Evolved Politics

I've been kicking an idea around since Thanksgiving, so I decided it was time to actually attempt to write it down and see what it looks like when the words are there in front of me.

In The Exploit, a book exploring a theory of networks structuring everything today from politics to more simple interactions among groups and individuals. The authors, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, say that networks are not structured on the basis of power, but instead on the basis of protocol - which is to say that control (or modulation, distribution and flexibility, as Galloway and Thacker note) enables relationships in networks to exist.

Part of my worry is that this control is built into the networks themselves by those creating them, whoever that may be. Galloway and Thacker say that "control in networks must aim for an effectiveness that is immanent to the network, in the sense that the most perfectly controlled network is one that controls or regulates itself." If this is true, it would seem that one of the most perfect networks to be found in the real world is that of the universe itself, in that the rules of the sciences - be it physics, chemistry, biology and so forth - regulate how everything relates. More specifically (follow me on this, I promise it's going somewhere), evolution - natural selection - is one of the methods of modulation apparent in nature. The genius of natural selection is that every line of evolution is broken down into endless mutations and variations of the genetic code that result in creatures almost perfectly suited to their particular niche.

My main point, then: can this same logic be applied to us today as citizens or consumers or whatever title your niche merits? Perhaps the genius of networks is that it allows for the same method of modulation as evolution: individuation in extremely small steps leading to, as Gilles Deleuze said "dividuals." This is to say we become discrete points within networks, and even within the masses we are sectioned off into samples, data and markets. Galloway and Thacker say that "in the context of the control societies, individuation is assumed to be continually modulated, precisely because it is informatic, statistical, and probabilistic." The idea of probability raises an interesting idea, springing out of my worry earlier about who structures the networks in the first place: does this cutting up of the market or the masses or the citizenry into more and more discrete and specialized nodes mean that the probability of controlling each "sample" or node is higher? Are we more vulnerable than ever to manipulation (or the even more unseen modulation)?

-the ambassador

Vision, Ideology and SUVs

I'd like to add a few things to the discussion of how we look, how it's shaped by our ideologies, and where those ideologies come from that the colonel began in his last post here. His analysis of images is, I believe, spot on. The difference between their denotations and connotations can be thought of in another way: that of fact versus feeling. To a certain extent, an image is a fact - which is to say, it shows what it shows. On a different wavelength, however, are the feelings that these images conjure up for us. These feelings, as the colonel points out, are shaped in large part by our ideologies.

Corresponding to the quote from Marx and Engels, Jean Baudrillard writes in an essay entitled "The Ideological Genesis of Needs," published in The Consumer Society Reader, that "the survival threshold is never determined from below, but from above." This also connects with the colonel's example of Starbucks, SUVs and McMansions - these are only normal for those who can afford them, but have been structured in such a way that they are also "normal" for everyone else.

If our ideologies are decided for us by elites, does the potential for us to change them, to restructure them in such a way that is more based in reality still exist? Can we take control of ideologies, and perhaps make them "for the people, by the people?"

-the ambassador

What we see and how we look

In the book Practices of Looking by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright they draw a difference between "seeing," the casual observance in passing by, and "looking," the act of interpreting the things around us. Looking involves the relaionship of power and the meaning of an image.
There is a common fallacy that an image is unquestionably truthful. Which is fair to say and yet misleading at the same time. In a denotative way, yes, an image shows that X was happening at Z point in time in Y space. The truth of what X, Y and Z really means is the connotative way of "looking" at an image.
The connotation can, of course, be different for different people depending on the ideology they have been a part of for so long. Ideologies change over time and location, so our interpretations of an image are different than they would have been 50 years ago and are far different from the interpretations one might find abroad.
It is curious how a culture develops an ideology.
Marx and Engels (chapter 3, The German Ideology) say, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."
Quick examples: Starbucks, who but a man with money can afford a four dollar cup of coffee every day - yet it has become the paradigm of quality coffee. SUVs and McMansions, again the wealthy can afford these things - America's addiction to oil and credit?
Though these things seem like staples in our lives (even I am victim to the connotation of the Starbucks image) they have not always been, and it seems that the average person with limited means would not decide that expensive coffee and cars are important.
The wealthy, which typically translates into the ruling class, deemed these objects important and normal.
The desire to be normal is a question that must be faced. Where do our ideologies, which shape what our definition of "normal," come from? Why do we follow them and how do we brake away from them?

-the colonel

To make things a little more clear: though the contents page on the Narodna Collective home page say this is confined to political philosophy, it's actual contents will be a little more broad than that. Media theory, psychoanalysis as applied to politics and other themes will also be explored here. The foreign and domestic policy blogs will, on the other hand, be strictly what they say they are.

-the ambassador