I am of my world and my world is of me.

Image by spanaut via FlickrI am sitting here on a sunny afternoon, and the warm air is entering behind me. I can hear a radio coming from my neighbour's kitchen. The odd door opens and closes. above the humdrum of the city that surrounds me, I can hear birds and gentle sounds all around me.

This is the background to my existence. I am amidst the world, not alone. The world was there before me and will continue after me. In another sense, I have always been and will always be a part of this world. That I have experienced life and that that life will pass, is but a miracle of the world I inhabit, and of the consciousness of it which i was born and educated into by others like me.

This is far from trivial. This forms the essence of who I am, and the perception I have been granted by the miracle of nature. These others who have come before me and will follow me share a similarity which i recognize. This recognition is so potent that I look and see it in other objects around me, and see those objects in myself and the other bodies who I recognize as equals.

Sometimes I try to mimic the bird calls i hear when i am out and about. A dog barks at me and I growl back in a distinctive more or less dog-like manner. I can snort like a pig, neigh like a horse, indeed, some have said that at times I am as stubborn as a mule. The human animal is remarkable precisely because its body can metamorphisize into that of others at will.

Other objects outside of me can also be rendered mirror-like into the terms of my own perception of myself and those I identify with as equals. The way the dog looks sad when I am about to go out, the cat that panics when i am preparing to move house, the horse that is startled by a small piece of paper floating through its field of vision. I interpret the responses of these other mammals from the perspective of a human: I have an empathy with them because I can see that they too are similar though different to me. They too feed there children milk, have emotions and behaviours that I can recognize as coming from a similar source and myself, and that they too are similarly a part of my family, if only distant cousins.

Image by ecstaticist via FlickrThis relationship with mammals is much more obvious than the way I see beyond into the world as a whole. The relationship between me and my fellow embodied humans and the environment we share, is an extension of this primary recognition of myself in others, namely my family, friends and the wider human society and even spreading beyond that as described above.I see the world itself as an embodied being. there I have a tendency to see it as a whole; a world or universe beyond my immediate environment.

This process is reversible in that I am the world and the world is me. While I am stardust the world is also there for me. There are constellations in the sky that I recognize as part of my tribe. Like the expansive ocean, it draws me too it, while its vastness fills me with awe and dread. There is a mystery to its very existence precisely because my own existence is tenuous. It draws me to toward it, to understand it and the patterning that seems to emanate from it. Even though I can recognize in the universe a beingness, it is a beingness which gave birth to me and my kind. More than that even, to all like me, both animate and inanimate. It's power transcends me and my kind, and yet, gives me power to act upon it.

Is it any wonder than that throughout the ages, people have personified this relationship with our creator the universe as a human-like being, which created us in his or her image? Perhaps such a metaphor is a truly honest and open expression of who we are. Sure, this personified God is created by us, but nevertheless exists as an infinite environment that we witness when we look at the stars at night, when we see the sun being drawn across the skies during the day, when I sit here typing against the background provided for it, and which my mind can imagine thanks to it, not because of it.

The universe doesn't exist for me to understand and exploit it, but it understands me and exploits me in its development. I am of it and it is not of me. The universe is my God and it is the creator of me. I can c
                         Image via Wikipediareate because of this God, and any god I create is less than. The universe, after all, my be just one of a myriad of other infinite beings. Even a glimpse of this imaginary scenario makes my head whirl. But there can only be one creator of me, and that creator is the totality of all possible universes including my own.

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Brown Paper Bags, Refugees and Going Gaga: Fear and Loathing Down Under.

Image via Wikipedia

I just walked home from the station through the cold of night. A typical Melbourne drizzle was trying to after years of drought. I wasn't expecting to come home to find my blog page searchable on the web, but it was.

What a nice feeling to come into the warm and dry my hair.

Not so pleasant for an asylum seeker incarcerated in one of Australia's concentration camps, I suspect. Or for a suppliant at one of our over crowded and understaffed mental health wards. There is no asylum or anyone anymore, unless of course it is somebody carrying brown paper bags of cash.

Yes, yes, we all know how right Foucault was about Panopticons, of the need to shut down those awful places where people who were mentally troubled could be given asylum from the harshness and calamities of life in a modern society. It used to be mandatory to give someone a bed if they fronted claiming to be feeling suicidal or homicidal. Not anymore. Now they can just  be turned away and go home and hang themselves in the peace of their family home. What 

Foucault failed to appreciate was how the Neo-conservatives would co-opt his well-meaning critique and use this to shut down these state funded sanitariums and transfer the money to building Pantechnicons to house anyone seeking asylum and drive them to the point of insanity.

The Panopticon is no longer a physical construction but an idea which monopolizes the discourse within the lifeworld. The Neo-cons, now having colonized all the major political parties, continue this imperialism of ideas, this hegemony, into the lifeworld itself through the media of language.  Habermas was always closer to the mark than the short lived Foucault, who like a pop star gained notoriety with his untimely death.

The only response that these neo-conservative friends of low taxation and the rugged individualism of late-capitalism is to go around with their brown paper bags to any private jail builder they can find, to any tin pot government who will listen to the lovely rustle that these bags are said to make, and to dog whistle to the hounds of outer-suburbia, people who have fallen through the rather large cracks of a chronically underfunded and inequitable education system, who bark back the very words uttered by their political masters.

The political system is in danger of losing its  legitimacy as this conspiracy between left and right ignores the people at every level of decision making, preferring, instead of a deliberative democracy with robust forums, focus groups who are stacked with people who nobody knows, from suburbs that few have heard of, with people whop are possibly amongst the less informed in the society.

I am in danger of going Gaga. I'm sure I'm not alone. The ridiculousness of the political system risks turning sublime in a way not witnessed since the stupidity of 1930s Europe prior to the outbreak of WWI (part 2) or the European Civil War as it is perhaps more accurately called.

