I can't get no ( satisfaction - from exchange-value)

I have not written for my blog for quite a while. I do not know if I should really do my own psychoanalytical observations here. I have received demands for and against. I will favour at the moment the voices in favor, as I have not yet taken any rendez-vous with a professional and I could make you, my invisible audience, my symbolic master. So now I do know if I should dwell a bit into personal explanations.

It has all to do with the self, the perception of the self, and the expectations of the self. I have recently moved back to Brussels, my hometown and it takes some time to adapt. I am indeed confront with the self-perceived self of my past, the self I have constructed for me in U.K. And this new breed of self that has not entirely found itself yet. I have though high demands and expectations, I know that I had the luck to grow up in an environment that brought me informations and a way to value informations and I have also the brain capacities to process with ease these informations, though I do have to work still on my memory.

The fact that I find myself very intelligent, and that people find it hard to disagree on that statement but agree that it is not a mark of humility to state it, I find I have to learn a lot and do a lot with this intelligence and when I do not, I beat myself to the point that I sulk into doubt. It takes me time to get back unto my feet and tell myself that I need to start again. This is though how real strength is defined though: the ability to go back to a fight. So here I am back, to my world of reflection, with a self perceived as being worthy to lay down thoughts, no expectation to be incredibly smart and innovative ( not to put to much pressure at the beginning) but with the goal of someday looking back and the roads I took with slight pride.

So now that my time with my lacanian master that you are is up, I will start to write about a very simple class on a Marxist analysis of commodities. It is mostly for myself that I will write about it and I have not yet come to a conclusion, as usual with my personal work. The first exercise will be to outline the difference between two useful concepts: the use-value and the exchange-value. The use-value is the value of a commodity as it is. It is a very hard thing to actually conceive as it is linked to the concept of necessities. Indeed, something can be truly useful only if it is necessary. And a necessity is linked to either a mean to survive, either a mean to develop oneself as its own.

It is easy to value the use of food, and then again, exotic food has more exchange-value than use-value. It is more difficult to value a pen or a computer, as someone might find himself working to accomplish himself when others might buy these tools just to show they can exchange a possession for social recognition – social recognition is something I will later on define when I will define the different forms of capital ( and not stop at Marx definition of capital : Any commodity which helps the accumulation of exchange-valued commodities). So two forms of use-value: the material form, as something that we need so our body survives and the spiritual form - nothing essentially religious- but just specie-centered idea that the human only has a spirit – as something that we need so we can do something of our life as we have decided to independently do.

Now exchange-value is the thing of everyday now. It is the discussions around the price of things, as we exchange money for different objects. Money has become the universal standard to establish exchange-value. We exchange anything ( almost) for money and the price actually does not reflect on anything in particular. What we pay at a restaurant for example, is only defined as what the boss of the restaurant think is the normal price for what he serves. It has nothing to do with the pay of the cook, of the waiters and waitresses, of the food or the price of the designer he chose for his menu. It is something he thinks is the price that people will pay. This price will be accepted only by a social standard established by different networks of people. Let's say the boss of our restaurant is a friend of two newspapers editors, then his price will be high, as the media can easily make a price ( an exchange-value) socially acceptable or not, no matter the fact that the value of a dinner is relative to the taste of the person going to the restaurant plus the added use-value commodities used ( mainly the food and the labour).

Now we are constantly reminded that the exchange-value is the everyday lie that we accept. No matter that televisions cost far more in a store that the added cost of their productions ( and that the value added is done through off-shore front companies so less redistribution for profit is done), we are aware of it and yet ready to buy new ones before the old ones are really broken – Brave New World accepted ideology as well – reparation is something of the past, replacement is the standard of living now. What Marx has noted though is that the exchange-value of a commodity will always rises faster than the exchange-value of labour, meaning that no matter that a company makes profits, the wage of the common worker will never rise, except to the need of necessities ( the risk of a lower production due to excessive frustration). Satisfaction of the exchange-value of labour will be also discussed later on, I want to first talk about the standard of exchange-value.

Currencies are the universal standards of exchange-value and it seems a fair one. Of course, since the 20th century, the value of currencies are themselves only exchange-values, as the price of foreign goods depends on the exchange-value of a currency to another. Meaning that somehow, a currency will have a better value or a worst value depending on a socially acceptable consensus of the people buying these currencies. The value of a currency is therefore not defined by the general population, there is nothing democratic about it – except maybe in China -, but by the people who own a high social capital.

So here I have to explain the notion of social capital. Social capital I will define as the trust accepted in a source for its information. The trust in itself is the capital. Meaning that someone with high social capital will be able to decide more or less the exchange-value of any commodity, as it is the information generated. Somehow, no surprise here, but people with high economic (material) capital have had a high social capital for a long time. That's why two of the big three rating agencies belong to the “ public”, meaning stocks can be bought on the stock exchange so you can have a more-or-less important say depending on how much money you put in, and that the last one “Finch”, belongs to one of the most connected man of France. These three make the weather in finance, even when they are proven wrong.

