Metamodernism

[Speakpigeon]

Hm... It seems I was wrong. You seem to really do believe in the pre-19'th century historiography.

???

Fancy that. I don't. Yeah, I believe history works like economy. If something can be invented... it will... by somebody. If something is invented... somebody will use it. Pandemonium ensues. rinse. Repeat.

You're not even making sense.

That's Marxist history in a nutshell.

Is it?

Anyhow, I provided a quote of Marx expressing his view on the relation between men and context. He thought that people made their own history:

own view, expressed in his book on the 18th of Brumaire, was that "people make their own history, but they do not make it however they want, not under self-selected circumstances, but out of the actual given and transmitted situation".

And I followed up expressing my agreement with his view and how it obviously contradicted yours:

So sure, the context is very important but only in that it restricts the range of options people can choose from but it's ridiculous to claim like you did that "anybody in Napoleons situation and context would probably have turned out similar and made similar choices".

I think this is really all I needed to say and the fact that I have to repeat myself here shows I won't need to say anything else.
EB

 

[DrZoidberg]

Anyhow, I provided a quote of Marx expressing his view on the relation between men and context. He thought that people made their own history:

own view, expressed in his book on the 18th of Brumaire, was that "people make their own history, but they do not make it however they want, not under self-selected circumstances, but out of the actual given and transmitted situation".

And I followed up expressing my agreement with his view and how it obviously contradicted yours:

I think I misunderstood something you said. No, the quote does not contradict anything I said, or tried to say.

But you did say that you didn't think that history works like the economy. Which suggests to me that you don't agree with the Brumaire quote. So I'm quite confused as to what you mean.

So sure, the context is very important but only in that it restricts the range of options people can choose from but it's ridiculous to claim like you did that "anybody in Napoleons situation and context would probably have turned out similar and made similar choices".

I think this is really all I needed to say and the fact that I have to repeat myself here shows I won't need to say anything else.
EB

If there's a hole in the market somebody is going to fill it. The question is just who. A Hitler character could have been French or English, or Russian.... or even American. The entire western world was gliding towards extreme nationalism, utopianism and anti-semitism. It was going to get increasingly worse everywhere, until somebody took that rhetoric too far. Likewise, progress in media technology and propaganda was going to be exploited by some politician first somewhere. An American Hitler wouldn't have been identical to the actual Hitler. And the post war world of that world would look quite different. But it probably wouldn't be that different.

The Russian revolution had far gone and deep impacts on the Russian society and economy. But the Soviet union collapsed. Now the economy of Russia looks like the economy of any western country. Why? Because it's smarter. It's just the evolution of ideas. The smartest idea will win in the end, regardless of the flag or name of the winner

That's why history works like the economy. All in accordance to your quote.

This is why Marx didn't propagate for revolution or wanting to start a revolution. He didn't try to organise the industrial workers militarily. He didn't think he had to. He thought that when enough workers saw the truth no soldiers would protect the privileges of the elites. It would just spontaneously fall apart. His focus was on how to organise world communism after that situation. He believed that workers would be organised after the revolution. But there's different ways of getting organised, along similar lines.

I think you've confused that with the idea that the future lies open to be organised in any way. If you have? I'm not sure we disagree at all?

 

[Speakpigeon]

Anyhow, I provided a quote of Marx expressing his view on the relation between men and context. He thought that people made their own history:


And I followed up expressing my agreement with his view and how it obviously contradicted yours:

I think I misunderstood something you said. No, the quote does not contradict anything I said, or tried to say.

But you did say that you didn't think that history works like the economy. Which suggests to me that you don't agree with the Brumaire quote. So I'm quite confused as to what you mean.

So sure, the context is very important but only in that it restricts the range of options people can choose from but it's ridiculous to claim like you did that "anybody in Napoleons situation and context would probably have turned out similar and made similar choices".

I think this is really all I needed to say and the fact that I have to repeat myself here shows I won't need to say anything else.
EB

If there's a hole in the market somebody is going to fill it. The question is just who. A Hitler character could have been French or English, or Russian.... or even American. The entire western world was gliding towards extreme nationalism, utopianism and anti-semitism. It was going to get increasingly worse everywhere, until somebody took that rhetoric too far. Likewise, progress in media technology and propaganda was going to be exploited by some politician first somewhere. An American Hitler wouldn't have been identical to the actual Hitler. And the post war world of that world would look quite different. But it probably wouldn't be that different.

The Russian revolution had far gone and deep impacts on the Russian society and economy. But the Soviet union collapsed. Now the economy of Russia looks like the economy of any western country. Why? Because it's smarter. It's just the evolution of ideas. The smartest idea will win in the end, regardless of the flag or name of the winner

That's why history works like the economy. All in accordance to your quote.

