Over a long period of time, the human race has accrued to it
some stable, solid achievements. When there are solid achievements in the high
sectors or disciplines— science, philosophy, and high art— the processes by
which the achievements are recognized and assimilated happen, always, slowly
and incrementally. Solid human progress, in fact, is always slow. What I want
to argue is that the Internet has created a new kind of Solid World context.
Here, the seeds planted are free to grow incrementally, and thus establish and
consolidate a solid basis for progress on high levels. This Solid World is
angled specifically against what I call the Regular World, which is bound by
laws which make human progress impossible— newspapers which must come out every
day, magazines and journals which must be released month by month, and
especially (for the high disciplines) prizes, grants, and fellowships which
must be awarded at regular intervals. Whenever anything must be repeated at
regular intervals in high-discipline sectors, with no leeway given to lulls and
fertile periods, human progress is being arrested. Regularity is essentially
corporate, and bureaucratic. It is also not constructed to withstands major
changes, when and if they happen— why Solid World material takes a long time to
be assimilated. The 2015 Solid World online pile-up is thus a profoundly
disruptive force. It is also one of the key reasons I am still alive and
working steadily. That Solid World schedule— what appears online happens in its
own time, at regularly irregular junctures— is demonstrating for the public
what human life can be at its best, and most creative. Militaristic regularity
does not have to disrupt or corrupt serious creativity— organic devotion to an
interior life can be the name of the game, and serious individuality
cultivated.
Regularity (as has been spotted) is also a game to destroy
individuals— but the new 2015 thinking populace are allowed to no longer be
fooled by the corporate and the bureaucratic. Furthermore, what is Solid online
now manifests the promise of growing more Solid as time passes; so that the
corruption of the Regular will continue to be exposed at all points.
Individuality will be cultivated in more sectors, and respect and toleration
for individuals will have to be learned. The abrasiveness of the corporate and
the bureaucratic, and its machine-like Regularity, towards individuals, is one
reason the twentieth century was a partial charnel ground; animated by clowns
and dummies. Because Regularity must pretend that human progress happens at
regular intervals, which it very much does not, clowns and dummies must be
created to fill in the corporate blanks or dossiers, while the Solid must
happen elsewhere. Trash has to be generated to fill media vats— Regularity
demands it— but now, we live in an America which is developing a sense
of balance about such issues. As the public develops tastes for organic
irregularity, its superior, progress-oriented righteousness, confusion may have
to reign for many decades to come. What was a hands-down victory for the
corporate and the bureaucratic in the twentieth century may become a hotly
contested, high-stakes battle for hegemonous power and influence in the
twenty-first.
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