Yuri
Tarnopolsky
ESSAYS
Essay 53. Power: Hidden
Stick, Shared Carrot
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![]() ![]() Essay
53. Power: Hidden Stick, Shared Carrot ![]() ![]() ![]() We all have
intuitive images of power in social, economic,
political, and even intimate context. Trying to fish
out a definition of power from the Web, I quickly
found that it ran through Google's colander in
hundreds of trickles. The concept of changing
technologies of power (Michel Foucault) was the only
solid chunk that under circumstances could pass for
a golden nugget, but Foucault himself, as befits an
oracle, was not solid on anything. The oyster shell
of his famous motto about power “old right to
kill and let live was replaced by a power to support
life and let die” (qu'au vieux
droit de faire mourir et de laisser vivre s'est
substitué un pouvoir de faire vivre et de laisser
mourir) falls easily apart
into " support life and kill" and "let live and let
die" under the knife of analysis and some, myself
included, find it empty. The opposition is just not
true, starting at least with Hammurabi. And who but
Communists/Fascists and
anti-Communists/anti-Fascists could be solid,
regarding the chaotic torrents of the twentieth
century? Both C-s and F-s, by the way, wanted to
make die as much as make live. One was just the way
to the other. ![]() ![]() I cannot think about
power without its unambiguous source. There is no power
of money without its owner, whether individual or
corporate. Even within a corporation it can always be
traced to a desk and a name. Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze sensed the radical
change in technology of power that was coming with wired
capitalist democracy. By the end of their century, the
change would become obvious with the Panopticonic loss
of privacy (and sleep) and Laocoonic
entanglement of individuals in wired and wireless
connections (there is a real snake pit of wires
under my desk, see below). Many people had bad
dreams about technology even before that time and many
still have.
![]() The snake pit
(center) with Laocoon (left) and Panopticon (right).
How a
powerful leader comes to grips with a flood of
information? He brings his adopted sons and daughters into
his staff to share the snakes' coils. My
first and only impression of Foucault is that of
ultimate triviality of his parallel vision of the world,
which I am inclined to compare with the vision of
Plato's cave dwellers. The real world (together with
natural sciences and observation of facts) remains
outside. Instead, the cave dwellers develop
mythology and epic poetry. What he calls power I see
simply as organization: introducing order into chaos by
creating and breaking bonds. With
all still ongoing technical arguments about Foucault and
with all my personal revulsion to his style of secular
preacher carried away by the ability of words to combine
into a going in circles beadwork (I
have just crafted a short fragment of the beadwork), I consider him
prophetic because he was vague but insistent in
attributing some biological attributes to the historical
change. When he used the term bio, however, he
meant biology in its traditional meaning of life of known
organisms and species. Giles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari shared the same gravitation
to biological imagery (rhizome etc.), as well as to the
verbal compost on which a whole generation of
interpreters could grow the mushrooms of arguments. Thomas Hobbes and Werner Heisenberg , separated by a
great distance in time, represent a different, much more
imaginative type of prophets who saw society as a
consolidated and constrained organism. Life and
organisms were for them, in modern terms, meta-life
and meta-organism. I cannot accept any
social and political power that is impersonal and
invisible and, along Foucault, comes from everywhere.
Whether a carrot or a stick is held by a hand, personal
or composite, we can seize this hand by the wrist, all
the more, when the hand signs a check. I believe that the
direction of the flow of history has already become
streamlined enough to start a systematic inspection and
reappraisal of our most abstract notions stored at the
top shelves of the knowledge attic. We sense the
long-run course of history when we change dictionaries
and textbooks for more recent ones, as we sense the
short-run course of life while discarding telephone
directories, but when paper itself becomes a cumbersome
option, we may sympathize with dinosaurs. What exactly is this
direction? We instinctively feel its diffuse starting
point within the last quarter of the twentieth century,
but need another one to draw a line. As it is common in
history, we need the next turn to close the chapter, to
pin the past to cardboard, type a label, and put it all
under the glass cover of a display case. But then it is
too late to do anything but erect memorials. I am unable to
excavate even a thin layer of all rocky literature on
power. Here is my own sketch of the subject, which I am
trying to draw on water, with Thales of Miletus in mind.
