Caveat: Coughcough-krakough

Dateline:  Krakow

Being sick is depressing even at home.   But while travelling, it can be more so – the combination of feeling out of control physically with the demands of alien culture, language, etc., become overwhelming.  I'm pretty certain I've managed to acquire a flu virus.  Yesterday I wasn't feeling well, but I ambitiously set out for Wawel (castle+cathedral that constitutes Poland's historical home of kings and cardinals, including Karol Wojtyla before his promotion in 1978).  I made it to the hill (about 2km from my hotel), but felt feverish and was coughing, and suddenly just gave up and walked back to my hotel, where I spent the day drinking fluids, eating vitamin C pills, and watching some lousy French news channel and napping intermittently.  I was clearly feverish last night, but I resisted the urge to open the window of my hotelroom – I think you have to let the fever do its work.

During my long walk, I began thinking about an odd idea:  what if the success of global market capitalism is rooted in something neurological?  Obviously different economic systems play to different strengths and weaknesses of human cognition, but my recent reading on the nature of thought has brought to the fore the apparently "competitive" or even "darwinian" (not quite appropriate) nature of consciousness:  various "ideas" (or memes, as Dawkins might have it) compete in the space of the mind for ascendancy, and the most dominant currents are what get pushed to consciousness at any given moment.   Could the darwinian nature of markets, along with the primary role accorded to "memes" (e.g. branding in the marketing) within Euro-American capitalism actually have some kind of natural resonance in the human mind?

That's not to discount Marx's progression of modes of production, which I think I still believe in.  But perhaps, viewing each mode of production as a more-or-less successful meme (or rather, "meta-meme"?), could it be that the evolution of cultural-economic structures is inevitably "pushed" by its cognitive environment (memes, after all, have the human mind as their formative habitat) toward the market model?  Or, turning to the dialectic, is it simply that our current models of human cognition are being unexpectedly influenced by the ascendancy of post-industrial capitalism?  Certainly, one could do a productive study of the correlation between historical models of mind (from Plato thru Descartes etc.) and the contemporarily dominant economic mode of production. 

I don't know that the idea has any legs, but it does tie in, at least indirectly, with my understanding of both Quijote and Persiles as "maps" of the socio-economic space of Cervantes' time.   Zizek (sp?) has an interesting study on Deleuze that I was reading before departing on this trip, that posits Deleuze as the theorist of post-industrial capitalism.  And obviously my efforts to tie cognitive models to socio-economic modes of production come straight from Deleuze's "rhizomatics." 

Mostly I'm talking out of my ass – lacking texts or quotes to substantiate my ideas and observations.  But one thing travel has always done for me, and which I was hoping this long trip would do again, is that it gets me out of cognitive "ruts" and helps open me to new ideas.