a definition of sustainability:

A structure is sustainable if A. the energy requirements for its formation, sustenance, and expansion come from immediate solar radiation and geothermal activity, rather than energy that has been stored by structures from previous times. And B. if the structure does incorporate chemical processes that convert elements and molecules in the earth's crust from a form that is necessary to that structure, to elements and molecules that are not usable by it.

Materialism is for Monkeys

A friend on facebook asked the question "what does it mean to be human?" I've modified and expanded the answer I gave, so as to show the direction my thought has gone since I started reading a Thousand Plateaus. This hypothesis is very important, and research to this effect will probably be what guides my thinking from here on out. This is apparent when considering that this finding can reposition my entire work in Westfir into a materialist description of spatialized time, which can be described as a particular event, using sources from evolutionary biology, geology, and other disciplines. Its not meant to be an argument so much as a direction that an argument might be able to proceed upon. An intuition or sketch.

A humanoid is a monkey whose brain is on the extreme end of a trajectory of primate development consisting in the unpairing of sense from stimulus. The human brain, in its evolutionary history, has undergone successive deterritorializations from spatial processing in the forest milieu (that is to say, the ad hoc tracking of multiple levels of activity and possible sites of motion,) to a flat, grounded existence in the vast, largely empty shrub-steppe biome. This occurred as a cycle that repeated many times as the rainfall patterns changed in Africa due to periods of global warming and cooling, though at each successive stage the primates on this trajectory retained more and more of the steppe in them as they returned to the forest, becoming more grounded.

There is a tremendous amount of spatial processing power that is used in the forest that is useless most of the time in the steppe. Simultaneously there is tremendous evolutionary pressure on the disenfranchised monkeys to form a collective, nomadic organization that can retain cohesion in scarce times, while tracking behind weather patterns, game, and seasons in an environment that is not spatially, but rather temporally, complicated. It is not surprising, therefore, that the logic of spatial processing would become reinvested into social forms, as well as creating a understanding of temporality, which is stressed as something that the Neanderthals, for instance, lacked.

This logic of space is abstracted by the brain and repeated so as to form an "inner space." And also an "upper space" that always superimposes, a priori, above any appearance (stratification.) These are the poles represented in religion as the soul and God. This excess of spatial processing, and its splitting into multiple regimes, reterritorializes in constructing an abstract map of vegetation patterns, seasons of time, trajectories of game, spiritual sites (a close analog might be stations in the aboriginal walkabout,) water sources etc. It also fuses not just individuals, but a group, to a course on that map by effecting synchronization of speeds and symbiosis of motions for larger numbers of men and women. This tracking is effected through kinship bonds operating by lines of descent, and also by pairing. both operate in hierarchical levels that cause both to support each other by the common notion of descent.

There is nothing ontologically significant about this--it is simply a navigation system whose resources for spatial processing have been reapplied to the task of an inward organization first of the native sensations of the body, along the lines of opposition. But then, through these, all other sensation become collated to facets of the spatial logic, through identification with the other bodily systematizations. The native sensations of the body are the Freudian anal and oral stages, genital sexuality, as well as others such as breathing and the hand. These are organized by inner space, but are also transferred to outer space as well, becoming the aspects of deity and world, effecting a symbolic exchange between outer space and inner space that serves to infect outer space by lodging bodily sensations at the margins where spatial logic drops off into antimony or nonsense. It is in this way that we can deal with the external world symbolically: because it is first connected to facets of our bodily life, which are in turn organized by inner space.

A human is a monkey who has entered the autistic spectrum. That is, he has entered into a state of organization that is what Ortega calls Alteración, or "otheration" which is the repetition of space (along the same lines as above) to form an inner site of appearance "the open region where things show up," or a point of reference beside sensation and feeling, versus an outer space that serves as an opposite side in which sense is positioned between. In this we become other than the world, and the world becomes other than us.