![]() As a chemist, I am
spoiled by the great—but not unlimited—power of chemistry to
manipulate the natural course of molecular events. I
even think that Michel Foucault could see chemistry as
the purest embodiment of impersonal "biopolitics"
designed to deal with masses instead of individuals, if
only chemistry did not look so arcane to most normal
people. I have never thought about this ability of
science in terms of power, other than metaphorically.
Power implies that a measure of this ability
exists and there could be more power or less
power. In the modern
scissors-rock-paper game, money buys knowledge,
knowledge grows power, power pulls money. The wheel of
fortune, as any metabolic cycle, spins in one direction.
The real socio-political power, apparently, belongs to
the leaders of the nations, movements, and corporations
with above a certain number of digits after the dollar
sign. The power of an
experimental scientist can indeed be compared with
political power: it starts with an idea. Francois Jacob,
one of the creators of modern biology and as much poet
as scientist and soldier, wrote in his The Statue
Within (one
of the most memorable books I have ever read) Contrary to what I
had long believed, the process of experimental science
does not consist in explaining the unknown by the known,
as in certain mathematical proofs. It aims, on the
contrary, to give an account of what is observed by the
properties of what is imagined. To explain the visible
by the invisible. (Francois
Jacob, The Statue Within, Basic
Books, NY, 1988, p.288) We
do not experiment on history: history experiments on us.
But we still need imagination to understand the results.
In
science, as in politics and business, the cost of a good
new idea is often just the cost of a cup of strong
coffee. What makes chemistry and politics (as well as
the physics of high energy) so different is the cost of
the validation of the idea. Chemical
experiments today, especially in organic synthesis,
where the creative power of chemistry is most visible,
do not require, as a rule, any exorbitant expences. But
with the border between American politics and business
more porous than the US-Mexican border, a cup of coffee
and a vote will not suffice to do politics. Chemistry,
together with the rest of the academic world, hastens to
secure a double citizenship, contemplating the benefits
of both. ![]() As somebody with a
double background (but not double allegiance) of Soviet
totalitarian system and American democracy, I have my
own vision of what makes the new period of history so
different, at least in America. After centuries of the
Western emancipation of the individual and masses from
the violence of sovereign power, driven by the rise of
commerce and by Industrial Revolution, the new trend,
driven by the same forces of As a rule, there
is neither a single stick nor single carrot in the
new life-like systems. What still remains from the
era of emancipation and decline of sovereign power
is the ![]() ![]() The signature is a
product of a convergent evolution of stick and carrot:
it is a hidden stick (punishment for breach) married to
a shared carrot (expected mutual benefits, sometimes,
just the least evil). Power belongs to the
hand that signs a piece of paper. Note, however, the
great inequality of power between the random holder of
$1 bill and the Secretary of Treasury, as well as
between General Douglas MacArthur and the envoys of
defeated Japan. Note also the volatility of the
power: Robert E. Rubin is not the Secretary of the
Treasury anymore, but the dollar is still
valid, having lost some of its buying power,
however. The military power of Japan, so great
before Pearl Harbor, is minuscule, but not so long ago
its industrial power made Americans worry. In modern society
money not only buys knowledge, but turns it into big
business, some even say, commodity. Knowledge can be
commodity by the same reason as corn and copper: it is
just a string of 1 and 0 in a computer file. All ones
and zeros are as indistinguishable as grains of corn and
atoms of copper. A computer file has content but not
form. For
an anti-symmetric reason, art today is also commodity:
it has form but not content. Who cares what a piece of
art is about if it sells?
