Feudal nobility versus trading merchants who work with the world.
This falls into the classic pattern of the master/slave dialectic of Kojeve and Marx.
The slave overthrows the master through worldly power; in conventional terms, business, colonialism, et cetera, produced cash to pay armies and finance military rebellions.
The nobility then made concessions, lessening taxes, and so on, which rerouted resources from Royal appointed mercantilisms to the eventually enlightenment and modernist organisations of bourgeois capitalism.
If those mercantilisms were organised according to feudal or royalist hierarchy, the eventually modernist organisations required a different organising principle, not based on such hierarchy.
If royalist hierarchy had its origins in ability to provision efficient protection and provisioning of kingdoms, the new, eventually modernist, organisations were then obligated to function as a likewise or preferably better provisioning force, but one whose principles of organisation were more palatable to those that it organised; all this, if it was to effectively supersede feudal organisation.
Universality was the instrument used to garner the widest support, enabling bigger armies to be paid, more influence to be bought. This partial power grab from the ruling nobility was predicated on an ecumenical appeal, one that was articulated and deployed using the concentration of sociopolitical, military, and monetary forces at the command of merchantry.
Casting a universal net was always the best way of achieving quantitative force (the masses). Qualitative force (forms of activity concentration as nodes of network control), always had to rely on networks of relative, quantitative assent; or at least, not generate destabilising, quantitative dissent. If the qualitative forces, of ruling polarities, could not secure such more or less consensual networks, influence, power, and perhaps revenues, were considerably diminished. To the extent, that any conflicts between ruling polarities risked susceptibility to the question of whether or not such quantitative networks had been secured. It was out of this theatre of conflicting forces that the ideology of democratic universalism quite naturally emerged, as the simplest protocol of personalisation required for network efficiency. From a wider perspective, in no way could it seriously be considered an innovation, instead it was just a replay of a prior spiritual movement. The movement of ideological homogenisation had already been set by Christianity, itself a replay of anticolonial trauma, a replay conveying both imperial and colonised elements, a narrative pattern of irresolution itself perhaps eminently suitable as a therapeutic configuration applicable to all the travails of Occidental expansion, one calculated to appeal to all affected parties?
If the romanisation of the West familiarised the Occident with the experience of centralised administration and law, albeit from a polytheistic, spiritual base; Christianisation was that law as a universal projection, from a monotheistic, spiritual base, albeit, in Tridentine form.
The more sophisticated a network becomes, the more crucial does every node of its operation likewise become. Building in redundancy is costly enough; too much, is exorbitant.
Looking at the Earth as a site of global production, the immediate and interim task would be to generate as many exploratory tendencies as is possible. This is the injunction of variety, having a sufficiently wide spectrum of possibilities already inhabited and tested by experience, as a repository of future responses to unknown challenges. Under the sign of this injunction, no development can be underestimated, no culture can be dismissed. It is not the case, that there is any final arbiter of judgement or justification, in these matters; that it might be a case of either local or global appeal, whether in the political or any other sense. All of these categories are merely part of an ongoing process, one which requires further exploration before absolute, categorical fenceposts are dogmatically installed. From an operational outlook, such limitations of thought are a luxury that the alleged ‘species’ cannot yet afford.
Giving inordinate emphasis to anthropic culture of status and vanity wars, as an alleged driver of technological progress, is getting to seem ridiculous in an era where that culture obstructs said progress as much as it might be said to produce it. The reflex actions of ‘profitability’ have long been in counterintuitive excess of its usual, positivist, and hackneyed, justifications. Partisan rationales of all types continue to be trotted around as likely candidates of mass allegiance, so many would-be stallions of secure expediency in some hypothetical ‘race’ whose actual course no one has ever found.
Ideologies of progress require directions, about which there is mutual consent; the lack of which, given the absence of unquestionable, universal values; therein; resides the nub of the issue at stake.
Is survival enough, if that survival is hamstrung by an ingrained, genetic masochism, or cultural programming, whose parameters of a symbolic economy of ‘sweat’, ‘ground’, and ‘dust’, eventuate in the wrong kind of work ethic, one which actually obstructs free play, invention, and healthy innovation? If Baudrillard is right, that ‘work’, or ‘labour’, given its increasing dispensability to contemporary production scenarios, is actually a privilege that the worker could or should pay for, what fate for that Protestant work ethic, once so valued for its link to prosperity?
If qualitative force was once valorised for its ability to fend off competitors in the race of increasing provision for both itself and the quantitative masses, what value does it have when it can no longer do this, or when it elects to engage in partisan provision, in exclusive, non-universal ways? Is this backtracking from universal ambitions, exploitations, and responsibilities, a failure? Was the whole thing only ever a ‘Ponzi scheme’; a scam; a vast, historical heist? ‘Modernity’, merely a network aftereffect of the concentrated techno-compartmentalisations of such greed? One in which as much was lost, as gained? These questions accompany any and all historical change, and have no single answer; perspectives of evaluation multiply to the extent of producing potentially incommensurable narratives.
