Enactivating "gastrulation" of "globalization"

Engendering Invagination and Gastrulation of Globalization (Part #7)

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There would seem to be a poorly explored relationship between:

• governance of "globalization" at whatever scale and in whatever form
• design of structures and processes appropriate to such governance, as indicated above
• comprehensibility of the system to be governed and of whatever is designed to ensure appropriate governance
• communicability, including memorability, of the relatively complex issues to be governed and of correspondingly complex designs through which they are governed

Together these combine to constitute a credibility challenge, both in their acceptance by the governors and by those mandating them -- the governed in a democratic society. Whilst various disciplines may elaborate "theories of everything" -- appropriate to models of "global" governance as they choose to understand it -- if design, comprehensibility and communicability factors are not taken into account then such models will not be viable in practice. Overly simplistic models will be used in their place -- typically those based on the worst of binary logic (Us and Them: relating to challenging others, 2009). A key to richer apprehension of complexity is highlighted by the "correspondences" considered credible in any explanation, whether in the sciences or in the cultural realm (Theories of Correspondences -- and potential equivalences between them in correlative thinking, 2007).

The tendency, however, is to assume that whatever the complexity of the theory, it can be "repackaged" after formulation for communication purposes such as to circumvent difficulties of comprehension. What is not considered is the extent to which these considerations need to be designed into the models in the first place. Comprehension of complexity is the neglected key constraint in the adequacy of any theoretical explanation.

The process of "designed ignorance" is itself curiously exemplified by the exponential expansion of knowledge of whose details ever increasing numbers are increasingly ignorant -- as with the expansion of any "universe of knowledge". This form of "globalization" echoes the expansion of the blastosphere -- and the constraining memetic singularity it can be expected to encounter.

Requisite "mindbending": Much is made of the limitations of linearity, perhaps acceptably challenged by calls for "lateral thinking". The increasing difficulty is that many of the challenges are recognized as taking, often "vicious", cyclic form (Examples of vicious problem cycles and loops, 1995; Feedback loop analysis in the Encyclopedia Project, 2000). Strategic solutions, such as recycling, are increasingly defined in cyclic terms -- if only as a desperate effort to return to comprehensible linearity (Web resources on "breaking the cycle", 2002).

Whilst the "circle" holds the cognitive challenge to a degree, this is more subtly evident in any spheroidal understanding of "globalization". Civilization remains challenged by any "other" inhabiting the unenlightened "side" of the "globe" -- whatever the degree of explanation regarding the movement of the planet in relation to the Sun and the manner in which each periodically dwells beneficially in a condition of endarkenment with respect to an enlightened other elsewhere. The cognitive significance, and potential value, of this condition is understood to be highly problematic (Enlightening Endarkenment: selected web resources on the challenge to comprehension, 2005). Ironically there is little recognition of what might be termed "voluminous thinking", despite its extremely practical implications (From Lateral Thinking to Voluminous Thinking: unexplored options for subterranean habitats in dense urban areas, 2007).

It is in this context that the cognitive challenge of toroidal organization appears daunting, despite the apparent facility with which the toroidal form is achieved through the dynamics of human embryogenesis -- a pattern "known" instinctively to all and heralded cognitively by the ubiquitous nature of "invagination". It is therefore appropriate to explore this in terms of toroidal self-governance.

Ring composition: Whilst "gastrulating globalization" may well be an alienating notion, there are widespread indicators to the mode of understanding that may be involved. Most common is the circlet of beads, notably as "worry beads" (kombolói) or as an aid to prayer, as previously discussed (Designing Cultural Rosaries and Meaning Malas to Sustain Associations within the Pattern that Connects, 2000).

The cognitive implications of loops as rings benefit from the studies of "ring composition" in literature, as reviewed by Anthony Blake (Decoding the Past: ring composition and sacred number), notably with respect to the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas (Thinking in Circles: an essay in ring composition, 2007). The potentially more complex implications are separately explored (Sustaining a Community of Strange Loops: comprehension and engagement through aesthetic ring transformation, 2010).

Of special interest is the manner in which the toroidal form is reflected in such rings. The "beads" are independent circular segments (of the "doughnut") linked by the single circular thread through their centres. As mnemonic devices each bead may be associated with a particular theme, typically part of a prayer. Despite the relative complexity of the issues involved, no such mnemonic circlets seem to have been developed for issues relating to globalization or the environment -- where it might be assumed there was much to "worry" about, much to "pray" for, and much to "re-member" with respect to environmental cycles and "recycling".

Clearly the study by Mary Douglas (2007) offers many pointers of potential relevance to engaging with toroidal thought, especially as it is reflected in many aspects of tradition (circle dancing, etc.). Of special interest is the actual design and composition of a ring expected to "hold" a relatively complex pattern of insight and to facilitate engagement with it. These possibilities are potentially associated with the emergence of a dynamic, "cyclic" identity in keeping with the times and the value attached to music as a vehicle for identity (Emergence of Cyclical Psycho-social Identity: sustainability as "psyclically" defined, 2007).

Other relevant sources with which the process of "gastrulating globalization" might then be associated include the many kinds of cycles with which people engage and are variously familiar:

• periodic routines (daily routines, weekly, annually, etc)
• business and reporting cycles, factory cycles, product cycles
• gardening and agricultural cycles
• bodily cycles
• cycle of hours, especially as celebrated in intentional communities (monasteries, ashrams, etc)
• recycling patterns
• cybernetic feedback loops
• web rings of associates

With respect to career and life planning, there is the intriguing notion of how toroidal ring composition might relate to any perspective on "composing a life" -- and conceiving life as a "ring cycle" (Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life, 1990). Within the Chinese cultural framework, the Ba Gua pattern, notably as extended into a circular pattern of hexagrams of the I Ching, offers another sense of toroidal processes (Transformation Metaphors -- derived experimentally from the Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching) for sustainable dialogue, vision, conferencing, policy, network, community and lifestyle, 1997).