That Richard Serra is known as a minimalist
who works with the largest known
sheets of metal could be mind-boggling, but not in the
postmodern world. I see both him and much brighter and
likable Anish Kapoor as re-creators of
Freudian urges of growth and size—in dimensions as well
as cost—materialized
from the deep Id of Leviathan. There is a fine deep
similarity between them and the work of Foucault,
Deleuze, and Guattary. Better means more—steelwork,
beadwork, word work, bits, pieces, whatever). While
philosophers may argue whether we are losing freedom
(who knows what freedom is without knowing slavery?), we
are certainly losing free lunch. What
is free lunch, then? It is the commons, the public
sphere, which, by the way, is often provided and
promoted by the least free societies in the world. It is
free only in the sense that an individual has a free
entrance to an all-you-can-eat joint as many times a day
as he wishes. In politics, it is Hannah Arendt's public
space, which today is nowhere naturally free. Hannah
Arendt, who in my eyes was the last modern solid
thinker, just enough a poet to be a philosopher, and
sufficiently vague to be an oracle, cut the Gordian knot
of the power problem by separating it from violence. Her
solution—to see modern power as contractual, i.e., the
power of signature enforced by the cohesion of large
numbers of people—has not convinced everybody, and me
neither. My personal view is that she left one important
question unanswered: why is one side more powerful than
the other when they exchange signatures? And,
by the way, with the alleged decline of violent power of
the stick, why is our current bloody reality such a far
cry of carrot cake? But I ignore this question
here. Part of answer could be in sociobiology, after all. ![]() The meaning and
substance of power, freedom, and slavery is evolving. If
we cannot blame and lament evolution, the consequence is
striking: we have nobody to blame, not even the
President. All we still can do is to praise whoever
makes us happy, although happiness evolves, too. I believe this
is the essence of the meta-biology of the Western world:
the Leviathan is neither a person nor a god. It simply
lives on, as any other creature. In this sense, neither
Leviathan nor its organs and cells are free to desire:
all they want is to live on and live well and live
better tomorrow. Growth is the
universal obsession and what cannot be expressed in
numbers is not growth. Against this hedonistic spirit,
not only the Middle-Eastern militant and suicidal
spirit, but also the murderous spirit of Fascism and
Stalinism, which was the initial stimulus for all
discussions about freedom in the last century, look most
contrasting. What unite them is the attempt to do
history on the cheap: to make die is simpler than to
negotiate a contract, make live, in terms of Foucault. A
separate metaphysical question: is the modern
good-natured Leviathan self-destructive? And is it
good-natured at all? This is certainly not a chemical
question. But there is a more specific question behind
it: is any empire doomed? Intuitively, the main reason
could be that any growth, after an explosion of
creativity, is self-destructive, and so is human life,
but why? As for less abstract political reasons, the
simple reason for self-destruction could be the
outsourcing of management of the unbearable complexity
to external systems with dubious loyalty. NOTE (2016). An information
technology corporation is such system. The conflict
between FBI and Apple over encryption is the best
example. The Internet of Things seems to be the next.
Any corporation with the rights of an individual is more
powerful than any individual. It
is not enough to declare that I am not a social critic
and that I may argue with individuals, and may dislike
the course of evolution, but not argue with it. It is
not enough that the simple Buddhism-inspired idea of
minimizing desires has been my personal ideal (never
completely attainable, but never disappointing) for most
of my life. As a chemist, I must notice something from
my professional angle, but I have difficulty finding
analogs of political power in the world of molecules.
Nevertheless, as a chemist, I must see the world as a
structure. Whether it is a molecular structure of
Lipitor or the administrative charts of subordination,
is a combination of points and lines. I turn my attention
to the few unique points in the structure of world
power. ![]()
POWER
EXHIBIT 1 Chrys Lydon on his
excellent Radio Open Source uniquely complements
and often rivals Charlie Rose on TV. This is what I saw,
however, on the Open Source website: Mary's Notes, June 14, 2007 We
learned on Friday that WGBH in Boston has decided not to
continue airing Open Source as of July. We are
disappointed, of course, and surprised as well. To us
the station expressed concern about our long-term
funding and said that our program had not developed the
Boston audience they had hoped for. Public
Broadcasting System (PBS) and NPR (National Public
Radio) are an example of modern power relations. Their
consumers are free to pay or not to pay, although NPR
has no freedom of this kind. A tolerance of
the Leviathan to this kind of anarchy is highly
improbable. One of the saddest pictures of American life
for me is the decline of PBS and NPR, and WGBH
(Boston) in particular, where Antiques Roadshow and Suze
Orman with her "Women and Money" let you hear the sweet
jingle of gold almost every day.
