On the Bus © 2008

Chapter One:

CURRENTLY BEING UPDATED

Worky Worky Job Shit

‘The desire of one man to live on the fruits of another’s labour is the original sin of the world.’

— James Bronterre O’Brien, Poor Man’s Guardian, October 1834.

Avoid, if you can, the idiocy of hypural life:

Dip in brainpower may follow drop in real power

May 10, 2008 Special to World Science

Mod­ern, open and dem­o­crat­ic so­ci­eties are sup­posed to re­ward brains and hard work with suc­cess, at least some­what fair­ly.

But what if fail­ure degrades brain­pow­er, cre­at­ing a vi­cious loop in which suc­cess slips in­ex­orably fur­ther away for an un­lucky group that started out worse off?

Pow­er­less peo­ple of­ten achieve less be­cause lack of pow­er it­self erodes cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing, re­search­ers say.

A group of re­search­ers claims this may be ex­actly what hap­pens, so rosy views on the ben­e­fits of ad­vanced so­ci­eties must be re­ap­praised as sim­plis­tic.

“Pow­er­less peo­ple of­ten achieve less be­cause lack­ing pow­er it­self fun­da­men­tally al­ters cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing,” wrote the sci­en­tists in a pa­per de­scrib­ing their re­search find­ings.

The results high­light the im­por­tance of “empow­ering” em­ploy­ees to stim­u­late bet­ter work, es­pe­cially in in­dus­tries where er­rors can be fa­tal, they added. The find­ings, by Pam­e­la Smith of Rad­boud Uni­ver­s­ity in The Neth­er­lands and three col­leagues, ap­pear in the May is­sue of the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence.

The re­search­ers con­ducted three ex­pe­ri­ments with be­tween 77 and 102 Dutch uni­ver­s­ity stu­dents. They were put in dif­fer­ent sce­nar­i­os de­signed to make them feel ei­ther dom­i­nant or sub­or­di­nate. This mes­sage of “rank” was con­veyed ei­ther through sub­tle cues or di­rect state­ments, such as tell­ing par­ti­ci­pants that they would be paired with a part­ner who would di­rect and eval­u­ate their work.

The par­ti­ci­pants were then sub­jected to puz­zles or oth­er think­ing tests. The “pow­erless” play­ers con­sist­ently dis­played im­pair­ments in key think­ing pro­cess­es such as plan­ning, up­dat­ing a men­tal pic­ture and in­hibit­ing ir­rel­e­vant in­forma­t­ion, they wrote.

The re­search­ers ar­gued that this dip in over­all “ex­ec­u­tive func­tion” among low-sta­tus peo­ple re­sults from a loss of fo­cus on over­all goals. Con­sist­ent with this, they added, these play­ers per­formed as well as oth­ers in a fourth ex­pe­ri­ment us­ing a think­ing game de­signed so that it would re­main easy to fo­cus on the task goal. The orig­i­nal per­for­mance deficits seemed not to re­sult from a gen­er­al loss of mo­tiva­t­ion — “low sta­tus” play­ers re­ported put­ting in as much ef­fort as oth­ers, the re­search­ers said.

Ul­ti­mate­ly, they ar­gued, low sta­tus may drain per­for­mance by forc­ing peo­ple to de­vote part of their thoughts to the un­cer­tain­ties and threats that can arise from their su­pe­ri­ors’ chang­ing whims. A re­sult is that the pow­erless nar­row their fo­cus to small-pic­ture goals and to “de­tails” that might not be rel­e­vant to the task.

The find­ings “have di­rect im­plica­t­ions for man­age­ment and or­gan­iz­a­tions,” Smith and col­leagues wrote. In many in­dus­tries such as health care and nu­clear pow­er, “er­rors can be cost­ly, tip­ping the bal­ance from life to death. In­creas­ing em­ploy­ees’ sense of pow­er could lead to im­proved ex­ec­u­tive func­tion­ing, de­creas­ing the like­li­hood of cat­a­stroph­ic er­rors,” they con­tin­ued.

