Shortly after nine
At Punta Arenas,
Notorious for fire even in this
Tierra del Fuego
A noble warship of the Queen’s
Went bang, and fell in smithereens.

First there was a noise
And all the glass blew in;
We were standing by the window at the time, and then
Dark smoke, bright flame, little smuts of flying men.

The captain,
Naked from his bath,
Had plunged into the sea
When he felt the first explosion,
Surfacing in time to get his hair burnt by the second,
Treading water, weeping.

He was taken to the cabin of our boat,
Which thankfully survived,
And, too bemused to think of stooping,
Left a trail of smudges on the ceiling.

If we could hear the endless material clatter of our bodies, the rustle of its elements one over another would hinder most efforts at communication. Much would be white noise, but some, and the most disturbing, would display the regularities of life, like the engine room hydraulics audible when lying in the bath with our ears beneath the waterline. It is fortunate that we so rarely catch even a fleeting half-heard fragment of this strain, which if not a dirge does suggest that, when all the variations have been worked through, the concert must come to an end.

The old, of course, are increasingly haunted by this music, while the young are happily insensitive to the physical and mechanical aspects of their perfectly functioning bodies and hear nothing but their own sweet voices. Consequently, the under thirties are the greatest enthusasts for the philosophy of spirit, which can only seem plausible when physical problems are fewest and the anaesthetic of dualism quite unnecessary. On the other hand, those who have the greatest need for a comforting division between mind and matter are denied an easy path into that view by the increasing racket of our functions, which throws before them the uncomfortable possibility that knocking pipes, creaking bone, and tearing muscle not only impinge on but constitute mental presence.

Though Attical plotting is tight
And the justice ingeniously right,
    Greek Fate lacks the flair,
    And punctilious care
Of the matriphagistical mite.

"I am a man, not a number" cries The Prisoner, and everyone knows what he means and feels. But the centre of this observation, the citadel it defends, is often held to be the unique identity of the individual, yet a moment's thought shows that this view is mistaken; nothing could be better formed to designate the unrepeatable and distinct person than a number. – There can be hundreds and thousands more "Peter Smiths", but only one 2079303636.

It would seem, indeed, that something about names matters more than achieving a unique reference, otherwise numbers would quickly have been adopted instead. Indeed, there is an aspect to numbers that is incompatible with the values served by traditional names.

The explanation is simple, and evident from any thoughtful reading of anthropology. While numbers offer a pin-point accuracy of reference within a mono-linear series, such a thing is of absolutely no interest to a sexually reproducing organism with its irregular web- or net-like structure of family relations. An asexual species, parthenogenetic lizards say, might happily adopt numbers to refer to one another, but we are unlikely to do so. Men and women cling to names because the families from which they spring and those to which they give rise are matters of enduring and intense concern. And the man who is only numbered, by a state institution for example, is a terrifying concept precisely because designation in digits takes that person out of the context of parental descent and regards them as a unit with only bureaucratic relations to those that came before and will come after in the sequence of registration.

The scandalous characters in David Lodge's Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work amuse the public because their actions are assumed to be implausible and fundamentally false; the world of these fictions is comic because it represents the absurd as normal. Similarly, Sharp's Porterhouse Blue is funny for those outside Cambridge because it obviously is and must be too ludicrous for accuracy.

A minority of readers will have an entirely different different view. The experienced academic is entertained (no more) by these works because they represent tedious everyday reality as if it were a comic fantasy.

"Though to us it conceivably was
  A thing of rather greater weight
We closed the door and made him stand upon the step
  As if the urn of ashes in his hand
Were just some gritty sweepings,
  Rather than the essence of your earthly state."

"While we argued in a ghoulish whisper, he got wet
  And bored with carrying your can,
So, stooping, put it down behind the milk, and went away,
  Where she, my wife I mean, found you later in the day,
Orphaned yet again, right back where life began."

Much of an individual's enthusiasm for economic and social planning can be explained by the aesthetic appeal of map over territory. Perhaps all of it. Such a person may mistake the plan's informational purity, in other words its informational poverty, for freedom from error and waste, not perhaps appreciating that mistakes and misdirected effort are inherent to the real world, and part of its wealth of redemptive opportunity in the face of changing circumstance and emergency.

Furthermore, insofar as enthusiasts for planning are able to enforce the plan's purity, weaken the population under their direction. This is obvious, as already observed, the variety of intellectual content (some of it plain error in the prevailing situation) makes that society able to respond to changes and crises that emerge in spite of the plan. What seems like redundancy and waste today proves to be indispensable tomorrow; the faults of this decade turn out to be insights of the next.

The concept of Excluded Context is also relevant here. In creations governed by aesthetic principles it is clear that we guillotine off or edit out information that pollutes the tableau. The exclusion of the territory beyond the margin of the picture, the aggressive framing of the photograph, the abrupt start and end of the novel, the lost context of the lyric poem, are not losses that any one would restore. Similarly, the 'plan' tends to presume a static, bounded, even atemporal, society in a state of evil, that must be corrected to bring it a similarly fixed state of virtue, a state that is, by definition, insusceptible to unexpected internal development or external shocks. This is irresponsible negligence by any standard, but it is surprisingly common, and the history of economic planning provides many examples, the sad history of the Soviet Union being one long case in point.

