As Henri Laborit, who did his own research free from the constraints of Western academia has pointed out, science and technology amplify our reach, allowing us to seize and exploit what was previously inaccessible to us. Advancements in extraction technology allow us to drill and mine to ever greater depths. Advances in transportation technology allow us to gather materials from, and disseminate products to ever greater distances in ever shorter times. Advances in communications allow us to listen to, and to speak to, increasingly greater numbers of others at greater distances and in shorter times.
Those who are first to master and mobilize the latest technologies position themselves to exploit resources that are of no 'book' value to the laggards who lack the means to reach them; it is like stealing candy from a baby. What value does a depleted oil field have? How does that change for those who have just developed deep horizontal drilling and fracking technologies? As Laborit further points out, patents preserve the life of the ‘stealing candy from a baby’ advantage, and the vacuuming of scientific and technological inventive power as from Europe and Asia to the United States, making the U.S. the ‘stealing candy from a baby’ capital of the world. In order to protect this position, it is also important to be a leader in military technology so as to be able to keep the exploitations running smoothly.
Heretics like Laborit, Mach, Schroedinger have further pointed out that ‘production’ is a ‘spook’. We say that a volcano ‘produces’ magma, but here we go again, dropping out ‘induction’. We are not talking about ‘input’ and ‘output’ in the abstract Euclidian models of Western science, ... we are talking about ‘in-duction’ and ‘pro-duction’ wherein the volcano is a ‘duct’, like a ‘boil’ in a boiling (relational transforming) fluid.
“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).” – Erwin Schroedinger
The ‘duct’ is not the author of the production any more than a woman’s nipple is the author of the milk it produces, or the urethra is the author of the urine it produces. Like the tornado, the volcano, while it gives us the impression that it is ‘doing something’, is merely the place where in-duction and pro-duction are one dynamic [a coincidence of opposites] within a transforming relational continuum. There is a many-to-one convergence [sink, epigenesis] in reciprocal complement with a one-to-many divergence [source, genesis]. The volcano is NOT a ‘fountainhead’, it is a ‘figurehead’ and the notion that it authors the production of magma makes it into a ‘spook’. Volcanoes DO NOT PRODUCE MAGMA! Not focusing on the in-duction side of pro-duction doesn’t justify is in crediting the ‘duct’ with authorship of pro-duction. It is ‘duct’, not a supernatural Creator of material production.
Do we really believe the terrorist group is the author of terrorist violence, or it is a conduit or duct for the exhausting of relational tensional energy in the body of the global collective? Hint: the group may persist well beyond the life-cycle of its warriors, suggesting it is a conduit rather than a local independently-existing producer of violence. That is; “it takes a whole relational continuum to brew up an eruption of violence and/or magma”
There are three intellectual ‘tricks’ or ‘short-cuts’ of convenience that reduce the non-dualist relational features of our physically real experience, to notional things-in-themselves, as follows;
1. A full understanding of the source and impact of an ‘action’ such as an eruption that ‘produces something’, is indefinitely deferred both in the understanding of its roots and in the understanding of its ultimate impact. As Nietzsche puts it;
“How false is the supposition that an action must depend upon what has preceded it in consciousness ! And morality has been measured in the light of this supposition, as also criminality. . . . The value of an action must be judged by its results, say the utilitarians: to measure it according to its origin involves the impossibility of knowing that origin. But do we know its results ? Five stages ahead, perhaps. Who can tell what an action provokes and sets in motion ? As a stimulus ? As the spark which fires a powder-magazine ? Utilitarians are simpletons —“ --Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’
2. Science is utilitarian in this precise manner that Nietzsche is talking about. In spite of the fact that the general case of real, physical phenomena is nonlinear dynamics such as earthquakes and volcanics, avalanches and tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes,... ‘actions’, ...that cannot be predicted either in time and place of occurrence or in magnitude, ... it is easier just to start with the ‘action’ as if the local anomaly within the transforming relational continuum depended only ‘on itself’ [lightning flashed, the storm-cell is producing high winds, rain and hail and is growing larger and stronger]. Mainstream science turns relational features in the transforming relational continuum into ‘spooks’ by the following intellectual tactic, to avoid the indefinite referral complexity, by building the following avoidance tactic into the foundations of science and scientific thinking. Poincaré captures this as follows in ‘The origin of mathematical physics;
“Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.” – Henri Poincaré
NOW we can say that ‘the volcano produces magma’ because we have the device of ‘force’ that we can use to impute authorship of ‘action’ on the part of a ‘thing’. In the physical reality of our natural experience, the volcano, the storm-cell, the human, the group/organization is a ‘vent’ or ‘duct’ implied by the coincident reciprocal complementarity of in-duction [epigenesis] and pro-duction [genesis]. The bucket the volcano is drawing out from is the same bucket the volcano is spewing into. It is a siphon [duct, conduit], not a ‘producer’.