Now, about satisfaction, it is something personal to the extent that there is an emancipation for the power of structure around. The structures of the system are a necessary tool, in the sense that no one can promote anarchy as it does not bring forward a liberation from the necessities of life. Then again, we are not satisfied by the necessities only in life. We do need to do something out of our life to bring on an existential satisfaction. We can accept on one hand the animalistic satisfaction of procreation, in the sense that we live and do what we do so we can live on through our offspring and so one until the end of the earth, or we can do something for which we are proud to have bring something forward to humanity and all the other species that will recognize the contribution. What is not a necessity is do something we do not like for a defined amount of time just because we cannot choose something else ( or for a lesser time).

Satisfaction is relative to emancipation as I said, because it is a standard of living we accept for ourselves, and this standard is accepted because we are told is acceptable, until a certain point. This is why information is a useful tool for the emancipation for humanity, though still a difficult one to use, in the sense that the medium of information is still important to make an effect. We are satisfied by how things goes because we do not want to know more, and generally we decide to ignore what we know because how we came to learn was not enough to chose to accept it. What we have learned can possibly rise our level of dissatisfaction and because we do not do anything about, it is favorable to ignore the information.

I think I have now lost my self a bit in the meanders of political economy. Anyway, the prices do not reflect offer and demand, but by the complex relationship ordered around by exchange-values.
I will write more next week, as I have decided to take back on the goal to write an article a week as a way to prove and improve myself. That's all folks !  

Chess of life

I have the luck of having been introduced to chess quite early in my childhood and taken a liking to it. Of course, in the digital age, it is a game that tends to disappear and it is not one of the games that spurs creativity as a recent academical article as noted. On the other hand, chess has many advantages for self-development, and it is also a tool to a certain understanding of the world, in an ideal-type of way.

The concept of ideal-type is actually a good one to start up with the subject of chess, as no ideal-type exists in reality. The problem is that every words represent an ideal-type. For example, “ chair” represents something in our mind, but we never see it in the world exactly as we see it in our mind, so we create a group of things we observed that can belong to that group. The problem now is that such groups make sense only in relations to others as the limit of a group can exist only if they are other things that have borders as well.

So if concepts that make sense of the world is stuck in borders of this world, we find our thoughts on a checkerboard. BOOM ! Here I start with my chess concept ( it is not mine, it is actually more Wittgenstein's one, I have just adapted it). So we are stuck with generalisations in our mind of everything that surrounds us. Each generalizations have its limits, and our mind can only collect a limited amount of rules-concepts-generalizations-heuristics-devices. 8 by 8 cases, separated by black and white so we know every time what are the limits more or less. So we have a structure of understand that is a checkerboard. What you can see though is that a checkerboard will never move. It is 8 by 8, it is black and white. Point. It won't transform. It is a tabula rasa of understanding that is slightly useless as though we have understood more or less the limits of our understanding, no one can say that they have not changed there minds and that the relations between concepts have not changed.

So we need pieces. The pieces are the words we are going to define, the cases we are going to give depth to so we have a dynamical understanding of the world. Pieces are shit complicated to understand as they represent something for their modus operandi but their m.o. are useless if they would have been alone on a checkerboard. Indeed, a rook can move everywhere, and then would represent everything, if he had nothing to stop him. Something that represents everything, represents nothing. So again, a piece functions is only defined in relation to others. A bishop can move far and well, compared to a King, but it is kinda stuck, compared to a rook.

So we have dynamical concepts moving around in relations to others, but also in relations to where they start from. And here, we observe a hierarchy of concepts, where we have loads of little understandings, which can be sacrifice because they can be replaced easily by others. Who cares for the word chair, as I have the verb seating, I have stools, I have sofas and armchairs. On the other hand, I do care for future, past or present, because they are important for me to know where ( when actually) I am. And what about Me. Could Me be a king, that I might lose on a checkerboard? Anyway, we have a hierarchy of pieces, that is assigned rather by their uniqueness than by their function.

I would like to make a parenthesis here concerning pawns. A pawn can go a very long way and be transformed into a key piece for someones understanding of the world. Let's say use the color blue, which is not that important ( it didn't really exist in ancient greek, and there are a multiplicity of blues in Inuit ). It is a color. The thing though is that in relation with, let's say phenomenology or linguistic or history of art, we can start detail the color in all its specificities in a culture at a given time and how it might represent part of the view of the world this culture has. Bam ! The blue was a pawn of daily language that became a Queen to understanding the world. The pawn had to travel from its original position, to the furthest point it could go, and by always sustaining its relations to other points without falling out because its position was to be taken by a stronger piece.

What is weird though is that the responsibility of a concept and the power of its modus operandi are different as well. Indeed, let's look at the fundamental concept for a game of thoughts: the King. It's function is to go slowly where it will find a safe roof, which is not really impressive, and yet it is the most important piece. As such, it is only because we have a game that we have King, and it is the importance we put on this singular concept. If we take the Queen, we can make it as relevant we want to the other pieces as we wish. The Queen is the other singular piece of the game and it can do pretty much what we want her to do. Would we wish though to let her stay at home to care for the King, she wouldn't be that important anymore. She has a defined function, but her importance depends only in the relation she has been put with the others.