Chiasm: The deconstructionist literature on invagination notably makes occasional mention of chiasmic or chiasmatic structure, as noted in the survey (Annex A). In traditional rhetoric, chiasmus is the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures -- a form of cross-over or criss-cross -- in order to make a larger point. As noted in Annex A, an example of such use is given by Robert Gibbons (Transatlantic perspectives on America, The Atlantic Community, 12 January 2008):

Poems such as these that are created through the process Jacques Derrida has dubbed 'double invagination' possess so much energy within their folded boundaries that text alone threatens to be unable to contain it for long. Unfolding such an invagination can in fact also be dangerous both for the author and for the unwary reader, as the chiasmic relations concealed behind the double fold may turn out to be highly charged and potentially explosive. (emphasis added)

In his summary, Stephen Morton (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 2003) refers to the use of chiasmus by Theodor Adorno:

... the grammatical figure whereby the order of words in one clause is inverted in a second clause, aims to provide readers with a glimpse of the concrete historical conditions and material relations which are distorted by western knowledge and cognition. For example, the statement, the subject is the object, the object is the subject demonstrates how the object of thought is determined by the investigating subject. In the case of western knowledge produced about the non-western world the object of thought disappears under the weight of western representation (p. 55) (emphasis added)

Another focus of the challenge to deconstructionists of obscurantism, Jacques Lacan variously makes use of Rene Thom's topological insights. With respect to chiasm, for example, as noted by Louis Armand (Symptom in the Machine: Lacan, Joyce, Sollers, 2002):

For Lacan, when we attempt to untie the knot of the Real (R), the Symbolic (S), Imaginary (I), and le sinthome (Σ), and thus divide it into four separate parts, the following figure is invariably formed:

Fig. 4: Borromean knot (according to Jacques Lacan)

The topological entanglement of these four elements is consequently regarded as describing (by a process of metonymy) the radical condition of language as such (and exemplified for Lacan by the paronomasia of Finnegans Wake). In this way, the chiasmatic perversion of symptom and sinthome also marks a form of transversal, across which each of the relations described above is expressly interchangeable. Mirroring the subjective determinacy of the "dialectic of identification," the movement from position 1 to position 2 can be reversed, as 2 to 1, while 3 to 4 can be reversed, as 4 to 3-just as the imaginary identification of the mirror stage operates a reversal mechanism across the Other-locus in the emergence of the signifier as marking the subject's "entrance" into the symbolic order. In other words, both the symbol and the symptom present themselves in such a fashion that either of the two terms (S or Σ) takes them in their entirety, "so that the other passes over the one which is above and under the one which is below." Following from Rene Thom's theory of topological folds, Lacan argues that this doubled chiasmus is thus accorded an immanence as "the figure we regularly obtain when we attempt to separate the Borromean knot into its four parts."

What this might seem to suggest, at least in part, is that the machine in some way "returns" something to the subject. At the moment when Lacan asserts that there is not the "shadow of an ego" in the machine, he gives to the subject a recursive figuration as the I who is nevertheless "up to something in it." That is, in the machine-or we might say, as the spectral counterpart to what is left in the mirror (as its "symptom," for which the machine, as a "topological" figure, describes what Lacan will later term the sinthome): "The machine is the structure detached from the activity of the subject. The symbolic world is the world of the machine".

In the above articulation. "machine" might be usefully be understood as "global society", as typically experienced. Beyond the literary and psychoanalytical focus of Lacan, the "imaginary" and the "symbolic" can be explored as a dimension of considerable significance to global strategies (Imagining the Real Challenge and Realizing the Imaginal Pathway of Sustainable Transformation, 2007; Relevance of Mythopoeic Insights to Global Challenges, 2009).

Known also as chiastic structure (or ring structure), chiasm is a feature of ancient literatures including epic poetry and scriptures. Curiously the potential of epic poetry remains significantly unexplored with respect to the "global" challenges of the present time (Poetry-making and Policy-making: arranging a marriage between Beauty and the Beast, 1993). Concepts or ideas are placed in such ring structures in a special symmetric order or pattern to emphasize them.

Clearly chiastic structures then have a powerful mnemonic role and are appropriately described as psychoactive -- in ways previously considered (Psychoactive Text Warning: enneagram of precautionary attitudes, 2007). The question is whether incorporation of chiasm into toroidal mnemonic devices can enable new modes of engagement with toroidal processes. Of potential relevance in the "cross-over" characteristic of chiasm, as employed in optic chiasma, is the association it offers to the transformative switch between the two halves of Fig. 1c. This particularly calls for reflection in the light of the widespread predilection for "vision" metaphors in strategic development and presentation.

More provocatively, could any life cycle -- whether of a discussion thread, an individual, a web ring, any collectivity, or a government -- be reframed in a more integrative manner through designing chiastic structure into it? How might this relate to the cross-over characteristic of enantiodromia (Psychosocial Energy from Polarization: within a cyclic pattern of enantiodromia, 2007)? Also of relevance is the nature of the "cognitive twist" discussed with respect to "strange loops" (Sustaining a Community of Strange Loops: comprehension and engagement through aesthetic ring transformation, 2010).

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