P/I:
PLURALITIES/INTEGRATION
A newsletter about
participation in multiple worlds, multiple visions, but one humanity ; a
monitor of P2P developments
A newsletter by Michel Bauwens, [email protected] , an emanation of the
FOUNDATION FOR PEER TO PEER ALTERNATIVES (for now that’s just me, but
please do join!)
ISSUE 42: December
4, 2004: Why this newsletter? Why the title?
The title refers to the enduring tension between a multitude of worldviews, and their eventual integration. For a full explanation of the rationale behind the newsletter, see issues 1 and 2. An alternative name could be “P2P and Empire” because in practice I mostly focus on a analysis of the crisis of the current system on the one hand, and the emergence of a more participative worldview, which I call “peer to peer”.
Preferred themes: the networked society, cognitive capitalism, Empire and its discontents, the possible emergence of the peer to peer civilization, truth-building as a collective and ‘dialogical’ effort, the challenges posed to traditional religions and humanism by spiritual P2P experiencing and technological transhumanism.
If you like this project, please suggest any interesting links! We would be very happy to list our contributors. Thanks to John Dermaut, Christophe Lestavel, John L. Petersen, and the Multitudes mailing list for suggestions.
How to subscribe: Write to compiler Michel
Bauwens at [email protected] or at
[email protected].
ISSUE 42, Table of Contents
Counter-culture:
Infinity Factory is back
Counter-culture
(2): R.U Sirius’ new book.
Counter-culture
(3): think for yourself, question authority.
Consciousness:
Benjamin Lee Whorf is back in town.
Empire:
is Bush new age ?
Empire:
Bush and secrecy
A long time
ago, in a distant galaxy, the Internet was full of information and novelty
about alternative cultures and lifestyles. Paradoxically, this wealth was highly
dependant of the success of the so-called “new economy” corporate
culture. The crash of 2001 saw the disappearing of many invaluable resources.
Among them, Infinity Factory, the Disinformation video shows hosted by
pseudo.com. Frequently for the first time on video, we had the opportunity to
see people like Robert Anton Wilson, Douglas Rushkoff, Genesis P-Orridge, or
even less known actors of modern counter culture, such as Benjamin Rowe, Philip
Farber or Paul Laffoley.
Several
years after, the website www.rinf.com is
releasing again, on every Tuesday, the old disinfo shows, and archives some of
the best streams. Will they release the whole set? Will everything be archived?
These are questions that remain to be answered!
Recently
Michel presented in this newsletter R.U Sirius’ new website,
“neofiles”. The man also published recently a new book under his
real name, Ken Goffman, “Counter-culture through the ages: from Abraham
to acid house”. The book has its own website,
http://www.counterculturethroughtheages.com/
offering a
few excerpts, among them an foreword by Timothy Leary, one of his last
writings:
« Counterculture
blooms wherever and whenever a few members of a society choose lifestyles,
artistic expressions, and ways of thinking and being that wholeheartedly
embrace the ancient axiom that the only true constant is change itself. The
mark of counterculture is not a particular social form or structure, but rather
the evanescence of forms and structures, the dazzling rapidity and flexibility
with which they appear, mutate, and morph into one another and disappear.
Counterculture
is the moving crest of a wave, a zone of uncertainty where culture goes
quantum. To borrow the language of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya
Prigogine, counterculture is the cultural equivalent of the third thermodynamic
state, the nonlinear region where equilibrium and symmetry have given way to a
complexity so intense as to appear to the eye as chaos. ».
An
interesting online book presenting Timothy Leary and his impact on the
90’s techno-cyberculture :
( http://www.geocities.com/arno_3/ )
« Many people know Timothy Leary as drug-guru of
the psychedelic and cannabis edible counterculture of the 1960s. Not so many people know, however,
that Leary reemerged in the eighties as energetic promoter of the Internet and
spokesman of the Cyberpunks, an Information-Age counterculture whose members
believe that technology can help us to free ourselves from all limits -
physical as well as metaphysical. In this paper, I describe the development of
Leary's theories - how his focus shifted from psychedelic drugs to computers -,
and discuss Leary's impact on the cybernetic counterculture (the Cyberpunks) of
the eighties and nineties. I compare Leary's earlier theories, in which he
praises LSD as key to "cosmic consciousness" and sweeping societal
changes, to his later theories, in which he describes the computer as tool of
liberation and transcendence. In a critical analysis of the cybernetic
counterculture I try to find out what role Leary played in this counterculture.
My comparison of Leary's earlier and later theories shows that the psychedelic
counterculture of the sixties and the cybernetic counterculture of the eighties
and nineties have many things in common; most important of all, they share the
same aim: Individual freedom and ecstasy. I argue that the cyber-movement of
the eighties and nineties is a continuation of the freedom revolution of the
sixties counterculture. For Leary, the emergence of a global electronic
cybernetic communication network is a logical consequence (or further
development) of psychedelic consciousness-expansion. In my analysis of the
cybernetic counterculture I come to the conclusion that Leary was one of the
founding fathers of the cyber-movement and therefore plays a central role in
the cybernetic counterculture. »
In the
issue 40 of Pluralities/Integration, Michel presented the work of Benjamin Lee
Whorf who postulated that our mental categories were strongly influenced by the
language we use. This theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf theory was strongly
dismissed by the Chomskian orthodoxy, which postulates a unique
« universal grammar » hardwired in the human brain,
making therefore impossible to imagine strongly diverging languages (and
therefore different, language influenced, worldviews).
