The law of circumlocution

To regulate a state is the same Dickens suggests as to immobilize it.

How can it be different

IfI want to ensure that everyone is dong exactly what I want them to be, and when I want it, I have to interfere, I have to change, I have the ensure. Regulation or policing or monitoring is the scourge of the system. Or better it changes where the power of the system lies. it does not lies in the ability to do, so much as the ability to interfere. The problem then being that there is no logic or rhyme or reason to this interference. :Once one starts how would one very really stop?

The power of the interference is untrammled, in that it are the front line of converting humanity into regulation. What they regulate then goes. One might regulate the regulators to infinity (and so catch those regulation in other powers) but still not break the power of this initial throw. That is the initial demand that the world comforms to the rule book

To circumlocute is then to demand this of the world. A world stops being allowed to be what it would otherwise be, it becomes rather the necessarily products of forms. However of course at this point the regulators hit that problem that to force the world into the world of rules forces the rules to change in use (an never have the effect one wanted) as much as it changes the world. one is then faced with a hybrid of rules in the world. The only response of course of the good regulators is to invent new rules, new hybrid, and then new rues.

The entire enterprise therefore collapses into a sequence of hybrids and rues to regulate them.

It collapses into an utter bureaucracy beyond any possibility or sense.

It becomes utterly circumlocuted.

The real problem is then that the world inhabit the circumlocution of it. It becomes what it is thought then warping their nature as they try to control it. A zombie life form neither alive nor dead, living or regulation, one destined to bleed from the page into the world, and yet never loose the stigma of the back and white of the books pages....

so what is a machine?

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more ways of killing the cat

The point Marx says of this all is that the worker is killed twice. That is their sprit is broken in very different ways by capitalism.

The first stage is he world of manufactoring. Manufactoring industry break up an entire task into a series of mindless occupation. the occupation, may or may not be skilled. and are carried out be separate individuals. Humanity becomes then a part , a cog in a living machine, with nothing beyond that mechanic life. humanity is the cripples into place. That is, their education, and the life squeezes them into that cogs they are now going to be. They become useful in being a cripple, in being fit only for a single simple task.

what is more the logic of any captalisms system is that it genuinely squeezes he folk within it into place. they must be trained and paid for it. The system therefore is one of rigid heirarchy and protection. Each role is specially designed and protected. little deaths of little humanity pockmark the system therefore.

This is the the dystopia we all know so well, in the the Moon of First men in the Moon or the world of Ghormenghast: The world of the mechanic human. A World capitalism revists all the time: that is any time when there exists production processes where not any one could do it. The minute this happens little bubbles of pride and skill enter into a certain element of the system. Those 'skilled' workers become protective and proud of the limited disposition or skill. they start to protect their position, they start to despize others, then start to give themselves airs. Marx's point is that these airs and graces are distinctly defined and bound. They individual only have a pride in being a part of a system; that pride might be great, but the cost of crippling a mind so that it is only defined within a single series of tasks is greater yet. The richness of life is lost in the self importance of an occupation.

Be this as it may, this position of skilled worker within a system, trained p to a single task and protective of it (and only valued from it, though the job) clearly remains a deep element within capitalism.

Marx sees his great discovery as the alternative pole in capitalism. A machine utterly de skills. Anyone can do anything. This is the great maxim of the machine We are all theater directors now...The old worlds of skill are swept aside then in technological know how. The effect then on a humanity used to the protection and bonding on skill is then unmeasurable, Marx suggests.

In the immediate circumstance that effect is horrific. individual lives do not matter, and capitalism becomes then utterly blind to them. The world of capitalism plugs its workers into a machines, burns up their lives and then takes up another worker and does the same. If their is not need to train a work force, and no need to organize it beyond what a whip or starvation can and will do, then running the system is easy, and profits and lives are cheap.

And yet beyond this tyranny is that elusive of men, those who live in the communist sate. After all the old order of minds that were locked into certain jobs is now gone, but not utterly destroyed Humanity will still value itself in occupations, and yet that occupation is the factory could be doing anything or being anything. Pulling levers, pressing buttons, gives a flexible power. Moreover the rules that separate one from ones fellows are clearly broken down. One is no longer an occupier of a certain profession. , on is merely one pari of hands and eyes in a long and complex process: Ones action here and now echo across the that entire process, mingle with others, become one with others. To be a single human then is eroded in the machanic process. one eddies across others and through differing apparatus of the world.