So what is left within a game are the rules of the games. Indeed, the modus operandi and the rules are slightly different. First of all, the rules are set in the times of the games. For example, first moves can be different from other moves, and the clear example is that a pawn can move two steps if it is its first move. It is afterwards restricted. Another example is the King and the move called castling, where he moves two steps to hide behind a rook. He can't do so if he moved previously, or the rook moved previously, or if he is moving through a mate. Such moves are therefore constricted by the rhythm of the game. Rules are also quite tricky as they are sometimes unknown by most of the players. For example, en passant is a rule that not everybody knows, where a pawn can take a side pawn that moved its initial two steps. So the more rules a player knows, the better off he is.

So now we have introduced the player. Rules apply to him. Would he touch a piece, he has to move that piece and would he stop touching that piece, he can't change his mind to move that piece until it is his turn again. The player is constricted by the rules but like a piece can move within the rules limited by him. The main rule being the goal: mating the king ( not as finding him a suitable queen, but attacking him and living him no escape). The player assign the importance he wants to each of the pieces to defeat his opponent. That's where the opponent enters our realm of understanding. The game is Manichean, it is one against the other. To play well, the importance is not only to put your piece in a favorable place in relation to the other pieces ( and even the pieces of his own colors which assure his defense but also his moves to come) but to anticipate the other players move.

That's where it becomes tricky. Concept fights one another, over an important idea. We are almost in a Hegelian fight between a thesis and an antithesis. We are actually exactly there. As personalities that compose the self are nothing more than define in opposition with other personalities. We anticipate the other players move and most of the time, you anticipate the other player's best possible move. This is where the game gets tricky, because the best move can be set three turns afterwards by a succession of apparently irrelevant moves. We have to put our shoes in the other player's mind and assuming that he is slightly more stupid than we are ( would we think he'd be smarter, he would anticipate our anticipation and counter the our own counter-move). Would he be more stupid though, we can find ourselves at lost, since we foresaw wrong and would change tactic in mid-way leaving maybe an unexpected opening. The argumentation never goes as expected.

That's why we can fight ourselves at chess ( and the here-presented symbolic chess). Indeed, you just need to turn the checkerboard to see from the opposite perspective what has been going one and even better, you know what is anticipated from the opposition and go on this eternal fight of counter-anticipation. Internal discussion over what is right or wrong, over we should follow passion or reason, are set within a checkerboard, where there is a king one side and the other, and there are different arguments for one and the other, which are set within the limit of our mind and sometimes, unexpectedly, a pawn through experience would become more important that when it started and would reverse maybe the game we thought was set for ourselves.

Of course, we can cheat. To cheat we just have to be sure the opposition hasn't seen what we did or ignore the rules we have set ourselves. A game of chest, professionally, is noted down, so there is always a repercussion to inconsistencies of a game.

There are so many things to say about the games of chess set in our lives. We can observe that it is a relation game, and it is not necessarily because you have a lot of concepts on your side that you will win. It can for example mean that you did stay on a good defensive the whole game, but you went nowhere to attack the other, and worse, you stuck yourself and an opponent horse came through to stalemate you where you haven't left place to escape. Too many words can block winning an argument because of confusion when the other can move its concept freely to counter or attack.

The infinite variations of games means it is impossible to know how a game will end. It does depend on the players level of the game, but even then, every body forget pieces or make mistakes. It is of course impossible to apply a chess game to reality, but somehow, all of reality is applicable to a chess game. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose but we always lose a little, rarely it is a stalemate. And there is always another game coming.

Applied Spider-Man Theory

'With power comes responsibility' is Spiderman motto and a well observed rule that we can observe sometimes in our society throughout history. There are maybe though exceptions and to find these exceptions, I would like to explore to what extent is that motto true. If it was entirely true, would the Green Goblin really go on rampages like he does ? Well, that might not be the best of examples, since he is held responsible for his actions by Spiderman, and punish, maybe not accordingly in a fair way ( a lot of times Spider-man would be too nice to the different people who impersonated the Green Goblin, from my point of view).

Anyway, first we have to start with a definition of power, and I will use classic sociological theories to do so. First of all, any power is characterized by an inter-dependent relationship. You do need two people for one to exert power over another one and there must be a need for these two to be in such a relation. For example, it could be two lovers, in which case they are dependent on each other for their feelings to be kept alive.

First question that arises then is that most relations are asymmetrical at a given time, meaning that someone will always make a decision that the other(s) will have to follow. There is nowadays a view that power is unfair, but it is bound to exist in the sense that if two persons try to exert power on the other, they would nullify each others decision and nothing would move. That's why that in the example of two lovers, the decisions would have to be balanced, either in time or in the theme of what has to be decided.

Now that we know that every inter-dependent relations will have a power relation, we have to observe in which way the power goes. One has power over another one, if he controls some uncertainty to come. I hold a gun to your face, I'm dependent on you because I want your wallet, you are dependent of me because I'm holding some uncertainty about your future ( life or death). It does not have to be a threat but the uncertainty control can be a reward. I ask you to clean my shoes and you'll get a big fat check, I get to decide the quality of the cleaning.