But Chosmky
is far from satisfying everybody, and many criticizes its theories as being
purely formal constructions, completely divorced from the practice of language.
To see what are the current objections against Chomsky, one may go to this
site :
http://language.home.sprynet.com/lingdex.htm#tggchom
and
especially read this paper:
http://language.home.sprynet.com/lingdex/chomrong.htm#totop
But here is
perhaps the first nail in the coffin of chomskian theory. This is an artificial
life approach, which tries to demonstrate, through digital experiments, the
possibility of the spontaneous
emergence of vocabulary and grammar through the communication of two agents. This hypothesis, if
confirmed, should infirm the necessity for language to be hardwired in the
brain structure, Chosmky’s central argument.
Luc Steele
pursues this kind of research at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory.
His
“talking heads” experiment involved to robots communicating about
their environment by inventing new words and expressions.
The
“talking heads experiment” is now closed but the website remains
open, and one may consult various pages and the “guided tour”:
http://talking-heads.csl.sony.fr/
These
experiments lead to a “constructivist” theory of language
acquisition.
(From
:http://www.csl.sony.fr/downloads/papers/2004/steels-04c.pdf)
« The
constructivist approach to language learning proposes that children acquire
linguistic competence (...) only gradually, beginning with more concrete
linguistic structures based on particular words and morphemes, and then
building up to more abstract and productive structures based on various types
of linguistic categories, schemas, and constructions. (TomaselloBrooks, 1999), p. 161.
The approach furthermore
assumes that language development is (i) grounded in cognition because prior to
(or in a co-development with language) there is an understanding and
conceptualisation of scenes in terms of events, objects, roles that objects
play in events, and perspectives on the event, and (ii) grounded in
communication because language learning is intimately embedded in interactions
with specific communicative goals. In contrast to the nativist position,
defended, for example, by Pinker (Pinker, 1998), the constructivist approach
does not assume that the semantic and syntactic categories as well as the
linking rules (specifying for example that the agent of an action is linked to
the subject of a sentence) are universal and innate. Rather, semantic and
syntactic categories as well as the way they are linked is built up in a
gradual developmental process, starting from quite specific ‘verb-island
constructions’. »
Now you may ask, why is
an entertainment company like Sony so interested in deep scientific and
philosophical research like the origin of language? Such theories may help
robots (like Aibo) to communicate with each other. There are also some
researches trying to adapt these principles of evolutionary linguistics to file
sharing systems, helping digital agents to communicate more efficiently about
the musical tastes of their human “masters”.
A lot has
been said about Bush’s evangelism and fundamentalism. I found the
perspective offered in this paper amusing and refreshing:
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001031.php
« Believing,
it seems, is more important to the President than the substance of his belief.
Jesus Christ’s particular teachings -- well, those are good, too. But
what really matters is that if you believe you can do something, you can. »
« ... what Bush’s more orthodox Christian supporters seem to
dodge, is that this is not Christian doctrine by any definition. It is, in
fact, a key element of the broad, heterodox movement known as New Age
religion. »
To continue
on the same topic, the excellent online magazine Esoterica is currently
publishing a special issue about politics.
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/Contents.html
Among
interesting articles a very long and interesting paper about the role played by
Religion and secrecy in the Bush administration.
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeVII/Secrecy.htm
After
analyzing the White House’s politics, the author concludes:
“To
close, I would like to offer a few comments regarding the political role of the
scholar of religion in the world today. There was a time when I, like most
scholars of religion, believed that the best I could do was to remain as neutral
as possible about the political implications of my research while at the same
remaining as self-conscious as possible about the ways in which my work might
be affected by my own political opinions. Well, I must say that I no longer
believe in this sort of comfortable pretense of neutrality. When one's
government is committing acts as disturbing as those of the Bush
administration, and concealing them under layers of obsessive secrecy, no
thinking citizen, can pretend to remain comfortably neutral. As Bruce Lincoln
observes, “there is a political dimension to all religious
discourse,” including scholarship... Our study of religion is no more
neutral or disinterested than the religious objects that we study. The key
difference, however, is that as scholars of religion we cannot appeal to divine
"authority," a gift from the Almighty or a calling from God; rather,
we can rely only on our own human and fallible methods of
“persuasion,” by which we marshal evidence and argue our case, while
at the same time remaining open to the critical objections of
others ».
One can
only agree with these observations, but one may remember that the scholars of
religions have seldom been neutral ! It is sufficient to remember Mircea
Eliade and his role in Romanian Fascism, or the mysterious death of Ioan
Couliano, shot in the head in the public lavatories of Chicago University,
perhaps killed by the same far right that Eliade had supported many years ago.