wallpaper animals

It would seem to be common sense to say that no social or economic model which didn't take into account the psyche of individuals could possibly have any realistic hope of authenticity. Yet economics glosses over this omission: it would seem that it simply is too difficult. Keynes, to be fair, does spend a lot of time discussing the psychology of consumer: the idea of the 'propensity to consume', 'propensity to save' and 'liquidity preference' underpin his theory, although there is little detail as to how these might manifest in individuals beyond idealised reasoning about personal economic well-being.

However, Kahneman and others have started to unpick this rational model: people do strange things, particularly in the face of risk and anxiety. Kahneman's assertion is that people tend to overreact to small probability events, but underreact to medium and large probabilities. I think Axelrod's experiments with the Prisoners Dilemma echo these findings too. But losing rationality from the equation is just where our problems really start...

The real issue I think is that people are not the same, and certainly do not behave similarly in similar situations. However, the crowd dynamics (in situations where crowds are a factor) can create unusual social movements in response to small initial conditions (a la complexity theory). But even that doesn't allow us to think of people being the same. The real issue for me is that clearly we are different. How are we different? 


On the one hand, we behave rationally: we communicate, observe the behaviour of others, judge what might be in our best interests. But on the other hand, each of us hides vulnerabilities, dreams and desires that, even if they are not unique on a social level, appear to us to be utterly unique and fundamental to our identity. This sensual side and the rational side seem to co-exist. Personally, I believe that what keeps them working together is 'property'; or put another way a relationship to property is a way of balancing the needs of rational discourse with the sensual aspects of the personality.

In my agent-based model of communication and wellbeing, I am starting to consider these two mechanisms working together. But there are other problems which I am thinking about. For the sensual and vulnerable self has dimensions and depths which lie well beyond the making of rational discourse. The Freudian level of id, or Jung's shadow lurk behind the scenes often sticking a spanner in the works with regard to conscious behaviour.

This has led me to think about possible ways in which the subconscious might be modelled. One possibility is to model it as a sort of 'internal conversation': i.e. a conversation with an imaginary 'other', with the results of the internal conversation eventually moving into conscious communication after a process of selection (as in Luhmann). Another possibility is to elaborate Jung's archetypes as regulating levels in a subsystem of the 'conscious' (i.e. communicating) system (much as I discussed here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2011/05/luhmann-beer-harre-and-jungian.html)

Each of these are effectively internal reflexive 'mirrors' which turn a conversation in on itself for a period of time before that conversation emerges into the social system. It's a bit like a laser exciting photons before they have enough energy to be emitted in the beam. There are experiments to try: each configuration of 'mirrors' will produce different effects. I might hope that some of those effects have some bearing on what we actually see happening!

The prognosis for the education system is very bleak. The changes that are occurring now will have devastating and irreparable consequences not just on education itself but on knowledge and consequently, I believe, civil society. But, on the bright side, we are still here and no-one appears to have died directly from a lack of education (although there are indications that lack of education indirectly leads to an early grave: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8189498.stm) Even so, everyone's got to die sometime... just preferably not all at once!

In our period of bleakness, I think it would be more useful to spend time thinking about what has become of us rather than railing against the injustice of it all. There's some humour in that, and the humour can help us both manage the devastation and understand it. But beyond the jokes, what I think has become of us is that we have lost sight of our individuality and the sacredness of individual human life. Instead, we have become subsumed into the amorphous and mindless global communications networks which we have substituted for God.

The scary bit is the wiring.

Like the result of a medical experiment by Dr Moreau, every sinew, nerve and organ has been teased out of us, its signals analysed, and carefully connections made between them and the global network. The remarkableness of the engineering feat is only matched by the incompleteness of the knowledge that it took to undertake it. But our ability to discern the gaps in the knowledge have been compromised by the operation. Like Dr. Who's Cybermen, we are now wired-up; effectively prisoners to a global machine that is out of control, with the most powerful controls we once possessed - the ability to know something - taken away from us. It's no comfort to say that Heidegger predicted this.. we have cannibalised ourselves, becoming our own 'standing reserve', feeding on ourselves to drive our world. This is what the 'enframing' of technology does.