Meanwhile, boats are still arriving, camps are still being built, and more and more people go untreated in the community with a myriad of untreated mental illnesses. Of course, the illicit drug trade  which loves the brown paper bag and no doubt ensure that one or two make their way into the hands of politicians, police and the judiciary, has a significant input into creating these mental instabilities, as too do alcohol and tobacco, the two biggest paper bag industries of them all.

Gusmao and Ramos-Horta, the prime minister and president of East Timor respectively. have until now resisted the Brown Paper Bag diplomacy of the new Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard. How long will this last for, I wonder, with Oil money now being waved around right under their noses? Meanwhile, the concentration camps are overflowing and more must be built, no doubt complete with military bases to defend the outer suburbs from invasion.

Oh, what a lovely life. Shop till you drop! Don't worry, the economy is going gangbusters, you can borrow on your over-inflated mortgage. And who cares about asylum anyhow.   Stuff you Jack, I'm all right. They can all go and hang themselves for all I care.

No doubt, some of them will.

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What is post (post) modernism?

It's been a beautiful Melbourne day. Grey skies accompanied by a fine drizzle with an occasional gentle gust of wind. Just magic. So, why considering all this, am I feeling not quite up to my usual self? Perhaps, there is not an answer to the question why? Maybe, I just need to accept that I feel as grey as the weather and the intermittent showers and breezes. The answer might only in fact be superstitious, but then an irrational answer will often suffice in the absence of a better explanation.

I plan to meet up with my peers tomorrow. We are the core group of post (post) modernists. The group consists of a semi-retired Professor from Malta, an Italian PhD student and a picaro. I'm not telling which one I am, but I the term came to both the picaro and the Professor last week. An example of Jungian synchronicity. Over a coffee or two no doubt,  I expect that post (post) modernism will again be discussed. The Professor will say that 'two negatives make a positive' and the picaro will say that we are past what in fact never existed in the first place. All of us are excited to finally find our way past this aberration of Western thought, which was only ever really a watered down version of modernism proper in the first place: (post) modernism.

Even the post-modernists always accepted the fraudulent nature of their claims. 'Post-modernism is really only exists as a subset of modernism and doesn't exist separately to it' there foremost proponents  such as Lyotard seem to argue. This was all bad enough until butterflies  in Upper Mongolia started causing bushfires in the outer suburban Sydney, and dolphins actually attained an intelligence level greater than the average human: Whales became sacrosanct. The truth was, as Holmes told Watson, that fact is stranger than fiction; Crows were found to be in the same group of intelligence as these sea-going mammals, and whats more, they didn't even need to get their feathers wet to be so.

Ah, yes! But there is no truth, they would no doubt argue. Well, that's a truth statement if I've ever heard one. That sounds like a universal claim to an absolute truth to me at least. Post (post) modernism would rather, from my point of view at least, maintain that there may very well be absolute truths, but that we as humans can not know those truths directly due to the very limitations of our mode of perception and the limitations of language, our sole method of expressing any truth with any foundational accuracy. Art, of course, with its recourse to more subliminal meaning, may express these truths, but again, only in an interpretive and not a direct way.

From one cold winter's morning to another, this idea develops with a mixture of jollity and perseverance. That is the way of the post (post) modernist intellectual.  Over a coffee or two in a cafe in Heidelberg, far from Paris' left bank <> ,  these ideas develop one day at a time into questioning the very bases of modern thought. Language does not permit an escape from the modern, and no amount of grammatical tricks will allow one to free oneself from the bondage of this idea. Just writing the present in the past tense is nothing but a cheap trick advocated by some postmodernists.

So, what is Post (post) modernism.  It is pure and simply an acceptance that human thought consists of rational and irrational components. That science and religion are equivalents just as are order and chaos. It rejects the notion that one is better than the other, accepting Maurice Merleau-Ponty's assertion that human consciousness is composed of perceptible and non-perceptible occurrences, The Visible and the Invisible being the seminal work in this area. It's basic tenet was written and described by Albert Einstein over a century ago, that matter and light are equivalents.

Furthermore, it is a proposed that human perception of the physical world is essentially dualistic, and while the physical world may or may not be so formed, it remains integral to our understanding of the world that we accept these opposing forces as a unity, St Augustine of Hippo was the first scholar of note to point this out nearly 2000 years ago.

The world at first appears Newtonian and well ordered. The deeper we look , however, he more this order seems to break up into disorder or chaos. If we go deeper still, chaos seems to give way to the extremely ordered world of the atom only to again resume its chaotic appearance at the sub-atomic level. The point being, we can never really know, because once past a certain point we are no longer directly perceiving phenomena but rely on intermediary devices.It becomes simply a matter of whatever works.

In any case, why should we expect the world to be one or the other? Since ancient times, order and chaos have been constant themes delimiting the way we see the world. Certainty and mystery  are intertwined and inseparable, and there is no escaping that. Absolute truths may or may not exist, but our limited positioning and the fact that we are confined to a body ensures that there can be no reliable omniscience in our knowledge. It can only be developed through discursive activity. There may  or may not be an omniscient view point but that view point is beyond the human realm.

The rain is pouring now. Who would have thought. The wind has ceased. Tomorrow is another day, and I expect it to arrive just the same as it did today.  The sun will inscribe its path across the sky, and the stars will go into hiding again. The wind and rain will do what they do. It will be cold because it's winter. What exactly will happen in detail is another point entirely. And of course, I am relying on my memory of the past to predict what tomorrow's present will be. That is a process that has worked for me and other bodies like me in the past, and I expect that it will work just as reliably in the morning. Who knows, I may very well be wrong.

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