Because Pyramids are easier to build than Spheres

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, 1988

Some time ago, a fiction dressed up as non-fiction entitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail tossed a salad of fact, speculation and historical explanation together to create a vast conspiracy theory of the history of Western thought. It was amusing, and showed what could be done with speculation and a quick wit. But non-fiction only by virtue that it lacked a plot to go with its plots.

Two novels have come out of this work, one the low quality computer adventure game puzzler The DaVinci Code - whose recent adaptation as a film merely confirmed its vacuity - all of the production quality in the world, plus two fine actors - could not make "A. Pope" a difficult riddle. The other is a great book, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, whose title contains more wit than all of Dan Brown's elephantine skulking about.

Eco's first novel, The Name of the Rose was a deep meditation on the nature of loss, intellect and the limits of both reason and emotion. The second, an evisceration of non-thinking, superstition and the rhetoric of power. Foucault's Pendulum refers both to the physics of a pendulum allowed to swing freely, as it will trace out a circle in the room that it is in, and to the post-structuralist thinker, Michel Foucault, whose work explored how reason must construct a world of unreason, and a world of overt materialism must construct the covert world. The conscious implies a monolithic sub-conscious which overthrows the best intents of the knowing self, and so with the world.

On pages 312 to 313, he has the thesis of Holy Blood, Holy Grail pop out of a simple computer program. It is one of the more amusing dismissals in the book. In person when asked about his interest in the material of occultism, whether he chose it for any attraction to it, he snapped back "It's bullshit!" Eco even quotes bits from Grail along with a host of other occult speculation books. His character notes dryly that the random Garbage Out would "sell a few hundred thousand copies". He was off by an order of magnitude - Brown has sold millions. Yesterday Eco was 15,462, which to be in the swing of things, it should be noted mysteriously that Martin Luther died in February 1546. Given enough numbers, two of them will match.

But Eco is part of the cult of the feminine, and in ways which elude Brown's hamfisted typing. In Pendulum the characters are intellectual charlatans, that churn out pap to specification for a disreputable publisher who runs a vanity press on the side. The racket described in the book conformed to details provided to me by friends in publishing - the types themselves anyone associated with academia is familiar with. Boundless intellectual energy combined with a complete lack of genius.

In the end it is the girlfriend who debunks their operation, by proving what they thought was a secret document was, in fact, a laundry and flowers list. Men, in both The Name of The Rose and in Foucault's Pendulum are constantly regretting their betrayals of women.

From here, one could go anywhere rhetorically. I could take a side swipe at the 9/11 conspiracy theory movement, or the obsession with irrelevant details in domestic policy.

But instead, let us take Umberto at his word, that there really is a inevitable rhetorical plane, which is as powerful in human affairs as the physical plane of a pendulum. That is, we are bound up in power, even as we attempt to appropriate it. After spending a few pages riffing on how the different kinds of automobile power train could be used to represent the different arrangements of the "Tree of Life", one character tells himself:

When you assume an attutide of suspicion, you overlook no clue. After our fantasy on the power train and the Tree of the Seirot, I was prearted to see symbols in every object I came upon.

And from there the characters descend into an orgy of dates, numbers, explanations, tortured confessions and finally, insanity, theirs and others. The climb out of this madness begins when they see its effects on others, how their fog of connection pulls other weaker intellects - who have neither genius nor energy - into the belief in a conspiracy that the more that it is denied, the more obviously it must be so.

The matrix of power is, in Eco, caught between the obviousness of its existence, and the denial of responsibility by those in power. The Nazi's did not tolerate secret societies, because they were one - the secret to their power over lesser minds is that the concocted a fictional web of associations, and lesser minds were drawn into the hermeticism. And the drugs. Just like other secret societies that stumble into power.

Pyramids are, indeed, easier to build than spheres - not merely in the physical sense, but in the social sense. Pyramids are not self-organizing, but they are self-replicating, once started, layer by layer the blocks below conform to the blocks above. The advantage of the web of connections that is association, is that it can, always, be used to point back to one text or event which is they key.

At the top of the right wing pyramid of public signs is 911. It has overwhelmed lesser intellects as Michael Ignatieff whose descent from Booker short listed thinker in the tradition of Isaih Berlin to neocon Texophile is one of the sad spectacles of letters in recent years. The web of connections that creates an "Islamofacism" - a contradiction in terms in every direction - is no more stable than the concoctions of the characters of the book.

The doctrine of hermeticism is also the doctrine of the neo-con forerunner Leo Strauss, that all texts are not for the public, and only the initiate is allowed to know the meaning, which, with perfect circularity, is how to encode messages that will allow elites to control the public. This collides, however, with the pop world, where there is no subtext of control to the media stream, it is the absorbtion itself which is the control. Not the content, but the absence of content.

