Solution Space

Experimental Unit 4: The Emergency-of-Emergencies and update to Friend/Enemy Distinction by Adam Stephen Wadley

Experimental Unit Episode 3: Operational Concept: Discursive Blindspot of Internal Conflict by Adam Stephen Wadley

In this episode, I (re-)introduce my concept of emergency-of-emergencies. This is built off of the "systems-of-systems" frame within systems theory and the "complex emergency" concept developed by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Complex Emergencies include wars and conflict but go deeper with that. I enlarge this concept in ways the military is not able to by connecting the notion of complex emergency to individual spiritual emergencies and crises of identity. By shifting into Emergency thinking, I hope that we can find an adequate response the emergency-of-emergencies that we are facing. I also relate emergency to the root of the word "emerge," which means to come up from water. The emergency is just what is coming up for us right now. This quasi-psychedelic shift may make it possible to break through discursive and strategic deadlocks.

Second Experimental Unit episode. I expand a bit on the concept and mainly talk about “emergencies-of-emergencies,” a take on “systems-of-systems.” Things get self-referential as I offer a view of reverse parasociality, the idea that one can be more genuinely oneself in a mediated format. This is the result of systemic cascade emergency between top level systems of systems (states) and what I term the personal emergency, the emergency of incarnation. The importance of paradoxically normalizing emergency (the emergency of what to say, the emergency of distrust) in order to build foundations of trust or meta-trust.

Ultimately this is state-building activity, and I’d like to encourage the audience to see themselves as state builders. We are all sovereign in our own sense, and I think at the moment the most important thing is to respond to the emergency of communication. I practice sacrificial transparency and concept formulation to that end, and hope you find it useful in addressing your own exigencies.

Links

Explanation of Koans and double-bind:

https://myemail.constantcontact.com/The-Double-Bind--trap-or-gate-.html?soid=1101242677087&aid=OYt25LQH6sA

RAND report on systems destruction warfare:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1708.html

The first in a new kind of internet-only show, this is a recording I made of my thoughts on complex emergencies. I found this concept on the Joint Chiefs of staff website: https://www.jcs.mil/Doctrine/Joint-Concepts/Joint-Concepts/.

Complex Emergencies are of a higher logical type than war. War is a kind of complex emergency. I realize I’m a neo-pre-Socratic in finding my one principle, emergency. I go into how I think this is better than finding a historical scapegoat. Alienation from these social narrative modes can lead to messianism and misanthropy, which are not so dissimilar.

Rambling here like the episode is a ramble. Hope it entertains, I plan to kind of go over the same things some more and post more by just letting myself go. Have to fight negativity and anxiety to put things out, hopefully it is useful to someone out there.

More on the Experimental Unit to come in episode 2

After some time in the tank, this episode features the ideas that have brought me back. I introduce the concept of semio-stratocracy, an amalgam of Barthe's/Baudrillard's semiocracy, or rule by signs; and stratocracy, a term for a government dominated by the military. I lay out a kind of semiotic conflict theory drawing on Bateson's work on the double bind, Baudrillard/Wilden's idea of a higher logical order being necessary to displace a system, and Schmitt's concept of the sovereign deciding the state of exception, and defining the normal situation. In this, I venture a new warfighting concept, along with semio-stratocracy itself and also the idea of the weaponized concept, namely sacrificial transparency, to begin to describe an operational logic which can carry us out of a spiraling war logic.

This episode takes concepts from cognitive warfare and more to talk about why our opinions matter. Instead of thinking that we have "no influence," we can consider that opinion and state of mind are crucially important fields (ones states and militaries are trying to influence). I put together some thoughts from this angle and draw out words with multiple meanings to try to think more expansively about the work we do with ourselves and on the world.

On this show, I recap and expand on the introduction to Cognitive Warfare I provided last time. Then, I dissect Chapter 8 of the Report on NATO's 1st Scientific Meeting on Cognitive Warfare and describe aspects of what the authors claim about China's strategic culture and approach to cognitive warfare. I also explain how I think aspects of cognitive warfare are found within the text itself to portray NATO in a noble light. I claim that this reflects cognitive warfare endemic to the West (and all societies), and that such societal echo chamber-type thinking it itself a threat to us as we contemplate threats to our ability to think and act for ourselves from foreign powers and also domestic institutions.

In this first episode on Cognitive Warfare, we cover definitions of cognitive warfare taken from NATO documents, and relevant statements made by Xi Jingping and General Gerasimov of Russia. This new focus of warfare makes the human mind the battlefield. We also begin to think more expansively about the ways that states are engaged in cognitive warfare with their own citizens, not only with each other. More to come as Cognitive Warfare introduces a new frame to discuss love and war in the 21st century.

See texts cited in this show here:

https://www.thesolutionspaceproject.org/post/cognitive-warfare-resources

In this episode, I describe the concepts of total war and total art. Both of these concepts use the word "total," emphasizing that many different elements are integrated into a holistic war, artwork, or gesture. I talk about how "total art" may be the way for us to prevent the logic of total war from consuming everything. "Total Artwork" has its origins with Richard Wagner, and the concept itself should be interrogated to find whether there is really "an" artwork any more than there is "a" war.