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Discourse as Social Interaction

September 20, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Discourse as Social InteractionDiscourse as Social Interaction by Teun A. van Dijk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a fairly standard introductory text. Here we see a Foucaultean influenced approach to rhetoric in which the positions and interruptions, cuts and corrections of a text reproduce the power structures and people’s places in them. Knowledge is presented as active positioning within a time index. This is managed through a variety of different contexts, each chapter meant to highlight a cut of institutional rhetoric, whether this is between sexes, as politicians, in a community, between races and so on. All the differentials are made available when we take a specific view — with our knowledge of how those institutions work. Is this a manner of finding the information we want in the text? Or are we super imposing only one view? There is only one view available at a time, otherwise how can we tell if someone is behaving in this or that manner due to their positions in a transaction (store owner, customer) or race, or age or any other difference?

This is where discourse studies breaks down, because we can’t isolate those interactions solely though one context at a time except in our study. In real life these contexts cross over each other and depattern one another.

In many ways this was a good refresher as to the many approaches and methods, although these different views only work because we assume an identity as a more basic substrate to the participants identity — one founded on the unquestionable equality of subjectivity. It is only with this unquestionable “0 level equality” that we are able to understand that there is a difference in power between participants. This difference must then be attributed to the institution and their relative agency in their roles, because without it, how could we under that there is any differential at all (so therefore, they must be equal).

This normalization of equalization has often been the role of universities in order to insist that knowledge based approaches is a way to elitist enforced equality… that the advanced studies of rationalization (mostly only available to the wealthy) is the way for one to signify that one is more deserving to be equal and not fooled by the power differential of institutions used to create inequality.

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The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

July 12, 2015 / posted in rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and MoneyThe General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Keynes is often touted as the most famous of economists, mainly because he was most influential as to how governments and economies are run today. We do have to recognize that his theory was the product of his times, and that economics as a whole is still developing.

In a sense though, Keynes is less a creative theoretician than he is a mechanic. If you understand neoclassical economics as a set of relations, Keynes is best understood as ushering a new era of economics in which the “natural” point of equilibrium is no longer viable. This is like the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism. Keynes allows us to understand that given a particular initial context, the “natural” equilibrium could be anywhere else. This allows governments today to twist the economy around so that we don’t focus so much on producer credit as we do on consumer credit. Keynes has found a new way to exploit a market bubble, one founded on consumption.

We are paying the price for his ideas.

Yet his ideas are really only a mechanic’s patch. If the machine works only in certain temperatures, then let us keep that machine in those temperatures. Not revolutionary. Just understanding a limit of economics’ rationalism.

Towards the end of his book he makes a stab at understanding the limits to the formal limits of economics when he realizes that all he is really doing is questioning assumptions in economics. He ends by stating that often economists only go for the logically consistent and easy answers rather than risk being wrong going for an obscure truth. He admires those of the latter but isn’t seemingly willing to build a new theory based off of any obscure truths. In this sense, his questioning of economics rationality is a questioning of his own theories as well. Does he undermine his book? In a way he does. He should have started with this foundation instead. But alas, I guess Keynes is more an academic than anything else.

I did find his writing to be stuffy. His precision is remarkable but his writing is too flat. He could emphasize his ideas better and explicate them by speaking sometimes of an outside of economics.

I think that as an economist he is important to understanding where we come from. After Keynes we got away from all the speculation panics that used to rock the economy every 20 years with its horrid unemployment. Too often, as many of these reviewers demonstrate, that, in not knowing where Keynes is responding to, we only see the insufficiency of his ideas. And so, his ideas are too dated. As a mechanic he helped usher in an era of abundance but this abundance was found on tooling the neoclassical system and “hacking” it to work a certain way, not on building a new theory, one that would ultimately be sustainable. Our current consumer and government debt in sustaining endless demand for relatively full employment is proving to be worrisome.

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The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967

February 8, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967 by John Kenneth Galbraith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am definitely a fan of Galbraith…and I don’t say that about many authors. While not a complete collection of his writing, this is definitely a good selection of what he was about as an economist.

What I find fascinating is that The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State come from an American economist (or Canadian if you like) and yet support many of Marx’s conclusions about merchant ideology. The sense that merchant capital extended to producers and consumers alike (producers since the Dutch in the 1600s and then, to consumers after WW2, as state backed consumerism) guarantees the use value that makes production monetarily sound (completing the material dialectic of merchant capital) ex post facto is astounding. That Galbraith extends this idea by recognizing that technology is the key to capitalism, in terms of production and social disruption, something not yet recognized by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo or Marx is will worth the read. If communist minded individuals and Marxists alike read more of Marx and actually kept their minds open instead of being reactionary we might have a deeper understanding of our state backed capitalism.

While Galbriath does not advocate revolution, he definitely insists that we need to change our values if we want to survive in a degrading environment and do more with our lives than make the anonymous bureaucrats wealthy (technocrats of our technostructure as he calls them).

Despite this insistence that humanity use its powers for more than making wealth and endless production and increased poverty and degradation, Galbraith adds with this thought a heavy analysis of the inner workings of state and industry as a unity that transcends the explicated boundaries of American politics. He understands that we are not really free anymore; that our freedom is limited to our consumerist subjectivity. While this analysis does miss some of Marx’s social understandings (that a change in material relations means a change in societal arrangement) Galbraith does add a refreshing view of how economics and infact higher education is complacent in arguing for the status quo. For why should they bite the hand that feeds them?

Furthermore, as we specialize deeper and deeper into fields of study, we lose the ability to connect the more general dots. Our world becomes fragmented across many areas. Specialists cannot see where they are going, much like those economists who eschew math appear less rigorous. People doing specific tasks will more likely see their world through the filter of that task, and be unable to comprehend outside of it. As our complexity in our world rises with each year, it becomes less and less likely that there is anyone driving the wheel. This is how we can see the technostructure, as an faith that promotes itself so that we become less and less able to break from it as time goes on, as our specific interests (employment, leisure, study) becomes less and less able to identify the nature of our cage — as an over arching planning structure. Much like how the planning system in the Soviet state was run by anonymous bureaucrats in a state apparatus, our planning system is run by anonymous technocrats in various corporate chains backed by a state system.

I won’t continue on about how this is reflective in our worldview of modernism — our production of epistemes — but there is a direct link here, between how our knowledge is formed and our value system is driven by philosophical, educational and economic concerns for no other reason than to develop itself further, for us to be more completely mired in its logic and its mindless production of demand desires and status on various corporate and civil chains of our own unthinkable making.

We live on this Earth, and fulfill the needs of the very game we create in order to live together on this Earth without ever really looking up and acknowledging that we have created extreme wealth and extreme suffering with no end in sight… if only so that one can be satisfied at the expense of another, and for what? So we can die together and leave the world a slightly more ugly place?

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Transcritique: On Kant and Marx

January 30, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Transcritique: On Kant and MarxTranscritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kojin Karatani argues for the formal equivalence of Kant and Marx as for Karatani, both thinkers critique their fields of study (Kant in philosophy and Marx in economics) by positioning themselves in the interstices. For both, all knowledge is a constructive difference, a synthesis of different transcendental fields. For Kant, we have empiricism and metaphysics suspending the transcendental apperception. For Marx, money weaves a field from which surplus value can perpetuate capitalism through the extension of merchant capital. This reading relies on the understanding that different spheres of money, different cultural, geological, economic and semiotic values allow merchant capital to attain surplus value through what is basically arbitration. Karatani then expands on Marx, applying him in various ways up to the current consumerist state. This reading by itself isn’t enough — Karatani emphasizes that such disparate spheres are created through the metaphoric union of the capitalist-nation-state. Much of Karatani’s chapters on Marx are devoted to arguing for this articulation while correcting much simpler readings of Marx as perpetuated by Engels. Of course, Marx and Kant are both difficult thinkers to read. Kant is notoriously erudite, and Marx is notoriously long winded. Yet Karatani manages them both, along with various supporting thinkers and their various positions, to illuminate Marx and Kant while maintaining a slender volume just over 300 pages in text.