The third element of power we need to find, if we want to see the verstehen, it is the will to make someone do something. It does not have to be conscious, but it has to be accepted. Back to lovers: I want new shoes and someone in love with me offers them to me. I can accept them and offer back gratitude or more or I can refuse them and reject the person courting me. Have I exerted power in both cases ? In the first one, I would say that I did, as I have accepted that I hold a way to make someone do something for me, in the other one, even though I made someone do something I have reacted in such a way that it will not ( hopefully) happen again. In the second case, I have not exerted power, but the image the other had of me did and as such, he forced himself.

Now, what are the different types of power we can observe in society?

The first one is the power of Coalition. Meaning that many can form peer pressure, or threats to make someone do something. Unions are a good example, though it has to be noticed that they are trying to counter another form of power. They do though exert a form of pressure to act in a certain way in an inter-dependent relationship by holding cards over the future.

The second one is Hierarchical Authority. I have a boss, I have to obey him. We both work for the same institution, but this institution has given this guy the power to tell me what I have to do otherwise he will ask that some sanctions will be applied to me. He represents the power of the institution into which I am a part of, and as such, it is not directly the person who has power.

The third one is the power of the person holding an Information. In social sciences, informations ( and it is slightly similar in physics) can represent anything. So someone holding money for example, holds information that will make anyone do something. A better example might be, in theory, the University professor ( in a perfect world) who can ask his audience to be quiet, otherwise he won't share what he knows.

The fourth one is the Mastery of a process. Imagine that a prisoner is given the right to serve whoever he wants in a prison, well, people will have, to some extent, obey him otherwise they won't be sure what they will be served. He is not an authority, as he was not given power, but is one in practice.

The fifth one is the power of the Expert. Everybody knows this power: the doctor who can prescribe you a good drug or tell you everything is alright and you should go to work. The lawyer who tells you you'd better settle or loose in court, even though in your mind you are totally right. The architect who tells you that another floor will really not fit the general symmetry of the building.

The sixth one is the power of the Network. It is a vicious power that everybody to some extent uses. You know a guy who knows a guy so you can do something that someone else, who knows no one, can't do. The person with the network, does not have a power of coalition, because it is not a fixed group, he does not have to be an expert or an authority, but he is just a pal with the person who has some power.

Finally, there is the Manipulation. It is all the form of power that are based on simple manipulation of the pathos of the other. The other one is in love with you, well you don't have to go and get your coffee anymore. The other one is stupid and get enraged easily, well you have heard that this guy you hate told something against him in his back and he better get his ass slapped. Someone you never met does not know you're bluffing when you say your his boss's son, he will also get your coffee.

Now, all these powers have limits and consequences. To have limits and consequences, the power relation has to be observed, felt and understood. If I went to see ' Eat, pray, love' 5 times with my girlfriend because I'm telling myself I love that film, the power my girlfriend has over me is probably limitless. If I suddenly become a pure existentialist in front of man holding a gun in front of my face and decide I might as well die here, he can shoot, but he won't have made me handed in my wallet.

The thing is that sometimes, we see the power and dislike it, but without observing what gives this power its limits. The limits of power are a lot of times set by the responsibility this power has in an inter-dependent relationship. For example, a King of France has an almost absolute power over his kingdom. He has so only though as long as he can hold his kingdom together. Now if he starts going crazy on spending and taxation and people do not recognize their country anymore, they will find a way to fight this power. The opposite is kind of true, someone who has a lot of power, but use it in such a way that everybody in the relationship is happy, will hold to this power very long. If women are portrayed as the weaker gender, men will have to be polite and courteous because they are the protectors. If now women want to be seen as equal, men do not want to hold the responsibility anymore.

With the loss of power therefore might also come the loss of responsibility, which might be the vicious side of this story. Imagine the owner of a company. He gets to decide who works where and what salary they'll have, and if he abuses of that power, like the king, he would be in trouble. But now, a CEO, who does not own his company, is not responsible for anything, as he would point at the shareholders and say that they hold control over future uncertainties. These shareholders though, will point at the market and consumers to say that they hold the control over the future uncertainties of the company. Everybody has some power, meaning that everybody is responsible, meaning that nobody is.

We can find this disappearance of power and responsibilities in a lot of strata of society I think. Certainly in politics, in economy, in class inequalities. The best way to avoid the costs of power is obviously the tendency for synopticon. The synopticon is the process of everybody looking at one person. This person will look as holding a lot of power, and yet it is only because everybody looks at him that he will look as being responsible. A National football trainer would look responsible for his team, but it is just because he is the one put up front by the team and the owners of the club. Mubarak is also good example of someone who looks like he is in power of a country and held responsible for the inequalities in this country, but he was just a front figure for a whole clique.

People are afraid to look powerful, because they do not like the cost of power, the responsibilities. They prefer to put up masks. If you want to make something positive for the world though, you do need to have power over what goes wrong. I don't know on this one if I really prefer Spider-man over Superman.