See APPENDIX 3. ![]() POWER EXHIBIT 2 If somebody says
that pharmaceutical companies rob the society and its
ailing members, I would agree. The scientific mind
most susceptible to a cup of coffee is not easy to
find, but you need only a few of them. To deceive
society, in politics as in business, you often need a
lot of money and a small army of mercenaries. Here is a fresh
(2007) example. Sad-faced Dr. Robert Jarvik says in a
huge ad of Pfizer: "I take Lipitor instead of a
generic." But why? It is a fundamental law of
chemistry that properties of pure individual
substances or their mixtures of a defined composition
do not depend on the way of preparation. A short
search on the web could explain why Pfizer does not
wish you well: the patent on Lipitor is about to
expire. Meanwhile, Pfizer, contemplating the coming
end of Lipitor, supports the scientific series of
Charlie Rose, as I , already conditioned like
a lab animal, was almost shocked to learn. To me this is one
of many signs of the current trend, which, as Marcia Angell believes (The
Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us
and What to Do About It, Random House,
2004), started
with Ronald Reagan. The borderline between politics
and religion began to mexicanize by the same time.
Today the double allegiance of biology in America to
God and Darwin has been financially reinforced by the
President in the name of a "higher authority." For the sake of
justice, I must say that the picture is complicated
because all money, regardless of origin, circulates in
the national and global turnover like water and
oxygen. Like water and oxygen, it does not smell. The
wonderful properties of money do not depend on its
origin and ownership. I believe this is what makes
Western societies and America in particular
exceptionally stable. Nothing unites us more than
money. Watch the French experiments with
socialism. What can end this
stability? The growth of non-monetary values, such as
religion and fanatic ideology. Alas, this is the great
paradox of liberalism: it keeps us on the thrilling
edge of self-destruction, but the only alternative to
it is tyranny. Pfizer ranked 24th
in Forbes list of Fortune 500 companies in 2005 and
49th in 2002 Table 1
Pfizer, as we may
suspect, uses its power to manipulate bodies and minds
of very large numbers of suffering people with the
single goal of increasing the numbers in the above
Table 1. I must emphatically
deny having any competence in financial and business
matters, but this incompetence is exactly what makes
me a typical subject of big power. I understand power
as something that can be compared with another power
on a scale. The purpose of this Essay is to formulate
a measure of power. ![]() POWER EXHIBIT 3 Next follow some
data, I don't know how reliable, about concentrated
power to sign checks and executive orders. DISCLAIMER : By no means do I
want to attach any moral judgment to the following
data. As a chemist, I see the data as concentrations
of components in a mixture and I am interested only in
the further direction of events. Neither do I denounce
Pfizer Inc. (which I may only as a molecule of
the mixture). Neither do I denounce capitalism and
concentration of money because in order to do that I
need something better as a reference point and I have
no idea what it can be. Table
2
Table
3
Table
4
Table
5
Table 6
Table 7
Table
8
![]() When we have to deal
with big powers, some bigger than others, we need a
measure of big power before
we actually approach it. EXHIBIT 3,
in my view, demonstrates that the lower tier is quite
commensurable with the upper club, taking to account
that the upper tier, such as government, has a wider
spread of goals and expenditures. In this sense—money per goal—corporations and even
individuals can compete with governments and usually
exceed them. Power must be not
just big, but concentrated. Concentration is a
fundamental chemical factor. Concentration of power has
also deeper physical and chemical analogies (localization
of energy), which I omit here. Here is a
non-technical illustration, perfect for our purpose: The second law [of thermodynamics]
tells us about energy dispersal and entropy is the word
for how that energy dispersal is measured — how spread out
the energy becomes in a system, how much more dispersed it
has become compared to how localized it was. Such energy
changes and consequent entropy changes are the focus for
understanding how and why spontaneous events occur in
nature. Only sometimes do the structures or arrangements
of molecules in an object help us to see greater or lesser
localization of energy (that used to be called ‘order to
disorder’). (System: ice cube; surroundings: warm room.). Source; this
short web page is of universal relevance for simplicity
hunters. The liberal sword
against corporations and inequality is double-edged:
equality enfeebles and incapacitates, unless in
intellectual exchange. The ice cube melts, which may be
OK, but the hot coffee cools down, too, in the
nondescript room of equality. The tables in POWER
EXHIBIT 3 illustrate a peculiar paradox of the
