Friends & Enemies, Part 3

Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, 20 June 2014 16:32.

by Neil Vodavzny

Tim Stanley – or Dr Tim Stanley I presume – was opining here on the joys of set books, as in there are apparently better things to do at college. One of these is the tidy ability to collate information, ferreting around on-line and so forth, so the notion of reading a book from cover to cover becomes history to the keen student of life.

Dr Stanley is presumably very clever – up there with Ed Miliband – so that would work for him. It’s a state of mind which actually has social affiliations: one has to socialise, and books come a poor second. So it would go down well with the guitar-hero generation who disdain the hard grind over the superficial or worthless.

Stanley’s uber-casual stance is more or less what I mean by the “only connect” quote. The mainstream are connected as never before, but have much less (to no) knowledge of how things connect. I recall reading that the word fornicate derives from the Latin fornix for arches in the colosseum which were popular venues for trysts. There you have a type of social ritual, sex alongside violence. The world according to Stanley is a connected one with none of what I call the spontaneity of a world based more on image. I recently picked-up a DVD of Iwo Jima, with first hand recollections of veterans, one of whom recalled the attraction of psalm 23 to marines. This is very imagist phrasing (King James Bible), and if you’re in a battlefront situation images are comforting things.

If the modern world is as text-based as I suspect, then the instinctive, imagist knowledge associated with everything from race to sex – stereotypical and real – is lost. Nefarious Nips leads logically to the topic of caste-based, semi-feudal societies – as they were up till the 19th century – but first I want to broaden things out towards the future envisaged by H+.

H+, as I suppose, is a type of techno-Stanley-ism. They are very big on superficial information or text of various kinds, from cyber-code to DNA-code. Since DNA gets namechecks intermittently on this site, I thought I’d nail my colours to the mast here. I’m more a follower of Asian alternate science, such as that represented by UVS-model - being more holistic. For a while I was in contact with Iresh Ranjan Bhattacherjee , who to the undiscerning may appear barmy, though I can’t say as his hypothesis on dynamic balance of living things is wrong or right, and doubt if anyone else can.

DNA and proteins spontaneously adopt fractal symmetries, branching like trees. Each branch or “bunch” represents an energy gradient. Where does the energy come from? It’s intrinsic to the universe. Everything branches, so we have a universe of structures of galaxies, planets ... Yygdrasil. Consequently, it doesn’t impress me that there’s a coded-text of genome; we are largely what we are or, as Popeye says, I am what I am. The fact that we live in an information world doesn’t alter the fact.

Take the case of social evolution advocated by Wade. Blatant falsehoods based on non-existent or indecipherable text. Dawkins made it his career; even the word he coined, meme, has been appropriated in the lexicon of social-media.

The spontaneity of image is real and symbolic. Anything textual is a secondary phenomenon – it has no intrinsic worth without the instinctive, psychic, symbolic source of all information. This is something I will return to in a moment. Any healthy society should be concerned with breeding, but genes are just a part of the overall process. Societies that more nearly approximate a feudal pattern – as India still does – are vastly more highly structural. Both at the social level – castes – and at the level of village or tribe. With these structures in place, there are inbuilt rules on breeding, such as arranged marriages. This is a much more subtle process than genetics.

In a similar vein, a work of art arises from nothing. The value of the Taj Mahal is in its organic baroque opulence, wheels within wheels which merge into a single visual, sensual experience. Refined ornament brings a sense of organic growth from nothing to something. Such opulence, like Versaille I suppose, is a sign of wealth. It’s not Mammon, it’s opulence, so we’re already into a type of pseudo-feudal, class or caste-oriented social system.

One thing that strikes you is you can trace societies through the history of image, since there is a “carry-over” from one era to another. The architecture of the 20s, New York neo-gothic skyscrapers, art-deco fashion.. This carry-over starts to fade-out as the implacable weight of capital bends society to its will following WWII, the 60s lighting a brief ember of rebellion.

You can see this carry-over in tracing medieval-goth through the pre-Raphaelites to Art Nouveau and the fantasy-goth architecture of Rennie Mackintosh to Bauhaus’s ethos of holistic art, design and production.

Image cannot survive Freudian-capital for reasons previously adumbrated: its products have arbitrary value, not intrinsic value of aesthetics and Eros. These latter, along with race, have to be considered anti-capital, anti-Freudian. In order to understand icons of pop-culture, we have to be enabled to see the elements of race and Eros. The aforementioned Flash Gordon, with its fascistic, heavily sexualised undertones, was a big influence on Star Wars. A heroic interloper amidst age-old dynasties with strength of arm and mind can topple empires. Romance of the old (European) school, and not a pan-galactic dollar in sight.

The Japanese have their own highly idiosyncratic approach. On the subject of Iwo Jima, the Japanese have carried their track-record of black humour, erupting nightmarishly from black volcanic sands, into their unique brand of pop-culture. From the original

Gojira (1954) to the fabulously ludicrous Battle Royale’s isolated killing-island premise, and anime Evangelion, an extended parable of Freudian therapies masquerading as angelic mechas.