There is a need for a new quest for personhood and individuality. But this can be no 'revolutionary' call - that would simply feed the global machine. It requires instead individuals seeking inside of them the vestiges of what survived the operation. To do that we need to see what 'enframing' did to us, how we have become, and how what we know ourselves to be is different from how we have become.

More specifically, I wonder if the wiring was achieved with an analytical understanding of the structures of cognition: essentially a synchronic model. We labeled those parts of cognition, mapped the brain, worked out what had what effect and so on. Then we wired ourselves up. There was never any consideration of the emergent effects, of the diachronic model.

When I look at myself, I might speculate on the synchronic aspects of my engagements with the world (like this blog). There are patterns to be seen, which I have tried to understand more precisely with models. But each moment has a history and future. Within that history and future there are also patterns: the note that is played and dies away; the glance that stays in the mind long after it was made; the loss that transforms everything.

What I may be beginning to think is that Jung is right: that there are a finite number of states in an infinite amount of time. Understanding the diachronic process is to understand the patterning of those finite states. Bringing better knowledge of the diachronic process together with the synchronic process is perhaps when we will start to unpick the wiring.

One of the longest-running debates within Critical Realism concerns the role of absence. In "Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom" Bhaskar introduced a new 'turn' in Critical Realism, introducing 'Dialectical Critical Realism' which contextualised original critical realism within a dialectical process which, Bhaskar argues, was driven by determinate (i.e. concrete and identifiable) absence.

Dialectic is a very hard book, and much discussion has surrounded the topic, much of it sceptical. I count myself among the sceptics. The real problem is to be able to point to anything 'real' about absence without drawing on rather crass examples (the absence of rains leading to famine, for example; the absence of a treaty leading to genocide, etc). This is in contrast to original critical realism, which pointed to the real phenomena in the world and in asking how scientific knowledge about them might be possible, posited mechanisms as an explanation. Bhaskar's argument is that mechanisms are stratified and tensed in history, and that processes operate within those time structures driven by the absences at any particular time point: the injustice that persists, the things that can't be explained, and so on. That may be fair enough, but he then goes on to say that absences are real, in the same way that mechanisms are real, which for many is a step too far. Then it gets complicated: are absences the drivers of mechanisms, or mechanisms the drivers of absences? Are absences in the mind or 'out there'? Bhaskar (I think) is saying the latter.

I've been thinking about all this in the context of music. Withholding the root of a chord is a common musical technique for prolonging musical expression: Wagner's Prelude to Tristan and Isolde is the classic example, but 16th century polyphony is similar. Absenting the root suspends expectation, withholds a resolution or finality, creates more tension, gives direction, moves towards something, raises expectations. Because of the absence, the music keeps driving forwards. But if we think like this, the issue is neither absence nor mechanism, but prolongation: another word for viability.

We can go a bit further here. Because a distributed cognition approach to music would then start to identify absence within the mechanisms of regulation between individual viability and the world 'out there'. In this sense, absence may well be 'out there'. Moreover, it being 'out there' is a fundamental component to the viability of each of us. One might almost say that we rely on there being real absences in the world: without them, we wouldn't exist. 

However, this is then to privilege mechanisms over absence. The mechanism detects the absence. But what drives the mechanism? Answer: absence! This seems very paradoxical! Is there progress?

That of course is a leading question (quite literally!). Bhaskar's view on dialectic is that there is an emancipatory force in the world driven by absence ("the pulse of freedom"). It is the role of philosophy to identify and unpick determinate absences, and that this is an emancipatory project. I find the latent utopianism here hard to stomach. Absence may well be real, but it is wrapped up in processes of prolongation and viability. If there is emancipation to be had, I think it lies in the possibility of an individuals finding a way through the absences of the world which harmonise with their own viability.