It is on this maze of detail without design, everything connected to everything else that the post-modern system relies upon for its art. This is not to look down upon the ability to spin syncretic fantasies, there have been other syncretic ages, and other syncretic peoples. The printing press ushered in such an age, of Gargantua, Don Quixote and Orlando Furioso - where the flood of knowledge from antiquity, combined with a new science of signs from the Hindu and Islamic world, in the form of algebra and analytic geometry created a moment of flooding opportunity for creation, recreation, combination and recombination.

But what finally ended this age, which in art and literature as well as science, was one of restless recombination - was the emergence of more unified doctrines, where a few realized that the way to taking the welter of connection run riot was to force a single interpretation downward, and replicate it by brute certainty. This brute certainty was reflected in the Society of Jesus, in the Inquisition, in the rise of Calvinism within the Protestant movement, and finally in the age of absolute monarchs from which "all honor emenated".

This construction of a pyramid of truth, backed by force, and replication, is what is termed "logocentrism" in post-structuralism. The importance of a single point of reference, from which the pendulum is allowed to swing, turning the chaotic tumble of patterns that can be traced, into one predictable order, which moves relentlessly in an unchanging circle - from the designs of flow of the sand pendulum to the expression of a single rotation.

Eco nails exactly the mixture of free play of discourse without any rules beyond aesthetic resonance, in that it is a small group of semi-attached insiders, who have enough limitations on their knowledge to be able to distille hundreds of years of billowing vaporousness into one solid story that has some pretense of credulability. The truly knowledgeable character sees too many connections - in ever kiosk and window - it is the core of syncreativity to be a room full of guys deciding which riffs to play upon.

Anyone who has experience with Presidential campaigns will know what I am referring to.

The Grail is a Weight

The ability to direct people to act with extreme prejudice based on lies is the holy grail of post-modern government. It began there, and it has ended there. Eco's book directly references the web of Nazism, and the portrait of the parliament of newly elevated initiates plays on images of Hitler's bunker in the end days of World War II.

Having spun this literary metaphor of the post-modern, where everything is connected to everything, and power disintegrates into the actions of the mad - did Eco see how powerfully the forces which he described would explode on the world. What is Al-Qaeda, but a secret society whose members are drawn into a hermeneutic interpretation of all acts and signs? What, indeed, is our White House, but a rather banal messiah cult which saw Iraq, increasingly as the cinosure of their syncretic policy. Yes there was oil in Iraq, but more importantly there was a legitimacy in a contending duel of secret societies. Iraq was the center, therefore Al Qaeda had to be there, or the force from Saddam had to emenate out. And therefore a new regime would do the same, by the mystical power of purple fingers - that colour of the mystical regal, that Newton thought so powerful he divided it into two - would do the same.

The response to this wave of top down secret hermeneuticism in power, both high and lower power, has been an explosion of a different kind of power, and a different kind of organization. The illusion of the post-modern, as Eco describes it, is that in complete freedom and unlimited information came complete individuality. When instead the consumers of information, like the consumers of anything else, are left only with the reality of the system itself. What a can of Campbell's soup means, in the end, is the system of Industrial Agriculture itself, against which there is a growing revolt.

The crucial key to this revolt is the nature of authenticity and participation itself. Authenticity contains within it the imperative for sustainability. What has not happened is the acceptance of these as principles, standards against which future actions are measured.

The Revolution Cannot Be Televised

I've been criticised before - publically and privately - for the "optimism" of this view, that a different form of social organizat - the sphere - combats both the degenerate state of symbolic syncreticism, and the top down paranoia which has engulfed the body politic. Can anyone imagine that the front runner for Canadian Liberal Leader is in favor of torture? That we have a society where even so called intellectuals fall for the peurile "ticking bomb" fallacy? No one will find a ticking bomb by torture, because those tortured know that there is a definite and exact end. Torture works precisely by there being no exact end, denied that power - which CS Lewis said of hell "that there is no way to make the suffering cease except to yield to it" - torture has no force to extractconfession, since those with the information know that a false lead will buy time, and time is all they need.

Instead what I am proposing is not optimism in any sense, technological or otherwise, but pragmatism. Pragmatism is optimistic in that it sees a better outcome through action than through error - it seens a better outcome because of the realism of its prescriptions.

Consider for example, my argument that internet people will man the next government, that they will form the state apparatus, and they will demand a state which moves as they are used to moving - in relation tho Myspace, or blogging, or email lists - or any other form of activity. Already this is happening for the pragmatic reason that the next government will have to hire from the internet, and will see internet success as a measure of competence. The corrupt old boy network that the present executive has used hasn't been able to come up with even high quality spear carriers to Bushflack the public and the press.

But what lies under this is an intellectual principle that goes beyond a banal demographic observation - and that is that non only does one need people, one needs people who can work together. The intellectual harlots of Eco required years of training to spin their webs, and the flies were very cultured ones. What other endeavor do we have that trains people for years? There is the church, the military, the corporate bureaucracy - and we are burning through all of them as sources of order which can be the scaffolding for a state.