Lure an Instant Blast. Past-Present-Future

Well, it is almost confirmed: neutrinos go faster than light. Which raises the question of what else could go faster than light? Well, if a fundamental particle goes faster than light, can we still believe that the rest of the world follows the speed limit? There are no sanctions against going faster than light, otherwise Switzerland ( and I love this scenario) would have been warped in a black-hole and never heard off again.

The recent study that is left apart from the mainstream media is a research done at Cornell University where a psychologist managed to prove that some people are precognitive, when compared to the average. Which means that they could guess the event coming, even if that event was random and not capable of being calculated. I know, it sounds crazy, but how come it sounds more crazy than neutrinos going faster than light? Isn't it in the end maybe the same paradigm forbidding anything to go faster than light that forbids us to think that the future exists before we make it ?
So here is the theme of this article: the paradigms of time.

It will of course be composed in three, because so far we are only capable of doing such a taxonomy: past, present and future. What it might be is also an evolution in humanities evolution, in a very weird way and I hope that I am wrong, because Copernican revolutions are starting to be annoying, in the sense that we always restart from the start all our thoughts and at the same time feel the need to work at filtering the ideas from the past that should not be taken for granted.

I'm not sure how to structure this article, as dividing in it three and it looks like I'm repeating point, but if I work thematically, it will be worst as I would lose myself or repeat arguments, the perfect ingredient for boredom ( if you aren't already). Just to throw out my thesis before everything, and try not to be too linear, I will try to defend the idea that we have not concentrated enough on the future, though it is, in the public, only part of our society since the end of the nineteenth century ( thank you sci-fi), it will become ever more important.

How and why and what the fuck are three good questions to this erratic claim. What I want to observe though is that in antiquity and in our history, until I don't know when, it is actually relative to societies and individuals, we have concentrated ourselves on the past as a way to see the world. It is of course logical, in the sense that we can more easily generalize and make sense of the world if we have examples we can build on. It is though more than the logic. The past has been a way to legitimize our present and our future.

We were anchored in rituals and mythologies that would tell us 'eternal' truth that guided us. It is why these societies had a slightly more deterministic outlook that our present. It wasn't scientific determinism, in the sense that everything was the consequence of some cause indirectly related to the Big Bang, but that everything was already written or the choice of some unearthly human-looking god figure. This god(s) figure would also be related to the human in power, through some kind of story or ceremonial selection. And the gods always came from a long time before humanity and only our memory served us. Knowledge, then represented the accumulation of stories and rules.

Then came the present in our mind, and we killed the gods, and we invented free-will. Free-will is the lie of the present. When the past uses memory, we uses perception to make sense. We look left and right and study how the world goes through repeating experiments and transforming them into formulas. No matter we know that the formula can always be discussed. Which is the bases for contemporary knowledge: discussing what has been accumulated. The present is the most important time at present ( haha), in the sense that we tend to see history as something that glue us, but we are not ready to build a better future because present problems seem more important. The present is also seen as somehow accidental, so legitimacy doesn't come from the past, but from the fact that things are the way they are.

And the future will come some day as the main perspective. Of course, I will not be there to see a society of individuals future-oriented I think. Hopefully though, I will help towards that like many others have in the past. How would that look though. Well first of all, we would be more morally responsible, as a better future for each of us is the only reasonable answer to the ultimate question of ' why be good ?'. More than that, the future is based on imagination, which might be the faculty the makes us different from animals. It is also the faculty that made our reality nowadays. For all the Ian M. Banks readers out there, if they do read scientific publication, they would understand that a lot of the new physics theories or engineering marvels come out of his books, just like Isaac Asimov invented ethical robotic and the concept of Earth as a self-regulated-system otherwise known as Gaia.

Overall, it is difficult to understand that we need to forget our memory, we need to not trust what we see, but only imagine what is to come to jump unto the next realm of understanding. I know that it is still a limited way to absolutely understanding the world, but it is always within limits that we have understood the world, and every time the limits have grown. Which might also be the center of limited-rationality, that we act as rationally as we think we can, but only because we do not understand our limits. Would we consider a future, where our limits have augmented, we already are opening our frame of decision and extending our rationality.

So now, I will try this difficult task of considering futures, even near futures and then think about how the present can lead to the different scenarios. The past and the present will then be mixed into one since they are the same from a future perspective. The question about the present will only be how it will be judged, though that's actually a trick of our present-oriented mind, since a future-oriented mind won't have to judge the past. All in all a difficult question, where I've lost myself in this free writing exercise which I feel will lead to somewhere.

Socio Scooby Logy Doo

So I am writing an article on monsters and it might look childish but science is in the end just fiction confronted with reality and there are probably some realities in our cultural monsters. Of course, the fascination for monsters is not shared by everybody, the fact that I have grown in geeky culture through and through is either the chicken or the egg of this fascination. Now I will present here some observation about the contemporary monsters we encounter in our comics, films and books. While reading this, let's keep in mind that monsters have existed since the dawn of humanity and are as important memes as deities and some deities happen to be monsters. I will though speak only of contemporary monsters and I will not work on their evolutions as it would have to follow the evolution of society. ( Yey, I have here the idea for another article to come ).

