No one can _evoke_ that existential turn. That does not mean that it won't happen, it just means that we have to have an understanding which is both materialist and historical of how such qualitative leaps occur.
Carrol
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I agree with just about all of this, but still there is a role for supportive persuasion. I just don't understand why it doesn't work better. The rest of this post is mostly a rambling re-elaboration of agreement, with occasional provisions.
How did you or I or anyone on the left ever become involved in fighting the prevailing order? Part of the answer is someone, somewhere, somehow moved us in that direction. Sure I was primed for it by various experiences, but people, particularly writers and art moved me into a different view.
Punctuated equilibrium. The parallel with human history is pretty stunning, and pretty difficult to give a coherent meaning to. I don't know what the connection is, even if there certainly appears to be one. Perturbations in superficially stable systems that gyro out of stability in the absence of internal or external driving causative forces---the configuration of the system itself generates them.
But there is a philosophical problem in this parallel. In the non-human physical world, including the biological world, there is nothing like `intentionality' or `will'. There are only material systems, forces and interactions. In the human world by contrast there is almost no human activity that isn't completely saturated with `intentionality', or people who are out to do something with all the `intention' they can muster. The collisions either in the small one to one level or on the mass level are all driven by intentions, ideas, dreams, emotion (the reigning ideology of the system itself) and so on.
In the atomic world of Brownian motion, gas molecules never suddenly migrate over to one corner of the box. In the human world, that is exactly what goes on all time. It is almost impossible not to pattern behavior.
Now it might be that in the large scale or global view, people do become like systems of material particles. Locally they seem to be saturated with will, intention, and coherent organized behavior. But given sufficient time, globally they behave like material systems under perturbation or periods of punctation to these mechanical systems under evolution or phase changes between equilibrium. Hence the parallel. And hence the dismissal of free will or a causative history of human intention.
If I buy this, and I do to a limited extent, then what is the purpose of arguing and trying to organize? This is Doug's perennial (or perineal?) antagonism with you, isn't it?
Anyway, to answer that question, it is possible to have both worlds. Which you point out under `manure the ground...' (Hey, I only worked in horse stables once and didn't like it.)
In some of the programs for chaos theory graphics, there is what is known as the seed. I think (but don't know) this seed is related to the fact that many of the equations used, have some built-in contradiction, a point or region of singularity where they fail, where they are not well behaved. They fail the classic test for differentiable functions at these points, yet they are otherwise orderly.
Unfortunately, I don't known enough to talk about this correctly. But I think it comes down to either you start with a fucked up equation and use a `good' interval, or you fuck up the interval and use a `good' equation--both approaches require a contradiction.
You can take a well behaved function (continuous, differentiable) and set it up to evaluate an improper interval. One way to do this is to make the function re-evaluate its own previous value, in effect set up a recursive loop. The inverse way to do a similar thing is to pre-process the interval by recursion and use the resulting set as the interval to evaluate.
So the parallel or metaphor with historical points of punctuation is this. If you feed the contradictions back to the system, you should eventually get something like chaos. One way to feed the contradictions is to scream about them over and over (in politics, economics, art, rhetoric, even terrorism). Maybe it will work. Maybe that is the seed. Who knows. In the Marxist view, Capital is supposed to do all this recursion work on its own.
I just assume that the people in charge of Kapital are not that stupid and will correct the system, so it needs much more perturbation than a classical mechanical system.... in the form of the rhetoric of outrage coupled with activist anarchy, protest, strikes, and so forth.
But it would sure be easier if most people just looked at their predicaments. It doesn't take genius to subtract your bills from your paycheck and understand something doesn't add up.
Anyway, despite all this, and given forty years of patience, it seems to me, we in the US are actually at a threshold, just at the boundary of going asymptotic. Personally I can barely contain myself in a kind of hyperactive kid way of twisting around on my seat waiting for the god damn recess bell. What are we waiting for? The other metaphor I use (with myself) is sitting at a dinner table with relatives who all hate each other and are politely snipping at one another other. The tension just get tightened up with each round of insults, put downs, and petty bickering.
I realize that the political economy is not a psychological entity, but it sure feels like one.
CG