It is also that this world offers an antidote to the decayed, and indeed degenerate, syncretic symbolicism - and that is that it is people, not symbols, whose connections form the moving solidity. Bonds of acquaintance, association and action which form, bloom, die, or leave behind seeds for the next project. It is, in the end, the association of people, not facts or factoids, ideas or memes, which drives the blogosphere, we like to who we know, who we read, and who we find. Google understands this - an incoming link is a vote for the site, not necessarily the content.

The DaVinci clods of this world are still spinning stories, and if necessary forging, or pouring into scraps, the needed disinformation required to reach a kind of modus vivendi with the world. They are still the ocean that ripples, the rogue waves that pour over boats. The DaVinci code, the book, made money, and spawned a movie. A movie that required the resources of the top down system to produce.

A movie that lost money. The top down system is still relentlessly in control, even if, after each cycle, it is more bankrupt than the cycle before. And this is the economic observation to go with the demographic observation. The next wave will have to make, not consume, money - because it will come to power when there is no more ruin left in the country to be had.

This then produces a principle to go with the faith in the network itself that Micah Sifry has been writing about, and more than that producing tools for - and that principle is beyond the internet. It is sustainability.

If promiscuous misconnectivity of symbols is the post-modern illness, and the celluar pyramids the symptom, then it is in unsustainable extraction that the fever lies. The converse is a faith in the power of connection - people become more flexible, not more encrusted as they connect, and it social order is not the hermeneutic coven, but the adhocratic, and ultimately participatory democratic forms which have their visible part on the blogs, but their active part through out the society.

This congressional election cycle is being watched for signs, one of those signs is already here – Lamont is a challeger because he has local cachet, but he is an issue because he has national exposure. Case, while having a greater political base in his challenge to Hawaii Senator Akaka, is fading in the polls simply because his brand of DLC conservatism no longer can command a national focal point. But these are minute blips, footnotes, in the larger economic process which is seeing the river of oil become more and more expensive, and the greater and greater realization that it joins with tributaries of blood.

Paradigm Lost

Eco's work might be called the neo-classical moment of post-modern literature, which produces the sprawling The Satanic Verses which was ultimately a mediation on power and language of the same kind, where a small core created a syncretic text which drew even the angels themselves into it, and of course Infinite Jest by the prodigal David Foster Wallace, with its Americanized obsession with the syncreticism of commericalization and the media stream. Eco, Wallace and Rushdie remain on bookshelves because they are the great elaborators in narrative of the post-modern floating opera in its most polished forms, building on the moments of Barthes, Pynchon.

But their limits are seen in that since these epochcryphal labors, they have not produced other works which have had the lasting and shattering impact of their signature works. Soon there afterwards the easy kitschification of Neal Stephanson would take over the same territory, presuppose a pseudo-Darwininan answer, in the form of Snow Crash to the question of what keeps the free play of memes and factoids from descending into intellectual grey goo. Anyone slogging through his Baroque series knows that whatever principle Stephanson thought to apply, it isn't working.

That these works, which proclaimed a vast sprawling maximalism have not lead to others which produce answers. The attempt to produce tighter joints, or larger holes, has left no air. Instead it is a more profoundly humble approach - of small pieces loosely joined which is supplanting the attempt at syncretical maximalism in our lives. If in on our lives, then in our government, and in our art, and in our theory which attempts to provide intellecutal momentum. This is not a utopian statement, but one which rises from the observation that the top down system has no means of coming to truth, but instead is governed by powerful anti-truths such as the creation of a conspiracy to build an Iraqi bomb and give it to al-Qaeda terrorists - nor a means of preventing its own mechanisms from flooding its intellectual eco-system with the paranoia which untruth feeds - nor the meanst to pay for either. There isn't enough oil on the planet to make Bush's Sate of the Union speechifying true, there aren't enough Fox News outlets in the country to persuade people of it after the unfacts are plainly visible, and there aren't enough clever wordsmiths to cover over these first two facts.

Instead the opinion leaders were not the media triumphalists who proclaimed a Bushite new order in the wake of the Reichtag fire of September 11th - when 90% of Americans approved of Arabs flying planes into buildings - but those 9% who had the faith in the network of people, and not the labyrinth of media images. If that 9% can overcome 90%, even with billions spent against them, and a daily bombardment of the most powerful production values available to the media-culture's war against intellectual resistence - then whatever the counter force that allowed it to happen is truly at the point where it can conquer the world. Think on that, imagine there was a military victory where one side, using cheap new weapons defeated a body 10 times as large with total air superiority. It would up end instantly the notions of victory.

And yet, with Bush hanging below 40% in most polls for nearly 3 months, and the tide turning against pro-war incumbents everywhere in the US - that is precisely what this new system is doing.