One Way Weave part 2; Header tanks
The deep problem of ecology, a problem that perhaps lies also behind the New Age, is the problem of unintended consequence. That is, the problem of what might always also be happening as a result of a certain process. In terms of the science this problem has perhaps three main strands, which might be characterised as: the Molecule, the Journey, and the Effect. Moreover one neither needs to be a Marxist (or a sociologist) or a fantasist to understand that each of these strands finds an echo in politics.
Such echoes need to be understood both directly and indirectly. - Directly, each strand poses a deep political problem in its own right. To think a strand is therefore to pose a political and social problem. But also, and perhaps more profoundly, the very word ‘globalize’ implies two very distinctive elements. On the one hand, a sealed in system, that is a world, remains the real horizon to each and every journey – bending all the journeys as it were back into themselves; and thereby forcing them to jangle against each other. On the other hand, within the bounds of this space there appears an infinity of moves, or possible journeys. The ‘global village’ or global eco-system, a space which when you are in it, feels both featureless and boundless (as the universe itself feels). One is free therefore to follow whatever path one can find, and do so without regard to a ‘native’ geography or limit. In short to glabalize, is to shift the limit of the universe, away from the natural bounds of plain or forest or any other set of fixed geographical features (or for that matter, towns and streets), and into an apparently featureless world, and yet one in which there exists a strange curving in of all journeys, all connections, a curving in, that ensures that the most unlikely of moves ultimately jangle within each other (and form a local landscape of their own). The space, in the bending of the globe, stops being intelligible in terms of two dimensional maps, and as an axis within which a set number of fixed things simply occur; and becomes rather, through apparent freedom and yet very real capture, the agent that bends apparently unrelated journeys, forcing them into new, transitory, and yet (for a while) very distinctive landscapes.
To understand the bent but featureless world of globalization is quite naturally a problem for both natural science and politics. Both approaches must in themselves seek to grapple with the attempt to grasp what units can be understood as travelling, across this world, and what paths might be being traced by these paths; and what landscape of effects are created through their conjunction. Moreover this parallelism of approach is made all the more urgent by the fact that globalization demands that all the dimensions which are caught up in its bending, can at different points be fed back into one another; the Political and physical world included. To pose the problem of the ‘global’ world on a social level, is to raise a set of problems in their physical world, and vice versa. In the rest of this Rant, I will examine the first two of these strands, while reserving the final one for next week, where I will also consider the political world that these strands create.
The first strand identified above is that of a molecule. The modern molecule, is tied to a unit of a journey, but also a unit of effects. A molecule, such as carbon dioxide, does not have a formal physical presence that a person or a football does; it is a far more metaphysical reality, and one marked by three distinctive elements. Firstly each molecule has a certain genealogy, which ties it back to a process of production of its own. Carbon dioxide is not simple irreducible ‘stuff’, but rather is itself the product of the union of other elements (atoms) which could always be doing something else, somewhere else. Each unit (beyond say the quark), is therefore itself at once a process in which other smaller particles are doing ‘something’, but also a point of stability, and fixity in these doings. Carbon dioxide might involve smaller parts, and yet as the name itself implies, these smaller particles as they are drawn off to form a unit, are bounded in their relation to each other. The genealogy of the molecule therefore includes not just a history, but also a point at which that molecule becomes fixed and certain – it relates therefore to a point of stabilization.
Secondly each molecule exists upstream of a series of effects. To be Carbon Dioxide is therefore to exist as a product of respiration, or to be bound up with the construction of the particles which build living matter, or to be warmed up in a way different to other gases or to be…. Thence each molecule therefore essentially creates a second set of bounds. It is not just of itself a bound to the atomic or chemical process which created it, but its presence creates a very great number of effects of its own, effects that are unbounded (one can never know precisely what a molecule might do in certain circumstances) and yet finite in themselves (each process itself is predictable, and one could, given infinite time list the lot). It matters not here that such effects might unpick the molecule itself, making it other than it was, so long as the effect itself remains predictable.
The picture is of course complicated by the fact that these elements are not simply separate from one another. Carbon dioxide or the carbon and oxygen that compose it, can be broken up and drawn into other molecules, other processes, in a series of complex ways. Each molecule has no claim to being a simple point in a process running from atoms to small molecules to large, as elements further ‘up’ the chain will directly reach down into the atomic principles themselves, and apparently bypass the world of carbon dioxide itself. (Carbohydrate is itself distinct from carbon dioxide.) And yet, each molecule imposes a distinctive tariff of energy needed, and a process which must be undergone, in order to unlock its chemical elements.
Thirdly each molecule has a high degree of ubiquity. In itself. each carbon dioxide molecule is therefore highly exchangeable with each other such molecule (or is so theoretically). This is not to say that each molecule is not itself unique (it has a history, it was created at a certain point, and destroyed at another, and made a series of journeys in between), it is merely that this uniqueness does not belong to its integral molecular nature. The history of a molecule (and its uniqueness) is therefore a history held elsewhere – in the particular effects upon others that that molecule has.