The same applies to ‘businesses’. Business is a technology that in-ducts and pro-ducts, business is not a thing-in-itself that jumpstart authors ‘pro-duction’, by virtue of ‘its own force’. ‘Force’ is an ad hoc idealization. Sure we can measure the force of winds ‘pro-duced’ by a hurricane, but such winds are coming and going at the same time, and ‘force’ can only have one direction at a time. ‘Force’ is not real but it is used as the excuse of why things move. There are no ‘things-in-themselves’ in a flow-based (field based) world, there are relational forms/features as in the transforming relational continuum. ‘Will’ is the corresponding logical fix to explain how a human, as a thing-in-itself can produce material results.
3. The hubris of Western humans who have come to think of themselves/ourselves as ‘independently-existing things-in-themselves with internal force driven and directed actions who ‘produce results’, is the lynchpin that holds the entire thing-based spook complex together. Nietzsche captures this fact that ‘will’ is simply an artefact of language; i.e. a utilitarian piece of logic to enable the fragmentation of the transforming relational continuum into separate parts, ... parts that need to be internally animated now they have been removed from relational space and recast by language, as if is they reside, operate and interact in an absolute space and absolute space measuring/reference frame;
“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
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‘Production’ is the ‘deed’ that implies a ‘doer’. Western justice knows all about this. In spite of the relational social dynamics that can brew up intolerable conditions for some and obscenely privileged for others, by way of Mach’s principle;
“The dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” – Mach’s principle
... the model of man or business as an independently existing ‘doer of deeds’ that is fully and solely responsible for its own will-full, productive actions and results, ... is what language gives us to explain a man, a corporation, a nation, a volcano, a hurricane.
Laborit’s model included ‘in-duction’ together with ‘pro-duction’, acknowledging that, as with the storm-cell, animating influence derives from the relational tensions between regions of deficiency and regions of surplus.
If we assume that the world is populated by people of the same race and same properties and dispositions, it would still hold that those who got the technologies of horizontal drilling and fracking ahead of the others would be in a position of ‘stealing candy from a baby’ and become ‘major producers’. Patent laws and military alliances (threats of embargoes etc.) would help to keep the others babies vulnerable to having their candy stolen.
So long as we constrain our view of the ‘producers’ to ‘independent beings’ whose ‘productive results’ need be viewed only as if coming from the immediate past, we shall credit the ‘producers’ with the authorship of the productive action, just as we credit the ‘producers of terrorist acts’ with the authorship of such acts, ignoring the physical reality that such acts drive from relational tensions which can brew over centuries. Being a conduit for the release of relational energies is not the same as being the full and sole producer.
What has Laborit done differently? In ‘Les bases biologiques des comportements sociaux’ (‘The biological origins of social behaviours’) he speaks about ‘open systems’ wherein outside-inward [epigenetic] influences are in reciprocal complementarity with inside-outward [genetic/productive] influences. In so doing, as Einstein says; ‘Space becomes a participant in physical phenomena’. So long as we mentally model activity in terms of ‘independent things’ and ‘what these things do’, as if in a non-participating space’, we are obliged to attribute the movements and interactions of these things to the things-in-themselves [hence the invention of ‘will’ as an animating engine, which sets up the pseudo-reality of jumpstart authorship of production]. The reality is that relations are at the bottom of these things and their actions, whether terrorist actions or business production actions.
