Continuing the Nietzschean as Composter

Oh--but it would also take an infinite time for an infinite tree to fall, never getting closer to a center of gravity that pulls it inward. This all happens in a fall that has no reference outside itself, or no source for the gravity by which it falls except its own internal impetus--a falling into itself, away from itself. The pull of that earth to which the tree would fall is also falling; and the earth to which it would fall also rises with new growth. The tree takes on the aspect of gravity itself, pulling all up into itself even as it falls down. Even as it strives down into the earth, as an inverted tree, and grows roots in the sky. A rising and falling in all directions and no directions at once; a driving into unity and a pulling-apart into multiplicity all at once; even a driving into multiplicty and a pulling-apart into unity.

Is this just a metaphor? No. I tell you no. We are monkeys, always monkeys and we can only ever think the thoughts of monkeys. Monkeys are from the forest. It just so happens that we've wandered into deserts or make deserts of our own. In the sky of those deserts our mind still thinks there are trees--it is too used to them or accustomed to them to think of a sky without trees----and there is no height or canopy to bound the trees we see, so we start talking about infinite trees and other crazy things.

RE: Ray's Zizek link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIpiXJW3dYE

A great interview--and one good ramble deserves another.

Whats missing, or at least, barely touched on, is what I call "the earth moving beneath us." What I mean by this is that ideology, as a purely "mental" phenomenon, is actually imbedded into to the active, physical processes of techne viz. machinic reproduction of symbols; the extraction of fossilized energy that is so overwhelming that it creates/deterritorializes hundreds of millions entirely from their day-to-day sustenance and then back onto purely symbolic relationships; the production of spaces and places with specific psycho-social effects (how does the lab rat whose life is in cages and mazes compare to the rat in the wild?--or the city for that matter? We could ask the same question of the human in the mazes and cages of suburbia.)

Yet--the physical import of this technical system has now reached truly global proportions. It is drastically changing the earth. But ideology--including the magical belief in capital, in money, markets etc. etc.--lacks the ability to compute these changes and truly understand itself as a physical process. Physical limitations are fundamentally traumatic to ideology, and Zizek's use of a psychoanalytic term is apt: disavowal is at work, at least on the political left. There is also something else at work, though: outright paranoia that doesn't just say "I know full well there's global warming, but..." and goes further to say "global warming is a liberal plot."

The rubber is meeting the road, though; Zizek is right to say that the recent economic crisis is not the end of capitalism by any stretch of the imagination--as if to say that capitalism is any stranger to crisis. It is, rather, a sort of shifting of axioms--the cannibalizing of the welfare states in Europe was named, as was the sub-prime crisis. There is nothing, at least on the surface, that is troubling about these from the standpoint of the global economic system. We know, from Deleuze and Guattari, that there are always to two tendencies at work: one that concentrates capital, even capital understood in more general terms as a species of the power to control the activity of human bodies. The other that redistributes capital through central apparatuses in order to sustain further accumulation, and to assimilate more facets of life on earth into the system. Naturally there will be an ebb and flow between these two tendencies.

Not so fast, though. Maybe what we're seeing is the first divergence of these two tendencies. maybe they were only ever in accord because, running parallel to the sort of of tremendous accumulation, centralized accumulation that Marx described "(the ownership of the means of production falling into fewer hands".) There was an exponential explosion of energy that allowed this accumulation to occur, undermining whole classes and races, while simultaneously effecting redistributions and generating new wealth and fortunes at various new frontiers, both figuratively and literally. he expansive, redistributive system was only possible with an exponentially expanding energy horizon. What we're left with when that expansion ceases is a brittle construct of accumulation and centralization that will inevitably create problems for itself that it can't solve (that it could only solve by expending more energy.)

So, as we've discussed, the sub-prime mess is just our partial internalizing of a previously global hierarchy within our national borders. The promise was that we could take in millions of new people from global and local hinterlands and integrate them into our consumptive society (which only exists as the pinnacle of various stages of production that have been integrated globally through a politico-military order.) But the collapse just means we now have a much bigger and less enfranchised underclass.

Or the ongoing/upcoming sovereign debt crises in the first world are just the result of a demographic profile in European countries and Japan, and to a lesser extent the coupling of their lower classes into global labor pools. These problems are flowing into realities that aren't just structural problems of capitalism--but actually facets about the earth underneath.

Why couldn't the "American Dream" extend further and further, until suburbia filled every piece of flat land in the country? I think its largely because oil got to 140$ a barrel, and oil got to 140$ a barrel because global production peaked. The demographic issues are something that capitalism can't really deal with either--they are something belonging to the earth; to breeding and growth, which is something that ideology only touches on when it becomes truly monstrous. Economic theory, for instance, never deals with people but only workers--almost assuming that workers spring forth form holes in the ground, rather than from a complex, nurturing social milleu from which they are ripped even before they are born.

Zizek's also, I believe, alone amongst philosophers in even pointing out that earth is turning into the slum planet. He mentions that there are a billion people in slums now. The UN projections say that number will triple in the next few decades, and these projections don't take into account peak oil or global warming. I predict, based on the example of places like Lagos, there will be vast zones not even integrated into the order as "reserve armies" of labor. Pure slums. slums detteritorialized from labor dynamics and onto the forces in the earth that operate, as it were, underneath. The wretched of the earth, in a sense. There will be other elements as well. Those lodged in marginal lands--permaculturalists. The goal should be to hook these up and make them circulate together. I know not how, though I believe that Christianity will be a vital piece.

To answer the question of the link "are we living in the end times?" I'll just say this: the history of the world is ending. Life will go on, and there will even be global histories that crisscross times and places in uncanny connection. But the singular world history that began in Rome will not survive the coming age. That's my prophecy.