A molecule is not therefore a thing, but rather a point of stabilized composition, and effect. A molecule exists as a peak of predictability in matter, from which a certain series of consequences can be understood as flowing, and yet one that never owns its own history (and is therefore ubiquitous – each of itself can stand for all the others). The connection between such a unit and the wider way in which we understand the world is clear. Modern political jargon is peppered with little molecular units (‘Mondeo man’, the poor, the taxpayer), which serve at once to stabilize a certain process, whose name they adopt (from carbon dioxide to work shy), and from which a certain series of effects necessarily follow. Moreover each such particle of social matter is ubiquitous in itself (there are a large number of ‘women voters’ or the phrase has no meaning), and therefore their existence can be asserted irrespective of individual histories. The role of such molecules is to create a history, not to be one (‘women in the twentieth century voted Tory’…).
As discussed above, such parallelism of itself should come as no real surprise. Molecules physical and political, serve a purpose, they invent a unit, which is of itself capable of wandering across the apparently featureless surface of the world, while all the while, establishing strange connections within that surface, between apparently separate elements. A ‘worker’ therefore fixes a set of relations, which can be applied from society to society, and caught up in a variety of histories (which remains external to them). And yet politically there is a very real problem here, in that our current set of political systems (as I considered in last week’s Rant) have a tendency to constitute themselves as molecules, albeit complex ones (‘Westminster Village’, the Voter etc). Democracy therefore pitches itself firmly within the global system that it is attempting to encompass. This paradox is expressed in that most complex of units, the Nation State. The result is that not only are the rights of certain molecules (the nation state) asserted over the rights of all others; But also, and more critically, this assertion is made irrespective of a history. Merely to say the magic word ‘nation state’ is enough to give rights, and to be a history maker/breaker, and the right to ignore the history that led up to that ‘state’ (why after all do we not want Kurdistan, or do want Sudan, one country is viable but no nation state, while the other is a nation state, and yet not viable…).
The second strand considered above is tied to the notion of a journey. In a complex sealed sphere, “where you are” and “how you got there” clearly matter as much as what (or who) you are. To be ozone on the surface of the planet is to be a nasty pollutant, but to be ozone miles up in the air, is to be a vital element for life. The history that was made external to the molecule is therefore, through such journeys, itself made to sing. Each molecule matters because of the journeys it is taking or might take, a set of journeys whose overall effect is highly unpredictable and complex. Thence the global climate is not simply the product of the sun warming the earth, or even exactly what gases are or are not in the atmosphere, but a dynamic construct involving numerous features (global currents, amount of salt in the water, strange one off effects…). Journeys, which endlessly dynamically echo into one another, become the driving force(s) for both the continued creation, and also slow adaptation, of forces.
The problem on the level of the political here, is rather complex. Since its inception, capitalism has had one single unit within which this complexity is directly expressed - Money. Money is after all (amongst many other things) the attempt to directly embody (and quantify and calculate) the many shifting patterns and journeys that ‘capitalist’ society encompasses. This creates a very deep problem. On the one hand money is of course directly expressing a very real phenomena here. Journeys are at once unique constructions, and yet all such journeyings do indeed echo into one another (or at least can do). There is therefore a sense in which they are all caught up by each other (and money directly registers that fact). And yet at the same time, it can only do so by booting into an abstract (and therefore collective) dimension, possibly the most important element in these journeys (that they were unique). Money thereby oscillates somewhat precariously between the two strands outlined here. On the one hand it is the faithful handmaiden of the journey. It follows and accumulates (or dissipates) as journeys make useful and productive connections. And yet at the same time, it pulls these journeys into a molecular unit (the dollar, the pound, figures on a screen), and forces them to also dance to the molecule’s tune (one needs capital to start, and having money, is owning extra possibilities).
Ostensibly, the political problem in these last two strands is rather similar. In both, the problem is that our social systems attempt to delimit a complex system from within, and according to the molecular units that are the denizens of that system (rather than its bounds). There is of course here however one clear difference. In the former strand the link between the molecular unit and the global system in which it occurs was deliberately occluded (the nation state against the world). In the latter one, the problem is that it rather creates an all too simple union between two rather distinctive elements, and thereby risks distorting the whole.
This in turns leads to an essential difference that globalization poses to the political and economic worlds. The logic of globalization is surely to make the nation state more and more vicious, as such a state needs to actively assert its economic and political and social rights, in the face of global forces. It is however less clear what the position of money will be. It is very easy to envisage worlds where money remains fundamentally molecular in its nature, and therefore grabs the journeys which it can chart into an odyssey of greed and desire. It is however also possible to envisage other worlds where money is sensitised to the different nature of the journeys which it follows, and thereby manages to invent new ways to ensure that journeys which aid the overall human-centred global system are promoted over all others.
However, in order that this last point can be fully developed (and the role of the assertion of humanity into a global system, which otherwise lacks humanity as such) it will be necessary to firstly consider the third strand mentioned above – that of effects. This is because it is only through the effects of the productive elements (molecules and journeys) that humanity comes into the world at all. It is therefore from the world of effects that one needs to understand how one might make a human politics, more able to dovetail (and in part orchestrate) the global affairs by whose actions, humanity itself is endlessly composed. This will be the topic of the final Rant of this series. For now what needs to be noted is that globalization imposes a strange economy upon a featureless world, which is nonetheless folded in upon itself, and horribly finite. It is a world where what it contains must be at once created, but also pitched against all other such creations, in varying highly complex ways. These ways are then very hard for society to encompass directly, as it is often only through their overall effects that we perceive or even know of them. It is only through these effects therefore, that one has any hope of defining the kind of economic or political world able to encompass the global, a point that I will fully develop next week.