“Such empow­erment might be par­tic­u­larly vi­tal in jobs where it is dif­fi­cult to main­tain goal fo­cus be­cause crit­i­cal situa­t­ions are in­fre­quent,” such as air­port se­cur­ity and product-defect de­tec­tion.

In a larg­er sense, the find­ings sug­gest that dif­fer­ences in in­her­ent abil­ity, mo­tiva­t­ion, or dis­crimina­t­ion aren’t the only fac­tors sep­a­rat­ing the “haves and the have-nots,” Smith and col­leagues wrote. “The cog­ni­tive im­pair­ments of be­ing pow­erless may al­so be an im­por­tant con­trib­u­tor, lead­ing the pow­erless to­wards a des­ti­ny of dis­pos­ses­sion.”

…

This leads us fairly naturally to an interesting review of a book about the mainstream media:

review1

To see an appraisal of that media in action, go to

O’Connor, Patrick, ‘Australian Labor government’s “2020 summit”: more political spin to package right-wing agenda’, World Socialist Web Site’, 2008

My personal Idea (cheap):

A Socialist Colony on Macquarie Island!

A good depository for the nation’s riff-raff, leftists, Aborigines, artists, scientists, women, etc. To be powered by Solar Energy and Wind Power, and sustained by soybean whalemeat-substitute. Survival skills required. Apply now.

Please see my comment in the Riot ACT:

Must agree with the quotes (I’m an ‘unacknowledged legislator’ too) — I wasn’t present but the predictable load of failed neoliberal crap — more regressive tax, lower wages, worse working conditions, more un(der)employment — from Murdoch’s Poodle will now be pseudo-legitimated by this exercise in ‘consultation’. Harry Potter couldn’t have worked better magic. (The Apology, Kyoto, etc are all similar attention-deflecting and legitimising devices, however valuable in themselves.) In my view, R-U-D-D spells F-R-A-U-D.

Of course, I didn’t vote for the schmuck.

Anti-Futility League

In recognition of the suicide of ’social democracy’ and the self-strangulation of Stalinist ’socialism’ over the years, I would like to announce the formation of the Scurrilous & Numinous Anti-Futility League as a substitute for the valueless (though not priceless) Two Party-One Party State System of the uttermost West.

Those who would like to join this organisation may contact me at agp@grapevine.net.au. What is the point? We shall see. Meanwhile, please have a look at the rest of my website! Thank you.

ps if anyone reads this shit please let me know. I feel like some Kronstadt rebel broadcasting into the ether.

Metaphor and power

© 2008

[variorum edition, or, what a bunch of turgid bullshit]

Creative Work and the Division of Labour(ers)

Creative work is neither play nor slavery. It is the concretisation of the imaginative, the transforming of the world and ourselves. We can all do it too, or can learn to … under ‘communism’. We just may not be able to do it exclusively. (Who ‘polishes the boots under communism’? Unpleasant, uncreative tasks may, where possible, be (semi-)automated, redesigned, obviated (made unnecessary for the aim), made pleasant, or failing that, shared — which includes ‘doing it yourself’. Only after exhausting these possibilities will we use bribery, blackmail or force ‘on ourselves’ — or do without. Though while we do not live by bread alone, we cannot live long without it.)
An advanced society without a mandatory division of labour(ers) is possible only through the massive intensification of creativity and ‘all-round development’ of each individual, a truly ‘liberal education’ for all. It would be supine and preposterous to think that the drive for socialism is dead after a mere 164 years.