This is why Marx didn't propagate for revolution or wanting to start a revolution. He didn't try to organise the industrial workers militarily. He didn't think he had to. He thought that when enough workers saw the truth no soldiers would protect the privileges of the elites. It would just spontaneously fall apart. His focus was on how to organise world communism after that situation. He believed that workers would be organised after the revolution. But there's different ways of getting organised, along similar lines.

I think you've confused that with the idea that the future lies open to be organised in any way. If you have? I'm not sure we disagree at all?

All this seems irrelevant to me, except perhaps your idea that history works like the economy, which doesn't make sense to me.

It may be that we just disagree as to what history is. I see history as the aggregate of past events involving humans. As such it can't be said to "work like the economy". Sure, the economy has an impact on history and history has an impact on the economy, but it would be quite extraordinary to find that they work the same. You might just as well claim that the way nature works is like the economy.

Sure, we can always find similarities and analogies between even completely foreign matters but I believe history is more complicated and also more complex than the economy. History is affected mostly by the existence and activity of a centralised and hierarchical power structure that seek to control and organise as many people as possible. The main production of this power structure is immaterial, cannot be stored, and is not subject to speculation. You could call it 'organisation' or 'politics', it doesn't really matter which. It's fundamentally confrontational, government v. the people and everyone for himself. The economy on the contrary is based on the cooperative activities of many different organisational instances within societies, with many different types of operational structures, ranging from the big multinational companies and governments to the lone individuals, all seeking to exchange goods, some material, some immaterial. Yet, even immaterial goods get to have a storable value through money and debt. This difference is really as extreme as you can get. History gets to be more complicated and complex because its actors all want different things, for example some want power while others seek protection. Often enough, they don't even know what it is they really want, whereas the working principle of the economy is clear to all because there's only one, which is to make a living out of exchanging goods cooperatively with other people and organisations.

Anyway I won't have the time to elaborate but it's probably enough. I'm sure you'll disagree, which explain our exchange so far.
EB

 

[DrZoidberg]

All this seems irrelevant to me, except perhaps your idea that history works like the economy, which doesn't make sense to me.

It may be that we just disagree as to what history is. I see history as the aggregate of past events involving humans. As such it can't be said to "work like the economy". Sure, the economy has an impact on history and history has an impact on the economy, but it would be quite extraordinary to find that they work the same. You might just as well claim that the way nature works is like the economy.

Sure, we can always find similarities and analogies between even completely foreign matters but I believe history is more complicated and also more complex than the economy. History is affected mostly by the existence and activity of a centralised and hierarchical power structure that seek to control and organise as many people as possible. The main production of this power structure is immaterial, cannot be stored, and is not subject to speculation. You could call it 'organisation' or 'politics', it doesn't really matter which. It's fundamentally confrontational, government v. the people and everyone for himself. The economy on the contrary is based on the cooperative activities of many different organisational instances within societies, with many different types of operational structures, ranging from the big multinational companies and governments to the lone individuals, all seeking to exchange goods, some material, some immaterial. Yet, even immaterial goods get to have a storable value through money and debt. This difference is really as extreme as you can get. History gets to be more complicated and complex because its actors all want different things, for example some want power while others seek protection. Often enough, they don't even know what it is they really want, whereas the working principle of the economy is clear to all because there's only one, which is to make a living out of exchanging goods cooperatively with other people and organisations.

Anyway I won't have the time to elaborate but it's probably enough. I'm sure you'll disagree, which explain our exchange so far.
EB

I'm getting more and more confused. Governments and companies works basically the same. Successful companies are also a "centralised and have hierarchical power structure" internally. So is governments. They exist in a larger context where they "compete". But the complete competition of countries and markets is actually not true. They always cooperate way more than the compete. All according to Adam Smith's savvy observation that players in the markets primary concern is to avoid competition. This zero sum game view of international politics and trade is the brain failure of the fascist/nazi movement. Similarly this is how nature works. Ecology is basically a description of how an entire ecosystem works in symbiosis.

"works like the economy" is just a description of what works in a complex system with ego driven players. That's nature as well. Today we use terms from evolutionary biology to describe the economy, as well as the mechanisms. So I'm increasingly at a loss to what you mean.

Sure, the actions of personalities decide whether or not we'll talk Xhosa or English in England. But the end result will probably look, more or less the same. Bad ideas die because they are bad. With bad ideas I mean ways to organise society that is not robust.

The way nature works is that once every 70 000 years or so a massive meteorite crashes down and kills 25 - 75 % of all life on Earth. The less robust species die. In the economy every 8 years or so we have a recession. Every 50 years or so we have a war. Weak companies and weak governments fall apart. Non-robust governments may take the place of a collapsed non-robust government. Just like weeds may take the place of a patch of grass newly weeded. But weeds are weak. In the long run they will be out-competed by more robust species.

