All that is solid melts into air
Marx wrote in 1848 that: "all that is solid melts into air," alluding to the way that capitalism subsumes social relations and makes all men subject to a form of exploitation; though some, arguably more than others. Capitalism has become the defining feature of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, and arguably to some extent, extending to years before that in various guises. The point here, is that things change, parameters change in society, and in the last few years there have been some serious shifts in the material nature of human life ranging from a heightened sense of vulnerability through COVID, the growing uncertainties and disappointments of climate change, tipping point changes in the acknowledgement of race and other minority relations spanning including gender and sexual orientation, to the cast iron, in-your-face prediction about the impacts of climate change, and renewed global political disruptions. Good things and bad, intermingled, as ever, but pointing in the direction of the winds of change.
"The past is a foreign country," (L P Hartley) ... we do things differently now. The things we have taken for granted are changing. Cracks occur in society when there is change; and these cracks often provide an opportunity to look behind things taken for granted, the way things are done, the kinds of things that are said and not said, the way things are looked at, the tools used to evaluate events and situations. This is a big deal for geographers, because looking at and describing the world is geographers do.
It is as if the code that runs our social operating system becomes revealed, and given its visibility it is possible to ask questions about the way that visible operating system runs. Uncomfortable code is revealed. Facial recognition, for example struggles to cope with people who are black, and cameras often wrongly expose images of black people. If our technology can be racist, what else can? And how come no one talks about it. What else works in the technological society that gets in the way; postcode profiling, impact of social media associations, gender, health profiling etc.
Maybe there is more, not only the concepts we use, the code we build, but maybe it is the value system we used to inform all these decisions. Perhaps the failures in the codes humans produce, are not failures in the code at all, but the failures in human coding, failures that humans can't recognise because it's their own operating system. A virus application on a computer cannot scan itself because the code it needs to scan is being used at the time. It takes an out of body experience (an application on an external drive) to scan the hard disc. How do humans scan their own hard discs for failures. This is the question of the post structuralist philosophers, who realise that the biases and failures might exist in the very tools we use to check for them; in language, in gesture, in images, in the very human machinery itself. Perhaps this is why the Occupy movement, using the anarchic Guy Fawkes mask, is focused in part in finding new forms of democracy, new structures, new ways of looking at the world. Perhaps this is why in acts of self abnegation, there have been toppling of statues and dissatisfaction with the structures and givens of society.
Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose post structuralist philosophical works posit new non hierarchical ways of looking at and problematising the world, create a new language for change, for social forces, social stratification, association and meaning. A new ethics for a new age.
