Because im a STEMlord and Gaddis was hype on cybernetics when he wrote that book I had a good time thinking about a lot of the things that were going on in the book using some concepts I'm more familiar with than literary theory: feedback, robustness, and criticality, and how they relate to each other. Feedback is pretty straightforward to understand. robustness is a more vague concept from biology that suggests that the operation of a biological process """ought""" to be fairly insensitive to changes in parameters that can easily be changed. Obviously this is something you want to have if you're designing a system yourself, and something you expect to find (to some extent) in a system that you find to have been operating for a long time (e.g. genetic transcription, or on a much shorter timescale, capitalism). Criticality is a characteristic most commonly understood in the context of thermodynamic systems near a kind of phase transition, where microscopic fluctuations in the current phase begin to extend to all scales. An example of this is when water vapor is brought near its critical point the density will begin to fluctuate on an extremely wide range of length scales causing it to appear to shimmer, a phenomenon called critical opalescence. More generally the concept of criticality has been generalized to many different kinds of systems that see fluctuations at many different scales.
Feedback is probably the easiest one of the three to pick out in JR, probably because Gaddis put it in there himself. He quotes weiner, one of the primary figures of the cybernetics movement, often enough and named of the characters after JW Gibbs, a physicist whose work was foundational in statistical mechanics and therefore influential to the cyberneticists who built on information theory, which gained a lot through the interaction with statistical physics through the common use of the concept of entropy as a measure of information. Gaddis sees a sort of dark reflection of the vision of the cyberneticists, who perhaps had in mind something like Cybersyn. Instead Gaddis describes a world drowning in useless messages, with people at what serves as the commanding heights of the financial capitalist economy sending out directives to subordinates who carry out their commands to waste and pillage and then returning the relevant output data: profits, with social details appearing only to the extent to which they influence the financial details. With surplus value and accumulation as the only inputs to these decision makers the outcomes are predictable: strikes at the plants they buy up and sell off, uprisings of native Americans whose land they desire, and otherwise general insanity. When one of the main characters, Amy, is having issues with her spouse her father and uncle deal with the problem the only way they know how: financially. They aim to tank his business with no care given to the fact that this most likely (and indeed eventual) response to this would be to return to his home country and take his son, and Amy's, with him, and no comprehension that this would be a problem for anyone. The information is filtered out, lost among the important details of business, requiring nonstop attention.
So if one were to consider the ideal cybernetic society as one immaculately planned, organized to everyone’s advantage it’s immediately clear that something is wrong here. If this ideal cybernetics is a work of Reason reified into an ideally reasonable society, what we see in J R is not a work of Reason at all, something more Demiurgic. The cybernetic capitalism in J R is a blind, idiotic creator with the feedback inputs necessary to propagate its structural form forward through time to the exclusion of anything else. What it creates is garbage immediately upon inception. It is constantly rocked by crises and overproduction but somehow manages to maintain its form as the people who make up the society are thrown into chaos. Here Gaddis shows that he understands robustness well enough, even if not on purpose. Capitalism is not going to collapse as long as it is capable on enlisting anything and everything else not just to prop itself up but to continue to extract profits (value as labor time is something lacking in Gaddis’ understanding of capitalism, almost certainly a result of his bourgeois background).
But how does this robustness come about? It arises out of the use and re-use of people, anyone available. Throughout the novel we see people taking dramatic and intersecting arcs through the society Gaddis has modeled for us. We see how events in Wall St. affect the small Long Island town of Massapequa, an upstate factory, a brewery in the Midwest, and a fictional region in Africa just to name a few. Moreover, we see how the events in Wall St. mediate interactions between these otherwise unconnected regions, with the events in these regions changing the landscape in which decisions that ultimately affect everything are made. The PR specialist who brings in an elementary school class to buy a share of stock eventually working for one of the students he originally brought in. A brewery and a toy manufacturer interfere with plots over the region of Africa wracked by war instigated at the behest of tycoons looking for lucrative government contracts. People are shuttled around the corporate network in whatever way is most convenient for whoever makes the choices. In the interest of shaving off as much cost as possible the legal and financial structures are balanced on a razor’s edge. Causes and effects wrack the human and environmental components of the system and the precise details are contingent on the variation of any of the smallest components, as long as if affects the bottom line. Gaddis grasps the criticality of finance capital even though “criticality”, as an intellectual fad, blossomed well past his time. He understood it because he was able to witness first-hand the mechanisms that allowed the chaos he saw around him to maintain itself somehow while chewing up and spitting out its individual components.
But if everything collapses the players near the center of the machine return mostly unscathed. Perhaps there is to some extent a changing of the guard but the people who owned the means of production get off relatively easily compared to the people left jobless, displaced or dead in their wake. They continue with their lives, feeling relieved that perhaps they will get a new start and that life will not be so bad after all. Even in his myopia Gaddis shows some insight.