I highly recommend this book. This is my second time reading it. The first time, I was a little lost, better read on Kant but not very well read on Marx. This time around, about ten years later, I ate this book up. Karatani proves to be a close reader while being a precise reader, a difficult task. He brings up details when details are needed and illustrates broad topics when overviews are to be given. If I were to characterize his approach of transcritique, it is less about utopia (both Kant and Marx are prone to be understood as utopic thinkers) and more about understanding the context by which the logic of their fields of study are arranged. Marx did so in his volume 3 of capital, understanding the state’s irrational role in supporting and promoting capital in relation to other states. This is much like how Kant, according to Karatani, in his 3rd critique moved forward to speak of a “plural subjectivity” often thought of as his thoughts on aesthetics.

It’s strange that Marx and Kant can be read against one another with such similar structures.

In a way, I wish for Karatani to have included at least a conclusion, to tie both of these guys together, as he did so in the beginning. What have we to gain from this methodology of transcritique? It’s true that his last chapter on Marx moves forward to provide alternatives and reasons as to why capitalism should not be allowed to persist, and why it will inevitably fail. Still, he leaves this methodological approach behind, and the first third of his book (on Kant) without mention in the conclusion. His big take on bracketing as being necessary for knowledge leaves me wondering — what does this method of transcritique bracket, and where are Karatani’s antinomies? What assumptions does he see himself making? Technology for Karatani is in pure service of capitalism’s ability to create organic unity in production and capital as well as the creation of new temporary values in the form of lifestyles. He brackets the possibility for technology to create relations outside of the 4 social relations as he espoused by Marx.

In a way though, this book could stand a third section, one on information, knowledge and money together. This section would combine these two points and statistic a new domain of examination, namely that of the internet… with bitcoin and the like. Coming out in 2003, it’s surprising that only 10 years later, transcritique could stand to be updated in this way. Technology has surly surpassed our ability to grasp what we are doing as it extends much more quickly how we can do it.

Still, a great book. It’s amazing how little Marxists, even staunch communists, have read of Marx. They get too caught up trying to solve the problems of capital that they don’t seem to appreciate or understand what capital is, and how it allows for much more than just problems. If you’re on the fence about this book I would recommend reading it. Nearly every page has something worth taking away from, and that means you probably have to reserve two hours to read 50 pages. The time is well spent.

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The Nature and Properties of Soil

January 25, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all, utility / No Comments

The Nature and Properties of SoilThe Nature and Properties of Soil by Nyle C. Brady
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We may not think about it, because we treat the ground we walk on as a surface to get around from place to place. But the soil is the collection of what earth’s crust. Mixed with chemicals and chunks of matter collected from geological, meteorological, cultural, technological, social and the soil becomes a matrix reflexive of more than just “recent” geological and climate events but it also comes to mirror the action of man. The depth of our knowledge of the soil correlates with the noticed differences in phenotypical expressions of plants, animals and society. We build on the soil, so we need it stable, we grow on soil, so we need it fertile, we live on soils so we need it to be productive, expansive, beautiful and natural. Natural here, acts as a term to stabilize this collection, as we recognize soil as what it isn’t by what we need it to be. Thus, our knowledge grows deeper and deeper as we track (un)desired changes in the areas of (un)welcome surprises. Plants don’t grow as good, or they have a discoloration. Floods happen. Buildings and roads collapse or crumble. Soil is one of the areas which has an influence, as soil is foundational to all aspects of human existence, as all life comes from it, all stability is attributed to it, without it we wouldn’t have a place to be. We are made of it. It makes us, and returns to us our waste as useful, life and abundance (at least before there was too much, and too great a variety).

Thus, this textbook’s depth reflects the depth to which humankind has become knowledgeable about the soil because we have traced our needs back to the soil, to this depth, that this 1000 page book is just the beginning. Yet even with its multitudinous diagrams, rampant calculations, redox equations, and geological terminology to nominalize difference in types, origins, natures of soil; you can still find hearty admonishments, and mentions of what humans use the soil for, what humans want from it, how humans mistreat it because it costs too much, or we were once ignorant. Our dependency on this prime earth is foretold in these pages by the amount of time, devotion and study it has taken to amass this depth of knowledge. And there are still things we don’t yet know about the soil but hope to find out! Our reliance is truly unending.

Along the way, you’ll find that much of this information is classified into chunks. But the parts of these chunks interact with one another, in dimensions the book still tries to highlight but obviously holds to be less important than the consistency of what has been chunked. Likewise, the soil itself has bands of interference as influences from one area, say climate, or another, say, by a farmhouse, all intermix. This is the nature of soil, that soil is a collection of anonymous particles that share similar constraints. For example, while the book mentions resistance in soil, this resistance is mostly due to contextual factors, such as what other influences of climate, geology, industry in its “surrounding” shall also claim influence. The creation of these contexts are the mutually shifting ground of shifting soil, as there is no soil; soil is what stays the same regardless of changes, and that formulates a substantive basis for naming them by what stays mostly the same.

Perhaps in some order of decades we may want to consider additional soil types, but this may not happen as our knowledge of the soil and our knowledge of our reliance on it, has introduced some movements whereby we wish for maintaining the soil, or even improving its functions in the aspects we deem to be desirable for the soil. This too is a sliding scale. As our knowledge increases, so we do find more ways in which our actions and treatment has influenced the soil heretofore unseen. The collection of our actions is a retroactive synthesis, ex post facto, of the true nature of our actions, not just in how we know but also how we are ignorant.

This differentiating edge of what soil can show us in our own knowledge highlights two aspects, both of which are parallax. On the one hand, we create our knowledge as an imprint (extension) of what we are… not just expressive of our desires but also expressive of aspects of our person as are unaware of being. On the other hand, this highlights the need for a post-rational approach to conceptualizing our frame. Following the work of Humberto Maturana, we can understand that “life is knowledge” and thus knowledge is the conceptual correlation with the extent of our ability to comprehend and appreciate what we are. The parallax isn’t simply that human consciousness is the limit that defines our fields of knowledge, but that the limit of our knowledge is the extent of our human differentiation from the manifolds of soil, flesh and matter. It follows then, that our discursive practices are the materialization of our knowledge. The two go hand in hand as more than epiphenomenal, as the correlation isn’t causal but it is a literal surjective distinction that expresses itself from the zones of ideational substance and material abstraction.

Following this, we can draw parallax lines in a projective geometry between economics as a rational material quantifiability, the internal classifications of which are on the level of value-form as espoused by the ideology of merchant capital and the post-structural conception of the void as the abstraction to which we ground all concepts immanently within a transcendence characterized by the value-form of the void, as the zero-phoneme signifier is the only position from which we can measure all determinate fields of knowledge against. We sacrifice knowledge of the union of a parabola’s curvature at the apex if we understand the apex as necessarily coinciding with the zero degree angle of measurement of a cartesian y-axis.

We can also understand the correlation of depth between our bodily elements and the elements adopted from a soil polluted with those reactive elements. This is akin to an expression of a generic within a transcendental field. Only within that field can we note the presence of a generic as a nominalisation when a functional value operates through blind procedure to highlight the operate distinction as reflective of a knowledge about the other domain. In other words, because we like our monoculture more, the stress of the soil is reflected in the diminished quality of vegetation, although we may notice first the diminished quality within ourselves.

