Chris, I got you wrong. From this post, I learned much, and I am not joking.
All these years I tried to conceptualise the world in terms of forests, a
handy analogue for space/time continua. You showed a better way.
Here in England for example we have Epping Forest. This is a
small woody area in North London full of things like Queen
Elizabeth I's hunting lodge, pubs selling Thai food amid
Ye Olde settings, with Great Oak swings in the garden which
demented kids who hate to be torn from their playstations
try to demolish, etc.
In Germany OTOH they have the Black Forest. It is bigger,
enough even for people to feel OK wearing lederhosen in.
In Russia, it is all the opposite way round, as you'd
expect being a cognescento of Russian philosophy: there they have
these simply ginormous forests all over the place, interspersed with
small beleaguered settlements of melancholic drunken Russians
pretending this is part of Europe and lying amid the meadows
while trying to speculate about the nature of the cosmos beyond the
treetops.
In the Black Forest, Wandervogel wander and think about knightly
tasks. After a very long while they get lost and the problem then is to work
out where the fuck they are. This is why Germans have so many parts of
speech related to 'here' type questions.
In Epping it's all 'now' type questions.
Here in Epping, people decide to try Nature on Sunday afternoons. Mostly
they hope to avoid each other, and to avoid deranged geese in the meres,
crashed world war two warplanes complete with handlebar-moustached
corpses of English heroic fighter pilots with skulls locked in a grinning
rictus which seems to shout 'Tally-Ho!' at one, etc, before staggering
back to the hypo and condom-littered carpark where they must decide
time-questions like is there enough time for a swift half, enough time
to catch the tube before closing time, etc. and then they rush to consult
the timetables and work out that only a frenzied jog will get them to Epping
tube station before the last train which has any hope of conveying
them to the West End, civilisation etc.
Meanwhile, in Russia the melancholics continue to stand motionless
at bus stops where buses never stop, pointing three fingers at
their necks (Barkley knows why). These woody metaphors were how I
circumnavigated around philosophy. Barkley + his very clever Russian wife
found a way of sublating the problems of space, time, trees, undergowth, cut
shins, absence of bus stops etc, into a book about Marxism and non-linear
dynamics. I am absolutely sure that Barkley like me has been involved in
non-linear attempts to get out of intractable forest. This is why I relate
to him and him to me.
I'm about to post a big piece on oil. It may not be such of a yawn any more
to anyone who just had to fill up their tank at a gas station. This is my
direct route to the non-linear dynamics of capitalist crash. I drive a
Fiesta, a brand new one admittedly, but even so I have no regrets. I get 60
non-linear miles to the gallon out of it. Soon I'll be foraging for firewood
in Epping Forest though. I'll be thinking about you.
Mark Jones
http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
PS I meant what I said. This was a good post.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Burford" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2000 12:11 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:19691] Dialectics and Nonlinear Dynamics
> At 11:27 25/05/00 -0400, you wrote:
> > For those who are curious, I have a recently published
> >paper on these issues.
> >"Aspects of dialectics and non-linear dynamics," _Cambridge
> >Journal of Economics_, May 2000, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 311-324.
> > It is also available on my website without the figures at
> >http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb.
> >Barkley Rosser
>
> Congratulations on getting published in this journal.
>
> This is an important area of left political economy. I will copy the
> abstract and then comment on extracts.
>
>