This is an age, perhaps like any other age, where nostalgias of all types make strong claims. But the danger of producing such nostalgias in ‘surround-sound’; in high-definition holography; and in the thematic repetitions of a gaming culture leaking its contrived ludicity beyond the borders of its productions into the wider, so-called ‘world’; all these developments are relatively new, the seeming reconfiguration of a historical womb or matrix, into which a culture that has perhaps lost its hubris seems to be retreating, perhaps unable to face the challenges it once so confidently faced.
Or it could simply be that the epistemological overflow resulting from what has been called ‘information overload’, exceeds traditional anthropic configurations, and modes of application, of knowledge? That a new episteme is necessary in order to effectively manage the unruly proliferation of data silos? This is not a new problem, neither is it entirely unanticipated:
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“Carmody essayed a feeble joke. is this any way to run a galaxy?’ he asked.
Well, how did you, expect us to run it? We’re only sentient, you know.’
‘I know,’ Carmody said. But I had expected that here, at Galactic Centre -‘
‘You provincials are all alike,’ the Clerk said wearily. Filled with impossible dreams
of order and perfection, which are mere idealized projections of your own incompletion. You should know by now that life is a sloppy affair, that power tends to break things up rather than put things together, and that the greater the intelligence, the higher the degree of complication which it detects. You may have heard Holgee’s Theorem; that Order is merely a primitive and arbitrary relational grouping of objects in the chaos of the universe, and that, if a being’s intelligence and power approached maximum, his coefficient of control (considered as the product of intelligence and power, and expressed by the symbol ing) would approach minimum – due to the disastrous geometric progression of objects to be comprehended and controlled outstripping the arithmetic progression of Grasp.'”
Robert Sheckley, “Dimension Of Miracles” (1968)
In addition:
“These were the innocent days before the problem became acute. Later, Index runs were collected in Files, and Files in Catalogs – so that, for example, C3F5I4 meant that you wanted an Index to Indexes to Indexes to Indexes which was to be found in a certain File of Files of Files of Files of Files, which in turn was contained in a Catalog of Catalogs of Catalogs. Of course, actual numbers were much greater. This structure grew exponentially. The process of education consisted solely in learning how to tap the Rx for knowledge when needed. The position was well put indeed in a famous speech by Jzbl to the graduates of the Central Saturnian University, when he said that it was a source of great pride to him that although hardly anybody knew anything any longer, everybody knew how to find out everything.”
(Draper, Hal. “Ms fnd in a lbry.” Fantasy and science fiction, Dec (1961).)
My own, “The Administrations of The Infinite” (http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=686), further explores the predicament:
“However, because of the decontextualised nature of ‘cyberspace’, the degree of abstraction from the flow of ‘background life cues’, as it were, is greater. The increased abstraction enables a space wherein all possible ‘objectifications’ render as pure possibilities. Such a space, being conducive to ‘pure’ intellectual consideration, enhances the range of considerable possibilities to infinity: the task of navigating the infinite is endless, without final objectification. It is essentially the task of a writer. One is being asked to author one’s own life as an object in a general ontological system. “
“As the so called ‘world’, ‘itself’, dissolves into its ‘own’ possibilities, as one ontological habitat or another, pronounces its wary, self-interested, structural verdict, at every step of an abyyssal dissolution it tries to objectify as ‘elsewhere’, but which its very actions essentially constitute, the lecturer’s predicament is truly that of everyone and every ‘objective’.”
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The usual responses to information proliferation are various ideologies of necessity, and then ideologies of selective use and preference, in short, the specific and subjective question: “What do you want?”
Given that the notion of the subject is equally applicable, potentially, to any form of decision-making agency; whether a conventional ‘organic individual’, a ‘peoples’ (under whatever ‘collective’ rubric), a polity, corporation, or some other form of institution, to say nothing of possible ‘artificial intelligences’; the stage is effectively set for each and every one of those differentiated ‘subjects’ to engage in declarative interchange, according to network protocols they themselves propose.
Looking beyond the insularities of vision and perspective, the partisanship of purposes, all the ironies of global variety being compressed into electronic simultaneity. The resulting intermittent conditions of anthropic experience, oscillating between the parochiality of the local and the technological synthesis of the global, produces an abyss of possibilities no longer bound by the usual anthropic conventions of history.
The gates have been opened, for all insularities to disappear into each other and themselves, and perhaps even for insularity itself to disappear, leaving only a vast, global anxiety; one which no wishful plane of insularity can flatten; one which stretches in all directions; a multidimensional, epistemological environment surrounding each and every insularity attempting unilinear imperialism, in which every conquest or acquisition, is simultaneously a deprivation.
This is a new scenario, a world, if ‘world’ it be, where those who wish to lose themselves, find themselves; and those who wish to find themselves, lose themselves. A world where Socrates’s injunction to “Know Thyself!”, displaces every wishful and insular self-image, to reveal a fractal and fluctuating, processual core, stretching into the unknown. From this perspective, the earlier mentioned development of ‘surround-sound’, nostalgia-cocoons, is perhaps no surprise. The price paid by any insular ignorance with global ambitions, but unable to meet its global responsibilities. When imperial desire is not matched by imperial knowledge; when exploitation is the only epistemological relation; the ongoing production of horror, for which one’s own imperial allegiances are responsible; is quite naturally a scenario that the insular wish to block out and hide.