Thus, the poverty of our soils knowledge is the poverty of our own organisms, as we attempt to master the earth; for it is not the individual human that struggles against the earth but the earth that struggles with the entire mass of humanity as we collectively shape our planet. Thus, the form of our knowledge as a discrete mathematics, the collective metaphor of set theory spacializes and flips the metaphysics of presence from a substantive position of a classical era in which knowledge was knowledge of material, but rather the formal interrelatinos become the means by which knowledge is generated. Thus our place of observation becomes part of the network of knowledge. In a post-rationalist conception, we understand where we are by where we want to see, intersubjectively, as stated by Vittorio Guidano is also explicated by John Galbraith in economics as a self referential series of groupings which create identity and sublimate actions for group subsistence. Although this post-rational approach developed by Guidano goes beyond economic justification for uber-production as outlined by Galbraith, we can see although with Badiou’s set theory that the formalization of knowledge is reflective of classifications and their attendant distinctions. These distinctions formalized as separate chunks that reify dimensions of the context for consideration is reflective not only of how humans understand themselves in larger organizations (family, clan, tribe or seniority, department, branch, corporation or citizen, city, county, state, nation) but also in impersonal relations such as within soil, or in symphony or other unified “fields” of experience. Of course we would study that which we found to be useful to us! And of course our study would be reflective of who we are and what we do.

In this way we can understand the our desire to learn about soils is our desire to relate to the other of us, that is, the matrix from which we come and to which we return, the soil.

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Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

January 5, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, utility / No Comments

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to AnotherCritical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this very interesting book, Philip Ball takes us around through various formalizations of physics, as a method of describing how matter (or energy) is actuated in order to highlight a possible formulation for how society is actuated. Curiously, he starts with Hobbes and then walks through the various material relations. Along the way he notes various new ideas as they describe matter and energy, showing in clear lucid language how this may or may not apply with society.

He does come up with some striking similarities for the models, but ultimately this is less a new sociology that is an extension of physics (a new physics) and more of a “look what I found, isn’t this weird?” kind of text. I would recommend this as a very interesting read, but unlike physics, there isn’t an easy correlation of model to actual particulates, in part because while we can see some analogous lines (especially with his prisoner’s dilemma or and game theory) he does lack an object of study. Society is too vague, and human agency is not discussed at all. Ball is more interested in how mobs of people have “emergent properties” but he does not discuss the role of agency or how these properties might emerge. In this way, despite the thickness of the book, this is more about finding interesting descriptions than it is about creating a working theory with an episteme from which we can build a system of human society. This forms the fatal flaw in the book, if there is one.

Thus, if you find this kind of topic interesting, it’s well worth the read. It will give you food for thought. Ball writes very clearly, concisely. You get a glimpse at the very interesting but also very diverse fields of study which you may not be aware of. But if you’re looking for a manifesto or an outline for how society should work, or how to even approach understanding human groupings as a system, you’re bound to be disappointed. Ball seems to find such discussion to be fruitless for himself to contemplate even as he engages the thoughts of others who have attempted such conjecture before.

Nonetheless, his revolving around the topic of critical mass or supercritical fluids before phase shifts as a way of describing social relations was of great abstract interest for me. Unfortunately, computer models do not translate well into human interaction in the sense that we have no solid metrics from which to gauge how people vary from one to another.

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Social Behavior Of Female Vertebrates

December 30, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Social Behavior Of Female VertebratesSocial Behavior Of Female Vertebrates by Samuel Wasser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The preface in this book notes that sexism within human culture is reflected in animal behavior studies by casting males and females within human roles. This favors males of a species as having more agency than females of a species. This collection of essays seeks to demonstrate that females have, at times, greater agency in competing with each other and determining which mates they should choose.

While many of these essays are not about humans, they all note that resource allocation and wealth division plays a role in organizing the nature of sexual interaction (monogamy, polygamy, and so on) between all individuals. This goes on, even between birds, to demonstrate that some level of trust is required between individuals, even when child rearing is mostly limited to sitting on eggs.

It would be of great interest to analyze and then test an economic hypothesis of animal behavior. While animals do not use money, so money cannot be a metric to determine value, we can see that valuation is passed between individuals as a way of evaluating the desirability of mates and what mates can offer. For instance, in courtship rituals, male birds often demonstrate their ability to hold onto territory. I would have liked this book to be larger, with more variety of essays, but considering the amount of work it takes, I suppose this is a rare sampling to begin with.

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what’s wrong with baseball? Absolutely Nothing.

August 7, 2012 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, note to self, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, utility / No Comments

went to a baseball game. a few days ago.

dodgers vs the cubs. i went to a game before when i was 12 but it was without framing, as a school trip. overall, i dont remember anything, so i consider this to be my first baseball game

the initial striking was how immersive being in the crowd was.

usually when i saw baseball games, it was in a movie or a tv show. and so, baseball was a backdrop against a larger plot. at first i kept feeling like there was a larger story i was missing; that my attention needed to be elsewhere.

of course there was nothing like that.

a bunch of random things happened, with the jumbotron, with things like air guitar, dancing, kissing. the audience basically entertained themselves through the jumbotron while the players did whatever they did… guess baseball is a slower game so they needed that. but really, the emotional energy in the crowd was nearly overwhelming. i found myself recoiling when they did the wave, or when random shit happened… the audience was totally in it.

i realized then, something very unlike what my 19 year old self would realize, i think, if he were there.

there is nothing horrible at all about baseball games. Absolutely Nothing ™.

so this is why sports fans are sports fans: you have the near immersal of what it means to be in a group, in a community… with the colors and the cheering and the singular mindedness of the crowd. this rabble focus is what so many 19th century philosophers and political thinkers were afraid of; the mob. this is the heart of democracy and fascism rolled all into one. (south park got something right! rabblerabblerabblerabble)

i found myself kind of sickened by it and at the same time, wanting to be part of it… despite the fact that it was so inane, all the actions and the spectacles… arbitrary. random.

what was so jarring in this had alot to do with the advertisements that snuck in. this is our world; where bank of america’s logo was on the jumbotron all the time, and state farm’s logo was on all the tickets… despite this being dodgerland. dodger dogs, dodger water, dodger gear… the other brands, subway and bank of america and state farm… there, almost like part of the infrastructure…. support beams we see, sitting on the bleachers, but we don’t really see. branding to support branding.

not bad perhaps, since everything takes funding… but i think this kind of experience made me feel, wow, this is really leaning dangerously close to the beginning of social engineering… democracy works by appealing to the masses, so complex ideas and policies always need to be distilled to their simplest form for dissemination and emotional reaction. in much the same way, capitalism — marketing of experiences like dinner, or ziplines or sports events also need to be focused to be pleasurable in their specific ways that they are. everything is distilled, made simpler. focused

i see our lives as becoming fuller and fuller, until there’s very little room for us to move without having some business or some experience waiting for us to come in and sit there… that its easier to go to a dating mixer than to the bar, or its easier to do all your banking and credit cards and payments with one financial profile (linked across several or even just one financial institution)… or your medical records will be stored across a national database for instant access. no more having to go through the same proceedural exams once you switch small time dentists or opticians. everything made easy. want disney? go to the disneystore. go to disneyland. want sandwiches? google sandwiches and go to a sandwich shop. have sandwiches 24/7. want philosophy? go to the philosophy factory and download any number of works, that might have taken a PHD 25 years to find and read… you can have it all on your kindle.

this kind of hyper-realism…
this availability of different cultural affects:
apparently tonight william shatner was in the audience somewhere for they did a star trek tribute… during the fireworks display they played was to the music of star trek… movies and tv shows. when they were blowing off fireworks and i was watching young and old take out their cell phones to take pictures and record it… this event was wondrous… a real crowd pleaser. why were they trying so hard?

this notion of enchantment, which was missing from the desperation that arose out of 9/11… has found itself reborn today in momentary displays of immersive experience… ok, sure, there’s nothing really bad about going to see a baseball game and its following fireworks… (except maybe your team losing). but this is the kind of pure, unanalytical, uncritical embracing of patriotism, team spirit, community, crowd-oneness that people are missing… we all are in this together and for a moment, despite being competitors in driving, in jobs, in relationships, in living space with all these angelos, we can all pretend that we belong together and that everything fits in a secular humanism devoid of poverty, suffering and discrimination.