power of money: big money is powerful only if
concentrated on a small number of well-defined goals,
best of all, just one. But if so, the big check is not
needed: money can be supplied over time in a sequence of
not so big packages. In this case, however, a social or
political goal may completely change or lose relevance
over time. Besides, grand money is usually wasted on
grand scale. Some tables also imply that even big
charitable foundations may generate just a sprinkle of
money dispersed over small grants, but if they are spent
over time on the same goal (as with tuberculosis), they
might work perfectly well. The problem with long
term financing, however, is that nobody is in a
hurry. I think we have to accept the imperfections
of our world. Intolerance is a form of perfectionism. The power I am
interested in is, i.e., the power of great power
players, the big power, seems to be something that has
no next level of power above it, like a king or a
monotheistic god. It is the good old power of
sovereignty, however limited and modified, without which
we cannot win (or lose) a war and save (or sink) the
nation. The sovereign power, that was prevalent
for previous millennia of history, today, in the age of
democracy, is limited in many ways. It is funny to see how
a weak leader in the "most powerful in the world" position
feels so naked without an upper floor above his office
that he cynically refers to a "higher authority" directing
his actions. Anti-symmetrically, the religious fervor of
the American Right has been whipped up by strong leaders
in the weakest positions in the world. God keep Jerry
Falwell at his side and not let him return to earth. That
the Unites States is the only remaining superpower in
the world is a cliché. Another cliché, "the rising power of
China and India" makes more sense because it is
measurable, justly or not, in hard numbers of production
and wealth. What does it mean to
be the only top power of a kind? I see no sense in such
statement. I can declare myself the most powerful man in
my house—where I am the only
man. We can say that a nation is stronger than another
nation only if we compare them in a contest. The Iraq war and the
War on Terror do not provide anything to prove that the
United States is more powerful than a bunch of
terrorists in Iraq, although intuitively we may not have
a slightest doubt. Are China and India candidates for
two more superpowers? Is the new money-drenched Russia,
with its nukes, oil, gas, polonium, and political
terror, another pretender? There are big global
players which are worlds in themselves: the United
States and the European Union, two biggest and very
different agglomerates of industrial democracy, of which
the second one is still at the formative stage. Unlike
India, China, and Russia, they consist of numerous
powerful and largely independent subunits—corporations or corgs
(corporate organisms, see Essays 32 to 35
and 43)—which form the lower
tier of power. The nature and actual
distribution of power in the world is so crucial for the
global future and such a complicated and dark topic that
somebody must finally put the dog-eared Foucault aside
and start the investigation of power form a clean
slate. Not me, of course, but I wish to add my own
contribution to the mess of the Augean stables
before a Hercules comes. ![]() The complexity of technology of power calls for a simple measure of big power. Since the big power does not have somebody else's penthouse on the roof of its corporate building, I suggest, quite intuitively, the following top-down measure of big power before it has actually been tested: The highest power
belongs
to the individual, corporation, or government that can designate the largest sum of money for a single goal. IMPORTANT: The outcome of a power
contest (negotiations are also an instance of power
contest) may differ from the expectation. This sounds
like quantum physics, but this is because in the Big
Power Club we deal with a very small set of contenders
and contests, so that statistics does not work (and
time
series prediction makes no sense in history because
of evolutionary novelty). What follows, by the way,
is that a conflict between big powers in business as well
as in politics means partly gambling. Examples of goals:
eradicate malaria, close national borders, win computer
operating system market (Microsoft and Apple), become
Number One in national education (even Number Three
would do), build protection against terrorism, enhance
democracy in Russia, establish the dominance of a
certain political party for 50 to 70 years
(sovietization? roveization?), etc. Power, therefore, has
no absolute measure, but powers can be ranked if applied
to the same goal. The problem with big
goals, however, is that they may be impossible to
achieve. But to achieve what is achievable (to buy a
house, marry up, learn Chinese, travel to Machu Picchu )
is not a matter of power but a matter of average wealth,
desire, and, probably, some sacrifice. Power works
against chaos and not against order and organization.
