The Dice, the Drone and Chance: Regarding Mallarmé's CinéPoem 'Un Coup De Dés...'

Here's Mallarmé's great poem Un Coup De Dés... (Trans =A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance). Kindly read it. Enjoy its sweeping aestheticism. Jienjoy! I will say something about in a moment.

         

I thought about that poem by Stephane Mallarmé, which I hadn't read for decades, as I tinkered with titles for my haiku, titled Une Friendly F-Fire. Don't worry about that e. You see, I was driven by the Muse to re-read Mallarmé after I was done, and the haiku published. And I was worried whether the French title of his poem had started with 'Un' or 'Une'. The answer is the former. Perhaps 'Une', used as I have, can never be right, but I will stick with it.

[More about Haiku]

Mallarmé's poem's silky -- is there room to add, 'and simultaneously chaotic and, perhaps, byzantine'? -- texture, its charming effect on the receptive and, I think, skeptical mind alike, is as fresh and refreshing to me today as it ever was those many years ago already. And yet, what I remembered before now was the musicality. Not the centrality of the concepts dice and chance in the whole composition. I had been a (sur)face reader, then, and was still learning the ways of deep text-reading. Chance I knew, but wasn't much interested in. Civilization -- the art of war, more specifically -- had not yet compelled science to invent drones, noisy helicopters and those B52s being the closest 'cousins'. Re-reading Mallarmé precipitated a veritable conceptual clash between Dice and Drone.

But there are dark clouds ahead, so to speak. What I want to say just now -- I am very clear about this (the hint is there in the haiku) -- is that the drone, as we in the early days of the 21st century are coming to know it already, long after Mallarmé's time for sure, is not any thrower's dice. Nor is the throw of the dice -- consequential as it may often be in a 'casino' or some other betting den (smoke-filled and intense and 'levitating;) -- in the same frame of thought as the drone's. Nor are the coming generations of drones to be awaited and anticipated with the equanimity that Ebay's naivety recently inspired in media narrations of the internet of things.

I suspect that, as we inch toward and past 2050, a throw of the drone -- or of swarms of drones with the tropical bee's charged, deadly, pinpoint intensity -- from unknown or impromptu or rogue places beyond the hazy horizon, will increasingly and perhaps ceaselessly occupy and terrorize the collective mind. Why? Because of the cargo or parcels we will fear it carries and is intended to deliver, remorselessly and at no moment's notice at all -- and with no qualms. Intended, indeed, to defeat real or imagined enemies, or wreak what will turn out to be unprecedented havoc on global social order and humanity's broad sense of ontological security in deep neighborhoods, in what we have hitherto been able to know as peacetime. How long it will take humanity to return to that old, historical sense of normalcy may be the arithmetical-moral equivalent of a Hundred Years War (here's a fistful of images).

 [Read Maurice Keene (2011) "The Hundred Years War"]

The point, finally, is this: "A throw of the dice will never abolish chance", yes. But the drone, weaponized, is another kind of thing altogether. Its stealthy, unrestrained throw threatens in a fundamental way the chance to live in privacy and safety and splendid isolation [here is another conception of 'splendid isolation'] in unreachable places. Unreachable because one has quietly inherited or found or devised buffers (of Time, Space and Number) and other sorts of rings and layers and moats of protection against unexpected or unwanted intrusion. A reign of armed drones would 'abolish' any sense of national security, as average citizens have come to understand it, and would threaten to render extinct the idea that people may have of organized society free of warlords and marauders, and intruders who are too stealthy and too swift and too targeting to keep at bay. 

The drone threatens to abolish the chance of not being reached; of not being found by those whom one does not care to be found by, and cannot hide from.



Updated: March 1, 2014

Nuclear Energy For Kenya? Not For a Long While!

It was surprising to read in one of the local dailies yesterday that the Kenyan government delegation, led by the Prime Minister, which was attending the Investment in the New Kenya conference in London, had asked UK investors to help Kenya develop a nuclear energy sector.

It was surprising on several grounds. First, the debate on the merits and demerits of nuclear power generation in Kenya has not even started here; certainly not in the public domain. This means that Kenyans are nowhere near reaching a consensus on this controversial and even dangerous idea; and that the consent of the governed is even farther from being sought or secured. Second, and following from the first, this news was breaking in London, not Nairobi -- which is not the way to go about such consequential matters.

Third, the timing of this nuclear idea could not have been worse -- and this makes both the idea and its timing patently frivolous. Why do I say so? One has simply to consider the idea in the context of the raging controversy surrounding Iran's nuclear ambitions, and the long-running geopolitical tensions fuelled by North Korea's nuclear programme (which is now to be scaled down or even, hopefully, wound up), to arrive at this unhappy conclusion. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it is reported that the audience which heard the Energy Minister's (Kiraitu Murungi's) suggestion, which was supported by the Prime Minister (Raila Odinga), responded with "laughter."
I read that laughter to signal both surprise and discomfort.

The arguments advanced for the nuclear option were essentially that: (a) it is a significantly cheaper source of electricity than hydropower; and, b) the sources of hydropower are under threat from the wanton destruction by Kenyans of water towers, the emblematic one being Mau Forest. This suggests to me that if the water towers were to be secured against destruction, then the case for the nuclear option, at this time, might not be persuasive simply on the grounds of its relative cheapness -- and when there are viable alternative sources of energy (such as geothermal, solar, wind and even coal).

So, why has the leadership failed to secure the water catchment areas -- and why are they not embarrassed to own up to this failure, and to see it for what it says about them and us? The answer, my friends, as one might say, is blowing in the uncertain political winds.

Let's face it: It is not yet the time for nuclear power generation in Kenya, and it is not likely to be before 2050. The home-grown technical expertise and capital base for such a venture are simply not there yet -- and are decades away from being in place. Kenya does not yet have a private sector entity with the muscle to do so, and the public sector is paralyzed by self-interest and private deals -- which are not in the public interest. If we were to go for nuclear energy now, we might in effect be doing it for other interests with greater financial muscle and political motivation: such as Libya's sovereign wealth fund, to which we seem to be surrendering everything that matters lately (oil pipelines, oil refineries, petrol stations, hotels and prime city plots).

The level of corruption in the country remains too high to allow for the safe introduction of nuclear technology at this time. One remembers, for example, that we could not, in the recent past, ensure the procurement of appropriate water purification chemicals, instead of plain chalk. How, in this kind of atmosphere, are we going to ensure the safe keeping and disposal of spent nuclear fuel-rods? And how are we going to protect the public from the dangers of radiation leaks and other accidents arising from a dysfunctional and intrusive polity? In whose parochial hands are we going to insist that the contracting for -- and, more importantly, control of -- nuclear facilities must always be?

The national political tectonics are also still too volatile to have such a facility in the country, which might be the focus of attention of warring ethnic bands. Before we can start serious planning, let us go through another three to five general elections to have some clarity about the stability and direction of our political culture and institutions. In the meantime, let us empower our universities to build up a critical mass of expertise in this and related fields. And let us allow time for our private sector to mature and acquire the requisite capacity. In the meantime, let us fully exploit our potential in hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, coal and fossil fuel.