this kind of singularity reminds me of a conversation with some hipsters about books a few nights earlier. rather than lament that no one ever read anymore, we started talking about how people do read, but in different media. i tried to steer the conversation into “the novel started off as a distraction for victorian women on their summer trips (something to do when sitting in the carriage or on a boat)… and ends today as just another source of entertainment (like the long drawnout serial tv dramas like lost or 24)… if we are upset that no one reads anymore, we are probably missing the fact that without the novel as a penultimate art form, no one really processes data in a long drawn out way, for deeper analysis… you don’t get this immediate engagement with tv serials, movies, video games or performance… and following that, do we need the kind of thought that goes into something like moby dick or war and peace?”

no one had any answer that moment. but i think that if we start having our entertainment as immersive singular experiences that exist in “dodgerland” or “when you turn on your xbox and select any video game” … that fragmented disconnected disjointed (ir)relevancy, means that we won’t be able to examine this content without understanding the larger frame its presented in… (since each content will have its own specific logic, like an anime with a ton of characters who behave weirdly but fit together). in other words analysis will be limited to less about what something is, than how it fits in — less what it says than how it functions when placed in the context of a larger whole… in a metaphysical way what “time” it presents in, as it defines its own time and is defined into a time. in a sense, we will have to leave the why to programmers, marketing departments, designers and engineers who create the box, package the content, as they understand how it fits in financially and socially, why people come to it, how they use it, what they are looking for… the only way to engage has to be on a deeper level of abstraction. otherwise, you will a puppet in the system. even while philosophizing, you run around, a rat in a maze of market forces. you are collectively shuffled into traffic, follow the defined paths beaten by urban engineers to maximize efficiency of travel, regulated by invisible giants for a specific purpose… the result of which, is poor design that juxtaposes and fails in most dimensions (lost in traffic, stores isolated and starving, stuck in traffic, accidents, even death); or good design that maximizes its output (easy flow, plenty parking, encouraging you to feel good about buy things you dont need, to a highway that dumps you onto your neighborhood with easy access home to bed).

i think the majority of systems are designed to input-output, they are haecceity oriented; transform one material into another for the purpose of quiddity. it might be information of one type, into another, but the result is nearly always a modularity that interlocks with other modularities… be it a car on the road with other cars, or one web page that functions on most any browser. you can be a unique, but the big system knows you entirely; plays you like a fiddle and when its done with you, you’ll don that solider uniform. your condition may be weird but the health care system has a form for you! its all about the processing. not as an industrial society that used to can fish or make fords on an assembly line; we do this to ourselves now. the rationalization of process invades our subjectivity and cleans it out. even in scifi dystopias of post-armageddon, we still have robot mass murders, insane, inhuman machines that have a system to wipe out the human element.

rationalizations of process and process oriented management (of people, as employees or as customers) is probably the one far reaching mindset that came out of the 20th century…. its also the biggest, most useful and most damning box that we have built for ourselves. as capitalists, we have developed money, at least as students of economy, into a raw unit of social value. in the process of using money as an objective measure to determine the viability and value of pursuing endeavors, we’ve also had to objectify processes so as to track money… so we can further measure the potentiality of any and every course and each level and each intersection, be it in government or business.

as mice in such processes, we are bombarded by a variety of paperwork, forms, meetings, appointments… junctions which administrators and bearucrats alike shuffle us into different hallways, websites, telephone transfers, offices… we are transformed from one client into the next client, and our goals are often sidelined by the process we must endure to reach our goals. the only reprieve from this process must be immersive entertainment, new worlds that we can partake as fully as possibly… with their own logic and their own rules… to be fresh and enchanting, to allow new and better candies… which ironically, sublimates this model of rationalization… single player video games are the most obvious, since there’s a path (or paths), a storyframe the player must masochistically follow to reach the endline. like sade flogging our subjectivity into the perfect worthy superhero who only he can reach the end (and you must be he if you were there for this all). in baseball and other distractions, we have the model which is presented as a series of courses, time for the jumbotron, time for the commercial break, time for the cliffhanger at the end of the season… the better the structure is hidden, the better disney reminds us we aren’t standing in line for hours, the more immersive the experience, the more hidden the process, the more successful the distraction, the purer the aesthetic and the more separate that highpoint emotion is from everything else (to be repeated?).

so when stacking processes, the model of the individual as a free standing spiritual being has to give way to a multi-valent subjectivity… a raw nothingness that is waiting to be transformed into client, or employee, tracked along a series of rationalized tiers (level 1 admin, level 2 senior engineer, platinum card member)… on the producer side we have a series of machinic trees that eat employees and shuffle customers and product like blind jugglers. on the consumer side people are demographized into a crowd of impersonal hunger for particular experiences (a particular sporting team, snowboarding or surfing, the regular motley of a demographic of restaurant, a group tour)… very different from the very personal subjectivity of the “everyman” individual that nearly every main character written since tom jones was approaching the end of the 20th century… (this past naturalistic subjectivity was most visible in mary shelley’s frankenstien, a subjectivity in a non-subject body, the post-human frankenstien!)…

what we are doing is no longer a matter of self improvement, for there is nearly no self. we are regulated into narratives trapped in bodies, with too many properties to count! i am every kind of number to any institution. to find yourself, to look for that center that william wordsworth had when he wrote “Lines written a few miles above Tin Abbey” is impossible today. wordsworth could be whole writing as an upper class poet, lazying in the shade with his sister, but we can only be EAT PRAY LOVE, a series of disconnected, disjointed experiences that are marginalized by the objective processes that dominate our landscape of process oriented institutions., that package experience, package us so many slices of individually wrapped cheese. this post-self is an XML file, a tree crowded with attributes, children and nodes, namespaces needing to populated and defined, attributes that connect only to one or two situations… we are maps that defeat definition, maps that can be read from any dimension but are every shifting and changing in tenor dependent on vector, content and value. you could become any fan at any moment; soak in the media light and follow any event; you can jointly comment on yahoo news, or huffington post or reddit. thats because we are one piece. as individuals on the street we have no connection but our connection is deeper than occupying space. together we create a mindless, headless bastion moving godlessly and clumsily, an orgy of demographics, unified and unpredictable, gobbling up the planet, turning the earth inside out as we stack her guts along as highways, guardrails, airplanes, cell phones, and strip malls, event as we stack her guts on us as an exoskeleton of devices to extend ourselves in invisible social dimensions, to join as a single forge of entertainment and profit maximization.

each layer is different; at each step up the tree or across a branch, we have a different logic, a different department. vast stretches of sociality are the same; paper work, stamps, requisition and cross-benefit analysis, but many areas are radically different; and they may bump into one another like galaxies whose gravitational influence cross-congregate and (dis)assemble like rap and rock or 4chan and minecraft or the colbert report and highschool… but an interesting elucidation for another post.

so yes, this is what i went though while watching the baseball game. dodgers vs cubs. dodgers won, 6 to 1.

from Social to Universal, what comes after a Monetized Economy?

April 29, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rules, Uncategorized, utility / No Comments

I’ve written about the failure of our economic models to account for our happiness and welfare in the work place. I want to go into a little more detail about what an alternative view for our society might look like post-money, but first, some more general news about the failure of our economic models to register real value outside of the work place in terms of the Global Economy.

 

Current Opinion from some Economists today…

…expresses a criticism of the FED. At the Roosevelt Institute there recently was a panel on the Future of the Federal Reserve, a large debate surrounding the current actions and criticisms of the Federal Reserve as well as panel talks about the FED’s current program, the so called QE2 which is scheduled to be halted by June of this year without a clear date (or even plans) for a better and more effective QE3.

It seems that the general consensus agreed upon by everyone except the Fed and the government is that QE2 was in fact too conservative to be a success and was in fact a failure. QE2 did not generate the jobs people hoped for nor did it spark the economy with low interest rates.

The FED becomes an easy target in current debates as to why the economy is at risk as to why haven’t job growth happened and who is to blame. I am not an economist, so I will spare you the details, but I am very interested in the subject. If anything, we are plagued by a systematic failure of the existing financial infrastructure. The problem comes from huge debt. In order to handle many of the national and international debts that are due this year entire nations will have to get debt financing. The question, of course, is who do they get it from?