Power, thermodynamically, brings into motion a social
machine which can be quite ineffective, rusty, and
wasteful. The goal of big power
is always an adventure. It is especially true about
wars, whether hot, cold, trade, or social wars. This is
because big goals always have uncertain future: history
brings surprises. Only in few cases we know that the big
goal is achievable in principle. In other cases we run
an experiment, by definition, without precedent. Big goals are
especially wasteful because they often require a
sequence of small steps that create bottlenecks to
spending designated budgets. As result, spend now, ask
for more tomorrow is a typical attitude. Now I can feel some
firm ground while attempting to justify the
characterization of USA and former USSR as superpowers:
both could designate huge sums of money for sending
humans into space, and one could even send them to the
moon. Both could spend huge money on wars and be
defeated. Their ventures were initiated by way of
signature. In this sense, the US President is the most
powerful leader in the world. He can procure, control,
and waste the largest sums of money in the world. By
George, do we really want to be the only superpower? Now let us consider
the goal of roveization of America and turning it into a
de facto one
party system. Of course it had a good chance of success.
It is my personal belief that the reason why the goal
was not achieved at that time (it still remains
realistic and even more probable in the future) is that
Karl Rove—or anybody else—could not put his
signature under an appropriation bill to buy the best US
President for the project. It was like filling up the
Saturn V rocket in the Apollo Program with diet Coke.
The fizz is over. A pessimist would
remark that any big goal is self-defeating, but if this
were true, I would be extremely optimistic about the
future of democracy. For comparison, the biggest of the
Soviet projects, set by Vladimir Lenin and pursued by
Joseph Stalin, to create a new (i.e., Orwellian) man,
failed, too, although the biggest stick in the world was
used for this purpose. True, there was a carrot of total
abundance and happiness (otherwise known as Communist
Utopia), too, but it was so far ahead in the future,
always hidden behind next corner, that its aphrodisiac
powers amounted to nil. The
more I think about the reason for the collapse of
Communism the more I see it in a sudden realization of
the Soviet ruling class that they did not need to wait
for the future to achieve fabulous prosperity. If George Soros hired
a man who could think day and night how to dislodge the
President and gave him billion dollars, he probably
would succeed. But the same could be done by a
determined Republican against the best Democratic
President in history. My modest discoveries
up and down the billion dollar scale reveal to me the
deadly efficiency of money in American elections. The
data on cost of elections can be found in publications
of The Campaign Finance
Institute , for example (2004): Jon
Corzine (D- N.J.) spent $63,209,506. Hillary Rodham
Clinton (D-N.Y.) spent $29,941,194. The remaining Senate
winners in 2000 spent an average of $4,737,365. Even
hundred million dollars is a relatively modest sum on
the national scale. But nothing can be more focused than
the election campaign: just about one person. Then why
$23 million of George Soros did not do the job?
Because the presidential campaign of 2004 was about at
least a quarter billion dollars. This is, of course, a
very rough simplification of the actual electoral
mechanics because geniuses that think day and night on a
problem are rare and do not form a statistical ensemble.
Political life is a game with just one bet. Today
the deadly stick is in the hands of Islamic terrorists.
