Lyotard: "How do you prove the proof? Who decides the conditions of truth?"
The restricted spectrum of knowledge is at the foundation of our current hyperrealities - the biggest crisis yet for the capitalist system.
In order to optimise the efficiencies for the elite operators in the global financial system, knowledge has been restricted, repackaged and sold as a new knowledge, a technological knowledge.
And, as Lyotard said: "Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just or the beautiful, etc but to efficiency."
Postmodernists view society as a "giant machine".
Our educations are contorted to fit in with the requirements of this machine.
It is no longer necessary to learn about the macro subjects, Real knowledge, as these subjects have no role in the machine.
Out goes Real History, Real Philosophy, Real Mathematics, Real Science and Real Languages and, instead, we are taught Business Studies, IT, Marketing, Media Studies, Cybernetics, Political Science and Government, Economics and Commerce.
"There are potentially two sorts of knowledge. One, the positivist kind would be directly applicable to technologies bearing on men and materials, and would lend itself to operating as an indispensable productive force within the system. The other is the critical, reflexive or hermeneutic kind - by reflecting directly or indirectly on values or aims, would resist any such 'recuperation'" - Lyotard, again.
Cybernetics are at the core of this hyperreality.
Because the global financial system is based on only a few teetering blocks of foundation stone, any analysis of these bases has to form a major part of any market analysts' armoury.
The pseudo-reality is self-fulfilling.
By imposing an autistic and psychopathic template on the system, the financial architects define the rules of engagement - we enter this distorted reality to determine their methods and aims, and then we depart to more holistic pastures as soon as is reasonably possible.
The cybernetic matrix has several core defining properties.
Firstly, maximisation and optimisation of the performativity of the financial system is the creed. All decisions are made in deference to the critical input-output ratio and to matters of efficiency.
Secondly, the cybernetic template is primed for corruption, and not just by its basic feature of rewarding the most antisocial behaviours in the marketplace. Through the establishment of an IT-based template, insiders, institutional power and the speculators are able to game the mathematical and statistical elements to proprietary benefit. The cybernetic structure provides, effectively, a closed system - numerous parameters that should have a relevance and a weighting are, instead, externalised.
With respect to the current crisis, these points are key.
All decisions related to the meltdown of the late phase of shareholder capitalism are made in deference to the markets exposing the greatest liquidities.
Credit derivatives define the creative decisions.
All lip service paid to lower tiers of the global financial system are simply that, lip service.
Crises are recurrent in capitalism, and the crises will always be more impactful at the lower levels of the system because any remedies prescribed are not targeting these strata, being focused entirely on the needs of the players at the Great Capitalist Poker Game that casts an ominous shadow over our economies and, indeed, our planetary eco-system.
Such an abusive template is a difficult sell.
Lyotard: "The state spends a large amount of money to enable science to pass itself off as an epic: the state's own credibility is based on that epic, which it uses to obtain the public consent which decision makers need... The sign of legitimacy is the people's consensus."
But the science of shareholder capitalism is a pseudo-science, an utter mockery of scientific principles.
Economics has no rules, no theory, it is not replicable under new circumstances, historical measurements have no value in any current assessment of the subject, there isn't even the groundings for a scientific hypothesis.
The Dismal Science is, in fact, The Dismal UnScience.
For most people in the world, it is simply Dismal...
Lyotard: "The subject of knowledge is not the people, but the speculative spirit."
Economics, when translated into the cybernetic world of arbitrage and hedging and the parcelling and selling and reselling of risk and debt, is a multi-disciplinary high stakes gambling medium.
This is not science.
We use cybernetics in our analyses of markets because the forms of analysis dovetail perfectly with the hyperrealities of the financial system. Fuzzy logic, neural networks and some fiendishly clever algorithms have been created to gain an edge in our trading activities in all marketplaces.
We do not believe in these analytical forms as a pure knowledge - they are merely adaptations to a matrix of fake knowledge and fake realities that define our postmodern world.
For example, our neural nets are extremely robust - up to 20% of our trading is based on these software creations. We game the pseudo-reality through laterally-thought inputs and train up the software to spot patterns in the underlying data. These patterns provide profit from the inefficiencies in the market, almost exclusively established by the gaming of the markets by those in positions of power.
This is not knowledge.
This is not science.
This is gaming.
A good way to consider knowledge is to think of a bicycle wheel, with numerous spokes emanating from the centre of the wheel. Each segment so developed may be regarded as an area of knowledge.
Postmodern shareholder capitalism, the states that are part of the project and the media who are there to provide disinformation merely look at one of these segments. All of the other areas of knowledge are superfluous to the performance of the capitalist entity.
By restricting knowledge to such a small area of the complete continuum of knowledge, we have established a mass of stupidity.
For, not only is the vast majority of knowledge discarded as being of no importance to the efficiencies of the marketplace, but also, the cybernetic and IT-based methods utilised to define these hyperrealities are, at best, simplistic and, at worst, idiotic.
We constantly have to resist pressure from computer nerds who think that their restrictive vision of the world has some relevance.
To a person, these individuals have a great failing - the inability to conceptualise and create holistic real-time structures that define the hyperrealities at play.
They think that they get it and we don't.
We think that they are "... those hyperbrains glued to their computers which, though already considerably underused, diminish themselves even more by having a machine function in their stead" - Jean Baudrillard.
And, it is these gross idiocies that enable the machinations of the grotesque abuses that have to be perpetrated in order to maintain this system.
This weekend, we applied our vast range of analytical methods to the corrupt world of the English Premiership.
We traded on all nine games.
Every stance was based on a holistic view of the corruptions in the market.
All of our trades won.
This seems to me a little bit of a waste of life, really.
I'd much rather be studying Cosmology...
We finish today with a statement from James Mitchell, Professor of Physics at the Université de Rennes I: "Many of the mathematical models used in banking were created by scientifically skilled young people who were lured into the banking industry because they could not get those kinds of salaries (and prestige) in research laboratories. Banks have taken much of the cream of the scientific talent in America and Europe, and to what end? The rush to increase profits has come to naught and in many cases led to financial disaster. Imagine what those young people could have done if they had chosen careers in science and medicine. What innovations might have resulted? What breakthroughs might have been achieved? Instead they were used to create a false financial system that is ruinous for our countries."
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
