[i am sending this to nettime to pose a question about the
role of the .US constitution as code, and how it may relate
to hurricane Katrina, before, and reconstruction efforts after.
it is based on a series of posts relating people to transistors
which is linked at the end, based on some previous writings.
this is more of a rant than anything else, yet i send it out in
case others have comments or ideas about this aspect... it
is part of the electronetwork site electronetwork.org and a
list http://groups-beta.google.com/group/electronetwork-l
which was were this post originated, forwarded here. brian]
i've been wanting to write something hopeful about the
most recent cataclysmic disaster in New Orleans, yet it
has been hard to sustain hope, the deluge is complete.
it would seem that there are so many problems of such
a scale, and in my opinion - no one - in government or
public life who is capable of handling any one of these,
less the dozens that concurrently are going on at once.
they all relate to policy, in one way or another, decision-
making and ideas of planning. excepting that 'planning'
is considered rather retrograde for the current managers
of the machinery of state, the political 'managerial' class
has a different philosophy about how things really work,
which may be split from a reality others may share, live.
in other words, ideologies do not match issues we face.
[**correction: the following is a misstatement/mistaken way
of trying to say: that energy policy (in the .US) is unrelated
to economic policy, is unrelated to transportation policy,
is unrelated to housing policy,... national security,... etc.]
for instance, in policy many are compartmentalized into
industrial methodologies, which are unconnected with
other areas in which these same things interact: such as
with energy policy and its role in inflation or raising costs
of living, in turn, bankruptcy of industries not adapting to
changing patterns (airlines), else raising of fees (UPS),
else the cost of some smoked almonds at a grocery store
and running machinery, materials, packaging, shipping.
there is so much that could be approached through this
situation and yet words are almost too difficult a way to
frame ideas which are so vast. i was going to draw the
bubble diagrams in an attempt to enter into aspects of
perception, reality, media, representation, cyberspace,
and then issues of race, logic, language, psychology-
and to reference why, when this is happening in New
Orleans it is perceived as different from elsewhere in
the world, such as Africa, which have been in states
of despair for decades. what is going on with issues
of representation? why is the crisis and responsibility
perceived one way in one instance, and another in
another instance? i believe it is another indication of
the role of a conceptualization of how we are trained
to think about things (perceiving, judging reality, even)
that goes to the core of 'the constitution' of the self, in
the sense previously written about on list, with regard
to the individual as a state and a state of individuals.
if one looks at the 'source code' which in the .US has
been programming relations between individuals in
this state, it was composed by minds which were, in
the time of its writing, slave owning white americans
who, as a public group of men, decided to declare a
common public which could be open to evolving of
the principles beyond their limitations, including the
ideas of equality, rights, justice, liberty, privacy, etc.
the .US constitution created a framework with bugs,
which are evident in any .US city and which has often
been ignored or disregarded as a structural necessity
to keep and maintain the current system working as is.
that has been an accepted 'moral' and 'ethical' lapse of
a utopic vision, which if only everyone followed ideas
of certain political managers, all would be redeemed
and it is the people who are imperfect, not the ideas.
no need to demythologize issues of race or class in
relation to the issues New Orleans, in relation to the
issues of policy - programming of how individuals are
interacting in making the larger state function, how and
why, where and who-for. it is only limited by imagination
how things could work, for what purpose, by reasoning.
thus why after 200 years of a constitution could there be
such a difference between what is said to be real, and
what actually exists? how can there be multiple views
of what is going on, and yet no agreed upon 'reality'?
the news media (at least this once) brought multiple
perspectives to bear upon a situation in which aspects
of the panoptic prison of media representations finally
had to square with views outside agreed-upon constructs.
it is one of the few times when having multiple television
news organizations
