THE "ONTIC CONSTITUTION".

As the whole world over wakes from its millenia of 'tribal' sleep its peoples leave their homelands and walk into the shanty-towns of cities. This global migration now claims over half the human race.

They became other than they were. They forget themselves and become cyphers, numbers in a computer to be computed into the profit and loss of institutions, companies and states. Something is needed to establish authentic identities: something that gives the immigrant, the countryman and the refugee the wit, the savvy, the intelligence and the assurance of the original native. Yet what was this but his confidence that what he was, was part of an immemorial whole that had never and would never change?

It was a falsehood. Everything has a beginning and an ending - even Being itself. We know that each consciously individual human alive today 'began' some billions of years ago. The clock of history has ticked for this unimaginable length of time to bring this individual into Being. Then this particular clock will chime one last time and go out - for ever and until the End of Time itself. That particular history has ceased to Be.

There is no comfort to be had in the old certitudes of an endless and immemorial return of the 'same'. But is endless change, the mere 'churning' of the economic machine all that we and our descendants can look forward to? Is our knowledge of our true 'state of Being' merely a poisoned apple? It is not. This knowledge of finitude has cargoed other powers. Men are able to make war on each other with such titanic efficiency that what was a merely summer pastime, and the cement of nations, has now passed beyond any such employments into prohibition - for all but deranged suicides.

The "War of the Arts of Peace" proposes its consequence. The term appears an oxymoron. This is because these Arts are relatively unpracticed by the great powers who have won the physical wars of recent centuries. My own country, England - or more accurately London - has not practiced the basic engine of the most powerful of these Arts for some five centuries. This did not concern this island during the history of its Empire. Administering the globe's capital gave Britain supreme power. Since then, for the last seventy years, Britain has been slowly disintegrating. Today its 'constitution', which remains obstinately 'post-imperial' has virtually ceased to work. Its state is fracturing, as are all the states of the West. They all lack the cement of War. My proposal is to institute an "Ontic Constitution" to mediate the "War of the Arts of Peace" that would prevent them from regressing into the tribal states that they once were - and that they once dominated. The states that acquire this 'Ontic Constitution' will be the ones that survive and dominate the comfy little tribal failures.

Over half of the human race have now made this 'walk' into a 'crypto- (or pseudo), urbanity. They have left, never to return to, that "Time of Eternal Return". Only those who learn to make this transition to a true Urbanity and live in an Ontic Constitution can hope to survive this terrible history as 'themselves', aka. something more distinctly 'real' than a culture pulped into oblivion by the faceless and meaningless mathematics of the "Age of Trash" (so exactly named by Rem Koolhaas).

To achieve this is no easy task. Yet it is those States who have generated the most of this "Trash" that are least able to cure themselves. For it is precisely these once-powerful cultures that forbade themselves the use of the tools to create an 'Ontic' Constitution for themselves. For seventy years, since the ending of the Empires of Britain, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy and Germany these states have ruined themselves by governing their own people as if they were imperial subjects whose unruly and untrustworthy spirit must be destroyed by the denigration and destruction of their metaphysical lifespace. The citizens of these states have been rendered powerless to resist being reduced to the mere economic statistics required to support the fiscal revenues of their directionless, pointless, ontically frivolous states. Meanwhile, out of a foolish respect for the erstwhile achievements of this well-past-its-sell-by Western Culture the Asian Tigers follow in their footsteps.

I was 82 this summer. It has taken me seventeen years to script my 44 Lectures. I have been attached to my pacemaker for three-and-a-half years. I have less energy than before. But I will mediate these lectures as an internet course for those who wish to learn my techniques during the year 2016-2017. I call this variously a 'Camera Lucida' and a 'Tricorso'. Its ambition is to leave its Participants with the powers to exercise these Techniques at every scale, from the individual spirit to a whole society. For those who wish to know more I recommend that you 'click' on the headings below and in the blue sidebar to the right.

PRINTED COURSE MATERIALS - IN the "AGE OF TRASH.

An 'outline' of the printed Course Materials may be found in the blue sidebar to the right. Click on them to download them as Pdfs so you can either read them now or print them to keep. I dislike having to present the Course Materials in any other medium than the one thousand colour-printed kaolin-coated pages of their three hardbacked and signature-sewn volumes. If there is an everyday, immediately-to-hand example of the "Age of Trash" (aptly so named by the eminent Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas), it is the screen you, my Dear Viewer, presently contemplate. A printed volume is physical. Its smooth, finely-imprinted pages glow with the CORRECT colours. A volume is COMPLETE. It shows its whole in relation to its parts. These relations will NEVER change. Its meaning may elude the reader for a long time, and many readings, perhaps even for ever. But the volume itself remains, physically intact, unmoving and always ready for the reader to 'enter'.

