Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The Shadows of Totalization, Part XXXIII

From now on, I am going to be thinking of Totalization as the process or processes by which ideas, impressions, perceptions, and behaviors, attitudes, and practices sluff back into, slide back down into, fall down into, their preconceived (“preconceived” being however these had already been conceived for whatever social structure had possessed or utilized them) pattern (orbit or path.)

In this sense, I mean for Totalization to be, not analogous to or metaphorically similar, but directly and literally the same as inertia. Inertia must be understood as the resistance of mass to a change in its state of motion.

“The vis insita, or innate force of matter is a power of resisting, by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.”- Sir Isaac Newton, definition 3, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

“In the absence of net external force, a body either is at rest or moves in a straight line with constant velocity.”- Newton’s first law of motion, the “principle of inertia.”

Note that just as an inert mass may be moving uniformly, there may be motion and even dynamism within Totalization, a kind of “constant velocity.”

Note also that Totalization wouldn’t be an absence of potentiality for change or conditions for change. It wouldn’t mean, for example, that in a Totalized society there weren’t people in universities or businesses or sitting on a street corner who didn’t have fresh ideas; or musty old books in dark libraries containing glowing idea-embers, or dusty old museums where phantoms of the past might begin to breathe anew. It might mean, though, that Totalization would intercept these breaths of fresh air and re-knit them so no change was actual.