“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013
So, production is a ‘spook’, made possible by the imposing of an absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame which removes [from view] the relational origins of social dynamics, giving rise to the notion that ‘independently-existing things such as humans, corporations, nations, can be the jumpstart authors of ‘production’, along with the ‘hurricane’, the ‘volcano’ etc., ... all as a result of language and the errors of grammar in which we reduce relational activities to terms of ‘things’ and ‘what things do and produce’. Do volcanoes produce magma? Do hurricanes produce violent winds, rain, hail, lightning and storm surges? It is convenient to say so and science uses it exclusively because “it delivers economy of thought” as Mach puts it, but he also warns.
“Science itself, … may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presenting of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought” —Ernst Mach
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“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach
The deconstruction of ‘power’ is corollary to the deconstruction of ‘production’. There is nothing preventing a person or collection of people as in a state, from using his superior military power to rape and pillage. In a world where this is the general ethic, it is important to stay on the leading edge of the advancement of military technology or else one will be exposed to pushback from those who one has raped and pillaged with impunity, backed by their superior military power.
That is, just as ‘pro-duction’ and ‘in-duction were relative aspects of one relational dynamic in terms of kinetic energy, so are ‘haut-pression’ (oppression) and ‘sous-pression’ (suppression) relative aspects of one relational dynamic in the field of potential energy. The more one resorts to the former, the bigger the debt accruing in the latter, as in opposite phases of one wave dynamic.
The oppressive economic power-over of Euro-American colonizers induces a corresponding suppression or economic power deficiency which is an active deficiency like a debt that needs continuing servicing. Power is relative rather than a ‘real property’ of a ‘real thing-in-itself’. Where power is [mis]taken to be real, it is often seen as being ‘good’ or ‘benevolent’ as with the white to the black. The egotist belief in one’s own superior power [as if power were absolute or innate in a thing-in-itself rather than relative] characterizes ‘white power’ or ‘white supremacy’ where whites expected deference from blacks so that blacks should get up and give their seats to whites on a bus etc. If the black fails to give deference, this is interpreted as an offensive act by the white, by way of ‘projective identification’.
Power can be given meaning in a local in space-and-time action/event, however, as with ‘production’ and ‘growth’ it is relative rather than innate, and while we are impressed when we see it used to overwhelm resistance, both its deeper origins and its ultimate agency are indefinitely deferred, and cannot be seen in the analysis of a notional open-and-closed event wherein we assume that the present depends only on the immediate past. That may be true for science, which has rigged its own foundational assumptions to make it so, but it is not true for the physical reality our natural experience, which our intuition will readily affirm.
We live in a transforming relational continuum where everything is in flux. ‘Production’, ‘growth’, ‘power’ are convenient concepts that deliver ‘economy of thought’ which can synthetically de-complexify and aid discourse [the finger pointing to the moon which is not the moon] but which, [mis]taken as real, can lead to incoherence in individual and collective social behaviour as it is currently doing.
Science and technology are building on these ‘spook’ notions of production, growth, progress, advancement when the reality is that it has no idea what it is doing in the physical reality of our actual, natural experience. Science thinks, questions, plans and operates in ‘semantic reality’, an ‘uncluttered reality’ constructed from imagined ‘independent things’ and ‘what these things do’.
Superlatives flow freely in announcements of ‘advances in science and technology’ such as re-usable rockets. There is jubilation over such ‘revolutionary advancements’ that promise to ‘change our lives’.
But John Zerzan is on target with his view that ‘science is causing more problems than it is solving’. That is, the push of science and technology has not a clue as to its impact on the physical reality of our actual, natural, relational experience. The complexity of the world we live in is far too great to know.
‘Production’ of new technology is not what is actually, physically going on. The ‘engines of production’ are merely ‘vents’ for the reciprocal complements of an epigenetic-genetic non-dual relational dynamic. The ‘in-ductive flow’ that is counterpart to the ‘pro-ductive flow’ is not readily visible. The projectile spewing of magma from the volcano makes the volcano appear to be a productive fountainhead, but what we are looking at, in physical reality [as contrasted with semantic “reality”], is relational transformation. Otherwise, the production from the earth should be contributing to the growth of the earth.
