Date:          Mon, 20 Jun 1994 14:22:22 +0100 (BST)
Subject:       schizoscience



Thanks to Thomas and Alan for feedback. It seems likely i'll just 
have to roll with Thomas' remarks, which are all helpfully exacting. 
I've fallen in love with the term phase-space, and it's torture to 
hear it defined so precisely (aaaghh! stuck in state-space, total 
bummer). I also agree i've been treating dissipative structures much 
too generously (as runaway self-organizing processes, rather than 
mere far-from-equilibrium homeostats, does nonlinear dynamics already 
have the word i need?). Even 'complexity' or 'antichaos' ('plectics' 
is Gell- Man's latest suggestion i think) seems more interested in 
the attainment of FFE stability (collapse into territories) rather 
than migrations away from equilibrium, which strike me as the really 
important tendencies (no longer placing dynamics in the service of 
conservation, but rather the opposite). I suppose a-life is the 
exception here.

Alan's points are more immediately tractable. Yes, i am treating 
capitalism as a (virtually) integrated planetary system that 
overwhelms all incommensurability. Don't aim at where your enemy is 
now, but where they will be in the future. All restricted local 
economies are melting into general economic dynamics, at great and 
accelerating speed, with an ever more sophisticated array of 
techno-financial hyperinstruments installing compatibility. Tax 
systems (combined with government borrowing on international 
markets) already provide the grid, as D&G point out in Plat.-13, and 
IMF universalization has reached escape velocity. There isn't a 
chance in hell that regional political initiatives can achieve long-
range autonomy from the fate of the planet as a self-organizing 
system or singular artificial eco-process. With China on-stream and 
India arriving fast nationality and regionalism are on the way out, 
except as desperate nodes of xenophobic resistance that slide very 
rapidly into fascism (as Europe seems intent on proving). Any 
revolution that is not spontaneously planetary is doomed. 
    Take China as an example (20-25% of the world's population). 
The Maoist set-up allocated vouchers of local validity that were meant 
to ensure people were fed as long as they remained in the 'right' 
place. A directly bureaucratic rationing system was thus able to 
treat the population as a resource of the state, territorially coding 
it, and forestalling - to a considerable extent - bottom-up out of 
control developments. The Deng Xiaoping reforms of 1979+ replaced 
this system with the cash nexus, i.e. currency of general (ultimately 
international) validity, allowing exchange to deterritorialize. BANG! 
150 million excess peasants migrate toward the coastal cities and 
especially the SEZs, buying food within a market system, and 'locking-
in' the whole chinese economy to universalized transactions: 
speeding up integration with Hong Kong capital (meaning in turn, with 
that of Taiwan and the world). An irreversible process. 
    If this isn't a realistic picture, paint me another one.










  


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