Technology, Invention, Metaphor

In other words, we must expand ‘human nature’ through productive technology, artistic and scientific. Technology here means technique of all kinds and its embodiment. It transcends mere jimber-jawed gadgetry spawned by the Corporation Militant, and spans the range from banjo-playing to building cities and beyond. It is possibly the key to our survival and even flourishing as a species (if we don’t kill ourselves with it first), and is frequently a form of dynamic architecture or sculpture , often literally ‘poetry in motion’. It is the product of our hand and brain, and reflects the diseases of each. It may even be metaphor in action. E.g., take ‘the sun is a marigold on a mirror’. Perhaps the ’sun’ could be a newfound(ed) city (apologies to Dantë, Campanella and Arnold Wesker) in which energy and matter are used at many times their present ‘efficiency’. Utopia is nowhere, but the materials for making it are all around us.
The dialectic in my terms is at least heuristic, like induction or ‘thought experiments’.

Dialectic, Map-Making

The mind builds itself from the environment it modifies. Invention is art, art is invention. Poetry is like cartography. There is a radical difference between the map and the territory , the plan of a house or city and the actual building of one. The one contains or implies the other through successive approximations and the productive process is the ‘dance’ between the two. The finished product(s) generally begin(s) that process again.

Liberation

Creative or intelligently productive work uniting hand and brain (whose products are not filched away by a taskmaster), is the key to the liberation of humanity. Progress requires power. Work, stored and saved, is lasting power, but not the sort which can be easily sequestered by an individual. Society should employ the greatest trained intelligence of the greatest number, an ever-growing cadre of the educationally ‘enhanced’ which will eventually embrace all humanity.
Exchange, too, if it is necessary where we are simultaneously directors of production and consumption, will benefit.

Dialectical Metaphor & ‘Technology’

One way of enhancing this ‘mental labour factor(y)’ may be the use of ‘dialectical’ metaphor , and not always verbally — music, for example, is an exercise in the passage of quantity (frequency of vibrations) into quality. This may be something we can all lend ourselves to, even at the present early stage of the development of human nature. The length of time people have been on this planet is but an eyeblink compared to even mammalian or hominid life, let alone life in general.
A ‘dialectical metaphor’ selects as its ‘vehicle’ the dialectical ‘opposite’ of the ‘tenor’ implied by it in the context of the ‘story’ (history) being examined. So, for private property, public [not-private] property; ‘private property is public property’. That implies a situation in which private property has become, been made, public. But what can that mean? This question may well spark off a long discussion (as it did with Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844).

I am interested in exploring ingenious or ‘gestaltic’ metaphor (essentially, ‘diaphor’) and its use in revolutionary praxis for producing new syntheses, new social liberatory ‘devices’, artistic and technical — to avail ourselves of maximum creativity from the ‘greatest number’, these may be designed/embodied, or embedded within a story, play, painting or poem.
There is a potential concrete relationship between metaphor and its purpose or object: particularly the overarching purpose of a task in the context of the whole project or conjuncture. That is a non-alienating relationship which is both political and economic.
The use of such metaphor is the essence of power and genuine ‘empowerment’. Metaphor in such a case is the fusing of an idea, originating in the material brain, with that new (shard of) reality made under its guidance, crossing like a spark a ‘productive barrier’ or gap; ‘metaphor’ can only be fully understood as part of the labour process, individual and collective, whether in literature or anywhere else.
What one needs to understand is the causal, teleological (partly planned, partly adventitious) relationship, and how the best metaphor — in both the arts and poetry — brings new knowledge of that which is not yet known or made. (The known and made, as Vico saw, relate.)
Thus to me, it is obvious that labour may produce and use metaphor, though is not itself metaphor, where ‘metaphor’ entails a purely ideational relation between a concept and its ‘signifier’ (itself a thing intentionally manufactured in the real world) . Metaphors are the productive goods of thought, which itself is a labour and a guide to action in a resistant context.

Utopia? Building the Poem of the Future?

But I am not advocating utopianism. We must first defeat the shark and the pilot fish, the leviathan of aristocratising capitalism and its underlings. Indeed, we now face the epochal struggle for democratic control of our ‘globalised’ planet. But for this we must have a sun to follow, a spiral journey taking us into unknown starfields in which the supposed ‘finite earth’ is awake to the whole universe. That is the most exalted form of creation we can achieve.