There are thousands if not millions of science and technology driven production enterprises on earth, each one understanding precisely what is being done and what results will be forthcoming, but no-one knowing the combined effect of all of these projects, each one justified on the basis of the clear benefits it will deliver. It is assumed that it will all be good since each project was given approval on the basis of its ability to deliver positive benefits. Of course, each one was designed in Euclidian space, the space of our noun-and-verb language; i.e. the space of semantic reality. So, all will be well if the space we live in is also Euclidian, in which case there will be no ‘interference’ as there is in a relational space [non-Euclidian space].
But what if our living space is relational, as McLuhan describes it [the relational medium is the message]. What if we are managing 20 productive facilities in an agricultural valley. The 20 teams of scientists and technologists, along with their finance managers, will clearly state their cases and show clear benefits. What about the mom&pop businesses that got left in the lurch on the old highway route when they re-routed it to serve then new projects? [lining the new highway with insider-friends of the developers]. What about farmers losing their sons to the new activities and family farms having to sell out to big agriculture. What about the new slick and educated city guys scooping up the sweethearts of simple country guys? These physically real ‘relational interference effects’ are referred to by economists as ‘externalities’ and by politicians, ‘progress’. The reality is that nobody knew what was going to happen in the physical reality of the relational space of our real-life experience. The neat and tidy scientific space used by the project managers; i.e. the ‘semantic reality’, ... was kept in precedence over the physical reality of the unknowably complex space of our actual, natural experience.
Do we understand the complex ecosystems that established a living base for us in the indefinitely deferred roots of our development, non of which is addressed in our scientific and technological project plans? Does David Abram have a point or not, where he says;
“Each creature—two-leggeds included—has only a restricted access to the mystery of the real. As a human I may have compiled a great mass of data about the ways of the world, yet in a practical, visceral sense…an earthworm knows far more about the life of the soil than I do, as a swallow knows far more about the wind. To be human is to have very limited access to what is.” – David Abram
Evidently, he does have a point, but he is speaking about the physical reality of the complex relational space of our experience, where we have to deal with the unfathomable complexities of ‘chaos theory’, ‘nonlinear dynamics’, ‘self-organized criticality’, ‘relativity’ which make prediction impossible.
As has already been mentioned and commented on, science and technology prefer not to formulate their understandings in such complex space, they prefer to work within a simpler, linear, Euclidian space where ‘things’ can be taken to be ‘real material entities in themselves’ and ‘space’ can be taken to be ‘Euclidian’ and thus a non-participant in physical phenomena; i.e. as Mach pointed out;
“Science itself, … may be regarded as a minimization problem, consisting of the completest possible presenting of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought” —Ernst Mach
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“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach
The benefits of working in this simpler space; i.e. in a ‘semantic reality’ is that our ego gets to enjoy the notion that we are the fountainheads of ‘production’, rather than figureheads that put a toll on circulatory flow induced by relational imbalances. All 20 of the valley project managers will get their results and their corresponding rewards, and the valley swallows, earthworms and two-leggeds will get whatever really unfolds which will be nothing like the predicted and validated results of the scientific projects.
It is much easier to make production proposals using logical propositions because this frees the proposal maker from acknowledging the non-dual physical reality of the relational space we live in; e.g. DDT kills mosquitoes is a logical proposition that points to significant benefits that can be experimentally validated on a large scale. Of course logical propositions do suffer from an inherent ‘incompleteness’ (Goedel) which can be expressed in terms that such propositions are ‘genesis out of the context of epigenesis’. In a relational space such as the physical space of our experience, epigenesis and genesis are a non-duality, as in ‘relativity’ and ‘Mach’s principle’. The wonderful new world constructed by European colonizers in North America, had a simultaneous flipside to it; i.e. the destruction of the wonderful established world on Turtle Island.
What is actually experienced is relational transformation, but Euro-American colonialism doesn’t give up its absurdity easily, so we continue to use Euclidian space based ‘semantic reality’ for our ‘operative reality’ while suffering the dysfunctional consequences in the physical reality of the relational space of our actual lived experience that differs radically from the semantic realities of science and technology. The mismatch is euphemistically termed ‘externalities’ which are getting so large as to overwhelm and swallow up the imputed ‘real’ production activities.