BOOKS AND BUILDINGS

A Book resembles a Building - in relation to the fluxious chaos around it. However large, a building remains 'present' to all who would understand it. The Web is like a the faces in a city's endless crowds - all here today and gone tomorrow. Every 'page' on the web is unstably related to every one of a billion others. It as if, after some obliterating tragedy, all the books ever printed were unbound, their leaves loosed to float in an infinite Sargasso. Yet to look overboard is to find, swimming to one's hand, the leaf one wanted. If there is one characteristic that typifies 'trash' it is the 'web's' total, unceasing, refusal to cohere, clarify and achieve a semantic and syntactic textuality beyond the state of being mere, disconnected, "data'.

Nevertheless, without these marvellous inventions I could not have 'scripted' (I do not call it writing when every verbalisation has its iconic 'double'), these 44 Lectures. Neither could I propose to give this little Course (that I call a 'Camera Lucida'), over the internet. I write the above merely so that you, by Dear Viewer will know what I really value and the nature of the ambitions of this 'War of the Arts of Peace'. Wallowing in the trash of our Digitial Age is not a substitute for the ancient ambitions of humanity. Its machines are better employed to realise these ambitions more effectively.

THE BLUE SIDEBAR and this MAIN COLUMN.

The blue sidebar contains only "Course materials".

What follows here, on this main sand-coloured page are references to some essays I have written in order to 'situate' you, Dear Viewer, in the subject of the 'War of the Arts of Peace'. You may choose to subscribe to the Course after reading the Course materials offered in the Blue Column. Or you may like to have a look at some of these essays before you ask for the Course materials.

'LISTING' POST-MODERN BUILDINGS:

2016 is the year that Historic England (the Department of State that used to be, until this year, called "English Heritage"), will begin compiling their analyses of the "Post-Modern" buildings to recommend to HMG's Minister for Culture Media and Sport for 'Listing' for statutory protection against summary alteration or demolition. The owners of these buildings become legally constrained, on pain of considerable fines, or even imprisonment, to ask permission of their Local Authority to execute any such works.

LOOKING INTO THE VOID. An essay examining whether the 'Anglosphere' has ever either understood the fundamental engine that powers the metaphysical part of human lifespace-design, or ever made of use of its practical application. This Essay ends, after page 16, with a proposal as to how the ignominious ejection from Basra City (and ultimately both Afghanistan and Iraq) could have been avoided and the Constitutionalism of the West permanently installed in the Middle East (and any other regimen).

SOME FAQS. Questions that pass through the mind

DIRECT E-MAIL link.

SOMETHING TECHY FOR THE NERDS. A word on the tech of this site.

INDEX to the Essays that are 'buried' behind the words (coloured red or green), on this page. Click on the coloured section of the text to release the Essay.

SAND-COLOURED Page.

1.Britain has been slowly disintegrating. aka. "The Trillion Dollar Kindergarten" is an essay describing a strategy for 'Pacification' using the construction of a chain of city-blocks comprising a whole Quartiere of at least the Capital City. The strategy aims to build-in an Ontic Constituion scripted into an Arendtian Theatre of Appearances that is of a sufficient scale to appropriate a 'Body Politic'. In this way any New Constitution may be 'naturalised' for the culture INTO WHICH IT IS BUILT.

2. will be the ones that survive and dominate the comfy little tribal failures.: "THE METAPHYSICAL FRACTION"; a short essay predicting a general and complete inability to grasp the ultimate meaning of the "44 Lectures".

3. computed into the profit and loss of institutions, companies and states. The fruits of political failure from sixty years of the leadership, by "FENLAND TECH", of British Architectural Culture.

4.Its machines are better employed to realise these ambitions more effectively.: "THE TWITTEROCRACY REBELS", and "FROM Tee-WALL TO CITY-WALL"; an argument for a "FACULTY of URBANITY" whose purpose would be to propose how one may employ a new understanding of Architecture to come between losing a war in the ruins of a city and winning it by obliterating it. The ambition to return Architecture to the close (but improved by a radical rethinking), relationship it has had with Military Engineering for 9,000 years.

5. "But then this is what I intend to teach you.": "DEAR POTENTIAL PARTICIPANT". A letter to those who would particpate in the Seminars of the "Camera Lucida".

End of the INDEX of ESSAYS hidden in the blue text (but highlighted in a different colour), on the Sand-coloured page.

There are other ESSAYS on this sand-coloured page, which are also highlighted in a different colour. But they are titled as they are.