undercurrent

April 02, 2004

currencies

Heraclitus : All things are an exchange for fire, and
fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.

The Cornish moors are where civilisation ends temporarily, small oases of inutility; land that since neolithic times has been neglected as unusable, uncultivated, filled with tough, incredibly tenacious and prolific plants as hardy as the rocks and boulders they share their unhomely life with.

As the gorse flowers burst out of this bleak weatherbeaten landscape, each tiny point in the million clusters of intense, glowing yellow seems a miracle of chemical synthesis and biological tenacity; like the mice that live on the tracks of the London Underground, they make you wonder at life's opportunism and optimism in the most adverse conditions.

The only intervention humans make here, apart from feebly trying to re-imagine it all as a picturesque tourist attraction, is to burn them. Recently another massive gorse fire took place nearby; acres and acres of moorland left as charred, post-apocalyptic ruins, vast ash-carpeted fields decorated with frayed black spider-leg twigs, where a week ago there was a mass of newly-blooming gorse.

Almost exactly a year ago I scored a front page photo for a local rag. A gorse fire was blazing away on the hill above our house and I was the only person on the scene with a camera, running up the hill towards the fierce orange glow in the sky. The blaze was right next to the house that stands alone at the peak of the hill; this is supposedly the house where Straw Dogs was filmed; it was the most isolated-looking building they could find, and it's still likely that if you got caught in a man-trap here, no-one would hear you scream. I wouldn't have liked to be at home there with 80 hectares of moorland burning outside.

It's no coincidence that these fires happen at the same time every year or that according to the newspaper 'arson is suspected' vaguely in every case. The farmers receive a subsidy if the moorland that belongs to them is 'cleared' before the end of March - so if they haven't got round to it, a lot of fires just happen to get started around that time. Wonderful example of how these box-ticking quantitative bureacratic systems work; since the (appearance of the) end result is all that's measured, people will naturally pervert the system by 'delivering' in the laziest way possible, making the objectives irrelevant and the whole thing literally senseless.

It's systematization and 'accountability' itself that drains all sense and purpose from everything. Once in the smooth isomorphic realm, all things are exchangeable ad dementia. NHS hospitals suddenly offer patients appointments they can't possibly keep to make sure they'll disappear off the waiting lists until next month. Carbon-fuel-haemorraghing nations trade cash for third-world clean slates. And high high above all of this, risk managers offer to cancel out the future given sufficient funds.

Unquantifiable intensities flow on messily beneath this floating network of mutually-cancelling quanta. Is real life merely the residue of these radical chunks of commerce, these hidden circuits, these spontaneous surges and instant sublations, a byproduct, incidental, as they seem to be inviting us to suppose?

Or more a function of inefficiency, governed by the gap between the algorithms that control subject behaviour to assure predictable outcomes, and the material realm of their application; contingent upon the amount of investment available for enforcement?

Anyhow, line management ensures that qualitative intentions, if they exist, are transmuted further into pure zombie-program-flow with each step between policy and practice. Perhaps this is where reality squeezes itself in through the gaps.

Matter, difference, a matter of indifference, a faintly irritating relic that has to be dealt with only under duress, that vaguely threatens one's integrity, that must be bought off with narcommodities or fought off with insurance; It's finally left entirely to those who have somehow failed to get caught in the net; tugged and stretched by invisible, indifferent forces, they hang catatonic in the hissing cold glare of office striplights, terminally confused, brittle, filled with white noise, rampant indecision, and stewing paranoia. Through eyes corroded by clarity, they see burning, and pay homage to an economy that isn't engaged in a futile denial of its own body.

How could Heraclitus have foreseen that this cold fire, whose caustic caricature of logos he felt the need to document, whilst indeed despoiling the polis, would also be inverted, enslaved to a global machine geared to virtual equilibrium, indifferent to what flows beneath?

Posted by robin at April 2, 2004 12:48 AM