Let's start with the basic for any analysis: a simple definition and a simple taxonomy ( an Aristotelian organization) of monsters. The definition will be 'a supernatural threat to humanity'. And the subgroups of monsters are the big monsters, the hunter monsters and the swarm monsters. As you can see, it is pretty basic ( basic reflexion has time and time proven to be really infinite and might actually be an oxymoron). Now we have to see what I mean by these subgroups.

Well the big monsters are most probably the oldest monsters humanity had. They are the giants and the titans, the cyclopes and the leviathan, the king kong and the godzilla. They are the top of the food chain that everybody expects but never meet. They have also been embodied in science with mega-volcanos, intergalactic crashes, surprising tsunamis and lunatic suns. The newest kind of big monster I can think of is the alien spaceship. The aliens in themselves can embody different kind of monsters, but the spaceship usually represents what is too big to be controlled. The fear behind monsters is probably the one of finding something we could never have control on. We have to thank though hollywoodian mythology which always finds a way to destroy the threat and makes us forget that destruction is not a synonym for control.

Now a monster that I think has appeared only at the end of the 19^th century ( though this has to be verified) is the swarm monster. The best example is of course the zombie. They have the power to increase exponentially and though they are small and weak, get us because of their number. I said that the first swarm I can think of in our culture are the morlocks in the H.G. Wells ' The Time Machine'. They represent the mass of workers having evolved in subhumans and are the enemy of the small elitist communities of Eloi. There is so this elitist representation of the proletarians that we can find in the end in zombie movies as well. Of course, swarms are also represented by science nowadays though diseases and infections, but the fear I think is the lost of power of the few who think themselves smarter against the mass of slow, small minded beings.

Finally, I add the hunters. The hunters are actually like human beings but generally feed on humans. The differences are only the differences we want to see. As such, it works like racism does, in the sense that we generalize an evil on a specie more or less similar to ours and the legitimization for hunting them down is the prejudice, without considering their weaknesses ( except as a mean to eradicate them). What is funny is that at the end of the 20^th and the beginning of the 21^st century, we have seen an interesting evolution that tries to show an open-minded humanity which seeks to understand how these hunters are unique individuals that might deserve life. I am of course speaking of this attitude towards humanizing vampires, werewolves, witches and the such to involve them in romances with humans. We are now trying to glamorize their weaknesses and show their powers as tools given to the chosen few to protect humanity ( from itself usually). We could ask ourselves if in our culture, there is not a slow glorification in the media for the sociopath as a rational egoist, which happened to be the perfect human in a neoliberalist system.

There is a fourth group which I do not want to consider at this time: the ghosts. They represent too many things at the same time ( gods, hunters, different teleologies on life,...).

Ok, so we have different monsters, and we have humanity. What humanity represents most of the time is a specie-centered group which loses any ideal of being one with an ecosystem. Of course, modernity has disconnected us ( except through different resistance group which tried to present a positive organic perspective of the world) from this reality for the illusion of control. Monsters though show that we cannot control everything. As I have pointed out, big monsters cannot be controlled like sheeps and swarms are by definition overwhelming. Here, the interesting part about control and the environment is that when we have increased our capacity to travel, we have had to write down laws, as norms are not shared for every communities. Laws represents how everybody should act within a given-space. Hunters represents what laws cannot stop. Hunters are far more problematic for humanity because they also represent the excuse for humanity to be unlawful. Of course, in the middle-age, we managed to legally condemned witched through godly trials but we have stopped believing ourselves and now we have no laws to hunt hunters. We do now give them the rights we give ourselves or the one we give animals.

In a lot of cases with monsters, we become so obsessed with the survival of our species that we do not even consider other animals we used to live with. All the stories turn around the humans and how they confront the new threat. Of course, animal centered stories are not that common. It does show that monsters reinstate the dichotomy human vs. nature. They somehow legitimize our superiority because we can talk about our fear of them and find ourselves as victims ( what christian societies love to see themselves as). It is a human vs. nature where the sign-system disappears. With monsters, who cares that Britney Spears was a best-selling artist. The past and the future disappears, so knowledge of the signs created by humanity get in the background, excepted possibly for the hunters where their weaknesses are often hidden in some old books.

It is a paradoxical situation, to see that monsters represent the end of modernity and also the end of traditions. Traditions have never disappeared, but most of the time just transformed themselves. When I use the word tradition, I am speaking of ritualized social interactions. This is especially true with swarms. They oblige the humans to be constantly on the move to find an island of peace. This constant traveling, continuous escape, might be actually the ideal-type of true modernity, where no one is bound in a space or a time but has to always reflect. It does of course challenge our ethics, as knowing whether protecting the weak is something the group has to do, as it might put in danger everybody.

