machine, by Lyotard in Driftworks and by various authors in the "Oasis" issue of Semiotext(e). We use the term "psychic nomadism" here rather than "urban nomadism," "nomadology," "driftwork," etc., simply in order to garner all these concepts into a single loose complex, to be studied in light of the coming- into-being of the TAZ. "The death of God," in some ways a de- centering of the entire "European" project, opened a multi-perspectived post- ideological worldview able to move "rootlessly" from philosophy to tribal myth, from natural science to Taoism — able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect's, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.
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But this vision was attained at the expense of inhabiting an epoch where speed and "commodity fetishism" have created a tyrannical false unity which tends to blur all cultural diversity and individuality, so that "one place is as good as another." This paradox creates "gypsies," psychic travellers driven by desire or curiosity, wanderers with shallow loyalties (in fact disloyal to the "European Project" which has lost all its charm and vitality), not tied down to any particular time and place, in search of diversity and adventure...This description covers not only the X-class artists and intellectuals but also migrant laborers, refugees, the "homeless," tourists, the RV and mobile-home culture — also people who "travel" via the Net, but may never leave their own rooms (or those like Thoreau who "have travelled much — in Concord"); and finally it includes "everybody," all of us, living through our automobiles, our vacations, our TVs, books, movies, telephones, changing jobs, changing "lifestyles," religions, diets, etc., etc.</p>
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<p>Psychic nomadism as a tactic, what Deleuze & Guattari metaphorically call "the war machine," shifts the paradox from a passive to an active and perhaps even "violent" mode. "God"'s last throes and deathbed rattles have been going on for such a long time — in the form of Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism, for example — that there's still a lot of "creative destruction" to be carried out by post-Bakuninist post-Nietzschean commandos or apaches (literally "enemies") of the old Consensus. These nomads practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire for TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, "liberated" bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars.</p>
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<p>These nomads chart their courses by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics — and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises.</p>
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<h1>Theory of the Dérive<br>
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Guy Debord</h1>
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—<br>
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<p>“Théorie de la dérive” was published in Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958). A slightly different version was first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two dérives. This translation by Ken Knabb is from the <a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/cat.htm" target="_blank">Situationist International Anthology</a> (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.</p>
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<p>One of the basic situationist practices is the <em>dérive,</em><sup><a href="#1.">(1)</a></sup> a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.</p>
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<p>In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.</p>
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<p>But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data.</p>
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<p>The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.</p>
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<p>In his study <em>Paris et l'agglomération parisienne</em> (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that "an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it." In the same work, in order to illustrate "the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives ... within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small," he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.</p>
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<p>Such data — examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone's life can be so pathetically limited) — or even Burgess's theory of Chicago's social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives. </p>
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<p>If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.</p>
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<p>An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in <em>Médium,</em> May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, "It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence." From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being "as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality," and are thus "truly independent from one another."</p>
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<p>At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities that are such rich centers of possibilities and meanings, could be expressed in Marx's phrase: "Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive."</p>
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<p>One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups' impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.</p>
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<p>The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.</p>
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<p>But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.<a href="#2."><sup>(2)</sup></a></p>
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<p>The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.</p>
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<p>The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with personal disorientation. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism. </p>
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<p>In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure — the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambience: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it's interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).</p>
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<p>The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.</p>
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<p>In the "possible rendezvous," on the other hand, the element of exploration
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is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this "possible rendezvous" has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a "possible rendezvous" for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by
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chance meet the person who has arranged the "possible rendezvous." In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn't know where the first "possible rendezvous" has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.</p>
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<p>Our rather anarchic lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.</p>
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<p>The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draft the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambience, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the earliest navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.</p>
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<p>Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended bordering regions. The
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most general change that dérive experiences lead to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.</p>
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<p>Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>"The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours."</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>(To be continued.)</p>
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<p align="right">GUY DEBORD<br>
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1958</p>
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<p align="center">[TRANSLATOR'S NOTES]</p>
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<p><a name="1.">1.</a><i>dérive:</i> literally "drift" or "drifting". Like <i>détournement,</i> this term has usually been anglicized as both a noun and a verb.</p>
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<p><a name="2.">2. </a>"The <em>dérive</em> (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was <em>to the totality</em> exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say <em>detourns</em>) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always <em>contraindicated,</em> so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed 'ordinary life,' that is to say, in reality, into 'petrified life.' In this regard I now repudiate my <a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm" target="_blank">Formulary</a>'s propaganda for a <em>continuous dérive</em>. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That's the extreme limit. It's a miracle it didn't kill us" (Ivan Chtcheglov, excerpt from a 1963 letter to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord, reprinted in<em>Internationale Situationniste</em> #9, p.38).</p>
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