If the government that prints money has no money to pay for its debt, then who does it?

The current bailout situations and the burst of that financial bubble earlier in 2008-9 resulted in monetizing private debt as public debt. A short term solution seems to be simply to do the same thing again. If that happens, loser in these transactions will be individuals who have saved up money. It will eat away at the savings of the American public — in fact of the rest of the world since the US dollar is known as “reserve currency” meaning that people in other countries will use the US dollar to transact business because their own government’s money is not considered stable enough. In fact, China has the largest amount of US currency in reserve, totalling an astounding 3 trillion dollars.

But of course, decisions the FED stem directly from situations here in the U.S. and not of the rest of the world.

This might stave off the problem for another time, but the debt problem persists. Interest rates will mount and at some future point an even larger debt will be incurred, things time with our public economy and our private savings exhausted… our credit exhausted…

So what is the solution?

If you are not sure if you can trust the reserve currency, the idea is to switch to a currency you CAN trust. In this case, GOLD and SILVER. SO you see that the price of gold is to break $1,600 for a troy ounce by the end of 2011. Additionally companies that mine metals are a desired commodity as well as indicated by China’s repeated bids to buy foreign mining and farming companies. In fact there are rumored talks among some of China’s officials to reinvest their U.S. Currency into Gold.

So why aren’t U.S. officials fazed? Everyone’s doing the same dance right now — everyone’s still using U.S. currency. At some point there needs to be an exit strategy. According to Max Keiser, Goldman-Sachs officials have started sipon money from the stock market into commodities and alternative currencies. One such online company, Zynga, wildly successful for its which had made a move last year in Oct 2010 to create its own currency. With the investment of Goldman-Sachs officials, the Fed is investigating the matter. According to Keiser though, Goldman-Sachs is siphoning money from Wall Street all the while keeping the bubble of pricing up through the use of computers that trade. One of his evidences despite the Dow’s recent record high even in this bad economy stems from the drop in VOLUME even while the PRICE is high. The idea being that the unwitting American shareholder will be left holding the worthless shares when this new bubble bursts.

 

Holding the bag means holding… what?

So my judgmental sentiments aside, it seems that when the economy “downsizes” in value because of inflation — because the monetization of our economy creates excess value, value based on speculation of the future value of money — the system will implode. Much of this is doom and gloom. One fair indicator of when this will happen in the near future is the fall of the United States as an economic power — passing its economic torch to its largest landowner, China as soon as 2016 according to Chris Martenson.

This of course may not happen, 2016 still is over one presidential term away, and who knows maybe Bernanke will wisen up and the Financial overlords that bombed a 65 trillion dollar world economy to personally make for themselves a few million will find themselves in jail…

But if that doesn’t happen, there’s a good chance that we homo sapiens will have to reorganize into a new resource distribution system. Doubtlessly, this will involve money, as people have always had money, but it may not involve capital as the primary exchange for labor.

This is a little beyond the scope of this post, but it’s perhaps important to note that democratization of private industries is not the key to establishing a more free society.  The logic of freedom, as Zizek put it eloquently:

the key to actual freedom resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family. Here the change required is not political reform but a transformation of the social relations of production—which entails precisely revolutionary class struggle rather than democratic elections or any other “political” measure in the narrow sense of the term. We do not vote on who owns what, or about relations in the factory, and so on — such matters remain outside the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one will effectively change things by “extending” democracy into the economic sphere (by, say, reorganizing the banks to place them under popular control). Radical changes in this domain need to be made outside the sphere of legal “rights.” In “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, solutions are sought solely through those democratic mechanisms which themselves form part of the apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees the undisturbed reproduction of capital.

He continues on here, citing how violence is the inescapable and inevitable truth of the States’ impotence, and that extending the logic of the state into new regimes is a needless production of the same. So rather than dwell in violence and democracy, let us instead move back into the apolitical communities where most of us are heavily invested and are infact, as American sitcoms like to show us, largely apolitical.

There are perhaps an infinite number of possibilities but I will cover only one form, Peer to Peer Networks, which, instead of being an extension of state democracy, or state anything, rather is an extension of the communal commons “space” by which most of us interact anyway… (even if it’s not recognized by our current global the economy as such.)

 

Introducing Peer to Peer Networks

The rosey scenario of so called Peer to Peer Networks comes from a computer analogy but it carries with it a sociological ideology of individuals interacting as individuals and not through the manifests of corporations. Peer to Peer interaction gets a great deal of exploration through P2P Foundation, a utopian organization that seeks to explore the very real possibility of a new form of distribution closer to the maxim ‘think global, act local’ in which interested individuals interact with one another in mutually beneficial ways. If you think this is radically different from Homo Economius, you’re absolutely right. This organization tends towards the touchy-feely-poetics but one article likens the difference between spiritual self-suifficiency vs interdependent interbeiningness via “spiritual collectives” vs “gurus” with the emphasis on collectives as being more wholesome since we are socially interconnected.

There is much to be said and in my opinion (not said) about how P2P is beneficial but as presented here, the impetus is to take a larger view of who we are as human beings and offer a human solution rather than one concocted through the confines of “Rational Choice Theory“. The thinker I would like to cite for this line of thought is Hazel Henderson.

Henderson is a grown-up hippie. Her main attack on the economy today stems from what she sees as two critiques:

  • Seeing monetary exchange as the only meaningful measurement of production
  • understanding human beings as theoritical economic creatures that seek only to maximize utility and reduce cost

    • She points out of course, that people are not so perfectly greedy, although greed is a part of who we are… and that over half of all the meaningful production occurs through the work of women. The PTA meetings, the cooking, the cleaning, even helping your neighbor paint their house on the weekend — these are meaningful acts of production that are not measured in any form of monetary exchange. Likewise, for her, financial instruments whose only purpose is to change a tax status or promote speculation is not a meaningful act of production, although it carries with it a monetary cost. Many of the ‘goods’ we enjoy, like the environment, likewise cannot be monetized, valued or taken into the consideration as a cost inherent in any kind of business plan. As such, the environment is generally worthless and meaningless according to economic theory. Also, our hanging onto the notion of GDP as a meaningful measurement of economic health makes no sense, especially since new cars may be exchanged between two countries and then counted as GDP for both countries.  Structurally her critique means a few things:

    • Money fails as an indicator of meaning since it fails to objectively capture what we value
    • On the producer side, a variety of interactions exist without any consideration of money (they are valueless, even if those behaviors maintain the quality of life for all)

    Our attempt to organize our society around economic theories of value is a terrible thing, resulting in incredible amounts of waste and human misery. We work too long to support those we love who we never see because we have to work.  An extensive video of hers can be found here: The Alternative Economy of Hazel Henderson.

    If you are like me, then I apologize, because the only thing I find somewhat grating is that she calls it the “Love Economy”. All the same, her suggestion is not to remove money, but to de-center it.  Instead of money, we would find meaningful metrics in the healthiness of society through several different axises which are not tied to the market.  She cites thirteen separate axises of human need.  For instance, the quality of clean air will be measured by environmental engineers on a scale relevant to their industry, not to a dollar value which can then be compared to other monetized “goods” and found to be more or less valuable than other goods as an ‘objective’ dollar amount.

    The Love Economy however, is just one expression of P2P. In the larger picture, the Love Economy stems from a trying to arrange society in order to maximize it values, something which is largely impossible to maintain if you hold that the only value is the collection of money.

    This would mean the end of the cost-benefit analysis and ROI for decision making. (If you would like to glance a governmental body of text related to the work I do on a daily basis for businesses, take a peek: Cost Benefit Analysis for Americans with Disabilities Act 2010, in particular “side transfer for water closets 602.3”.) Even if this text puts you off, I am afraid most of us would not be able to function without these kinds of “objective” guidelines.  How would managers or committees decide any course of action without a financial basis to limit and define meaningful activity?