The final question when doing a laying down the problematics of a sociology of monsters is the question of the Nation-State. I will repeat the Weberian definition of the nation-state as the entity that has the legitimized monopoly of violence. Of course, this notion is anchored in the Hobbes' prince to whom we give all our force so this prince ( State) can protect us. The Nation-State though has rarely got the power to save us from monsters. It does echo the previous paragraph that states that modernity becomes ambiguous with swarm monsters, but the nation-state problematic appears with all the monsters. If the State cannot protect us, it is also too big to unite us all, it is too slow to pass useful laws and it is why militia appears and it is not even some form of idealized anarchism that takes place. The question of reinstating a State at the end of stories is not even often raised ( the exception I have in mind is Independence day where running the State becomes a hereditary profession).

So, I will stop here with just to never diminish the potential of fiction to question our society and I will dwell into more reflective entertainment now for our next discussion.

Distancing Through Clustering Theory

Well, I took a holiday from this job I gave myself to explore personally innovative ideas. I took a holiday from that means that I have arrived in this bleak town of Brussels, started fights with different administrations and administrative comities and read nothing particularly interesting. My life is the life of everybody, minus this blog and some other projects with other people less self-disciplined than I am.

It is though funny that discipline is not ingrained in me and in most people I know. The few people I know who have a need to be active and productive are people who grew up with limited television time, and my little sister. The rest of the population is easily satisfy by a screen and talk all day long about their failed dreams of being some day famous. I think that there might be some conclusion there about the influence of the television over our lives, but I am not sure.

I am an adept of cinema and find a lot of pleasure of watching most films and I have found what makes an annoying film for me: predictability. This is why I have found in these last weeks lots of pleasure watching Film Socialism of Godard, Habemus Papam by Nanni Moretti, Outrage by Takeshi Kitano and The Housemaid by Im Sang-Soo were all great surprises for me. Of course, those are all well known controversial directors and it is just abiding by the cliché of the pseudo-intellectual for me to advise them to you.

Anyway, the idea that came up to me recently is the antagonism of the global village theory. As you probably know, most people would profess that the world is getting smaller as the phone connections, the internet, the television and the transports are getting faster. Indeed, an earthquake taking place in Kathmandu in a morning will be known to have happen in the afternoon in the rest of the world. But as much as information travels that fast, I think that we might actually see the growth of something quite opposite to a global village. I do not at this time have a name for it, but by the end of this article, I will have an epiphany.

Now why would I say something so counter-intuitive ? Well, it is just that distance is not calculated by speed. Speed is calculated by distance and time. Physical distance is, as far as we know, a component of our universe that does not change on Earth. Now time is something that is accelerating, as it is relative to our lives and we find the need to do everything quicker. Polls show that we get frustrated waiting for our computer to turn on. If time is accelerating, it means that what we are used to take one day, would actually in our mind take longer even if it takes one day. For example, we do get worried when we come back from holiday and our postcards have not arrived yet, when the post has never changed its habits we do find it slower and slower.

Of course, when we talk about the global village, we do not talk about physical distance, but relative distance is something quite different. Relative distance has different definitions, but I will explain it as the space created by every individuals at the moment. Which means that if you live in a city, you are closer to a lot of individuals, but you will feel more alienated from your neighbors as you do not have the same grounds for social interactions, compared to village folks who do know how to interact and what to interact about.

So as it seems that information makes it way quickly from one side of the earth to the other, you have to observe to what extent people are open to those informations. Here is another component of my theory: information saturation. Information is now distributed by individuals and institutions. More and more information is leaking out, meaning that everyday, every body has to increase its filter to see what they are willing to accept or not. As the filter gets stronger and stronger ( filtering out more and more informations) it means that the information collected will be more and more self-centered. Let's take as an example Facebook. The more friends you have, the less you hear about them all.

What we will see in the future is an increasing price for diminishing physical distance as well, which is exemplified by the rising cost of capital city's real estate price. I do not know if the price of prostitutes has risen as well, but I would not be astonished by it. We are becoming more and more individualists when we can become more connected and this is because we have not reach the balance between the outside and the inside, between in-group and out-group between aliens and friends. Uncertainty brings us always back to positions we know and we are now becoming conservatively hermits. I still haven't found the expression for the theoretical pendant to the global village. I really don't know, maybe the saturated agglomeration.

Short History of Nothing

 History really starts with language and painting. Language provides the common ground for compromises and communication. Sharing was already done materially, but it could not be organized in time. The point of painting is that it provides lasting symbolism. With lasting symbolism set within a ground of compromises we can see slowly the 'real' disappearing. The real is here defined as the organic existence of one human, his tribe and nature. It is the present, but language has introduced the possibilities, hence the future, and painting has introduced the past. At this point did the present and everything that goes with it started it slow death. Here in time, at the end of prehistory, we can find the beginning of a super-structure, the ideologies of humanity, set in rituals explained by language and pictorial representation of the ideas.

 The second changing process of humanity has been the settlement. Settlement was consequentially the creation of an order different than our primate order, though we did not see the eradication of primate power-relations, we saw growing a different orders in parallel defined by possession, not affected by the physical appearance of the person. Agrarian modes of production meant that there was no need anymore, needs used to be the foundation for the daily problematic of survival. It was not an entirely prosper society as nature would always have its way to annoy humanity, but it was not either a period where someone would tell someone else to do their own job. Everybody had something to do.