A monkey is frantically absorbed in his environment, being bombarded with sense information that his brain races to process, all while moving in patterns and algorithms that incorporate the information and turn it into a path that it navigates. His ability to project possibilities of motion always flows from the environment, and is immediately cashed out in a reaction of the body. But, in creating the rudiments of society that can take over, for instance, the constant absorption in identifying potential vulnerabilities to predators these resources are freed up to construct possibilities in thought, and a whole space that moves even as we close our eyes and standstill. possibilities can proceed out of the body, as choices. Reaction can proceed out of the world, creating a matter acted on by will; the loop is closed by, then, controlling the stimulus we see by causing certain reactions.

The simplified setting also disenfranchised the primates' ability to track multiple objects in their environment, from its locus or "center of gravity" in the horizon immediate horizon. Possibility comes at us from the hole at the far side of vision, from whence the world and power flows. The horizon in the forest is very close and small, and imbued with nearby objects; the forest itself is a very close enclosure. But in the steppe, the enclosure is grandiose, far off from any immediacy, and instead fused to the movements of the sky, trailing off into infinity. Also, more importantly, these multiple objects and trajectories can shift their "center of gravity" from the horizon and to the blank spot behind our vision. This is what we call subjectivity, which arrays various choices, and enchains desire within a projective schema that can be implanted and controlled--one can control what possibility others see.

This is what we call power. Furthermore, this structuring cannot be content with simply applying itself to constructing possibilities for desire to chose from. It must also impose itself on desire, first by assimilating all other bodily organizations, making them work within the gradients of abstracted opposition, and in turn turning them into strata; and specifically by impressing sexuality into a schema of fullness and lack, pegging this to the sexual difference of male and female, and creating systems of pairing and descent. Volumes could be written on just this, but suffice to say that Freud's intuition of oedipal organization arising from an event in the "primal horde" was quite right. The only thing that must be shown is how the oedipal is contingent on a prior organization of fullness and lack, and is just the particular manifestation of this schema of bodily organization that applies to the severed pair of the penis and vagina. (This is the true castration--why both men and women can be castrated.) This allows us to replace the tenuous narrative of Totem and Taboo, which ultimately begged the question by making the father already operate on oedipal lines, with the hypothesis of hominid evolution arising out of cycles of de/re-forestation in Africa, while still preserving its basic critical and explanatory functions.

A Strange Reversal

Western History can often be best understood as the slow inversion of Plato. The history of culture is a history of changing class structure, beginning with the Platonic understanding of a tripartite division of class into the Reasoning, Spirited, and Appetitive classes.

The industrial revolution brought about hopes of a complete inversion of the hierarchy outlined in Plato's Republic. Communists dreamed of a world in which the class of producers would rule, eliminating the need for class division all together, uniting the world into a single global community of cooperative workers.

Such a dream would not come to pass. Instead, technology has allowed for a much stranger inversion of the Platonic model. For the majority of western history since Plato, a vast underclass has been responsible for the acquisition of raw materials from the earth, the processing of those materials into workable mediums, and the production of goods of consumption for a smaller middle class of educators, lawyers, doctors, managers and so on, who in turn followed the command of an elite class of the wealthy, who owned not just the means of production, but in fact the raw materials and the human beings would would operate on those natural resources.

We find ourselves in a time however, in which the acquisition, processing, and production of goods from raw materials is carried out more and more by machines. Oil refineries which once required a small army of well trained men to maintain operation are now operated entirely remotely, without a single human being on site. This change in the mode of production is in the process of obsolescing what had long been the primary mode of human existence. As a result, the middle class swells to unheard of proportions: the majority of American citizens are neither land-owners nor productive workforce, but a middle class of goods-users, consumers, a vast service class whose consumptive desires drive the machinery of industry indirectly. Those wealthy owners who must fight to the death of their rival corporations are at the mercy of the fickle wants of this vast middle class.

Rather than reason, we are now governed entirely by appetite. The type of power once wielded by the wealthy, for so long considered a divine right, handed down by God himself, has become instead an anxious rat race to keep enormous multi-national corporations afloat by catering to the whims of the middle class, whose ever growing sense of entitlement only solidifies their role as the massively unconscious, mostly mad dictator.