All the actors don't want different things. All humans are remarkably similar. Due to the fact that we were almost pushed to extinction not that long ago. We have very similar needs.



All strong revolutionaries can achieve is dictating the last names of our elites and the names on statues in our capitals. Life in that society will be, pretty much, the same. In the long run. I've worked in plenty of large corporations tasked with improving their processes. They're more similar than different.

 

[Speakpigeon]

It seems you're just confusing "history" and "politics".

History is just things that happens. Failure or success is irrelevant because once it happened it won't unhappen due to failure. Fascism happened and that's recorded as a historical event. You can start to talk about "failure" once you consider Fascism as a political movement seeking power not just now but for a thousand years or more and then, yes, Fascism failed to have staying power. Failure is a political concept, not a historical concept. There are no historical concepts beyond the notions of events, time, happening etc. I think you may have internalised Marx's way of thinking about history. He was very good at reconceiving ideas but it doesn't mean he was right.

Anyway, it was just a matter of vocabulary, we were not talking about the same thing.

Now, I would agree that you can draw parallels between the way the economy and politics work. Yet, I don't think it's anything more than a loose similarity. These things are ultimately physical and have therefore to obey physical constraints, which, ultimately explains the similarity, just as there are similarities between the face of a human being and the face of a fish, or the face of an ant, a cricket, a spider, an elephant. They're all different but they all have to comply with similar constrains, the need to see, eat, etc. Yet, it's only similarities since it's also clear that you have very many organisms that don't have anything that looks in any way like the face of a human being.

So, basically, when you said history works like the economy, all you have really said is that politics and the economy have to comply with the laws of nature.

Sure, I can agree with that.
EB

 

[Malintent]

So after reading through all of this I still have no idea what is so good about sliced bread.

 

[ronburgundy]

It also fits nicely with Deleuze's idea of human identity.

We don't have a true self. We have several true selves. We also aren't masters of our destiny. We're shaped by our community(-ies) and context.

He argues against the individual, but instead for the dividual. We're all a bit schizophrenic. It's not that we have a true self that behaves differently depending on who we're around. But we really are different people. Which should be obvious, since it's only a persons actions that are a true gauge as to who that person is. We're all incredibly deluded regarding what we'd do given various hypothetical extreme scenarios. The truth is that we have no idea how we'd behave for situations we're not well prepared.

The dichotomy isn't the individual vs the collective. There are no individuals. Instead we have a fluid assortment of various collectives we pop in and out of. Depending on which collective we exist in at each given moment we will behave differently, and therefore be different people.

As usual, most Pomo, when stripped of the obscurantist, polysyllabic argot, consists of sophomoric truisms.

Since this goes against the core of liberalism (as well as American conservatism, which technically is liberal) which is what defines the entire western world, I'd argue it's not a truism. I think it's a dramatic shift of focus.

I don't think it does go against individual persons (and their rights) as a political/moral construct. Individual persons can have multiple "selves", because the person is a stable physical entity whose individual brain is the basis of all those selves. That physical brain is the sole physical place in the Universe that experienced those variant selves and can store memories of those experiences. Further, the variant selves are not at all distinct from each other. Their overlap and shared use of mental systems is far greater than their differences. And while the self changes with context, most of the differences between one person and the next tend to stay the same. IOW, while I might become a more aggressive self when in a threatening context, so do most people, thus my relative degree of aggression compared to others is rather stable. Across most contexts, I will tend to maintain my relative standing on any given trait compared to others in those contexts. Thus, there stable truths about me that are not captured by and transcend any contextual self, and those are a product of the body and brain that define my personhood that remain far more the same than changed from moment to moment.

BTW, I would argue that all of what I said above is rather consistent with good ol fashioned modernism as properly understood.
Modernism does not contend that we have arrived at perfect knowledge. Rather, just the opposite, that we never will and thus we should be always striving to evolve our ideas, morals, political systems, etc.

Also, it is science that has produced the understanding of the role of the physical brain situated in a particular body as the foundation of all aspects of a person's selves, which are what vary with the contextual factors that are processed by that brain. I don't really understand what "scientism" is besides a strawman used by pomos (most of whom grossly misrepresent Kuhn, btw).
The only destructive or "wrong" type of scientism I have encountered is when people form an overly simplistic notion of what science is and equate it to the exact methods employed in natural sciences rather than to the more general form of reasoning that justify those exact methods within the context of the questions being asked. IOW, people who reject in principle that social sciences can take a scientific approach. What I mostly see is pomos using "scientism" as an excuse to blindly dismiss scientific approaches to social science issues so they can hold onto or advance intellectually unsupportable nonsense.