  In parallel with the development of agrarian society still existed hunters-gatherers societies that would help the legitimization of stronger and bigger countries. The Chinese empire could not exist if it was not for the Mongolian invasions. Same goes for the Greeks cities and the roman empire. No empire existed without its counter nomads society, liberty grew in parallel with necessity. With the prosperity of agrarian societies, humanity also saw its rate of survival rising, meaning a rise in population, then a human surplus that meant that all societies would find the need to expand.

 Consequentially, surplus of production appeared. Surplus of production is an unintended consequence of our life-style that we have not really managed to control. We produce more than what we need, meaning a few things. First of all, it legitimizes not working for some. Secondly, it legitimizes exchange and gives a new form of power to the one who owes more of what is less, or harder to produce. Necessity of the product disappeared behind the rarity of the product.

  As any form of power needs language to save itself as well as material power, super-structure really developed with production surplus. The symbolic legitimization too different forms through time and the most famous one is probably religion. The questions of religious rules and how it legitimizes power are different from region to region, but some are possible to be generalized. Religion created a notion of group beyond the one of the family. Something important as in-group/out-group generalizations would expand in their complexity in time. It could be said that you could include someone in your group or not through language but important language did spread at some point of the other. Religion was rarely something taken for the sake of communication. Religion grew in most civilizations as a leverage to power. It was a branch of power that would try to control abuses of power, when it was not abusing of its power itself.

Religion has managed also to legitimize the present, through its interpretations on institutional scales. Religious messages were not always messages of conservation of the present order, but most of the time were. It might have been the revolution of Christianity if it would not have been institutionalize by Constantin. Of course, there is no difference between philosophies and religions except the question of institutionalization and the degree of adoption by populations.

Largely adopted philosophies or religion were also the way to show dissent to the order of power at a given time. They were always based on a shared belief asked to be the new traditions, though most of the time not yet transformed into cyclic rituals. Rituals are the transformation of the belief into mechanic repetition as a reminder of the foundation of the believes.

Believes, as zeitgeist, are understood in history through art and changes in art forms. The obvious example of an early change in art form demonstrating a change in belief is the art under Akhenaten. As much as art is nowadays considered independent from any religion, belief or philosophies, it is just the proof of the diversity of believes in the masses legitimizing the incapacity for change. As such, we can observe that as much as social movements in the twentieth century appeared to be important and changed slightly society, they never had the expected impact, if any impact at all. The civil right movement was just the process of introducing already established social norms from the north of the United States to the south, the sixties did not create the expected society.

Print created the change in taste and the spread of different philosophies. Taste is an important factor as it is linked to art's form. Reading is though an activity that requires times, and writing even more so. It is the only place where the worlds of possibilities fight each other to represents the truths and future truths of the world. ( nothing is false as we understand it, but only not true in our world at a given time). It has though been hard to understand the effect of reading unto our world, and fortunately, the Lumière Brothers and Edison appeared and got championed to develop their inventions as they lead to television, cinema and radio: ways to distract like reading can but without training our capacity for attention ( hence making our brain more flexible to new ideas).

As taste got widespread, ideas conflicted, we managed to spread ideas further and came our capacity to keep big accounts, create big economies and industrialization made its way. The most important factor for industrialization was the development of cities. Cities represented the destruction of local cultures, myths, stories and musics. It imposed a top down approached to art ( and art is the form of the ideology of a moment) so was destroyed anything local that was brought and only the owner of shops who had history within the town got to make the rules of the city. ( the first cities in the renaissance and middle-age where the first places that fought off feudalism through signed charters).

They were the places where only shops existed and consumption as a sign of a well-lived life became the way to live for everybody. It was not directly a need for industrialization, it was a consequence of the expansions of cities. New traditions were consumption and as such taste became the tool of domination. Attention, private taste was different from exposed taste. As such, the high-class maintained tastes for old music when any new money tried to impose its style which was since always changed. Taste became an ephemeral tool of domination as if you 

dress like yesterday, or tomorrow for that matter, you still do not dress right.

Of course, upcoming bourgeoisies tend to always think that slow change is for the best and always believe that they are good to everybody. This has been the form

of 'liberalism' since 18^th century. It maintains though the need for conformity, and this can be seen through the use of badly drawn humor making fun of anything out of fashion. This desperate need for conformity actually reflects every position of insecurity, as you can see in every countries in a conflict people tend to be more conservative you can see that most of the newly bourgeois get scared of their conception of the ridicule.

 As taste has its constant war, humour starts to be a shared space. This is why we can see that the most successful forum on the internet is 4chan, as it is the place where everybody exchanges their funny pictures. No content is needed, except a demand for freedom to make fun of everything without any necessity. It is of course the strange foundation for a new belief, something for the future where knowledge economy ( the jokingly given name to our 'service-based economy' - as service use to be something helpful and given, and the only knowledge needed is to know how to present oneself). This subject requires quite an extended skill in social forecasting....