Mechas are a common theme of anime, human symbiots of giant destructive droids, and the line where one begins and the other ends. This could be almost the critical theme of modernity, for most of the reasons already adumbrated. At Iwo Jima, one of the most deadly tasks for marines was to direct tank gunfire onto enemy positions (concealed on the rock-face). The crew could not make visual contact without opening the hatch and exposing themselves to enemy fire, so a marine had to run to the back of the tank where a field-phone was sited, directing the tank-commander from there.

War is hell and all that, but there is a sort of heroic romance in that display of human cooperation. Iwo Jima was a fortress-island combat of ferocious savagery that lasted 4 weeks; a battle, not some endless indecisive and nigh-irresolvable conflict, seemingly common occurrence on our screens. Another thing I noticed was the super-elegant US dreadnoughts, sleek of line limned against pacific blue. Even though it’s not South Pacific, in fact WWII tech finds its way into such retro-futurist classics as Battlestar Galactica (TV) and Starstruck (graphic novel). British comics writer Warren Ellis is also an admirer of a WWII aesthetic and ethos, while Nazi robots are evergreen favourites.

Is it possible WWII technology represents an optimum condition? What I mean is, the A-bomb is virtually the end of that phase of technology. Developments following that point towards the next phase, meaning smart-weapons and the cyber-sphere. Ironically, the net was apparently evolved from cryptogrammic work on Nazi codes

This puts another complexion on a fascination with retro-tech: it belongs to a world that is much more image-oriented, and so has some sort of innate romance and attraction. If we’re in a cyber-sphere, it’s not that the technology’s more advanced, it’s that we are in a textual world, racing away from instinct, psyche, symbolism. A race away from the obvious, stereotypical realities of race and sex, the source of all human cultures.

There is, however, a more nuanced, less obviously Whiteman versus the world attitude that I choose to call “the Tao of race”. Partly in honour of Confucionism, which led China down a road of anarchic socialism during the glory years of blue Ming vases and birds of paradise.

Anarchy is the Taoist doctrine of universal order, each part mirroring the whole. China’s version of feudalism was in some ways more centralised than Europe’s, but in other respects more organic and harmonious. I am going to put the case for very highly structured quasi—feudal societies as a less uniform view of race and heritage, one which is almost a natural result of the social structure. India’s caste-system is extremely complicated with 4 Hindu castes representing priests, governers, traders, servants – amongst other tribal/religious affiliations.

Castes are therefore human types, in that breeding predominantly within a caste advantages certain temperaments. Temperament is something you could term sub-racial, so it is a fairly nuanced attribution. Any feudal society - such as Japan was till the 19th century – advantages temperament. For example, the Samurai class of disciplined warriors. However, Samurai are also nurtured, raised and trained to follow in the profession of their forefathers. In other words, breeding in a feudal society is a mixture of nature and nurture.

So, it’s highly nuanced and evolves elaborate ceremonies, crafts and sub-cultures. Mishima, the reactionary author of the Sea of fertility quartet, was of Samurai heritage and his books are severe in their ancestral colour and zest. Actually, another good example of the colour and zest of feudalism is Xena: Warrior Princess, which captures the chaotic order within disorder of ancient cultures. The only flaw I found was the Amazons seemed to be of Maori lineage, but I guess we’ll forgive that.

Feudal societies, in that they are social or occupational castes, to some degree breed for certain traits (to the extent of forced or arranged marriages in some cases). Secondly, they are highly structural, village and guild-oriented, able to nurture traits into elaborate sub-cultures. Why I call this the Tao of race is because it actually is a very highly ordered arrangement. Part 3 alluded to fractals, and that we live in a universe of branching structures; UVS theory is another related idea, clouds and vortices are spontaneous manifestation of energy.

Anything spontaneous is powerful and real and cannot be denied. The growth of a plant from seed to fruit is essentially going from nothing to something. Perhaps that’s a slightly Eastern idea for us Westerners, but I would point out that, in terms of race, Wade is probably right that racial differences are not that apparent from DNA. If, as I suppose, DNA is text, the information it contains is superficial by comparison to image; ie, the proportion of a figure, that which gives it being. This process is powerful and undeniable, a situation of dynamic balance.

Whatever racial differences are, they are probably manifestations of proportion (the Golden Mean is a mathematical measure found in nature), unstoppable, and most likely mysterious. We are apt to focus on intelligence, but intelligence is a harmonious construct – like a Mozart symphony – and abstract reason a development of this. It has also been pointed out that strength is a virtue; ethnicity in the context outlined above has the strength of a peasant class, and diversity. Intelligence in a more or less abstract capacity, it could be said, is largely the prerogative of a priestly caste, and what I tend to think is the more subtlety is enabled in the social order, the more different temperaments will flourish.

Ethnic strength is emblematic in force of image, nurtured in guilds, villages, tribes – Apache, Sioux – which attaches them to “the great spirit” so and so and so and so and so.

Neil Young is someone I think of as very white. The lyrics here reach across race, to a sort of brotherhood of Man. Only if race is manifested in spirit can such a brotherhood exist