This suggestion, that economic planning has a strong aesthetic dimension, will strike many as prima facie misconceived; the dismal science is utterly lacking in joy (and some would say, I think correctly, that this deficiency is evidence that it is not yet a science). But there is more to aesthetics than simple delight, and in any case economics yields intellectual pleasures that are sufficient to motivate my thesis. After all, economic planning resembles all systematic philosophy in offering the reader the potential of intellectually apprehending a world that otherwise lies beyond our grasp, and the reward is pleasure of a kind, and aesthetic therefore.

The comparison with philosophy takes us a little further: like a pure philosophical system 'Planning' must be couched at a level of abstraction so high that it can make plausible claims to universal descriptive, explanatory, and predictive power. It is this level of abstraction that renders such aesthetically persuasive systems open to error, for some phenomena are so complex that even only moderately abstract accounts are only very approximately true, however pleasing they may seem to be. And in the realm of economics this approximate nature is more or less fatal, since micro-economic phenomena are so important to the Plan and are the source of developments that may lead to system-wide transformations that leave the Plan irrelevant.

The aesthetic attractions of fiction, that it presents hyper-integrated networks of causal relations with little or no redundancy is also true of economic plans. Moreover, just as the fictional scheme, which neither needs nor should have an end, is shielded from the problem of infinite extension by arbitrary termination, all 'Plans' have a state in which no further change that is worthy of notice is deemed possible. History comes to an end and, absurdly, all concerned live happily ever after.

Finally, for now, it should never be forgotten that novels are written for the satisfaction and pleasure of those outside the story, for the author and the reader. Plans, too, are aesthetic in this respect; they serve the interests of those making the plans and observing them, and these are interests not in any simple or pecuniary sense (though such things are not quite completely irrelevant). Plans, like novels, are a joy to behold, rich in significant links and satisfyingly comprehensible, unplagued by clutter, unknowns, unknowables, dead-ends, delays, waste, and needless duplications. Most satisfyingly of all they have a sense of purposeful termination, the arbitrary stop that is dressed as a necessary and inevitable closure delivering Peace, Stability, the Just Society.

At first I thought it was affection
Made them stand behind me so,
Or tenderly patrol the rocks
And beams on which I stood,
Their shins and whiskers beaded
By unexpected spray.

Twenty yards further down the shore
A man in waders caught a fish
Too small to keep but big enough to kill;
The nearest took it at first bounce
And headed for the trees.
My following left with quite disgraceful speed.

Cats, are strangers everywhere,
Never get to love the land,
Prefer to lurk like refugees:
Alien beggars in Japan.

We often feel that a popular singer in some indistinct way speaks for us as individuals. This is a pleasant experience, overall, but there is a less attractive interpretation. Far from being an altrustic representative, the singer can be seen as a demagogue that charms and attracts the listener through the offer an overwhelmingly attractive fantasy of identification with a dominant will in active control of an audience. The listener is encouraged to project themselves into the role of monologuist, voicing the will of the crowd, and suppressing dissenters. This paradox explains the otherwise peculiar experience of that listener, who is passive and subservient but nevertheless believes that the experience is one of liberty.

While the singer is a focus for projection, and open to every one of the audience, a toll is extracted, which is in part economic, through ticket prices and the cost of recordings, but also entails a more insidious loss of freedom. In this respect the resemblance to the political orator and demagogue is very close; the speaker makes it possible for the individual members of the audience to project their will on to others through the medium of that speaker, but they sacrifice a great deal of their actual personal freedom in order to obtain this sensation of powerful independence and realised expression.

There is, however, this difference between singers and politicians; the latter make little or pretence to deep significance, and their influence is shallow even when widespread, and they retain no long term purchase over their listeners. The singer, by contrast, asserts and through the traditionally successful methods of metrical language and musical accompaniment, they suggest extreme profundities and can consequently exert a long term directing power on the mind. Only time, or a competing fantasy, typically another singer, dislodges the controlling form.

Moreover, the singer's authoritarian voice denies significance to all others; it drowns out competition and by the use of music even achieves hints of supernatural power. The singer is a jealous god. Lend me your ears said the orator, but the singer will return nothing once given, the mind in total must be surrended; "Subdue your will to mine", says the singer, "and become free".

But serious though this is, the most damaging aspect of contemporary song is the credibility that it gives to the concepts of central, authoritarian control. It seems possible that these fantasies of extreme and hypnotic power are in part responsible for the steady erosion of personal freedom evident all around us. The singer-audience relation is so dominant a cultural structure that it has come to suggest that the most intense form of freedom is to be achieved through the medium of the singer, and that the individual can only be free by limiting the acts of others via a collective organism, the "singer" or the state.

Even the most sentimental piece that succeeds in raising tears escapes our full censure, however much we resent the imposition; but we hate nothing so much as an abortive attempt to move our feelings to the point of spontaneous response.