I hacked discipline's dropbox account using... uhh... the dark web? And I found:
"Clarence Tuppins - The Damocles Crisis: A Thriller Based on Our Military and Its Crimes" (PDF)(47 MB)
Great stuff here:
Major Hardbody turned his head. Then he turned it again. "17% of women in the military report being sexually harassed." Samantha Babe winked and took off her uniform, revealing a pink leotard. "I assure you, Major Hardbody, this will be entirely consensual."
I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air
Of any living voice but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music, played when fair
And angel fingers wove, and unaware,
Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.
No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call,
For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,
The black and awful chaos of the night;
For through it all--above, beyond it all--
I know the far sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the light.
Don't worry though: He could also churn out work more to rHizzonE's taste:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
I was not after glory,
But there was glory with me, like a friend,
Throughout those crippling years when friends were few,
And fearful to be known by their own names
When mine was vilified for their approval.
and
Time shall have more to say than men shall hear
Between now and the coming of that harvest
Which is to come. Before it comes, I go—
By the short road that mystery makes long
For man’s endurance of accomplishment.
I shall have more to say when I am dead.
http://www.bartleby.com/233/711.html
walkinginonit posted:Hey RedMaistre have you read Edwin Arlington Robinson's "John Brown?" There's a huge religious bent to it, but I think the poem is basically an explanation of the historical dialectic unfolding and there are so many badass lines in there.
I was not after glory,
But there was glory with me, like a friend,
Throughout those crippling years when friends were few,
And fearful to be known by their own names
When mine was vilified for their approval.
Time shall have more to say than men shall hear
Between now and the coming of that harvest
Which is to come. Before it comes, I go—
By the short road that mystery makes long
For man’s endurance of accomplishment.
I shall have more to say when I am dead.
http://www.bartleby.com/233/711.html
Yes! And I was thinking of singling out that poem, but its substantially longer than the two I did bring up. Love 'persona' poetry.
He did a decent poem about Lincoln too, though his reticence about politics (which is noticeable to a lesser extant in the John Brown poem too) makes it too vague and lacking in historically specificity-he might as well have been writing an ode to some 17th century French monarch or antique Roman general. This chariness about confronting in verse the particular social significance of the Civil War and Lincoln's presidency not a singular sin, though.....
When we began the experiment in 1945, meats of any kind were decidedly variable in supply. However, one prepared animal food with a guaranteed constant formula was readily available. This food was Purina Laboratory Chow, and we decided to make it the basic item in the diet, keeping it constantly available in a metal feeder. It was not a perfect food for dogs, as it had been developed as an all-purpose laboratory food for rats, mice, guinea pigs, and monkeys as well as dogs. It contained more roughage and less fat than was ideally suitable for dogs. It proved, however, to be an intrinsically sound diet, as our experimental animals developed into healthy and vigorous adults with every indication that their growth was equal to normal breed standards or better.
Laboratory Chow, meanwhile i have a dog coming to stay whose owner is going to give me premixed bags of various foods to cook for xher each meal.
Edited by swampman ()
i also cant find the thread where somebody talked about leaving it in their org library.
i leave this gardening Stalin as my offering to us all
Themselves posted:whats the name of that crypto book that i lost the link to? i thought it was cryptopedia or something but i don't want to learn about "...the Weird, Strange, and Downright Bizarre", at least unless the word capitalism is on every 3rd page.
i also cant find the thread where somebody talked about leaving it in their org library.
i leave this gardening Stalin as my offering to us all
its also, uh, not really what i'd call a "crypto" book, unless you're thinking of actual crypts
Themselves posted:i leave this gardening Stalin as my offering to us all
totally gonna get this framed and hang it in my garden shed
tpaine posted:no one here has any thoughts of their own
http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/dickheads
c_man posted:i finished the dialectical biologist and i thought it was great even if the last chapter was a little weak
i like the insertion midway through of the chapter where they troll some nerd about Richard Dawkins, using the identity of a fake South American professor
Themselves posted:Graeber writes a response to the 'Zzone. Guess he was pretty bent outta shape from tpaine's evisceration
http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/dickheads
argh
Edited by aerdil ()
aerdil posted:
what is that wet spot on your carpet. did you invite gwap over. did you rub his nose in it
stegosaurus posted:i got these two books from india, newly printed, and uh.... they smell weird. i confirmed it with other people. they smell strange. like feet sort of. I don't know what to do with this information
i'll be straight with you: you now have cancer. those books might cause some health problems too.
vijay prashad's 'no free left: futures of indian communism'
maoism: a critique from the left, edited by the Convenor of the Research Unit of the Communist Party Of India (Marxist), Prasenjit Bose
HenryKrinkle posted:
weirdest thing about the militant/swp is their continuing love of cuba despite otherwise hating anything remotely resembling socialism in any other context
this was another fun one from them:
http://www.themilitant.com/2015/7901/790105.html