One perhaps becomes communists.

well maybe.

What is clear is where Max is correct in his prediction, and where there is a hitch.

The first two of these two arguments are predictive. Humanity is oddly skilled and oddly values in a system of skilled workers in the workshop. Humanity is likewise utterly devalued in a mass production process. The trouble comes that the way government fight the latter is to impose the former (that is to create workers rights and treat all jobs as if they were skilled). No socalist government has then really been able to wrap their heads around what the final stage, what the path to communisms might look like. We simply do not know what kinds of minds are being born for there. They might well be everywhere, and yet us brutal socalists of the now might suppress them. Who knows?

The problem is then what does the socialisms consciousness within the machine, the sharing of that social labour look like to us? A problem that not so easy to solve (and one that Marxists have singluar cocked up for the last 150 years or so)

In this marx is right...

This last point of Marx of course has a great del of power to it. The self as in the pompous hegelian this is ME might be highly problematic. It is that bit of a me that drives bourgeois society on, and makes it function as it does. It make it demanding.

However the second rubric of the self, which ted it to the gentle empiricist pitching what they are in the world, opens one up to the idea that ones identity does always bleed across the world. Modesty demands as much. That is it demands not that I am, but rather that what I am mves and shifts across a world. What I then feel about myself and my actions, about what i is to have an effect, and what it is to be effected in todays world, is rather different from what it was before. My actions have different effects, my power toreach others is different, my realtion with any sort of external world is also very very diffeent.

l of which goes with out saying: Well after Marx said it we all took it as read.

That this in a sense is the problem with the history of a future. he novels written their are frustrating in that one reads them, one takes on what they are saying on board, if becomes a ready platitude and one forgets its fiery origins. the world is full of Marxists who know it not...

But here Max licks his lips.He knows he always aims to say something richer in his works. That is to have odd treasures hidden within the long and complex prose that most simply will never read. ha way one reward those who actually study with other truths than the one that is readily accepted, other insists into the re-vamping o the self within the machine.

However it needs to be said that although Dickens accept the logic of the empirical changing human and the machine, he doubts where any series of changes will ever be enough to mitigate that bourgeois self-man and self conciousness: If a revolution works peoples must act to make it happen, and what will they think about those actions?

Will they be merely bound by determinism?

Bound by pride? Or bound by some unspecified feeling of the future - but where then Dickens asks can one get this feeling? where does it come from?

How acan ti be born?

Marx has an answer...

Marx no doubt thinks this worry about identity is rather bourgeois. It is precisely the kind of problem he thinks will vanish in his state.

And yet this is a big claim.

Marx knows that Dickens is the great chronicler of what it is to be human for his time.

That is what it is to live in the nineteenth century, and have nineteenth century thoughts.

Dickens is therefore right for his time.

that goes without saying.

And yet it is not what the revolution calls for.

That revolution needs is not the novels of the present, but rather the books of the future.

And it is the job of Marx's peculiar brand of economy, storytelling and philosophy that is right them

This job is utterly proactive. One does not get the future one chooses without stocking the past with the right types of critiques: The right movements and thoughts.

These thoughts then need to be blend across an emerging thinking process, or a series of definition about what it is to be human.

Once this movement has occurred then and only them is it time to talk about the kind of Self conscious act that a revolution might take.

One needs then to write the novels of the future, make the myths for revolution - make revolution and its protagonists truly revolutionary. Before ever one can even think on acting.

Hence he might say Das Captail, and the Eighteenth Brumair: What are these but novels for the future?

the two prisoners

Dickens has a second problem with the Marxian appeal to self consciouseness:

There are two inhabitance of that jail o the self.

One the one hand in that jail in Marseilles there is the individual who self consciously effects his self within others, He therefore operates by a series of effects upon other which then force them or better oblige them to behave in a certain way (The Blandios moustache). He then interprets this behaviour as somehow to his credit or as a testiment that the world shoud always conform to his hopes and expectations of it.

To be self conscious was then the have an effect, and a powerful one on others and the revel in that effect on sees then in their reaction not what they themselves thought, but only your impression upon them. On sees then only ones power and how it was effected. One does not actually care what they were at all. A self is the effected in forcing the reaction of other.

That is as I make a world in my mind to be in. I must se that world reflected in the action of others and through them, If it is i become egostical and unpleasent: To be a powerful self as such, to feel is then not to care for a consequence.