Like the art of prolonging a beautiful piece of music, emancipation is the art of prolonging a beautiful life.

Ibn Khaldun was a remarkable 15th century social theorist and early economist whose ideas foreshadow those of Durkheim, Marx, Bourdieu and Giddens. His work was based on a close examination of desert societies in the 15th century, highlighting the processes of development of rich and poor. Khaldun has been on my mind following my return from Ras Al Khaimah. His concept of Asabiyyah describes the emergent processes of social transformation following invasion by nomadic groups, and the gradual assimilation of the dominant 'culture'.

Whilst there are don't appear to be any immediate parallels between a medieval context of frequent invasion and decay of civilisations, the processes Khaldun describes have modern counterparts in terms of social capital and social networks. But what I am part of (and practically every other UK and US university at the moment) is some sort of incursion (although of course, welcomed!) into Arab culture with a European model of education. How might Khaldun see this?

Education is welcomed into the culture as a way of diversifying an economy: as a service industry, education is big business. Students for foreign universities are spread between the native populations and migrant workers (or offspring from them). There are more native students for more prestigious universities, whereas for less prestigious institutions, there are more migrants. There are often significant differences in political power between migrant workers and natives: but the power imbalances can often serve as a motivator which drives individuals towards increased capability and education. Foreign educational institutions similarly find themselves as migrant institutions with fewer rights to property and disadvantaged legal status.

Bearing in mind the contrast between these different social groups, the distinctions that Khaldun draws on to highlight the relationship between urban civilisation (kingdoms) and Bedouin civilisation (nomadic) may be a useful starting point. One of the principal questions is to examine the viability of this situation, and the viability of 'nomadic' educational businesses. Political imbalance and injustice acts to adjust the distribution of risks in society, and the anxiety that results focuses on education to manage it. The principle political inequalities are often not inequalities of wealth, but of risk. This suggests a more general point that increasing wealth in a super-rich country does not bring increasing political power or more even distribution of risk.

In a society of unequal risk distribution, education is attractive because only education and the capability that can arise from it can give increased flexibility in response to managing risk. Increases in capital in terms of property are less possible (housing, for example, is only available for rent): what counts is the increase in social capital - particularly the ability to influence the ruling power; this depends on property relations to ideas and skills.

However, there's a catch here. Good education depends on good teaching. If teachers do not have sufficient educational capital to maintain their own wellbeing and flexibility in an unequal society, they will not be happy: and it's rare for an unhappy teacher teach well. The status of migrant teachers is the same as for other migrant workers. In this way, what appears as education might not be able to deliver in terms of the increase in personal and social capital. I suspect this is the case for most educational incursions in unequal societies, however prestigious.

This is not insoluble. It requires a rethink as to how education might be organised. The fundamental issue is to treat the doctor at the same time as the patient. To do this, I think that learning activities, particularly those involving overseas contacts (from more equal societies) can work magic. Activity constrains communications; but it does so to enable them. Global coordination of activity is now possible.  It means organising education around tools and scenarios rather than curricula. With this, a viable future for nomadic educational  incursions
might be a possibility.

i saw this picture on brooke's blog and i immediately saved it for what i wanted our back area to look like.  i want to add a window box and do a bricked- in grilling station!!  

warren painted the swing and hung it.  i got a cushion from world market...it will do for now but i would love to eventually recover it in a trina turk fabric.  please excuse the ADT sign and the lack of plants....one day we will get there!!  it's always a work in progress.  i would also love to cover the chain w/ rope.  

last but not least, i wanted to show y'all taylor's window treatment.  i showed y'all the inspiration:

and here it is in her room.....i think it turned out really cute!  now if i can just get the rest of her room together that would be great!!

i hope y'all have a wonderful mother's day!!  mom- thanks so much for being my best friend!  i love you :)  see y'all next week!