The middle class, divided against itself due to its plural culture, cut into a thousand and one compartments by the ever finer division of economic strata, drives the machine of capitalism forward without any guidance but want.

It is indeed the appetitive part of the soul that has come to rule, but it has not come to rule by an elimination of all class and a unification of the nations of the world, but instead by the sheer magnitude of the productive power unleashed by technologicla control of the material world.

We are still in the middle of this transition, of course. Countless human beings still work in factory positions that have yet to be overtaken by robotic workers, and our cultural understanding of the world is still largely shaped by the Platonic model. But it is no longer so easy for a few men in positions of great power to carry out their own wills on the people without fear of complete loss of the power they wield. Only by obeying the will of the masses, any of the many, so often contradictory wills of the many, can any man or woman in a position of power hope to remain in their privileged position. No longer can their be any myth of divine right handed down by God: power is given only by circumstance, and it is maintained only by moving with the flow of the unconscious consumer horde.

We can only expect this picture to become more clear as less and less of the confrontation between man and nature involves man at all. As technology takes over the role of the slave, it is desire that will shape our future, and it is then desire which must be shaped to determine the course of history.

Buddhism in China and India

The importance of Buddha in India was in being a novel solution to the problem of karma; or, perhaps, in making karma problematic in the first place, by extending it to infinity as fused to the wheel of birth and death, in which all temporary differences in fortune are smoothed out in the vastness of time. Karma ceased to be a conservative preservation-enhancement condition for life in the caste hierarchy and became total and complete, leaving nothing outside of itself. Meanwhile merit gained a referent outside of karma, which is to say--outside of existence--and positioned itself equidistant from all castes.

But the significance of the Buddha in China was very different because it presumed an entire dimension of existence--the karmic--that the Chinese were naive to. Hence he served first and foremost to introduce the very idea of karma, only then introducing it as a problematic, and only then as problematic with a solution. This provided a teleological trajectory to existence (I think this was basically lacking in Chinese thought up until the introduction of Buddhism,) leading to an empty point of transcendence.

But how is nirvana teleological? Its simple: as a point of no return, nirvana is a state in which any permutation of desire (the Buddhist correspondence to our space-time, which was also cashed out in terms of "will" in 19th century Germany) will lead to, even if it takes an infinite amount of time. On the other hand, there is no exit from nirvana So, nirvana is the final state into which all things tend. This could be called teleological because what we're talking about is desire, which desires its end and must be satisfied with nothing, else it would break free of it, and fall back into the desire for things. At the same time, existence becomes an infinite gradient stretching from the fullness of desire (hell, grinding away at itself, whirling in an enclosure that is itself) and nirvana. Merit is simply a position within the gradient.

This is, of course, just one way in which Buddhism can function. Another way is to radically and irreparably decenter desire from objects, invested with fullness, and a subjective position of lack. The void is sealed off in our heart and finds its fullness. Meanwhile Eros, which is neither lack or fullness, ceases to be chained, but becomes the earth. The body moves with the body of the earth; finds this great body in its depth.

The written word as the abstraction of meaning and the beginning of history.

In the most ancient cultures there are almost always a holy man, maybe someone that was a bit of a crazy. Someone who could see past the boundary of the thinking of the culture to the horizon. They always did this in the terms and context of their culture, but always motioning at the possibilities beyond the actualities of their culture. With writing the dynamic openness of the holy man becomes closed. His interaction with the tribe is codified and written down. The idea my be preservative, but what is valuable about the holy man isn't what he says, it is the fact that he speaks beyond the context of the life of the culture. Yet once written down the words can only be a part of the settled culture, no longer do these words open us up to the limitless horizon, instead they show us the walls in which we already dwell.

Going over many details, this is the beginning of decay for life. Life needs constant newness to stay vital. As the letter takes over out lives, no longer do we live in nature, constantly mystifying and refreshing, we live in the stagnation of settled and explained history. Insofar as we live in a history we live in a construction, a jail of our own words. The natural use of metaphors to point beyond falls into a dogma or a world view that is no longer beyond pointing at all.

Without writing language is personal, we try so hard to preserve it now in text, but it is already fallen.