    It’s most likely too, that the destruction of money as the primary signifier/coupler/de-/re-territorialisating agent will signal the end of corporations. The injunction of corporations as legal entities that benefits key players in the corporate hierarchy must end.  Corporations as entities of ownership and resource control were seen by Marx as a form of communism and collective ownership, but modern corporations are concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a relative few:  I forget where I heard this but something like the top 34 corporations in the world have more GDP than all but the top 8 countries, of which the corporations are “members of”, but you can imagine how long that would last, especially with a weakened US dollar.  As reported by Lenin’s Tomb this class struggle is comparable to what’s happening in other countries like the middle east because it’s a class struggle, even if the stakes are somewhat different.  If corporations throw their weight around, of course local governments that can’t follow them need to provide conditions for those corporations such that a corporation will understand that it makes monetary sense for them to stay.  This is perhaps ironic for those of us living in the United States, as our material wealth in the 50s – 90s had come from corporation’s exploitation and the oppression of other nations for the US’s material interests, as pointed out by Keith Hart.

    But now that the corporations have become increasingly powerful in a global economy, they have the option of forcing by design or accident local changes to their favor.  It’s not too far off then, that Corporations can be considered the dominant species on the planet.

     

    from Social to Universal in a Global Economy

    Given such a dramatic statement, for us individuals to understand our place in the world we cannot rely on simply being just a citizen of a nation or a worker inside another corporation.  We have to understand our role as producers and consumers, first and foremost (since that is how we meaningfully interact with a value-system of money).  This switch from citizen to consumer/producer fuels much of the current revolution in Search Engine Optimization.  Most of the industry is still mulling over how social networking influences online presence.

    Online presence includes all the online discussion in the 3rd dimension of consumer to consumer (the first being business to consumer and the second being consumer to business).  The freedom of information on the internet has eliminated the days when corporations had control over their timely product unveilings, or their press releases.  The internet has allowed companies to have a better feedback of what works for their customers and what doesn’t.  Since the speed of information is so much faster, companies need to release products that aren’t perfected in order to remain competitive or deal with informal press releases better.  Both Apple and Coke have proven adept at providing expression as their main marketing maneuver rather than the more traditional marketing which aims at offering consumers impressions.  The influx of twitters and facebook “likes” and “shares” have proven to have an increasingly huge but causally unclear influence on search engine ranking.  Already all the major SEO companies have begun to recognize that in good marketing relationships with customers online, your cusomters produce your best (and worse) content.  More often than not, relationship building online and instantaneous information flow has allowed each of us to become both consumer and producer.

    Which brings me to back to the original point, the producer-consumer dichotomy. One interesting point, among others, that came from an interview with Rachel Botsman came from her observation that we generally think of ourselves as citizens only, or first. That kind of view will need to change in the near future when we have to reorient ourselves as simply participants. In a peer to peer economy, we will be both consumer and producer, not just consumer. We will be directly responsible for our individual interaction and participation as to how resources are transacted. Her example is eBay, in which strangers can participate on equal footing for remote merchandise that is bought without examination.

    The philosophical implications of this are many.  The internet has provided a new objective, recordable voting mechanism for companies to be ranked even before consumers open their wallet to “vote” in economic transactions.  A blogger can collect a valuable audience which then becomes an asset to marketers.  Facebook is an extremely intelligent implementation of this kind of collection of information, perhaps one that rivals even Google, with it’s long term information hoarding.  This kind of objective interaction with the Other verges on an interaction with the Universal.

    Arguably this kind of dichotomy was marked by the first modern cosmopolitian philosopher, Hegel.  Hegel reverses the formalism of Kant by extending Kant beyond subjectivity and as Zizek says, Subjectivising substance devoid of content.  By the imposition of his dialectical process, Hegel reaches the notion of the Universal, garnishing a multitudinous rambling along the way.  Any contemporary philosopher who seeks to tackle the universal must address Hegel, even if it’s by avoiding the Hegelian Dialectic method.

    The most traditional conception of the universal is best expressed through Lacan’s (read Zizek’s) Real in which madness, phantasms and partial objects cannot cohere into a meaningful subject.  Is this rhetorically not the perfect analogy to describe the unlinked disorder of the internet where we reach 404 and partial hits on keywords — such as when I search for one word and get something completely different that I click on?  I don’t want to go into schizoanalysis or anything like that.  Rather I want to point out that our relationship with the universal, especially as monitored through the internet is mediated by a direct attempt by a corporatized other to impose universality on each of us small others through a medley of law (and other paranoiac applications).  Whether this be through the paranoid discourse of the state (legality) or through the internet’s opposing hysteria as expressed through Bing’s initial video campagin today we have the increased injunction from the Other Enjoy! and Obey! simultaneously.

    This is not a new injunction.  I won’t blame this on Hegel, but increasingly in an more ethnic world with global trade, everything becomes relevant for examination — starting with culture and human rights and ending with intellectual property and intangible costs.

    Overlawyered.com‘s author, Walter Olson has written extensively about how the legal system has developed into the political monstrosity it exists as today.   Apparently attorneys before law school were more pragmatic, trained on their job in apprenticeships.  After law school invoked a liberal agenda to use the legal system to argue for change, everything became a matter of litigation — what was perhaps previously a personal dispute between you and your boss now became a matter of employee and employer for all to bear witness to.  Increasingly individual concerns have become scrutinized, first through totalitarian states like Stalin and Maoist Communisms, but more recently in the overlawyered culture that exists today — anyone can sue anyone for anything, right or wrong.  The influx of attorneys qua politicians (up to 30% or 40% of politicians are attorneys, I believe) comes from the desire to use the court room as a place to change law, which it isn’t supposed to be.  Legislation is supposed to change laws.

    Anyway, in many ways, the injection of the internet into the intermix of what is accountable (accidential emails, even blogging about belly dancing can ruin a divorce settlement).  This kind of dissemination of all aspects of human life even a humorous but somewhat mostly true guide on how to live with your philosopher-relative or life-partner becomes fodder for the voracious paranoia (followed by aimless surfing/hysteria) leaving footprints of human desire and meaning objectified even if this wealth of information doesn’t lend itself directly to meaning.

    Don’t get me wrong, participation in the world is definitively more meaningful than retracting into rigid rationalism, i.e., Hegel is more relevant than Kant, who can’t even leave his house without a God as a universal-guideline.  After all, isn’t that what WW2 showed Sartre?  Young Sartre stopped writing so much and took his place as a public intellectual, held himself accountable for his actions and attempted to take his message of humanism and authenticity in the face of an ever-growing global economy of maginalization and monetization of human meaning.  After all, old Sartre knew that meaning was in social interaction not in transactions.

    Social interactions is something people complain about losing, in an environment with too many people, when we can be alone in a city of one or fifty million people.  Companies are finding out that we got choices — as with any sales person today has to answer to each of their clients: “Why should we buy from you?”

    Just like companies are discovering that collecting Facebook shares and re-tweets is the truest indicator of actual meaning.  And that meaningful relationship will lead to trust, reliance and transactions.  Given this article, that social networking produces the same chemicals falling in love, perhaps I should rescind my statement — that love economy isn’t so far off…. only perhaps “economy” is outdated.

    Perhaps we should call it the love network.

    Meaning at Work, or Why utility is a prori only to itself

    March 27, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, utility / 8 Comments

    When I was growing up, my parents presented me with a life path.  It went something like this:

    1. Go to public school
    2. Go to College
    3. Get a job
    4. Get married and buy a house
    5. Have kids
    6. Work until your kids have left home
    7. Work until you retire
    8. ????

    I asked them, what’s the point of that?  They didn’t have much to say, I’m not sure why, but their basic argument was to say, well, look at us.  We are doing it and it’s fine. (Ironic perhaps, but they are at step 8 now, and the four question marks seem to loom over them everyday…. such that they still have no answer.)