The great modern conflict is in part caused by a huge
difference in the cost of human life in the totalitarian
and democratic societies: depreciation in the former and
bubble in the latter. The sides cannot come to a
handshake until the currency exchange rate is agreed
upon. America is still
seduced by carrot cakes. The smaller the carrot cake,
the more attainable. Not pie in the sky, but a carrot
cake for everybody. While it still works—and I believe it
still does—the American idea that
you can have a bigger cake than your neighbor, is quite
sound. Money is power, for
better or worse, and I do not believe that for worse
only. I do not have any egalitarian ideals. Chemical
reactions run in a preferred direction only because the
instability (i.e., energy) is distributed very unevenly
over the atoms of reacting molecules. Yet the growing
inequality of power in the global and national
contractual society, which is taking shape right before
our eyes, begins to test this idea. From Manmohan Singh
to Zbigniev Brzezinsky (well worth googling), a few very
different people who combine wisdom and personal
experience with power express doubt in the hedonistic
worship of the carrot cake. They probably know well that
the price of human life fluctuates on the markets of
history and any general trouble brings all stocks down.
Somebody will come and just take your cake away,
together with your life. What instead, then? A
global auction for homo sapience? A topic for a
future Essay. The only power that
can compete with money is the power of idea. Why?
Because money is number and number is just an idea,
too. This direction of discourse might be
productive in the analysis of the Iraq War phenomenon in
which two very different currencies of human life are
involved in the trade. Life does not play the scissors-rock-paper game. It plays money-love-death game, in which there are no rules. ![]() APPENDIX 1
QUESTIONS:
1. What is the phenomenon of Heidegger,
Foucault, and Deleuze-Guattari (or, for that matter,
modern art, which is as impossible without a symbiosis
with middleman as postmodern philosophy without cult
promoters) from the point of view of a chemist? Think about the
phenomenon of catalysis. 2. The term "War on Terror" (or,
for that matter, war on poverty, drugs, and crime) sounds
like an acknowledgment of respectability of the enemy.
What exactly is the power distribution between the USA,
Europe, and terrorism? 3. Has American power been diminished
or increased by the presidency of George Bush? Or it just
seems so? Same question applies to Russia and Putin.
4. Does my definition of power mean
that the power of vote in democracy is nonsense? Quick
answer: yes, the outcome of an election today is the
outcome of the wrestling contest of big powers. Of course,
the Republicans may have more power in terms of money. But
they also have a bigger goal.
APPENDIX 2
I
believe that Foucault's Panopticum is not quite up to
date. With the following composition I express
the spirit of the post-postmodern Panopticon in
which the individual is
formally free, but actually imprisoned by the
Internet cubicles of the crooks, predators, and
respectable companies craving for his individuality
(called today identity) in order whether to
steal or sell. It is the presumption of freedom that
locks the prison. ![]() David in
the F-house of Statevill prison, Joliet, IL
APPENDIX 3
FROM:
http://www.radioopensource.org/
This
is not the news we ever dreamed of posting. After
tomorrow’s
broadcast we are putting Open Source on a summer
hiatus. We learned late last week that a brand-name
media company that had asked to partner with us had
changed its mind. So for now, the best hope on the near
horizon of relaunching the program and refinancing it
has gone aglimmering. Without
a substantial new funder, we cannot keep paying our
bills. Your help and support has helped bridge the cost
of production these last six weeks and helped pay some
of our debts. For now the most responsible thing seems
to be to regroup and think realistically about a new
program for the fall. We
are actively dedicated, all day every day, to the
essential mission: seizing the epochal opportunity of
the web to stretch the public conversation… to hybridize
media, to enlist the audience, to extend the palette of
colors in the cultural as well as the political
conversation; in short to democratize and globalize one
model forum of constructive talk for the new century. UPDATE 2
Radio
Open Source is back! I quote: The
summer is over, and so is our hiatus. The
Open Source conversation is reborn at the Watson
Institute at Brown University.
2016: http://radioopensource.org/
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Page created:
2007
Revised: 2016
The ideas of Essays 51 to 56 are developed in INTRODUCTION TO PATTERN CHEMISTRY Website: spirospero.net To contents email Essays 1 to 56 : http://spirospero.net/essays-complete.pdf Essays 57 to 60: http://spirospero.net/LAST_ESSAYS.pdf Essay 60: http://spirospero.net/artandnexistence.pdf |