On the other hand their is the dreamy man of perception. He knows that the world beyond him is open and varied He has been therefore here or there or anywhere. He wanders. The is sustained then in his wondering by the fact that at any one time he can create a little mirror to himself in a fantasy. He can eat the his own words, or but if meat out of a hunk of bread. His self consciousness is therefore his power of dreaming. tht s of hpo ghtta the orl might be otherwise.

His self is then that self affection, that touching ourselves or dreaming for ourselves we all do, when the world is complex, in the hope that he dreams might become reality. His perception or himself in this loop in this self as affected in a hoop, is but the dream of a dream. it function not to make him more active but rather to open him up to others. A dream carried out is a dream alone, which then makes him responsive to others and look s their action and their behaviour for elements that might echo that dream: his dreams his doing it to himself therefore opens him to the wills and minds of others.

Here then dickens says are two very different forms of self consciousness: To be conscious of ones action and of one dreams are really not the same thing To merely then hope for that moment of Hegelian revelation when history becomes aware of itself, is to beg the question, which awareness is this? A question which cannot be answered, and yet which will have very great relevence to any outcome or any hope for the future...

The boundless

Dickens and Marx essentially play the same game.

Both want to understand how something utterly boundless tumbles into the world. Industrialization does something weird to nature. Nature stops being something that ought to be understood either in terms of a divinity or a fixed series of cycles, and becomes rather a filed of power, which industrialization gradually inhabits. The power of nature fractured or plunders, becomes the power of a humanity who appears able to rewrite some of the rules of life (epidemics become less serious, power becomes a resource to be held on tap etc.)

A world of ever expanding and complexifying network of powers and machines, replaces an only order., and both Marx and Dickens realize that such a network must fundamentally alter how humans understand their place in the world.

How could it not? Suddenly new powers become open, and new problem and opportunites arise: What it is to hold down an identity or to relate to ones fellows suddenly became richer and more difficult. Population rocket, and mix, new lines of communication are created, new ways one can influence ons fellow, and new ways to force them to do things.

The perpetual tumble of natures power into the laps of a population forces the existing powers of that population not examine themselves. They cannot imply assume that they are the ones, that they are the power in the land. other powers,better to wield technologies could always be quietly being born. Power structure becomes then very precarious. The threat is not rebellion and revolt the taking charge of the state by specific elites) but rather full scale revolution ( the sudden and violent change in the nature of the society).

But this change is going to be so complete. But is likely that the revolutionaries will not understand their power. They will rather be simply doing what they always had done, or hoping to or trying to, as the rules slipped and changed, and revolutionised that 'always'. The agent of change are never necessarily meaning to be that change.

Or at least they are nt Max says until socialisms becomes self confident of of its power. I is this self consciosunes on the behalf of technology to be the power, the change, and humanity to understand itself as the wielder of this technology that compose or form the nature of the revolution. That is communisms happens and history ends when humanity self-consciously assume its power to own its own technology.

But here Dickens eye brows meet. There is a problem and he knows it. Marx is asking far too much of self consciousness or reason. Technologies work by eroding what humans thought they could do. It warps then habits or makes then function otherwise. This power is one of genuine revolution: that is it runs against how hans tend to understand themselves. Its power is that surprise. If one merely jumps the of the habit of self conscious desire for change, then one has changed in a sense nothing. This will be a habit. one will look to change as the answer, and forget that what actually matters is he fact that changes are eroding what was already there. They work in not being self-conscious as such. That is in warping reality. to make then the reality to be warped is therefore a solution.

Not only does it mistake the nature of the change (which needs to warp) but also the relationship between humanity, with their little lives and neat order, and the nature that is bought into those wold. This nature will not simply cease being nature, in that it will always be a challenge. , and in a sense this is its revolution and well as its definition. That is the Marx's strong argument that nature becomes a field to inhabit needs to keep hold of the fact that nature in doing so remains as it was, the indexes of possibility and changes beyond humanity. one might not contain that beyond in divinity or in cycles and yet that does not stop the beyond being real and vivid. It matters.

Natures power therefore remains in the sense that it is the step beyond self consciousness, and to be human. The oddities of modernity is that this other is perpetually being invited into society. The problem is how does one relate to this often rather unwelcome guest. ...

Max says change everything to become its friend: Dickens that such a change is not possible or desirable as some guests are too grumpy to be placated, and one can never simply alter ones self: one needs rather to cope and live with the gripe and snipe of the guest.

History at leas t now has suggested that this second approach, might be the only one possible....