    But at the time, being something like, 10 years old, I didn’t have much to say.   I’m not going to fight-club my way through this, but I will mention that this post will survey a growing trend that I have noticed across different areas of our online media, that of where meaning and work inter-relate.  After all, even if you don’t follow the schema above, if you wish to be “standing on your own two feet” you’re going to have to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

    Contribution doesn’t always mean being paid but it does mean earning a living somehow and not soaking up someone else’s resources.

    But that’s the catch isn’t, it?  I mean, how I defined the problem: in a meaningful way. That’s problematic.

    If you’re on the blogosphere reading this post written in American English, most likely you’re in the upper part of the Global Economy.  Not necessarily at a leadership position, but certainly in the upper stratas of the global-economy.  So you think of the world in terms of $$$$ in terms of capitalism.  How does meaning fit in?

    After all that’s what this blog is about: Meaning.  In particular:

     

    Meaning in the Workplace

    I’d like to cite an article first written by Tammy Erickson.  You can find the article in the Harvard Business Review Blogs.  The article is titled: Meaning is the New Money, although the url suggests an earlier title was about challenging deeply held something… (probably belief?)  To sum this article: Erickson challenges the common belief about what best holds us together as a work-force when we work at a job.  For instance, my parents suggested that I do something I like.  What I like, like many teenagers, had nothing to do with earning money because it was pretty much focused on pleasing myself.  And no one will pay me to do things that please me.

    So while many of us like money, working a job to make money isn’t something (I hope) most of us have to do.  What my parents meant is that we should do something for a living that we at least enjoy.  If you think about it, most of us spend more time with our coworkers in a week than with our loved ones, at least during our waking hours.  That’s kind of a sad thought.  All those turn-key children.  Left alone without guidance from parents who slave away….

    No, Erickson argues that we all need meaning in our jobs, we all need to be energized by what we do, to believe that it matters.  Here’s a compelling quote:

    My research has clearly shown that high levels of engagement, and the associated discretionary effort, occur when our work experiences reflect a clear set of values that we share. For many today, meaning is the new money. It’s what people are looking for at work. Clear company values, translated into the day-to-day work experience, are one of the strongest drivers of an engaged workforce, one primed for successful collaboration.

    Now if that doesn’t convince you read, or at least skim, the article I don’t know what will!

    Isn’t what all the corporate magazines talk about?  Team-building a corporate culture with a cohesive message so everyone is on the same page, working happily towards a shared goal?

    So now, if I get this right — companies not only need to produce more value for their customers than it costs (monetarily) to produce that good or service — they also need to produce meaning for their workforce so that their employees are on board the project too… not just as a wage earner, but with a clear vision and focus as to how their work at the company is meaningful and helps others in the long run.

    Sounds like managers also need to become teachers!  And CMOs and CEOs need to be philosophers!  So then, if I take this article literally, business organizations need not only a clear cash flow that makes fiscal sense for them to operate and survive business cycles, but also that businesses need a clear pedagogical skeleton so that the message is disseminated from the philosopher-CEOs and COOs and CFOs that drive a business towards its strategic goals.

    Certainly many of the more successful corporations that have exploded since their founding today have that clear mission and vision of the kind of company they want to be.  But besides the issue of meaning, what else is at stake?

    What happens when we lose meaning?

     

    The Great Depression of the early 21st Century

    Certainly in our current lifestyle, we find ourselves amid a “Great Depression” comparable to the many depressions in the earlier part of the 20th and latter part of the 19th century… For instance, Detroit basically has 50% unemployment (from World Socialist Website via Jodi Dean, here: The Depopulation of Detroit).  If we take Detroit as a sintome of our current employment life, what does that entail?

    The issue as I see it has less to do with what happens if we get meaning back in our life, but what happens if we lose it.  If we treat our jobs as vehicles for money, which is how we might traditionally look at our job, we end up in a completely different kind of “depression”.

    From the Socialist Worker via Jodi Dean, we get an interview of Alex Callinicos called Capitalism’s Crisis.  This Callinicos hails from a Marxist view of what has traditionally been seen as a deficit on the part of laborers.  I’m not a big Marx expert, or even fan, but I do find him useful.  The idea is that the surplus value of a laborers’ only real commodity (his time, energy and life-force) is where capitalists make their profit.  The crisis of capitalism that Callinicos refers to is the end of capitalist profit.  I don’t want to talk about capitalism too much here as a system, but the basic idea is that as long as capitalism is profitable that profit can be spread among everyone (albeit unevenly).  When that profit stream dries up, it needs to get its $$$ from somewhere, so Callinicos talks about how it is going to try and take more of it from its working class by deducing wages or benefits.

    So the lack of jobs that say, Detroit faces (along with the rest of us) also stems from the lack of profit that is to be had (eating up all our equity from our finance instruments circa 1980 to mid-2000s).  By the way, Alex Callinicos also wrote a book called Against Postmodernism which I read trying to figure out what Postmodernism was.  I was an undergrad at the time, and frankly, my first attempt to grasp what he was saying resulted in a huge fail.

    But in any case, if Callinicos is correct, then our current recession is actually a depression.  And as such, it is unlike the depression resulting from the speculative crashes in 1929 — this depression is actually a crisis in the logic of capitalism.  If the system of economic redistribution is no longer adequate to redistribute… meaning or money or whatever it distributes, then it has failed us.  To quote Callinicos,

    The great Russian revolutionary Lenin said there’s never a really hopeless situation for capitalism as long as workers allow it to survive.

    Sooner or later the system can recover from any crisis. It would be difficult for it to return to the pattern of the recent past, as the financial system has been seriously weakened.

    While the slump continues, it’s important to see that it’s uneven. One section of the system, the historical core in North America and most of Europe, is still quite depressed.

    But if we look at China and the economies associated with it, which include Germany and Brazil, they are growing quite quickly.

    This reflects the way in which the Chinese state threw everything into preventing a protracted economic slump.

    The fact that this bit of the system is growing is a further destabilising factor, however.

    It produces tensions between the US as the dominant capitalist power, and China—increasingly seen as the major challenger. That makes it harder to manage capitalism.

    But even if they do find a way of muddling through, what produced the crisis was the logic of capitalism and the system—a system that is driven by blind competition in pursuit of profit.

    That system will continue to produce crises and continue to try to solve them at the expense of working people and the poor.

    So the only real guarantee of escaping crises like this one is to get rid of capitalism altogether.  That may not be a bad idea, but it also may not be necessary.  Callinicos seems to adhere to Marx to understand what Capitalism is… but you should also understand that Marx himself did not really see capitalism as a horrible system.  Faulty, to be sure, but not without its merits.

    Nonetheless, we can take this Callinico’s call to action a step further.  Richard Seymour, author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb, in an article titled Towards a new Model Commune critiques the basic segmentation that happens in capitalist culture — the organization of the workforce, the regulation of our 9-5, the unthinking box each of us puts herself in when we think, oh I should get another job, often with a helpless conviction that there is in fact no other way for one to live…. that we cannot effect a change in the larger system because I’m just one poor little me!  What can I do? The question then comes as a parallax reversal of JFK’s statement, we should not live for our system — we should ask that our systems live for us, allowing us to live.

     

    Beyond Nihilism: Meaning without Utility

    Having followed me thus far, you’ll be impressed with how far “left” I have gone.  But this is not a matter of liberal or conservative however; the status quo has no substance in itself.  People will only adhere to a meaning if it continues to service them well.  So the question is more aligned with Immanuel Wallerstein‘s dichotomies from his World Systems Analysis.  We have rather, three parties, a defense of the status quo for no change, a desire for some carefully measured change, and then we have those few who want radical change.  Critical theory, or at least a philosophical eye on the relations that be want change, push for change, dooming it to be “left”.  So what does this mean? Our “left” and “right” positions is really more accurately, a measure of how things can be “better”.  The Americanizations of Liberal and Conservative are anything if not misleading.  Conservatives may want change, but it’s not so much change of what is fundamentally sound, but a tweaking of our current day back to the intentions of “the good ole days”.  Liberals more would more on the side that what is fundamentally sound has yet to be.

    Thus, the content of both sides is irrelevant, their positions are metered around what is seen as being fundamental “change” or not.

    So my point in bringing this up, if anything is that while you’ll see that while this entry has gone into the very “liberal” ideologies of Marxist critiques of capitalism, you can find similar thoughts echoed, if not in the right then at least in the status quo.

    My evidence for this?  Straight from the business blog of Tony Schwartz, We’re in a new energy crisis.  This one is personal.  While much of this blog’s purpose is to promote their “The Energy Project” which has to do with auditing tasks that businesses (and their front running exes) perform to save energy.  Not energy like green energy or electricity, but personal energy.  What does this blog post reveal about one of his key principles?  It’s worth quoting:

    Companies need to take up the cause of a new way of working.

    The companies that build competitive advantage in the years ahead aren’t going to do it by seeking to get more out of their people. They’ll do it instead better meeting people’s core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — so they’re freed, fueled and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.

    What assure people energy — what meets their needs — is to give them meaning, to energize them with a goal, exactly what Erickson writes about above.

    But then we knew this already.  Victor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning which is actually a memoir of his survival from a Nazi Concentration Camp.  His analysis and conclusion is that human beings need meaning to survive.  He observed that those who survived the camp did so because they had sufficient reason not to give up.

    I don’t think that we of the global economy are ready to give up.  And our daily lives DO have meaning, albeit personal meaning.  For many of us, our jobs mean a little bit, we find a way to incorporate what we do into the larger picture of how others live around us.  Even still though, to get supreme satisfaction is requires more than just knowing that we did our part in some small way.  Having a personal disjunction between our life with our family and friends and what we do in the office is perhaps one of the greatest conundrums of the modern era.

    Both Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard (to mention a few) cite our postmodern, post-industrial society with its circularity of capital (C-M-C and M-C-M) with its built-in limits as endless producing — all without producing any meaning.  Instead, meaning is foreclosed between production on one side, and consumption on the other-side through the parallax multi-faceted kernel of $.  The only thinker I know of who seems able to transcend this analogous gap between money, commodity and capital is Kojin Karatani and he proposes a barter type system as a way of side-stepping the dialectic. (Slavoj Zizek has written extensively about parallax gaps, of which this is one… but he does not offer solutions, just further re-defining of the problems in the dialectical structure.)

    Anyway, such discussions between meaning and money are fit for another time.  And my reading of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy is quite rusty.  I did try and tackle this subject before here: On Capitalism, a Tragedy although the approach was quite philosophical.

    And no, I don’t think capitalism is a tragedy, I was just playing off of Michael Moore’s Capitalism, a Love story.

    So the takeaway?  If anything it’s not that we can work more hours in a day.  Or that we could be more productive if we paid our employees more, or save our economy by shrinking the benefits to those who have jobs.  I suppose I can write a little bit on that some other time, maybe.  But what I want to end with here, is simply that if we are to find our way out of the current economy deadlock, and our collective dissatisfaction with how much we work then we need to take a risk and alter the way we approach work.  This can’t happen until businesses collectively see their mission to be more than just greed and profiteering.  The world today is remarkably different from when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.  The main difference is that the world then was much bigger.  Today we live in a sandbox. We find our resources dwindling and our pollution with no where to go.  We used to shit in someone else’s backyard — but only now we see that someone else’s backyard is also our backyard.

    If anything we need to forcefully reinstill meaning into our existence.  Instead of embracing the null of capitalism and relying on transactions and cash flow to be the determining factor of meaning and rationality (decision making) we need to find some other means.  Which will be hard, because we wouldn’t be changing the tangible pieces on the table.  We would be changing the intangible relationship of those pieces, the logic of how they work together.  I think if anything, the experiment of a centralized bureaucracy like the Soviet Union’s most likely isn’t the answer…

    So to get back to the takeaway, we have to understand that Homo Economicus cannot be the basis for Rational Choice Theory.   This kind of maximization of utility can only be cohered when understood in conjunction with a meaningful metric.  Only one kind of meaningful metric exists:  MONEY.

    One could argue that the metrics don’t need tampering and the basis for rational choice is sound, it’s rather the instrumentation needs to be refined.  But then if you use the Energy Project as above, can we actually put a dollar sign for every effort spent on pedagogically infusing an employee with the company mission?  Or the time spent by a manager to explain to an employee how they fit into the company network?  Or the extra productivity an employee may show (or not lose) because such time and energy was spent?

    Well, business has a vested interest in these things, and big business has a ton of money and a need for quantifying studies so I am sure someone has been insane enough to create tools to describe what I’ve described directly above.

    But in all seriousness: I am not alone in voicing a concern that economic theory is insufficient in properly modeling and putting into practice what is healthy for human beings.  This article:  Goodbye, Homo Economicus from Economist’s View voices concerns about the insufficiency of linking rational choice theory (with its model of humans as homo economicus, interested mainly in external measurable values of maximizing utility and minimizing cost).

    What the “madmen in authority” heard this time was the distant echo of a debate among academic economists begun in the 1970s about “rational” investors and “efficient” markets. This debate began against the backdrop of the oil shock and stagflation and was, in its time, a step forward in our understanding of the control of inflation. But, ultimately, it was a debate won by the side that happened to be wrong. And on those two reassuring adjectives, rational and efficient, the victorious academic economists erected an enormous scaffolding of theoretical models, regulatory prescriptions and computer simulations which allowed the practical bankers and politicians to build the towers of bad debt and bad policy. …

    Which brings us to the causes of the present crisis. The reckless property lending that triggered this crisis only occurred because rational investors assumed that the probability of a fall in house prices was near zero. Efficient markets then turned these assumptions into price-signals, which told the bankers that lending 100 per cent mortgages or operating with 50-to-1 leverage was safe. Similarly, regulators, who allowed banks to determine their own capital requirements and private rating agencies to establish the value at risk in mortgages and bonds, took it as axiomatic that markets would automatically generate the best possible information and create the right incentives for managing risks. …

    The scandal of modern economics is that these two false theories—rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis—which are not only misleading but highly ideological, have become so dominant in academia (especially business schools), government and markets themselves.

    I am not familiar with the author of this article.  Where this article stops, is in suggesting how economics could be reformed so that the internal models that build our current understanding of how resources and finances should be handled better on a different axis of value.  That’s okay though, this article is from a blog about economics, not about meaning in the face of rational nihilism via utility… an understanding of money that is nearly a priori due to its near-circularity.

    But if anything, the takeaway should be that our current system needs to change in some fundamental ways because of a lack of meaning in our workplace and the lack of integration between our system of resources and how people live.

    It’s not enough to BS a company work-place environment.  That environment needs to be genuine. People today are quite savvy at detecting bullshit.  Likewise any meaning a company creates, like the lessons in a public classroom, for it to be meaningful, need to be integral to our personal lives, in some way.  And that choice has to be allowed by each individual, we need a society that sets the proper conditions for such connections to thrive.  What such a society should be, or how it should be transitioned onto is of course, a difficult but collective choice each of us needs to make on a daily basis. In the case of public education, nearly impossible for students — perhaps near impossible for us capitalists — as we’ve defined our global system of economics to systematically exclude the intangibles, thereby excluding the very things that assures each of us the highest priority in meaningfulness!

    Still, the next time you go to work, decide for yourself, if this is what you ought to be doing.  Not in terms of today or tomorrow, but in terms of next year, or ten years from now.  Understand that maximizing a paycheck is like maximizing utility.  Getting a pleasant job that is close by is like minimizing cost.  Is that really the best way to live — according to such minimal and circumstantial constraints?

    After all, in the journey of being alive, we collect things, bank accounts and stuff.  It’s not been accepted that anyone who has died has come back to really talk of their post-life experience.  Even still, we all see that No, you can’t take it with you.

    So the worthwhile part needs to be the journey, not the destination.  Why else would we possibly be here and now, alive today?

    If this is so, then society should try and maximize its populations’ “journey” instead of maximizing utility in the form of numbers in a corporate bank account…